their own lack of safety in diminishing numbers. Had to be.
From one side of the street, two soldiers appeared. Across from the APC, another. One of them was holding a bloody, torn sleeve. He must have been behind the others when the grenade went off. They ostentatiously dropped their guns. The wounded driver wriggled on the ground.
Vorontsyev stood up, almost swaying with weariness. He motioned with the gun.
'Come on!' he barked. 'Get in! Get in or I'll kill you!' He should have done, but he was beginning to be appalled at the slaughter. It was no longer a gratuitous feeling, but wrenched at his stomach. There seemed a stench in his nostrils. The perspective he had rigidly bound in the toil of action loosened and came free, and he was still eighteen miles from the only airport, and thousands of miles from safety. He waggled the gun down at the young peasant faces. Men on military service, without sophistication or great intelligence. Badly frightened automata, shocked out of their normal machine-like operation, their officer dead.
'Get hi!' he barked. 'One of you drive!'
They seemed to hold a silent debate, and then one of them climbed into the driving-seat.
Tick him up!' he shouted, pointing at the wounded figure on the ground. They did so, bundling him gently into the back of the APC, the double doors opened. One of them examined the wound, and took out a field dressing, binding the calf that had been torn by a bullet. 'Get moving!' Vorontsyev called, sitting down next to the driver hi the officer's accustomed seat, turning so that he could watch the two men and the driver, and the wounded man supported in one of the seats.
'Where?' the driver asked, his hands gripping the wheel to still fear.
'Turn round — back the way you came. I'll give directions.'
The APC's engine roared, and then they turned on the dirt of the street, picking up speed as if to leave the carnage behind. Vorontsyev felt the weariness leave him, feeding instead on the shocked, stunned faces of the men he had captured, lifting himself up from the level of their self-abnegation. Now they did not even hate him. They were feeling nothing.
The APC left the village behind. Still no one had come out of any of the houses as they bumped over the rise and the village dropped out of sight. Within a quarter of a mile, Vorontsyev barked, 'Right here!' They turned off the road, down a narrow dirt track. The driver appeared puzzled. The rifle prodded against his arm, which quivered as at the touch of an electrode, and he changed down. The surface of the track was pitted with craters, in some of which icy pools remained.
Vorontsyev watched the sky, and the road ahead. It would be some time before the men became dangerous again with renewed hatred; and by that time he would have dumped them, and the driver. He would not kill them. He would simply leave them, in the middle of nowhere, on foot.
During the short afternoon, as they wound slowly, methodically along tracks and lanes, often screened by trees or high hedges and walls, always heading generally eastwards, the sky darkened swiftly and heavy cloud pressed down on them. A wind, too, sprang up; the weather had been deceptive in the morning. When it began to snow, large flakes driven into their faces, pattering against the sides of the APC, he knew he had been given the kind of luck he needed. The weather closed in on them. He worked from the map and the compass as the scenery was blotted out by curtains of rushing snow.
No air traffic.
Eventually, he abandoned the soldiers. They feared him, momentarily, but hatred was already beginning to make them calculate recklessly. They were beginning to be dangerous to him. They climbed out of the APC reluctantly, hauled out the wounded man without tenderness, and stood beneath the trees, sheltered from, the worst of the weather, looking up at him in a murderous little knot effaces. He almost abandoned his plan to lake the uniform of the man nearest him in build — but he knew he had to disguise himself if he was to drive the APC the rest of the way.
The man did, shivering with rage and cold as he stripped to his underwear, then donned Vorontsyev's sweaters and anorak and slacks. He seemed to hate the still-warm clothes, but he was forced by the temperature to put them on quickly. Vorontsyev bundled the uniform into the cab, jumped in shaking with cold, and drove off. He drove until the wind and temperature made it difficult to hold the wheel or use the gears — then he stopped, dressed in the chilly uniform, and swigged from the vodka in the first-aid kit.
Gradually, warmth returned. He had abandoned the men at least three miles from the nearest dwelling. They wouldn't die, but it would be a long time before they could describe what had happened.
He drove on, ten miles still from Khabarovsk, having covered nearly eighteen miles of country tracks and lanes. It was already beginning to grow dark with evening rather than storm.
He picked up the first of the roadblocks in the gleam of the headlights, only yards ahead of him. He had skirted Khabarovsk as best he could, keeping to the east of the town, but eventually, after three hours, he had had to join one of the main roads, which would take him through the outer suburbs to cross the river. He wanted to be south-east of Khabarovsk, and time was running out.
The roadblock was thrown across the approach to the bridge, a red-and-white pole, bollards to close the traffic flow down to a single lane, armed soldiers. He slowed behind the cars ahead of him as the brake lights went on, glaring in the falling sleet. He put out the cigarette, adjusted his uniform to some impression of tidiness, and waited to creep forward, or for them to come to him. He tried to shake off the narcosis of the journey. He had thought about nothing, made no plans beyond getting to the destination he had decided upon — even when he began running it had been there, a means of escape more like a child's dream than a plan. But, it had settled itself, apparently, and he had made no conscious effort to rid himself of it.
As the soldier marched down the little rank of waiting cars, he realised the mistake he had made. The sleet shifted aside for a moment, and he could see an army truck up ahead, in another lane. He had ignored the sign he had passed a hundred yards back redirecting priority traffic — which meant any army vehicle. Quickly, he wound down the window.
The cold flowed in, sleet peppered his face. The soldier looked up at him. He believed, in that moment, that they knew who he was — even though the chances of the soldiers he had abandoned getting to a telephone had been almost zero. They might, might just have to run into another army unit 'What the hell's the matter with you?' the guard asked, his face old and flat under the helmet. 'Can't any of you buggers read?'
'Sorry — ' Vorontsyev murmured, thickening his Muscovite accent, not able to trust himself to assume another way of speaking; he made himself more stupid, uneducated. 'Nearly asleep — been driving this bloody thing for hours.'
'Papers?' The guard held up his hand lazily. He didn't want to listen to anyone else, had his own grouses about being on duty so long his feet had gone numb and his back ached.
Vorontsyev handed over the papers as nonchalantly as he could; sensing a situation developing even as the heavy mittened hand took them, flicked a torch on them. Perhaps it was the click of the officer's boots coming down the line, or the fact that the car ahead of him pulled away, its boot having been slammed down after a perfunctory search.
'Where's the bloody picture, then?' The guard held out the ID papers. 'And your movement orders — in the cab?'
'Picture fell out,' Vorontsyev mumbled, looking sheepish. 'Sent it to some tart, I expect.'
Nothing, nothing yet 'What's going on here, Boris?' the officer said, and Vorontsyev saw the soldier wince at the use of his first name by the younger officer.
'Nothing much, sir. Silly bugger — sorry, sir — this man pulled up in the civilian queue — and he's lost the picture in his ID card.'
'Has he? You, where's your picture? Have you reported this to your officer?'
'Sir — he said he had more important things to worry about.'
'Mm. From Moscow, are you?'
'Sir.'
'All as thick as cowpats, they are, sir,' Boris offered, obscurely in league with Vorontsyev now that the officer was present.
'It says here you're from Tallinn.'
'Lived in Moscow for years, sir. Mother's from Tallinn — '
'Bloody conscripts for you,' Boris murmured helpfully.
'Why are you driving around on your own. Where's your officer, the rest of the platoon?' the officer snapped,
