Nevertheless, Vas handed towels and bottles of water to each of the fighters and congratulated them on an excellent display.
When Sam had glugged down almost a litre of water and suitably recovered enough to get his breath back, he looked at the three Voronin brothers and thought of the challenge Brendan Williams might yet present. “So, what do you think?” He said. “Am I ready?”
Mikhail staggered over to him and put his arm around Sam’s shoulders in a great show of affection and pride. “Yes, my friend,” he said, “You are most definitely ready. Believe me.”
Sam smiled but before he could reply, the radio crackled into life in the cabin. Pyotr ran back inside and snatched up the receiver, knowing it to be his father calling from their home in Moscow. “Yes Papa, go ahead,” he said, shutting the door behind him.
When he emerged from the cabin a few minutes later, Sam and Mikhail were fully dressed once more, both wearing thick sweaters and fleecy jackets to warm their bodies from the biting cold now that they had cooled down.
Vas turned to Pyotr as he headed back towards them and saw that his face was troubled. “What is it?” He asked, suddenly concerned. “Is it Papa?”
“No, Papa is well,” replied Pyotr, “but he did tell me some bad news.”
Now Mikhail and Sam turned towards him too, curious to know what this news was.
“It seems your training has been for nothing, my friend,” Pyotr said to Sam.
“What - why? I don’t understand,” He replied.
“It’s Williams,” explained Pyotr, “He’s no longer in Afghanistan.”
The news came like a gut shot to Sam’s belly, harder than any blow Mikhail could have inflicted. “But your father said he could track him - said that Williams would not escape!” He exclaimed.
“And indeed he has not,” retorted Pyotr. “My father has tracked him and knows exactly where he is.”
“So then what is the problem?” Sam asked, “I still don’t get it.”
“Because, tovarich, Williams is now in a place where you cannot reach him.”
“What do you mean,” said Sam, confused, “is he dead?”
“No, my friend,” replied Pyotr solemnly, his face stony with regret. “He is in Siberia.”
“Siberia,” Sam exclaimed, “well that’s okay, I can still—“
“No Sam,” interrupted Pyotr. “You can’t. You can’t do anything. It was all for nothing.”
“Why?” Sam still did not understand.
“Because,” replied Pyotr, looking hard into Sam’s eyes and feeling sick for having to tell him. “You can’t go after him because Brendan Williams is now serving ten years hard labour in a Siberian prison camp.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Seven months later. ‘The Garden’ Penal Colony, Northern Siberia.
‘The Garden’ was a name that conjured up images of pretty things - flowers in bloom, freshly cut lawns and nature in all its bounteous glory. Yet The Garden Penal Colony was a world away from that rose-tinted image. In fact, it was bleak and cold and dark, accessed from a single road through a dense forest twenty-five miles from the nearest town. In winter, daytime hours could fall to as low as minus eleven and at night it was significantly colder.
It seemed entirely appropriate then, that the Russian for ‘Garden’ was ‘Sad’ - a name that was eminently more apt.
Surrounded by high barbed wire fences patrolled by guards with machine guns and monitored by others in watchtowers at set intervals along the boundary, the cluster of buildings stood as dark, featureless monoliths in an otherwise baron and unforgiving landscape.
Scheduled for reform, the prison itself was a relic of the Cold War and reminiscent of the old Gulag system which had been abolished almost a half century before. It was now somewhat out of place in the new, post Glasnost Russia - indeed, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, monstrously archaic institutions like The Garden were no longer supposed to exist.
Yet, due to The Government’s continuing failure to authorise the dilapidated penal colony’s much needed modernisation, it still remained as a stark reminder of the former Soviet Union’s hard line stance on dealing with its more undesirable elements.
As a result, the 700 criminals currently incarcerated within The Garden’s crumbling walls consisted of terrorists, cannibals, serial killers, rapists and paedophiles - the majority of inmates being of either Russian or East European descent.
However, there was one Brit - the Welsh mercenary, Brendan Williams, who had been arrested by Russian forces in Afghanistan for the brutal murder of an entire family of innocents in his zealous pursuit of hostiles.
He was said to have raped both a mother and daughter, with the father and two sons being forced to watch at gunpoint. After which, he had slit the women’s throats before then shooting the man and his teenaged boys in the head.
For this barbaric act, he had been tried in Moscow and sentenced to ten years hard labour at the notoriously tough penal colony in Siberia. So far, he had served just eight months of his time at The Garden but the prison was already proving to be more than deserving of its fearful reputation.
Along with Williams, who had previously been the only Westerner, there was now also one American.
This new arrival had been at the prison for just four weeks and was listed on the camp’s records as being a former enforcer for the Voronin organisation. Indeed, it stated on the official documentation that he was personally responsible for the deaths of many men.
In truth, he was accountable for just three. However, he had purposely conspired to be sent to The Garden specifically to kill a fourth - and no barbed wire, no armed guards or machine gun turreted watchtowers were going to stop him.
***
It had taken all of Vladimir Voronin’s significant influence to get Sam sent to the Siberian prison on the pretext of being an underworld enforcer.
Thanks to his years in the K.G.B. he still had considerable sway within The Kremlin and had called in several favours from officials who knew better than to refuse him.
However, what Sam was intending went against Vladimir’s better judgement and he, along with Vas, Mikhail and Pyotr, had pleaded with him to reconsider the very dangerous path he was hell bent on pursuing, knowing well The Garden’s terrible reputation.
Vladimir was also at pains to warn Sam that once he was in the system it could prove almost impossible to get him out. Yet Sam was still insistent and determined to go ahead with it nonetheless.
So, in spite of their misgivings and the fact that it had been a laboriously slow process, in which Vladimir had bribed, cajoled and, in some cases, threatened various officials, Sam was finally registered as a convict and absorbed into the Russian penal system; his fabricated back story being that of an enforcer for the Voronin organisation. This was purposely because his association with Vladimir would at least offer him some form of protection. Indeed, with his ties to the Voronin family, both guards and inmates alike would be inclined to treat him with a little more respect for fear of reprisals on the outside.
Yet before being sent to The Garden, he first had to await transportation there from a prison in Moscow.
So, handcuffed and delivered into custody under the dead of night by police officers on Voronin’s payroll, Sam was photographed, fingerprinted and processed by the prison authority and held on remand until transportation North could be arranged; the sheet on his officially authenticated docket falsely stating him to be guilty of multiple homicides.
The very nature of being locked up for twenty-three hours a day was something of a baptism of fire for Sam but no matter how hard he found it, worse was yet to come.
Nevertheless, after weeks cooped up in a Moscow holding cell, the transfer order finally came through and shortly afterwards he found himself shackled by the hands and feet and on a train bound for Russia’s most notorious
penal colony.
Three days later, after a long and arduous railway journey, the train eventually reached the remote town in Siberia that was its final destination. Once there, Sam was then bundled into a truck and driven a further twenty-five miles to the place where he had been sentenced to spend the next eight years of his life.
However, as he climbed down out of the truck and took a first glimpse at his new surroundings, he immediately realised the near impossibility of the task he had set himself.
What is more, if he thought the holding cells in Moscow were tough, then The Garden, in comparison, was like something straight out of hell.
***
Upon arrival, Sam was stripped, had his head shaved and every orifice thoroughly examined for contraband. After this, he was supplied a uniform consisting of a dark grey jacket with a wide navy stripe across the chest and a pair of matching trousers with a stripe running up the length of the left leg. He was also given work boots, underwear and a coarse grey shirt.
Next, he was assigned a bunk in a tiny cell, located in Block Number 1, sharing with a multiple murderer by the name of Yuri who reportedly had a taste for human flesh. Fortunately, however, his new cell mate kept himself to himself and hardly ever spoke.
Sam was also allocated a work detail. The Garden followed the established Soviet principle of work and rest, with designated zones for both. His cell was located in the ‘home’ zone whilst the vast open space beyond the fence was the ‘work’ zone.
Work at the camp focussed around the production of wheat - preparing the land, sowing the seeds, and harvesting the crop - all of which was done with basic farm implements such as scythes and rakes and without the use of modern machinery, in accordance with the forced labour element of the inmates’ punishment. Tractors with long trailers were only used to transport grain to the huge steel bins that dominated the skyline to the East of the prison itself.
All prisoners were required to sign a document every hour to confirm their presence - no matter what they happened to be doing - and were not permitted to leave the field for breaks.
Cooked meals were restricted to just one a day and were typically meat stew with pickled cabbage and one small slice of bread.
In all, it was an immensely austere and dehumanising system which Sam found difficult to adapt to. From the brutal strictures of daily life to the mind-numbingly dull hours locked up in a tiny cell - it was all so radically different from the privileged world he had previously known.
It was also difficult living in such close quarters with a group of violent and unpredictably volatile individuals, although for the most part they left him alone thanks to his well publicised association with the Voronin family. However, he was now extremely thankful for Mikhail and Pyotr’s ‘game’ which had forced him to become fluent in Russian so he could at least converse, when necessary, with those around him.
Otherwise, however, it was a joyless and harsh existence which offered little in the way of respite. Furthermore, with such high levels of security and with the guards watching his almost every move, it was difficult for Sam to see a way of getting to Williams.
However, what concerned him most, after being at the prison for four weeks, was that he had not yet so much as set eyes on the man he had gone there to kill.
***
In the weeks leading up to his incarceration, whilst Vladimir was busy calling in favours, Sam had continued with his training in the forest on the outskirts of Moscow so as to stay in peak physical condition. Now, since his arrival at The Garden, he was conscious of maintaining his fitness.
However, the frequent, physically punishing outdoor work helped with this even though his meagre diet was barely enough to sustain him.
Nevertheless, when back in his cell, with Yuri laying on the bed staring silently at the wall, Sam would also keep himself in shape by doing sit-ups and push-ups until he was too exhausted to do anymore - all the time focussing on Williams and the need to be prepared for when his chance might finally come.
However, during the long hours spent locked up, he could not help but think about Miriam and Claudette too. Indeed, there was little else to keep his mind occupied.
He got through the days by thinking about Miriam; fantasising about what she might be doing; imagining her at work on her rounds at the hospital and afterwards sitting down to a meal at the small table in her bedsit with a place set for him.
However, at night his dreams were haunted by the vile images of Claudette being violated and abused in the glade, always followed by the horrific vision of her hanging from the tree, a swastika carved across her breasts and a knife wound in her pregnant belly.
Yet these dreams always ended with the faces of the men responsible; three of them dead, their corpses rotting and being eaten by worms, but three more standing over them, taunting Sam, daring him on. Locke, the leader, alongside the man with the crescent moon scar on his face and finally Brendan Williams, the man whom Sam thought of as The Albino. His pale skin seemed to glow ghostly white and his prison uniform appeared almost luminescent as he silently beckoned Sam towards him.
But then, just when he was within arms reach, Williams’ image would disappear and the sound of mocking laughter would wake Sam with a start.
It was only a dream but there was an undeniable truth to it. Williams was eluding him.
Indeed, when after another month Sam had still not set eyes on him, he tentatively started to make enquiries - although nothing too blatant so as not to arouse suspicion.
Nevertheless, it was soon confirmed to him that Williams was, in fact, an inmate at the prison - which came as something of a relief as Sam was beginning to fear Vladimir’s intelligence to be incorrect.
However, it also became clear that things were nowhere near as straightforward as he might have hoped.
According to the information gleaned, Williams had originally been housed in Block Number 2, which might well have accounted for why Sam had not seen him, being that inmates from one block were not allowed access to another.
But that was not solely the case. Williams had apparently become involved in some sort of fracas shortly before Sam’s arrival at the prison and as a result, had been sent to the High Security Wing for an unspecified length of time, hence the true reason for why Sam had not yet encountered him.
However, the time Williams was likely to spend in High Security was not so clear. Indeed, opinions varied from as little as six months to as long as two years.
This came as a terrible blow to Sam, knowing that he might have to serve a serious amount of hard time without ever even seeing the man he had gone there purposely to find, let alone getting a chance to kill him.
Furthermore, prisoners in the High Security Wing were confined to their cells for twenty-three hours a day with the remaining hour pre-designated for solitary exercise in a walled yard that was inaccessible to the general populace - thus making any attempt to get to Williams whilst he was being incarcerated there absolutely impossible.
It was a devastating set back but there was nothing Sam could do but accept it.
All he could do now was wait.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
By the April of 1997, Sam had been resident at The Garden for twenty months and Williams had been locked up in High Security for almost two years.
By now Sam had realised that it did him no good whatsoever to constantly think about Miriam. After all, it was just a fantasy of a life he might never have and did nothing for the state of his flagging morale. Indeed, any thoughts of her at all were damaging to the mindset he needed to survive in prison.
So he concentrated on doing his time, on serving his sentence as quietly as he could and putting all thoughts of Miriam out of his head.
However, the nightmares persisted and seemed to grow ever stronger as each gruelling, brutally hard month slowly dragged by.
Each mornin
g before daylight, the prisoners were marched out into the fields in twenty man work gangs, sometimes walking up to three miles before being halted by the machine gun wielding guards and put to work on the land.
Depending on the season, punishingly long days would be spent either tilling the ground, sowing seeds or harvesting crops in what was relentless, back breaking toil. Then, after the last of the daylight had been exhausted, they would be marched back to the prison once more.
For months Sam suffered terrible blisters from the hours spent scything and hoeing but now the skin on his hands had grown hard and resistant, although still not immune to the almost perpetual cold.
Sam no longer exercised in his cell as the added exertion after a day in the fields was just too much to sustain for months on end. Now, as soon as his head touched the pillow, he went out like a light, only to be visited by the visions of Claudette and the men that had killed her once more.
As time passed, whilst he waited for Brendan Williams to be released back into the general population, Sam began to wonder if there might be some way of hiding one of the farm tools to use as a weapon for when the time came; a scythe or an axe ideally but anything with a sharp edge would do.
Yet he soon realised the idea was impossible. All tools were strictly monitored and accounted for; each one signed out and back in with the prisoner’s name and number listed next to the implement used in the daily work log. Furthermore, when not in use they were kept permanently locked in a tool barn which was guarded at all times, so there was no way Sam could hope to steal one.
It seemed Sam’s only chance to kill Williams would be out in the fields, using any means possible. But with armed guards everywhere that idea was fraught with danger.
Nonetheless, he could see no other way as it was the only time when convicts from all blocks mingled together.
A plan of how he was going to do it, however, without getting killed himself, was still yet to present itself.
Indeed, Sam was still contemplating a solution to this thorny problem two months later as he and the teams of men around him worked away with their scythes, harvesting the rolling hectares of golden wheat that stretched out almost as far as the eye could see.
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