by Alex Dryden
The room was in total darkness still, no light came through from outside and she realised there were no portholes. She could switch on the torch again. In its light she saw the lever that held the chain. It was locked into place in the cogged wheel that arrested the chain at the right length for their anchorage.
She got to her feet and saw the sledgehammer the crew would have used to free the chain. She lifted it and calculated as she had already done before in the women’s hold the force of the current, and the distance to the sandbank that jutted out downstream from the ship as the river curved around slightly to the west. The ship was hard on the chain and the current pulled it downstream. It was anchored away from the bank, but not close enough for anyone to jump in safely and swim to shore. She lifted the sledgehammer to shoulder height and brought it down on the lever. It sprung away with a crack and suddenly the room was filled with the deafening noise of the chain slowly beginning to unravel as the drum was freed and the ship was dragged by the current.
Then it began to pick up speed as the current took hold of the ship fully, with nothing to hold it now. She guessed that the river flowed at four or five knots here. She felt the ship slowly drifting with the current as the drum unrolled the chain. How long was the anchor chain? Would it allow the ship to travel far enough in order to ground it? The chain was unravelling faster now as the current picked up the ship still further, and then its own momentum began to push it away from the anchor embedded in the silt. Thirty seconds, forty, the ship was probably doing a knot of speed now, two knots maybe.
Then she felt a judder as the stern, the deeper part of the vessel, touched the bottom, but the current still forced the vessel on.
Someone above would have noticed what was happening now, even if they didn’t know why. She pulled on a military cap, took her pack and waited in the lee of the hatch. Almost immediately she heard shouts, and the hatch to the anchor room was flung open. Two crewmen entered rapidly. She heard shouts outside. Then the bow of the ship struck an immovable object on the river floor; a rock maybe. She heard a grinding, ripping sound echoing up through the hollow steel of the bow. It was too late for the crewmen to arrest the drum. It was running wildly.
Anna silently slipped through the hatch and on to the deck as the ship began to tilt to the side. She heard the crashing of unsecured objects on the deck, the clatter of boots, then shouts and curses as the ship began to heel violently. Men were sliding, dropping their weapons as, keeping to the shadows, Anna made the rail on the side where the ship had heeled and threw herself over it into the fast-flowing water.
As she hit the water, floodlights went on, but they now all pointed down into the river nearest the ship, at the angle to which the ship had tilted, and soon she was away, yards from the shore and she struck out in the darkness until she felt sand beneath her feet. She was freezing, the water ice cold, and she ran up the shallow incline of the shore towards a group of trees. From the eastern horizon, the sky was beginning to lighten.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE WOLF DMITRY was fast; faster than anyone on the ship to respond to the imminent disaster that was unfolding. In the commandeered captain’s cabin, he felt the movement of the ship through a sleep that was never deeper than the slightest slide from wakefulness. And with a mind that suspected sabotage in anything, his instincts told him almost at once that it was the woman.
He sprung half-dressed from the bunk and automatically picked up a loaded GSh-18 locked breech pistol on a chair beside it.
As the ship grounded it wasn’t hard for him to see that the approaching catastrophe was no accident. An anchor as big as the Rossiya’s held fast here in the silt at the bottom of the river and so some human agent was responsible. What had happened? That he couldn’t guess, and it was anyway unimportant. Only the agent of the disaster was on his mind.
He swiftly put on his boots and jacket. He was out of the cabin as the ship’s pace picked up and then suddenly shuddered to a near halt as it struck the river bed. By the time the hull ground itself further into the silt and, then, what felt like rock tore at the metal shell and the whole structure began to heel violently, he was on the tilting deck and had the pistol gripped in his right hand like an extension of himself. The heeling was now more than ten degrees and any unsecured items on the deck were beginning to slide in the darkness, knocking unwary conscripts against the guard rails and over the side. There were shouts and crashes and cries in the darkness. Then the deck was listing at twenty degrees and still the ship kept turning its port side towards the surface of the water.
He shouted up at the bridge deck to a panicked crewman to switch on the floodlights. The man dragged himself up the slope of metal inside the bridge. And Dmitry began to search in the darkness for the person he knew in his angry heart was the cause. It must be the woman. The body of Ivan the evening before had told him that. The man’s face was mashed by broken glass. He had never quite believed her story. There’d been something wrong about her from the moment he’d seen her. She was different. The discovery of the foreman’s body the night before only now confirmed what he’d sensed when he’d had her standing against the wall and he’d seen how she’d received his blows with what could only be described as a practised resilience. He knew he should have locked her up then, the previous evening, after the body was found, and that made his heart blacker and now his fury slowly ground itself into a sharp, focused point.
But he hadn’t locked her in the ship’s brig. Instead he’d wavered, his mind on other things, perhaps – on a paranoid idea of saboteurs everywhere that had clouded his judgement and induced him to overlook the single element, the woman, who posed all the danger. Instead of locking her up, he’d merely sent the picture of her that was on the dolt Ivan’s phone, which had been found in his cabin after he’d disappeared, to his superiors. Dmitry had looked through the pictures on it the night before – all women, and all women that a drunken fool like Ivan would never have had a chance with. But he’d sent her picture on to Moscow during the night. He knew there was something not right about her. Better to be safe than sorry and Igarka was the first place they’d come to on the river where there’d been any mobile phone reception. He’d missed his chance to neutralise her the night before but he wasn’t going to miss it again. His career was on the line, but personal rage was what drove him.
Now as he gripped the rail with his left hand and as the ship heeled further over with every minute, he looked out into the darkness and he knew she was there somewhere. Maybe she was still on the ship, or already in the water. He shouted again at the bridge for light.
The problem was that in the darkness and with the river now churned up with conscripts who’d fallen from the deck, he couldn’t find the body which he hoped would shortly be a corpse. If he could only calm his furious mind and sort out the dozen or so drifting figures. In an instant he instinctively judged that those who’d fallen accidentally were drifting slowly downstream, flailing their arms in the current, shouting half-heard calls for help. Some of them undoubtedly wouldn’t know how to swim. But he didn’t care for them. What he was looking for in the dark waters wasn’t a drifting or drowning figure at the mercy of the current, it was a determined, planned escape, a body that was neither flailing nor shouting for help, but was aiming itself straight to the shore, out of the current.
All he could see as his eyes adjusted to the darkness was some white water where bodies thrashed the surface and he shouted at the bridge again, screaming for his orders to be obeyed. The ship’s floodlights suddenly burst their blinding light over the water. The ship was still tilting, it looked as if it wasn’t going to stop. It must have grounded on a shelving bank, he thought, next to a trough in the riverbed. And it was falling slowly and inevitably into the cutting. Feverishly he examined the whiteness of the water where humans were disturbing it.
And then he saw it: a straight, aimed kick of white water; it was not heading for the ship, which would have been logical if it had been a consc
ript, nor drifting helplessly in the current as others were, but directing itself at the bank, only yards away from it now, the kicking of the water behind the figure forming a line of foam, the direction straight and true.
He raised his pistol but the floodlights on the ship were now pointing close on to the water with the ship’s tilt. Their light wasn’t spread away from the hull but down into the water at the sides. The dart of white water he’d seen was suddenly lost in the darkness again, where the lights now failed to reach. He was at the edge of the deck. He gripped the rail more tightly with his other hand, his feet sliding on the metal, wet with the night’s dew. He remembered where he’d seen the white water and fired four, five shots slightly ahead of where he’d seen it, and then beyond. It was guesswork, but he was highly trained.
The ship tilted violently again and the water began to lap over the sides, flooding into his boots, and he felt the freezing sensation grip his ankles and shins. He only just kept his grip on the rail which was now at an angle of thirty or even forty degrees. The short recoil-operated action of the gun worked perfectly but there was no cry of a wounded person. The shots must have been too low or wide, dipping into the water behind the line of foam as the ship leaned suddenly again, and he tried to steady himself once more. He heard himself shouting vile curses at the woman and saw the helpless conscripts drifting past him, trying to grab the guard rails which trailed in the water. Others were already lost in the darkness behind the vessel.
The barrel of the pistol rotated again, he planted his feet wide, his body flat against the guard rails where the gravity of the angle had thrust him. Now he could get a fair shot and he blasted two more bullets into the darkness ahead of where he’d last seen the line of white water. And then the ship shuddered to halt, almost on its side, and he needed both hands to grip the rail or he would have gone over the side with the others. The bullets, where were the bullets? In his urgent departure from the cabin he must have left them behind. The rotating barrel was empty. Dmitry leaped over the rails which were now half underwater and seized a rifle from a conscript trying to get back up again over the rails, thrusting him back with the rifle butt into the water as he did so. With the rifle over his head he swam on his back in the direction where he knew she’d gone.
Anna felt the last two bullets pound into the mud on the bank to the left of her as she ran on to a harder surface of stones and then tore ahead for the cover of the trees. The trees now showed dark against the lightening of the sky to the east and she made it into a small covey of stunted, twisted trunks and branches and then ran on without pausing until she’d put them between her and the ship. She knew she had almost no time. If she could make it to the shore, then so could others. And now she saw lights coming on in the town in response to the shooting and to the ship’s floodlights. The catastrophe would be immediately visible to anyone in the town who saw the ship’s lights directed down into the river.
She didn’t pause to catch her breath but ran on. She’d noted the low buildings of the town from the evening before, and their arrival at Igarka. Before she and the others had been locked in the holds.
Now she ran towards one low building in particular. It was one of several that served the lumber factories and she saw it was surrounded by piled logs and sawn planks; a sawmill. She was in the lee of the sawmill less than thirty seconds after she’d passed the trees. She felt her feet treading deep wood chippings and saw the sawdust on her boots. There was a door on the north side of the corrugated structure. She tested the handle and found it locked.
She unstrapped the Thompson Contender from her back and tore off the plastic waterproofing and hoped that her improvised efforts to keep it dry had been successful. She didn’t bother with the silencer. From a distance of two feet – dangerously close to be shooting into metal – she fired off a round into the lock and saw it twist and collapse. She jammed her shoulder into the door and it gave way easily.
As Dmitry hit the bed of the river with his feet, he heard the single shot and judged the direction. He hauled himself on to the shore, the rifle still held high. Then he felt the ground harden under his feet and knelt and saw the footprints, the smaller prints of a woman’s boots. He stood and ran towards the trees, stopping briefly to find traces of the boots where the ground had become harder and it was difficult to see. He was through the trees, when a light came on outside what looked like a long corrugated iron warehouse. The light illuminated the river frontage of the warehouse, on the western side. He saw two figures, uncertain what to do. He ran towards them, levelling the weapon until he saw they were workers, a foreman perhaps and another man. He shouted instructions. But they wavered. They saw a man in soaking trousers and jacket waving a rifle who could have been, from their point of view, the problem not the solution. Dmitry fired the rifle into the air.
‘Get everyone out here!’ he screamed. ‘I want the town surrounded.’ The authoritative violence of his voice was enough to delay them no longer.
Anna heard the voice and recognised it. She also saw the glow of the lights on the eastern side of the building where the light crept around to shed some illumination on the north door where she’d entered. There was little time. She walked steadily into the blackness of the mill feeling along the walls and the worn wooden surfaces of work benches, bumping occasionally into equipment. There would be a cupboard, a metal cupboard most likely, but what she was looking for might also be lying around loose, locked up at night. And there would be more than one, a dozen or so probably. She followed the interior metal wall, came to a cupboard, opened it and scrambled around inside it with her hand. She felt the sharp pain of a saw blade, followed it back to the handle and knew it was a chainsaw. She lifted it out, shook the machine with her hand and found to her relief it was full of fuel.
Then she stopped and looked back towards the door where she’d entered and which she’d closed as best she could behind her with its lock now shattered. A thin sliver of light from outside outlined the door jamb. Too risky. They – he – would find it. But perhaps that would work in her favour. He’d enter through there and she would exit at another door. She walked slowly, the chainsaw in one hand, the Thompson Contender in the other, towards the eastern side of the building, then felt along it until she came to another door. Padlocked on the outside. She put down the chainsaw and felt with her left hand for the slight gap between the door and the jamb, then knelt until she could see the bolt the padlock held in place against the lightening eastern sky. She placed the barrel of the gun into the gap and fired two swift shots and felt the bolt shatter. And then lights went on in the mill and she was out of the door as a rifle bullet sliced into the door frame to her right.
Outside the building there was a pandemonium of men without a leader. She saw a Niva jeep across the mud and sawdust and a man getting into it. She ran for it and opened the door, dragging him out and knocking him cold with the pistol butt. She flung the chainsaw into the passenger seat and, finding the keys in the ignition, started it at the second try and gunned the engine into life. With no lights she aimed straight along the wooden road that was now just visible in the dawn. The jeep crashed against the ill-fitting wooden beams of the road until the wood road ran out at the edge of the town and she was on a dirt track that headed northwards, into the forest. The jeep slewed in the mud, bumped against a thin tree trunk to the side and very nearly turned over. But she was in trees, the thin silver stems of trunks picking out the thinner light of the dawn coming from the east. Two shots rang out but neither hit her or the jeep. She’d reached beyond the small town and she jammed her foot on the throttle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHAT ALEXEI PETROV saw from the foredeck of the Sibirski ferry just a few hours later was nothing like the Igarka he’d seen before. A ship, which he soon found to be the Rossiya, wallowed on its side, half-submerged. Its funnel was pointing almost at the bank. But it was on the banks themselves and around the town that the scene erupted in his eyes and in his mind. There a
ppeared to be an army camp in the making. It was as if half a regiment had suddenly arrived in this town of just a hundred or so permanent inhabitants.
A launch was coming towards the Sibirski as the ferry slunk behind the island that protected Igarka from the main river. Through a megaphone from the launch, a Federal Security Service officer ordered the captain to moor at anchor and not approach the jetty which had been just completed after the spring torrent and which would normally have received the vessel. The captain obeyed at once. The man with the megaphone, Petrov saw, was a colonel in the FSB, or KGB as it had once been known and was still called privately. That’s what it was in everything but name. The ferry’s anchor began to be prepared and was dropped several hundred yards upstream from the Rossiya.
As the ship slewed to a halt, its stern swinging downstream in the direction of the current and the stricken ship, Petrov took in the scene in greater detail. There were thirteen troop-carrying helicopters that he could count. Some were the older Hind versions – gunships to carry troops into forward battle. Others were the newer Mi-24s that were replacing the Hinds. Both were attack helicopters used in the wars in Chechnya or, in the case of the older ones, in Afghanistan in the eighties. Around the helicopters were tented camps, hastily set up in the past few hours, by the look of them. He saw soldiers from the GRU, Russia’s biggest foreign intelligence agency, as well as OMON groups and FSB officers and one or two MVD uniforms amongst them. It was a display of Russia’s disparate and, frequently warring, security forces. Then, straining his eyes, he thought he saw on the bank nearer to the ferry an FSB general.
Petrov had once visited the set for a film about the battle of Stalingrad. They’d had a front line of World War Two T-34 tanks and, behind them, five thousand modern tanks, their modern design concealed from the film’s audience. That was what Igarka looked like, a film set, he thought. It was as if the hundreds of men were preparing for a small war and, as he looked, he heard two more gunships approaching and he watched them land on hastily improvised orange plastic crosses on the edge of the town.