by Alex Dryden
Anna finished carving a hole in the ice floe and switched off the chainsaw. She waded back to the shingle bank and crouched down behind the broken tree. He would find the tracks that led to the cliff – eventually. Maybe he already had. Then he would see the jeep smashed on to the shore below the cliff and, like her, he would see the descent. He would spot her footsteps in the snow that led down to the river. She could run, or she could wait for him, but she didn’t need to think long before she decided which choice she would make.
She cranked the chainsaw again, twice, three times before it sprung into life. There was a little fuel still left. Then she tied the throttle to On and wedged the running saw into a crook of the broken tree. She crawled backwards now, away from the tree and the ice floes, up the shingle bank, following the river’s curve for twenty yards, before she found a rock. She took up a position behind the rock and unslung the Thompson Contender from her back, checked the barrel had a centrefire rifle cartridge, and slid the safety catch. She chose a big game round, rather than the rimfire bullets she would normally use to disable or kill a human or small animal. But after what he’d done to her on the ship the Wolf was now big game to her. She got up from behind the rock as the chainsaw ran on, cutting empty air, its noise excluding all else in the silence and creating a fatal focus of attention. Then she walked up the shingle bank and ascended the cliff in a different place from where she’d first come down.
Dmitry grabbed at a rock on the way down the cliff to stop himself from sliding and almost lost the rifle. He was exposed, too exposed on the gently sloping descent, and now he knew – even without the sound of a chainsaw – that he was close to her. Her steps on the descent were firmly printed in the snow.
He reached the foot of the cliff and looked up the shingle bank towards the sound. There was her jeep, crashed over on its side. He would check it, but without expecting her to be inside it. It was no accident, he was sure of that. He crouched low and approached the jeep. Through the driver’s window now facing the sky, he saw at once that it was empty. He walked back still in a low crouch to the edge of the cliff.
It was dark down here, but not quite dark enough. Against the snow he could be seen and so he followed a route right against the cliff where snow hadn’t been able to settle. His first thought as he crept with the rifle ready and the catch off was that this was going to be easy, easier than he’d expected. Unless she was looking right at him, she would see virtually nothing and the noise of the chainsaw meant that she would hear even less. He crept further against the lee of the cliff and picked out a collapsed tree up ahead. It was leaning in towards the river and a few ice floes were jammed up against it. That was where the noise was coming from. She must be behind the tree. Cutting wood for a fire maybe. The bitter cold coming off the river was chilling him to the bone now even with a jacket, as he no longer had the warmth of the jeep.
He came closer – thirty, twenty yards away from the broken tree – and then something began to trouble him and the thought made him instantly duck down against the cliff. There was no cover here but the darkness.
The thought that snapped suddenly into his mind was that the noise of the chainsaw was steady, consistent, without revs, without the higher then lower pitch of whining that it should be making, without the different, lower sound of a blade cutting into wood. And he realised then that it was cutting air and that there was no hand on the throttle.
He looked up and saw a rock between him and the broken tree; cover of sorts. And he began to crawl on his belly tight to the ground, his right knee bending up to give him traction, his left leg long, dragged along by the right leg, and the rifle an inch or so off the stones, held in his left hand up ahead of his body, leaving his right hand free to press the trigger. He felt himself break into a sweat. He knew he was crawling into a trap and only the darkness, and the rock, could come to his aid. And then the chainsaw stuttered, ran on a little, stuttered again and stopped, leaving the river and the shingle bank and the high moon smothered under a deafening silence.
The blow that struck him like a metal whip across the cheek came from nowhere. He reeled out of the crouch he was in behind the rock, dropping the rifle that clattered on to the stones, and let out a sharp cry of surprise and anger, as much as pain. He fell heavily onto his side, but was on his feet in seconds. It was her, the long barrel of a kind of handgun he’d never seen before levelled at his head, her hands steady, both of them on the gun, her feet apart and, from the moon’s dull glow, he thought he saw a smile on her face.
‘You would have been a hero,’ she said in the deep silence.
He put his hand to his cheek and felt blood.
‘You don’t know who I am,’ she said. ‘But they would have made you a general. If you weren’t such a fool. If you’d killed me or locked me up. As it is, I’m going to kill you.’
Anna put the long-barrelled handgun down, on to the surface of the rock behind which the Wolf had been hiding. For a split second this perplexed him. But then he launched himself at her. As his body almost flew across the stones at her still figure, she stepped slightly aside, away from the rock, and he felt the agony of her boot in his neck as her right leg kicked high and with immense force into him. In his off-balanced position, he was flung aside by her boot and landed heavily on to the rock, the twin agonies in his neck and now his side making his head swim. He thought he’d broken a rib and he howled in anger and pain as he slid from the rock, but all the time his eyes were on the gun that rested a few inches away.
With as much force as he could muster from his winded and broken body, he catapulted himself towards the gun. Her boot crashed on to the back of his hand and he felt the fingers snap between her boot and the rock, and then a second blow directly in his face that sent him reeling backwards so that he lay flat and splayed on the stones.
‘That’s for what you did to me,’ she said.
The Wolf struggled painfully to his feet. He had beaten five men in hand-to-hand combat to be the man he was and now he was being slowly, measuredly, beaten by this woman. But her first attack had been out of nowhere. She’d weakened him first. He felt a rush of anger, as if she’d played an unfair move in a training exercise, and he saw her smile – more of a snarl – across the six feet that separated them.
He held his good hand up to his cheek where the barrel of the gun had smashed into it, then scraped down it, all the way to his mouth. The blood was still pulsing down on to his arm and chest. His other hand was a mess of broken bones and his left side where he’d been thrown on to the rock sent a searing pain up into his lungs where the breathing was restricted. He knew she could kill him now.
‘Lie on your face,’ she commanded, and he did so. If she was to put a bullet in his head then she might come close. That would be his last chance. But she might just shoot him from where she was.
But he heard her boots crunch on the stones towards him.
‘Put your hands behind your back,’ she ordered him.
He did so painfully and heard her behind and above him. Then he felt a rope twisting around his wrists and he cried out in pain as it caught one of his broken fingers. The knot was tightened. She stood with one foot on his back, near the rib he suspected was broken, in order to get the leverage to pull the knot tight. He nearly fainted with agony. Then, with one boot she turned him over.
‘Get up.’
It was a struggle anyway with his hands tied, but with his injuries it was impossible to stand without causing himself the most extreme pain. But finally he was on his knees, rasping breath rushing from his chest in an agonised burst, and then on to one foot and then the other, until he was standing in front of her.
‘Turn around. Walk back the way you came.’
The journey back along the shingle bank was hell enough, but the scramble back up the ascent of the cliff blotted out any thought in his mind but the searing pain when he stumbled and had to get up again, feeling the long barrel in his back, and her sure-footed steps behind him. He t
hought of turning, one last throw of the dice, and trying to kick her off the side of the cliff. All that prevented him from the attempt was a dawning belief that she might not kill him.
They reached the top after a struggle of pain and fear.
‘To the jeep,’ she ordered. ‘No rest.’
He staggered on, through the trees where the moon’s light darkened, past the branches she’d laid by the track, until he saw the glint of metal which was the jeep’s side.
‘Get in.’ She held the door open for him and he half fell, half stepped up on to the seat as she shoved him all the way inside. He almost fainted again then, and he vomited with the pain, choking the contents of his stomach on to the passenger seat. He could do nothing now but lie there.
He heard her in the back of the jeep and the terror of his imagination brought an image into his mind of her circling the jeep with a fuel can – that she was going to burn him alive. But then she returned and tied his feet together with some cord she must have dug out of the rear of the jeep.
Then she stood and looked at his half-upturned face for what seemed like an age.
‘I sent them your photo,’ he rasped. ‘To Moscow. To Balashiha. You didn’t lose his phone when you killed Ivan.’ The thought seemed to give him the brief strength of a final victory over her. ‘Whoever you are,’ he said, ‘you’re finished.’
But for Anna, the Wolf’s threat was now irrelevant.
‘If you don’t freeze to death,’ she said, ‘when they find you, you can explain how you managed to lose Russia’s most wanted defector. A former SVR colonel.’
Then she turned and he lay in floods and waves of pain and felt the blood slowly begin to coagulate on his face. The last thing she did before leaving him was to sling his rifle across her shoulders.
Anna retraced her way to the cliff, down on to the shingle bank, and along to the broken tree. She picked up the branch she had meticulously cut and waded into the freezing waters at the edge of the river until she reached the floe where she’d made the hole. With some difficulty she climbed up on to it, using the branch for support and, once she was inside the hole she had cut with the chainsaw, she pushed against the jammed and grounded floe in front of her. The makeshift pole and paddle forced itself against the floe and, using all her strength, she finally felt the ice floe on which she had taken refuge dislocate itself from the others, turn slightly in the current, and then it was free. With the branch she guided it and her towards the main current of the river to the north.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ON THE FOLLOWING morning at just after five o’clock, Alexei Petrov sat with his elbows on his knees in Igarka’s harbour office and waited.
Outside the poorly fitting window there was a bitter wind blowing from the north that was following the course of the river. A low grey sky hung over Siberia. From the wooden bench next to the wood burner where he sat, he could see how the wind blasted the young trees sideways on the edge of the town and he felt its chill as it crept under the gaps in the door of the office. A slight snow had fallen overnight. Despite the fact that it was June, the wood burner flamed in the corner of the office, packed with wood, and Petrov was still dressed in a padded jacket.
Early on in the evening before, a member of the GRU Communications unit had shown him the simplicity of the satellite phone and he’d made a test call to the FSB colonel, Fradkov. It had all worked. Now he waited as the Igarka harbour master was out somewhere and, whatever else he was doing, was hopefully checking to see who was going downriver to Dudinka in one of the sixteen-foot aluminium boats that were lithe and manoeuvrable enough to avoid the remaining ice floes to the north.
But now, at this particular moment, Petrov was alone and he took the piece of paper that Eileen had dropped on the Sibirski the day before from his pocket. It was just a scrap from the inside of a cigarette box and it had been folded roughly in two. He looked at the small writing in Russian, a scrawl merely, and wished he had his wife’s magnifying glass that lay in the drawer at home with the rest of her things. Petrov sighed at the thought of his wife’s few possessions. Then he squinted one eye half shut and read what the scrawl said. MNF is nuclear power without danger or waste, from sea water.
Petrov crunched the paper into the ball of his fist as the door to the outside swung open and the harbour master entered in a gust of wind that blew a twisting billow of snow into the room. He slammed the door behind him. The wind’s noise was cut as if with a switch.
‘It’s like autumn out there, not spring,’ he said and stopped by the wood burner to warm his hands. He was silent until that was done – a man who wasted little effort, Petrov noted, and did things in the order that suited him. One of the great unhurried, and Petrov silently approved. When he was done with his hands, he turned.
‘There’s a man who lives up in Dudinka leaving in half an hour,’ he said. ‘Pay for half his fuel and he’ll take you.’
Dudinka was about a hundred miles north of Igarka. With luck he’d be there in the late afternoon, Petrov thought. If the man had a decent outboard, that was.
‘What kind of boat?’ he asked.
‘Aluminium open boat with a forty-horsepower engine. You know the kind. He’s reliable.’
‘I’ll take it. Thank you.’
The fuel cost relatively little, but it would still knock a hole in the money he’d brought with him. But there was no other way north of Igarka and he’d known that.
The harbour master opened a half-empty bottle of vodka and put his thumb and index finger into two glasses and put all three things on the table. He poured them both a shot. It was just after 5.30 in the morning, Petrov noted, looking at his watch for the first time that day. The harbour master proposed no toast – perhaps he’d exhausted them all long ago – but simply raised his glass to Petrov, who raised his own. They downed the two shots in one go. The harbour master filled his own glass a second time, but Petrov put his hand over his own. The harbour master grunted, lifted his own glass and took it straight down. Petrov tried not to watch him, as if the man might be embarrassed, but he didn’t seem to care. Life expectancy for men up here was about forty-six years, Petrov knew.
The man who was to take him north looked about fifteen years old, Petrov thought. When he came into the office, it didn’t occur to Petrov that the boy could be his ride to Dudinka. He’d assumed he was the harbour master’s son. But down on the jetty outside the office, he watched the man, who told him his name was Roman, and admired the businesslike quality of his arrangements. He took great care with the preparations. The river was dangerous and if you went in up here you might last less than a minute.
Roman took the lid off the outboard and checked inside the cowling and, to Petrov’s eyes, it looked well oiled and cared for. The tank was full and there were a dozen more portable military metal cans that held five gallons each. There was little room in the boat for anything else and Petrov jammed his pack into the bow of the metal boat, underneath a tarpaulin. Then he sat slightly forward, where Roman indicated, in order to balance the boat; not too heavy in the stern where the outboard dug into the water, but not too low in the bow either, or the waves that were chopped into high crests by the wind fighting against the current would come over into the boat.
Petrov offered the boatman some bread and cheese he’d bought at the shop the night before, after his lesson with the satellite phone. They sat in the boat that bounced against the wooden posts of the jetty and ate in silence. Roman gave him an apple in return. Then he turned, checked the outboard again, and pulled the cord. The engine immediately came to life and sounded clean and good.
With the wind countervailing the current, it was rough and the journey was going to be slower than Petrov had thought unless it died down. Roman pulled out not quite into the centre of the current, trying to find a happy medium between gaining the maximum from the flow of the river, while avoiding the highest waves in the centre. He hasn’t even asked to be paid upfront, Petrov realised, and his liking f
or the boy grew.
The noise of the engine and the wind was too great for more than the occasional shouted remark and they soon fell into silence, leaving Petrov with his thoughts. And, in particular, the thought of the note he’d read and had flung into the wood burner before he’d left the office. MNF – that was Muon Nuclear Fusion; a safe, clean way to providing nuclear power.
To Petrov, it sounded like some Holy Grail – and with about as much chance of existing, let alone of being discovered. But then he thought of Professor Bachman’s documents in the inside pocket of his jacket and knew they contained a secret that was, perhaps, some Holy Grail, the unimaginable – at least to him. And he thought that his possession of them must be of some significance. Why him? Why a militsiya lieutenant, a tribal Evenk, a childless, wifeless dot on the fringes of an anyway disintegrated society? Except, as Petrov knew deep inside himself, it wasn’t he who was disintegrating.
And then, as the waves’ spray soaked the outside of his padded jacket and he felt the water running down his face and neck from the oiled cap on his head, his mind turned to the woman. Who was she? And what was her significance? The FSB colonel had told him she was a terrorist. Petrov was inclined to think the opposite – not just because that thought came naturally when you encountered anyone from the intelligence services, but because somehow, over the past few days since Bachman’s murder, a picture of her was slowly forming in his mind. And this instinctive picture wasn’t taking the shape of a terrorist. It was dim, that was true, coming and going in waves of native intelligence, but every time he tried to attach the epithet of ‘terrorist’ to it, it disappeared altogether. But then there was the small army gathering at Igarka and the ‘search and rescue’ helicopters that occasionally flew low over the boat and then turned over the forest, scouring it, and this small army was there because of her.