by Alex Dryden
She couldn’t hear what they were saying but she could see they didn’t know what to do, or were just bored with performing their duties. They’d probably been ordered to scout the area and would certainly not have been told what – or who – they were looking for. Just a woman, that’s all, with papers in the name of Valentina Asayev, or most likely no papers at all. No doubt they were just a small cog in the huge operation to track her down that she’d seen from the river. Their role was probably to check all the forest dachas in the sector of this part of the city’s outlying areas. Were they ordered to shoot on sight, she wondered? Perhaps, but she doubted it. Her arrest, that was what the SVR wanted. They wanted to put her on parade, the defector, the traitor, not lifeless in a coffin. Then they would kill her.
She lowered her head from the sill. She hoped they would go away, after a cursory, uninformed check on one of several scattered properties in the forest. They would say to their officer that they had looked and found nothing.
She crouched behind the window, waiting for them to leave, and out of sight to anyone who looked in, even from close to the window. And then she heard a key being inserted into the lock of the front door.
Anna rolled under the simple wood-frame bed, all the cover she could find. She heard the door open, a creak of un-oiled hinges, then their boots on the bare wood floor. She didn’t see them close the door behind them. From under the bed, she saw only their boots now. They’d walked into the living room, and stopped. Looking around for any sign of a break-in.
‘Let’s go home,’ she heard one of them say. ‘There’s no one here.’
There was no reply. So they were a local militia, she thought, talking of home in the city.
‘Come on,’ the same voice complained, ‘we’re off duty in an hour. It’ll take that time to get back to the city.’
‘What’s so important there?’ the second voice spoke.
‘It’s my girlfriend’s birthday.’
‘So?’
‘We’re going to a movie, then having some dinner at her friend’s place. Come on, let’s go. There’s no one here.’
But she saw from beneath the bed that their boots didn’t move. The man who wished to leave was apparently not in charge.
‘The smell,’ she heard the other one say then. ‘I thought they said this place had been empty for a month.’
Then she watched a pair of boots – his, she presumed – walking to the kitchen part of the room. But the kitchen area was out of her sight from beneath the bed. Then she heard the sound of the iron pan she’d used for cooking being picked up.
‘Someone’s used this. Recently. Look around the back,’ the soldier in charge said. ‘Someone’s been here.’
She heard the sound of a pistol being primed and watched the pair of boots still by the front door turn and leave. He wanted to get this over with and leave.
She knew that if he looked half carefully, he would see where she’d destroyed the lock from the outside, even though on the inside she’d drawn down the wooden bar to lock it.
She heard the cooking pan being put down, carefully, it seemed now, not banged on to the stove. They – or he, in any case – was wary now, thinking of a living presence nearby.
Then she heard a shout. It was coming from the back. She couldn’t hear the words, but she knew the second soldier had found the broken lock. She heard the wooden bar being lifted from the inside and the second soldier entering, apparently showing where the lock was broken. Then, she guessed, the next noise was of metal – they’d found the crowbar in the kitchen – a deep, almost hollow sound of thick iron.
‘We should radio,’ the leading soldier said.
‘Ah come on! It’s probably just a common break-in. Let’s leave the fucking place.’
The lead soldier was silent. Then she heard the sound of footsteps and she saw his boots as they turned towards the front door. ‘No. We’ll radio. Then we’ll wait for instructions.’
At that moment he saw her. And they were the last words either of them spoke. From the doorway to the bedroom, Anna Resnikov fired two bullets from the Contender, each to the head. The lead soldier had just seen her, a fraction of a second before the bullet entered his forehead, maybe simultaneously. His companion was facing sideways and received the second bullet through the temple. They fell down, crumpling in two piles of flesh, like figures with their bones removed.
Anna walked over to them and looked down at the floor. One of them had fallen over the other. They resembled bodies piled up after a scrappy execution.
She stared down at them, the gun butt in both hands, a faint heat coming from the barrel. But then she realised the heat was coming from her, not the gun. She saw two kids. They were just like the guards at the border. Carelessly trained youths, out of their depth. Conscripts who didn’t even want to be in uniform. They were in their late teens and at the mercy of the brutal Russian army system – and now they were dead by her hand. Yes, it was an execution, but not a scrappy one.
She looked at the second soldier, the one who’d wanted to leave and who’d gone around to the back. He would miss his girlfriend’s birthday, she thought, a movie then dinner afterwards at her friend’s house. And then Anna felt the unfamiliar wave of remorse rising that she’d felt for the first time at the border. The disgust, or fear of the nullity of other people’s deaths, was coming over her again.
But this time she shook it off at once, shut off her mind to thought altogether. She knelt and took their guns. Then she began to strip the uniform from the second man’s body. There was less blood on this one. When she was dressed in the uniform, she went to the shed, picked up more vegetables and two animal traps. Back in the dacha, she found a hunting rifle and ammunition. She didn’t check whether the ammunition fitted the Contender, she just took everything there was, filling her pack and her clothes, stuffing pockets until they overflowed. When she left the dacha, she was dressed in the dead boy’s uniform.
She rammed the jeep through the forest, bouncing it against the hard permafrost and the broken branches. It was as if she were seeking to destroy her thoughts by destroying the jeep. But all the time her mind was on the task in hand, to head east, away from the river, towards Norilsk – and then on, further east, to the Putorana mountains.
It was roughly seventy miles from here to Norilsk, she guessed, and she knew if there were roadblocks around Dudinka on the river, there would be an impregnable ring around Norilsk. They must know she was heading beyond there, to the secret military and nuclear base, and to reach where she was going she would have to get through the city. There was no other road, even in the forest and on the bare tundra. She joined the metalled road that headed towards Norilsk a few miles to the east of Dudinka and checked carefully that she wouldn’t be running straight into a roadblock. There was normal traffic here. Nearer to Norilsk, that’s where they would form their stranglehold.
She drove fast for around twenty-five miles through an icy rain that made the road dangerously slippery. Then the trees began to fall away to leave just withered stumps. Closer to Norilsk, all the time now, nature was dying. It was here that the pollution of the world’s largest city beyond the Arctic Circle began to tell. For the remaining miles to Norilsk all the trees would be dead. The sulphur dioxide and the other chemicals from the city’s smoke stacks had killed the land itself. She’d seen the stacks of Norilsk once before, many years ago from the air when she was on active duty. They made Norilsk look like a city on fire.
Her body leaned forward, into the steering wheel, as she saw the wasteland unfold along the road’s edges. They said this wilderness produced over one per cent of the world’s sulphur dioxide pollution. And it did so in order to make from its palladium and platinum the catalytic convertors in the West so that western cars ran more cleanly.
As she got to within thirty miles of the city, a smog descended over the land and the acid rain began to fall. The permafrost land was no longer any good for growing living things, but she knew the s
oil was now harvested for the quantity of heavy metals it contained.
She saw it from a mile away, along a straight stretch of road. It was a poor place for a roadblock. If they’d thought about it harder, had longer to think and set it up, perhaps, they’d have put it just around a corner where was no opportunity to see it in time and flee. But it was undoubtedly a roadblock; there’d be spiked chains across the road and some other kind of barrier. But it was the gathering of jeeps and the helicopter that caught her eye first. She slowed to take in the number of jeeps, the probable number of men, the helicopter. It was a heavily manned obstacle and she knew she wouldn’t get through it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ALEXEI PETROV STEPPED off the aluminium boat on a sleet-driven beach of mud and shingle. They were two miles south of Dudinka. The boat had just passed the village of Sitkova and the place where it was now beached contained a few simple wooden houses like some Arcadian vision from Tolstoy. The wind had died and lazy grey smoke came from metal flues that protruded from the rough, bark roofs of one or two of the dwellings.
Petrov stood on the beach, lifted his head to the sky and filled his large chest with the pure air. What a feeling it was to be back, to be here where his life had begun, and from where his spirit had never quite been severed. He felt it growing all the time. The feeling of space, the space in the blood of a nomad, after the confines of the city and the ferry, was at first almost disorienting. Home? he thought. Here in the north, in the wilderness, home was everywhere. To the north and east there were thousands and thousands of square miles of empty tundra, and there were thousands more of forest, the Siberian taiga, to the south and west. Norilsk and the nuclear facilities in the Putorana mountains, with their ICBM base, were the only, though not inconsiderable, blot on the pristine, untouched landscape of the far north. But the city’s foul, polluting chimneys increasingly leached their baleful influence over the wilderness, and the city was still nearly a hundred miles away. He would avoid it, Petrov decided, skirt to the south and follow where he knew the reindeer were being driven.
It was here that he’d chosen to leave Roman and to seek out his tribal family. Roman had changed his own plans. He had now decided to go much further upriver, far beyond Dudinka and towards the estuary that led to the Kara Sea. He was going fishing, he told Petrov, if the authorities were letting people like him pass through.
Petrov turned. His big, round face broke into a smile of gratitude at the boatman. He handed over money for his half of the fuel and warmly shook Roman’s hand. It was funny how you could meet someone for the briefest time, travel with them for a few hours in conditions that made it impossible to talk, and still feel you had made the deepest connection, a friend for life. Then he walked up towards the few wooden houses that were set back, safely up on the bank and away from the cataclysmic spring torrent of the river. Already back on the river, with a wave of his hand Roman was gone.
Petrov stood longer in the silence and stillness, feeling his way into the natural world. With the wind gone, he felt as if he was the last person left on earth. Then he came out of his quietness and walked past the first few houses, shuttered and locked, until he came to a house at the back of the village, furthest away from the river. There was a man sitting on a porch, whittling a larch stick, and there were wood carvings of animals he’d made which were dotted around and hanging at odd angles on the log walls. A bottle of vodka was open on the boards beside him. The man was his mother’s cousin.
Petrov exchanged a greeting – the man wasn’t drunk yet, he saw. But the cousin hardly spoke and merely pointed in an easterly direction.
‘How long ago?’ Petrov asked.
‘They left four weeks ago, maybe a little more,’ the man answered. ‘In time for the reindeer to calve up by the Putorana.’
Petrov eyed the snowmobile next to the man’s house. ‘Can you take me there?’ he said.
The man looked at him steadily, then drank slowly from the vodka bottle. ‘Some of the way,’ he said eventually. ‘But look, the snow’s going, in some places it’s nearly gone. We’ll see how far we get.’
‘Okay. How much?’
The man finally stopped whittling the stick but he made no answer.
‘How many of them went this year?’ Petrov enquired.
‘Twenty-five… thirty. And they took a thousand reindeer.’
Petrov recalled that in his childhood there would be eighty or a hundred herders, men, women and children, plus all their dogs and several thousand reindeer on the trek to the east and the summer feeding grounds. Now, too often, his people went to the cities, confused by the Russian schooling they’d been forced into, tempted by the pittance in wages the cities offered. And he supposed that he was one of them, one of the lost. Unlike him, however, most of his people ended up drunks, in jail, or dead before their prime.
‘Pay for the fuel and a hundred roubles on top,’ the man said.
‘That’s steep.’
‘It’s up to you.’
‘Okay. We can go now?’
‘Anytime. But, like I say, the snow is going fast. We’ll only make it part of the way.’
Petrov decided to take his chances.
The snowmobile was old and the fuel was evidently mixed with something else, Petrov guessed. Its engine stuttered and choked and barely came to life. It sounded sick. But they set off, slowly at first as if the engine was getting used to some new medicine, and then they wound their way to the end of the village, Petrov clinging to the rear of the vehicle with both his hands behind him. Once they were clear of the scattering of dwellings, the driver kept to the shade of the trees where the snow was deeper and melted last. It was slow and precarious finding the good snow, but it was a lot quicker than Petrov could walk and he knew he would have to walk a long way when they ran out of snow, a day and a night perhaps, before he made it to the edge of the plateau they called Putorana; ‘the land of lakes and steep shores’ in the Evenki language.
The herders, his mother, a brother and some cousins, would also have taken a southern sweep, away from the pollution of Norilsk. There was nothing for the reindeer left to eat near the city. They must already have crossed the land on their reindeer-pulled sleds, when the snow was deeper than it was now, and when they could also cross the countless rivers and ponds and lakes on the thicker ice. With the summer almost here, the permafrost was already beginning to soften on the surface and the whole area, through six time zones, would begin to turn to bog, except up by the plateau. It was when full summer arrived – soon enough now – that the giant Siberian mosquitoes would start to plague every living creature. The plateau protected the animals and men from them too. Its elevation kept the insects away, preferring lower, wetter ground.
The snowmobile bounced and crashed its way through the larch forest for dozens of miles, until finally Petrov guessed they must be south of Norilsk. Maybe the city was a hundred miles away to the north of them, maybe less, he couldn’t tell any more. He was numb from the ceaseless movement and painful thudding of the snowmobile and it was only by looking at his watch and guessing their speed that he could hazard a guess. He’d hardly seen anything in the crashing and swerving of the vehicle, and he’d heard nothing above the engine. The blur of the violent motion had shut down his senses. They’d stopped four times to refuel from tanks strapped to the back.
The forest then began to thin and open out into treeless tundra, where the moss and lichens grew that fed the reindeer. Out in the open, the diminished snow was left only in great patches where it had drifted, around which the melt had begun to reveal the white lichen and moss the reindeer liked and which they had to dig through the snow to find in winter.
But they kept on, somehow, still heading east, in twists and turns to follow the available snow, skating sometimes across watery patches that thrashed the engine into an ear-piercing roar of protest. Finally, after several more hours, his mother’s cousin pulled over and cut the engine. The way ahead now made it impossible for the
snowmobile to continue.
Petrov dismounted and picked up his pack. He gave the man a hundred roubles, and then added twenty in gratitude. It wasn’t much, but it would keep him in vodka for a week or two. The snowmobile started again and the man turned and headed back towards the river village without a look or a word.
In the blessed silence, Petrov stood still and pondered the way ahead. A day and night of walking, he guessed, before he would catch up with the herders. The sun was growing hotter, out here summer was arriving more slowly but at least it was arriving.
Looking down in a shrinking patch of snow, he saw the recent tracks of a wolf, a sacred animal to the Evenk. They would use its hide for warmth, but never ate the meat. They would eat a bear and use its hide. But the wolf was not to be eaten, only buried in the four corners, bone by bone, to the north, south, east and west. Above him, high in the sky, a white eagle circled slowly in ceaseless vigil. Petrov made sure his gun was loaded. A wolf and an eagle; the eagle could sometimes kill even a wolf, and both could put an end to him.
He began to walk in an easterly direction across the frozen and sometimes boggy ground and after several miles came across the spoor of reindeer and the occasional, broken lines of sled tracks in the little remaining snow. There were different types of reindeer that pulled the Evenk’s wooden sleds to the ones they kept for meat or hides or breeding.
As he walked in the timeless landscape, his mind turned again to the woman. He knew where she was heading now. She was also going to the Putorana; the place of infinite wilderness, all but inaccessible to anyone except the natives and the wild creatures. But also the place where the nuclear missiles were buried in silos hollowed out deep in the mountains and where the nuclear research and development facilities were hidden from view. The ICBM silos were a secret place – almost like a sacred site in a perverse way – but a secret that his tribe knew well, even though they chose to ignore it.