Tundra

by Tim Stevens

  Lenilko watched the flakes of snow strike the pane of the window and slide, misshapen and spent, down its length.

  ‘Your silence suggests to me that you held something back. That you’ve been dealing with a situation that should have been escalated to your superiors long ago, that you’re not equipped to handle. I get the feeling, Semyon Vladimirovich, that you’re out of your depth. And that you know it, and something – pride, ambition, whatever it is – has blinded you to the magnitude of what you’ve been facing.’

  Lenilko’s mouth worked, but no words came.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve ordered, since this is the end of your involvement in this crisis and you won’t be receiving any further information,’ said Tsarev. ‘As you know, I sent twelve men to the station. I’ve instructed their leader to divide the group, to despatch the helicopter to the location of the Tupolev while a smaller force pursues the fugitives from the station. A larger detail is being scrambled elsewhere to help secure the Tupolev, but my men are closest and therefore have the best chance of salvaging the situation.’

  Lenilko rose to his feet, distantly surprised that his legs were able to support him. The phone at his ear, he approached the window, gazed at the toy store across the square.

  Games. He’d been playing games, and Tsarev was right, he’d known it all the time.

  The General said, his harsh voice a degree softer: ‘This is the end of our association. I can’t help you from now on, can’t afford to have anything more to do with you. But for what it’s worth, Semyon Vladimirovich – and I know it’s scant comfort – I believe I understand your motivations. I know all about ambition, and the power it can exert. I also believe you were driven not only by a desire for personal glory, but by the genuine conviction that you were doing the right thing for Russia.’

  Lenilko’s throat worked desperately to force words past the dryness. Tsarev was going to end the call at any moment, and Lenilko couldn’t endure the humiliation of saying nothing in response. He didn’t know quite what he was going to say until after the words had left his mouth.

  ‘Thank you, General. For everything.’

  ‘May God be with you, Semyon Vladimirovich.’

  The line went dead.

  Even before Lenilko turned to the door, he heard the alarmed voices of his staff outside, the heavy footsteps as they approached.

  Twenty-eight

  The wind scoured the ground at a forty-five-degree slant, propelling sheets of snow across the Ural-4320 so that it felt as if the vehicle was about to be engulfed.

  They had been on the move for thirty minutes, Haglund at the wheel, Purkiss and Budian beside him in the cab. Avner hadn’t looked happy about being asked to climb into the rear, but he’d followed Clement up. Also in the rear compartment were three of the snowmobiles and four Ruger rifles with spare ammunition, which Haglund had retrieved from the arms storeroom just before they’d set out.

  The truck had a maximum speed of seventy-five kilometres per hour. On a straight road, they could reach Saburov-Kennedy Station in less than two hours. Given the terrain ahead, and assuming it was traversable at all, they were more likely to take twice as long as that.

  Haglund said, ‘You’ve considered, of course, that Saburov-Kennedy Station may have been notified about us. That it’ll be assumed that’s where we’re heading, and the staff at the station will have been instructed to detain us the moment we arrive.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve considered it.’ Purkiss saw the ground rise ahead of them, the flatness of the tundra around Yarkovsky Station starting to give way to more uneven terrain. ‘But I don’t think they’ll do that. They’ll want to keep this whole thing under wraps for as long as possible. They’ll come after us, and try and stop us before we get there. They know what vehicles we’ve got at our disposal, and they’ll be confident they can reach us first.’

  It was remotely possible, Purkiss thought, that the troops wouldn’t pursue them. That they’d read Purkiss’s note, and would focus all their attention on the Nekropolis and the activity there. But although they’d almost certainly investigate the lead Purkiss had given them – he was relying on it – there was little chance they’d allow Purkiss and the others to get away.

  While they were making final preparations to board the truck, Clement had said in Purkiss’s ear, raising her voice above the wind: ‘A left field question, but what if we stay put? Explain to them about Montrose, offer to help them in any way we can.’

  ‘Because they may come in with all guns blazing. We might not get a word in.’

  She nodded immediately.

  Haglund lapsed into silence once more. Seated between him and Purkiss, Budian stared straight ahead through the windscreen. Some of the dullness had left her eyes, but her expression remained slack.

  Purkiss ran the possibilities through his mind, finding the flaws in each plan as soon as he formulated it. They were unlikely to outrun the troops at their back, however much of a head start they had. Even more unlikely was the notion that they’d stand a chance in the event of a firefight, four lay people and one intelligence agent against an unknown number of Spetsnaz soldiers.

  No. Their only hope of success, of survival, lay in an entirely different approach. One involving that most ancient of tactics: deception.

  The idea that was growing in Purkiss mind would, he knew, be opposed by the others. They’d regard it as counterintuitive, as outlandish, as grossly irresponsible. So he’d have to keep them in the dark about it as long as possible, until it was too late for them to prevent it.

  But he’d need Haglund’s cooperation.

  Purkiss said, ‘Stop the truck.’

  *

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘It’s our only chance.’ Purkiss looked his watch. ‘Forty-five minutes we’ve been on the go. Assume we had half an hour’s head start, which is optimistic to say the least. That puts us an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of them, at best. But we haven’t even hit the really rough terrain yet. And we don’t know what sort of transport they’re using. They could have something with tracks, which will give them a huge advantage over us. I’m assuming they’re not after us by air, because they would have found us by now. But they might have called in air support from Yakutsk. If we hit some insurpassable obstacle, we’ll be sitting ducks.’

  They sat alone in the cab of the truck, Purkiss and Haglund. After Haglund had pulled to a halt, his normally impassive face creased in surprise, Purkiss had jumped down into the cold and tugged on Budian’s arm – I need to talk to Gunnar alone – and bundled her into the back. Avner and Clement had peered out.

  ‘Don’t ask questions,’ Purkiss said. ‘Sit tight. We’ll be on the move again in a moment.’ He slammed the door on Avner’s cry of protest.

  Back in the cab, he’d told Haglund his plan.

  Now the engineer said, ‘The others won’t cope. They’ll slow us all down.’

  ‘Clement will be all right. Avner, Budian... we’ll have to be robust with them.’ Purkiss glanced down through his window. The blown snow was already beginning to bank up against the wheels of the truck. ‘Come on, Haglund. We have to do this. Time’s slipping away.’

  Haglund stared through the windscreen, the muscles of his closed jaws working. He’d kept the engine running, and he reached down and released the handbrake.

  ‘Okay. We do it.’

  *

  The ground swept inexorably upwards, the landscape pitted with gnarled tree trunks and outcroppings of rock, visible in silhouette against the white of the snowfall. The cloud cover above was almost total, blanking out all starlight.

  Twenty minutes had passed since they’d set off again, and Purkiss hadn’t yet seen what he was looking for. He leaned towards Haglund and peered at the Ural’s dashboard. They’d covered sixty-nine kilometres, and their speed had slowed to 45 kph, the truck’s tyres slipping occasionally on stretches of ice, the unevenness of the ground requiring Haglund to weave around pits and protrusions rather than allowi
ng him to maintain a straight course.

  Haglund geared down as the truck rocked over a particularly erratic series of dips when Purkiss said: ‘Wait a moment. Over there.’

  He pointed through Haglund’s window to an indistinct strip of darkness, forty or fifty metres to their left.

  Squinting, Haglund said, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Pull up.’ Purkiss drew on his face protection and dropped down from the cab once more. The cold hit him anew, knocking the breath out of him momentarily. He picked his way across the rough ground, taking care not to turn his ankles over. As he approached the strip of ground, he saw he’d been right.

  He stood on the lip of a ravine, a ragged scar in the tundra some twenty metres across. Lowering himself to a crouch, he crept closer. The ground sloped gently before suddenly dropping into blackness. Purkiss could see the other side descend and disappear, the bottom of the crevasse invisible.

  He scrabbled about until he found a large rock loose enough to be prised out of the ground, and rolled it towards the edge. It bounced off the side with an audible crack, but any further noise it made on the way down was snatched away by the keening wind.

  No good.

  One of the pieces of equipment Purkiss had salvaged from the hangar back at the station was a flare gun. He unclipped it from the holster at his side and reached out as far as he dared, aiming the gun downwards into the ravine.

  He fired.

  The brilliant orange and yellow flash a few seconds later made Purkiss think he was staring into a pit of hell. He closed his eyes, the image imprinted on his retinas. He’d seen what he needed.

  A few yards further along from Purkiss, the walls of the ravine approached one another so closely there couldn’t have been more than six feet between them. A truck the size of the Ural would get jammed there.

  Purkiss made his way back to the truck. He opened the passenger door and climbed halfway up.

  ‘This’ll do,’ he said. Haglund cut the engine and jumped down himself. He jogged over to the edge of the ravine to inspect it himself, while Purkiss went round to the back of the Ural and opened the doors.

  Avner and Budian cringed away. Clement peered out intently.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Avner cried. ‘Will you just tell –’

  ‘Cover up and get out,’ said Purkiss. ‘Change of plan.’

  They stood, huddled and shuddering, while Purkiss and Haglund began to unload the essentials from the back of the truck. The three snowmobiles, the rifles and spare magazines. Haglund opened a small box and handed out compasses to each of them.

  Avner stared at his, uncomprehending. ‘What?’

  As he worked, Purkiss said, ‘We’re jettisoning the truck. It’ll create a diversion, at least for a while. And the sleds will be faster.’

  Budian let out a low sound, half sigh, half moan. Avner grabbed at Purkiss’s arm.

  ‘Jesus Christ, are you nuts? We’re only halfway there.’

  ‘And that’s about as far as we’ll get, if we carry on in the truck.’ Purkiss waved a hand. ‘Look around you.’ He turned to face them all. ‘Okay. Gunnar and I will each take one of the two-seater snowmobiles, Efraim and Oleksandra riding with us. Patricia, you know how to ride one of these?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You’re in the single seater. We move in convoy, Gunnar in front, me at the back, Patricia in between. The wind and the snow will most likely cover the tracks but it’s worth maximising our odds. Gunnar will navigate, but he’s given you compasses in case for some reason we get separated. Gunnar, give them the co-ordinates.’

  Haglund did so, repeating them twice.

  Purkiss continued, ‘We’ve room for two rifles. Efraim and Oleksandra, you’ll have to carry them.’ He glanced around, uncertain whether everything he’d said had registered, but impatient to get moving.

  Haglund started heading back to the cab of the truck. Purkiss hurried after him. ‘Hold on. I’ll do it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is my idea,’ said Purkiss. ‘I’m the one who ought to carry the risk.’

  Haglund swung up behind the wheel. ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s going to get us out of this alive, if anyone is. We can’t afford to lose you.’

  Purkiss watched the truck start its slow rumble towards the ravine. It picked up speed as it approached, and for a terrible moment Purkiss thought Haglund had misjudged the distance and was going to go straight over the edge. But he slowed as the Ural reached the lip of the precipice.

  Now, thought Purkiss.

  The driver’s door swung open as the truck began its final forward tilt. Haglund leaped and hit the ground hard and rolled.

  With a grinding of metal chassis against rock, the truck toppled over.

  The impact as it hit the place where the ravine walls came close to touching was almost palpable through the ground beneath Purkiss’s feet. Haglund was up and scrambling away when the fuel tank blew.

  The black and orange bloom was followed by the thump of the blast, muffled by the walls of the crevasse. Shrapnel spun upwards, riding the cloud that billowed over the edge.

  An explosion was good. It increased the chances of their pursuers finding the remains of the truck. Purkiss waited for Haglund to reach them.

  ‘Let’s get moving,’ he said.

  Twenty-nine

  Four of them came for Lenilko this time, not two, and unlike before there was no politeness for the sake of appearances. They led him through the office suite, past the scattering of cowering staff, past Anna’s white, terrified face, and all but shoved him into the elevator.

  He recognised them as Rokva’s men, and was vaguely surprised. He’d been expecting a visit from people answerable to the Director of the FSB himself. But the elevator opened on Rokva’s floor.

  Once again he was ushered into his boss’s office; once again, the two men were left alone. This time, Rokva didn’t treat him affably. The Director remained behind his desk while Lenilko was not offered a seat.

  ‘Normally I would open,’ said Rokva, his voice quiet and cold as a snake’s hiss, ‘with an accusation. But we’re past that, aren’t we? You know precisely why you’re here. So perhaps we can start with your explanation.’

  Lenilko noticed something suddenly, something he’d been distantly conscious of but hadn’t identified to himself. Since the banging on his office door, through the march upstairs and the arrival in Rokva’s office, he hadn’t felt afraid.

  He wondered what that meant. Did a man before a firing squad as the executioners raised their weapons, or a man on the gallows as the noose was slipped around his neck, experience the same thing? A last-minute suffusion of courage, the psyche’s mechanism for protecting itself when all hope was lost?

  He became aware Rokva was waiting for a reply. ‘My explanation, sir.’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘With respect, Director, I have already given my explanation. My reasons for taking the action I did were never a secret to you. I believed this was an operation best conducted by the Directorate of Special Operations. By us. Everything I’ve done has been with that belief in mind.’

  ‘Including directly disobeying me.’

  ‘If you refer to your instruction to hand over control of the operation to Counter-Terrorism, then again, with respect, sir, I must point out that the six hours are not yet -’

  ‘Do not play games with me.’ The fury in Rokva’s eyes was so black that Lenilko thought for an instant he was going to be shot dead, right there in the office by the Director himself. ‘You know the order you violated. I told you the Englishman, Purkiss, was not to be harmed under any circumstances. Any circumstances. Now I learn that you instructed an Army general to send in Spetsnaz operatives to terminate every person at Yarkovsky Station. Including, of course, Purkiss. Not only that, but you persuaded our President to sanction this action. You cannot have told him Purkiss was at the station, because there’s no way he would have given his approval for the assau
lt.’ Up until then, Rokva had been leaning across the desk, his small hands folded. Now he sat back, dwarfed by the antique high-backed chair. ‘Disobeying your superior is nothing, nothing, compared with misleading your President into authorising action you know he will afterwards bitterly regret.’

  With the rapturous force of a religious conversion, Lenilko understood. His unnerving lack of fear wasn’t because he had nothing more to lose. It was because some part of his unconscious had realised there he had a way out of this. And when he started to speak, it was as if he’d rehearsed the words, like an actor, until his delivery was pitch perfect.

  ‘You’ve got a problem, sir.’

  Rokva all but recoiled. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You’ve got a problem, Director Rokva, sir.’

  The quietness was entirely gone from Rokva’s voice. It cracked across the desk like a whip. ‘Remember who you’re talking to, Lenilko.’

  ‘You’ve all but fired me already, sir. Which means that I can no longer be accused of insubordination, because I don’t work for you any more. Rudeness, yes, possibly, but not insubordination.’

  Rokva’s eyes shifted to the door behind Lenilko. For the first time Lenilko felt a thrill of alarm. If the Director decided to call his men in and have Lenilko hauled away, he’d miss his opportunity.

  Quickly he said, ‘Your problem is John Purkiss. Once it emerges that you connived at my operation while knowing full well that Purkiss, the untouchable, was at Yarkovsky Station, and while knowing his life was under threat, and while keeping his presence there a secret from not only the Director of the FSB but the President himself... your position won’t be much better than mine, to be honest. You may not face charges of treason, as I’m assuming I will, but at the very least you’ll be kicked out of your job in disgrace, and your career will be at an end. Not to mention the humiliation your family will be put through.’

  Lenilko was astonished at his own boldness, his arrogance, but in a detached way, as if he was observing himself as a character in a film.

  Rokva remained standing, the rage in his face undiminished. But he was listening.