Tundra

by Tim Stevens

  Clement kept close behind, alone in the other sled. Purkiss had been concerned that she’d be overly cautious after her mishap earlier, but she maintained the speed he set.

  The compass was on the dashboard before him. Purkiss ignored his watch. Time seemed to be of lesser importance, and in any case had taken on an unreal quality, as though the brooding mass of the tundra had sucked it in, distorted it.

  Apart from direction, only distance mattered now.

  The digits on the odometer ticked over steadily. They’d covered eighteen kilometres since resuming their journey. Eighteen gone, which meant seven or ten remaining.

  Haglund had said there was a rudimentary network of roads in the vicinity of Saburov-Kennedy Station, where the landscape began to flatten out once more. Purkiss held on to that knowledge. Roads meant predictability, reassurance.

  A mild slope presented itself ahead. Purkiss slowed as he approached the crest, mindful of a possible sudden drop beyond.

  At the top of the slope he pulled to a stop.

  Clement drew up beside him.

  Despair dragged at Purkiss, threatening to smother him in its dark embrace.

  The tundra continued a kilometre or so ahead, before terminating at the base of a ridge that stretched from left to right as far as the eye could make out. It peaked off centre, resembling the back of a gargantuan prehistoric beast half buried in the ground.

  Clement let out a sigh like a prayer.

  Thirty-two

  ‘We go up,’ said Purkiss.

  As they’d approached the ridge, he’d begun to appreciate its height. At its peak it reached perhaps one hundred metres into the sky. In places the surface was smooth and sheer, in others more rugged but tilting at no less than sixty degrees from the horizontal.

  ‘We have to find a way round,’ Clement said.

  They’d ridden the sleds along the base to first the right, then the left. The ridge continued, implacably, showing no sign of petering out in either direction. Purkiss had dismounted and stood gazing upwards.

  ‘There is no way round,’ said Purkiss. ‘None that we’ll find any time soon.’

  For the first time he heard a catch in her voice. ‘We can’t take the sleds up.’

  ‘So we leave them. We go on foot.’

  She seized his arm, another first. ‘There’s still five miles to go.’

  ‘We can do it.’

  He moved away, striding along the base, peering up into the darkness. Some way along, he saw an immense furrow winding up the rock wall. The top of the ridge was visible against the cloud background. Purkiss estimated the height at this point at forty metres. The angle of the slope was about as favourable as any he’d seen so far.

  He returned to the others. ‘Gunnar,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to climb.’

  He helped the engineer out of the sled. Haglund lurched as his injured leg supported his weight. Purkiss put an arm across his back.

  ‘The rifles...’ muttered Haglund.

  ‘Excess weight,’ said Purkiss. ‘They stay behind.’

  The three of them made their halting way to the spot Purkiss had identified.

  ‘You first, Patricia,’ he said. ‘I’ll support Gunnar.’

  Clement hesitated a second before grasping the rock face.

  *

  They reached the top in, by Purkiss’s estimation, thirty minutes.

  Purkiss kept close behind Haglund, reaching out to steady him each time his boot scrabbled loose from a foothold or his weakened left arm failed to find purchase, aware that if the big Swede were to lose his grip entirely he’d plummet backwards and take Purkiss with him and Clement would be entirely on her own. At one point Haglund stopped, didn’t reply when Purkiss called urgently to him, and it seemed he was on the point of blacking out. But he muttered something inaudible, perhaps a curse, and resumed his ascent.

  Purkiss watched Clement, several metres above, scramble over the top of the ridge. She let out a sound he couldn’t interpret, and for a moment he closed his eyes. There was a ravine on the other side, probably, or some other obstacle.

  He shoved Haglund over the rim of rock and hauled himself up.

  The ridge dropped a short distance beyond to the edge of a plain that swept towards the horizon, its surfaced pocked with clumps of scrub and trees and rocks. Cutting across it, veering from the left and extending at a slight angle ahead, its surface glassed with ice, was a road.

  Resisting the urge to run, Purkiss instead supported Haglund once more and led them down the slope on to the plain. They reached the road in ten faltering strides, the potholed tarmac surface feeling impossibly alien under Purkiss’s feet, like that of another planet. With his free hand he fumbled the compass from his pocket. The road led off at twenty degrees from the direction in which they were heading. Nonetheless, he thought it would be worth following for some distance at least, until it threatened to take them too far off course. They might be lucky and encounter a civilian vehicle, perhaps even one from Saburov-Kennedy Station.

  Wordlessly, side by side, they began to make their way down the road.

  *

  Without the snowmobile’s odometer, Purkiss had no way of knowing how much distance they had covered. He estimated they’d gone three kilometres, though it was probably less, when Haglund staggered and fell before Purkiss could catch him.

  Purkiss knelt beside him. ‘Gunnar. On your feet.’

  This time he knew the man had lost consciousness for a second or two. He opened his eyes, stared at Purkiss uncomprehendingly.

  ‘On your feet. Keep moving.’

  Haglund rose, let out a roar he didn’t attempt to suppress.

  He can’t go on much longer, thought Purkiss.

  He began to count their paces. After two hundred-odd, Clement said, ‘Look.’

  To the right, a vague shaped loomed in the darkness. They advanced. It was a building of some kind, with objects in front of it that Purkiss took a moment to recognise as fuel pumps.

  A filling station.

  His hopes up, he said, ‘Wait here,’ lowered Haglund to the tarmac, and went over. As he got nearer, his spirits dropped. The station was derelict, its wall and roof completely caved in. Every visible metal surface was brown with an icing of rust.

  Next to the remains of the main building he saw a smaller structure, its walls still standing but its door gone. Purkiss peered inside. A garage, housing a pick-up truck of some kind that looked like a relic from Soviet days. It squatted on wheels that were completely flat, and its framework too was a lattice of rust. Apart from a few oil barrels that had been cut in half to form rudimentary storage containers, and an assortment of tools and machine parts and lengths of flex, he found nothing of the remotest use.

  Purkiss returned to the others, hoisting Haglund to his feet without giving him a chance to object.

  *

  A little more than three hundred paces on, Haglund fell for the last time.

  He struggled to get up, but dropped back. ‘It’s not... the pain,’ he gasped. ‘Just... can’t use my leg at all.’

  Purkiss stood looking down at him.

  After a beat, Haglund said: ‘You kept the handgun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then use it.’

  Purkiss ignored him, staring back down the road the way they’d come.

  ‘Farmer.’ He felt Haglund grasp his ankle. ‘Do it.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Purkiss, pulling his foot free. ‘I have an idea.’ To Clement: ‘You know how to use a gun?’

  Her eyes were wide behind the goggles. ‘You’re asking me to –?’

  ‘No. Not him.’ Purkiss took out the Beretta pocket pistol he’d removed from Budian. ‘Stay with him. I’m going back to the fuel station. I’ll be back quickly, but in the mean time fire this if anyone hostile approaches.’

  He began to make his way back down the road, disturbed at how leaden his limbs felt, how sluggishly his thoughts moved.

  In the garage Purkiss tipp
ed the odds and ends out of one of the half barrels. He tested its strength between its hands. Like everything else it was rusted, but it felt solid enough. He selected a long rope of flex from the mess on the floor and again gauged its strength. With a screwdriver he punched several holes into one end of the half barrel; then, looping the flex through the holes several times, he tied its end.

  Hauling the makeshift sledge behind him, Purkiss headed back to the other two.

  To Haglund he said, ‘Think you’ll be able to climb in?’

  Haglund’s eyes had been closed. He opened them, looked at the barrel.

  ‘You can’t do it,’ he rasped. ‘Too... heavy.’

  ‘You’re getting in this bloody barrel if I have to knock you unconscious first,’ said Purkiss. ‘It’ll just make life a lot harder that way.’

  With Clement supporting Haglund’s legs, they manoeuvred him in. His feet protruded almost comically over the edge.

  Purkiss wound the free end of the flex around his waist, his chest, harnessing himself as securely as he could. He heaved.

  The strain was immense, far greater than he’d expected, and for a moment he wondered if agllund was right, that this was an impossible task. Purkiss leaned forward, grasped the taut flex in his hands, and felt the load behind him inch forwards.

  ‘Come on,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘It’s the end game now.’

  Thirty-three

  As the cold tightened its band and the fatigue began to replace his bones and his muscles and his sinews with stone, Purkiss felt his mind retreat, dissociating itself from the body that housed it and was betraying it.

  His last conscious thought for some time was that they’d gone far enough down the road, that it was taking them at too great an angle from their destination, and that they needed to step onto the tundra once more. He jerked his head at Clement and angled leftward, feeling the roughness beneath his boots once again.

  After that, the madness started to creep in.

  First came Kendrick, Purkiss’s friend who’d been shot in the head the previous summer. He’d lived, and months of rehabilitation had restored him to almost full mobility, but mentally he was... different. He strolled across the windblasted ground out of the darkness, his hands in his pockets, dressed impossibly in nothing more than a T-shirt and jeans and a bomber jacket.

  ‘Purkiss, what the fuck are you doing?’

  The scar on his forehead where he’d had the reconstructive plate and the skin graft, together with his lopsided grin, made him look piratical.

  ‘A cripple and an older bird. They’re slowing you down. Dead weight. Cut them loose and get your sorry arse out of there.’

  Purkiss squeezed his eyes tight, focused on the rawness in his hands beneath the gloves, the frightening deadness in his feet.

  When he opened them, Hannah stood in front of him, his on-off partner of the last half year. Beside her was Vale, cigarette in hand. Both their faces were etched in sadness, Hannah’s with a regretful tinge, Vale’s with one of disappointment. Neither of them spoke, and they were gone in the blink of an eye.

  Purkiss waited for Claire to manifest herself. Claire, his fiancée, dead now nearly six years. Claire, who had torn open the wounds all over again even four years after her death.

  But she didn’t come.

  He tried to list the symptoms of frostbite. Of hypothermia. All that came to mind was a smorgasbord of recollections, of random images from the recent and distant past, of snatches of discordant music. He half expected to hear the sweet, deadly singing of sirens, luring him to his doom; and yes, there they were, fantastical creatures calling to him from the depths of the permafrost, hundreds of metres beneath his feet.

  So easy to end the pain. So easy to lay down his burden, bury his face in the frozen earth, and sleep.

  Time had lost all meaning. It yawned chasm-deep ahead, before contracting like a released rubber band. Something so infinitely flexible couldn’t exist, surely? Purkiss felt he’d discovered an important truth, something that had eluded philosophers and scientists for millennia. When he tried to get a grip on the concept, it vanished.

  His hallucinations, dreams, whatever they were, took on a more basic character. Where there’d been music, there were now single, jarring notes. Complex images of people were replaced by elementary percepts: primary colours, geometrical shapes, flashes of light. Purkiss supposed it meant he was near the end, his mind running out of creative power and running on reserve before it shut down entirely.

  Lights.

  He felt himself being pulled down a tunnel towards a distant point, as if his consciousness was being dragged back towards a reality it had decided it had had enough of.

  Purkiss stopped.

  The shock was intense, the return to the terrible real world with its extremes of cold and bodily pain and despair.

  And light. A steady rind of it curving above the meniscus of a ridge, another bloody ridge, half a kilometre ahead.

  No. It’s another mad vision, a mirage, a fever dream. Crawl back into your cocoon.

  But he knew this was different.

  Purkiss gripped the tow rope, found he was already gripping it as tightly as he could. Probably had been all along. Just as he must have, on autopilot, been checking the compass.

  He turned to Clement.

  She wasn’t there.

  *

  He found her, face down in the snow, a hundred metres back. He stooped over her, constrained by the harness around his chest, and wondered if once he crouched beside her he’d ever get up again.

  With his boot he rolled her over. Her dead eyes were closed, the goggles knocked askew when she’d fallen.

  He knelt, because it seemed proper, and stripped off her balaclava. Let her skin feel the touch of nature, even though nature was what had killed her.

  He stared at her lips. Leaned in closer, raising his goggles, bringing his eye as close to her mouth as he could.

  Against his exposed cornea, he felt the slow, rhythmic flutter of breath.

  Purkiss pulled the balaclava back over her head. With a silent shout of defiance against the weakness of his body, against the tundra itself, he reached under her arms and stood and hoisted Clement over his shoulder and turned and felt the renewed strain of Haglund’s weight against his torso and didn’t care, because all that mattered now was putting one foot in front of the other, a thousand times, ten thousand if need be, until he reached the light.

  Thirty-four

  The ridge had posed a conundrum. Aleksandrov had spotted its snaking shape on the satnav screen and said to his driver, ‘How would they get round that?’

  The driver played with the image, sweeping left and right. ‘It ends six klicks to the southwest, Captain.’

  Aleksandrov considered it. Either they had gone that route, or they’d found some way to climb the ridge, in which case they abandoned the snowmobiles and would now be on foot.

  ‘Take us round,’ he’d said.

  By the time the Vodnik was rumbling along the top of the ridge, and there was no sign of the fugitives, Aleksandrov had decided the only option was to continue heading towards Saburov-Kennedy Station. If they arrived there first, they would wait out of sight of the station for their targets to appear.

  The truck ploughed across the ground, its speed aided by the relative evenness of the terrain. Aleksandrov felt a sense of disquiet. Were they too late? Had the targets reached the station already? Or had they chosen a more circuitous route?

  ‘One kilometre to destination, sir,’ said the driver.

  They are to be prevented from reaching Saburov-Kennedy Station at all costs. Tsarev’s order.

  Light appeared ahead, dim as if shielded. The station was located within a natural basin, Aleksandrov knew, and he could see the slope of the side looming ahead.

  He leaned forward, straining to make out the detail.

  ‘I see them,’ he said.

  *

  Purkiss heaved Clement off his shoulder so th
at she slapped, limp, against the slope. He bent, hauled her up again, tried to throw her further. She slid back down.

  The rise was no more than ten feet, and not particularly steep. But he couldn’t get Clement to the top while still towing Haglund.

  With fingers like bloodied sausages inside his gloves, Purkiss unwound the flex from his body and flung it aside. He scrabbled at the slope – it was less rocky than the ridge they’d ascended earlier, and purchase was difficult – managed to get a hold, and climbed.

  At the top, he gazed down into a large natural quarry, at the base of which lay a complex of structures larger and more elaborate than those at Yarkovsky Station. Arc lights blazed around the perimeter. There was nobody in sight.

  ‘Hey,’ called Purkiss. His cry came out as a pathetic croak, which was snatched away immediately by the wind.

  The wind changed direction abruptly, bringing another sound to his ears. The rumble of a heavy vehicle.

  He turned, vertigo nearly toppling him from the rim.

  Back across the plain, a kilometre distant, a military vehicle of some kind was rolling forward. His blurred eyes made out the turret surmounting it, the ugly phallic protrusion.

  A machine gun.

  Purkiss looked down into the basin again. He could slide down the slope on this side, out of range of the gun. Stumble to the buildings and hammer on doors.

  But he’d be too late.

  Purkiss reached down, drew the flare gun from the holster at his side. His finger trembled on the trigger as he pointed it upward.

  The soaring arc, the subsequent brilliant explosion, were more beautiful to him than anything he’d seen before.

  An instant later, a cacophony of barking erupted from one of the buildings. Huskies, he thought.

  Five seconds after that, a door opened and figures emerged, six of them, gazing at the sky. Purkiss rose to his knees and waved his arms feebly. One of the men pointed and shouted something. They began running across the rock floor towards the base of the slope, beckoning him down.