by Jeremy Duns
There was something emerging in the mist by the side of the road and I peered through the window anxiously. A figure appeared, and I saw flashing lights and a red star on a white helmet.
Roadblock.
*
I removed Anton’s spectacles from my jacket and put them on. It was a miracle he’d managed to take a photograph of me at all, because his lenses were so strong that within seconds my eyes began to throb and it became hard to see anything. I peered over my nose and saw that they had stretched several militsiya cars across the road in two rows to block it. The line of traffic was building up quickly as a result, because every time they let a car through they reversed one of the patrol cars in the first row a little way, let them through, closed the gap and then did the same in the second row. That meant they were taking a couple of minutes to clear each car. And it meant that they were being very thorough indeed.
The question was whether or not they knew about Anton. Bessmertny’s wristwatch read ten past noon. It could be that Yuri and his men were still trying to sort out what had happened in the flat – or it could be that they had got on the radio and told these chaps to look for someone in Anton’s car.
The car in front of me cleared through the set-up, and I was waved forward. One of the men knocked on my window and I rolled it down.
‘Passport, comrade,’ he said. They all looked the same – like schoolboys playing dress-up. This one had cut his chin shaving this morning, or perhaps it was a pimple he’d picked at. I handed him the passport and he took it and opened it.
‘Move your head closer to me,’ he said, and I did, feeling the heat of spotlights. He squinted at me, and then back down at the passport.
‘What is your destination?’ he asked. He had a pistol on his hip, one hand placed on it.
‘Leningrad, officer.’
‘A fine city. And what is the purpose of your visit there?’
There was a faint clunking sound from behind me, and I prayed he hadn’t heard it in the surrounding din. I pushed Anton’s spectacles up my nose – the frames were too large for me and kept slipping down – and tried not to look flustered.
‘I’m visiting family,’ I said.
He frowned. ‘But it says here that you were born in Moscow. What family?’
The strength of the glasses was making me dizzy, and I could feel my pores opening and the sweat starting to bead.
‘My second cousin,’ I said. ‘He moved there last year, and he wants to show me his new flat and introduce me to some of his colleagues.’
‘What does he do?’
‘The same as me – he’s a physicist.’
He flicked through the pages, but I couldn’t make out his expression through the lenses. I felt I might faint but I couldn’t risk closing my eyes. If I looked over the glasses, he might think I was condescending to him so I stared straight ahead, not focusing, trying to shut off the message from my brain to my retinas so they weren’t affected so much. Sirens were circling behind me, and then I heard a burst of static from one of the nearby cars, and a message being delivered through a transmitter. Was it Yuri or Sasha, telling them to stop a yellow Moskvitch with the following registration? I strained my ears but couldn’t hear. Then one of the car doors slammed and I saw another officer approach and tap my man on the shoulder.
He turned, and the officer whispered something in his ear.
There was no way I could make it through two lines of cars. And at the first sign of any attempt, they would shoot.
The officers stepped back from the car. Oh, Christ. Were they about to try the boot?
The first officer stepped forward again, and leaned into my window.
‘Please proceed,’ he said, handing me my passport. ‘My colleagues here will signal the way.’
XIII
The traffic from the roadblock began to thin out, and once I’d passed the fork for Kiev and was sure nobody was on my tail, I took some gravel lanes through a thicket of woods, then pulled over and helped Sarah climb out of the boot.
‘How are you?’ I said.
She grimaced, stretching her arms and legs. ‘I’ve been better. I take it we’re through, then?’
‘For the time being.’ She climbed into the passenger seat and I told her what had happened at the roadblock.
‘So they got some sort of a message?’ she said. ‘I wonder what it was.’
‘Good point.’ I put the militsiya channel back on. There was some beeping and static, but then a message came on, which appeared to be on a loop. We listened to it in silence as I steered us back onto the motorway and headed towards Leningrad.
‘Comrades, this is Colonel-General Shchelokov, and I have been asked by our General-Secretary, as Minister of Internal Affairs, to relay the following information to you on behalf of the Supreme Soviet. You were alerted earlier today that enemies of the state, two English spies, had escaped from our custody in Moscow, and were at large. They are, I regret to say, still at large, and must be apprehended at all costs. They are a menace to our society, and intend to cause the Soviet Union great harm. Be warned that they are also highly trained special forces operatives, and will stop at nothing, including murder.
‘Within the last few minutes, men within the Moscow militsiya discovered the body of one of their colleagues, Sergeant Grigor Ivanovich Bessmertny, who was left to die by these fugitives while on the run. His family has been informed, and a funeral is being arranged. It is now, I think, incumbent on all of us to honour the memory of Grigor Ivanovich Bessmertny, and bring his murderers to justice. After this message will follow a description of the fugitives, and other information that I hope will lead to their swift arrest, detention and trial. I offer my sincerest condolences to the family of Sergeant Bessmertny, and pay tribute to his gallantry and service. I call on you all, as my men and as his comrade, to hunt down his killers immediately.’
‘Christ,’ said Sarah softly. I sensed there was also reproach in her voice, but I didn’t regret what I’d done, even if it were true that he had died. He would have done the same – or shot me – had the situations been reversed.
‘Listen,’ I said, as the descriptions came on. They were mostly accurate, if perhaps a little unfair, except for one detail. ‘Did you hear that? They think I’m wearing Bessmertny’s uniform.’
‘So? That’s hardly going to bother them if they find us, is it? Your disguise isn’t exactly foolproof.’
‘That’s not my point. Their wheels aren’t turning fast enough. They’ve brought out a big gun, Shchelokov, to rile up the blood of the hounds. But that recording has to be at least an hour old. There was no mention of this car, or Anton, or what we’re wearing now. That’s why we made it through the roadblock. No doubt they’ll record another message soon enough, but they’re behind us for the time being. I don’t think they know where we’re headed yet.’
I turned to face her, and noticed that her smile was painted on.
‘You need to get some sleep,’ I said.
‘I’d love to,’ she smiled, ‘but you keep talking.’
I shook off my jacket and handed it to her, and she tucked it under her chin and leaned against the window as I drove. When I looked over again a few minutes later, she was sleeping.
The traffic became sparser still, and I drove as hard as I could towards the border, my hands gripping the wheel until they turned numb. We passed cranes and television towers, restaurants and factories – the great dreary expanse of the Soviet Union. The road became rougher, and despite the low cloud cover, the temperature had dropped.
I started thinking about my life up to this point: what I had done, and what had brought me here. Or rather who, because it was mainly Anna who had brought me here: there was a straight line between our conversations in that Red Cross clinic in Germany in 1945 and this car in 1969. She hadn’t dragged me here, though; I’d come along willingly. I had always chided her for being an idealist – but she had always known that I was one, too.
‘You lik
e to discuss specific events, Paul, but you avoid any discussion of principles. Don’t you feel that society would be better if we were all equal – no more rich and poor?’
‘And milk and honey flowing throughout the land? Of course. But it’s a dream.’
‘Everything is a dream if you do nothing about it. What have you been fighting for these last years? Wasn’t it for a better world?’
‘A world free of Nazism, yes.’
‘Is that all you have learned? So now we simply return to what was before – the same old ways, the same old systems?’
‘Yes. There was nothing wrong with them.’
‘I don’t think many people would agree with you, Paul. I think the last five years have brought everything into focus. Yes, Nazism was a great evil, and conveniently enough for your country many millions of my countrymen have died extinguishing it. But we cannot now be satisfied with simply living in a world that is not evil. Many of us want to live in a world that is fair, a world that has a chance of keeping peace between all men, instead of waging war on each other every few decades because one nation wants more of the cake than another. I never wanted to live in a country ruled by the Germans. But I don’t want to be ruled by the Americans or the British, either…’
I had let myself be persuaded because, despite my token resistance, I’d been dissatisfied that the war had ended with no clear resolution. It did indeed seem as though we were about to return to the old ways again, as though nothing had changed in the intervening bloodbath.
And, more simply, I’d fallen for her.
The music on the radio ended, and led into an international news bulletin. I turned it up. I didn’t think there would be anything of any importance in it, but you could never tell. The first item was an interview with a cosmonaut who had been part of the Soyuz 7 mission. No mention was made of the fact that the Americans had put a man on the moon. Perhaps they hadn’t made that public either.
The next item was about a military coup that had just taken place in Somalia, which was talked of in ecstatic terms by the announcer – presumably there had been Soviet support for it. After that, there was a report on the forthcoming talks on arms limitation with the Americans in Helsinki, which had apparently been in dispute for some time. The tone was generally positive, but the suggestion was that the Americans had already ceded to Soviet demands for the talks to take place on their terms; I wondered if the mention of it was deliberate. Well, everything was deliberate with the Soviets when it came to the dissemination of news, but was this a more precise message and, if so, who was its intended audience and what reaction was it intended to spark? The delay in the militsiya message suggested it wasn’t directed at us, and it seemed unlikely that such a report would make any difference to the Americans if they truly were planning an attack.
An alternative was that it had been prepared earlier, say yesterday, as part of a wider strategy to present the Americans in a bad light over the talks, and it wasn’t related to the current crisis. But no wonder they were so bloody jittery: they’d lost the big prize in the space race, were in a border dispute with the Chinese and just as they were coming out of long negotiations with the Americans over weapons reduction talks, Nixon had decided to fly some nuclear-armed B-52s directly towards their border. Coupled with a supposed chemical attack on two heavily fortified naval bases, they’d snapped.
The bulletin came to an end. Once again, there had been no mention of a chemical attack, but I guessed they would reveal that only once they had retaliated, if then. There might not be a news service in place after a nuclear war, and there would probably be few people alive to listen to its broadcasts.
I suddenly wanted to forget the lot of it: the U-boat, the mustard gas, the men in the bunker in Moscow. Perhaps if we managed to escape over the border, we could head somewhere else instead, Sarah wearing my jacket in cars in other countries, smiling that soft smile.
I blinked the thought away and locked my wrists on the wheel. As I passed a restaurant by the side of the road, I remembered we hadn’t eaten anything apart from a few stale biscuits at Anton’s flat. I looked across at Sarah and realized that if we were going to get over the border it might be an idea to gather our strength. I pulled over a few miles later at a roadside restaurant with steam coming from the windows, and gently woke her.
We took a table facing the door and a surly, barrel-chested waitress walked over. I picked up the menu and ordered kotlety with black bread and coffee. The waitress curtly informed us that the food would take several minutes to prepare and sauntered off.
Sarah stifled a yawn, and I found myself aping her. I’d been driving for five hours without a break. I started going through my plan to cross the border, keeping my voice down to barely a murmur.
‘Is it dark enough?’ Sarah said. It was twilight now, the sky just a greying pink on the horizon.
‘It’ll have to do.’ There was nothing to do now but head full pelt for the target, and hope. We would fill up fast with fuel and get going. I glanced through to the kitchen to see if there was any progress on the meal and saw that sitting on the shelf behind where the waitress was standing was a small transistor radio. And that she was talking to someone in the kitchen, and nodding towards us.
‘I’ll explain the rest in the car,’ I said. ‘We have to get out of here.’
I left a few token coins on the table, and we made for the door. The waitress came running out after us, but we were already at the car.
*
I headed back onto the road, putting my foot down. It had been a stupid, foolish, stupid bloody mistake. The militsiya would now be told precisely where we were, and they would hand the information over to Yuri and Sasha soon enough. I had just lost our advantage, and had painted a bull’s-eye on our rear ends to boot, all because of my empty belly, which now felt even emptier.
I put my foot down, and a little less than two hours after leaving the restaurant we passed Leningrad, after which I cut around Vyborg and drove to its outskirts. As we approached the pogranichnaya polosa, the twelve-mile protected zone around the frontier, I took a detour into a gap in the undergrowth by the side of the road and pulled up. I took Anton’s forgeries out of my jacket and placed them in the glove compartment – they would only help to identify us now. I told Sarah that if we were caught we would claim to be geologists.
One of the Russian playwrights, Denodovski, had defected at a literary fair in 1962, and in reviewing his debriefing documents I’d come across a curious mention he had made of the border conditions. He had said that on a trip to Karelia years earlier, when he’d been part of a group of geologists, the whole lot of them had been detained for three days by the border guard because they didn’t have documents proving who they were. This, he claimed, was-because the KGB had in fact banned geologists and certain other experts from carrying documents: they were afraid a foreign government might rob them and then use their specialized documents to justify a scientific presence near border areas and infiltrate the Soviet Union. But this meant that there was one valid reason not to have documents near the border.
Well, it wasn’t the best cover in the world – they would probably only need to make a couple of telephone calls to establish from our descriptions alone that we were fugitives wanted for murder and various crimes against the state. But if we were caught, it would probably all be over anyway.
‘Ready?’ I asked, switching off the ignition.
She nodded, and we began to make our way through the bushes, treading very carefully. There were men with dogs patrolling this area, as well as three security fences, tripwires and watchtowers. But the entire length of this border was secured in this way, so this was as good a spot as any to attempt to cross.
Night had fallen now, but there was still some visibility. The mist had returned, though – swathes of it covered the ground and a foot or so above it – and I found that if I crept on my belly I could move for several yards at a time following bands of it between bushes and trees. I mot
ioned to Sarah to do the same. I picked up a small stick and used it to feel in front of me for trip-wires. After I’d been doing this for fifteen minutes or so, I caught sight of the turret of a watchtower poking out from a large clump of pines to my left: it wasn’t quite a forest, but there was a lot of cover there. I pointed it out to Sarah, and we started making our way towards it, keeping as close to the ground as possible, watching for any sign of men or dogs.
I wanted to make a beeline directly for the watchtower for several reasons. Border control towers often lack heating in order to focus the minds of the guards, but even that doesn’t always work and sentries in watchtowers tend to be less alert than their colleagues on the ground. One of my contingency plans for defection had involved making my way across from Finland, so I knew from studying the towers on the other side of the border that it was possible to avoid several lines of guard positions by crawling directly under the towers, where there were no additional sentries posted besides the men in them. I had no idea whether the Soviets used the same system on this side, because my plan had involved simply walking up to the nearest guard after crossing the frontier and surrendering, then waiting for the local KGB chief to be contacted and my bona fides to be established. We would simply have to hope.
Luckily, the mist was holding, and as we moved deeper into the woods I found I could cover ground a lot faster than before, when I’d had to stop every five seconds to find the next spot of cover. Unfortunately, I could see that Sarah’s stamina was already flagging, and she was stopping not for cover but to catch her breath. I wasn’t faring as well as I’d hoped I would, either. Earlier I had all but forgotten the ache in my hand, but now it came back as a stabbing pain and I found myself feeling disoriented.
I blinked to try to snap myself out of it. This was no time to start hallucinating. Well, at least I no longer had my Nigerian fever slowing me down. It was quite a year I’d had: I’d caught a deadly African disease, been shot at, tricked, exposed as a traitor, tortured by a madman in a dungeon in Sardinia and hunted to within an inch of my life. And now here I was, with the world on borrowed time, crouching by a pine tree in Russia with a woman I barely knew – and just a few miles away from the West again.