by Adam Hall
'Marius,' I said, 'it's fifty yards from here, and we'll have to pick our way over the new snow. Don't worry too much about making a noise – it'll be quite well covered. Just get there as fast as you can.'
'Understood.' There was a tightness in his tone now, and that was good: I wanted the adrenalin to run.
I helped him shrug out of his heavy striped greatcoat, and he helped me with mine; then we buried them under the snow. Underneath we wore black bomber jackets, stolen at three o'clock last night from the reception hut where incoming prisoners were issued with new gear.
Another sound came in now: boots crunching from south of us, towards the centre of the camp.
'Flatten yourself against the wall,' I whispered to Marius, 'then freeze.'
I watched the shadow as it lengthened across the snow, a man's figure, the bulk of an assault rifle projecting from it. Rattle of a door handle as he tried the gym. The last two nights there'd been no sentries coming this far: I'd checked. Perhaps tonight it was the punctilious guard, the only one who tried the door handles.
If he comes any farther to check the rear end of the hut, strike to kill, don't risk anything now, it's too close to zero.
I could see the steam from his breath at the corner of the gym, lit from beyond him, then the sudden glint on the barrel of the rifle as he came into sight, his head turned in this direction, the beam of his torch swinging, the flurries of snow whirling between us, hiding me, revealing me. Hiding me enough? Revealing me too much? I couldn't turn my face away, needed to watch him, to prepare the strike.
To the other side of me there was nothing but the wall of the massif with its rocky outcrops, so perhaps I was blending in with it because the guard was still swinging his torch, over me and away again, the backglare from the snow half-blinding him as I stood with my eyes narrowed to slits, their lashes putting him surrealistically behind bars as I watched him.
If he keeps on coming we shall need great speed: go into the toraki-kuo within two seconds before he can bring up the gun.
To kill.
But he was turning now, the snow in his face, in his eyes, and his boots crunched away down the path from the gymnasium.
I checked my watch immediately: it was a minute to zero.
'He's gone?'
'What? Yes. Relax.'
I heard Marius let a breath out.
'We're beginning the count-down,' I told him, 'with less than a minute to go. You feeling okay?'
'Of course.'
Bloody arrogance.
Last one, Alex had said as he thrust the sacking bundle into my hands. The last one of six. He didn't know what I wanted them for, didn't know when I was going to use them.
Thirty seconds.
'Thirty seconds,' I told Marius. He didn't answer.
A flush of silver light was creeping across the snow from the east. It would be moonrise, but we couldn't watch it from here, from the west side of the gym.
The tin alarm clock had been less easy to get hold of. The prisoners hung on to any possession they could call their own; it made them feel like people of property. I'd had to trade my spare of issue boots for the clock.
Fifteen.
I told Marius, but again he didn't answer. What could he say, after all? Good luck? Of course we'd need good luck, every vestige of it that God Almighty could spare us, and you don't think I'm praying, do you? You think I never pray.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
The snowflakes whirled, pretty as cherry blossom as they blew past the corner of the hut.
Look, it was this or nothing, that's why I haven't gone mad.
The only choice was another forty years in penal servitude with Balalaika just a mention in the dusty record books, Mission abandoned, won't you get that into your bloody head?
Seven.
Six.
Five.
'Four seconds,' I told Marius.
We shifted our packs, settling the canvas straps.
Three.
I let my eyes rest on the snow where the light was brightening, and took joy from it, joy also from the cool kiss of the flakes as they landed on my upturned face and my eyelids as I closed them just one more time.
Two.
Opened them again to look across the camp under the tall floodlights.
One.
To look across at the shape of the huge diesel generator as the hand of the tin clock moved to zero and the sky was lit with a blinding flash and a moment later there came the shuddering whoof and the whole camp was blacked out and we began running for the wall of the thousand-foot massif.
23 : OVERHANG
I drove the piton into the seam and tested it with the rope but it pulled down at an angle and I drove it in harder, tested it, found it good and hauled up.
From three hundred feet the camp was lit with fireflies as emergency lamps came on. Flames still reddened the sky from the generator's diesel fuel, and black smoke rolled in waves between the huts.
Snow drifted past us from the east side of the massif, more heavily now, shrouding the moon, giving us a smoke screen on the face of the rock, which was miraculously free of too much ice.
'Haul up,' I called down to Marius, and felt the rope grow taut.
I'd got the half-Mongolian smithy in the forge to make me twelve pitons two days ago, adapting them from pit gear and grinding four of them into bird beaks in case we needed them. Of course we'd need them; we'd need a lot of other gear – hooks, friends, ice screws, pulleys, bolts, jumars – but all we'd got was what we could get, just the pitons, some crude carabiners, two broad-faced hammers, and two weighted picks made from rusty steel – the ones we used all day were impossible to take from the pits; they were counted whenever we knocked off. The rope had been easier to get away with from the stores, hemp, 12 mm, recently delivered, no fraying in it.
Andrei had made the pitons and the picks for me at the forge. He was massive, seven feet high, all muscle.
'From the city?' I'd asked him. His great oval face dripped with sweat.
'I am from the city, yes.'
'You've got people there? Relatives?'
'My mother.' He leaned on his five-foot hammer, watching me, his eyes crimson from the heat, an animal smell coming from his goat-hide apron.
'She okay?'
'She is okay. She is an old woman now. Why do you ask me?'
'I've been managing to get some mail through,' I said, 'to the city.'
'You must have friends.'
'Right. I need you to do a bit of metalwork for me, Andrei.'
'I've got enough work.' He turned aside and spat, then wiped his face with the rag he kept in his apron.
'I could let your mother have some money.'
'You haven't got any money.'
'I'd have it sent to her through my friends in the city.'
'How much?'
Sparks flew suddenly from a coal.
'A thousand US dollars.'
Andrei's eyes narrowed. 'That is a lot of money.'
'Yes.'
'A lot of work.'
'No. You've also got to say nothing about this.'
He tilted his great head, sighting me along his nose. In a moment, 'Very well. I say nothing. A thousand dollars. But must be paid in rubles. People will try and steal from her.'
'In rubles, then. She can find somewhere to hide them.'
Drips hung from the end of his hooked nose, like tiny rubies in the light of the forge. 'Under the bed.'
'No. I'll get my friends to show her better places than that. Leave it to me, Andrei. No one will steal from your mother. Just tell me where she lives.'
That day he began work on the twelve pitons.
I could hear Marius now, hauling up from below, his breathing audible, too audible, Christ, we'd only just started.
'You want to rest?'
He thought before he answered, didn't want to say yes because of his pride, so he compromised: 'Maybe for sixty seconds.'
'Don't rush it.' In the wind I heard his pick clinking against the granite. 'And don't drop anything.' Eventually the guards would search the terrain below the massif. They would search everywhere.
There was a lot of noise going on below us now: the klaxon horns still sounding the alarm, the dogs barking, engines starting up, the PA system relaying orders to the guards as the big gates swung open in the far distance and three snow tractors rolled through it with their headlights sweeping across the snow. Beyond the west side of the camp I could see shadows moving and the glint of eyes in the lamplight as the wolf pack watched the confusion for a while and then began loping away.
'Marius?'
'I'm ready.'
I adjusted Alex's lamp on my forehead, where I'd strapped it with a strip of canvas, and hauled up on the pick and searched for the next seam in the granite, the next sound piece of ice, rejecting three or four tricky placements before I was satisfied and drove a piton in and slung the rope, testing it, finding it good, cutting a step in the ice and hauling up.
'When you're ready!' I called to Marius, and felt the rope tighten.
Four hundred feet, as a rough estimate.
'Five minutes' rest.'
Marius didn't answer, was out of breath again, and I secured the line for him. A few feet below me, he was half-covered in snow from the east wind as I was, not looking up at me, hanging with his head down, his brow resting against the rock face, could have been dozing, praying, I couldn't tell and I wasn't worried: he was safe enough on the line.
The camp looked pretty now, a Christmas scene, with the torches lighting the snow as the search continued among the huts. The klaxons were silent at last but the dogs were still baying, freed by their handlers to work the terrain, could have been given the scent already: after the explosion and the resulting blackout the huts would have been ringed with guards called out for the emergency, and a general roll call could have been ordered at once as a precaution.
Dmitri Berinov, Hut nineteen. Missing.
Marius Antanov, alias Nikolai Parek, Hut twelve. Missing.
The rope felt good under my hands, the rope and the pitons and the rock face and the near-darkness. Here we were safe. Here was the difference between freedom and the closing in of the war-trained pit-bulls, their jaws ready to maul if their handlers couldn't call them off in time, the wolf pack circling outside the wire if we'd ever managed to climb it, the first search vehicles arriving just in time to drag us back to the camp still alive, then the orders issued in the morning for the head-shaving and the shackling before we were held down across the vaulting horse in the gym for twelve lashes as a preliminary to being thrown into the solitary confinement cellars still bleeding and with rations of black bread and stale water for two months, three, until the commandant was satisfied that the message was understood by the rest of the prisoners: this is Gulanka, and there is no escape.
You still think I was mad to go for the final chance? Then that's your bloody business.
I looked down at Marius. 'Ready to haul up?'
He got his head lifted and looked at me. 'What? Yes,' got one hand tightened on the rope and handed me the piton he'd pulled out.
In another fifteen minutes we'd climbed another two hundred feet at a rough estimate, the placements easy enough with good deep seams and no dirt or dead moss in them, no loose blocks, little ice and what there was of it sound, the wind remaining at constant force and the snow flurries more of a help as a screen from below than a hindrance here, our lungs getting used to the thin air and Marius holding up as best he could.
Then we met the overhang.
Marius was looking up from below me, wondering why I'd stopped.
The curve of rock jutted six, seven feet from the vertical, hiding the faint light from the sky, and ran east and west without a visible break.
'Oh my God,' Iheard Marius say.
I took a minute to rest, to think. 'We get these, sometimes,' I told him.
He was quiet now.
Six, seven feet of granite brooding above my head, cutting us off. I reached up and ran my hand over it, having to lean backwards over the drop.
The surface was bare, seamless.
I heard Marius again. 'So we go sideways?'
'No.'
'We've got to.'
'We can't.'
'For God's sake, why not?'
'Moving sideways across the face is always dangerous. In any case we don't know how far we'd have to go, how far the overhang goes. It could be fifty yards to the east and we might take the west, and find it reaches for five hundred.'
The wind buffeted the rock face now, tearing at his voice.
'But we can't go over it.'
I went on feeling for seams, fissures, even cracks. 'According to professional practice, yes, we can. Even if we tried going sideways it would slow us up, and time's critical. We've got to reach the top of the massif and get away overland before the search vehicles are in the area tomorrow – with the dogs.'
'It's snowing too hard for that.' He was close to me now, Marius, wanting comfort. His breath steamed in the rays of my little lamp.
'This wind could die in the night and by eleven in the morning there could be sunshine.'
Decision, make a decision, my fingertips sliding across the freezing rock, coming away numbed. But there weren't any choices.
'I'm going to go sideways,' Marius said, his throat tight.
'You're not going anywhere,' I told him. The adrenalin was on full stream now and I could think better.
'I can't do anything else,' his voice came.
'Marius, hook your fall-arrest line to your harness. Now.'
'Where?' I'd had him rehearse it fifty times, and he'd forgotten: you've heard of stress.
'To the front.' I didn't want him pitched forward against the rock if he came unstuck. 'I'm going down again,' he said, 'some of the way. Remember the ledge we crossed, where we rested?'
'Marius, I want you to get this. I'm taking you to Moscow. I'm not dropping you off this cliff for them to find your body in the morning and learn exactly where I am. All we've got to do is get to the top of this massif, one foot at a time. Get there, you understand? Keep that in your mind.'
'I knew you'd lost your reason, Berinov. I told you.'
I fished out another piton and drove it in for a foot rest and pulled myself up against the curve of the rock, unhooking my pick and reaching higher with it, scraping with its point, searching for anything I could find.
It took minutes before a narrow seam caught at the pick, but it was there, and I hauled up. 'Move with me, Marius. Keep close.' I got the hammer and drove a piton in, hard, weight-testing it. But the lead line was still taut. 'Marius!'
'I can't!' His tone was lost now, desperate. It was a case of extreme funk, and I understood that. To look up at an overhang at night has put fear into hardened pros unless they're perfectly prepared. We weren't.
But I'd got to take Antanov with me: He was a man with a life to live, and he was Natalya's passport to freedom. He was also the key to Balalaika.
'Marius, think about Moscow. Think about your sister. Think about destroying that bastard Sakkas. All that's going to be possible as soon as we reach the top of the massif. So think about getting there. Think about being there.'
Okay, Alex had nodded, his eyes bright on me in the shadows of the huts. Okay.
But Marius didn't answer. He was praying now, I knew that.
'Marius! Tighten your lead line and – '
Then he passed out and I felt a jerk on the line and knew that he was swinging over the seven hundred foot drop with the weight of a hanged man.
24: SAKKAS
The wind was whipping at gale force across the massif and we lay huddled together against the risk of hypothermia and frostbite.
I'd put a compress bandage around his head but he still hadn't moved or spoken, and I was hoping to God amnesia hadn't set in. At intervals I kept asking him his name and he stirred at last.
'
Name?'
'Yes. Do you remember your name?'
'Of course. Marius.'
I went slack with relief. It was all locked in this man's head, Balalaika.
'We're moving on,' I said.
'Through this?'
'We've got to.'
The snow was blinding but the last of the moon's light was dying in the west and we steered by it towards the railroad station that I knew was six miles away. Before morning we climbed into a freight car as the train slowed for the gradient. Marius had asked me just once as we'd lurched through the snow, 'How did we get to the top of the massif?'
'I found a chimney in the rock face.'
'How did you get me past the overhang?'
I thought of the intensity of the cold in that dank chimney, slivers of ice lining its sides, digging into my back as I bridged my way up, tension in the muscles of the calves, tension in the shoulders, taking deep breaths before each move, tension because of the drift of air, and the crack of moon haze above that might be from a mouth too narrow for a man, too narrow even for a helpless ferret in the field. Then suddenly I was there, in the wind again, swinging out onto a shelf and seeing that the angle eased above me now; from here to the top would be a breeze, a scramble, if I could get Marius this far. I drove a piton in, then two more for an anchor, then lowered myself into the mouth of the chimney for the descent, my back sore now against the rock, to where Marius was hanging, still limp, like a fly in a web.
The chimney was harder the second time, with no rope. I needed it, you see, for the pulley system. To bring Marius up. It's not in the guidebooks, hauling a dead weight up a chimney with a hemp rope and three approximations to carabiners hammered out of old steel in a labour-camp forge. I would not recommend it, no, as a technique. The wind slapping now against my face, the arm and shoulder muscles singing, then burning, glad of those days swinging the axe at the seam of nickel in the mine, the extra hours in the gym. Wondering how the precious contents of Marius' skull would survive the upward passage against the unforgiving rock. I might strain at the hemp rope till my hands bled onto my boots and the blood froze there, blending with the flakes of snow, hearing the thud of his back against the granite wall over the shriek of the wind, then letting the piton take the weight while I took three sharp breaths, four, and heaved again, but if Marius couldn't remember everything about Sakkas' business empire then Balalaika would die, though he might live.