by Craig Thomas
A patrol of four, returning, topping the rise twenty yards away. Rifles, Kalashnikovs, slung over their shoulders, gait weary, relief and tiredness evident in the slouch of the shoulders.
Davenhill had an impression of heads snapping up, of fumbled movements, then the Parabellum roared in the quiet where the only sound had been the labour of footsteps through the snow. The noise banged back from the building behind them, seemed to echo from the low sky.
Then the Russians were firing, even as they split from the tight group; two of them, moving in separate directions, firing from the hip, bent low and running. Two bodies lay on the ground, ugly sprawling things like dark stains.
Then the exaggerated noise again from Waterford — he was in a crouch, hands stiff in front of him, both holding the gun. He was turning on his axis like a doll, spinning like something on a muscial box, firing alternately at one then the other. Davenhill saw flame from the direction of one of the Russians, who had paused long enough to kneel in the snow — and the young man in front of him, who had stood stupidly observing events he seemed not to comprehend, was flung back against him. Davenhill clutched the thin body as the anorak came away, and then stumbled and fell, the dead Russian on top of him, an obscene weight, his Walther sticking butt-up from the snow, out of reach of his hand.
Then there was a single shot, then silence. Davenhill lay sobbing, feeling the scream rising in his throat, threatening. It had to be madness, this being buried beneath a dead body naked to the waist and the trousers hanging open across the privates…
He heaved at the Russian, as at something loathsome, and staggered to his feet. Waterford was inspecting the bodies. Davenhill plucked his gun out of the snow, and wiped it, attending minutely to the whiteness, the wetness that had gathered on it, and in the barrel. Then Waterford was beside him, his hand on his shoulder.
'Don't sulk,' he said, but his voice was without rancour or sarcasm. 'I'm sorry the game has changed.'
Davenhill felt himself shaking with relief, quivering, and was ashamed. Waterford squeezed his shoulder. Davenhill looked at him; he saw the gulf between them in experience and nature, and he saw the kind of man Waterford was. Yet he saw something akin to pity, too — even regret.
Then the moment was over. Waterford said, 'We'll have woken the dead. Let's get moving. We might have to run all the way to Ivalo yet.' He looked down at the dead young man whose buttocks were exposed by the broken trousers as he lay face-down in the snow. 'Pity they killed that poor sod. Star witness, he would have been.'
Then he walked abruptly away, towards the top of the rise. Davenhill looked at the white buttocks, and the creeping red stain just showing beneath the hip, and felt sick.
'Come on — there are other patrols out, Alex. We have to move!'
Davenhill began to walk up the slope in Waterford's deep footprints.
There was an increased tempo of activity. Ilya was certain of it now. While Maxim interviewed a Senior Sergeant in the KGB Border Guard, Vrubel's most senior NCO, he was standing at the window of the wooden hut put at the disposal of the two SID men to conduct their enquiries. It was late afternoon, and Ilya's head was thick with cigarette-smoke and pointless interviews. Maxim seemed to have the stronger constitution when it came to the dead-end minutiae of their profession.
Outside, the pace of footsteps through the packed snow, the number of people appearing from the doors of other huts in the HQ compound of Wire Patrol Station 78, increased. Movement between huts: men emerging into the failing light tugging on jackets — a fur-lined flying-jacket, he would have guessed in one case — the tread of heavy boots audible, even through the double-glazing.
He looked once at the Senior Sergenat, a heavy man with a square, passionless face, probably looking a dozen years older than he was — grizzled hair stiff on his head, creased low forehead. The man was glancing over Maxim's shoulder. As his gaze caught Ilya's, he looked promptly back at Maxim.
'Thank you, Sergeant, that will be all,' he said on impulse. He saw Maxim's shoulders flex, then relax. He would play along.
'You've been very helpful,' Maxim said.
The Sergeant seemed suspicious, then nodded and stood up. The chair scraped on the wooden floor.
When he was gone, Ilya said, 'Come over to the window — tell me what you see.'
Maxim, amused rather than intrigued, joined him. They were silent for a few moments, then Maxim said in a curious voice:
'The wire which divides Comrade Lenin from Coca-Cola — was that what you wanted?'
'No, idiot. Closer than that.' Ilya, too, looked across the six or seven hundred metres of treeless, levelled ground that separated them from the wire and the two visible watch-towers that overlooked it.
'Oh. Mm.. ' He rubbed his chin in mock-thoughtfulness. 'Ah — a Border Guard running, is that it?'
'Yes!'
'Unusual, I agree. Shall we put him on a charge? Perhaps he is a follower of Trotsky?'
'Why is he running?' 'Caught short?'
'Lot of people about?'
'Some.'
'More than earlier? See that man in the flying-jacket? That's the second I've seen in a couple of minutes.'
'Oh, no!' Maxim exclaimed in an assumed falsetto. 'It's happening! Finland is invading us!'
'Seriously…'
They both heard the sound of rotors quickening, and across the snow from somewhere out of sight a redness was splashed from helicopter lights.
'Where are they off to?' Maxim asked.
'I wonder. Let's ask.'
He walked swiftly to the door, taking his fur-lined coat from a peg beside it, jamming on the fur hat as he went through the door. The sudden change from the fugginess of the room struck both men — the crisp air after the fumes of the stove.
They walked out into the middle of the open space before their hut. Suddenly, Maxim began to trot, a mere half-dozen steps before he cannoned into a soldier, who lost his balance and fell over. Maxim pulled him to his feet, dusted him down, and snapped:
'What the devil's the rush, soldier?'
'Trouble across the wire, man! All hell's broken loose by the sound of it!' Then he gagged, saw the civilian topcoats, the two strange faces, and backed away. Maxim moved after him, but felt Ilya holding his arm. The soldier was fiddling with the strap of his rifle.
Then all three of them looked up involuntarily as a helicopter, red lights at tail and belly, lifted over the huts, the nearest trees parting like dark waves from the downdraught. Then the soldier, sensing his release, trotted off- looking back over his shoulder from time to time until he was out of sight behind a barrack block.
The helicopter shifted sideways in the air, gained a little more height, and streamed away from them, towards and across the border wire.
'What in hell's name — ?' Maxim breathed, watching it.
'Come on!' Ilya snapped. 'This is it!' He turned Maxim away from the sight of the diminishing helicopter, a black spot winking red.
'What the hell is?' he asked, in his puzzlement returning to the humour they had shared in the hut.
'The whole bloody shooting-match!' He was looking about him, realising that his voice was raised unnaturally. 'Finland Station!' It came out as a harsh whisper, just audible above the retreating drone of the helicopter.
The HQ seemed to settle, briefly, then another high-pitched whine of rotors, and, away to their right, where their own helicopter had landed in a clearing, the winking of lights.
'Finland Station?' 'Yes, you silly bugger!' Ilya was shaking his arm as he gripped them. 'That chopper is over the border, in Finland. Why? Ask yourself why! It has to be the answer to the puzzle!'
'Oh my — !' Maxim's face went blank, then came back to the present. 'What do we do?'
'Where the hell is our pilot?'
'Canteen?'
'On his back reading a naughty book! Where the hell is the rest room — where are their quarters?'
The two young men looked around wildly, feeling the puzzle that
the HQ presented.
'He went off that way,' Maxim said, pointing to their left.
'He did. A hut down there.'
They began to run, feet slipping minutely with every stride on the packed snow. They seemed to be the only people now running in the whole of the camp.
'What about that bloody soldier?' Maxim panted.
'If he's as thick as the usual, he'll spend an hour realising he's given the game away!'
They went on running. Heads turned to look at them, but with the incuriosity of routine. They were part of the retreating wave of activity.
'But if he's not-?'
'Then they know that we know — and up yours!'
'What the hell is over there?'
'Who knows? Hell! Our people?' Ilya skidded to a halt, mounted the two steps up to the porch, and wrenched the door open. Maxim crowded into the doorway with him, and Ilya felt the prod of his Makarov automatic in his back.
'Careful!' he could not resist saying. 'My virginity.'
Their pilot, the young, assured man who had been so unguarded, it had appeared, during the flight from Murmansk, was lying on his bunk at the far end of the small barrack. He was alone. The room was warm, and a record player beside his bunk was tinnily producing Mozart. He lifted his head from the pillow and his supporting arm, smiled — then saw the two drawn guns.
'On your feet!' Ilya barked, then: 'You do and I'll blow your hand off! You won't fly again.'
The pilot stopped reaching for the automatic in his holster, hung on a peg above the bed with his flying-jacket. He raised his hands, and the recognitions nickered in his face as his thoughts embraced the sequence of half-observed events that had brought them there.
'Yes — we know,' Maxim said. The pilot nodded in acquiescence. 'Get up.'
'Stupid,' the pilot observed.
Ilya, the scheme forming desperately in his mind, as a sequence of ill-linked episodes, a badly-edited film, said; 'One chance! Only one — but it's there. With your assistance.'
The pilot remained seated. 'Assistance?'
'Don't drawl, and don't delay! On your feet, and get into that flying-jacket. You're going to take us up, and show us the view!' He smiled. Turning to Maxim, he added: 'Ever been to Finland, Maxim?'
'No. Always wanted to, though.'
'Great. Let's have a little holiday.' He walked over to the pilot, careful to leave Maxim a clear field of fire, and pulled the pilot to his feet. The young man, sensing, perhaps, that an extreme purpose had settled uncomfortably on the room, made little physical protest. Instead, he put on the jacket that Ilya handed down to him, picked up his cigarettes and lighter, and walked slowly to the door, his hands in his pockets.
At the door, a sheepish grin on his face, he said, 'And what do we do now?'
'We walk directly to the chopper, and we make it go up in the air, and head west, across the border,' Ilya said. 'By the way — what's going on over there?'
The pilots shrugged. 'Routine patrols. It happens all the time, this far from Moscow.'
'Balls! No one in their right mind flies routine patrols in those beauties. They're MIL-24s, gunships!' 'Clever.'
'Only a well-spent Soviet youth, taking a proper interest in the armed forces of our glorious country, get going.'
They crossed the packed snow in a tight group, Maxim walking alongside the pilot, apparently engaging him in animated conversation, with much laughter, while Ilya, the gun in the pocket of his coat, walked just behind them.
The transport helicopter in which they arrived was in the same condition of constant readiness as the MIL-24s that had taken off minutes before, even though it was not required until the following day when it would take an off-duty platoon for forty-eight hours' leave in Murmansk. It sat on a swept concrete square, white-and-yellow striped, in a tiny clearing just big enough to allow it to take off and land. Camouflage netting, now drawn aside, concealed it from the air, and its temporary hangar was erected around it when the weather required. At that moment the corrugated structure was wheeled back under the trees.
The pilot nodded to the two members of the groundcrew on duty, and they asked no questions when he climbed aboard. Maxim, then Ilya, clambered awkwardly after him up the handholds on the fuselage. Once inside, they settled themselves in metal-framed, canvas-webbed seats behind the pilot.
'Ask no one nothing!' Ilya ordered, taking pleasure, an almost wild delight in what was becoming for him a daring piece of initiative — an escapade. 'Just take off, and follow those taxis!'
'And don't bugger about with the machine, will you?' Maxim added, his tone level, without the slightest humour.
'We may be ignorant laymen, but if this thing doesn't behave as helicopters normally do, then I'll make sure you don't live to regale your colleagues with the tale!'
'All right, Comrades. Just like the flying manual says. Strap yourselves in, please.' He fitted his headset, settled in his seat, was aware of Ilya craning forward over his shoulder to watch him, and began the checks; hurrying them as much as he could.
As he settled to the task, he began to be less aware of his danger. His stomach settled, and the routines with which he was so familiar possessed him.
He set the turrets on the computerised fuel-flow, then the turbines began to wind up. Ilya was aware, comfortingly, of their increasing whirr. Then the chopper jiggled sideways as the tail rotor started. When there was sufficient power to the main rotor, the pilot released the rotor brake, flickered a switch, and hauled over the handle of the clutch which engaged the drive to the main rotor.
Ilya, seeing the ease, the speed of familiarity, assumed that nothing untoward was in the pilot's mind. The pilot, aware of the gun near his right ear, knew that he could have done a dozen things that Ilya would never have noticed until it was too late.
He settled to fly them. He knew the extent of their possible discoveries. He did not — he suddenly perceived — have the nerve.
He ignored the whole problem.
When they came back. It would do, then. Then they would be taken care of.
Through the canopy top, Ilya saw the rotor blades begin to turn as the engaged clutch bit, and he heard their swirling beat. Normal. As they achieved proper speed, they became a shimmering horizontal dish.
The pilot gently moved a lever to his left, and the rotor blades changed angle. The engine pitch rose as the engines fed more power to the rotors. The chopper moved off its shocks, the wheels for the moment just in contact with the ground. The pilot gently pressed the rudder bar to counteract any rotation of the fuselage, paused to check his instruments again, then moved the left hand lever slightly higher. The MIL lifted from the square of concrete, and the light suddenly increased as they lifted clear of the trees. It was not yet dark The pilot checked the drift caused by the wind, and the chopper swung round towards the border.
'You know the course, don't you,' Ilya said. It was not a question. Suddenly reminded of their presence — and Ilya applied the cold barrel of the Makarov to his jaw at that moment — the pilot merely nodded. He moved the control stick, altering the angle of the rotor disc, and the MIL moved over the wooden huts, towards the open ground, snow-covered, and the huge wire.
They passed over the wire at less than a hundred and fifty feet, then the racecourse-like stretch of open ground, then the lower, unmanned fence on the Finnish side, and a narrower space clear of trees, then the forest that engulfed both sides of the border at that point. There was little danger of being picked up; they were too low for radar detection, and the Finns maintained few watch-towers. They relied instead upon regular helicopter patrols — regular as clockwork, risibly punctual. It was a token to independence, designed not to anger the Soviet Union or give the least provocation for a border incident.
They saw the white, winding line of the single road, a parting in the trees, and the further, icy gleam of the river to the south of them. Maxim tapped Ilya's shoulder, and he leaned back.
'What are we going to do?' Maxim whispered.
Ilya, aware of the pilot, stretched his right hand so that the gun rested against the pilot's neck, just where the hair touched the collar of the flying-jacket.
'Don't get any ideas,' he said. 'Sorry if it makes you nervous!'
'Look, Ilya — you're behaving like a kid! What are we going to do, afterwards V Ilya looked at him, and scowled like a child. The flickering, half-plotted scenario he had felt was in his grasp was not a firm outline. Separate incidents, nothing more, the bulk of his plan already put into operation when the MIL took off.
He said: 'We can't go back there.' Again he glanced at the back of the pilot's head.
Maxim nodded. 'Too bloody true, my son.'
'Look — if we — ?' He thought, shook his head. Then: 'This thing can take us back to Murmansk!' His voice was a breathy whisper.
'Oh, yes? Outrunning those gunships you seem determined to take us towards?' Maxim turned away, looking ahead, past the pilot. The darkening sky was empty of lights.
Ilya was silent, offering after a while only: 'I'll think of something.'
'You do that. Meanwhile, ask him what is going on.'
Ilya increased the pressure of the gun against the pilot's neck, sufficient to alarm him. He saw the slight spasm of the shoulders, the wrinkling of the neck as if to get rid of a stiffness. The man was frightened.
'Now, what are we doing here?'
Silence. The steady beat of the rotors over their heads, the dark flow of the forest below, patches of white clearing like baldness, the road like a parting in thick hair. Then, ahead of them, winking red lights, one above and to port, the other to starboard, at about the same height. They were overtaking the two gunships.
'What are they doing?' Maxim snapped.
'Looking,' the pilot offered.
'In Finland? What do they want — a wolfhead for the mess wall?
'No.'
'Enlighten us.'
A tremor passed through the pilot's frame, as if he were trying to overcome some deep, traumatic block. He was afraid of them, but he was perhaps more afraid of something else. Both Ilya and Maxim, looking at one another for a moment, realised the significance of what the pilot must know.