by James Steel
Chapter Fifteen
Once they had agreed a plan, Alex was able to get on with organising specialist equipment and training for it.
Magnus had brought two large crates of high-spec arctic kit with him. Alex had emailed him the men’s boot and clothing sizes and he had picked it up from a supplier in Oslo on his way to London, along with a supply of winter rations.
The large medieval hall was used as a fitting room and equipment store for all the gear they were taking. As the crates were unloaded and divided up it became strewn with piles of heavy parkas, salopettes, boots, cross-country skis and poles, tents, sleeping bags, rucksacks and cooking equipment.
The weapons and ammunition would have to wait until they got to Transdneister. Arkady was constantly on his BlackBerry, haggling with his arms dealers to make sure they got the best assault rifles, machine guns, heavy weapons and explosives available.
Magnus then took them all out into the snowy grounds and got them practising cross-country skiing and some basic arctic survival drills.
He also came up with an idea for getting across the open ground to the camp perimeter.
As usual he started his sentence by clearing his throat quietly. ‘Prevailing wind is northerly so I think maybe we have the ground blizzard on the north side?’
The others looked at him.
‘Ground blizzard?’ said Pete.
‘Yes, it’s when the wind picks up the snow and the ice and you have the fog effect on the ground, two feet high? Maybe it gives us the cover, but then,’ he paused, ‘we also have the frostbite risk as well. Ambient temperature is minus forty at night but for each mile per hour of windspeed you add a degree of freezing and so with average windspeed of thirty miles an hour you have minus seventy degrees.’
Col winced.
‘At that temperature frostbite time is maybe,’ he shrugged, ‘five minutes. Even with the heavy clothing on, you will certainly be experiencing hypothermia by the time you get through the wire and that is not a good state to go to assault in.’
‘Hmm.’ Alex nodded; this sort of detailed knowledge was exactly why he had brought his old friend along.
‘I take your point about the wind but I think we are on to something there.’
They began working on ways to reduce the wind exposure using Magnus’s experience in snow camouflage and concealment.
Pete also came into his own. He took over an isolated storage barn on the estate and quickly turned the huge, empty, metal shed into a FIBUA training centre. Using the rough-and-ready training techniques that they developed in Iraq, he drew chalk lines to the floor to simulate floor plans of buildings and used the stairs to the hayloft for all-important stairwell drills. He then took the team through a quick refresher course on urban warfare skills.
It wasn’t perfect but in the limited time they had available Alex could see that they were beginning to function as a team: assessing threats quickly, communicating well and moving fluidly around obstacles.
Alex came back from a session in the FIBUA barn early one afternoon to check his emails, principally that the regular flow of mail order invites kept coming through from Sergey. So far, he was relieved to see that they had.
He entered the main house through the big porch, stamped the snow off his boots and headed in through to the medieval hall, paused to throw another huge log on the fire, before crossing to the other side into the kitchen to get a cup of tea.
This was a shabby modern room; last done up in the 1970s when some land had been sold off. His father had never updated the lurid orange cupboards and Alex retained a curious childhood affection for them.
He walked in and found Lara sitting at the table in front of the Aga, warming herself. The house still didn’t have central heating so the kitchen always was the focal point in the winter.
They both looked startled and quickly scrambled for something to say.
She beat him to it,‘Ah, Sasha, how is your little winter training ground?’ she said with a smile; he noticed that she had adopted the familiar ‘ty’ form of address in Russian with him now.
He hadn’t seen her on her own since she’d arrived. She had listened in carefully to the planning discussions and had passed on a number of requests for special equipment to Sergey by email. She had also briefed the team on the Moscow end of the plans, when they hoped that events on the street would move their way and the team wouldn’t have to be as directly involved as they were in the assault.
She had relaxed a lot since her uncomfortable journey here; the men were all focused on the job in hand and hardly paid any attention to her, apart from the odd covert glance at her figure as she walked past.
Alex adopted a similarly low-key manner with her now. ‘Oh, it’s going OK. The guys are out practising FIBUA in the barn.’ He busied himself making tea. ‘You want some?’ he asked rather abruptly and she nodded.
He was normally pretty good at chitchat, he enjoyed the company of intelligent women, but he still found it hard to talk to Lara because at least half his brain was scrambled by the sheer physical hit of being with her; the sight of her long limbs, the curve of her cleavage, the thick snake of blonde hair twisted over one shoulder exposing the elegant arch of her neck. All these stimuli kept cutting into his normal thought processes like interference on the radio. It really didn’t help this self-consciousness to have had Sergey’s tactless quip about her being a man-eater.
He had no idea what Lara thought of him, but beneath her icy calm he suspected she was terrified. He had caught her once, when he turned away, out of the corner of his eye: her expression of intelligent interest in the briefing had fallen away and been replaced with a disconcerted, lost look.
He sorted out the tea and gave himself some time to restore control: You’re on a job, Devereux, stop fucking around! You do not have time for this.
He turned back to her, prepared to be as chatty as possible, but she was quicker off the mark.
‘Have you always done this?’
‘What?
‘Fighting.’
‘Yes, I didn’t go to university and joined the army straight from school. Yes, I have always done this.’ He sounded more defensive than he had intended to.
‘Well, your Russian is very good.’ She didn’t mean it to but it sounded like a consolation comment.
‘The army was keen for people to learn it and I discovered that I did actually want an intellectual challenge, after all, so I took a course.’ He didn’t add that it had been another way of sticking two fingers up to his father, who had been furious at him ‘wasting his time on all that foreign crap!’
Alex continued, ‘I also once had a Russian girlfriend in London.’
Oksana.
She had been so far removed from the sort of girl his father expected him to date that he had felt it was safe to go out with her. His main memory—apart from a lot of sex—was of the smell of her cheap hairspray and her mouth reeking of the strong Russian Prima cigarettes she favoured. She had been hard work but he had loved learning the language through her; even the most banal conversation—‘Pass the salt’—had become an adventure.
Lara nodded and there was a slight pause.
‘And you? Have you always done TV?’
‘Well, yes and no,’ she said, recovering her poise. ‘I did chemical engineering at Voronezh Institute of Technology.’ She nodded, acknowledging his surprised look. ‘Yes, I know. Everybody in the West always looks like that when I tell them, but technical education was always a lot bigger in Russia. Plus my father thought it would be a sensible thing for me to do.’
‘And was it?’
‘Well…’ she paused to consider its merits and then said in a very direct manner, ‘you have to work hard to get it right and I enjoy intense experiences. I mean, I like the rigour of engineering, it’s very black or white; things are either right or wrong. Flow rates either go down a pipe or they don’t. It teaches you to be very intolerant of bullshit.’
She looked at him str
aight, and now he had a moment of discomfort. He hadn’t realised that she was that analytical about life. What was she making of him? He felt his previous remarks must have been scrutinised with a microscope.
He managed to nod sagely in response and then handed her a mug of tea.
‘Thanks,’ she muttered and sipped it thoughtfully.
He sat down opposite her at the table.
‘So, after that, how did you get into TV?’
‘Oh, Sergey “discovered” me.’ She made speech marks in the air and laughed.
Alex smiled. ‘Oh, right, was that a recruitment programme they ran or something?’
‘Not exactly. He was drunk—can you believe it?—in a bar in Moscow and some instinct deep within him instantly recognised my journalistic potential.’ She grinned a million-volt smile this time and then indicated her body with a downward sweep of her hand.
Alex was sent back to square one. He had been making some polite headway off that topic, but she had now, with disconcerting directness, brought him right back onto it.
She looked straight at him. ‘Alexander, I am under no illusions as to why Sergey liked me: I have a fantastic ass and great tits. He always said they were a work of art, he thinks they should be in the Hermitage.’ She laughed at the memory, folded her arms and squeezed her breasts together as she arched her back, pouted and cocked an eyebrow at him.
This was killing him.
She relaxed the pose, went back to sipping her tea and continued, ‘So, as you can see, after engineering I have subsequently done a degree in flirtation with a Masters in flashing my tits. I’ve done a lot of field work on my thesis.’
There was something rather disturbing in how coldly she was able to be honest about her attractions.
Alex nodded as he scrabbled to regain traction. ‘Right…So, you’re very close to Sergey then?’ he said with an intelligent frown on his face.
Lara’s eyes lost their mischievous look; the blue suddenly seemed very cold.
Oh shit…He felt he had just touched an electric fence around a no-go area and flinched under the intensity of her anger.
She dropped her eyes and turned away, realising that she had invited such a question by being so frank. She looked back at Alex in an evaluating way; he seemed a thoughtful man to her and she knew that they might well both be dead in a few days’ time, so she felt an urge to tell him the truth about everything.
She said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘He took my soul,’ then paused and shrugged. ‘But you can live without one.’
His mind whirred. What did that mean?
There was an awkward pause before, with an effort, she regained her light-hearted tone and continued: ‘But, unfortunately, Sergey has the emotional attention span of a five year old so it was never going to last. He is a very good businessman but he has still got to learn that women are not businesses—you can’t invest in a diversified portfolio of them. I think he finds it easier to commit to grandiose ideas than a single real woman; somehow she might threaten the perfection of his idealism.’ She shrugged again and concluded generously, ‘We all make choices in life.’
Alex tried to move on. ‘Sergey certainly seems very passionate about the coup; he’s a lot more profound when you get to know him.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Has Sergey been talking to you about literature again? About Russkaya dusha?’
Alex nodded and she tossed her head in annoyance. He realised that Sergey had not only favoured him with his thoughts on the matter.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I love Russian literature, it was one of the great things we shared, but he talks shit—all Russian men do. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.’ She shook her head dismissively and looked away.
Alex couldn’t quite believe it was all nonsense; Sergey had seemed so passionate on the topic. ‘You don’t think so?’
She turned dangerously slanting eyes on him and a slight flush came over her high cheekbones.
‘Believe me, it’s all bullshit.’
‘The Russian soul?’
She flared up and pointed at him. ‘It’s a romantic dream of his. Russian men like to get drunk together and talk about grand emotions to justify their boorishness by making out that they are profound underneath it. They’re not, they’re just ill-mannered louts. Look, Tolstoy once said, “Everybody thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.” Russian men are a prime example of that; I have had enough of them.’
She warmed to her theme. ‘Sergey says he loves Russia but it’s easy to love people from a distance. If he really loved the Russian people why does he spend most of his time living in London?’
This passionate speech completely steamrollered the attempts Alex had been making to calm his emotions; now he just stared openly at her.
It wasn’t just Lara’s beauty that made her so captivating —her lucent hair, her figure, her finely etched features. It was the fact that such a keen spirit animated her, so that when she spoke she became almost iridescent: each word brightly illuminated by the arch of an eyebrow, a widening of the pupils, a pout of the lips or a tilt of her cheekbones. It all came together in a brilliant fusion of thought, expression and gesture, holding him helpless in its beam.
Chapter Sixteen
WEDNESDAY 10 DECEMBER
The next morning, Roman and the remaining eight members of the 33rd work team stood to attention as usual at roll call.
However, this time the eyes that showed over their iced-up facecloths were all fixed on the izbushka by the side of the parade ground.
All of them knew the hell that Big Danni would have gone through in there overnight: curled up alone in a tiny, pitch-black cell, racked by unstoppable shivering.
And Roman knew that he had done it all to save him.
His network of political supporters saw him as the figurehead of their efforts to bring freedom to Russia. But Big Danni was not a political; he was just an ordinary criminal. That was what made his sacrifice all the more telling for Roman.
He was worried as he looked at the hut. He couldn’t see any smoke coming out of the chimney on top of it. Usually a little streamer of warmth hung from the metal pipe, bent over, away from the northerly gales.
The usual routine of roll call went ahead—Kuzembaev came down the line with his torch and made his joke—but all eyes continued to be fixed on the hut as the morning guard squad opened it up and went inside.
A minute later the door banged open and a guard shouted to his sergeant on the edge of the parade ground to come over. He ran across, went inside and a few seconds later a guard ran out along the edge of the parade ground and into the infirmary block. He returned with a stretcher and then four men staggered out of the door carrying Danni’s huge weight.
He was curled up in the foetal position, his feet and head sticking awkwardly over the sides of the stretcher. As the guards stumbled in the snow past the ranks of prisoners they stared at it. Roman could see that the body did not move at all. It was frozen solid.
Danni had fought all comers in his life but he could not fight the cold.
After they had gone, the sergeant ran over to Commandant Bolkonsky on the platform in front of them and spoke with him quietly. The commandant nodded and then returned to the microphone.
The Tannoy blared out over them; Commandant Bolkonsky sounded as cheerful as usual.
‘So, good morning, guests, and welcome to another day in Camp Honolulu. As you can see we have had a, er, technical problem with the air conditioning in one of our guest suites and one of our visitors has overindulged on our wonderful climate. So watch yourselves out there or you’ll get the same!’
Chapter Seventeen
THURSDAY 11 DECEMBER
The following evening, Roman took his place in the queue outside the canteen as usual, but he was hoping something different would happen.
The canteen only had room for ten work teams at a time and the men inside liked to sit for as long as possible after they had eaten, savour
ing the warmth and the feel of the food in their bellies, however poor it might be. Shubin and the deputy team leader went inside to drive a team out with shouts and cuffs in order to make room for the 33rd.
Eventually, the line of exhausted, frozen convicts was able to push its way through the double set of doors and into the low building. It was packed with men on benches or eating standing up when they couldn’t find a place to sit. The sound of their shouting and arguing filled the space, along with the smell of fish and sweat. The temperature was just above freezing so the new arrivals steamed as the ice on their clothing and faces warmed up.
‘Come on! Move yer fucking arses!’ Shubin yelled at some scavengers who were hanging around the serving hatch hoping to cadge some extra helpings. He pushed a couple out of the way and the 33rd shuffled forward to the hatch.
Although there was a lot of shouting and pushing at the back of the queue, as the men approached the serving hatch they fell silent as if approaching the altar in a temple of food. Except for the numbers on their backs, the men in the queue were identical in their grubby black coats and hats, like some black-clad priesthood. They licked their lips nervously and each tried to look over the shoulder of the man in front to see if he would get a decent portion in his battered metal bowl. This was, after all, their lifeblood. If you missed out on a full complement of food in this climate it could mean you got a cough, caught pneumonia and died.
The dinner they awaited was fish skilly: porridge with bits of bones, scales and cabbage floating in it, with a measly bread ration.
Roman shuffled forward amongst them. He kept his spoon tucked into the top of his boot so he would have two hands free for carrying his bowl of precious food and fending off possible scavengers, or just pushing his way through the crowd. He felt exhausted, hungry and deeply troubled by Danni’s death and stood with his head down. However, as they moved nearer the serving hatch he was careful to look up and see if his special contact was on the shift that evening.
He recognised the beefy hands and forearms doling out the food through the waist-height hatch.