December

by James Steel

  Olga the cook was there.

  She had been selected by Commandant Bolkonsky to be a worker at the camp from Governor Shaposhnikov’s catering company, because he didn’t like trouble over women and he thought that even in the years that the MVD guards worked at the camp, none of them would be tempted to indulge in her. She was heavy-set, with forearms like hams sticking out of the sleeves of her stained, brown uniform dress, wore a hairnet over her greasy hair and stank of body odour.

  Despite this she was the most important woman in Roman’s life. Only her substantial midriff, shoulders and arms could be seen through the low serving hatch as she doled the black stew out into the bowls and shouted at the men: ‘Come on! Let’s have you!’

  Roman ducked his head down to show his face through the hatch and said, ‘Hello, Olga!’

  That was as much as he ever saw of her; he straightened up again quickly so as not to attract attention from the few guards squeezed into corners of the room. As she dumped the food into his bowl they exchanged a few guarded words.

  ‘Any letters from your brother?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ah, very bad news, someone tried to kill him on Tuesday. They really mean to do him in.’

  ‘Ah! It’s another Time of Troubles!’ She shook her head sympathetically as he took his bowl and moved along to squeeze onto a place at the end of a bench.

  After the work teams had finished their guzzling and been kicked back out into the cold, the cooks and trusties cleaned the kitchen and Olga returned to the women’s quarters, barricaded off behind a barbed-wire fence outside the main prison area, where she lived with two old nurses and the commandant’s secretary. Since her husband had left her, and her only son, Anatoly, had been killed in Chechnya, all that was left was her daughter, Vera, in Moscow. She hated the government for what they had done to her son but had had to take this job in a hellhole when her boss at the catering company had told her to.

  She was upset now because of the information from Roman. She always had found decisions difficult and now she was torn between two options. She was allowed only ten minutes of phone time a week and her regular slot was not until tomorrow evening, Friday 12 December. She knew that all phone calls from the camp could be tapped by the guards, but she also knew that most of the time they didn’t bother. So she wondered if she should wait until Friday to call, when they wouldn’t bother listening in, or should she say that there was an emergency and risk them taking more interest than usual and probably deciding to listen?

  She had no illusions about what they would do to her if they caught her passing on information. As much as she hated Krymov and his whole regime, and wanted to help protect Roman from them, she eventually decided that she could afford to wait twenty-four hours before making the call in greater safety. Nothing would happen to him soon anyway.

  Chapter Eighteen

  FRIDAY 12 DECEMBER

  Olga finally made her move the following evening.

  After she had served dinner and cleared up, the bulky old cook wrapped herself up in her heavy coat and several shawls, and slipped out to the phone booths in the hall of the main guard barrack block.

  The hallway was old and freezing from the draught under the swing doors. A fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air from the soldiers leaning up against the wall waiting their turn on the phones. With a hundred and ninety guards in the camp and only three phone boxes, there was always a queue for them and people guarded their time slots jealously, banging on the doors to remind others when their time was up.

  As she walked past the queue to take her place at the back, several of the younger soldiers leered at her, more out of boredom than lust. Many of them were just conscripts and hated it in the camp as much as the prisoners. She stuck her nose in the air and pulled her shawls tighter around her.

  A sign on the wall next to the booths read: ‘Ministry of Interior orders: no official information is to be transmitted over these phone lines. All conversations will be monitored for illegal content and severe punishment imposed on transgressors.’

  To emphasise the point a guard sat in a booth at the end of the row, with headphones for listening in. As she walked past she glanced in and saw that the bored young private was watching hard-core porn on a small DVD player with headphones on. The official eavesdropping ones were draped unused around his neck. She tutted at him in disgust; he looked up at her with a blank stare and then went back to his film.

  When her time came, she marched into a booth and shut the door firmly behind her. She called a number in Moscow; a woman’s voice answered casually, ‘Hi there.’

  ‘Verouchka?’ Olga asked a little hesitantly.

  There was a pause. ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘How are you?’ It was a curt request without any sentiment.

  ‘Very good, Mama.’ The voice gained confidence. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Ah, you know, not so good, I had some bad news from Pyotr; his brother was nearly killed in an accident recently.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you know any more about it?’

  ‘No, not much to say really. Anyway, how are the cats?’

  They exchanged domestic details in a desultory way for a couple of minutes before Olga hung up and made her way back to her quarters.

  In Moscow the woman put the phone down, hastily turned to her laptop and sent an email to an anonymous Hotmail address.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Planning and training continued at a fast pace at Akerly.

  All the men knew that they were going to face a tough assault when they arrived, and the fear focused their minds. Magnus led them out on a five-mile cross-country ski around the estate every morning, followed by a gruelling PT session in the medieval hall led by Yamba.

  The skiing used muscles they were not normally conversant with and Yamba’s ferocious PT drilling found a lot more. Arkady was the only one who grumbled—as a pilot he felt all this wasn’t really his scene—but he got no sympathy from Alex.

  ‘Look, we just don’t know what’s going to happen when we get out there. If we get shot down in the helicopter on the assault we are going to have to do some serious escape and evasion. It’ll be a hundred miles south to the Chinese border through an arctic wasteland with MVD troops in hot pursuit after us on Skidoos, so we’re going to need to be fit.’

  Arkady backed off after that and got on with his squat thrusts.

  The work on developing protection from the ground blizzard made progress. Magnus took a spare tent, cut rectangular sections of the white Gortex and stitched them on the inside with space blankets to create a wind—and cold-proof material. Each of these had four elastic straps, taken off rucksacks, sown into their corners, so that they could be slipped over someone’s hands and feet. The person was then fully covered so that when they crawled through the ground blizzard, over the open two hundred metres to the outer perimeter fence, they were well insulated from the killing frostbite risk.

  The preparations enabled Alex not to think about Lara. He was careful to avoid seeing her alone again and she too kept herself apart from him and the guys. Both had been unnerved by their rather too candid conversation in the kitchen and realised that that sort of involvement was not going to help them get the job done.

  Eventually, everything was ready.

  Sergey’s Gulfstream G550 flew back in from Moscow to Wolverhampton Halfpenny Green airport, which lay half an hour’s flight by helicopter northeast from Akerly. It was an old Second World War RAF base that was now setting itself up as a West Midlands executive airport, and was perfect for a low-profile departure from the country.

  The irony of launching a coup in a faraway land from there was not lost on Alex, though. He joked with Colin: ‘Well, I don’t know if we’ll succeed but we’ll certainly be the most exciting thing ever to come out of Wolverhampton.’

  ‘Exactly. Better than their fookin’ football team, I tell yer.’

  Arkady’s weapons order was finalised and waiting for them, along with
details of the refuelling arrangements in Transdneister.

  Magnus was confident that, although they weren’t going to win any competitions, they could at least ski at a reasonable pace cross-country. He was looking forward to picking up a new sniper rifle from Arkady’s dealer.

  They were due to leave on Sunday, but then on Friday lunchtime Lara ran into the kitchen as the rest of them were eating. She looked deadly serious.

  ‘Sergey has just emailed me. They tried to kill Roman earlier this week. He got a message through from the contact in the camp. We don’t know when they will try again, but we have to move straight away. Can we leave tomorrow?’

  Alex put his fork down and stared at her for a moment.

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to, aren’t we?’

  He stood up, orders quickly coming to mind. ‘OK, training cancelled this afternoon. Start packing straight away! Col, sort it out! Arkady, get on the phone to your dealer and see if the order can be brought forward by twenty-four hours. I’ll talk to the airport and see if we can revise the flight plan.’

  The kitchen door burst open and they ran out: Pete to the barn to recover his FIBUA kit, Magnus to get their skis and arctic kit packed up, and Yamba to help Col.

  The training period had been good to get them used to working together and they responded well to the emergency and all plans were successfully brought forward by twenty-four hours.

  Chapter Twenty

  SATURDAY 13 DECEMBER.

  By eight o’clock on the following morning, they were all packed and loaded up into the helicopter. Lara was going to fly with them to Halfpenny Green and meet a pilot of Sergey’s there. He would then fly her back to London in the helicopter whilst the others flew straight on to Siberia in the jet. When they landed at Krasnokamensk a contact of Sergey’s was supposed to meet them at the airport. However, Alex still had no idea how reliable that person would be or what sort of reception would await them.

  He couldn’t help wondering if they would meet the same fate as the Equatorial Guinea coup attempt, when another former public school, British officer, Simon Mann, had been arrested at Harare airport on his way to war. A thirty-four-year sentence in an African hellhole prison had been his reward.

  Alex went back into the medieval hall to check that everything was packed and no incriminating evidence had been left behind; operational security was still very much on his mind.

  He stood at the far end of the huge stone-flagged room in his arctic warfare kit: white combat trousers and jacket, and white webbing, with his bayonet strapped to his shoulder harness.

  He took one last look around the room, glancing up at the portraits. The irony of another Devereux going off to war under the eyes of his ancestors did not escape him. He felt the pressure of them looking down on him.

  ‘Better do a good job, Devereux, or don’t bother coming back here.’

  ‘Death or glory, Devereux.’

  He nodded to them and bent down to haul his rucksack onto his back.

  ‘Sashenka.’

  He turned round. Lara stood at other end of the hall watching, and then walked towards him uncertainly through the streaks of December light coming down from the high windows.

  She came up close to him and paused for a moment, looking nervous. ‘Please be careful. I don’t want you to die. I embrace you.’

  She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her head into his shoulder so that her hair caressed his cheek; she exhaled slowly and he felt her breath on his neck.

  She stood back, looking pale and all the more beautiful for it, and holding his arm affectionately. ‘You are brave, going off there to fight: Sergey just talks about things but you are doing something. You are a soldier.’

  Alex blanched and stood stock-still with his rucksack balanced awkwardly on his shoulder. His head had been full of last-minute checks and plans, with thoughts of the operation, of doing his duty to his ancestors and his country, when she had caught him off guard. He was staggered by such a gorgeous woman being so Russian, so emotionally direct, with him.

  He was too flummoxed to think of anything to say so he just nodded gravely.

  Lara took his silence as stoic indifference to danger, which prompted her to feel she had to make some gesture to match his bravery. She looked down, trying to think of something to say or do. Faced with the finality of their departure, their last chance of being alone and the fact that Alex might die, she desperately wanted to give him something as a keepsake. She gritted her teeth in frustration, unable to think of anything to give him; she had no jewellery on, nothing. She looked up at him and saw the bayonet on his webbing shoulder strap.

  She pointed her finger at him and said sternly, ‘I’m going to give you something now and you’re going to bring it back to me.’

  She reached out and yanked the bayonet out of its scabbard.

  ‘Hey!’ Alex dropped his rucksack in alarm and grabbed her wrist to stop her.

  ‘No!’ Her eyes flared up at him.

  He looked at her and slowly released her hand.

  She flicked her hair round over her shoulder and leaned her head over to one side so that it hung down in a cascade like a sheet of white gold. She then stuck the knife into it at the nape of her neck, pinched a thin lock with the other hand and cut it off with a sharp movement of the blade.

  She held up the long strand of hair triumphantly; it shone in the winter sunshine. She stuck the bayonet back in his scabbard, then leaned towards him and twisted the hair onto a strap on his webbing over his heart.

  Alex could only watch her as she stood back looking at her handiwork with satisfaction and smoothed it flat with one hand.

  ‘There.’ She tried to regain her composure by adopting a brusque tone. ‘Now that is mine and I want it back.’

  She pointed a warning finger at him again and smiled her electric smile. Before he could respond she kissed him slowly on the lips, looked at him meaningfully and then turned and walked away down the long hall.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Alex sat in the front of the helicopter, as Arkady flew it, his head in a daze.

  He was aware that he should be fully switched on and anticipating any events that might occur when they arrived at the airport, but he couldn’t get his brain to work. It was like a screw not threaded properly; it just kept turning round and round aimlessly, so he just stared at the white fields and roads coursing past underneath them.

  Lara sat with the others in the back of the helicopter. They had both returned to quietly ignoring each other in front of the others.

  After half an hour they flew over Halfpenny Green airport: a flat field with the snow-shrouded outlines of a few Cessnas and helicopters parked along the edge of the single runway, a small control tower next to it. It was not a busy place at the best of times on a Saturday morning; with the state of the economy and the weather, it was utterly deserted.

  Once they landed, Alex came out of his dream; he had to start responding to events. Two large hangars had recently been built at the end of the runway and Arkady landed next to one. Sergey’s pilot stepped out of it and walked over to the helicopter. The team pulled their rucksacks, skis, tents and other gear out of the luggage compartment and then stood around as Lara said a muted goodbye.

  ‘See you in Moscow.’ She grinned at them all, uncertain if she would.

  ‘Oh, and, Alexander, one last instruction I remembered on the way here.’ She handed him a folded piece of notepaper that she had scribbled on during their flight. Alex nodded and her eyes met his for the briefest moment before she hurried away and got back into the helicopter. He stuffed the note into the top pocket of his snow smock and then turned to help the others lug the gear through the side door of the hangar.

  The gleaming white Gulfstream G550 was parked inside. It was the intercontinental version with twin Rolls-Royce engines mounted either side of the tail plane and a wider wingspan than normal, giving it a range of 7,800 miles. With a normal seating configuration it could tak
e up to nineteen passengers, but Sergey’s version had been modified to include a front kitchen and then a large six-seat cabin with a shower and bedroom in the tail.

  Once the gear was stowed onboard, Arkady spoke to the tower, the hangar door motors whirred and the doors rolled back. He powered up and they taxied forward along to the end of the runway. The rest of them settled back into the luxurious white leather chairs.

  ‘Bit plusher than what we usually go to war in, eh?’ commented Colin, looking round at the oak and gold-trimmed cabin. In Africa they usually travelled strapped into the draughty, noisy cargo bay of an old Antonov AN-12.

  Alex grinned and settled back for the flight. He pulled out a wallet full of the maps and plans of the attack that he wanted to look over and consider further. As he sorted through the papers, he surreptitiously pulled Lara’s note out of his top pocket and flicked it open as discreetly as he could.

  The Cyrillic handwriting was bold but flowing:

  Alexander, one more thing, as it says in Dr Zhivago I hope we can find peace in our lives through ‘human understanding rendered speechless by emotion.’

  He folded the note and slipped it back in his pocket.

  ‘Human understanding rendered speechless by emotion.’ What did she mean by that?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  SUNDAY 14 DECEMBER

  A thin dawn light shone over the deserted airfield at Krasnokamensk as the Gulfstream broke through the clouds and began its final approach.

  Arkady was tired from flying, haggling over weapons, loading them and then flying again for the last twenty-four hours.

  ‘Krasnokamensk Tower, this is Flight GX 3974, come in,’ he said wearily into his headset.

  Alex watched him anxiously from the co-pilot seat. He established contact and identified the purpose of the flight: ‘GeoScan geological research team inbound on orders of Governor Shaposhnikov.’