Archangel

by Robert Harris

  Kelso hoisted the two cases and O’Brian called out, ‘Watch yourself, Fluke.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Traps. Remember? He’s got this whole wood wired.’

  Kelso stood, looking at the ground, uncertain, remembering the spurt of snow, the snap of the metal jaws. But it was hopeless to worry about that, he thought, just as there was no way they could avoid passing directly by the door of the cabin. He waited for O’Brian to finish packing up the Inmarsat, and then they started walking together, treading warily. And Kelso could sense the Russian everywhere now: at the window of his squalid hut, in the crawlspace underneath it, behind the stack of cordwood piled against the back wall, in the dank and mossy water barrel and in the darkness of the nearby trees. He could imagine the rifle trained on his back and he was acutely aware of the softness of his own skin, of its babyish vulnerability.

  They reached the edge of the clearing and followed the perimeter of the forest. Dense undergrowth. Fallen, rotted logs. Strange white fungoid growths like melted faces. And occasionally, in the distance, crashes, as the wind shifted and brought down falls of frozen snow. It was impossible to see much further than a hand’s reach. They couldn’t find a path. There was nothing to do but plunge between the trees.

  O’Brian went first and had the worst of it, lugging the two heavy cases and the big battery, having to twist his bulky body sideways to edge through the narrow gaps, sometimes left, sometimes right, ducking abruptly, no free hand to protect his face from the low branches. Kelso tried to follow in his footsteps and after half a dozen paces he was conscious of the forest swinging shut behind them like a solid door.

  They stumbled on for a few minutes in the semi-darkness. Kelso wanted to stop and transfer the edit machine to his other hand but he didn’t dare lose sight of O’Brian’s back and soon he had forgotten about everything except the pain in his right shoulder and the acid in his lungs. Trickles of sweat and melted snow were running into his eyes, blurring his vision, and he was trying to bring his arm up to wipe his forehead on his wet sleeve when O’Brian gave a shout and lurched forwards, and suddenly – it was like passing through a wall – the trees parted and they were in the light again, standing on the ridge of a steep bank that fell away at their feet to a tumbling plain of yellowish-grey water a clear quarter-mile across.

  IT was an awesome sight – God’s work, truly – like finding a cathedral in the middle of a jungle – and for a while neither man spoke. Then O’Brian set down his cases and the battery and took out his compass. He showed it to Kelso. They were on the northern bank of the Dvina facing almost exactly due south.

  Ten yards below them, and a hundred yards to their left, dragged clear of the water and covered in a dark green tarpaulin, was a small boat. It looked as though it had been taken out for the winter, and that would make sense, thought Kelso, because already ice was beginning to extend out into the river – a shelf maybe ten or fifteen yards across that seemed to be widening even as he watched.

  On the opposite bank there was a similar strip of whiteness, and then the dark line of the trees began again. Kelso raised his binoculars and inspected the far shore for signs of habitation but there was none. It looked utterly forbidding and gloomy. A wilderness.

  He lowered the binoculars. ‘Who’re you going to call?’

  ‘America. Get them to call the bureau in Moscow.’ O’Brian already had the case of the Inmarsat open and was slotting together the plastic dish. He had taken off his gloves. In the extreme cold his hands looked raw. ‘When’s it gonna be dark?’

  Kelso looked at his watch. ‘It’s nearly five now,’ he said. ‘An hour perhaps.’

  ‘Okay, let’s face it, even if the battery holds on this thing and I get through to the States and they fix us a rescue party – we’re stuck here for the night. Unless we take some pretty dramatic action.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We take his boat.’

  ‘You’d steal his boat?’

  ‘I’d borrow it, sure.’ He sat on his haunches, unwrapping the battery, refusing to meet Kelso’s eyes. ‘Oh, come on, man, don’t look at me like that. Where’s the harm? He’s not going to need it till the spring anyhow – not if the temperature keeps on dropping like this – that river’ll be iced over in a day or two. Besides, he shot up our car, didn’t he? We’ll use his boat – that’s fair.’

  ‘And you can work a boat, can you?’

  ‘I can work a boat, I can work a camera, I can make pictures fly through the air – I’m fucking superman. Yeah, I can sail. Let’s do it.’

  ‘And what about him? He’ll just stand there, will he, while we do it? He’ll wave us off?’ Kelso glanced back the way they had come. ‘You realise he’s probably watching us right now?’

  ‘Okay. So you go keep him talking while I get everything ready.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Kelso. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’

  ‘Well, at least I’ve had a fucking idea. What’s yours?’

  A fair point, Kelso had to concede.

  He hesitated, then focused his binoculars on the boat.

  So this was how the Russian survived – how he made his occasional forays into the outside world. This was how he acquired the fuel for his lamp, the tobacco for his pipe, the ammunition for his guns, the battery for his transistor radio. What did he use for money? Did he barter what he caught or trapped. Or had the encampment been set up in the 1950s with a treasury of some sort – NKVD gold – which they had been eking out ever since?

  The boat was concealed in a small depression, protected from the river by a low screen of trees: to anyone drifting by, she would be invisible. She was resting on her keel, propped up to port and starboard by logs – a sturdy-looking vessel, not big, room for four people, at a pinch. A bulge at her stern suggested an outboard motor, and if that was the case, and if O’Brian could make it work, they might reach Archangel in a couple of hours – less, probably, with the current flowing so fast through its narrowing channel.

  He thought of the crosses in the cemetery, the dates, the obliterated faces.

  It did not look as though many people had ever left this place.

  It was worth a try.

  ‘All right,’ he said, reluctantly, ‘let’s do it.’

  ‘That’s my boy.’

  When he stepped back into the trees, he left O’Brian aiming the antenna across the river, and he had not gone far when he heard behind him the blissful, rising note of the Inmarsat locking on to the satellite.

  THE snow plough was coming on fast now, thirty, forty miles an hour, rushing down the track, throwing up a great white bow wave of freezing surf that went smashing into the trees on either side. Kretov was driving. His men were jammed together next to him, nursing their guns. Suvorin was hanging on to the metal moorings of the jump seat at the back of the cab, the barrel of the RP46 poking into his thigh, feeling sick from the vibration and the diesel fumes. He marvelled at the complexities that had overwhelmed his life in so short a time, and pondered nervously the wisdom of the old Russian proverb: ‘We are born in a clear field and die in a dark forest.’

  He had plenty of time for his thoughts because none of the other three had addressed a word to him since they left the airfield. They passed chewing gum to one another and TU-144 cigarettes and talked quietly so he couldn’t hear what they were saying above the racket of the engine. An intimate trio, he thought: clearly a partnership with some history. Where had they been last? Grozny, maybe, taking Moscow’s peace to the Chechen rebels? (‘The terrorist gunmen all died at the scene …’) In which case this would be a holiday for them. A picnic in the woods. And who was giving them their orders? Guess …

  Arsenyev’s joke.

  It was hot in the cab. The single windscreen wiper batted away the pawprints of snow with a soporific beat.

  He tried to shift his leg away from the machine gun.

  Serafima had been on at him for months to get out of the service and make some money – her father
knew a man on the board of a big privatised energy consortium and, well, let’s just say, my dear Feliks, that – how should we put this? – a number of favours are owed. So what would that be worth, papa, exactly? Ten times his official salary and a tenth of the work? To hell with Yasenevo. Perhaps it was time.

  A heavy male voice started grunting from the radio. Suvorin leaned forwards. He couldn’t make out exactly what was being said. It sounded like co-ordinates. Kretov was holding the microphone in one hand, steering with the other, craning his neck to study the map on the knee of the man sitting next to him, watching the road. ‘Sure, sure. No problem.’ He hung up.

  Suvorin said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Kretov, in mock-surprise, ‘you’re still here? You got it, Aleksey?’ This was to the man with the map, and then, to Suvorin, ‘That was the listening post at Onega. They just intercepted a satellite transmission.’

  ‘Fifteen miles, major. It’s right on the river.’

  ‘You see?’ said Kretov, grinning at Suvorin in the mirror. ‘What did I tell you? Home by nightfall.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  KELSO CAME OUT of the trees and walked towards the wooden cabin. The surface of the snow had frozen to a thin crust and the wind had picked up slightly, sending little twisters of powder dancing across the clearing. Rising from the iron chimney the thin brown coil of smoke jerked and snagged in the breeze.

  ‘When one approaches Him, do so openly.’ That was the advice of the maidservant, Valechka. ‘He hates it when people creep up on Him. If a door has to be knocked upon, knock upon it loudly …’

  Kelso tried his best to make his rubber boots thump on the wooden steps, and he hammered on the door with his gloved fist. There was no reply.

  Now what?

  He knocked again, waited, then raised the latch and pushed open the door, and immediately, the now-familiar smell – cold, close, animal, with an underlay of stale pipe tobacco – rose to overwhelm him.

  The cabin was empty. The rifle was gone. It looked as though the Russian had been working at his table: papers were laid out, and a couple of stubby pencils.

  Kelso stood just inside the doorway, eyeing the papers, trying to decide what to do. He checked over his shoulder. There was no sign of movement in the clearing. The Russian was probably down at the river’s edge, spying on O’Brian. This was their only tactical advantage, he thought: the fact that there were two of them and only one of him and he couldn’t watch them both at once. Hesitantly, he stepped over to the table.

  He only meant to look for a minute, and probably that was all he did – just long enough to run his fingers through it all:

  A pair of passports – red, stiff-backed, six inches by four, lion-crested, marked ‘PASS’ and ‘NORGE’, issued in Bergen, 1968 – a young couple, identical-looking: long hair, blond, hippyish, the girl quite pretty in a washed-out kind of way; he didn’t register their names; entered the USSR via Leningrad, June 1969 –

  Identity papers – old-style, Soviet Union, three different men: the first, a youngish, jug-eared fellow in spectacles, a student by the look of him; the second, old, in his sixties, weathered, self-reliant, a sailor perhaps; the third, bug-eyed, unkempt, a gypsy or a drifter; the names a blur –

  And, finally, a stack of sheets, which, as he fanned them out, he saw were six sets of documents, of five or six pages each, pinned together and written in pencil or ink, in various hands – this one neat, that one hesitant, another a wild and desperate scrawl – but always, at the top of the first sheet, in neat Cyrillic capitals, the same word: ‘Confession’.

  Kelso could feel the freezing draught from the open door shifting the hairs on the back of his scalp.

  He replaced the pages carefully and backed away from them, his hands raised slightly as if to ward them off, and at the doorway he turned and stumbled out on to the steps. He sat down on the weathered planking and when he raised the binoculars and scanned the rim of the clearing he found that he was shaking.

  He stayed there for a couple of minutes, recovering his nerve. It occurred to him that what he ought to do – the calm, rational, sensible thing: the not-leaping-to-any-hysterical-conclusions kind of thing, that a serious scholar would do – was to return and briefly make a note of the names for checking later.

  So when he had satisfied himself for the twentieth time that not a soul was moving in the trees, he stood and ducked back through the low door, and the first thing he saw on re-entry was the rifle propped against the wall, and the second was the Russian, sitting at the table, perfectly still, watching him.

  ‘He possessed in a high degree the gift for silence,’ according to his secretary, ‘and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much …’

  He was still in full uniform, still in his greatcoat and cap. The gold star of the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union was pinned to his lapel and shone in the dull light of the kerosene lamp.

  How had he done that?

  Kelso started gabbling into the silence. ‘Comrade – you – I’m startled – I – came to find you – I wanted –’ He fumbled with the zipper on the front of his jacket and held out the satchel. ‘I wanted to return to you the papers of your mother, Anna Mikhailovna Safanova –’

  Time stretched. Half a minute passed, a minute, and then the Russian said, softly, ‘Good, comrade,’ and made a note on the sheet of paper beside him. He indicated the table and Kelso took a pace towards it and laid the satchel down, like an offering placed to appease some unreliable and vengeful god.

  Another endless silence followed.

  ‘Capitalism,’ said the Russian eventually, putting down his stub of pencil and reaching for his pipe, ‘is thievery. And imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Thus it follows that the imperialist is the greatest thief of all mankind. Steal a man’s papers, he will. Oh, easily! Pick the last kopek from yer pocket! Or steal a man’s boat, eh, comrade?’

  He winked at Kelso and continued staring at him as he struck a match, sucking the fire into the bowl of his pipe, producing great spurts of smoke and flame.

  ‘Close the door would you, comrade?’

  It was beginning to get dark.

  If we have to stay here the night, thought Kelso, we shall never leave.

  Where the hell was O’Brian?

  ‘Now,’ the Russian continued, ‘and this is the decisive question, comrade: how do we protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, these thieves? And we say the answer to this decisive question must be equally decisive.’ He extinguished the match with one shake and leaned forwards. ‘We protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, and these stinking, crawling thieves of all mankind only by the most ferocious vigilance. Take, for example, the Norway couple, with their serpenty smiles – crawling on their maggoty bellies through the undergrowth to ask for “directions, comrade,” if you please! On a “walking holiday” if you please!’

  He waved their open passports in Kelso’s face and Kelso had a second glimpse of the two young people, the man in a psychedelic headband –

  ‘Are we such fools,’ he demanded, ‘such backward primitives, not to recognise the capitalist–imperialist thief–spy when it worms its way among us? No, comrade, we are not such backward primitives! To such people we administer a hard lesson in socialist realities – I have their confessions here before me, they denied it at first but they admitted it all in the end – and we need say no more of them. They are as Lenin predicted they would be: dust on the dunghill of history. Nor need we say anything of him!’ He waved a set of identity papers – the older man. ‘And nor of him! Nor him!’ The faces of the victims flashed briefly. ‘That,’ said the Russian, ‘is our decisive answer to the decisive question posed by all capitalists, imperialists and stinking thieves!’

  He sat back with his arms folded, smiling grimly.

  The rifle was almost within Kelso’s reach but he didn’t move. It might not be loaded. And even if it was l
oaded he wouldn’t know how to fire it. And even if he fired it he knew he could never injure the Russian: he was a supernatural force. One minute he was ahead of you, one minute behind; now he was in the trees and now he was here, sitting at his table, poring over his collection of confessions, making the occasional note.

  ‘Worse by far however,’ said the Russian after a while, ‘is the canker of the right-deviationism.’ He relit his pipe, sucking noisily on the stem. ‘And here Golub was the first.’

  ‘Golub was the first,’ repeated Kelso, numbly.

  He was remembering the row of crosses: T. Y. Golub, his face blacked out, died November-the-something, 1961.

  The essence of Stalin’s success was really very simple, he thought, built around an insight that could be reduced to a mere three words: people fear death.

  ‘Golub was the first to succumb to the classic conciliationist tendencies of the right-deviationism. Of course, I was merely a child at the time, but his whining still clamours in my ears: “Oh, comrades, they are saying in the villages that Comrade Stalin’s body has been removed from his rightful place next to Lenin! Oh, comrades, what are we going to do? It is hopeless, comrades! They will come and they will kill us all! It’s time for us to give up!”

  ‘Have you ever seen fishermen when a storm is brewing on a great river? I have seen them many a time. In the face of a storm one group of fishermen will muster all their forces, encourage their fellows and boldly put out to meet the storm: “Cheer up, lads, hold tight to the tiller, cut the waves, we’ll pull her through!” But there is another type of fishermen – those who, on sensing a storm, lose heart, begin to snivel and demoralise their own ranks: “What a misfortune, a storm is brewing; lie down, boys, in the bottom of the boat, shut your eyes; let’s hope she’ll make the shore somehow.”’

  The Russian spat on the floor.

  ‘Chizhikov took him out into the dark part of the forest that very night and in the morning there was a cross and that was the end of Golub and that put an end to the bleatings of the right-deviationists – even that old hag his widow put a sock in her mouth after that. And for a few years more, the steady work went on, under our four-fold slogans: the slogan of the fight against defeatism and complacency, the slogan of the struggle for self-sufficiency, the slogan of constructive self-criticism is the foundation of our Party, and the slogan of out of the fire comes steel. And then the sabotage began.’