Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

  ‘Dobriy vecher!’ he greeted me through the open window.

  I wished him a good evening, too, and looked at the logo on the arm of his blue overalls: DPS – Russian traffic police. Five-ten; hundred and forty pounds. Clean shaven. Nose like a hawk’s bill. A misdemeanour cop in a felony world.

  ‘You’re a long way from home,’ he said. ‘You must be lost.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Not at all. Thanks for asking, though. Hell of a night, isn’t it?’

  The headlights of the police vehicle opposite brightened to main beam, filling the junction with a powerful wash of white light. There were at least two of them, then.

  ‘Da,’ he said. ‘Takaya kholodina.’ Bloody cold. The cop peered into the Lada, checking out the empty passenger seats. ‘It’s just that I saw you take the turn to Molochkovo-Dubenets. And five minutes later, here you are again.’

  He laughed.

  I laughed.

  He must have clocked the Lada’s out-of-area number plates. If he was crooked, he’d try for a bribe before calling me in. If he wasn’t, and he had already asked for backup, he was playing it cool.

  ‘No,’ I said, raising my voice over the mounting hiss of the gale, ‘it’s just that the road to Pesok looks a bit sticky, that’s all.’ I jerked my head towards the lake. ‘I’m going to head up to Krupp and see if I can get round that way instead.’

  A gust of wind hit the side of the Lada, blowing snow into my face.

  ‘Pesok?’

  I nodded.

  ‘OK then. No problem.’ He stepped back and raised his voice. ‘I’ll just check your licence and insurance and you can be on your way,’ he continued. ‘Wouldn’t want you out-of-towners to think we didn’t do our job right, would we?’

  ‘Of course not, officer. It’s in my wallet.’ I looked at him, still smiling. ‘May I?’

  He nodded and I moved my right hand slowly behind me, putting my fingers into my jeans back pocket and producing a folded hundred-dollar bill. Benjamin Franklin had been getting me in and out of trouble for days now. He was worth a final shot, either way. I straightened the note and held it out, so the policeman could see how much I was offering.

  ‘Here you go.’

  He snatched the note immediately and folded it, palming it out of sight with a flick of the wrist so practised he could have performed on stage.

  ‘And your insurance, Mr …?’

  ‘Ivanovich,’ I replied. And then, producing another hundred-dollar bill: ‘My pleasure, officer.’

  The second bill followed the first into his top pocket.

  ‘It’s fortunate your paperwork was in order, Mr Ivanovich.’ He wrinkled his blade of a nose. ‘Have a good night.’

  He turned and walked back towards his vehicle, signalling to his partner through the windscreen with a flick of the baton to kill the flashing top lights. I put the Lada into gear. I could do it now and eliminate any uncertainty. But I didn’t want to kill Russian cops any more than I did Irish or French ones. Corrupt or not, they weren’t the enemy. And anyway, knocking a traffic patrol out could cause more problems than it might solve. As soon as they failed to respond to their HQ’s first radio call, someone somewhere would know something was up. Much better that everyone went home happy.

  The patrolman opened the passenger door of his DPS Niva. I let out the clutch. My tyres rolled forward, biting into the freshly fallen powder. But instead of climbing in, the cop hesitated for a moment, half covered by the open door, before turning around to face me. His right hand dropped to his side, degloved, struggling with the cover flap on his white leather holster.

  His partner must have run the stolen Lada’s plate.

  I floored the gas. The cop looked down at the holster trapping the pistol he couldn’t free, and then up again into my headlights. Mouth open, screaming, he put his left hand across his face, as if blocking out the glare would shield him from the impact.

  It didn’t.

  The Lada struck the passenger door dead centre – hard enough to pin him between my front bumper and his chassis, but not hard enough to fire the airbags. He coughed a spray of blood on to my windscreen. From deep in his throat came a dreadful shrieking, cutting through the howl of the wind and the throb of the engine.

  I opened my door and fell to the road, rolling clear on the frozen ground as the second cop stumbled out into the snow, little Makarov pistol in hand. He spun around and fired high, sending three shots whining well clear of my head.

  There were five metres between us. I found my feet and kept low, thrusting forward, hitting him in the guts with my shoulder. His boots slid from under him and he came down on his back, gun arm up, sending more shots into the sky above us. I rolled away and grabbed his right wrist with my left hand, twisting it backwards. Another shot rang out. The awful screaming from the police car stopped abruptly.

  I rotated his arm and chopped down with the inside of my right palm. His elbow snapped inward. The pistol fell into the snow, tethered to his belt by an expanding coil of white safety wire. I unclipped it from the butt of the semi-auto and stood up. The policeman was on his knees, left hand scrabbling at the road, right arm dragging limp behind him. He was half begging, half crying, pleading with me not to kill him. I let him go and went back to the patrol car. Through the shattered side window I could see the policeman I’d bribed hanging lifeless. The last stray shot had passed through the Niva’s door frame and hit him in the side of the head. The Makarov’s steel-core rounds punch way above their weight.

  I needed to move on, and fast.

  I leaned in and removed the keys from the ignition and threw them into the trees beside the junction. Then I fired a shot into the radio receiver. Lying in the passenger footwell was a metal flashlight. I reached in and took it, and then circled around to the nearside. Brain matter and blood clots patterned the snow-covered highway. Though my fingers were slowing with the cold, I did what the cop had failed to do and opened the flap of his holster. I extracted a fully loaded magazine and stuffed it into my pocket with the Makarov I’d already picked up.

  My Lada hadn’t been damaged beyond smashed sidelights. I got in and cranked the engine and reversed, sweeping the beams of the headlights across the surviving patrolman. He was sitting up now, staring at me, clutching his shattered arm. Tears sparkled on his cheeks, glistening in the halogen glare. He’d lit a fuse that threatened to blow up the border in my face. Russia’s western sector was one of the most highly militarized on earth. His radio call could pull the combined weight of two entire divisions down on me – five thousand troops or more of which were within rapid striking distance of that area alone. Even if the local commanders didn’t know who I was, all that would matter to them was that they were hunting a cop-killer.

  As I drove, I dropped the magazine out of the Makarov. Empty. But there was a round in the breech. I juggled the steering wheel and the pistol and put on the replacement clip. Nine bullets in total. Then I felt inside my jacket to make sure the Angel of Death hadn’t taken flight. It hadn’t. Talia’s cell phone and the photograph of Rachel’s calculations were secure, pressed tight to my chest next to the snapshot of my mother.

  I checked my watch. Twenty-one thirty. I had ninety minutes to get to the RV before the Russians likely sealed it off for good.

  35

  I drove north until I reached Krupp. There the road struck out west, through forest. Frozen birch trees inched past the window – silver statues glowing by the verges. Snowflakes the size of moths careered into the windscreen, as if pulled towards the car by the traction of the headlights. I checked the rear-view mirror obsessively, looking for any sign of unwelcome company – but there wasn’t another car on the road.

  I was losing time.

  I cursed the cops, the delays, the weather. Then I crossed what felt like a small stone bridge. I hit the brakes and slid to a halt and jumped out, running back to check. I shone the police flashlight at the side of the road. It was buried in snow, but I’d driven over the tin
y, frozen Piusa River. I got back in and turned left down the next farm track.

  I drove cautiously, but the way had been cleared. This was horse country. Most likely tractors were keeping the roads open for supplies to the farms and stables whose lights dotted the clearings between the trees. After a few hundred metres the lane looped back on itself. I crept forward in second gear, searching beyond the white veil clinging to the windscreen for the switchback on to the forest path I hoped would take me to the border. Ten metres, twenty, thirty … I stopped.

  Nothing.

  I closed my eyes again, willing the image of the old satellite maps I’d spent so many hours poring over to reassemble in my mind. But all I could see were Rachel’s eyes staring back at me through the inferno in Arkhangel. I blinked. And there in the rear-view mirror, illuminated in the red glow of my tail lights, was the snow-fouled opening of the shortcut through the trees. The entrance to the track was hidden at ground level by a bank of frozen snow, piled up in the wake of a plough. I shoved the gearstick into reverse and rolled backwards, taking the car off the road.

  I switched off the engine and looked at my watch again.

  Twenty-two thirty.

  It had taken an hour to drive eighteen klicks, and the thought of the upcoming trek across country filled me with foreboding. My legs cramped, my shoulder burned, every time I flexed my hands the cuts at the base of my fingers opened and stung. But then, just as I killed the headlights, the outline of what looked like a man flitted across the road in front of me, heading away from the track. I squinted into the snow-swirls and scoured the darkness for any sign of him.

  Nothing.

  To my right, through the trees, what might have been the porch light of a farmhouse flickered weakly through the snow. Whoever it was must have been heading home. If I’d really seen anyone at all. I was almost hallucinating from tiredness, and I knew it. There was no time – and no point – in chasing ghosts now. Perhaps there never had been.

  Come on, Max, keep it together.

  I stepped out into the blizzard and stuck the torch into my belt.

  The base temperature had risen a few degrees, but the wind chill made it feel like minus twenty. I pulled Aleksandr Denisovich’s cap down and blinked into the white storm swirling unseen in the blackness between the trees. But as much as the weather blinded me, it also blinded anyone trying to follow me. It would be impossible to get a drone or chopper up, and a satellite would be useless. And although a thermal imaging scope would pick me up as easily here as it would have done in Arkhangel, they’d need to get close enough to identify me, not just detect me. At six hundred metres the glow given off by one man looks the same as any other. I hoped not even Russian officers would want to start shooting up their own troops.

  Their night vision kit was going to be of limited use, too. It was so dark there was almost no image to intensify, and I was crowded by trees. I’d taken the torch for signalling, not navigation. Switch it on, though, and even in those conditions I’d be painting myself a bright green target.

  There was no hiding the car. But snow was falling thick and fast enough that my footprints disappeared almost immediately – not, at this point, that there would any longer be much doubt where I was going. I looked up. For the first time in hours a smudge of light in the sky silhouetted the tops of the trees. I stepped forward and counted twenty paces – pistol at the ready – running my hand along the ice bank for balance until I found the break in the branches that marked the opening to the track.

  Thirty minutes to RV.

  I stopped, momentarily overwhelmed by the cold and the darkness. And then I heard my mother’s voice, clear against the white-whistle of the storm-song, whispering ‘Bayu Bayushki Bayu’, warning me to be careful lest the grey wolf snatch me away into the woods.

  The wind dropped a little. I mouthed a pointless thank you and sniffed the air. The intensity of the snowfall softened. High above, the blanket of cloud was beginning to fray. Here and there moonlight bled through the rents in fleeting flashes of silver, pooling for a second or two on the forest floor.

  It was a straight shot for another kilometre until I hit Highway 178. It was doable. I could do it.

  Just walk, Max.

  I stumbled immediately, falling as my boot found a rabbit hole. I cursed as my already bruised ribs crunched on the ground. I picked myself up and listened. But I could hear nothing except the wind ebbing and flowing and my mother’s voice, steel-sharp in my brain, singing lullabies to her wicked son. I willed myself westwards. My hands, cheeks began to sting. Frozen beads of ice clogged my eyes. I took another step. And another. My legs moved like lumps, weaving me in an uncertain path between the birches. After what felt like a few minutes, I checked the time again. I’d been out of the car for quarter of an hour.

  Fuck.

  I pressed on. And then the path stopped abruptly. Trees on three sides. The scattered moonlight that had got me this far was swallowed by the forest. I groped in the dark, squinting obliquely along what I thought was the trail, using any faint scrap of light to see the way. I cracked my shin on frozen deadfall. In my mind’s eye I saw the satellite map I’d memorized in Poland – lush green in the spring photographs, almost useless in the winter darkness. The track should have veered sharp right, but now I was trapped. I must have disorientated myself when I fell. I turned a silent circle. And then another, spinning myself inside the vortex of the dying storm.

  And then I stopped still, and breathed out, and accepted the deeply inconvenient truth that I was profoundly lost. I listened intently for my mother’s voice, racked my brain for any solution that did not involve retracing my steps. But I was blind and deaf and out of options.

  I was almost out of time, too.

  If Jack Nazzar had assembled a team on the border he wouldn’t, couldn’t, keep them there indefinitely, however much he might want to. And whatever it turned out that Frank really wanted, I could guarantee it wasn’t a land war on NATO’s eastern border. The wind dropped to a standstill. I bowed my head and listened again.

  Above the gentle whisper of snow falling on snow, I heard the unmistakable sound of a man cough. I held my breath. Ten seconds. Twenty. And then again, muffled this time, as if the mouth had been smothered by a hand. Six to eight feet away. Low down. Directly in front. Unmistakable. A man for sure. I extended my right arm, aiming the Makarov down into the darkness.

  The wind picked up again. Clouds scudded overhead. Moonlight flitted across the clearing. It took a heartbeat for the landscape to take form. When it did, the ground in front of my feet seemed to turn in on itself, churning shadows into the snow, whipping a branch towards me. But it wasn’t a branch. It was the barrel of a rifle. No one was trying to follow me. They were already here. A soldier in winter camouflage, lying prone on the forest floor, was turning to engage his target: me.

  I fired first.

  Two shots centre mass. The sniper’s white ghillie snowsuit turned him into an amorphous, abominable snowman. He fell back but not down. The muzzle of his rifle dipped. I couldn’t see my sights, but at that distance I didn’t need to. I fired again into his white balaclava as the moon hid itself again. He disappeared into the shadows. I was on him in an instant, firing another shot into his torso at point blank. But he was already dead.

  The round from the Makarov had obliterated the mouthpiece of his comms set. I pocketed the pistol and pulled the headset free, holding it to my ear. An operator was asking him in Russian to confirm his position, confirm contact. I dropped the radio and picked up his weapon: an SV-98 – a standard-issue Russian sniper rifle fitted with a tactical suppressor, and a thermal scope mounted in-line with the optics. Good enough.

  I brought the scope to my eye and scanned the treeline. The silver-dark of the birch forest morphed into a black and white thermogram. It was like looking at a video shot in photographic negative. Heat gave off a bright, white signature; cold showed up as inky-black. As I swept the optics across the black snow around me, white outli
nes darted between the trees at two and three hundred metres on either side of my position. And if I could see their heat trace, they could see mine.

  But unlike them, I could positively identify my enemy.

  Either they’d been waiting for me, or I’d stumbled into a border exercise. I wasn’t planning on asking them which. The man I’d just killed had been lying down, facing away from me. No sniper would do that in those conditions unless he was covering a choke point and expecting his target – imminently. It was a sure bet that the path I’d been looking for unwound in front of him. Getting lost had almost certainly saved my life.

  If I ran now, they’d know to shoot me. If I stayed put, I risked not being able to outpace them when they caught up with me. The safety on the rifle was off. I eased the bolt back and checked the breech. Bullet brass glinted in the moonlight. I set the scope magnification to times six and dialled in one hundred metres. Weapons free.

  I stood up.

  Deep breath. Long exhale. Stop. Settle. Squeeze.

  The first outline dropped into the black snow-sea at his feet. I pivoted. Cheek on the stock. Eye to the scope. Right hand working the bolt.

  Acquire.

  Fire.

  Two more dead men in the snow – and more soldiers to come than I had shots left in the rifle’s magazine. I racked the bolt and checked the trees again. On either side and forward of my position men were scuttling through the undergrowth. From the way they were spread out, it looked as if I’d walked into the back of a cordon stretching north and south along the road. Whomever they’d been expecting, they’d assumed their target would come up Highway 178 itself – which was less than two hundred metres distant through the trees as the crow flies. It looked like they’d fanned out along it.

  I squirmed down next to the rapidly cooling corpse of the sniper I’d shot in the face and considered my options. It was a further six hundred metres along forest track to where it joined the highway. From there it was another seven hundred metres along the road to the north-western Estonian border post. I couldn’t risk cutting back the three hundred metres to the southerly crossing: there was even less of a guarantee that Jack would have his men in place there – and if they weren’t, the odds were that the Russians would take a gamble and keep up their pursuit. The corner of Estonia that lay to the south-east was effectively cut off, and my chances of getting more than a gunshot ahead of the enemy were bleak.