Archangel (40 page)

The tank went to war ingloriously with a militia car in front, blue roof-light rotating, to clear the traffic from its path.

Old the tank might be, but not obsolete, not for putting down an insurrection. Six shells for the main armament had been scrounged from the arsenal. A machine-gun of 50mm calibre was mounted on the turret. If anything was wrong with the old monster, the driver thought, then it was the fitting of the turret hatch. The rubber sealing of the hatch had long ago rotted, it leaked and he sat in a pool of water.

But it was only nine kilometres to Barashevo, and the pack snow on the road was good for the tracks.

When they passed the station at Lesozavad, a small crowd of villagers waved to the observer in the turret and cheered the tank on its way.

" You have not behaved to us as we would have expected.'

The Colonel General moved along a line of prisoners and offered his hand as if he were a departing guest. Manicured fingers met those that were bone-thin and filthy with factory oil.

The gates opened, a gun-barrel peeped first, then a helmeted head. The gates were wide enough apart for a single man to squeeze through. The crew didn't wait, they were gone. The Colonel General was slower, as though he sought an answer that as yet eluded him. He paused in front of Holly.

if you ended it now, after what you have done for me, there would be leniency.'

'You are not going through the gate because we hope for leniency.'

'I think I knew that. I will not forget you.'

'Goodbye.'

The Colonel General swung on his heel. The gates creaked as they were pushed shut. There was an emptiness now, a moment of confusion, and Holly shook himself, tried to shrug away the mood.

it was the right thing. We fight them clean . . . '

The driver swore at the sluggish sticks as he brought the tank to a halt in front of the Major.

The Major skinned up over the track skirting and the paint-chipped armour-plate of the turret. He carried the plan of the camp in his hand.

'We have a few minutes yet before you go,' he called into the hatch. 'I want the main armament readied, one in the breech. They'll use the machine-guns against you, and you are authorized to use shell-fire against them. You'll be hatch-down, but we'll be with you on the radio. I don't want any pissing about with those machine-guns, if necessary ride right over them. As soon as they're out, the infantry goes in.

Keep on the move inside.'

'We heard they'd got a Colonel General as prisoner,' said the observer.

'They let him go.'

Astonishment from the gunner.

'Other than the machine-guns do they have any firing weapons?' the gunner.

'Two machine-guns, that's their lot.'

'Poor bastards . . .' The driver spoke to himself from the bowels of the tank.

'There's a queue in Hut 5,' Poshekhonov said. He laughed because Holly did not understand him. 'Hut 5 is a brothel now. That's the extent of our liberation, Holly. Home comforts for the storm troops. There's a queue half way down the hut. She wasn't the only one through the fence, you know, the little one who came to see you.'

'What have we begun?' Holly seemed to lean against Poshekhonov's shoulder.

'You should know that, Holly. Of all of us, you should know what we have begun.'

Holly's face was close to Poshekhonov's. 'Promise me something, friend.'

it is not an easy time to make promises that can be honoured.'

'Promise me you will take care of the girl.'

'When?'

'When they attack.'

'Our iron man, our leader of more than seven hundred zeks, and he asks for the safety of a girl who need not have come?'

'Promise me.'

Poshekhonov tried to laugh again, but when he looked hard into Holly's face he met only the steel gaze.

'I think you care for all of us, Holly.'

'I care for all of you.'

'I promise, Holly. I will care for the girl when they attack.'

Holly punched Poshekhonov playfully on the arm and walked away.

Rudakov ushered Adimov out of his office.

Down the corridor the door to Kypov's room swung open. Rudakov saw the Colonel General follow the Commandant into the passageway. Ten minutes before, the Colonel General had been held in the camp Kitchen . ..

What was happening? He forgot Adimov. He hurried down the corridor after the two men.

Kypov turned.

Rudakov looked at the Colonel General in bewilderment.

'How did it happen?'

'They let me out, myself and the flying crew.'

'Why?'

'Their leader said that if they kept us and tried to use us as a shield they would be animals. He said animals would be forgotten. He said that if they freed us they would never be forgotten, never as long as the camps exist.'

'What bloody use is it to them whether they're forgotten or not, when they're about to be mangled?'

'I don't know,' said the Colonel General drily. 'I've never led a mutiny.'

'Who is the leader?'

'They've all taken the name strips off their tunics. There is one who can be identified. Tall, darkish, speaks fluent Russian but with something of an accent.'

'Michael Holly . . . '

'Once the attack goes in, he's to be shot on sight,' Kypov spoke with determination, a man who had at last retrieved his respect in the anticipation of combat.

'What did you think of this Michael Holly?' A hoarseness in Rudakov's voice.

'I thought rather well of him,' the Colonel General replied. There was a light smile at his face, as if he were not prepared to share his emotions with strangers. 'They have a Central Committee, and every man on the Committee wanted either to use us as sandbags or to hang us. Of course I think well of him. He is not a man to be underestimated.'

'Get that scum of yours on the microphone,' Kypov ordered.

Inside the Guard House they found a chair for Adimov. He was sat down in front of a table, and Rudakov lifted down the microphone from the wall bracket. Adimov gripped the microphone with white knuckles. He looked round at the walls that were covered with lists and typed guard rosters and duty orders and photographs from the files of selected prisoners.

He felt Rudakov's faint tap on his shoulder.

'This is Adimov, from Hut z. You will all recognize my voice. I want to tell you to surrender. You have been misled, you have been betrayed by your leaders. In a few minutes the gates of the camp will be opened, and those of my comrades who wish to leave the camp may do so, and they will not face penalties . . .' He had no script to read, he spoke as Rudakov had tutored him. 'I have been told by the Comrade Political Officer that only the leaders will be punished. This is your last opportunity, I urge you to come through the gates. My friends, all of our grievances will be most thoroughly investigated. Take this cbance, walk out of the compound . . . '

Adimov looked over his shoulder at Rudakov, saw the nod of satisfaction. His thumb slid purposefully along the stem of the microphone as if he raised the switch from 'On'

to 'Off'.

'Was that good, Captain Rudakov?'

'Excellent, Adimov.'

The voice was distorted over the loudspeakers in the Kitchen.

'And the tank attacks at four o'clock?'

'Not your concern.'

A desperate hush in the Kitchen, all eyes on the twin loudspeakers.

'And once the attack starts Holly is to be shot on sight?'

'What's it to you, Adimov?'

The words were ferried the width of the compound by the exterior loudspeakers.

Then a distant shout, harder to hear.

'The microphone's live . . . '

Rudakov was close to the microphone now, and screaming. There was the sound of struggling.

'Bastard, stupid shit.. . stupid bastard, Adimov.'

'I don't need your ticket, she's dead. The letter said she was dead. She was dead before I went o u t . . . '

The loudspeakers were severed. For a few seconds there was ice-cold soilness inside the compound, then the zeks were moving.

'I didn't know he had the guts,' Holly said. 'Can you deal with a tank?'

'I can deal with a tank,' Byrkin replied.

Chapter
23

The camp lay squat on the snow plains, an isolated place that seemed to fly the yellow pennant of contamination.

Outside, soldiers in pairs and threes had used their trench spades to make small holes in which they could cower down from the wind with their rifles, their machine-guns, their anti-tank rocket launchers. The dog-handlers were out with their animals and the skis. The Major had told his boys whose homes were two and half thousand kilometres from the
Dubrovlag
of the dangerous, seditious scum led by Western provocateurs, who had risen in rebellion behind the creosote-covered fence. The troops did not doubt the word of their Major. Let the Fascists break out, let the Traitors come through the fence . . . There were no birds in the winter trees, no song to impede the crackle of instructions over the portable radio sets. The camp was doomed.

The death of the camp would come before dusk, and dusk was hurrying across the flat snowscape of Mordovia, like a fog wall on a calm sea.

The marksmen watched the camp from their eyrie on the roof of the Administration building. There should have been despair among the
zeks.
The bastards knew that a tank was coming, they knew that an infantry force had gathered, they knew that their leader was a man marked in the gunsights for death.

A grey light was settling on the compound. Only the perimeter lights were lit. The huts were deep shadows. The Kitchen was blurring, fading, from the view of the marksmen. They followed with difficulty the movements of men running between the huts, between the Kitchen and the Bath house, between the Store and the Library.

The tank was late coming. They would not use the searchlight that had been brought to the roof of the Administration building until the tank arrived in the compound.

The Kitchen was built of brick and concrete, the most secure construction in the camp. All who would not fight the action were gathered there. The old, the useless, the sick. And the women made a lonely group as if the liaisons of Hut 5

counted now for nothing. There were no jokes in the Kitchen, but a desperate, close quiet, with each man listening for the low-slung conversations of the Committee who were grouped close to the doorway. Holly stared out towards the black spaces sandwiched between the compound snow and the outline of the huts. Waiting for Byrkin. Byrkin away on his rounds and sprinting from hut to hut, diving for the cover of the darkness underneath the stilted floors.

Chernayev was with Holly, and Feldstein. The girl was close to Holly, ignored and uncomplaining.

The loudspeakers barked at them from high on the walls.

' . . . The gates have been opened. You must go immediately to the gates. You have two minutes. There will be no further opportunity to leave the compound before the intervention of the military . . . '

Kypov with his parade-ground shout.

'. .. You have this last chance. Go immediately to the gates with your hands on your heads. You will not be harmed. You have two minutes.'

Holly looked around him, watching for the first man to rise. One man close to him with the cough of consumption, one with a crutch and an amputated right leg, one with the tremble of a disease that was incurable, one who could not see without grotesque owl spectacles.

Who would be the first, Holly?

Why don't the buggers move? They can't fight. They're helpless bloody food for the tank gun . .. why don't they go? Holly thought of a second hand ticking on a watch face, jerking through the movements of revolution. Two minutes only.

'You can go . . . Any of you who want to go. There is no shame in going. . .' Holly shouted.

They gazed back at him. Dumb cattle, quiet.

'Who are you to tell them that they can go?' Chernayev hissed. 'You think that you pull every string, Holly?'

Holly pitched himself forward towards the nearest part of the sitting mass. He dragged at the man with the consumptive cough, and the grip of his hands was flailed away. He pulled at the man with the amputated right leg and felt the crutch end spear into his stomach. He tugged at the man who could barely see and found only a weight that was dead to him. No man moved.

Holly caught at the tunic of the girl.

'You go, Morozova, you go.'

'No.' She looked up into his face, and there was a calmness and a sureness.

'Why . . . ?'

'You called through the wall of the cell, you called "Don't please them with your tears". To walk through the gate is to weep.'

Holly shook his head. 'Feldstein, you go, you are not a fighter.'

it is better to lie down in front of the tank than to walk out now.'

Holly leaned against the doorway, and covered his face.

No man should see him. God, how were they so brave? He had unleashed that bravery. Easy enough to burn the Commandant's hut, to poison the garrison's water, to cut through the two fences of barbed wire. Nothing when set against the courage of sitting cramped on the floor of the Kitchen when safety beckoned through the opened gate. He felt the girl against him. He felt her arm slide surely round his waist.

'There has to be a time when we go through the gate.'

She had a small, husky voice. 'Not when they tell us, when they bribe us. In our own time we go through.'

Clumsily Holly slipped his own arm around the girl.

Through her tunic his fingers found the hard rib bones, played on them, climbed them. 'Before you were here, before t h a t . . . what did you do?'

'I was a pianist.'

'When this camp no longer exists as a prison for a pianist, that is the time to go to the gates. When it is destroyed, when the camp is as if it had never been. When there is no place here for a pianist.'

His cheek rested on the top of her cap. He heard the struggling whine of an engine, the clanking of tracks biting on ice and tarmac. The coming of the tank. The roar spread through the compound, through the Kitchen, through Holly, through the girl who was against him.