December (13 page)

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!’

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, savouring 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.

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.

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.

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.