The traffic from the roadblock began to thin out, and once I’d passed the fork for Kiev and was sure nobody was on my tail, I took some gravel lanes through a thicket of woods, then pulled over and helped Sarah climb out of the boot.
‘How are you?’ I said.
She grimaced, stretching her arms and legs. ‘I’ve been better. I take it we’re through, then?’
‘For the time being.’ She climbed into the passenger seat and I told her what had happened at the roadblock.
‘So they got some sort of a message?’ she said. ‘I wonder what it was.’
‘Good point.’ I put the militsiya channel back on. There was some beeping and static, but then a message came on, which appeared to be on a loop. We listened to it in silence as I steered us back onto the motorway and headed towards Leningrad.
‘Comrades, this is Colonel-General Shchelokov, and I have been asked by our General-Secretary, as Minister of Internal Affairs, to relay the following information to you on behalf of the Supreme Soviet. You were alerted earlier today that enemies of the state, two English spies, had escaped from our custody in Moscow, and were at large. They are, I regret to say, still at large, and must be apprehended at all costs. They are a menace to our society, and intend to cause the Soviet Union great harm. Be warned that they are also highly trained special forces operatives, and will stop at nothing, including murder.
‘Within the last few minutes, men within the Moscow militsiya discovered the body of one of their colleagues, Sergeant Grigor Ivanovich Bessmertny, who was left to die by these fugitives while on the run. His family has been informed, and a funeral is being arranged. It is now, I think, incumbent on all of us to honour the memory of Grigor Ivanovich Bessmertny, and bring his murderers to justice. After this message will follow a description of the fugitives, and other information that I hope will lead to their swift arrest, detention and trial. I offer my sincerest condolences to the family of Sergeant Bessmertny, and pay tribute to his gallantry and service. I call on you all, as my men and as his comrade, to hunt down his killers immediately.’
‘Christ,’ said Sarah softly. I sensed there was also reproach in her voice, but I didn’t regret what I’d done, even if it were true that he had died. He would have done the same – or shot me – had the situations been reversed.
‘Listen,’ I said, as the descriptions came on. They were mostly accurate, if perhaps a little unfair, except for one detail. ‘Did you hear that? They think I’m wearing Bessmertny’s uniform.’
‘So? That’s hardly going to bother them if they find us, is it? Your disguise isn’t exactly foolproof.’
‘That’s not my point. Their wheels aren’t turning fast enough. They’ve brought out a big gun, Shchelokov, to rile up the blood of the hounds. But that recording has to be at least an hour old. There was no mention of this car, or Anton, or what we’re wearing now. That’s why we made it through the roadblock. No doubt they’ll record another message soon enough, but they’re behind us for the time being. I don’t think they know where we’re headed yet.’
I turned to face her, and noticed that her smile was painted on.
‘You need to get some sleep,’ I said.
‘I’d love to,’ she smiled, ‘but you keep talking.’
I shook off my jacket and handed it to her, and she tucked it under her chin and leaned against the window as I drove. When I looked over again a few minutes later, she was sleeping.
The traffic became sparser still, and I drove as hard as I could towards the border, my hands gripping the wheel until they turned numb. We passed cranes and television towers, restaurants and factories – the great dreary expanse of the Soviet Union. The road became rougher, and despite the low cloud cover, the temperature had dropped.
I started thinking about my life up to this point: what I had done, and what had brought me here. Or rather who, because it was mainly Anna who had brought me here: there was a straight line between our conversations in that Red Cross clinic in Germany in 1945 and this car in 1969. She hadn’t dragged me here, though; I’d come along willingly. I had always chided her for being an idealist – but she had always known that I was one, too.
‘You like to discuss specific events, Paul, but you avoid any discussion of principles. Don’t you feel that society would be better if we were all equal – no more rich and poor?’
‘And milk and honey flowing throughout the land? Of course. But it’s a dream.’
‘Everything is a dream if you do nothing about it. What have you been fighting for these last years? Wasn’t it for a better world?’
‘A world free of Nazism, yes.’
‘Is that all you have learned? So now we simply return to what was before – the same old ways, the same old systems?’
‘Yes. There was nothing wrong with them.’
‘I don’t think many people would agree with you, Paul. I think the last five years have brought everything into focus. Yes, Nazism was a great evil, and conveniently enough for your country many millions of my countrymen have died extinguishing it. But we cannot now be satisfied with simply living in a world that is not evil. Many of us want to live in a world that is fair, a world that has a chance of keeping peace between all men, instead of waging war on each other every few decades because one nation wants more of the cake than another. I never wanted to live in a country ruled by the Germans. But I don’t want to be ruled by the Americans or the British, either…’
I had let myself be persuaded because, despite my token resistance, I’d been dissatisfied that the war had ended with no clear resolution. It did indeed seem as though we were about to return to the old ways again, as though nothing had changed in the intervening bloodbath.
And, more simply, I’d fallen for her.
The music on the radio ended, and led into an international news bulletin. I turned it up. I didn’t think there would be anything of any importance in it, but you could never tell. The first item was an interview with a cosmonaut who had been part of the Soyuz 7 mission. No mention was made of the fact that the Americans had put a man on the moon. Perhaps they hadn’t made that public either.
The next item was about a military coup that had just taken place in Somalia, which was talked of in ecstatic terms by the announcer – presumably there had been Soviet support for it. After that, there was a report on the forthcoming talks on arms limitation with the Americans in Helsinki, which had apparently been in dispute for some time. The tone was generally positive, but the suggestion was that the Americans had already ceded to Soviet demands for the talks to take place on their terms; I wondered if the mention of it was deliberate. Well, everything was deliberate with the Soviets when it came to the dissemination of news, but was this a more precise message and, if so, who was its intended audience and what reaction was it intended to spark? The delay in the militsiya message suggested it wasn’t directed at us, and it seemed unlikely that such a report would make any difference to the Americans if they truly were planning an attack.
An alternative was that it had been prepared earlier, say yesterday, as part of a wider strategy to present the Americans in a bad light over the talks, and it wasn’t related to the current crisis. But no wonder they were so bloody jittery: they’d lost the big prize in the space race, were in a border dispute with the Chinese and just as they were coming out of long negotiations with the Americans over weapons reduction talks, Nixon had decided to fly some nuclear-armed B-52s directly towards their border. Coupled with a supposed chemical attack on two heavily fortified naval bases, they’d snapped.
The bulletin came to an end. Once again, there had been no mention of a chemical attack, but I guessed they would reveal that only once they had retaliated, if then. There might not be a news service in place after a nuclear war, and there would probably be few people alive to listen to its broadcasts.
I suddenly wanted to forget the lot of it: the U-boat, the mustard gas, the men in the bunker in Moscow. Perhaps if we managed to escape over the border, we could head somewhere else instead, Sarah wearing my jacket in cars in other countries, smiling that soft smile.
I blinked the thought away and locked my wrists on the wheel. As I passed a restaurant by the side of the road, I remembered we hadn’t eaten anything apart from a few stale biscuits at Anton’s flat. I looked across at Sarah and realized that if we were going to get over the border it might be an idea to gather our strength. I pulled over a few miles later at a roadside restaurant with steam coming from the windows, and gently woke her.
We took a table facing the door and a surly, barrel-chested waitress walked over. I picked up the menu and ordered kotlety with black bread and coffee. The waitress curtly informed us that the food would take several minutes to prepare and sauntered off.
Sarah stifled a yawn, and I found myself aping her. I’d been driving for five hours without a break. I started going through my plan to cross the border, keeping my voice down to barely a murmur.
‘Is it dark enough?’ Sarah said. It was twilight now, the sky just a greying pink on the horizon.
‘It’ll have to do.’ There was nothing to do now but head full pelt for the target, and hope. We would fill up fast with fuel and get going. I glanced through to the kitchen to see if there was any progress on the meal and saw that sitting on the shelf behind where the waitress was standing was a small transistor radio. And that she was talking to someone in the kitchen, and nodding towards us.
‘I’ll explain the rest in the car,’ I said. ‘We have to get out of here.’
I left a few token coins on the table, and we made for the door. The waitress came running out after us, but we were already at the car.
*
I headed back onto the road, putting my foot down. It had been a stupid, foolish, stupid bloody mistake. The militsiya would now be told precisely where we were, and they would hand the information over to Yuri and Sasha soon enough. I had just lost our advantage, and had painted a bull’s-eye on our rear ends to boot, all because of my empty belly, which now felt even emptier.
I put my foot down, and a little less than two hours after leaving the restaurant we passed Leningrad, after which I cut around Vyborg and drove to its outskirts. As we approached the pogranichnaya polosa, the twelve-mile protected zone around the frontier, I took a detour into a gap in the undergrowth by the side of the road and pulled up. I took Anton’s forgeries out of my jacket and placed them in the glove compartment – they would only help to identify us now. I told Sarah that if we were caught we would claim to be geologists.
One of the Russian playwrights, Denodovski, had defected at a literary fair in 1962, and in reviewing his debriefing documents I’d come across a curious mention he had made of the border conditions. He had said that on a trip to Karelia years earlier, when he’d been part of a group of geologists, the whole lot of them had been detained for three days by the border guard because they didn’t have documents proving who they were. This, he claimed, was-because the KGB had in fact banned geologists and certain other experts from carrying documents: they were afraid a foreign government might rob them and then use their specialized documents to justify a scientific presence near border areas and infiltrate the Soviet Union. But this meant that there was one valid reason not to have documents near the border.
Well, it wasn’t the best cover in the world – they would probably only need to make a couple of telephone calls to establish from our descriptions alone that we were fugitives wanted for murder and various crimes against the state. But if we were caught, it would probably all be over anyway.
‘Ready?’ I asked, switching off the ignition.
She nodded, and we began to make our way through the bushes, treading very carefully. There were men with dogs patrolling this area, as well as three security fences, tripwires and watchtowers. But the entire length of this border was secured in this way, so this was as good a spot as any to attempt to cross.
Night had fallen now, but there was still some visibility. The mist had returned, though – swathes of it covered the ground and a foot or so above it – and I found that if I crept on my belly I could move for several yards at a time following bands of it between bushes and trees. I motioned to Sarah to do the same. I picked up a small stick and used it to feel in front of me for trip-wires. After I’d been doing this for fifteen minutes or so, I caught sight of the turret of a watchtower poking out from a large clump of pines to my left: it wasn’t quite a forest, but there was a lot of cover there. I pointed it out to Sarah, and we started making our way towards it, keeping as close to the ground as possible, watching for any sign of men or dogs.
I wanted to make a beeline directly for the watchtower for several reasons. Border control towers often lack heating in order to focus the minds of the guards, but even that doesn’t always work and sentries in watchtowers tend to be less alert than their colleagues on the ground. One of my contingency plans for defection had involved making my way across from Finland, so I knew from studying the towers on the other side of the border that it was possible to avoid several lines of guard positions by crawling directly under the towers, where there were no additional sentries posted besides the men in them. I had no idea whether the Soviets used the same system on this side, because my plan had involved simply walking up to the nearest guard after crossing the frontier and surrendering, then waiting for the local KGB chief to be contacted and my bona fides to be established. We would simply have to hope.
Luckily, the mist was holding, and as we moved deeper into the woods I found I could cover ground a lot faster than before, when I’d had to stop every five seconds to find the next spot of cover. Unfortunately, I could see that Sarah’s stamina was already flagging, and she was stopping not for cover but to catch her breath. I wasn’t faring as well as I’d hoped I would, either. Earlier I had all but forgotten the ache in my hand, but now it came back as a stabbing pain and I found myself feeling disoriented.
I blinked to try to snap myself out of it. This was no time to start hallucinating. Well, at least I no longer had my Nigerian fever slowing me down. It was quite a year I’d had: I’d caught a deadly African disease, been shot at, tricked, exposed as a traitor, tortured by a madman in a dungeon in Sardinia and hunted to within an inch of my life. And now here I was, with the world on borrowed time, crouching by a pine tree in Russia with a woman I barely knew – and just a few miles away from the West again.
It was colder now, perhaps below freezing, and Anton’s clothes didn’t offer much protection. It was getting darker with every passing moment and the temptation to stand up in the ground mist was enormous, but we were safest here, creeping along side by side. Ahead of us, finally, I saw the criss-cross structure of the traditional wooden watchtower, and I tried to block out everything as I made the additional effort to keep as low as possible and move in fluid, unnoticeable movements, elbow over elbow, feeling the grass beneath me respond almost as though I were a snake, or a fish swimming through a current.
As the feet of the watchtower came into view, I felt something on my back. I turned, thinking someone had touched me, before I realized it was rain. My spirits sagged. Rain was good in one sense, in that it worsened the border guards’ visibility. But in another sense it was terrible, because it released the body’s natural scents, and dogs might pick up on those. But I couldn’t see or hear any dogs around here. Perhaps they were taking it easy on a Monday on this part of the border. Perhaps this wouldn’t be quite as difficult as we had…
The bark came suddenly, and made my shirt vibrate on my back.
I froze, and heard a rustle next to me as Sarah froze too.
It came again, and this time I located it – it was about twenty yards away, to our right. Two barks from two different dogs. They worked in pairs.
Do not panic. Now is not the time to panic.
Elbow over elbow. Move away, to cover. I could no longer see Sarah, but hoped she was doing the same.
There was a shout from somewhere above. The sentry in the tower wanted to know what was happening, talking either to the dogs or to a colleague on the ground.
‘He’s heard something!’ It was his colleague replying, and he was close, perhaps twenty or thirty feet away.
Shit.
The rain was coming down in sheets now, and it was starting to hurt as it hit my spine and my calves. It was loud, as well, but that was good, because any senses it overrode for those hunting us helped. Elbow over elbow, elbow over elbow – just a few more yards to go. I couldn’t see where the dogs’ handler was, but border guards wore green uniforms precisely so they wouldn’t be seen.
Finally, I made it under the watchtower. I was dry, at least, and hopefully that would mean my scent didn’t get any stronger. But I had no real cover: no bushes, no trees; nothing but the wooden stilts holding up the tower. I squinted out into the darkness but couldn’t see any sign of Sarah in the low mist. I grabbed hold of one of the stilts to lessen my own visibility, pressing myself into it, every muscle tensed. I clamped my eyes shut: children do it and think they cannot be seen, and we laugh at them. But I didn’t dare open them, partly because the surface of my eyes might reflect light and give me away, partly through fear.
‘Which way, boy?’
It was just one of the dogs that had picked up the scent, then. The voice was harder to locate now, but that was because the sound of the rain was drowning him out, rather than the distance. They might be even closer now – not yet close enough to see through the mist and rain, but close enough to smell or hear me.
There was a faint padding noise behind me, and I opened my eyes a fraction and saw the outline of Sarah’s head emerging through the darkness. She had made it under, too. I reached out a hand and caught hold of her, and then pulled her in to the stilt. She was shaking very gently, and I covered her with my arms and pressed against her, urging her to control her fear, and thus her movements.
There was another vibration in the ground, and the front of my skull tingled as I realized it was the dog coming across the grass. It was heading straight for us. Gooseflesh formed on my arms and neck, as I waited for the animal to pounce on us. And then the vibrations stopped. It must be able to see us now, surely? I could hear it panting over the sound of our own breathing.
I stayed as still as I could, breathing through my mouth. Dogs see in monochrome and find it hard to focus over distance, so I hoped it saw four fuzzy grey wooden stilts holding up the tower through a screen of mist and rain. As a result of their vision, dogs mainly react to sources of movement, after which they investigate sound and scent. But in this case I thought the dog had been alerted by scent, the smell of our bodies brought out by the rain and exacerbated by our physical exertions over the last few hours. Now it was waiting to see if any of the stilts moved.
Judging by its reactions so far, this was a guard dog rather than a tracker. If so, it would be relying on air scent rather than following ground scent over a distance. That was an advantage, because air scent disperses more quickly. Now that we were under the tower and out of the rain, our scent would be harder to locate again. On the other hand, this type of dog would also have been trained to attack once it found its quarry.
It took a few steps closer to the tower, and barked again.
‘Where are you, boy?’
I tried not to take too much hope from the question. It suggested the handler couldn’t see through the rain either, and he would have much better eyesight than his dog. But it wasn’t necessarily sight that would give us away. I could feel Sarah’s heart hammering through her chest, as she could no doubt feel mine. The dog would be able to hear our heartbeats once it was within five feet of us.
If he found us, I’d have to kill him, because his training dictated he would try to kill us. Attack dogs are often overconfident – in training, they always win – and that might lead to mistakes. But it was a slim hope. I clasped my fist around the twig I’d been using to check for trip-wires. Could I use it? No, it would snap. I would have to use my hands. But then we would have to deal with the handler as well. And where was the other dog?
I had to calm down, because my heart was now thumping like a Salvation Army drum and I didn’t want to add to the pheromones of fear and stress we would both be giving off. I tried to find a pleasant memory to latch onto, and the warmth of Sarah’s skin reminded me of how she had looked that night in the embassy in Rome – her honey-blonde hair, eyes ringed with kohl, the white evening gown… But then I heard her catch her breath, and I thought instead of her in the Lubyanka, and saw a man attaching electrodes to the same arms that now held onto me in the darkness. She was here because of me and my actions. I’d promised myself I would keep her from harm in Moscow, and I’d failed. I had to get us through this. I couldn’t fail her again.
Calm. Think of pleasant memories, pleasant memories… It was useless – all my memories ended badly. But I had to find one. And then it came to me: Miss Violet, the old tabby cat my parents had adopted off the street in Cairo; I’d played with her on school holidays. I thought of her great piles of fur, and running my hands through it to make her purr, and the way she had jumped on my lap, narrowing her eyes in pleasure…
Vibrations under my feet. I tensed, ready to leap up and strike.
But the vibrations were getting softer, fading.
‘Come on, boy. Let’s get back into the hut, shall we, and stop playing games?’
*
I stood there, holding Sarah in my arms against the thin wooden strut. Above us, the sentry continued making his rounds. Sweat started pouring off me, as if in delayed reaction to the stress, and then it began to cool, sticking to my skin.
After a few minutes, Sarah very gently turned around. Her hands reached for my face, and then her lips grazed mine, and an electric current ran through me. I reached for her hands, and placed my fingers on her mouth. We weren’t out of this yet. We were still in the Soviet Union.
Once the rain had subsided a little, I crouched down in the mist and indicated with my hand in hers which direction we were to go in. Once I was satisfied she understood, I set off, making sure I could hear the sound of her breathing. After we had inched forward like this for what seemed like hours, I finally made out the first fence, a wire one. After watching for some time, I concluded that there were two border guards patrolling this stretch, but neither had dogs and after they passed each other there was a three-minute gap before either of them reappeared again. If the mist held, we should be able to get across the stretch in that time.
While scouting the situation, I’d crept up to the fence where the shadow was deepest and had shovelled away some of the earth with my hands. As soon as the guards passed each other, I turned on my back and, using a stick to prop up the wires, shimmied my way under the lowest line of wires. I could see the whites of Sarah’s eyes against the darkness, following my every move, and I watched as she carried out the same manoeuvre, a fraction of a second behind me. Once we were through, we began crawling to the other side, and carried out the same procedure. I’d lost count in my head and didn’t want to waste any time looking at my wristwatch, but I reckoned we were already approaching the three-minute mark.
But we had made it through, and it seemed that the game was now more a test of our stamina. There were two other fences, and they were of the same type. The first only had one patrol guard, and was much easier to get through as a result, but the final fence had three guards. By now I was exhausted and could tell that Sarah was as well. But we had come this far.
She helped me dig the earth away and then we waited for the guards to pass and shimmied under as we had done before. But this time we’d been a little careless, because there was more of an incline here and we hadn’t dug deep enough, so that just as we were coming free on the other side one of the coils of wire caught on my cheek and pulled at it. Without meaning to, I let out a cry, which I immediately muffled. But at once there was a bark. It was followed by the sound of footsteps and raised voices. The game was up.
‘Run!’ I whispered to Sarah, clambering to my feet. But I couldn’t obey my own instruction, and was conscious of a searing pain and blood dripping down my face. There was a line of trees in the near distance and I watched as Sarah’s silhouette stumbled towards it, but I was struggling to follow – my feet were slipping on the grass and my knees were shaking, and I fell before I’d gone even a few yards. Seconds later I was helped up by my arm, and I took in that the sleeve holding me was camouflaged. Somewhere to the left there was a dog on a leash, and the dog seemed interested in me. But I wasn’t interested in the dog.
‘I’m a geologist,’ I said pathetically, placing the palm of my hand against my cheek to staunch the flow. ‘I’m a geologist.’
There was no reply, and I looked up and saw that there were several men standing around me. My vision was starting to blur now, perhaps as a result of the fall, but a chill ran through me as I took in that they were all wearing gas masks. The masks were painted a sickly grey colour, and as a result it was like looking at a shoal of monstrous underwater creatures. It was all the more monstrous because the fact that they were wearing them could mean only one thing: a warning had been given.
This realization was confirmed by their behaviour. Without another word, they took hold of me, strapped me to a stretcher and carried me aboard a vehicle. As I came up the ramp, I saw another stretcher was already in there, and on it lay a beautiful woman in a grey dress with short hair, her eyes closed. My heart sank. Sarah hadn’t made it more than a few yards farther than I had. There was no hope, then – none at all.
The engine started up and we set off at great speed. I closed my eyes and tried not to panic, focusing instead on the pain in my cheek, and when that wasn’t enough I located the pain in my hand and thought about that as well.
Minutes later, my eyes opened again, my senses jarred by the squeal of metal: the doors of the jeep were opening, and I was being lifted out. It was still raining, and large drops splashed against my face. I could hear frantic but muffled orders being shouted around me, along with some sharp scraping sounds I couldn’t identify. The angle of my body suddenly inclined steeply. Directly ahead I caught a glimpse of a bizarre structure, made of enormous blocks of stone covered in moss and camouflage – a bunker. I looked up at the sky, the water pouring from it, and the cloud directly above me seemed to redden and expand. As the stretcher entered a dark, cool space and began descending a flight of steps, I knew that I had failed, and that Brezhnev had finally done it.