The world far below us was peaceful and still. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I dimly made out a landscape of ice and water, and at one point even thought I saw, clinging to the rocks of one of the small islands, a cluster of those curious miniature pines I’d seen in 1945. No doubt it was partly because I’d recently believed that nuclear Armageddon had already struck, but the serenity of it seemed almost unbearable.
If Brezhnev launched a strike, the Americans would retaliate with their Polaris missiles. The British plan was to target forty-eight Soviet cities, and the Americans would no doubt do the same. Leningrad, Paldiski and others were on that list, and while the blast wouldn’t reach here, the fallout certainly would. I wondered if the B-52s were still in the air, circling as they waited for their instructions, and if so what the men in those cockpits were thinking as they looked down.
‘You don’t happen to have any diving equipment on board, do you?’ I shouted over the noise of the engines.
‘No!’ Raaitikainen replied. ‘But one of the coastguard stations in Åland will.’ He caught my look and clapped me on the back. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a way through this. We’re nearly there now. Does it look like the world is about to end?’
I shook my head and began to reply, when the engine gave a shrill whine and we began to tilt.
‘What’s that?’ Sarah called out.
‘An engine?’ I said, but realized almost at once that it wasn’t that, but a shot.
I craned my neck, and saw the lights of a helicopter directly behind us. It looked like an Mi-8T, and it was firing its two PK machine guns directly at us.
‘Oh, God,’ moaned Sarah, rocking back into her seat. Raaitikainen was grappling with the stick, sweat pouring from his face, and I knew that we must have been hit somewhere. I unstrapped myself to help him take control, but we suddenly lurched again and I was thrown against the side of my seat, hitting my jaw and cutting open my cheek wound.
Dazed by the pain and dizzy from the motion, I tried to bring myself to a standing position, but I could see it was a losing battle. Raaitikainen had also been thrown, and was no longer holding the stick, and Sarah was now slumped back, her mouth in a rictus – we were in freefall. I crawled along the floor of the cockpit towards Raaitikainen’s seat, but the sound of the engines suddenly rose in pitch and then there was an enormous crunching. I guessed that the rotors had hit something. I looked out of one of the perspex panels and saw a greyish-brown block of something, and then realized it was ice, and that we were underwater. I shouted across at Raaitikainen but he didn’t reply. When I looked up, I saw why: the upper part of his head was covered in blood, and his eyes had rolled upwards. I fought my way towards Sarah and unfastened her seat belt. We were kicking at the forward section doors when the water started coming in.
*
Panicking, I gave another kick to the door, and this time it was enough to get it open. Freezing water gushed through in a torrent, nearly drowning me and pushing me back, but I kicked my legs harder until I was through the gap and out into the water. I couldn’t see Sarah and tried to shout out to her, but it was useless.
The gush of water in the helicopter had shocked me, but now it was chilling me through to my bones, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to last long in it. My heart was seizing, and my core temperature had plummeted within the last few seconds. As I tried to swim to the surface, my body was suddenly wracked with a tremor. I swam desperately towards the chunks of ice, found one and grabbed hold of it, but then more tremors broke through me, and I focused all my mental energy on trying to stop them. But they kept coming, sharper and sharper. Here came another one. Clench, tighten, stop it, shut it down. I was losing control. Soon they would take me over completely. The effort was getting to me, and I realized my cognitive faculties were being affected. If this continued, my body would shut down, and death would soon follow.
This realization strengthened my mind and I kicked upwards with more force. Finally, I saw the surface of the water coming to meet me. I kicked and kicked again, until I reached the surface and was breathing, my teeth chattering as I caught my breath and took in great lungfuls of air.
We had crashed on the coastline of one of the islands, with the cockpit submerged in the water and the rest of the helicopter jutting out of it. I looked around for Sarah and saw her a few feet away, her head out of the water but her arms flailing. I looked up and immediately spotted the Russians above us. They were quite a long way up but had already begun descending, and they had seen us, too: machine-gun fire immediately split the water, and men were starting to climb out of the cockpit and down ropes.
With my arms still quaking, I grabbed hold of part of the skids and hoisted myself up onto the shoreline. Then I began making my way around the rocks to get closer to Sarah.
‘Grab hold of me!’ I shouted at her, stretching out my arm. I caught hold of her hand and pulled as hard as I could, hauling her onto the rocks.
She gasped and then coughed up water. Her eyes started to close.
‘Don’t give up now,’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t give up now.’
Perhaps she heard me, because she placed the palms of her hands against the rocks and lifted herself to her knees.
I helped her to her feet and pointed to a line of woods behind us.
‘Can you run?’ I said.
She nodded dully, and we started making our way towards the woods. There were patches of snow and black ice, but adrenalin and the survival instinct had kicked in and we somehow managed to make our way across them. We had to get to cover. I couldn’t have come this far to fail.
We reached the top of a slope and I looked out at a large field, lit by the moon. There were trees all around the perimeter, but the field itself was completely barren – just grass, broken up with patches of snow and ice. No cover. Behind us, the sound of the rotors was almost deafening. I resisted the urge to look, but clearly we couldn’t go back down that way. Should we skirt the edge of the field and try to get around to the other side? That would be too obvious, and too time-consuming.
We had to find people, and warmth. There was a barn with white window frames at the far end of the field and, closer, an utedass – an outhouse. I turned to point it out to Sarah, but she wasn’t there. I looked frantically back at where we had just come from, but she had disappeared. She must have fallen, and I couldn’t see her in the snow over a ridge. I began to run back towards the water when a burst of machine-gun fire broke through the trees, cracking in my ears and making me drop to the ground instinctively.
Fuck.
I started running towards the utedass.
I had misjudged the situation horribly. Sarah was in worse shape than I had realized, and the Russians were much closer than I’d thought – gunfire clattered behind me before I was even halfway across the stretch, and the helicopter was now coming down to land in the field. I kept running, my arms starting to flail and my legs feeling like they might give way, heading for the door of the outhouse and praying it wouldn’t be the last thing I saw before the bullets hit me in the back. I reached the door and opened it, then slammed it behind me.
It was pitch dark and, unsurprisingly, smelled foul. The gunfire had stopped for a moment, and I wondered if somehow I had fooled them and they’d lost sight of me. But then I heard a voice, and recognized it at once.
‘Nobody move!’ shouted Sasha. ‘Hold your fire until I say.’ His voice was controlled, confident. He was no stamp collector any more. I leaned forward a fraction of an inch and peered through a slat in the wood. There he was, his silhouette clear against the background of snow. He was packed up in a winter coat, ushanka still in place. And one gloved hand was gripping Sarah by the arm. She was hanging off him, crying, and I thought I could see the tears freezing on her cheeks. He looked triumphant, like a hunter with his prize.
‘Come on, Paul!’ he shouted, his voice echoing off the trees. ‘Time to come out now.’
There was a small bench surrounding the toilet, and I climbed onto it. I prised the lid away, my thumbs shaking, and immediately recoiled at the stench. But the hole looked too small. I kicked at the side of it with the sole of my boot until the wood splintered and the hole widened. Then I held my shoulders tightly together, and lowered myself into it. The edges chafed against my skin through the wet clothes but I was in. I felt my legs sink into the frozen dried shit and piss and leaves, and vomit rose in my throat. I was in a small dugout under the outhouse – as I had hoped, it was open all around. And beyond me were trees. I ran blindly towards them. I must have gone fifty yards before I heard Sasha shouting again. But I was away from the Russians by then – for the moment.