Archangel (44 page)

CALMLY the Russian closed the door and collected his rifle. He pulled out a wooden box from beneath the table and filled his pockets with bullets. In the same unhurried manner, he rolled back the carpet, lifted the trapdoor and leapt, cat-like, into the space.

'We stand for peace and champion the cause of peace,' he said. 'But we are not afraid of threats and are prepared to
match
the instigators of war blow for blow. Those who try attack us will receive a crushing repulse to teach them not
poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. Replace the carpct~ comrade.'

He disappeared,
closing the trapdoor after him.

O'Brian gaped at the floorboards and then at Kelso.

'What the fuck
?'

'And where the hell have you been?' Kelso grabbed the satchel and quickly stuffed it back into his jacket. 'Never mind him,' he said, rolling back the carpe
t. 'Let's just get out of here.’

But before either of them could move a skull appeared at the cabin windows - two round eyes and a slit for a mouth. A boot kicked wood. The door splintered.

THEY were made to stand against the wall - shoved against the rough planked wall - and Kelso felt cold metal jabbed into the nape of his neck. O'Brian was a bit too slow on the uptake so he had his forehead banged against the planking, just to mend his manners and teach him a little Russian.

Their wrists were trussed tightly behind their backs with thin plastic.

A man said roughly, "Where's the other?' He raised the butt of his rifle.

'Under the floorboards!' shouted O'Brian. 'Tell 'em, Fluke, he's under the fucking floorboards!'

'He's under the floorboards,' said a well-educated voice in Russian that Kelso thought he recognised.

Heavy boots clumped on the wooden floor. Turning his head, Kelso saw one of the masked men walk to the end of the cabin, point his gun at the ground and casually begin firing. He flinched at the deafening noise in the confined
space and when he looked again the man was walking backwards, spraying bullets into the floor in neat rows, his weapon leaping in his hands like a pneumatic drill. Wood chips sprouted, ricocheted, and Kelso felt something strike the side of his head, just below his ear. Blood started trickling down his neck. He turned the other way and pressed his cheek to the wall. The noise stopped, there was a rattle of a fresh magazine being fitted, then it started again, then stopped. Something crashed to the floor. There was a stink of cordite. Acrid smoke made him clench his eyes and when he opened them again he could see the blond-headed spy from Moscow. The spy shook his head in disgust.

The man who had been firing kicked aside the shredded carpet and lifted the trapdoor. He shone a flashlight down through the rising dust, then clambered into the hole and disappeared. They could hear him moving around beneath their feet. After thirty seconds he reappeared at the door of the cabin, pulling off his mask.

'There's a tunnel. He's got out.

He produced a pistol and gave it to the blond man.

'Watch them.'

Then he gestured to the other two and they clattered out into the snow

SUVORI
N FELT WET. He glanced down and saw that he was standing in a puddle of melted snow. His trousers were sodden. So was the bottom of his overcoat. A piece of frayed silk lining trailed on the floor. And his shoes - his shoes were leaking and scuffed - they were ruined
.
One of the two bound men - the reporter: O'Brian, wasn't that his name? - started to turn and say something.

'Shut up!' said Suvorin, furiously. He clicked off the safety catch and waved the gun. 'Shut up and face the wall!'

He sat down at the table and wiped his damp sleeve across his face.

Absolutely ruined.
He noticed Stalin glowering at him. He picked up the framed photograph with his free hand and tilted it to the light. It was signed. And what was all this other stuffl Passports, identity papers, a pipe, old gramophone records, an envelope with a piece of hair in it... It looked as though someone had been trying to perform a conjuring trick. He sprinkled the hair into his palm and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The fibres were dry, grey, coarse, like a clump of bristles. He let them fall and wiped his hands on his coat. Then he laid the pistol on the table and massaged his eyes.

'Sit down,' he said, wearily, 'why don't you?'

Outside in the forest there was a long jabbering burst of gunfire.

'You know, he said sadly to Kelso, 'you really should have caught that plane.'

'WH
AT happens next?' said the Englishman. It was obviously
difficult for them to sit properly. They were on their knees, next to the wall. The stove had gone out. It was getting very cold. Suvorin had slid one of the records out of its paper sleeve and put it on the turntable of the ancient gramophone.

'It's a surprise,' he said.

'I am an accredited member of the foreign press corps -, began O'Brian.

The crack-crack of a high velocity rifle was answered by a heavier bang.

'The American ambassador -, said O'Brian.

Suvorin wound the handle of the gramophone very fast -anything to block out the noise from outside - and placed the needle on the record. Through a hailstorm of crackles, a tinny orchestra struck up a wavering tune.

More gunfire. Someone was screaming, far away, through the trees. Two shots followed in rapid succession. The screaming stopped and O'Brian started whining, 'The/re going to shoot us. They'll shoot us, too!' He struggled against the plastic wire and tried to rise, but Suvorin put his wet shoe on O'Brian's chest and gently pushed him down again.

'Let us,' he said, in English, 'at least try to act like civilised men.

This was not what I dreamed for myself, either, he wanted to say. It formed no part of my life's dreams, I do assure you, to arrive in some stinking madman's hovel and hunt him down like an animal. Honestly, I believe you would find me an amusing fellow, if only circumstances were different.

He made an effort to follow the beat of the music, conducting with his forefinger, but he couldn't find any rhythm, there seemed to be no sense to it.

'You'd better have brought an army,' said the Englishman,
be
cause if it's just three against one out there, they don't stand a chance.'

'Nonsense,' said Suvorin, patriot
ically. 'They're our special for
ces. They'll get him. And yes, if necessary, they will send an army.

'Why?'

'Because I work for frightened men, Dr Kelso, some of whom are just about old enough to have been touched by Comrade Stalin.' He frowned at the gramophone. What a racket. It sounded like howling dogs. 'Do you know what Lenin called the Tsarovich, when the Bolsheviks were deciding the fate of the Imperial Family? He called the boy "the living banner". And there's only one way, Lenin said, to deal with a living banner.'

Kelso shook his head. 'You don't understand this man. Believe me - you should see him - he is criminally insane. He's probably killed half a dozen people over the past thirty years. He's nobody's banner. He's crazy.

'Everyone said Zhirinovsky was crazy, remember? His foreign policy towards the Baltic States was to bury nuclear waste along the Lithuanian border and blow it into Vilnius every night using giant fans. He still got twenty-three per cent of the vote in the ninety-three election.'

Suvorin couldn't stand this unearthly, bestial music a moment more. He lifted the needle.

They heard a solitary shot.

Suvorin held his breath for an answering salvo.

'Perhaps,' he said doubtfully, after waiting a long while, 'I should think about calling up that army -,

'THERE are traps,' said Kelso.

'What?'

Suvorin was at the doorway, peering tentatively into the twilight. He looked back into the cabin. He had looped some rope around their wrists and attached it to the cold stove.

'He's put down traps. Be careful where you tread.'

'Thank you.' Suvorin planted his foot on the top step. 'I'll be back.'

His plan - and that was a good word, he thought, that had a certain ring to it: his plan - was to get back to the snow plough and use the radio to summon reinforcements. So he headed towards the entrance to the clearing, the only fixed point he had. There were good footprints to follow here, although it was getting dark, and he must have been midway along the rough path when he felt the explosion and a second later he heard it, a great rush of snow marking the passage of the shock wave as it travelled through the forest. Cascades of crystal pattered down from the higher branches and bounced off into space, leaving tiny clouds of particles hanging in the air like puffs of breath.

He spun around, the gun held out in a double grip, pointing uselessly in the direction of the blast.

He panicked then and began to run - a comic figure, a jerking marionette - trying to bring his knees up as high as they would go to avoid the sucking, clinging snow His breath was coming in sobs.

He was so intent on keeping going he almost tripped over the first body.

It was one of the soldiers. He had been caught in a trap -a huge trap: a bear trap, maybe - so big and powerfully sprung, the jaws of it had actually clamped into the bone above his knee. There was a lot of blood smeared around in the flattened snow, blood from the shattered leg and blood from a big head wound that gaped through the back of the
ski-mask like a second mouth.

The corpse of the other soldier was a few paces further on. Unlike the first man, he was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, his legs arranged in a perfect figure 4. There was a puddle of blood on his chest.

Suvorin put down his gun, took off his gloves and checked the pulses of both men - although he knew it was useless -pulling aside the layers of clothing to feel their warm, dead
wrists.

How had he ambushed them both?

He looked around.

Like this, probably: he had laid the trap on the path, buried in the snow, and had lured them over it; the man in the lead had missed it, somehow, the man in the rear had been caught - that was the screaming - and the lead man had turned to help only to find their quarry behind them - that was what was cunning: they wouldn't have expected that. And so he had been shot full in the front, and then the second man had been taken out at leisure, executioner-style, with a bullet at point-blank range in the back of the head.

And then he had taken their AK-74s.

What kind of creature was this?

Suvorin knelt by the head of the first soldier and pulled off his ski-mask. He took out his ear-piece and pressed it to his own ear. He thought he could hear something. A rushing sound. He found the little microphone attached to the inside cuff of the dead man's left hand.

'Kretov?' he whispered. 'Kretov?' But the only voice he could hear was his own.

Then the gunfire started up again.

THE fire was like a red dawn through the trees, and when Suvorin stepped out on to the track he could feel the heat of the burning snow plough, even at a range of a hundred yards. The fuel tank must have exploded and the inferno had melted the winter all around it. The vehicle stood blazing in the centre of its own scorched spring.

The gunfire was continuing sporadically, but that wasn't Kretov returning fire. That was boxes of ammunition, exploding in the cab. Kretov himself was sitting down, doubled over in the centre of the track, beside the RP46, as dead as his comrades. He looked as though he had been shot while trying to set up the machine gun. He had got as far as mounting it on to the bipod but he hadn't had time to open the cannister of ammunition.

Suvorin went up to him and touched his arm and Kretov toppled over, his grey eyes open, a look of astonishment on his broad, pink face. Suvorin couldn't see a wound, not at first, anyway. Perhaps the heroic major of the Spetsnaz had simply died of fright?

Another loud bang from the direction of the fire made him look up, to find himself being watched by Comrade Stalin, in his generalissimo's uniform and cap.

The GenSec was some way up the track, standing before the fire, his left hand on his hip, his right holding a rifle almost
casually across his shoulder. His shadow was long in proportion '~ to his squat torso. It danced and flickered on the churned snow.

Suvorin thought he would choke on his own heart. They looked at one another. Then Stalin started marching towards him. And marching - that was the word for the way he walked: quickly, but without hurrying, swinging his arms up across his barrel chest, left-right, left-right: look lively there, comrade, here I come!
Suvorin fumbled in his pocket for his pistol and realised he had left it in the trees, beside the first two corpses.

Left-
right, left-right - the living banner, kicking up the snow -Suvorin didn't dare look at him an instant longer. He knew that if he did he would never move.

'Why is your face so shifty, comrade?' called the advancing figure. 'Why can't you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?'