Adam Hall - Quiller Balalaika

This hadn't changed very much: a draught was still slicing across the floor from under the door to the urinals outside, but I'd found some newspaper and blocked at least half of it. The silence was also hard to get used to after the noise of the train, and I lay awake for another hour, listening to the distant voice of warning that hadn't given me any peace since we'd arrived at the camp.

It was the first time I'd taken an uncalculated risk during a mission, and now I knew why the idea had always frightened me: with a calculated risk, when you know most of the data, most of the hazards and the chances of escape, you can keep a modicum of control over the operation. Without that, you're plunging into the labyrinth blind, and may God have mercy on you.

It was something I'd been certain I would never do, however hot a mission was running, however urgent the need, the one thing that as a seasoned professional I would never expose myself to, because of its deadly threat to survival.

The uncalculated risk.

Mea culpa. But stay, be gentle with me, my good friend, grant me your charity, for madness of whatever kind can come upon any man at any time.

Sleep came at last from the shadowed silence of the night, broken only by the distant howling of the wolves across the snow.

'What's your name?'

I stowed my spare mittens in the empty orange crate along with the rest of my stuff. The crate was my locker, nailed to the wall above the bunk.

I looked round. 'Berinov.'

'Berinov.' He said it slowly, giving it a sarcastic twist, as if I'd said it was Napoleon. 'That the only name you got?'

He was a big man with a sloping forehead and eyes buried in puckered flesh, a hare lip distorting his mouth. Other men were gathered in the hut, getting what warmth they could out of the dying stove. It was evening, and a time for rest.

'It's the only name,' I told the big man, 'I'm giving you.'

'And why's that, now?'

There was a hook on the wall by the crate, made from a bent rod, but we never took off our coats until we were ready for bed. They'd taken the one I'd worn here at the check-in yesterday and given me a regulation issue with broad stripes on it; it wasn't lined but it was thick, and kept out most of the cold.

'Whoreson,' the big man said. 'I asked you a question.' Some of the men were turning to watch. They'd seen this before, had been victims of it themselves, probably, the old sweat and the new recruit routine. This was my second day in Gulanka.

'You're in my bunk space,' I told him. 'You can leave.'

'I'm in your what?'

I went to move past him to get nearer the stove, but he stopped me with a push of his hand. 'You telling me what I can do?' Feigning total disbelief, not a terribly good actor. He smelled of sweat and stale beer.

'What's your name?' I asked him.

'None of your fucking business, whoreson.'

'All right, then let's call you Mickey Mouse. You've only got one little problem, Mickey. You're full of shit.' I wanted to put a stop to this before I got bored, and there was only one way to do it.

'Say it again?' Cocking his head as if he really hadn't heard.

'I said you're full of shit.'

His eyes glinted and he pulled back his right elbow with his fist bunched and I looked around the whole of the exposed target area and decided on a sword hand to the right carotid artery because he was leaving plenty of time for it, and as he dropped I drove a finger into the spatulate nerve and got a scream that filled the hut, drove it in again and got another one and stopped right there because I didn't want him to start vomiting, there's always the risk with this strike because of the pain.

'Holy Christ,' someone said from near the stove, his voice hushed. I assumed nobody had put the big man down before.

He was rolling on the boards, hands clutching his jawbone with his eyes squeezed shut.

'Mickey,' I said, 'you're in my way there.' He didn't answer, quite possibly couldn't, so I took a light kick at the median nerve in his arm to wake him up. 'Mickey, you've got three seconds. Crawl if you have to, but get out. One.'

He was moaning now but I knew he could hear.

Some of the dogs were voicing outside, having heard the screams.

'Two.'

I hoped one of the guards didn't come in.

'Three.'

But he'd got the message, was crawling now, his big calloused hands reaching ahead of him and dragging his body after. He could at least have tried to get up, for God's sake, at least put on a show.

I watched to make sure he kept moving, then went over to the stove, where two or three of the men gave me room.

'Christ,' one of them said, 'You know who he is?'

'Of course. Mickey Mouse.'

'Could you teach me that?'

I swung the pick again, brought down stones, working my way along the vein.

'Could I teach you what?'

He was young, not more than twenty, light in his body, hunched, defensive; I'd noticed the way he walked, head down, glancing from side to side as if he expected trouble. 'What you did to Gradov.'

'Who's he?'

'The big guy in the hut.'

'Oh. What's your name, son?'

'Babichev.'

'Christian name.'

'Alex.'

He'd stopped work, was giving me the whole of his attention, and I glanced along the pit at the guard. 'Keep working, Alex,' I said, and swung my pick again and caught the glint of nickel.

'Yeah.' He saw the change in the vein too. 'You've struck,' he said.

'Looks like it. Why do you want me to teach you things like that?'

'I get picked on. You know?' He turned his face to me, his cheeks pinched from the weather, the cold, the misery, his eyes in a permanent flinch. 'There's no women here.'

'You haven't tried protecting yourself?'

He swung his pick. 'You don't understand. I'm not a big guy.'

'But you've got muscle.'

'Oh, sure. Yeah, I've tried hitting, a bit, but they like that, they like me to struggle, you know? They come at me two at a time, see, sometimes more. You don't know what it's like.'

I got the pans from the trolley and we started hammering the iron wedges into the vein. 'All right,' I said, 'I'll give you one or two of the basics. But it's not something you can pick up in five minutes.'

With a quick shivering laugh: 'Okay, but we've got more than five minutes to spare in this place, right? Rest of our lives.'

By the third day I knew more about Gulanka.

The twelve-foot-high reinforced steel fencing with its inward-curving scimitar frieze was bolted to the rock face of the massif with half-inch-thick iron strips; the rock face itself was sheer, and floodlit by night. The thirty war-trained pit-bull guard dogs could be unleashed within a second by their handlers from quick-action snap cleats, and they understood the command to kill; they were fed the minimum rations to keep them hunting fit and their staple diet was fresh red meat from the goats that were farmed at the side of the camp. The gates under the enormous archway where the trains came in were routinely manned by dogs and sentries, but were impenetrable anyway and fitted with foot-long, one-inch diameter bolts. When a train came through with supplies or prisoners and took away nickel and waste, the guards were trebled and armed with Chinese assault rifles, and every inmate of the camp was confined to quarters until the train had left and the gates were bolted again.

At night the main thousand-watt floodlights were supplied with current from three huge stationary diesels that ran from six in the morning until midnight, when the floods were switched off, to leave marker lights along walkways and around the buildings. A shifting roster of fifty guards was on duty through the clock. Most buildings outside the hutment area were out of bounds, but inmates could walk along the fence if they wanted to and look through it.