Adam Hall - Quiller Balalaika

Most of the supplies for keeping 700 men alive came in by train from Khatanga, on the river from the estuary opening into the Arctic Ocean, but in the short summers there were a few crops raised in the camp, mostly corn and potatoes.

No prisoners were ever released from Gulanka: they were brought here, without exception, to serve a life sentence. When they died – rarely past middle age – their bodies were sent by train to their relatives, if they could afford the one-million-ruble fee for this service. Mostly they were buried here outside the wire, with nothing to mark their grave. There were two priests at the camp, one Catholic and one Russian Orthodox, but they were drunk half the time, shacked up with a wood-burning stove and free rations of vodka and magazines from Moscow to read.

The rest, for most of the year, was snow. It was borne in from the coast on gale-force winds, to drift and pile against the fence and between the wooden hutments, sometimes bringing the crews out of the mines to clear emergency gangways through it. In summer the sun was seen on good days, and you could take off your coats and hoods and scarves and mittens, and sometimes even bare your arms to feel the warmth.

In winter, which lasted from September to May, wood smoke hung across the camp in a permanent fog except when the winds cleared it for a day or two. Half the inmates suffered from lung trouble, and emphysema was commonplace, the leading cause of death.

Outside the camp there were only the mountains and the snows, with at night the vast silence concealing and then revealing, as the wind shifted, the voicing of the wolves.

'They feed them meat,' Igor told me. 'It's to keep them near the camp.'

'You mean people escape?'

He cast his milky eye at me, his huge knife stopping its work on the pit prop. Today the snow was too heavy to allow crews to reach the mines, and we'd been detailed to the timber shop. Igor was one of the few ageing inmates I'd seen here, but he wasn't given light duties: he was as gnarled as an oak with a voice coming out of a barrel, and for this I respected him as a survivor.

'Escape? Well, yes, but none too often. Last year there was a character who tried it, croaked a guard one night and put on his uniform next day and went out with a mining crew and buried himself in the snow till evening – you can keep warm that way if you're well wrapped up. Then the same night we heard the wolves howling, a real chorus this time, and a search party went out and found a few scraps of this poor bugger left on the bones.' He worked his knife again. 'There's a big pack out there, twenty or thirty of 'em with a huge dominant male. You think the wire's something to get through? Try getting through the wolves. That's why they feed them, so they're never far away.'

I finished a pole and started on another one. The wood was seasoned, pine-scented, the slivers coming away clean under the knife. The guard was at the other end of the shed near the door, out of earshot if we kept our voices low.

'Have there been any other attempts?'

'To escape?'

'Yes.'

'Some. People get wire fever, in this place. They'll run at the fence sometimes, yelling their heads off. Those are the new ones in, been here only weeks. Could catch up with you – you never know what you'll do, the first weeks, never know yourself till Gulanka gets to you. Them as gets the fever gets put under special guard for a time, because it's after that they try and escape. You interested in escaping? Say no and you'll be lying in your teeth.' He swung his head to check on the guard, then looked back at me. 'What would you say's the easiest way of getting out of this place?'

'The train.'

'Right. It's kind of obvious, ain't it? We had a character try that one. He'd been a rich man, back in the city, in the mob, name was Nyazov, I knew him well, he was in my hut.' The 'city' was Moscow. Everyone talked about the 'city', a shining paradise at the end of the railroad line. 'He bribed the guard who was taking roll call. Tell you something – before they let a train come through those gates we're all confined to quarters and then roll's called, and if only one of us out of six or seven hundred doesn't answer his name – isn't seen to answer his name – the hunt's up, and until he's found they won't open them gates. You know Colonel Kalentsov? The commandant? He's been in charge here for twenty years, and takes pride in the fact that in the last twenty years no one's ever got out of Gulanka.' With a shrug, 'He's not a bad skipper, though, never touches the vodka, never -'

'What happened to the man who tried to get out on the train?'

Igor's milky eye was on me again. 'I'll tell you. Like I say, he bribed the guard so he wasn't down as missing. Then he got a civvy coat from somewhere and walked down to the gates with a whole bunch of official-looking papers in his hand. All the rolls had reported every man present in his hut so they let the train come in. Well this character Nyazov was going up and down handing out these papers – I saw one of them afterwards, they was just copies of a new daily routine order he'd filched from the orderly room.' He kicked his pine shavings together and dumped them into the bin. 'Then the train got up steam and started rolling, and you know what this character did? He knew it'd be stupid to just climb on board, so he waited till he thought no one was looking and made a dive underneath. Idea was, I reckon, to hang on to the struts and find space enough to wedge himself in for the ride.'

He'd stopped work again for a minute, and the guard gave him a shout. 'Get a move on, then!'

'Fuck yourself,' Igor said under his breath, and struck down again with the huge blade to make a perfect slice. 'But he came unstuck, poor old Nyazov, couldn't hang on for more than a couple o' minutes, lost his grip. They heard him scream, one o' the guards told me afterwards, when he went down under the wheels. They brought the two halves of his body back into camp, shoved 'em in a box and took 'em out there to the graveyard. Next morning at general roll call we got all the details from the commandant, told us to take it as a warning of what happens when people try and escape. Of course he'd been out of his bloody mind, Nyazov, because it was November and even if he'd managed to hang on under that train for more than a few miles he'd have been found some fine day stiff as a bloody icicle, still there. Those trains go seventy mile an hour, so what d'you think the wind-chill factor is when the temperature's fifty below for a start? Out of his bloody mind.' The big blade bit, sliced and came away, leaving a perfect taper. 'You want to know the only way to get out of Gulanka? It's easy, and there's some who's done it. Get yourself a bit of rope and sling it over a beam and kick the box away.'

'Okay, this is a sword hand. Palm flat, fingers tight together, thumb in line with the first finger, not tucked in, or you'll diminish the muscle tension.'

He watched me, Alex, his eyes intent in the dim light. We were in the wash house, the last to leave. Smell of soap, urine, tobacco smoke, the night smell, the morning smell.

'You right-handed?'

'Yeah.'

'Okay, the strike's like this and the usual target's the neck. It's to stun, if you hit the carotid artery right. That's here. You'll only kill if you use terrific force at that point – the sword hand's not normally used for killing. You cold?'

'Bit.'

He was always cold; most of it was fear. 'Swing your arms, but keep watching. This is the hammer fist. You can use it for a downward block or target the head with it, or the elbow or the groin or the knee, depending on the situation. The trouble with the sword hand and the hammer fist is that you need to pull back first to get the momentum, and that takes a lot of time, at least two seconds, and if your opponent's quick he'll get in first. But don't underestimate them as weapons – they can do significant damage.'