Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

Then she walked over to the box.

Before she was five feet away, she saw that the box was a coffin. The cortege was escorting a dead person; another death.

She looked around the inside of the truck until she found a tool box and, deep inside it, a tyre wrench. She put down the Thompson and picked up the wrench. Then she returned to the coffin. She dug the sharp edge of the wrench into the crack where the lid was nailed to the base and began, with one hand, the slow, hard process of heaving up the lid. Each nail came away, one by one. The lid was half free by the time she was able to yank it free completely with a splintering crash of wood and torn nails.

There was a winding sheet of sorts and she pulled this away, using the wrench as if to touch it with her hands might contaminate them.

Under the sheet was a face she recognised at once; the craggy, deeply lined face of the 68-year-old Professor Vasily Kryuchkov. She stared, first in horror, then in shock, and finally with a sickening, dead feeling that her life – all the lives – had been wasted. She turned her head and retched on to the bed of the truck. When she’d choked up everything she’d eaten from her guts, she looked back at Kryuchkov’s face again, lifting the veil for the last time. Too clever to die, but finally too dangerous to live.

She dropped the wrench on the truck bed, picked up the Thompson, and walked to the back of the truck. As she stepped painfully over the tailgate on to the ground, she heard a crack, then felt a stinging sensation in her side. She half turned, half fell. She saw the truck driver lying, crawling on his belly, a pistol in his hand, raised again for the kill. She aimed the Thompson without thinking and fired, blowing his skull in two through the bridge of his nose.

Then Anna fell, slammed down on to the road, and remembered nothing.

PETROV FOUND THE body of Anna some two hours later. From the entrance to the cave, he hadn’t returned to the funeral feast that was being given for his grandfather. The billowing black smoke, of aviation fuel, so he thought, changed everything. And maybe the wolf too, which had lurked stationary for half an hour, until finally it disappeared over a ridge in a steady, loping run.

He’d turned towards where the smoke was coming from, and began to walk, first up over a ridge and into a canyon, then up another ridge and down again into another canyon. The shaman’s coat was still draped over his arm.

But he was too wary to approach up close to the site of whatever it was that had crashed. All he knew was that it was the woman, somewhere the woman was near. The woman was behind everything he thought and did now.

From down below the small plateau where the burning of the helicopter had died down, he saw three or four more helicopters hovering high above and then he saw the occasional movement of men on the plateau as they explored the accident. He caught sight of them only when they came close enough to the lip of the plateau to catch a glimpse of an arm or a leg, the side of a body in military fatigues. But he kept himself well hidden, under overhangs in the rock, and walked swiftly away from the scene of devastation until he could no longer hear the sound of helicopters and the world was silent again.

It was later that he saw the footprint. More than an hour of walking had passed when he saw it in the deep cleft in the canyon, just after it had dog-legged to the north. He knelt and examined it and saw at once that it was most likely a woman’s boot. For several miles after that he followed her tracks, losing them occasionally as she climbed over rocks, then finding them again after much searching. But he knew it was her. He walked for ten miles or more, until the tracks started to lead upwards, out of the canyon, towards a ridge beyond which, he knew, was the road that led to the missile silos and the research station thirty miles to the north. When he reached the top of the ridge, he looked down and saw on the road a still life – a jeep, a truck, three bodies lying at intervals in the road. A still death.

He went to the body of the woman immediately. He saw the gash that had opened in her thigh, her bandaged hand, a long-barrelled handgun he’d never seen before, fallen by her side, a Russian military pistol thrown aside by her fall. And then he noticed bleeding from above her waist. The blood had slowed to a stop some time before. He pulled back her jacket and saw the bullet wound where it had entered just above her hip, through just flesh, and exited an inch or two behind. A surface wound, but one that had been enough, along with her other injuries, to bring her down and leave her down.

He knelt on the road and put his ear to her mouth. He felt nothing, not a breath. But he kept his ear there and placed a finger on the pulse of her right hand. He could feel the faintest movement, a jagged, muted struggle for life. And then he felt the thin, interrupted breath from her mouth. It seemed to last a minute between each breath, but it must have been less.

He looked up at the jeep and thought he should lift her into it, drive her to the nearest hospital in Norilsk. But at once he knew he couldn’t take the woman there. Whoever she was, Valentina Asayev, a former SVR colonel, a traitor, a defector, a terrorist, or… none or few of these.

He slung the shaman’s coat over her inert body and picked her up. Then he walked back up the slope, and over the ridge until he was out of sight of the road, then down again, scrambling, crawling, sliding into the darker depths where there would be water. Several times he put her body down, to rest certainly, but also to try to cover his tracks up from the road. It was most important they didn’t find his tracks up – or hers down. When he was thirty feet or so above the road, he saw the smaller boulders she’d arranged and evidently hadn’t used. He set them rolling down the slope and then tried to cover where she’d set them.

He walked over rock wherever he could, and finally found a sloping rock ridge that would take him to the foot of the canyon on the far side of the road from where he’d first come. There would be water there.

He bathed her wounds in a stream and dribbled some water into her mouth. She was pale, bloodless, but one time he felt her lips move a little as he wetted them.

Time no longer existed here, not any more, not amongst his own people, or in the land of endless light.

He walked on ten, fifteen miles along the broken canyon until he was at the foot of the slope that led up to the cave and the meadow where the camp and his people were. He never knew how he’d done it, no matter how strong a man he was. It was a superhuman effort, he thought dimly, something that he could never have done in the ordinary way of things.

For nearly two days, Anna lay on a palliasse of bound grasses with a deer hide laid over them before she was able to speak. She was in Petrov’s and his mother’s choom and it was Petrov’s mother alone who treated her wounds. Many herbs were used. Petrov noticed nine herbs in all and he remembered his grandfather’s story the night that he died, about the teaching of the nine herbs. Maybe, he thought, Gannyka had passed on the shaman’s language to his mother. But she never replied when he asked her.

In the meantime, Petrov made his daily calls to Colonel Fradkov. He learned of the crashed helicopter that he’d seen and Fradkov informed him of the ambush on the military road. Petrov intimated surprise and shock. He was then ordered to stop all his people’s usual activities and to command them to spread out along the roof of the plateau.

‘We have other developments,’ Fradkov told him on the second day. ‘Four terrorists have been arrested in Norilsk. They, too, were on board the Rossiya . They had explosives and a highly dangerous explosive material with them. From our interrogations, we understand they were heading to the far north towards Dikson. Apparently they intended to blow up Russia’s new and unique Arctic reactor. After further questioning, they will be executed, of course. But from our interrogations, we know there are at least two others still free.’ Fradkov paused. ‘Those we’ve captured are being questioned twenty-four hours a day. There will be little left of them before they’re shot.’