Brian Garfield - Kolchak's gold

This was the border country between Georgia and Armenia and it was so sparsely inhabited that the map showed every farm cluster and hamlet as a town. It was possible to avoid them all by judiciously selecting secondary roads which crossed at junctions between settlements; but this took time and added miles. I passed only four or five moving vehicles in the course of the entire afternoon: they all gave me terror but they were local people, farmers and deliverers, and none challenged me. It is a country filled with fear of strangers and although they must have been curious about the battle-torn condition of my car they’d been conditioned by a brutal life to mind their own business.

It was not going to be possible to reach the border in time to go through the wire at twilight as Pudovkin had counseled. The next best time would be dawn, so I had the hours of the night to use; this being the case I knew it would be wisest to abandon the car somewhere on this side of Batumi. The car was more easily identifiable than I was. They were looking for two men in an old black Volkswagen; alone and on foot I’d have a better chance in the populated area. I’d have all night to walk it.

…. I found a rutted driveway that seemed long disused; I left the car there, far enough into the scrub to be invisible from the road. I took the suitcase and the map and walked, eating cheese, finishing the wine, clinging to the hem of hope.

Batumi has the weary look of dusty jaundice peculiar to arid bordertowns everywhere. The buildings are shabby stucco in faded pastel colors-tile roofs and splintered grey doors, filthy windowpanes and rammed-earth streets. Grimy people sit on the porches in the last of the day’s warmth, drinking beer or smoking opium. Red slogans are daubed everywhere. The only vehicles I saw were the occasional small decrepit bus and now and then a military sort of police vehicle sliding among the town’s lights.

It is a river-delta town and there are clumps of mossy trees. I stayed close to these, in deep shadow under the valedictory light of dusk. I judged it the best time to move through the town: people were still abroad. The suitcase was in my hand, tacky with sweat; every hundred feet or so I changed it to the other hand. My groin itched with fear but I kept moving.

Ahead of me a bus stopped and picked up two people who’d been sitting on a bench. It pulled away and I sat down on the bench to rest my legs. After a time I saw a fat woman approaching the bench; I got up and moved on.

It was quite warm at sea level. I walked with my open coat swaying behind me; I must have been an odd sight, a tall man in a flowing greatcoat with a suitcase, striding through this town of dark swarthy people.

Then I saw the border crossing-the barred gates and machine-gun towers, the road narrowing to a single lane between sentry windows. Even at this hour there was a little queue of trucks on either side of it. I turned sharply left and walked south through narrow streets with the lights fading behind me until I came to a crossroad that took me along to the dusty Leninakan highway. I was unused to hiking and my ankles were beginning to flop loosely; I had the rest of the night to make a few miles and so I took it unhurriedly.

Now and then the lights of a moving vehicle would warn me of its approach and I would step off the road until it had passed. Once it was a truckload of soldiers singing gustily in the night; the call of their voices rang long after they’d passed.

The river was somewhere just beyond the fence and the growth of trees was heavy except along the cuts that had been made for the road and the border. When the road went close under the guard towers I forked away from it to the left and stayed inside the trees, groping parallel to it until I was past. Searchlights on the towers made steady crisscrossing patterns like inverted air-raid lights, throwing tactile yellow beams through the warm river mists.

I made that entire journey in a state of mind that can best be described as invulnerable euphoria. I was in a kind of shock and not fully aware of the dangers. It was almost as if I were an explorer on an expedition through uncharted country: I was curious, I behaved rationally in avoiding unnecessary exposure, I moved along steadily to conserve my strength-but I had blocked from consciousness all true realization of the odds against me, the absurdity of my solitary pilgrimage, the fact that I was undoubtedly the target of one of the larger manhunts ever to have taken place in that forgotten corner of the world. Possibly it was this obliviousness which had saved me up till then: I had not roused suspicion by skulking stealthily through Batumi. I had walked through it like an interested tourist. Had I not been in shock I’d most likely have done something furtive enough to give myself away. It is one thing to know the spy’s dictum- Act naturally and everyone will assume you belong there -and another thing entirely to do it without being paralyzed or galvanized by fear.

In the car with Pudovkin it had been different. Even in full chase we’d had each other’s courage. There is a certain exhilaration in sharing risks; perhaps it is only childish macho but it not only had bound us together, it had prevented either of us from becoming fearful enough to think of surrender. Alone it is something else. You can be tempted to give yourself up merely for the sake of having the company of your captors. Solitary flight is the most harrowing of all because a social animal has few defenses against it. This sense of awful aloneness nibbled at the back of my mind but my strange oblivious catatonia defended me, prevented it from crowding everything else out of my spirit. I’m sure that was the only thing that kept me going.

Now, finding the culvert and knowing it was Pudovkin’s because I could sight straight along the row of four trees, I saw freedom just beyond the barbed wire and felt certain I would make it. There was no alarm. The searchlights fanned across the fence in swift arcs, throwing surreal patterns that etched the thicket of branches in strange movement. Wind soughed in the trees and the thud of a diesel generator was a faint distant mutter in the night.

I moved forward along the line of four to within a hundred feet of the fence. Then I laid my coat and suitcase on the ground and sat down on the coat with my back to the bole of a swamp-maple sort of tree.

The searchlight was a good distance away-at least a couple of hundred yards to the right. It touched this point of fence and moved on a few more yards, intersecting the beam of the next light, then sweeping back across its arc. The light it threw was somewhat dissipated and considerably weaker than at points nearer the tower.

The towers stood above the treetops on wooden lattice structures; there were platforms halfway up and I’d seen similar towers in Germany. There would be a shoulder-wide hole in the platform and a rope ladder fixed to it. When the guard went up he drew the ladder up after him. It prevented insurgents from storming the platforms and taking over the machine guns. The tower would be manned by two sentries: one on the light and one on the gun. The range to this point in the fence was approximately two hundred yards from the tower to my right and nearly two hundred and fifty from the tower to my left. A machine gun is not precise at that range but of course if you throw enough bullets you have a good chance that one of them will hit whatever you’re aiming at. These were probably Kalkashnikov guns with a high rate of fire.

The open cut between Russian trees and Turkish ones had been timbered off and bulldozed to weeds. It was about fifty yards wide, a swath with the fence running down its center. Pudovkin had suggested the main line of defense was the mine field; the fence was secondary but I had to remember that electrified top strand. The three-strand fence stood about a yard high or a little better on wooden posts set eight or ten feet apart. You had to run twenty or thirty yards, get through the lower gap in the fence, and cross another twenty-yard flat into the farther trees.