Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘But you are not remaining here. You come from Mirgorod, and only the weather detains you. Correct? So your destination is where?’

‘We are going north along the coast,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Garshal. We leave tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. There is no hurry. Not until the storm blows through.’

The gendarme held out his hand.

‘Papers,’ he said.

‘The logs and registration documents are in the plane. If you want to—’ Gretskaya began, but the gendarme cut her off impatiently.

‘My concern is with persons only. Personal identification. Documents of travel.’

Gretskaya handed over her passport. Florian and Lom followed suit. The gendarme looked through them slowly and carefully, page by page. Then he put all three in the back pocket of his trousers.

‘Hey!’ said Gretskaya.

‘I have certain enquiries to make concerning these documents,’ said the gendarme. ‘Confirmations I intend to seek. You may collect them from the gendarmerie tomorrow, in the afternoon, and until then you will remain in Slensk. This will be convenient for you, no doubt,’ he said to Lom. ‘You will have more time to pursue your commercial interests.’

‘That decides it,’ said Florian. ‘We have to leave now, straight away, and not for Garshal but east.’

‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It’s not a flight to try at night, even without bad weather. Not without a navigator. The only sure way is to follow the river. If we lost the river–it’s a wilderness: no features, no landmarks–we’d circle till the fuel ran out, and if we had to go down, no one would come to look for us. No one would know where we went. It would take us weeks to walk out of there.’

‘If it’s a matter of additional payment…’

‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Not that. Anyway, why the hurry? We’ve got till tomorrow afternoon.’

Florian shook his head. ‘He could send a wire tonight,’ he said. ‘He could be on the telephone now.’

‘Who’s he going to call to check out a passport?’ said Lom. ‘The Lodka’s not open for business, not any more. Anyway, he’s not waiting for ID confirmation.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Gretskaya.

‘How many gendarmes are there in a place like Slensk? Two or three at the most. My guess is he’s on his own. And he’s worried about us. He didn’t buy our story and he didn’t like the odds, so he’s calling for help. Reinforcements. Only he knows nobody can get here before tomorrow. Fuck, he’s almost begging us to run.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Gretskaya.

Florian looked at Lom. ‘Let him decide,’ he said.

Lom emptied his balzam glass. The liquid seared his throat and left his mouth dry and rough. He didn’t need to think. Somewhere Chazia’s train was rolling north towards Novaya Zima with Maroussia and the Pollandore. It was a race, and nothing else mattered, and the train was moving, and they were not. At the thought of Chazia, Lom felt a tight surge of anger and purposeful violence. The iron aftertaste of angel stuff mixed with the balzam. There would be a reckoning there.

‘We leave,’ said Lom. ‘We leave now.’

Gretskaya poured another tumbler of Ligas Balzam, drank it down, and tucked the bottle inside her sheepskin jacket.

‘Then let’s go,’ she said.

In the war against his own people Colonel-General Rizhin’s weapons were of necessity crude. When Chazia evacuated the Lodka and removed or destroyed the intelligence files it contained, she decapitated, at least so far as Mirgorod was concerned, the system of informers and secret police that had held the Vlast solid for four hundred years. Rizhin took a more direct approach. It suited him better. He declared martial law. A curfew. Looters and stockpilers were to be summarily shot. Citizens were conscripted to worker battalions and assigned their tasks, and shirkers were shot. If there were no shirkers, some people were to be shot anyway, the weakest and least capable. What mattered was that people were shot.

Spies and saboteurs were captured and their confessions led to further arrests. In quarters where dissent was strongest, collective measures were taken. Reprisals. The citizens of Mirgorod, the newspapers reported, were shocked at the extent of the enemy’s penetration of their city and glad that Rizhin was there, relentless and vigilant, to protect them.

Against the enemy without, he ordered concentric circles of defence to be thrown together. Twenty miles out from the centre of the Mirgorod, Rizhin’s labour armies of women and children raised earth-works with their bare hands, excavating trenches and tank ditches, building breastworks and redoubts, laying barbed wire and mines even as the Archipelago air force strafed and bombed them. They carried away their own dead, and buried them when and where they could.

The outer ring of defence was expected to delay but not stop the advance. Rizhin’s main focus was on preparing the streets of the city itself for the fighting to come. He ordered that all the bridges should be wired with explosives. Machine-gun nests were to be built on high roofs and towers, the blocks around them demolished to provide clear fields of fire. Artillery and anti-aircraft batteries appeared in the parks and squares of the city. Air raid shelters were to be dug and public buildings camouflaged. The Armoury spire was painted grey.

Residents came out to barricade every street with anything to hand: tramcars and overturned carts were pushed across the roads and filled with earth, building rubble, gravestones uprooted from the necropolis gardens. Street nameplates and road signs were removed. All maps, street plans and guidebooks to the city were confiscated, and anyone found with one after that was arrested. Summary execution. Every house and apartment was prepared to be its own fortress. Its own last stand. Strips of paper were stuck across windows to prevent shattering and splinters. Attics were filled with sand. In every office barrels filled with water stood ready, along with spades and beaters and boxes of sand.

Barrage balloons drifted low and pale and fat, their cables invisible against the sky. And every day the beleaguered citizens of Mirgorod waited for the Vlast’s own air force to appear overhead. They looked up, expecting and then hoping to see Hammerheads and Murnauviks scattered across the sky, twisting, buzzing, deadly; stinging the lumbering, triple-bellied Archipelago craft out of the air. But the air force of the Vlast did not come. It was delayed elsewhere. After the first attacks on the city, the Archipelago’s bombers arrived alone: their fighter escorts no longer bothered to waste fuel by coming along for the ride.

All night and all day Rizhin worked. He planned, he terrorised, he cajoled. He did what he could, but he knew it would not be enough. He needed soldiers. Armies. Guns and tanks and aircraft and ships. And these he did not have. Not enough.

The armour of the Archipelago rolled through the unfinished outer defensive line in a dozen, twenty places, moving fast, and behind the heavy tanks came massed motorised infantry in half-tracked carriers and on motorbikes. Radio operators. Artillery tractors. Rocket trucks. Engineers to rebuild roads and bridges and lay out airfields and telephone cables. And following along behind them, more slowly but in unstoppable numbers, came columns of horse hauling supply wagons, field guns and four-ton mitrailleuses. Cavalry regiments. Division after division of foot soldiers marching.

At certain points, randomly, the armies of the Vlast attempted to make a stand. Men and women in their thousands advanced on the enemy at walking pace. Rifles and bayonets against tanks, artillery and machine guns. Wave after wave the men and women of the Vlast came on, the later waves slowing to pick their way across shell craters and over the mounded corpses of the dead. The attacks faltered, faded, resumed, hour after hour until the machine guns of the Archipelago were too hot to handle and their operators were depressed and sickened by the tedious, grinding slaughter. The awful noise of it dulled their hearing and frayed their nerves. The freezing air was clotted with the stink of hot metal and oil, mud and piss and the leakage of ripped-up and burst-open human bodies. Some of the Vlast infantry reached the enemy: they fought with bayonets and knives when their pocketful of bullets was gone.