Robert Harris - Archangel

'Fuel's low. I'd say we've got about fifteen minutes.' 'Then what?'

'Either we head back to Archangel, or we go on and try to find some place to stay the night.'

'Oh, what? You mean a Holiday Inn?' 'Fluke, Fluke -'

'Listen, if we try to stay the night here, we'll end up staying the winter.'

'Oh, come on, man, they have to send a snow plough, don't they? Surely? At some point?'

'At some point?' repeated Kelso. He shook his head. And there would have been another row if, just then, they hadn't rounded a curve and seen, above the snow-topped trees, a smudge of smoke.

O'Brien stood in the doorway of the Toyota, leaning on the roof, staring ahead through his binoculars. It looked as if there might be a settlement of some sort, he said, about half a mile off the road, along a rough track.

He slipped back behind the wheel. 'Let's take a look.' The passage through the trees was like a tunnel, barely wide enough for a single vehicle, and O'Brian drove down it slowly. The branches clawed at them, slapping the windscreen, raking the sides of the car. The track worsened. They rocked sharply - hard left, hard right - and suddenly the Toyota plunged forwards and Kelso was thrown at the windscreen; only the seat belt saved him. The engine revved helplessly for a second, then stalled.

O'Brian turned the ignition, put the car into reverse and cautiously pressed the accelerator. The back wheels whined in the loose snow. He tried it again, harder. A howl like an animal trapped.

'Get out, could you, Fluke? Take a look.' He couldn't quite keep the edge of panic out of his voice.

Kelso had to push hard even to open the door. He jumped out and immediately sank up to his knees. The drift was axle-deep.

He banged on the back door and gestured to O'Brian to switch off the engine.

In the silence he could hear the snowflakes pattering in the trees. His knees were wet and cold. He trod awkwardly, bowlegged, through the deep drift round to the driver's door and had to dig away the snow with his gloved hands before he could drag it open. The Toyota was tilted forwards at an angle of at least twenty degrees. O'Brian struggled out.

'What'd we hit?' he demanded. He waded round to the front of the car. 'Jesus, it's like someone's dug a tank-trap. Will you look at this?'

It was indeed as if a trench had been laid across the track. A few paces further on the snow became more solid again.

'Maybe they were laying a cable or something,' said Kelso. But a cable for what? He cupped his hands above his eyes and stared through the snow towards the huddle of wooden huts about three hundred yards ahead. They didn't look as though they were connected to electricity, or to anything else. He noticed that the smoke had disappeared.

'Someone's put that fire out.

'We're gonna need a tow.' O'Brian gave the side of the Toyota a gloomy kick. 'Heap of junk.'

He held on to the car for support and edged round to the back, opened it up and pulled out a couple of pairs of boots, one of green rubber, the other of leather, high-sided, army-issue. He threw the rubber boots to Kelso. 'Get these on,' he said. 'Let's go parley with the natives.

Five minutes later, their hoods up, the car locked, and each with a pair of binoculars hung round his neck, they set off down the track.

The settlement had been abandoned for at least a couple of years. The handful of wooden shacks had been ransacked. Rubbish poked through the snow - rusting sheets of corrugated tin roofing, shattered window frames, rotting planks, a torn fishing net, bottles, tin cans, a holed rowing boat, bits of machinery, ripped sacking and, bizarrely, a row of cinema seats. A timber-framed greenhouse fitted with polythene instead of glass had blown over on to its side.

Kelso ducked his head into one of the derelict buildings. It was roofless, freezing. It stank of animal excreta.

As he came out O'Brian caught his eye and shrugged.

Kelso stared towards the edge of the clearing. 'What's that over there?'

Both men raised their binoculars and trained them on what appeared to be a row of wooden crosses, half-hidden by the trees - Russian crosses, with three pairs of arms: short at the top, longer in the centre, and slanted downwards, left to right, at the bottom.

'Oh, that's marvellous,' said Kelso, trying to laugh. 'A cemetery. That's bloody perfect.'

'Let's take a look,' said O'Brian.

He set off eagerly with long, determined strides. Kelso, more reluctant, followed as best he could. Twenty years of cigarettes and Scotch seemed to have convened a protest meeting in his heart and lungs. He was sweating with the effort of moving through the snow. He had a pain in his side.

It was a cemetery right enough, sheltered by the trees, and as they came closer he could see six - or was it eight? - graves, arranged in twos, with a little wooden fence around each pair. The crosses were home-made but well done, with white enamel name-plates and small photographs covered in glass, in the traditional Russian manner. A. I. Sumbatov, read the first one, 22.1.20 - 9.8.81. The picture showed a man, in middle age, in uniform. Next to him was P J. Sumbatova, 61.2.26 - 14.11.92. She, too, was in uniform: a heavy-faced woman with a severe central parting. Next to them were tk~e Yezhovs. And next to the Yezhovs, the Golubs. They were married couples, all about the same age. They were all in uniform. T. Y Golub had been the first to die, in 1961. It was impossible to see his face. It had been scratched out.

'This must be the place,' said O'Brian, quietly. 'No question. This is it. Who are they all, Fluke? Army?'

'No.' Kelso shook his head slowly. 'The uniform is NKVD, I think. And here, look. Look at this.'

It was the final pair of graves, the ones furthest from the clearing, set slightly apart from the others. They had been the last survivors. B. D. Chizhikov - a major, by the look of his insignia - 19.2.19 - 9.3.96 And next to him M G. C'hizhikova, 16.4.24 – 16.3.96 She had outlasted her husband by exactly one week. Her face was also obliterated.

They stood like mourners for a while: silent, their heads bowed.

'And then there were none,' murmured O'Brian.

'Or one.’

'I don't think so. No way. This place has been empty quite a while. Shit,' he said suddenly, and took a kick at the snow, 'would you believe it, after all that? We missed him?'

The trees were thick here. It was impossible to see beyond a few dozen yards.

O'Brian said, 'I'd better get a shot of this while it's light. You wait here. I'll go back to the car.'

'Oh, great,' said Kelso. 'Thank you.'

'Scared, Fluke?'

'What do you think?'

'Whoo,' said O'Brian. He raised his arms and fluttered his fingers above his head.

'If you try playing any jokes, O'Brian, I'm warning you, I'll kill you.

'Ho ho ho,' said O'Brian, moving away towards the track. 'Ho ho ho.' He disappeared beyond the trees. Kelso heard his stupid laugh for a few more seconds and then there was silence -just the rustle of the snow and the sound of his own breathing.

My God, what a set-up this was, just look at these dates: they were a story in themselves. He walked back to the first grave, pulled off his gloves, took out his notebook. Then he went down on one knee and began to copy the details from the crosses. An entire troop of bodyguards had been dispatched into the forest more than forty years earlier to protect one solitary baby boy, and all of them had stuck it out, had stayed at their posts, out of loyalty or habit or fear, until eventually they had dropped down dead, one after another. They were like those Japanese soldiers who stayed hidden in the jungle, unaware that the war was over.

He began to wonder how close Mikhail Safanov might have managed to get in the spring of 1953, and then he consciously abandoned this line of thought. It didn't bear contemplating - not yet; not here.