Robert Harris - Archangel

Left-right, left-right - the living banner, kicking up the snow -Suvorin didn't dare look at him an instant longer. He knew that if he did he would never move.

'Why is your face so shifty, comrade?' called the advancing figure. 'Why can't you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?'

Suvorin swung the barrel of the RP46, his memory toiling back twenty years, to his compulsory army training, shivering on some godforsaken range on the outskirts of Vitebsk. 'Cock gun by pulling operating handle to the rear. Pull rear sight base to the rear and lift cover. Lay belt, open side up, on the feed plate so that the leading round contacts the cartridge stop and close cover. Pull trigger and gun willfire. .

He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and the machine gun jumped in his hands, sending a couple of dozen bullets sawing into a birch tree at a range of twenty yards.

When he dared to check the track again Comrade Stalin had disappeared.

IF Suvorin's memory served him right, the ammunition belt of the RP46 carried 250 rounds, which the gun would dispatch at a rate of, say, 600 rounds per minute. So, given he'd already used a few, he probably had something less than thirty seconds of firepower with which to cover 360 degrees of track and forest, with night coming on and the temperature plunging to a level that would kill him in a couple of hours.

He had to get out of the open, that was for sure. He couldn't keep on like this, scrambling round and round like tethered goat in a tiger shoot, trying to see through the gloom of the trees.

He seemed to remember some abandoned wooden huts at the far end of the track. They might provide a bit of cover. He needed to get his back against a wall somewhere, needed time to think.

A wolf howled in the forest.

He disconnected the machine gun from the bipod and hoisted the long barrel up on to his shoulder, the ammunition belt heavy on his arm, his knees almost buckling under the weight, his feet sinking deeper into the snow.

The full-throated howling came again. It was not a wolf’s all, he thought. It was a man - a man's exultant shout: a blood cry.

He started wading up the track, away from the burning snow plough, and he sensed that there was someone walking parallel with him through the trees, keeping an easy pace, laughing at his ponderous attempt at flight. He was being played with, that was all. He would be allowed to get within a few paces of his destination, then he would be shot.

He came out of the neck of the track and into the abandoned settlement and headed for the nearest wooden building. The windows were out, the door had gone, half the roof was missing, it stank. He put down the gun and crawled into the corner, then turned and dragged the weapon after him. He wedged himself against the wall and pointed the barrel at the door, his finger on the trigger.

KELSO heard the big explosion, gunfire, a long pause, and then the short and heavy clatter of a much bigger weapon opening up. He and O'Brian were on their feet by now, frantically trying to find some way of cutting the rope that bound them to the stove chimney. Each sound from the forest drove them to more desperate efforts. The thin plastic was digging into his wrists, his fingers were slippery with blood.

There was blood on the Russian, too, when he appeared in the doorway. Kelso saw it as he came towards them, unsheathing his knife - smeared across his face, on his forehead and on either cheek, like a hunter who had dipped himself in his kill.

'Comrades,' he reported, 'we are dizzy with success. Three are dead. Only one still lives. Are there more?'

'More coming.

'How many more?'

'Fifty,' said Kelso. 'A hundred.' He tugged against the rope. 'Comrade, we must get clear of this place, or they will kill us all. Even you cannot stop so many. They are going to send an army.

ACCORDING to Suvorin's watch, about fifteen minutes had elapsed.

The temperature was plunging as the light faded. His body began to vibrate with the cold - a steady, violent shaking he couldn't stop.

'Come on,' he whispered. 'Come on and finish the job.' But nobody came.

Comrade Stalin's capacity for springing surprises was truly endless.

THE next thing Suvorin heard was a distant click, followed by a whirr.

Click-whirr. Click-whirr.

Now what was he doing?

Suvorin found it hard to move at first. The frost had locked his joints and starched his wet clothes to board. Still, he was on his feet in time to hear the mysterious click-whirr turn suddenly into a cough and then a roar as an engine started.

No, no, not an engine exactly: a motor - an outboard motor- He was baffled for a moment, but then he realised. Fifteen miles, major. It's right on the river. .

WELL, the RP46 didn't get any lighter, nor the snow any easier, and now he had the oncoming darkness to contend with, but he tried. He made a valiant effort.

'Bastard, bastard, bastard,' he chanted as he ran, following the pulse of the revving outboard as it led him through the fifty yards or so of trees that screened the deserted fishing settlement from the river.

He crashed through the last barrier of undergrowth and came out on to the crest of a bank that sloped down steeply to the water's edge. He stumbled along the ridge, heading upstream. Some pieces of electronic equipment lay spread out in the snow. Grey ice extended for a little distance and the black water rushed beyond his reach - an immensity of it: he couldn't see the trees on the opposite shore. And already the little boat was heading towards the centre, and turning now, carving a great white sickle of spray in the darkness. He could just make out three crouched figures. One seemed to be trying to struggle to his feet, but another pulled him down.

Suvorin dropped to his knees and unshouldered the machine gun, fumbling to close the cover on the ammunition belt, which promptly jammed. By the time he had it free and ready to fire the boat had rounded the curve of the river - and then he couldn't see it any more, he could only hear it.

He put down the gun and bent his head.

Beside him, like a space probe landed on some hostile p1anet~ the antenna of a satellite dish pointed low across the Dvina to the dissolving horizon. One set of cables connected the dish to a car battery. Another was linked to a small grey box labelled 'Transportable Video & Audio Transmission Terminal'. Even as he watched, a row of ten red zeros in a digital display winked at him briefly, faded and died.

He had an overwhelming sense of emptiness, squatting there, as if some malevolent force had erupted from this place and escaped for ever, a comet trailing darkness.

For perhaps half a minute he listened to the sound of the outboard motor and then that too was gone and he was left alone in the utter silence.

THE FIGURE SUVORIN had seen trying to rise in the boat was O'Brian - my gear!, he shouted, the tapes! - and the figure who had pulled him down was Kelso -forget the bloody gear, forget the tapes. For a moment the boat rocked dangerously, and the Russian cursed them both, and then O'Brian moaned and sat down quickly and put his head in his hands.

Kelso couldn't make out anyone on the shore as they roared away from it. All he could see was the sky pulsing red above the tips of the darkening firs where something big wa~ burning fiercely, and then very quickly a bend in the river obliterated even that and he was conscious only of speed - of the racket of the outboard motor and the rushing current hurtling them downstream through the forest.

He was thinking with great clarity now, everything else in his life irrelevant, everything narrowed to this one single point: survival. And it seemed to him that all that counted was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this spot. He didn't know how many men were left alive behind them, but the best he reckoned they could hope for was that a search party wouldn't set out till the morning. The worst scenario was that the blond-headed man had radioed for help and Archangel would already be sealed.