The smoke climbed, the flames tickled, the heat breathed over him. Behind Adimov, Holly slept on.
Adimov lay on the ground and the warmth of the small flames was like a narcotic. If his boots were dried then, perhaps, he could manage to walk again through the night.
He leaned forward to take his feet in his hands and rubbed them and chafed the white skin. The smoke from the wood played at his nostrils, the odour was sapping and softening.
There were many thoughts in Adimov's mind… of a wife bedded down with cancer… of a woman outside a bank and crossing a road. .. of a tobacco store abandoned in a prison h u t… of punishment cells and loss of privilege… of the smile that would break on the pained cheeks of a woman in sickness. He would walk through the night for that smile. And across the hut, Holly's regular breathing comforted Adimov. His hand settled on another plank, dusty and dry in its rottenness, and he twisted to drop it into the heart of the fire, and his head sagged to the crook of his arm.
Holly already sleeping, and Adimov now asleep, and the fire bright and the smoke crawling towards the clouds from the doorway of a farm hut.
Like a kestrel that alternately hovers and then surges forward at speed, the helicopter ranged over the map co-ordinates that had been issued to its crew. The side-doors behind the fliers had been removed and on each flank of the helicopter sat a machine-gunner with a mounted armament, protected from the cold by electrically heated flying suits.
They flew low, the altitude needle bouncing on either side of the zoo-metre marker on the dial, and the cloud was a ceiling just above them that the pilot avoided. It was hard for them to see any great distance ahead or sideways because the further they looked then the more obscure was the greying mist of evening and darkness. The men in the helicopter placed little trust in the searchlight with which they were now equipped. Any search for fugitives was enough of a pin in a stack operation, but to rely on a narrow cone of light when daylight vision had failed was to hope for the miraculous.
Beneath them was the snow carpet, a vanishing expanse which played tricks on the eyes. The railway line was their marker-guide, and they had used its dark river slash as a reference to be married to the map that was folded under a plastic cover on the thigh of the second pilot.
The pilot of the helicopter was not required to make his own decisions on areas of search. The earphones in his flying cap carried the instructions that he must follow. He was aware of a growing frustration in the staccato commands that he was given by the Signals Officer who controlled him from Barashevo.
He was very young, the pilot, fifty days past his twenty-second birthday. He had been born six years after the death of Joseph Stalin but he knew little of the camps that were Stalin's legacy, except that it was necessary to find a suitable place for the minority scum who were parasites on the State.
He barely thought of the two men hiding somewhere beneath him. He sought only to find them, before darkness negated his efforts.
The helicopter hovered. The second pilot pointed to the map with a fur-gloved finger, indicated their position. The pilot acknowledged, switched the button for his mouth transmitter.
'Area C… east of the track. Nothing. Over…'
There was the stamp of static in his earphones, then the distortion of a mechanical voice.
'Hold your position for further instructions… '
The helicopter yawed, the wind tossed through the thunder of the rotor-blades. There were occasional snow flurries across the perspex, and the wipers smeared the pilots' vision ahead. The second pilot did not speak because he knew that the young man beside him was waiting, concentrating, for the new instructions. But he tugged at his arm, and when he had achieved attention he pointed ahead to the blurred horizon where mist and snow were mingled.
Something there. Something trickling upwards from the vague outline that might be a snow-sheltered hut.
The pilot nodded.
'Command… I have smoke, approximately two kilometres, ahead. I think there is a hut there… '
'Give your position.' A keener note to the voice in his ears.
'Over the railway track, eight kilometres north from Barashevo.'
'Wait.'
Didn't the buggers know the light was half gone?
'For your information, we have no record of an occupied dwelling close to the line and approximately ten kilometres north from Barashevo. Investigate.'
The engine roared forward, a great camouflaged bird of prey racing from the darkness of the cloud ceiling.
He was dreaming.
The same repetitious dream that led to the same tunnel, the same crevice. Always the setting was the ground-floor flat, her clothes on the bedroom floor, her sink in the kitchen filled with unwashed saucepans, her wanting to take in a film when he had arranged to go to Hampton Wick. Piffling excuses for a row. And when he tidied her clothes, and washed her saucepans, and cancelled his arrangements, then she would scream at him. His only weapon against her scream was morose quiet, and that was the catalyst that raised her voice. The dream always ended with her in full cry.
The scream had become a thunder. As if when she screamed the very ceiling fell on her. A crashing, heaving fall about her as she screamed.
Holly woke.
As he opened his eyes, the scream was cut. Not the thunder.
Thunder filled the hut, and smoke too, and there was a spread of light across the doorway of the hut. Short stabs of light.
Bastard helicopter.
Between Holly and the fire, Adimov sat confused.
'You lit a fire, you lit a bloody fire.' i was cold…' The defence of a trapped child.
'You've brought the helicopter.'
The flames were fanned by the down blast, singed his face as he charged the doorway with Adimov following.
Through the barrier of flame, through a hiss of fire. He felt the down draught of the rotors and his forage cap was torn from his head and billowed away in cartwheels towards the hiding place of the knife.
The helicopter coming down, seeking to squash him as a toad would a spider.
'My boots… my socks… they're in the hut…' Adimov was holding back, trying to wrench himself clear of Holly's hold. Knowing the futility of what he did, Holly bent his back and worked Adimov's arms around his neck. With his own hands he pulled up Adimov around his hips. Holly giving Adimov a piggy-back ride, as if they were part of a children's carnival. He looked up at the blackness of the helicopter's belly, just once he looked up. He reached the railway track, and where the snow was thinly spread he was able to muster the imitation of a run. A slow trot.
God, he was making good sport for them. A man running with his fellow on his back, and in pursuit was a helicopter with a ground-speed capability of 175 kph. Will they shoot?
No warning if they fire. Don't look up, Holly… get it over, you bastards. He thought of Angela, crying in the flat. He thought of Millet, laughing as he went from his seat to go back to the bar. He thought of two old people in a terraced house at Hampton Wick, who would draw their curtains and put a kettle on the stove and weep only when they were ready to give each other strength…
Get it over, you bastards
Above the thunder came the shrill crack of the gunfire.
Holly saw the pattern line of impact in front of him, he heard the singing ricochets from the chip-stones. No man can run into gunfire… there was a man who ran at the wire
… God, he wanted to live, and his legs refused him.