The fumes are affecting me, earlier than I expected. My head feels stuffed with cotton wool, and, like a dream, I see the tunnel ahead as the barrel of a gun, the rifling spiralling us along into a dark distance. I have an illusion I’m sliding forward, powerlessly pushed along by an invisible current: my head swims. My eyes are stinging, like vinegar on my eyeballs. I keep blinking, and try to focus on stepping carefully. “Follow Yuri, hold on to Mariam” I say to myself, over and over, like a mantra. But even my inner voice seems caught up into the current, moving me towards the blackness like a twig carried by a stream.
Behind Mariam, Axelson speaks again.
“The gases are affecting me, and probably all of us. We’re at risk of hallucinations, or even unconsciousness. Captain Sirko, is there an inspection hatch soon where we could get some air?”
“There’s one right here.” Yuri pushes at a dark space in the ceiling, I hear a hatch grinding as it rises, and suddenly there’s air in my nostrils. I feel like my head is being cleaned of dirty fuzz. We take it in turns to stand directly underneath the hatch. After a few minutes of recovery, we carry on along the pipe. Then after another ten minutes, Yuri lifts another hatch, and then we carry on; repeating and repeating. Soon, I feel like I’m walking on smoking coals, and my eyes burn in my head, but all any of us can do is keep walking to the next hatch: breathe deeply, then walk on again.
After an eternity, I hear the professor’s voice. “How long have we been going, Captain Sirko?”
“About two hours. At this pace, that’s maybe a mile.”
“How far to go?”
“Don’t ask.”
I try not to think about what is ahead. The oilfields will be guarded, I feel sure, by Ottoman soldiers. It’s possible there may be fighting there, and fires: indeed, the place might well be an inferno.
If we can get through that, our hope is to find a way out beyond the oil wells and down to a quieter part of the coast. In studying the local area, Yuri found out about several fishing hamlets within a few miles of the oilfields. If we can get to the shore before dawn, we may be able to find a fisherman’s boat and steal it. Then, it’s about a hundred miles along the coast to the border with Iran. But if escaping the oilfields takes longer, then we’ll have to lie low all day tomorrow. And all of us are half-covered in oil. I realise that, for us to survive, several things have to all go exactly right for us. Then I try to stop that thought, and just concentrate on stepping –
“Look!”
Yuri is holding up another hatch. But this time, instead of blackness through the gap, we see a red sky. Fire.
Yuri pulls himself up through the hatch, and hisses down at us. “We’re next to an oil derrick; the top of it is burning. We’d better get out of the pipe.”
I lift Mariam; Yuri takes her from my grasp, then lifts me too; the professor and Rufus follow me. We look around us. In the glow of the fire, I see Yuri smile grimly.
“When they draw pictures of Hell, it looks like this.”
He’s right. The livid light around us is blood-red. Here and there in the night sky, flames blaze at the top of derricks, crackling and leaping like demons. The air is roasting hot, and clouds of black soot billow past us. Yuri points his finger into the gloom.
“I think that is the way out of here.” A rough track leads forward among the forest of derricks.
“What’s that?” Despite the stinging soot, Mariam’s eyes are alert and watchful. She is pointing to something far ahead of us, something big. It’s standing on flat ground a hundred yards beyond the last of the derricks. And then, I hear the most welcome sound I can imagine.
Rufus is swearing.
In the lurid glow, we see a familiar shape. I suppose no-one, not the defenders or the attackers of Baku, knew how to fly it. Miraculously, it appears intact, exactly as we left it, sitting there on the runway.
“This is the damnedest luck ever! And the burning derricks – they light the airfield, like bloody broad daylight! Taking off will be easy. They’ve even left the rope ladder in place. But – I’ll still need to refuel, before I can fly her.”
We head over to the shed that we saw, all those weeks ago, when we landed. Sitting behind it are two large drums.
“Sirko, Prof – can you give me a hand to lift these and pour the fuel in?”
I look at Rufus. “We’ll all help. The more people lift the drums, the quicker we can refuel the aircraft. We need to move fast: there are probably Ottoman soldiers in the oilfields.”
Panting and puffing, we roll the fuel drums over the baked clay of the airfield to the plane. Even for five of us, the drums are heavy to lift, but we manage to hoist them up next to the airplane’s fuel intake. We hear the comforting glugging sound of pouring fuel. It’s a messy job: fuel spills over my arms, splashes my face and chest, but I don’t care. Now the second drum… and now, it’s nearly empty. The final gallons splash into our airplane’s fuel tank.
Like a punch, the drum is knocked from our hands. The clang in my ears is a bullet hitting metal.
“Leave it! Get in the plane!” Yuri’s shouting at us, and I hear the sliding bolt of the rifle that he took from the guard in the courthouse. He lifts the gun to his shoulder, and fires.
Rufus has climbed the rope ladder already; he’s clambering into the cockpit. I lift Mariam to him, and he bundles her into the space behind his pilot’s seat. I look up at the two of them. Their faces are oddly alike; pale in the night, edged with red light from the fires. I look into Mariam’s wondering eyes, her open mouth. I can’t tear my eyes away from her, and something snaps in my mind.
I see the dead children again.
My whole body feels awash with horror, and I feel my flesh surging with a hot, raw feeling that I’ve never known before. Rage against the murderers. I want to hurt them, kill them. I can feel my blood pumping, a brutal rhythm banging in my brain.
I still have the gun from the lake at Tri Tsarevny. I pull it out and hold it in front of me. It’s a mere useless decoy, of course. But in the light of the burning oilfields, I stand, pointing it in the direction of our unseen attackers. It’s like I’m watching myself; this mad woman who doesn’t care if she dies, who is making herself a target to distract our attackers, so the plane and its occupants can escape.
Holding the gun out in front of me, I start to walk across the open space of the airfield, in the direction of the gunfire.
Yuri fires again. He must be able to see the men who are shooting at us, because I hear a scream from the darkness below the derricks. He’s hit one of them. But now, I hear Yuri’s voice, yelling at me. I can almost feel the sound.
“Agnes, don’t be a fool! Get into the plane now! I’ll hold the soldiers off.”
The voice cuts through my trance; I come back to my senses. I just obey Yuri; I run back to the airplane, and grab the rope ladder. As I climb, Rufus clutches my elbows and drags me up into the seat beside Mariam. As he does, he hisses at me. “If you want to help, Agnes, then look after Mariam. She’s terrified.”
Yuri is still standing on the ground, rifle pointed out into the darkness. He holds the gun in one hand and with the other he reaches behind him, grasps one of the propellers and pushes it. I realise that the professor is standing on the other side of the plane, turning the other propeller. Then a bullet hole appears in the side of the cockpit.
“Oh my God!” It’s Rufus: the bullet has grazed his lower leg; he curses as he pulls out the throttle. But there’s a roar from the engines: we’re starting to move.
Another bullet whistles past my head. I see Axelson running, gripping the front edge of the wing, pulling himself up. Then I hear Yuri’s rifle barking again, and I hear him yelling abuse at our attackers. He’s doing it deliberately, I realise, to draw their fire. The airplane is huge, but it’s now a moving target; Yuri is a stationary one.