Two.
Opened them again to look across the camp under the tall floodlights.
One.
To look across at the shape of the huge diesel generator as the hand of the tin clock moved to zero and the sky was lit with a blinding flash and a moment later there came the shuddering whoof and the whole camp was blacked out and we began running for the wall of the thousand-foot massif.
23 : OVERHANG
I drove the piton into the seam and tested it with the rope but it pulled down at an angle and I drove it in harder, tested it, found it good and hauled up.
From three hundred feet the camp was lit with fireflies as emergency lamps came on. Flames still reddened the sky from the generator's diesel fuel, and black smoke rolled in waves between the huts.
Snow drifted past us from the east side of the massif, more heavily now, shrouding the moon, giving us a smoke screen on the face of the rock, which was miraculously free of too much ice.
'Haul up,' I called down to Marius, and felt the rope grow taut.
I'd got the half-Mongolian smithy in the forge to make me twelve pitons two days ago, adapting them from pit gear and grinding four of them into bird beaks in case we needed them. Of course we'd need them; we'd need a lot of other gear – hooks, friends, ice screws, pulleys, bolts, jumars – but all we'd got was what we could get, just the pitons, some crude carabiners, two broad-faced hammers, and two weighted picks made from rusty steel – the ones we used all day were impossible to take from the pits; they were counted whenever we knocked off. The rope had been easier to get away with from the stores, hemp, 12 mm, recently delivered, no fraying in it.
Andrei had made the pitons and the picks for me at the forge. He was massive, seven feet high, all muscle.
'From the city?' I'd asked him. His great oval face dripped with sweat.
'I am from the city, yes.'
'You've got people there? Relatives?'
'My mother.' He leaned on his five-foot hammer, watching me, his eyes crimson from the heat, an animal smell coming from his goat-hide apron.
'She okay?'
'She is okay. She is an old woman now. Why do you ask me?'
'I've been managing to get some mail through,' I said, 'to the city.'
'You must have friends.'
'Right. I need you to do a bit of metalwork for me, Andrei.'
'I've got enough work.' He turned aside and spat, then wiped his face with the rag he kept in his apron.
'I could let your mother have some money.'
'You haven't got any money.'
'I'd have it sent to her through my friends in the city.'
'How much?'
Sparks flew suddenly from a coal.
'A thousand US dollars.'
Andrei's eyes narrowed. 'That is a lot of money.'
'Yes.'
'A lot of work.'
'No. You've also got to say nothing about this.'
He tilted his great head, sighting me along his nose. In a moment, 'Very well. I say nothing. A thousand dollars. But must be paid in rubles. People will try and steal from her.'
'In rubles, then. She can find somewhere to hide them.'
Drips hung from the end of his hooked nose, like tiny rubies in the light of the forge. 'Under the bed.'
'No. I'll get my friends to show her better places than that. Leave it to me, Andrei. No one will steal from your mother. Just tell me where she lives.'
That day he began work on the twelve pitons.
I could hear Marius now, hauling up from below, his breathing audible, too audible, Christ, we'd only just started.
'You want to rest?'
He thought before he answered, didn't want to say yes because of his pride, so he compromised: 'Maybe for sixty seconds.'
'Don't rush it.' In the wind I heard his pick clinking against the granite. 'And don't drop anything.' Eventually the guards would search the terrain below the massif. They would search everywhere.
There was a lot of noise going on below us now: the klaxon horns still sounding the alarm, the dogs barking, engines starting up, the PA system relaying orders to the guards as the big gates swung open in the far distance and three snow tractors rolled through it with their headlights sweeping across the snow. Beyond the west side of the camp I could see shadows moving and the glint of eyes in the lamplight as the wolf pack watched the confusion for a while and then began loping away.
'Marius?'
'I'm ready.'
I adjusted Alex's lamp on my forehead, where I'd strapped it with a strip of canvas, and hauled up on the pick and searched for the next seam in the granite, the next sound piece of ice, rejecting three or four tricky placements before I was satisfied and drove a piton in and slung the rope, testing it, finding it good, cutting a step in the ice and hauling up.
'When you're ready!' I called to Marius, and felt the rope tighten.
Four hundred feet, as a rough estimate.
'Five minutes' rest.'
Marius didn't answer, was out of breath again, and I secured the line for him. A few feet below me, he was half-covered in snow from the east wind as I was, not looking up at me, hanging with his head down, his brow resting against the rock face, could have been dozing, praying, I couldn't tell and I wasn't worried: he was safe enough on the line.
The camp looked pretty now, a Christmas scene, with the torches lighting the snow as the search continued among the huts. The klaxons were silent at last but the dogs were still baying, freed by their handlers to work the terrain, could have been given the scent already: after the explosion and the resulting blackout the huts would have been ringed with guards called out for the emergency, and a general roll call could have been ordered at once as a precaution.
Dmitri Berinov, Hut nineteen. Missing.
Marius Antanov, alias Nikolai Parek, Hut twelve. Missing.
The rope felt good under my hands, the rope and the pitons and the rock face and the near-darkness. Here we were safe. Here was the difference between freedom and the closing in of the war-trained pit-bulls, their jaws ready to maul if their handlers couldn't call them off in time, the wolf pack circling outside the wire if we'd ever managed to climb it, the first search vehicles arriving just in time to drag us back to the camp still alive, then the orders issued in the morning for the head-shaving and the shackling before we were held down across the vaulting horse in the gym for twelve lashes as a preliminary to being thrown into the solitary confinement cellars still bleeding and with rations of black bread and stale water for two months, three, until the commandant was satisfied that the message was understood by the rest of the prisoners: this is Gulanka, and there is no escape.