‘The rifles…’ muttered Haglund.
‘Excess weight,’ said Purkiss. ‘They stay behind.’
The three of them made their halting way to the spot Purkiss had identified.
‘You first, Patricia,’ he said. ‘I’ll support Gunnar.’
Clement hesitated a second before grasping the rock face.
They reached the top in, by Purkiss’s estimation, thirty minutes.
Purkiss kept close behind Haglund, reaching out to steady him each time his boot scrabbled loose from a foothold or his weakened left arm failed to find purchase, aware that if the big Swede were to lose his grip entirely he’d plummet backwards and take Purkiss with him and Clement would be entirely on her own. At one point Haglund stopped, didn’t reply when Purkiss called urgently to him, and it seemed he was on the point of blacking out. But he muttered something inaudible, perhaps a curse, and resumed his ascent.
Purkiss watched Clement, several metres above, scramble over the top of the ridge. She let out a sound he couldn’t interpret, and for a moment he closed his eyes. There was a ravine on the other side, probably, or some other obstacle.
He shoved Haglund over the rim of rock and hauled himself up.
The ridge dropped a short distance beyond to the edge of a plain that swept towards the horizon, its surfaced pocked with clumps of scrub and trees and rocks. Cutting across it, veering from the left and extending at a slight angle ahead, its surface glassed with ice, was a road.
Resisting the urge to run, Purkiss instead supported Haglund once more and led them down the slope on to the plain. They reached the road in ten faltering strides, the potholed tarmac surface feeling impossibly alien under Purkiss’s feet, like that of another planet. With his free hand he fumbled the compass from his pocket. The road led off at twenty degrees from the direction in which they were heading. Nonetheless, he thought it would be worth following for some distance at least, until it threatened to take them too far off course. They might be lucky and encounter a civilian vehicle, perhaps even one from Saburov-Kennedy Station.
Wordlessly, side by side, they began to make their way down the road.
Without the snowmobile’s odometer, Purkiss had no way of knowing how much distance they had covered. He estimated they’d gone three kilometres, though it was probably less, when Haglund staggered and fell before Purkiss could catch him.
Purkiss knelt beside him. ‘Gunnar. On your feet.’
This time he knew the man had lost consciousness for a second or two. He opened his eyes, stared at Purkiss uncomprehendingly.
‘On your feet. Keep moving.’
Haglund rose, let out a roar he didn’t attempt to suppress.
He can’t go on much longer, thought Purkiss.
He began to count their paces. After two hundred-odd, Clement said, ‘Look.’
To the right, a vague shaped loomed in the darkness. They advanced. It was a building of some kind, with objects in front of it that Purkiss took a moment to recognise as fuel pumps.
A filling station.
His hopes up, he said, ‘Wait here,’ lowered Haglund to the tarmac, and went over. As he got nearer, his spirits dropped. The station was derelict, its wall and roof completely caved in. Every visible metal surface was brown with an icing of rust.
Next to the remains of the main building he saw a smaller structure, its walls still standing but its door gone. Purkiss peered inside. A garage, housing a pick-up truck of some kind that looked like a relic from Soviet days. It squatted on wheels that were completely flat, and its framework too was a lattice of rust. Apart from a few oil barrels that had been cut in half to form rudimentary storage containers, and an assortment of tools and machine parts and lengths of flex, he found nothing of the remotest use.
Purkiss returned to the others, hoisting Haglund to his feet without giving him a chance to object.
A little more than three hundred paces on, Haglund fell for the last time.
He struggled to get up, but dropped back. ‘It’s not… the pain,’ he gasped. ‘Just… can’t use my leg at all.’
Purkiss stood looking down at him.
After a beat, Haglund said: ‘You kept the handgun?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then use it.’
Purkiss ignored him, staring back down the road the way they’d come.
‘Farmer.’ He felt Haglund grasp his ankle. ‘Do it.’
‘Shut up,’ said Purkiss, pulling his foot free. ‘I have an idea.’ To Clement: ‘You know how to use a gun?’
Her eyes were wide behind the goggles. ‘You’re asking me to —?’
‘No. Not him.’ Purkiss took out the Beretta pocket pistol he’d removed from Budian. ‘Stay with him. I’m going back to the fuel station. I’ll be back quickly, but in the mean time fire this if anyone hostile approaches.’
He began to make his way back down the road, disturbed at how leaden his limbs felt, how sluggishly his thoughts moved.
In the garage Purkiss tipped the odds and ends out of one of the half barrels. He tested its strength between its hands. Like everything else it was rusted, but it felt solid enough. He selected a long rope of flex from the mess on the floor and again gauged its strength. With a screwdriver he punched several holes into one end of the half barrel; then, looping the flex through the holes several times, he tied its end.
Hauling the makeshift sledge behind him, Purkiss headed back to the other two.
To Haglund he said, ‘Think you’ll be able to climb in?’
Haglund’s eyes had been closed. He opened them, looked at the barrel.
‘You can’t do it,’ he rasped. ‘Too… heavy.’
‘You’re getting in this bloody barrel if I have to knock you unconscious first,’ said Purkiss. ‘It’ll just make life a lot harder that way.’
With Clement supporting Haglund’s legs, they manoeuvred him in. His feet protruded almost comically over the edge.
Purkiss wound the free end of the flex around his waist, his chest, harnessing himself as securely as he could. He heaved.
The strain was immense, far greater than he’d expected, and for a moment he wondered if agllund was right, that this was an impossible task. Purkiss leaned forward, grasped the taut flex in his hands, and felt the load behind him inch forwards.
‘Come on,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘It’s the end game now.’
Thirty-three
As the cold tightened its band and the fatigue began to replace his bones and his muscles and his sinews with stone, Purkiss felt his mind retreat, dissociating itself from the body that housed it and was betraying it.
His last conscious thought for some time was that they’d gone far enough down the road, that it was taking them at too great an angle from their destination, and that they needed to step onto the tundra once more. He jerked his head at Clement and angled leftward, feeling the roughness beneath his boots once again.
After that, the madness started to creep in.
First came Kendrick, Purkiss’s friend who’d been shot in the head the previous summer. He’d lived, and months of rehabilitation had restored him to almost full mobility, but mentally he was… different. He strolled across the windblasted ground out of the darkness, his hands in his pockets, dressed impossibly in nothing more than a T-shirt and jeans and a bomber jacket.
‘Purkiss, what the fuck are you doing?’
The scar on his forehead where he’d had the reconstructive plate and the skin graft, together with his lopsided grin, made him look piratical.
‘A cripple and an older bird. They’re slowing you down. Dead weight. Cut them loose and get your sorry arse out of there.’