“Do not turn back, no matter what happens,” they told him. They’d give him five minutes, then head out the south vestibule—the one through which Clay had entered this nightmare.
Five minutes passed like an hour. The air was so thick with expectation and fear and excitement and terror that Clay wanted to scream in order to cut through it — if only so that he could breathe.
Moving through the unlocked cluster doors, Clay and Volkhov tiptoed as silently as they could manage. All went well and they passed through the final door and turned to the right and Clay could see that the Tank’s door was open but the light was off and he assumed that Vasily had successfully removed the backpack.
Listening for a moment, they heard no sounds and that was a good sign because it meant that Vasily had made it outside without the guards being alerted or suspicious.
Clay and Volkhov had agreed that when they heard the lock in the inner door snap and when the door started to open outward, they would rush through the door and do their best to overwhelm the guard. There was supposed to be only one man standing guard, but he would be armed. Clay and Volkhov looked at each other with a shared agreement that they would see each other on the other side.
It was very dark and the overhead emergency lights provided little assistance, but the darkness should give them cover. Clay wondered for a moment about the mechanics of his body, how he should hold his voice out, just so, in order that his much smaller body could emit the same force of sound as the huge beast of a man.
He stepped to the door and felt the urgency in his belly. He cleared his throat silently and swallowed.
When they were ready and in place, Clay knocked on the door and with an authoritative voice commanded the guard to open up. He thought he did a pretty good job of it. He looked at Volkhov in the dim light and could see that the old man’s head was nodding approval.
The outer door opened and they heard the guard grunt and then they heard the key slip into the lock on the inner door, but then the sound stopped.
“Who is it?” the voice asked in heavily accented English, “say again who it is!”
“It’s Vladimir Nikitich, stupid! Open the damn door!”
They heard the grunt again and then the lock turned and the door began to pull outward and that is when they rushed through the door.
Clay slammed through the portal violently and felt the guard collapse into the vestibule wall as the door unexpectedly hit him across the face. He felt Volkhov rushing behind him, clasping on to the thin fabric of his prison jumper, and he saw the faint outline of the stunned guard with the machine pistol and he rushed him and put his hand on the gun, pushing it downward as he brought the full force of his body crushing downward against the darkened figure.
He was surprised when the guard recovered so quickly, and he felt the gun being ripped from his hand and a booted foot came upward and caught him in the chest and he was brutally kicked across the vestibule. He expected bullets to rip into his body at any moment, but Volkhov had responded like a man half his age and he crashed into the guard before he could raise the gun. With both hands the old man grappled with the gun and his head turned toward Clay, who had regained his feet…
The old man shouted “GO!” at the top of his lungs.
Time, in such moments, telescopes outward. Every moment, every motion becomes an infinity, an eternity. The reasons before you and behind you come into sharp focus in your being and you know what it is you are made of. Such moments are, perhaps above any other moments in one’s life, clarifying.
Clay was able to see in the darkness and he rushed forward to help Volkhov but it was too late and the gun fired and both Volkhov and the guard crashed to the ground.
Clay froze and heard Volkhov yell “GO!” again. This time it was weaker, less in bravery than in finality. He immediately knew that he did not want to waste the man’s sacrifice, and he pushed his way out the outer door and began to sprint along the south wall of the prison.
His right hand brushed lightly along the wall and the cold gripped him and he realized he was just in his prison garb. He could feel the cold assaulting his fingers through the cracks in the bricks where the mortar lines had crumbled and were now filled with flaking snow.
The gun fired again and when Clay looked back he saw the guard was backing out of the outer door and Clay felt himself sprinting as fast as he could run through the snow and down the gentle incline that led to the fence line. He lost one of his slip-on shoes in the snow, and then the other came off, and he fell down in a small snowdrift, but he clawed his way back up and kept running. He could see his breath rush out of his body like a spirit.
He ran for his life.
He broke towards where he knew the gap would be in the fence and was now running across the open field, struggling in his bare feet through the snow and from this point on things could only be called ‘surreal.’ He saw what looked like huge gray balloons floating all around him toward the ground and though he was confused he picked up his speed and looked over his shoulder to see if the guard was gaining on him.
He didn’t see the guard coming and thought perhaps that he had made it, and he ran toward the grey balloons floating beautifully out of the sky and he listened intently in the distance for a gunshot. But he didn’t hear any.
He didn’t hear any gunshots.
When he came up over the last rise where he expected to see the fallen trees, he noticed that there were no trees at all. He ran toward the nothingness. In fact, any clue that would tell him that the storm had destroyed any section of the fence at all was now gone completely. The fence that stood now was shiny and new, and the ground was disturbed around it evidencing the new construction, then his vision of the new fence was obscured by one of the gray balloons and then another and another.
Clay Richter stopped and stared in the middle of the pristine field of glowing snow and watched the forms fall downward in the crisp moonlight. His eyes focused intently on the billowing orbs as they hung in the sky and just gently swayed in the reflective glow of the nighttime. They contrasted sharply with the clear, black sky, filling up with air and glow from the snow’s bright light. They were beautiful and wondrous… and then Clay realized what they were.
Parachutes.
As he watched one of them down while it fell silently through the cold, he realized that hanging from the bottom of the round parachute was a paratrooper with a rifle.
His heart raced, and then he knew he was saved.
Clay ran in the direction of one of the men, waving his arms like a drowning man in the sea of snow. Collapsing into a snow bank, he struggled to move on all fours, shouting that he was an American and that he had been captured by escapees from the prison. Rising to his feet he stumbled forward thinking that the man was too far away for him to see Clay clearly, but the soldier looked around and noticed him, anyway. He heard the sound of Clay’s yelling and he started toward him, raising his weapon as he did.
What’s going on? Clay struggled in his mind to ask that question. Then he suddenly realized they could not know who he really was because he was wearing prison garb. They could not know him.
He put his hands above his head and dropped to his knees. He showed them he meant no harm. He repeated his story loudly as a soldier walked across the snow toward him. Another was making his way through the distance and Clay could almost see them, could almost read their faces.