Kolchak's Gold (44 page)

The bottle of wine we'd put in the car a moment before they'd identified us from the checkpoint was still intact on the floor of the back seat. I drank a good part of it and gulped air in long drowning spasms. My face was stinging with thick fever-sweat that ran into my eyes and dripped off my nose.

I scrubbed my face with a cloth and it came away dark with half-scabbed patches of blood. I threw it down amid the broken glass where I had been sitting before; I cranked the starter and after a long time the engine caught, and I drove shakily up the way we'd come.

The car had no fuel gauge but I was sure there was at least a half tank. By the map it wasn't much more than a hundred kilometers to Batumi on the border. The tank hadn't been punctured and the engine was running as well as it had before—roughly, but turning. The car would do it if I could. But all South Russia was looking for me—looking for this car—and I was overcome by the futile certainty of failure while at the same time I knew there was nothing else but to keep going, pushing whatever luck I had left. Bukov had said,
I know you'd rather be a moving target.
Moving or dead; had that Skoda had a radio?

With shattering violence freshly implanted in my mind I drove the hill roads like an old woman, stopping at frequent intervals to question the map. The country became steadily more barren, vegetated by what in the States I would have taken for clumps of piñon and scrub oak and juniper. I was in the lower mountains with the Black Sea's floodplain down to my right, occasionally visible through notches in the hills; the roads were narrow dirt tracks, still muddy in low spots. If it hadn't been a Volkswagen it might not have got through some of them; I had to rock it out of the mud twice.

This was the border country between Georgia and Armenia and it was so sparsely inhabited that the map showed every farm cluster and hamlet as a town. It was possible to avoid them all by judiciously selecting secondary roads which crossed at junctions between settlements; but this took time and added miles. I passed only four or five moving vehicles in the course of the entire afternoon: they all gave me terror but they were local people, farmers and deliverers, and none challenged me. It is a country filled with fear of strangers and although they must have been curious about the battle-torn condition of my car they'd been conditioned by a brutal life to mind their own business.

It was not going to be possible to reach the border in time to go through the wire at twilight as Pudovkin had counseled. The next best time would be dawn, so I had the hours of the night to use; this being the case I knew it would be wisest to abandon the car somewhere on this side of Batumi. The car was more easily identifiable than I was. They were looking for two men in an old black Volkswagen; alone and on foot I'd have a better chance in the populated area. I'd have all night to walk it.

…. I found a rutted driveway that seemed long disused; I left the car there, far enough into the scrub to be invisible from the road. I took the suitcase and the map and walked, eating cheese, finishing the wine, clinging to the hem of hope.

Batumi has the weary look of dusty jaundice peculiar to arid bordertowns everywhere. The buildings are shabby stucco in faded pastel colors—tile roofs and splintered grey doors, filthy windowpanes and rammed-earth streets. Grimy people sit on the porches in the last of the day's warmth, drinking beer or smoking opium. Red slogans are daubed everywhere. The only vehicles I saw were the occasional small decrepit bus and now and then a military sort of police vehicle sliding among the town's lights.

It is a river-delta town and there are clumps of mossy trees. I stayed close to these, in deep shadow under the valedictory light of dusk. I judged it the best time to move through the town: people were still abroad. The suitcase was in my hand, tacky with sweat; every hundred feet or so I changed it to the other hand. My groin itched with fear but I kept moving.

Ahead of me a bus stopped and picked up two people who'd been sitting on a bench. It pulled away and I sat down on the bench to rest my legs. After a time I saw a fat woman approaching the bench; I got up and moved on.

It was quite warm at sea level. I walked with my open coat swaying behind me; I must have been an odd sight, a tall man in a flowing greatcoat with a suitcase, striding through this town of dark swarthy people.

Then I saw the border crossing—the barred gates and machine-gun towers, the road narrowing to a single lane between sentry windows. Even at this hour there was a little queue of trucks on either side of it. I turned sharply left and walked south through narrow streets with the lights fading behind me until I came to a crossroad that took me along to the dusty Leninakan highway. I was unused to hiking and my ankles were beginning to flop loosely; I had the rest of the night to make a few miles and so I took it unhurriedly.

Now and then the lights of a moving vehicle would warn me of its approach and I would step off the road until it had passed. Once it was a truckload of soldiers singing gustily in the night; the call of their voices rang long after they'd passed.

The river was somewhere just beyond the fence and the growth of trees was heavy except along the cuts that had been made for the road and the border. When the road went close under the guard towers I forked away from it to the left and stayed inside the trees, groping parallel to it until I was past. Searchlights on the towers made steady crisscrossing patterns like inverted air-raid lights, throwing tactile yellow beams through the warm river mists.

I made that entire journey in a state of mind that can best be described as invulnerable euphoria. I was in a kind of shock and not fully aware of the dangers. It was almost as if I were an explorer on an expedition through uncharted country: I was curious, I behaved rationally in avoiding unnecessary exposure, I moved along steadily to conserve my strength—but I had blocked from consciousness all true realization of the odds against me, the absurdity of my solitary pilgrimage, the fact that I was undoubtedly the target of one of the larger manhunts ever to have taken place in that forgotten corner of the world. Possibly it was this obliviousness which had saved me up till then: I had not roused suspicion by skulking stealthily through Batumi. I had walked through it like an interested tourist. Had I not been in shock I'd most likely have done something furtive enough to give myself away. It is one thing to know the spy's dictum—
Act naturally and everyone will assume you belong there
—and another thing entirely to do it without being paralyzed or galvanized by fear.

In the car with Pudovkin it had been different. Even in full chase we'd had each other's courage. There is a certain exhilaration in sharing risks; perhaps it is only childish
macho
but it not only had bound us together, it had prevented either of us from becoming fearful enough to think of surrender. Alone it is something else. You can be tempted to give yourself up merely for the sake of having the company of your captors. Solitary flight is the most harrowing of all because a social animal has few defenses against it. This sense of awful aloneness nibbled at the back of my mind but my strange oblivious catatonia defended me, prevented it from crowding everything else out of my spirit. I'm sure that was the only thing that kept me going.

Now, finding the culvert and knowing it was Pudovkin's because I could sight straight along the row of four trees, I saw freedom just beyond the barbed wire and felt certain I would make it. There was no alarm. The searchlights fanned across the fence in swift arcs, throwing surreal patterns that etched the thicket of branches in strange movement. Wind soughed in the trees and the thud of a diesel generator was a faint distant mutter in the night.

I moved forward along the line of four to within a hundred feet of the fence. Then I laid my coat and suitcase on the ground and sat down on the coat with my back to the bole of a swamp-maple sort of tree.

The searchlight was a good distance away—at least a couple of hundred yards to the right. It touched this point of fence and moved on a few more yards, intersecting the beam of the next light, then sweeping back across its arc. The light it threw was somewhat dissipated and considerably weaker than at points nearer the tower.

The towers stood above the treetops on wooden lattice structures; there were platforms halfway up and I'd seen similar towers in Germany. There would be a shoulder-wide hole in the platform and a rope ladder fixed to it. When the guard went up he drew the ladder up after him. It prevented insurgents from storming the platforms and taking over the machine guns. The tower would be manned by two sentries: one on the light and one on the gun. The range to this point in the fence was approximately two hundred yards from the tower to my right and nearly two hundred and fifty from the tower to my left. A machine gun is not precise at that range but of course if you throw enough bullets you have a good chance that one of them will hit whatever you're aiming at. These were probably Kalkashnikov guns with a high rate of fire.

The open cut between Russian trees and Turkish ones had been timbered off and bulldozed to weeds. It was about fifty yards wide, a swath with the fence running down its center. Pudovkin had suggested the main line of defense was the mine field; the fence was secondary but I had to remember that electrified top strand. The three-strand fence stood about a yard high or a little better on wooden posts set eight or ten feet apart. You had to run twenty or thirty yards, get through the lower gap in the fence, and cross another twenty-yard flat into the farther trees.

I timed the searchlight sweeps. They didn't work in unison; they didn't always cross each other because sometimes they were both moving in the same direction. It made the intervals impossible to time precisely.

Generally it seemed about thirty seconds from the time one light hit the end of its arc and the time it made a complete circuit to that point again. Since the light crossed this point in the fence twice at this end of its arc it meant there was about a twenty-five second dark interval—provided the second light was moving in a pattern directly opposite to that of the first. That coincidence seemed to take place every ten or twelve minutes.

I had several hours to make these calculations and I made them with cool aplomb. The insensate stupidity had not worn off.

It was a warm night but I shivered through it.

I made my plan on the basis of a shallow depression in the earth about eight feet this side of the fence. When the lights crossed the little hollow they left it in shadow. It was a few feet to one side of the straight line of the four trees and that meant it might contain a land mine and so I spent at least two hours working on alternative ideas but none of them worked; it kept coming back to that hollow because I wasn't going to have time to make the whole run in one go, not when I had to stop and get through the fence midway. The strands were less than a foot apart and you couldn't simply dive through them. I was going to have to make it in two runs and the only place I could stop was in that hollow. If there was a mine in it I wouldn't have to concern myself about getting through the fence.

At an ordinary walking pace you cover about five feet a second. Sprinting over short distances you can multiply that by four. If I ran full tilt I could reach the fence in four seconds, take seventeen seconds to get through the fence and still have four seconds to sprint to the far trees without being picked up by the light. But Pudovkin had pointed out the fallacy in that. The first thing they'd see—light or no light—would be a running figure. You had to move slowly.

Walking slowly it would take me at least fifteen seconds to reach the fence. That was why I had to use the depression.

Behind me the sky pinked up with heavy clouds: dusk, then dawn. Fear began to pump the sweat out of me now.

I had to wait for that moment when the searchlights were almost equaled by the growing daylight: when everything merged into a common murk.

The trees made a mosaic against the clouds. I left my coat on the ground; it would only impede me on the barbed wire. I picked up the suitcase.

Sky merged with earth along the uncertain eastern horizon. I turned away from it and faced the fence. The beams were no longer visible but you could still see the yellow disc of light sliding along the ground, growing parabolically longer as it approached the end of its swing. It was no longer distinct at the verges and I knew it was time to go; never mind the synchronization of the farther light.

Up on one knee. I'd studied the line all night; I'd memorized it. The only place I might hit a mine was the hollow. Reckless: the hell with it,
go.

The light swept past the hollow, faded, came back faintly. When it crossed the hollow again on its return sweep I walked out of the trees.

I moved low to the ground and slowly, very slowly, bent double with my breathing tight and shallow, my sphincter contracted, my palms damp, sweat running in my eyes. I kept looking both ways at the towers because if a light or a gun muzzle began to swing too fast my way I was going to run for it.

The cliché is that time slows to a crawl in such circumstances: that one's feet seem to drag leadenly, every lurching step is an agony of needle-pierced nerves, all the muscles are drawn so tight they twang with vibration and the impulse to break and run wildly is almost overpowering. The cliché is true. There is no way to remember it all clearly but it lasted subjective
hours.
I had the suitcase clutched to my chest as if it would shield me against bullets; I moved like a man about to retch—and I was ready to. Somewhere in my head a clock was at work and at hourly intervals I knew another second had passed—yet at the same time the instants raced by in such a blur that I knew I wouldn't nearly have time to reach the hollow before the lights came swinging back and the guns opened up.…

When the pale searchlight pinned me I was lying bolt still in the hollow because they would spot movement before anything else. I didn't stir—and the light moved on. There was no land mine, but I didn't even think of that until after I was belly-flat in the depression.