“Mapped inside,” said Aleksandra. “How? By whom?”
Shargei didn’t answer her question. He asked one instead.
“Can you move through this tunnel?”
“Of course,” scoffed Aleksandra. “It is a little… roomier… than some of the sewers at Stalingrad. And not so long.”
“Show me,” said Shargei. “To Junction A, and then return. As fast as you can.”
He pushed back the sleeve of his greatcoat, and folded back the top of his glove, to reveal a gold Rolex. Undoubtedly the former property of a zek, or someone who never made it as far as a camp.
“It’s cold,” said Aleksandra, looking over to the twisting tunnels of the Replica. “Colder inside that steel, cork lining or not.”
“Don’t linger then,” said Shargei.
“I need grease. A thick layer on my torso. For the cold, not for slipperiness. Bear grease is best.”
Shargei nodded, gestured to one of the guards, who held out a large canister. It had a handwritten label “good grease”.
Aleksandra took the canister, forcing herself to glance away from the label. She recognised the handwriting, and had felt her heart leap, but she hoped that this had not shown on her face. Allowing someone like Shargei information was always a bad idea.
“I will need blankets, hot tea, and vodka as soon as I come out,” she said. “Or better, a sauna. And I’ll still need the tea and the vodka.”
“We have a sauna. It will be ready.”
“Tell your soldiers to turn around,” said Aleksandra. “Remember what I said about gawping.”
She didn’t actually care, but it was a way to exert control over the guards. Even the smallest victories could accumulate, become larger ones. If the guards got used to obeying her requests, it could become habit.
Shargei gestured, and the guards faced outward. Termin turned to the side, and looked at the ground. Shargei kept watching Aleksandra as she stripped quickly, opened the jar and slathered herself from knees to elbows with bear grease, afterwards wiping the stuff off her hands on the rocky ground, gritting them up.
It was cold, but nothing like the far eastern cold. Maybe only five or eight degrees below freezing.
“You said quickly,” she said, standing by the stepladder. “How quickly?”
“Sixteen minutes to get to Junction A and return,” said Shargei. “Or you are of no use to us. Slap the side when you reach the Junction, so I know you are there.”
He looked at his watch, waiting for the second hand on the smaller, inset dial to sweep around to the top, and said “Start now.”
Aleksandra did not rush. She climbed into the entrance, dislocating her right shoulder as she did so, undulating forward and pushing with her feet. The cork lining actually slowed her progress a little at first–she was unused to it–but soon she moved more swiftly, pausing to dislocate her left shoulder before the first turn.
She’d expected total darkness in the tunnel, but there was light. There were tiny pinholes drilled through the steel, which had been set with coloured glass, allowing the sunlight to enter. At first it was red, then a bit further on it changed to an orange hue, and then yellow.
Like a snake or an eel, she wriggled around the corkscrew turns. They were difficult, not like anything she had gone through before, but she did not allow herself any doubt. Her mind was thinking through the bigger situation, as she automatically twisted and writhed and edged forward.
What was the point of this place? What could it possibly be replicating? It made no sense as a sewer, or a building conduit. But it had to be something like that, some secret way in to a secure place, somewhere they wanted Aleksandra to infiltrate.
But Professor Termin had said it was not a shooting job. She was inclined to believe him, he seemed an innocent. A foolish innocent, unaware he too would undoubtedly be consumed by the beast he served. She would not trust Shargei’s word in any matter.
She slithered on, around and down and up, the cork-lined walls tight around her, but never so tight she could not go on. It would be harder to go backwards, but not impossible, and she presumed she would be able to turn around in the Junction A space. The size of the junctions wasn’t like anything she could think of either. Surge chambers in a stormwater drain? But the drain would not twist and turn as this tunnel was doing. Not that it mattered what the Replica was mimicking. She had no choice.
Go on. Try to stay alive.
Maybe something would change.
Stalin might die. Aleksandra might die. The Americans might drop lots of their new bombs…
Aleksandra popped out of the tunnel into the larger box that was Junction A, clicking her shoulders back in so she could use her arms to lower herself to the floor. The pinholes here had been set with blue glass, and there were more of them, so she could see clearly.
She slapped the walls on the left and right, hard. Even deadened by the cork, the sound echoed through the chamber and the tunnels, and would be clearly audible outside. A few seconds later she heard an answering knock, presumably from Shargei, the harsher sound of a pistol butt or something similar on the exterior steel.
Aleksandra looked back up at the tunnel where she’d come in, and saw there was something written on the cork just under the exit hole. In blood, with a forefinger, she guessed, though it was surprisingly neat.
It said “V.N.N.” and “Shargei is a cocksucking liar”.
“I knew that already,” whispered Aleksandra, smiling as she hoisted herself up and into the tunnel again, moving swiftly, because the cold was leeching her strength and suppleness, making it harder to do everything. Shargei might be a cocksucking liar, but he’d spoken truthfully about not lingering.
Aleksandra thought about “V.N.N.” as she squirmed towards real sunlight and the promised sauna, vodka and tea.
The initials had to mean Vladimir Nikolayevich Novitski. He was the master, the chief instructor in contortion and gymnastics at the Moscow Circus School where Aleksandra had trained from the age of six in 1933, until they were both swept up into the Red Army in late 1941. She’d only seen him once since then, very briefly, learning he’d been assigned to a tank unit, and seen lots of action. Small, extremely flexible people were useful in tanks. Aleksandra had almost become a T-34 driver herself, until her extreme natural ability for shooting people from very far away had been noticed.
It made sense that Vladimir Nikolayevich was the one who had mapped out the Original, whatever this Replica duplicated. But if so, where was he? If they had the master, why bring in the student?
Aleksandra had an unpleasant premonition she knew the reason. But she pushed it down, like so many other such forebodings. If you expected terrible things to have already happened to those you love, it was less of a blow when you found your expectations met… or horrifically exceeded.
She emerged from the Replica into bright sunlight, but it delivered little warmth. One of the women guards handed her a thick blanket, which she wrapped around herself, as she stepped into her felt boots. Her clothes were already tied up in a bundle, carried by another guard.
“Fourteen minutes,” said Shargei, folding his glove back over the Rolex and pulling down his greatcoat sleeve. “Sufficient. Escort Comrade Captain Levchenko to the sauna. She is to be issued vodka, one litre bottle.”
“And hot tea,” said Aleksandra. She had to grit her teeth to stop them chattering. The shivers she could control better, though her knuckles gripping the blanket ends were blue.