‘What about the others?’ Sini asks the lawyer.
‘They are going to jail tonight.’
Alex Harris is handcuffed in her holding cell then led down a staircase and outside to a waiting avtozak. She’s pushed into a little wardrobe cell. She can barely move. She shouts out to see if there’s anyone else around. Some of the guys shout back, they’re in the van with her. It pulls away and as it turns a corner her face is pressed against the cold metal wall.
They drive for twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, before the van comes to an abrupt stop. The engine falls silent. She can hear dogs barking, doors slamming, voices shouting in Russian. She stares at her shoes and draws a deep breath. A powerful current of fear is running through her body, making her heels bounce and her lungs tighten. ‘It’s okay,’ she whispers to herself. ‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’
And then the door opens and she’s led out of the van, followed by the others. They look around and see a dark sky, spotlights sweeping over the ground, high walls surrounding them on three sides, rolls of razor wire.
They’re in the reception area of a converted mental asylum. It’s the region’s main isolation prison. Murmansk SIZO-1.
Alex is led through a courtyard. In the darkness she can make out the shapes of people at the windows. Russian prisoners. She doesn’t know if they’re crazy but it sounds like they’re crazy because they’re screaming into the night. She turns to Camila. ‘Well, this is home,’ she says and laughs nervously, but sheer panic is coursing through her body.
Just behind them are Kieron and Phil. The activists are in a three-sided courtyard with four floors, fifteen windows across each wall. The bars on the windows aren’t straight and the windows aren’t quite square, and there are ropes hanging down the brickwork, connecting them horizontally and vertically. The ground is littered with sheets of beaten corrugated tin that have fallen from the roof. There are tall weeds growing through gaps in the pavement. The guards prod them forward. A spotlight is following them, casting shadows on the ground in front.
Camila looks back and sees the expression on Kieron’s face. ‘Hey,’ she says, ‘it’s going to be okay. We’ll survive this.’ Kieron tries to smile back at her, but he’s not thinking it’s going to be okay. Kieron’s thinking this is a nightmare, this is hell on earth, and he doesn’t know how he’s going to survive this place. The air is filled with shouting and screaming, but he doesn’t know what the prisoners are saying. The cries are guttural, something close to animalistic, and they’re coming from the windows, from the throats of women and men. The activists hear the word ‘Greenpeace’ shouted a few times, which means the Russians know they’re coming. And Kieron’s asking himself what they’re saying before they scream that word. Like maybe it’s, ‘Let’s fucking kill the people from…’
They’re marched past a basketball court, down the inside of a fence topped with razor wire and through a doorway. They’re inside now. A guard grips one of Alex’s wrists and flicks a handcuff over it then spins her around, yanks an arm behind her back and cuffs the other wrist. She’s marched down a corridor as far as the last door, where the handcuffs are removed and she’s pushed inside a tiny room. A woman is standing opposite her. She’s huge, there’s only just space in here for the two of them. The ceiling is pink and the walls are covered with mirrors.
‘Knickers down.’
Alex stares back at her. The woman is wearing a crisp blue uniform, hair pulled back into a tight bun below a peaked cap, cheeks pooled into a huge neck, no jaw to speak of, a mouth so small and tight it looks like the valve on a beachball.
‘Knickers down!’
‘Seriously?’
‘Knickers.’
‘What?’
‘Down!’
Alex closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and pulls down her jeans then her knickers. Slowly, tentatively, Alex squats, steadying herself by holding her hands against the walls. Her palms squeak as they slip on the mirrored glass. Awkwardly, with laboured breaths, the guard lowers her broad form until she’s on her knees. She’s right next to Alex now, bringing her face down, lower and lower, her breaths getting louder until she can look up and inside her.
‘Okay, knickers on.’
Alex is taken to the room next door and handed a mug, a bowl, a spoon, a tiny rolled-up mattress and a sheet. She’s led back down the same corridor, around a corner and up a staircase. The guard stops her outside a solid metal door, slides a key into the lock, turns it and pushes. And Alex is presented with a room that’s two metres by five metres with steel bunk beds that are fixed to the wall. It’s green, very green, nothing else in there except a sink and a toilet. She steps forward. The door slams behind her.
Two minutes later Camila is stood outside a cell door on the same corridor, shivering, clutching her bedding. The guard opens the door, and Camila is expecting Alex to be in there. But the cell is empty. All she has is her blanket, her cup, her spoon and her jacket. The door closes. She’s alone. She makes the bed, sits down on it and stares at the wall. She’s not scared. She’s furious. The investigators, the guards, the judge. It’s all bullshit. She scrunches up the blanket in her fists and kicks the floor.
On the corridor above her, Phil Ball is being strip-searched. He pulls out the insoles of his boots to show the guard there’s nothing in there. That way the guy won’t look more closely, he thinks. He has to surrender his shoelaces then he’s led down the corridor with Po-Paul and Kieron. The guard stops him outside one door, Kieron outside the next one along, then Po-Paul outside the door after that. They’re looking at each other with an expression that says, oh shit, so we’re not being held together. Then the guards pull open the doors and a cloud of cigarette smoke rolls into the hallway. Kieron is pushed into the cloud and the door bangs shut behind him. Through the haze of smoke he can see two pairs of eyes staring at him. There’s a young guy sitting on a bed and a man standing in the middle of the cell.
Kieron is twenty-nine years old, a former journalist at The Times newspaper in London. He’s tall, broad-shouldered and wears black rectangular glasses. He didn’t join the ship to protest against Arctic oil drilling, though he’s sympathetic to the campaign. Instead, he wanted to make a film about people willing to risk jail for a cause. But now he finds himself in prison.
Silence.
Kieron draws a breath but the smoke catches the back of his throat and he coughs. The man takes a step forward, Kieron takes a step back. The guy is wearing tracksuit bottoms and a white vest, his arms are thick and hard, he has close-cropped hair, a flat nose, a heavy gold chain nestling in dense chest hair. He says something in Russian, Kieron raises his shoulders, a shrug that says he doesn’t understand.
‘You no Russian?’
Kieron hugs the mattress to his chest. ‘No.’
‘What is your name?’
‘I’m… I’m Kieron.’
‘Kay-roon?’
‘Kieron. Keer-an.’
‘I am Ivan.’
‘Ivan.’
‘Yes, Ivan. Where you from?’
‘London.’
‘London.’ The guy nods. ‘Cool, cool.’
Kieron shuffles backwards.
‘Why you here?’
‘I’m a journalist. I was on a ship. You know Greenpeace? I was on…’
And in one movement the man’s face lights up, he spins around and lurches towards the window before shouting into the night, but the only word Kieron recognises is ‘Greenpeace’.
What the hell is he doing? Christ, thinks Kieron, he’s boasting to his friends that he’s got a foreign cellmate, that’s what he’s doing. Oh Jesus. He’s telling them he’s got one of the foreigners, he’s telling them what he’s going to do to me.