He kissed her cheek. ‘ Lydia, I am not Alexei’s father.’
Chang would not give up. He’d find her. Or die. There was no middle path. He called her name without ceasing but the flames swallowed his words. The smoke suffocated life. He could feel it dying in his own lungs and his fear for Lydia tore his heart into pieces.
The gods had warned him. They’d sent him the omen but he had refused to listen to any words but hers. He’d let her come over the wall with him and now he was paying for not heeding the murmur of the gods, for not keeping a balance of desires. He could live – or die – with that, but he could not bear that she should die for it too.
He called out. He roared her name into the fire and the flames roared back at him, their laughter in every crackle and explosion that they spat in his face. He could see nothing beyond the inferno towering around him, whichever direction he turned, and quite suddenly he realised he was looking with the wrong sense. Eyes could lie and confuse and panic. So he closed them. He stood totally still and exhaled the poisons from his lungs.
He listened for her again. But this time he listened with his heart.
Lydia knew her hair was on fire. Jens was no longer moving on her back. As she stepped forward, one painfully slow foot after the other, she refused to let her knees buckle even though, for all she knew, Jens could be ablaze too. Her mind no longer functioned properly. Control of her limbs had ceased and her lungs were shutting down. She couldn’t scream if she wanted to. How she was still on her feet and pushing through a tunnel of flame and smoke that never seemed to end, she had no idea. It occurred to her briefly that she was dead and that this was hell.
Chang, my love, I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say I love you. The thought expanded and filled her whole mind, so that when she heard his voice she didn’t know whether it came from inside or outside her head. But hands were lifting her father from her back and a strong familiar arm encircled her waist, supporting her. Even if she were dead and in hell’s torment for the whole of eternity, she didn’t care because Chang An Lo was at her side.
The final moments became a blur and she felt herself trembling uncontrollably. Big paws were knocking her head from side to side and the burning on her scalp stopped. Dimly she caught a glimpse of an eyepatch and heard someone laugh. Laugh? How could they laugh if they were dead?
‘You were supposed to stay on the other side of the wall,’ Chang said to someone. ‘You’re sick.’
‘I was bored. You can’t have all the fun.’
It was Popkov’s booming voice and the filthy smell of his overcoat covering her. She saw him drape Jens over his great shoulder like a doll and, without knowing how, she found herself on Chang’s back. She laid her head against his and tried to inhale but all she got was thick, choking smoke. She coughed, vomited, and felt herself slide down into a black hole so deep and so suffocating, she knew she would never claw her way back up.
Alexei watched the hangar turn into a fireball. It transformed the compound into shrieking, screaming chaos. The darkness was gripped by writhing shadows as the flames tore loose and the noise was deafening.
Figures hurtled towards the burning building, black and jerky in their panic, while others were racing away from it as though a pack of wolves was at their heels. Alexei threw the NAMI-1 into gear and drove at full speed straight for the hangar. To hell with anyone in his way. The heat hit him from twenty metres out and it struck so hard it was like driving into a wall.
He saw them coming, Chang and Popkov. Bursting out of the side of the hangar where half the wall was gone. What the hell were they doing here? Wasn’t Popkov wounded? Then he saw something on Chang’s back and realised with a shock that it was Lydia. Another figure with white hair lay across the big Cossack’s shoulder. It had to be Jens. He slewed the car round and gunned it towards the blackened figures, fully visible to all in the glare of the flames, but afterwards Alexei could not recall which came first: the shot or the explosion. They seemed to occur at the same moment, yet in his mind it was the shot that lingered, the sharp crack of a rifle ringing for ever in his ears.
They were still more than five metres from him. Silhouetted and defenceless. The shot came from the side, from a soldier whose adrenalin was running high, too high for him to keep a steady hand on his rifle. He’d aimed at Chang who was several paces ahead of Popkov, but he hit Lydia. Alexei saw her body jerk on Chang’s back, then hang lifeless, her hands flapping loose as he ran.
Alexei’s heart stopped. That was when he registered the other sound, a dull boom that reverberated inside his head like a roll of thunder. The stench of fumes burned in his nostrils and a part of his mind recognised them – a petrol drum had exploded. But all his eyes saw was the wall, the way it moved. What remained of the side of the hangar, with all its heavy structural timbers and solid planking on fire, blasted away from the building. For one second it seemed to hang in the air, choosing its victims, then came rushing down towards Chang and Popkov.
Alexei stamped on the pedal. The car flung itself forward in one final effort and Chang hurled Lydia and himself inside it as the wall crashed around them. The windscreen exploded. The canvas roof split as a blazing beam tore through it and embedded itself in the empty rear seat. Sparks and flaming debris rained down on the bonnet.
‘Jens!’ Alexei shouted.
Beside him on the passenger seat, clutching Lydia as if he would never release her again in this lifetime, Chang murmured, ‘Popkov.’
Alexei leapt from the NAMI-1 and he found them both. Popkov was half hidden under the car’s axle where the blast had thrown him. The chassis had protected him except for a long gash on the back of his leg. Amid the flames Alexei discovered Jens’ body. His head was half severed, his chest and limbs crushed under a flaming mass of timbers. His hair was smouldering. Another rifle bullet slammed into the side of the car and voices shouted, yet Alexei couldn’t move. He gazed down at his dead father’s mutilated face and couldn’t walk away. Not like this. Don’t let it end like this, Papa. He didn’t even feel the next bullet graze his ear.
It was Popkov who moved him. Physically picked him up, dumped him in the driver’s seat of the car and wrenched out the blazing beam from the rear seat. Seconds later Alexei was speeding towards the entrance gate with his three passengers crammed in the back. When the sentry challenged him, he swore viciously at the soldier and waved Dmitri’s papers under his nose.
‘Get out of my way, you fool. I have to report this incompetence to Colonel Tursenov immediately.’
‘Da, Colonel, da.’
The gate swung back and the forest opened before them. He drove only until the compound was out of sight and then stamped on the brakes, swivelling round in his seat.
‘How is she?’ he asked.
Chang didn’t reply, but he was crooning softly and it sounded like a death lament. In the corner the big Cossack sat hunched and silent, tears streaming down his blackened face.
55
‘Don’t die.’
From somewhere far, far above, the words drifted down to her. Like the tiniest flakes of snow that melt to nothing the moment they touch your skin. But these words weren’t soft.
‘Don’t die, my love.’
It’s too late. Can’t you see? I’m already dead.
There was no pain, no thoughts, no desires, no colours, just a nothingness. A hollow void. But if being dead was this, just nothing, what was the point of all the effort of life? And what happened to the future she had planned? Did it still exist? Would it go on unfolding without her? An image of Chang slid into the void inside her, Chang An Lo going on, taking himself a Chinese wife and having bright-eyed Communist children. All without her. Would he weep? Would he remember? The strange thing was that even in death her heart wanted him to be happy.