The advance towards the railway was made immediately after dark, with Paluchowicz and Makowski out on each flank as a special security patrol. The girl stayed close beside Smith while Kolemenos, Marchinkovas, Zaro and I fanned out a few yards ahead. It took us about an hour and a half to reach the screen of trees and we waited squatting on our haunches there for the two Poles on the flanks to edge their way in to us. They had seen nothing suspicious, they reported.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Marchinkovas will come ahead with me to the railway. The rest of you will follow on to the edge of the trees where you can see us and wait until we signal you on.’
The fence offered no difficulties. At the foot of the embankment there was a ditch. We climbed into and out of it. We crawled slowly up on to the tracks and lay there listening. I put my ear to the nearest metal rail. There was no sound. I stood up for a second, faced the trees and flapped my arms. I lay down again beside the Lithuanian and spent palpitating minutes awaiting the arrival of the rest of the party. Straining my ears for any warning sounds along the line, I heard every move of the approach of the others. I thought sickeningly they were making enough noise to be heard a mile away. It was the girl who came and crouched beside me. ‘All right?’ I whispered. ‘Yes.’ I looked round. Everybody was there. I looked across the shining steel rails and listened for a few more seconds.
‘Come on,’ I jerked my arm, jumped to my feet and leapt forward, taking Kristina with me by the elbow. There was an agitated scramble down the embankment on the far side and then we were running like crazy fools. We had covered about a hundred yards when someone shouted, his voice sharp with panic, ‘Down, down!’ I glanced over my shoulder and saw the lights of a passenger train. I dropped, pulling the girl down with me. We all went down and hugged the ground as the train thundered by. It had been a near thing. If anyone on the train had seen us I am quite sure we should have been ruthlessly hunted down.
The morning found us after hours of hard travel basking in sunshine on the secluded bank of a clear-water river. It teemed with fish, but we might as well have been onlookers at an aquarium because we knew no way of catching them. We lay about for a while and then Smith said he thought it better if we got over the other side as soon as possible. Unlike the rivers of the Baikal Range, the waters of this one moved slowly and were warm. The swim across was pleasantly refreshing.
The country on the south side of the river was fairly flat and gave us good cover. It was criss-crossed by shallow streams and it was at one of these a couple of mornings later that Kristina suddenly said, ‘I would like to wash my clothes.’ We all agreed it was an excellent idea. Kristina walked away from us down the stream carrying her shoes and splashing her feet in the water until she disappeared from sight. We stripped off and started our laundering. All of us were infested with lice and I derived a savage pleasure from holding my clothes under the rippling stream in the hope I could reduce the army of parasites which had lived on me for all these months. We beat our clothes with stones and then trod some of the filth out of them. A couple of hours passed while the sun dried our clothes as we washed ourselves and stretched out naked in the long grass. With a shock we heard the girl call a warning of her approach and dived for our trousers and just managed to scramble into them as she appeared.
Kristina looked as though she had been scrubbing herself. Her face was shining. She had been doing something to her hair, too. The chestnut tints glinted in the sun. She had contrived to persuade it into some kind of order and had carefully plaited the long ends. Keeping a straight face and holding herself erect like a dowager at a tea-party she greeted us. ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Were you expecting me?’ We all laughed at that and completed our dressing. And Mister Smith went away and picked a small posy of some pink flowers and gravely handed them to her. ‘You look beautiful, my child,’ he told her. Kristina smiled radiantly. It must have been one of her happiest days.
We were very near the border when we ran into the two Buryat Mongols. There was no avoiding the meeting. We saw one another at the same moment at a distance of not more than fifty yards and there was nothing to do but continue towards the pair. One was middle-aged, if one can judge the ages of these people, the other was definitely a young man. They could have been father and son. They stopped and waited for us to come up to them and grinned widely and nodded their heads. They bowed together as we came to a halt.
The conversation was embroidered and ornamented with politenesses and I took the pattern from them. They spoke slowly in Russian. They inquired solicitously whether our feet carried us well in our travels. I assured them our feet had carried us well and returned the inquiry. The older man was naively curious to know about us.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From the North — Yakutsk.’
‘And where do you travel to?’
‘We travel very far to the South.’
The old man looked shrewdly at me from beneath his wrinkled lids. ‘You go perhaps to Lhasa to pray.’
I thought that an excellent idea. ‘Yes,’ I replied.
But the old man hadn’t finished. He looked us over carefully. ‘Why do you have the woman with you?’
A bit of quick thinking here. ‘She has relatives who live on our way and we have promised to deliver her there.’
The two Mongols exchanged smiling glances as though approving of our protection for the girl on her journey. Then both dug their hands in their deep pockets and brought them into view clutching fistfuls of peanuts which they cheerfully handed round.
Each in turn wished us that our feet carried us well and safely to our destination. They turned away together and walked from us. We waited to see them out of sight. They had gone only a few yards when the old man turned back alone. He walked straight up to Kristina, bowed and gave her a handful of peanuts for herself. He repeated his good wishes to her and to us all and left us beaming goodwill.
When they had gone we set off at a fast pace. We were too near the frontier to take chances now.
14. Eight Enter Mongolia
PHASE ONE of the escape ended with the crossing of the Russo-Mongolian border at the end of the second week in June. It was notable for two circumstances — the ease of the crossing and the fact that we stepped out of the Buryat Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the Eastern Siberian Region of the U.S.S.R. with nearly a hundredweight of small early potatoes pulled out of a field only a few hours from the frontier. The timing of the potato field raid — at dawn on the day in which later we were to make our exit from Siberia — was particularly gratifying. I felt that, having gone into captivity with nothing, we were leaving with a valuable parting gift, even though the donors were unconscious of their generosity.
We reached the crossing point in late afternoon when dusk was deepened to premature darkness by massing black clouds heavy with rain. Far-off thunder rumbled like the uneasy mutterings of a troubled giant. The air was still, the atmosphere hot and oppressive. As far as the eye could see nothing moved. There was nothing to challenge our progress. The dividing line was marked by a nine-feet-tall red post surmounted by a round metal sign carrying the Soviet wheatsheaf, star, hammer and sickle emblems over a strip of Cyrillic initials. To east and west one more post was visible in each direction, so spaced in accordance with the contours of the country that an observer at any one post could always see two others.
I stepped round the post to see what might be inscribed on the other side of the plaque, but the reverse was blank. There was sudden laughter as Zaro called out, ‘What’s it like in Mongolia, Slav?’ He cavorted across to me with a hop, skip and a jump. The others followed with a rush. We pranced and danced, slapped one another on the back, pulled beards and shook hands. Kristina ran round, kissed each one of us in turn and cried with happiness and excitement. Mister Smith put a stop to the noisy rejoicings by pointedly swinging his potato-filled food sack on to his back and moving off. We ran after him, still laughing.