Gerald Seymour
Timebomb
For Gillian
Prologue
‘Come on, boys, put your backs into it,’ he rasped. ‘Show some life and push.’
But they wouldn’t have heard the anger, or the anxiety, in his voice.
It had been sluicing rain when they had started to move the cart and its load away from the bunker in Area 19. By the time they reached their destination, the sleet would have become a dense shower of snowflakes.
Three conscripts were at the back, gasping with the effort. Their boots slithered and slipped on the metalled surface where thin layers of ice had crusted. Himself, he had his shoulder on the right side of the cart. From there he could use his strength and guide it down the centre of the roadway towards the check-point. They had already passed through the gates in the wire that circled Area 19. In front of them was the entry and exit guard post to the Zone, and another half-kilometre ahead the main security post. Even he, Major Oleg Yashkin — and he had thirty-two years’ service with the 12th Directorate — was subject to the bitter cut of the cold in the gale. His uniform, of course, was of far better quality than those of the conscripts, and his greatcoat was heavier and thicker, but he, too, felt the brutality of the weather, coming from the north, sweeping down from the regions of Arkhangelsk or Novaya Zemlya or the Yamal peninsula. It was perfect for his purposes.
Not that he would show the three chosen conscripts that the cold affected him. He was an officer of status and experience, and to these three wretches he was a deity. He drove them on, his tongue lashing them when the speed of the cart sagged. He had chosen them with care. Three kids, none yet beyond their teenage years, none intelligent and able to question what was ordered of them — putty in his hands when he had come to their barracks hut and made the selection. He could reflect, as he strained against the cart, that the quality of the conscript kids was far below — in these times of chaos and confusion — what would have been tolerated in the 12th Directorate in the past, but standards for recruits were disappearing into the abyss … That, at least, suited him. These new times of chaos, confusion and betrayal were the source of his anger.
The cart slewed to the left, one of the kids tumbled over, and he had to wrench it back on course. Pain snapped in his shoulders and forearms, but it was merely a minor, irritating distraction from the anger that consumed him.
‘Come on, boys, concentrate. Work at it. Do I have to do it all myself?’
At the guard post was a barrier, chipped white paint highlighted by faint diagonal red lines. Another conscript came out of the hut and seemed to rock in the force of the gale. Inside, an NCO sat at a desk and showed no willingness to move into the teeth of the elements. Major Yashkin anticipated no problem, but anxiety lingered in him. It should not have. He had, after all, responsibility — six more days of it — for the perimeter security of Area 19 and the Zone. He commanded the troops, regulars and conscripts, who patrolled the fences and stood sentry on the gates. But anxiety gnawed in him because what he did that late afternoon, in a freezing sleet storm, was more than sufficient to cause him to face a closed, secret court-martial and be sentenced to death — a pistol shot to the back of the neck while kneeling in a prison yard.
At the barrier he told his conscript kids, his donkeys, to stop. Major Yashkin straightened to his full height, thrusting his medals’ strips into the sentry’s face, and accepted the salute. Beyond the grimed glass in the hut he saw that the NCO stood at attention. He did not have to, as a respected officer, but at least he had made the gesture. He went to the far side of the cart and lifted the protective covering, an olive green sheet of oiled plastic, shook the sleet from it and exposed the ends of two metal filing cabinets each laid lengthways. The sentry had little chance to observe that between them a smaller item was swaddled in black rubbish bags and fastened down with rope. The bar was raised. The NCO was now at the guard-post door: did the major need help? He declined the offer.
Two check-points were now behind him, one remained.
It was that sort of afternoon when the pulse of the huge installation had almost died. Physicists, technicians, engineers, chemists, troops of the 12th Directorate, managers, all those who contributed to the beat of the pulse, were gone to their homes if they did not have duties. The buildings on either side of the road were dark.
Twenty minutes later, the major, the three conscripts and the cart were through the outer gate. If the guards at the final barrier had demanded to search the cart, they would have found a canister, close to a metre in length and two-thirds of a metre in height and width, contained in a dull camouflaged protective bag that had stencilled on it ‘Batch No. RA-114’ in heavier type than the name of the mechanized-infantry unit to which it had been issued. As it was, they had seen only what was visible, the ends of two filing cabinets, and not the weapon, designated RA-114, which had been returned from Magdeburg as a front-line division packed, sent home its arsenal and stripped out its armoury from a base in eastern Germany.
The previous evening Oleg Yashkin had removed or amended the paperwork that existed around RA-114. He believed that unless a thorough search was made, RA-114 no longer existed and, in fact, had never been manufactured.
The afternoon had become evening. The sleet had become snow. The cart creaked through the suburbs of the city beyond the perimeter fence, its wheels gouging tram lines in its wake. They had left the road behind them and were on a track of rocks and stone chippings. Now he was close to his home. The cart was pushed past clumps of birch and pine trees, past small plots where families would grow vegetables after the thaw, past small houses from which dark smoke bustled out of chimneys to be dispersed in the increasing pitch of the snowstorm … If what he had taken out of the bunker in Area 19 had been smaller and more easily handled by a single man of his age, he could have carried it to one of the many holes in the fencing that now existed, where the alarms no longer functioned, and from where the patrols had been withdrawn because of troop shortages.
It was all chaos and confusion at Arzamas-16, the place that had no proper and historic name and went unmarked on any map covering the Nizhny Novgorod oblast. He had given his working life, his loyalty, his professionalism to that place. And for what? Major Oleg Yashkin did not see himself as a traitor, nor as a thief, but as a man wronged and betrayed.
His home was single-storey, built up from the foundations with bricks to waist height that gave way to an upper frame of stained wood planking. There was a low picket fence separating a handkerchief-sized front garden from the track. A dull light burned inside, where there was a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. It had been his home for eighteen years, since he and his wife — Mother, as he called her — had moved out from an apartment in a block inside the wire. For years now she had been ‘Mother’ to him, though they had not been blessed with children. She was not privy to what he had done that afternoon, with the help of the three young conscripts, but he had asked her specifically to cook apple cakes with the last fruit of the previous autumn’s harvest and to leave them in the small porch at the front of the house.
He had the kids unload the cart, take off the filing cabinets and the wrapped shape, then gave them the cakes. The following morning, back at his office inside the Zone, he would write the orders that would transfer each of them — with immediate effect — to duties closer to their homes and many hundreds of kilometres distant from Arzamas-16. Oleg Yashkin had had only four days to make his preparations, but the hours had not been wasted … In bed, that night, he would tell his wife — Mother — of the betrayal inflicted on him four days earlier.