He watched them push the cart away up the track and disappear into the whirlwind of the snow.
The filing cabinets were heavy, but he was able to drag them past his parked car, on which smoothed snow had settled, to the porch and to stack them on either side of it. Their usefulness was now over. Sweat trickled on his back, under his uniform clothing, as he heaved the wrapped shape, RA-114, round the side of his home to the plot at the back. In a wooden shed, he took off his greatcoat, tunic and trousers and hung them from nails. The cold clawed at him as he put on two sets of workman’s overalls, then lifted tools from more nails and went outside into the dusk. A mound of earth confronted him. The previous night his neighbour, who outranked him and was a zampolit in the community inside the fence, had called ‘What are you doing? You’ll disappear in there, Oleg. Is it your own grave …?’ He had been more than a metre down in the pit, and he had yelled back to the political officer a lie about a blocked drain. Then he had heard a gust of laughter, and ‘You shit too much, Oleg. Shit less and your drain will flow.’ He had heard a door close behind his neighbour. With a spade and a pickaxe he had dug till past midnight by the light of a hurricane lamp. Then he had scrambled out of the hole on his hands and knees, and washed in the kitchen. Mother had not asked why he had dug a pit in the night that was a full two metres deep.
He dragged the canister to the pit’s rim, paused, then put his boot against its side. It was a weapon. It would have been built to withstand being bumped and rocked across country in an army truck. He pressured the sole of his boot against it and it toppled into the black hole. He heard the squelch as it fell into the muddy pool from the earlier rain, but he could not see it and did not know how it lay — on its side, askew, on its end.
There was lead sheeting at the back of his home, strips of it, which had been there for weeks. He had planned to use it to repair the flashing around his home’s single chimney, but now he took the strips and laid them in the pit across the plastic sheeting that he could feel but not see. Then, laboriously, he began to throw back the earth, and cover what he had brought home.
He wanted to be finished by the time his wife came back, wanted it hidden. Inside the Zone, the name they had for the wrapped weapon was Zhukov. The fact that the weapon was called after Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, victor at Leningrad and Stalingrad, conqueror of Warsaw and Berlin, the most renowned commander of the Great Patriotic War — dead now for nineteen years — was a reflection of its reputation for awesome power. As an officer of the 12th Directorate, he knew that the giveaway radiation signature of a Zhukov would be masked by the lead sheeting.
He had not thought when the grave he now closed would be opened … More pressing among his concerns was how he would explain to his wife what the future held for them. It had to be done that night, could be delayed no longer. She did not know yet that at 16.05 on the afternoon of 20 March he had been summoned to attend the office of a brigadier general in the administration complex, or that he had reached the outer door at 16.11. She did not know that the brigadier general had not asked Oleg Yashkin to sit, or offered him coffee, tea, an alcoholic drink, but had kept his eyes on his desk and a typed list in his hands. He was told that, for financial reasons, the size of the 12th Directorate force at the Arzamas-16 site was being reduced by thirty per cent, that officers of long service whose wages were highest would be the first to face dismissal, and be gone by the end of the month. The sheet of paper was flapped in his face long enough for him to read the names. He had pleaded: what was the position with the pensions of retired officers? The brigadier general had shrugged, held out his hands, implied he had no authority to speak on the matter. He was told again that his last day of service would be at the end of the month, and then — as if this was news of high quality — that the house he occupied would be given him in thanks for his devoted service … There would not be a party to see him off after thirty-two years with the Directorate, no speeches and no presentations. He would come to work on the last morning, leave on the last afternoon, and there would be no line of hands for him to shake. He had seen the brigadier general take a pen, scratch out the name of Yashkin, Oleg (Major), then look sharply at his wristwatch, as if to say that the list was long and others waited, and would he, please, double quick, fuck off out of the room.
He had blundered out, across an anteroom, and barely seen those now waiting for an audience because humiliation blurred his vision … A man such as Oleg Yashkin believed himself owed the respect of the state and that he was entitled to his dignity. He remembered, of course, all those dismissed the previous year because their wages could not be paid — but such a thing could not happen to a trusted officer charged with the security of warheads. He had been in the room for eight minutes. His lifetime achievement was reduced to an interview with a bureaucrat who had not had the courage to look him in the face.
It wasn’t that his job was becoming less important, less busy. Most days, now, weapons came in to be stored haphazardly in the bunker and in wood buildings at the side. There were Zhukovs, and warheads for artillery shells, for torpedoes, for mines. They came to Area 19 to be dismantled — swords to be turned into plough shares — because the state could no longer pay the bills. Receipt of them was scribbled on dockets, abandoned in trays on crowded desks, and they were stacked in readiness for transportation to the workshops used by Decommissioning on the far side of the Area. He had taken one, and it would not be missed.
He had been the servant of a great country, a superpower. But wages could no longer be paid and his reward for loyalty was to be pitched out on the last afternoon of the month. His anger had found purpose, had been channelled. He tossed the last sods on to the slight mound, and in the spring — when the thaw came and the ground loosened — he would plant vegetables around it, would have time to do it. Behind him, a light came on in his home. His wife would have returned from the chapel that was a shrine to St Seraphim where she obsessively cleaned and scrubbed.
He changed back into his uniform. Racked with exhaustion, he went in through the kitchen door. Having washed his hands in tepid water, he poured himself coffee from the pot, laced it with vodka, and wore his best smile to greet her. Later, in bed, when they lay close to pool their body warmth, he would tell her of the betrayal and injustice inflicted on him. And he would tell her — so rare for him to lie to her — that he had repaired the damaged drain in the plot at the back of the house so she could parrot it once more to his neighbour.
He did not know of the grave’s future, or when it would be opened. Anger had made him dig it and fill it, but to what purpose he could not have said.
What Oleg Yashkin did know: he hated them for the humiliation piled on him. For the first time in his adult life, hatred governed him, not loyalty.
Outside, the snow fell and disguised the mound of displaced earth. The whiteness gave it cleanness and purity.
Chapter 1
He had been embedded in the family since the start of the year. Jonathan Carrick waited at the front door, listened as the children’s mother chided them for being late and not hurrying. He heard the scolding and could not help himself. He smiled. Then the clatter of feet on the landing above him, and their mother was leading them down the wide staircase and past two paintings, sixteenth-century Italian, more suitable for hanging in a gallery. She grimaced at him. ‘I think, Johnny, that finally we’re ready. At last …’