He had settled behind the heavy machine-gun, ground his haunches into the wet and cold of the sandy ground. A corporal lay on his stomach beside him to feed the belt, and the senior NCO had reached forward to check the sight and see it had not been moved. Let him do it, the captain, second rank, had said, let him make any adjustments that are necessary. It was late morning in spring, and the wind came from the east and flew the cone at full stretch from the mast. The wind strength would have been at a minimum of thirty kilometres. The conscript had looked at the cone, at the wave of the grasses, at a distant plastic rubbish bag that careered across the range…and he had fired.
Thunder blasted in his unprotected ears. He had to use his full strength to hold the machine-gun steady on its low tripod. Ten rounds in three bursts, then quiet had rested over the trench. They had all waited for the screech of the radio from the distant target butts. Five hits in a target that was two metres high and 1.5 metres wide.
'The boy has a natural talent,' the captain, second rank, had said. 'See that it is encouraged.'
After the officer had walked to his jeep and been driven away, the NCO had allowed him to fire again, another belt of ten shots. In those few minutes the wind had dropped, and he needed to allow for the reduction in its strength. He had fired, and the watchers had reported six hits out of ten shots.
That spring morning Igor Vasiliev had insisted that he should carry the heavy machine-gun back to the lorry. The body of the weapon was 25 kilos, plus 9.2 kilos for the barrel, the tripod was 16 kilos, and the ammunition was 7.7 kilos. As he had struggled to lift 57.9 kilos, the full weight of the assembled weapon and its ammunition, on to the lorry's tail, he had asked one panted question of the senior NCO: 'Who was that officer?'
'The chief of staff to the fleet admiral,' the NCO had answered sourly. 'Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko.'
From that day on, Igor Vasiliev always fired the heavy machine gun on the range. He had shot in the summer for his platoon in the inter-brigade championships, and had won, and next year — the last of his conscripted service — it was expected that he would shoot in the inter-divisional championships for a silver cup awarded by the general of Naval Infantry. And when Captain Archenko needed a driver to take him to military headquarters in Kaliningrad city, it was Igor Vasiliev who was sometimes assigned, and they talked of the science of target shooting.
After twenty-one wasted years, his life had started that April day on the firing range. Everything that made him proud, and the purpose of his life, was due to that day's intervention by Captain Archenko. The time spent with him and the knowledge gained from it provided the keenest pleasure he knew. And the heavy machine gun was his.
Doubling away from the officer, hemmed in by the ranks of the platoon, and with the weight of the heavy machine-gun across his shoulders, Igor Vasiliev wondered if Captain Archenko had a head cold, a bad one…perhaps even an attack of the influenza virus. He had not seen him, before, so pale and so distracted.
Every building, with one exception, in the naval base had been destroyed in 1945. Because it had offered the final escape chance for the tens of thousands of German civilians and military, the bombing by the Soviet airforce, and the artillery barrage, had been merciless and effective.
The one building that had survived had been the two-centuries old castle fortress built by Gustav Adolph von Schweden. Viktor walked there now. The ramparts were faced with heavy stone and topped by uncut grass, and they had withstood the rain of high explosive. It was where his grandmother might have come for final shelter. She had not found a place on the boats making the last evacuations. The town that surrounded the castle, and was flanked by the canal and the dockyards, had held out for a full two weeks after the surrender of the city of Kaliningrad, after the last boat had gone. His grandmother would have been the luckier if she had found a place on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff because then her fate would have been fast and she would have drowned with seven thousand others when the torpedo struck, and luckier also if she had been on the general Steuben or the Goya when eleven thousand more souls had gone, struggling against death, into the Baltic when the submarines attacked. His grandmother might have been here, cowering, when the resistance had finally collapsed and the Red Army had probed over the bridge that crossed the moat and into the castle. Her death had been slow, humiliating, filled with shame…and that was the prospect beckoning to him.
If he turned away from the sea, where patterns of buoys marked the approach channel to the canal and more buoys and lights gave warning of the wrecks, the extremities of old minefields and the probable location of long-ago dumped explosives, if he turned away from the limitless, white-capped sheet of water, his view would be over the canal, the shooting range and the lagoon. Viktor did not turn, did not look behind him. Had he done so, on this crisp afternoon with good visibility, he would have seen the wheeling gulls above the lagoon, and his eyeline would have drifted towards its far shore and to the needlepoint spire of the Holy Cross at Braniewo. By now the courier would be there, searching and failing to find the reason for his journey in the staking toilets beside the street market.
Viktor Archenko did not know how the suspicion had settled on him. Had he made the mistake or had it been made in London, or on the Polish side of the border fence? He remembered what his friends had said to him: 'You must be constantly on your guard. It is difficult for us to determine what is dangerous to you and what is not.' At another meeting, his friends had said, 'God has protected you this far, but there is a limit to the chances you can take. Be careful, because God does not protect fools.' However hard he scratched in his mind he could not think of a conversation in which he had betrayed himself. At the third meeting, his friends had said, 'We want you to realize that the most basic consideration we have for you is humanitarian, irrespective of how important you are as an information source.' At each meeting it had been stressed to him that he should exercise the utmost care and not try to send out too much too quickly. He was, his friends always said, an asset for the long-term. Fine words, but not for a man who could not run.
The castle, with its five angled bastions projecting out into the moat, had been repaired from the devastation of the bombing, not lovingly and in the way the Poles had rebuilt Malbork Castle, but crudely sufficient to make the interior a home for naval cadets. There were prefabricated huts in the courtyard and flat-roofed brick blocks, but he could see the old archways and the narrow windows that Gustav Adolph von Schweden had designed, and it was in one of those that his grandmother might have sheltered when the enemy came.
The story of his grandmother, her life and death, had been one of the two reasons that had driven him towards betrayal. On the rampart of the castle, he thought that he walked with his grandmother. She gave him strength.