The Carnival Master

13.

There had been no cover to take. They had all seen the dark, round object arc through the sky towards them and had thrown themselves in different directions, scrabbling on the frost-hardened ground and waiting for the blast to finish them off.

It didn’t come.

Buslenko saw the object dark against the snow and crawled towards it. It was a head. He grabbed the hair and turned the face towards him. Stoyan. Belotserkovsky was next to Buslenko now and looked down at his friend’s dark, handsome Tatar face.

‘Bastards! I’ll kill the fuckers!’ Belotserkovsky turned towards the river bank but Buslenko seized his sleeve and pulled him down.

‘Don’t be a fucking amateur,’ he said. ‘You know what this is about. Don’t lose your cool now. We’re moving out. And we’ll take our chances along the river. I need us to move fast.’

Belotserkovsky gave a decisive nod and Buslenko knew he was fully back in the game.

‘Let’s move.’

They moved in a half-run, covering a considerable distance in a short time. The forest on either side of the river had begun to thin out, offering less cover for their pursuers. Added to which the dawn that Buslenko had dreaded now worked in their favour. Maybe they were going to make it after all.

The only thing that worked against them was that the Teteriv river was wider and shallower here, and they had lost the cover of a steep bank. Buslenko heard a cry behind him and turned to see Olga Sarapenko fall, her rifle clattering on the stones.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

She sat up and cradled her ankle. ‘Nothing broken.’ She got up with a struggle. ‘It’s badly sprained, but my boot saved it from anything worse.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘For now,’ she said, with an apologetic expression on her face. ‘I’ll slow you down.’

‘We stick together,’ said Belotserkovsky. The big Ukrainian threw his rifle to Buslenko and then hoisted Olga Sarapenko onto his shoulders as if she were a deer that he had bagged hunting. ‘We’re nearly there. You have to keep us covered, boss,’ he said to Buslenko.

Buslenko grinned and shouldered both Olga’s and Belotserkovsky’s rifles. At his command, they made off again towards the houses on either side of the river that marked the outskirts of Korostyshev. But Buslenko was focused on more than making it alive to the town of his birth. Instead he was fixed with grim determination on a goal far to the west: a strange city in a foreign country. Where he had an appointment to keep.