Timebomb

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.

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.