Enigma Archangel by Harris Robert

Author:Harris, Robert [Harris, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780091911041
Amazon: 0091911044
Goodreads: 1743918
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-12-01T08:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Archangel

‘If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods.’

J. V. Stalin, 1936

Chapter Sixteen

BEFORE THEY COULD get out of Moscow they had to take on fuel – because, as O’Brian said, you never knew what kind of rusty, watered-down horse’s piss they might try to sell you once you got out of town. So they stopped at the new Nefto Agip on Prospekt Mira and O’Brian filled the Land Cruiser’s tank and four big jerrycans with forty gallons of high-octane, lead-free gasoline. Then he checked the tyres and the oil, and by the time they were back on the road the evening rush was in full and sluggish spate.

It took them the best part of an hour to reach the outer ring, but there, at last, the traffic thinned, the monotonous apartment blocks and factory chimneys fell away, and suddenly they were out and free – into the flat open countryside, with its grey-green fields and giant pylons and a vast sky: a Kansas sky. It was more than ten years since Kelso had ventured north on the M8. Village churches, used as grain stores since the Revolution, were being restored, encased in web-works of wooden scaffolding. Near Dvoriki, a golden dome gathered the weak afternoon light and shone from the horizon like an autumn bonfire.

O’Brian was in his element. ‘On the road,’ he would say occasionally, ‘and out of town – it’s great, isn’t it? Just great.’ He drove at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, talking constantly, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time to a tape of thumping rock music.

‘Just great …’

The satchel was on the back seat, wrapped in plastic. Heaped around it was an extravagant array of equipment and provisions: a couple of sleeping bags, thermal underwear (‘Got any thermals, Fluke? Gotta have those thermals!’), two waterproof and fur-lined jackets, rubber boots and army boots, ordinary binoculars, binoculars with night-imaging, a shovel, a compass, water bottles, water purification tablets, two six-packs of Budweiser, a box of Hershey chocolate bars, two vacuum flasks filled with coffee, pot noodles, a torch, a short-wave transistor radio, spare batteries, a travelling kettle that could be plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter – Kelso lost count after that.

In the rear section of the Toyota were the jerrycans and four rigid cases stamped SNS, whose contents O’Brian described with professional relish: a miniaturised, digital camcorder; an Inmarsat satellite telephone; a laptop-sized DVC-PRO video editing machine; and something he called a Toko Video Store and Forward Unit. Total value of these four items: $120,000.

‘Ever hear of travelling light?’ asked Kelso.

‘Light?’ O’Brian grinned. ‘You can’t get any lighter. Give me four suitcases and I can do what it used to take six guys and a truckful of equipment to do. If there’s any excess baggage around here, my friend, it’s you.’

‘It wasn’t my idea to come.’

But O’Brian wasn’t listening. Thanks to these four cases, he said, his beat was the world. African famines. The genocide in Rwanda. The bomb

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