Metro 2034

CHAPTER 6 On the Other Side

A moment later Homer was willing to believe he had imagined everything – the amorphous outlines of the barricade at the end of the tunnel and the voice that had seemed so familiar, distorted by the old megaphone. All sounds had been extinguished together with the light, and now he felt like a condemned man with a bag over his head, ready for execution. In the impenetrable darkness and sudden silence, the entire world seemed to have disappeared: Homer reached up and touched his own face, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t dissolved into this cosmic blackness.

Then he gathered his wits, fumbled around for his flashlight and launched the trembling beam forward – to where the invisible battle had been played out only minutes earlier. About thirty metres from the spot where he had waited out the fight, the tunnel came to a dead end, cut off by an immense steel shutter that filled its entire height and breadth, like the fallen blade of a guillotine.

His hearing hadn’t deceived him: someone really had activated the hermetic door. Although Homer knew about it, he didn’t think it could still be used – but apparently it could.

With his eyes weakened by all his paperwork, Homer didn’t immediately spot the human figure pressed up against the wall of metal. He held his automatic out in front of him and backed away, thinking it must be one of the men from the other side who had been lost overboard, but then he recognised the figure as Hunter.

The brigadier wasn’t moving. Streaming with perspiration, the old man hobbled towards him, expecting to see streaks of blood on the rusty metal. But there weren’t any. Although he had been fired on by a machine-gun at point blank range in the middle of a bare, empty tunnel, Hunter was unhurt. He had his flattened and mutilated ear pressed up against the metal, sucking in sounds that only he could hear.

‘What happened?’ Homer asked cautiously as he walked up.

The brigadier didn’t even notice him. He was whispering something, but whispering to himself, repeating words spoken by someone who was there, behind the closed door. Several minutes went by before he tore himself away from that wall and turned to Homer.

‘We’re going back.’

‘What happened?’ Homer asked again.

‘There are bandits in there. We must have reinforcements.’

‘Bandits?’ the old man exclaimed in bewilderment. ‘But I thought I heard…’

‘Tula has been captured by the enemy. We have to take it. We need men with flamethrowers.’

‘Why flamethrowers?’ asked Homer, completely confused now.

‘To make certain. We’re going back.’ Hunter swung round and strode off.

Before the old man followed him, he inspected the hermetic door carefully and pressed his ear to the cold steel, hoping that he could listen to a snatch of conversation too. Silence…

Homer realised he didn’t believe the brigadier. Whoever this enemy was that had captured the station, the way he behaved was absolutely inexplicable. Why would anyone think of using hermetic doors to protect themselves against just two men? What kind of bandits would engage in long negotiations with armed men at a border post, instead of simply riddling them with bullets as they approached?

And finally, what was the meaning of that final, sinister word barked by those mysterious sentries? ‘Judgement’?

There is nothing more valuable than human life, Sasha’s father used to tell her. And for him those were not merely empty words, not just some bland truism. But there was a time when her father didn’t think that way at all – there were good reasons why he became the youngest military commander on the entire line.

At the age of twenty years, you take killing and death far less seriously, and life itself seems like a game that you can start all over again if anything happens. It is no coincidence that the armies of the world were always made up of yesterday’s schoolboys. And all these youngsters playing at war were commanded by someone who could see thousands of people fighting and being killed as no more than blue and red arrows on maps, someone who could take the decision to sacrifice a company or a regiment without thinking about the torn-off legs, ripped-out intestines and shattered skulls.

There was a time when her father also regarded his enemies and even himself with disdain, when he astounded everyone with his readiness to take on missions that should have cost him his life. But he wasn’t reckless, and his actions were always precisely calculated. Intelligent and assiduous, at the same time he was indifferent to life, he had no sense of its reality, he didn’t think about consequences and wasn’t burdened with a conscience. No, he never fired at women and children, but he executed deserters in person and was always the first to storm the machine-gun nests. He was also almost insensitive to pain. Basically, he couldn’t give a damn for anything. Until he met Sasha’s mother.

She hooked him, so accustomed to his victories, with her own indifference. His only weakness – his vanity – which had driven him on against the machine-guns, launched him into a new, desperate assault that unexpectedly became a protracted siege.

He had never needed to make any special effort in love before: women themselves cast down their banners at his feet. Debauched by their easy acquiescence, he always sated his appetite for his latest girlfriend before he could fall in love with her and lost all interest in his conquest after the very first night. His relentless insistence and his fame blinded girls’ eyes, and very few of them even tried to apply the age-old strategy of making a man wait until they got to know him.

But she found him boring. She wasn’t impressed by his decorations and titles, his triumphs in battle and love. She didn’t respond to his glances, she shook her head at his jokes. And he started taking the conquest of this young woman as a serious challenge. More serious than subjugating the nearby stations.

She was supposed to be just one more notch on his gun butt, but soon he realised that the prospect of intimacy with her was receding – and also becoming less important. Her attitude made the chance to spend even an hour together during the day feel like a real achievement – and she only went that far in order to torment him a little. She doubted the value of his accomplishments and mocked his principles. She chided him for his heartlessness. She shook his confidence in his strength and his goals.

He put up with all of it. But more than that – he enjoyed it. With her he started reflecting on things, hesitating over decisions. And then he started feeling things: helplessness – because he didn’t know how to get close to this girl; regret for every minute not spent with her; and even fear – the fear of losing her, without ever having won her. Love. And she rewarded him with a sign. A silver ring.

Finally, when he had completely forgotten how to manage without her, she yielded to him.

A year later Sasha was born – which meant that now there were two lives he could no longer treat with disdain, and he himself no longer had any right to be killed. At the age of only twenty-five, when you command the most powerful army in the observable part of the world, it’s hard to rid yourself of the feeling that your orders can stop the world itself from turning. No tremendous, supernatural might is required for taking away people’s lives, but the power to give back life to the dead is granted to no one.

This truth was borne in on him cruelly when his wife died of tuberculosis and he was helpless to save her. After that something in him was broken. Sasha was only four years old at the time, but she remembered her mother very well. And she remembered the terrible, tunnel-black void that was left behind after her mother was gone. A gaping abyss – the closeness of death – opened up in her little world, and she looked down into it often. The edges of the abyss knitted together only very slowly. It was two or three years before Sasha stopped calling out to her mother in her sleep.

Her father still called out to her sometimes, even now.

Maybe Homer was approaching things from the wrong angle. If the hero of his epic refused to reveal himself, maybe he should start with the hero’s future beloved? Tempt him out with her beauty and youthful freshness?

If Homer discreetly described her charms first, then maybe the hero would step out of non-existence to meet her. For their love to be perfect, he would have to be her ideal complement, which meant he would have to appear in the epic complete and fully formed. Their curves and contours, their very thoughts would have to match each other as precisely as fragments of the shattered stained-glass panels at Novoslobodskaya Station. After all, they also were once parts of a single whole, so it was their destiny to be reunited. Homer couldn’t see anything wrong in appropriating this effective plotline from the long-departed classics. But although the solution looked simple, there were still problems: sculpting a living girl out of paper and ink proved to be a task beyond Homer’s power. And he probably couldn’t write convincingly about feelings any longer either.

His present relationship with Elena was filled with the tender feelings of old age, but they had met each other too late to abandon the past completely in their love. At that age people strive to appease their loneliness, not quench their passion.

Nikolai Ivanovich’s one true love had been entombed up on the surface. In the decades that had passed since then, all the details of her appearance, apart from one, had faded away, he couldn’t have described the affair from life any longer. And in any case, there had been nothing heroic about that relationship.

On the same day when Moscow was hit by the nuclear deluge, Nikolai was offered the chance to become a driver, replacing old Serov, who had been retired. His pay would almost double, and they even gave him a few days off before his promotion took effect.

He phoned his wife, who said she would bake an apple cake, and then she went out to buy champagne, taking the children along for the walk.

But he had to finish his shift.

Nikolai Ivanovich climbed into the cabin of the locomotive as its future master, a happily married man right at the very beginning of a tunnel that led off into a miraculously bright future. In the next half hour he aged twenty years in one fell swoop, arriving at the final station a broken man, with no one and nothing. Perhaps that was why every time he came across a train that had survived by some miracle, he was always overwhelmed by the desire to take his legitimate place in the driver’s seat, stroke the control panel with a master’s hand and glance out through the windscreen at the lacework pattern of tunnel liners. To imagine that the train could still be made to work.

That it could be put into reverse.

No doubt about it, the brigadier definitely created a special kind of field round himself, a field that diverted any kind of danger away from him. And what was more, he seemed to know it. The journey back to Nagornaya took them less than an hour. The line didn’t offer them any resistance at all.

Homer had always felt that the scouts and shuttle traders from Sebastopol, and all the other ordinary people who plucked up the courage to enter the tunnels, were alien organisms in the Metro’s body, microbes that had infiltrated its circulatory system. The moment they stepped beyond the frontiers of the stations, the air around them became irritated and inflamed, reality ruptured and all the incredible creatures ranged against man by the Metro suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

But Hunter wasn’t an extraneous body in the dark stretches of tunnel, he didn’t trigger the Leviathan’s resentment as he journeyed through its blood vessels. Sometimes he would switch off his flashlight, becoming just another patch of the darkness that filled the tunnel’s space, and seemed to be caught up by invisible currents that carried him onward twice as fast. Struggling with all his might to keep up with the brigadier, Homer shouted after him, and then Hunter came to his senses, stopped and waited for the old man.

On the way back they were even allowed to pass through Nagornaya in peace. The murky vapours had dispersed, the station was sleeping. They could see every centimetre of it lying open to view now, and it was impossible to imagine where it could have concealed those spectral giants. Just an ordinary, abandoned station: incrustations of salt on the damp ceiling, a soft, feathery bed of dust spread out across the platform, obscenities scribbled with charcoal on the smoky walls. But then other details caught the eye: strange scrapes left on the floor by some frantic, scrabbling dance, crusty, reddish-brown spots on the columns, ceiling lights that looked scraped and battered, as if someone had rubbed hard against them. Nagornaya flashed by and they went flying on. As long as Homer could keep up with the brigadier, he felt as if he too were enclosed in a magical bubble that rendered him invulnerable. The old man was amazed at himself – where was he getting the energy for such a long forced march?

But he had no breath left for making conversation. And in any case, Hunter no longer condescended to answer his questions. For the hundredth time in that long day Homer wondered why the taciturn and pitiless brigadier needed him at all, if he spent all his time trying to forget about him.

The foul smell of Nakhimov Prospect crept up and enveloped them. This was a station that Homer would gladly have dashed through as quickly as possible, but instead the brigadier slowed down. The old man was almost overcome by the stench, even in his gas mask, but Hunter sniffed it in, as if he could distinguish specific notes in the Prospect’s oppressive, choking bouquet of odours.

This time the corpse-eaters dispersed respectfully as they advanced, abandoning half-gnawed bones and dropping scraps of flesh out of their mouths. Hunter walked to the precise centre of the hall and up onto a low heap, sinking calf-deep in flesh. He cast a long, slow glance round the station and then, still dissatisfied, abandoned his suspicions and moved on, without finding what he was looking for.

But Homer found it.

Slipping and falling onto his hands and knees, he startled away a young corpse-eater who was eviscerating a soaking-wet bulletproof vest. Spotting the Sebastopol uniform helmet that went tumbling aside, Homer was blinded by the condensation that instantly coated the lenses of his gas mask on the inside.

Repressing the impulse to gag and puke, Homer crept over to the bones and raked through them, hoping to find the soldier’s ID tag. But instead he spotted a little notepad, smeared with thick crimson blood. It opened immediately at the last page, with the words: ‘Don’t storm the station, no matter what’.

Her father had got her out of the habit of crying when she was still little, but now she had no other answer for fate. The tears streamed down her face of their own accord and a bleak, high-pitched whine rose up from her chest. She realised straight away what had happened, but it took her hours to come to terms with it.

Had he called for her help? Had he tried to tell her something important before he died? She couldn’t remember the exact moment when she sank into sleep and wasn’t entirely sure that she was awake now. After all, there could be a world where her father hadn’t died, couldn’t there? Where she hadn’t killed him with her weakness and egotism.

Sasha held her father’s hand – already cold, but still soft – between her palms, as if she was trying to warm it, trying to persuade him, and herself, that he would find a car, and they would go up onto the surface and get into it, and drive away. And he would laugh like the day when he brought home that radio with the music CDs.

At first her father sat there with his back leaning against the column and his chin braced against his chest – he could have been taken for someone in a doze. But then his body started slowly slipping down into the puddle of congealed blood, as if it was tired of pretending to be alive and didn’t want to deceive Sasha any longer.

The wrinkles that always furrowed her father’s face had almost completely smoothed out now.

She let go of his hand, helped him lie more comfortably and covered him from head to foot with a tattered blanket. She had no other way of burying him. She would have liked to take her father up onto the surface and leave him lying there, gazing up at the sky that would turn bright and clear again one day. But long before that his body would become the prey of the eternally hungry beasts that roamed about up there.

Here on their station no one would touch him. There was no danger to be expected from the deadly southern tunnels – nothing could survive in there except the winged cockroaches. And to the north the tunnel broke off at a rusty, half-ruined Metro bridge with only a single track still intact.

At the other end of the bridge there were people, but none of them would ever dream of crossing it out of mere curiosity. They all knew what was on the far side: a lookout station on the edge of a scorched wilderness – with two doomed exiles living in it.

Her father wouldn’t have allowed her to stay here alone, and there wasn’t any point in it anyway. But Sasha also knew that no matter how far she ran, no matter how desperately she tried to break out of the torture cell she had been condemned to, she would never be completely free of it.

‘Dad, forgive me, please,’ she sobbed, knowing that she could never earn his forgiveness.

Sasha took the silver ring off his finger and put it in the pocket of her overalls. She picked up the cage with the quiet, subdued rat and stumbled off to the north, leaving a trail of bloody footsteps behind her on the granite. When she climbed down onto the rails and walked into the tunnel, an unusual omen occurred at the empty station that was now a funeral bark. A long tongue of flame emerged from the mouth of the opposite tunnel, straining towards her father’s body – but it couldn’t reach it and retreated back into the dark depths, reluctantly conceding that Sasha’s father had a right to his peace now.

‘They’re coming back! They’re coming back!’

Istomin took the telephone receiver away from his ear and gazed at it distrustfully, as if it was some animate creature that had just told him a ridiculous fairytale.

‘Who’s coming back?’

Denis Mikhailovich jumped up off his chair, spilling his tea, which settled on his trousers in an embarrassing dark stain. He cursed the tea and repeated the question.

‘Who’s coming back?’ Istomin repeated mechanically into the receiver.

‘The brigadier and Homer,’ the receiver crackled. ‘Ahmed was killed.’

Vladimir Ivanovich blotted his bald patch with his handkerchief and wiped his temple under the rubber strap of his piratical eye patch. Reporting soldiers’ deaths to relatives was one of his responsibilities. Without waiting for the operator to switch the line, he stuck his head out of the door and shouted to his adjutant:

‘Bring both of them to me! And tell the orderlies to set the table!’

He walked across his office, straightened the photos hanging on the wall, whispered something in front of the map and turned to Denis Mikhailovich, who was sitting there with his arms crossed, blatantly grinning.

‘Volodya, you’re just like some girl before a date,’ the colonel chuckled.

‘I see you’re excited too,’ the station commandant snapped back, nodding at the colonel’s wet trousers.

‘Why should I worry? I’ve got everything ready. Two assault units assembled, they can be mobilised in twenty-four hours.’ Denis Mikhailovich lovingly stroked the light-blue beret lying on the desk, then picked it up and stuck it on his head to make himself look more official.

In the reception office, feet started scurrying about, knives and forks jangled, and an orderly held up a dewy bottle of spirits through the crack of the door. Istomin waved him away – later, all of that later! Then at last he heard a familiar booming voice, the door flew open and the opening was filled by a broad, massive figure. Hovering behind the brigadier’s back was that old storyteller he’d dragged along with him for some reason.

‘Welcome back!’ said Istomin, sitting down in his chair, then getting up and sitting down again.

‘What’s out there?’ snapped the colonel.

The brigadier shifted his dark, heavy gaze from one man to the other and spoke to the station commandant.

‘Tula’s been occupied by nomads. They’ve slaughtered everyone.’

‘All our men too?’ asked Denis Mikhailovich, raising his shaggy eyebrows.

‘As far as I can tell. We got as far as the entrance of the station, there was a fight, and they sealed it off.’

‘They closed the hermetic door?’ said Istomin, half-rising out of his chair and clutching the edge of the desk with his fingers. ‘So now what do we do?’

‘Storm them,’ the brigadier and the colonel rasped simultaneously.

‘We can’t storm them!’ Homer suddenly chimed in from the reception office.

She simply had to wait for the agreed time. If she hadn’t got the day wrong, the trolley should appear out of the damp darkness of the night very soon now. Every additional minute spent here on the edge of the cliff, where the tunnel emerged from the thickness of the earth like a vein from a slashed wrist, cost her a year of her life. But the only choice she had now was to wait. At the other end of the interminably long bridge she would run into a locked hermetic door that was only unlocked from the inside – once a week, for market day.

Today Sasha had nothing to sell, and she needed to buy much more than ever before. But she couldn’t care less now what the men on the trolley might ask for in exchange for letting her back into the land of the living. Her father’s chilly indifference in death had been communicated to her.

Sasha used to dream so much about going to another station some day with her father, to a place where they could be surrounded by people, where she could make friends with someone, meet someone special… . She used to ask her father about his young days, not just because she wanted to revisit her own bright childhood, but because she was secretly setting herself, as she was now, in her mother’s place, setting some nebulously handsome man with shifting features in her father’s place and awkwardly imagining love to herself. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to find any common ground with other people if they really went back to the Greater Metro. What would they have to talk to her about?

But now there were only hours, or perhaps minutes, left to go until the ferry arrived, and she couldn’t give a damn for the other people – the women or the men – and even the thought of returning to a human existence seemed like a betrayal of her father. She would have agreed to spend the rest of her life at their station, without hesitating for a single moment, if that could have helped to save him.

The candle stub in the glass jar fluttered in its death agony and she transferred the flame to a new wick. On one of his trips to the surface her father had found an entire crate of wax candles, and Sasha always carried several of them in the pockets of her overalls. She would have liked to think their bodies were like candles, and a little particle of her father had been transferred to her after his light was extinguished.

Would the men on the trolley see her signal in the mist? Before this she had always guessed the time right, so she never had to waste an extra moment lingering outside. He father forbade her do that, and the swollen goitre on his throat was enough of a warning in itself. At the cliff edge Sasha usually felt as agitated as a trapped shrew, gazing around anxiously and only occasionally daring to go as far as the first span of the bridge, in order to look down from it at the black river flowing past below.

But she had too much time. Huddling up and shuddering in the damp, chilly autumn wind, Sasha took several steps forward, and the crumbling summits of high-rise apartment blocks appeared behind the gaunt trees. Something huge splashed in the oily, viscous river, and in the distance unknown monsters groaned in almost human voices.

Then suddenly their wailing was joined by a plaintive, dismal creaking.

Sasha jumped to her feet, raising her lamp high in the air, and they answered from the bridge with a stealthy, slippery beam of light. A decrepit old trolley was moving towards her, barely able to force its way through the dense white gloom, thrusting the wedge of its feeble headlamp into the night and prising its way through. The girl backed away: it wasn’t the usual trolley. It strained its way along jerkily, as if every turn of its wheels cost the man working the levers a great effort.

Eventually it shuddered to a halt about ten steps away from Sasha and a tall, fat man wrapped in tarpaulin jumped down off the frame onto the stone chips. Demonic spots of reflected light danced in the lenses of his gas mask, concealing his eyes from Sasha. In one hand the man was clutching an ancient army Kalashnikov with a wooden butt.

‘I want to leave here,’ Sasha declared, thrusting out her chin.

‘Lea-eave,’ the tarpaulin scarecrow echoed, drawling the sound in either surprise or mockery. ‘And what have you got to sell?’

‘I haven’t got anything left,’ she said, staring hard into those blazing eye sockets bound in iron.

‘Everyone has something that can be taken, especially a woman,’ the ferryman grunted, then he had a thought. ‘Are you going to leave your daddy then?’

‘I haven’t got anything left,’ Sasha repeated, lowering her eyes.

‘So he croaked after all,’ said the mask, sounding relieved, but also disappointed. ‘And he did right. Or he’d have been upset now.’ The barrel of the automatic caught the shoulder strap of Sasha’s overalls and slowly dragged it downwards.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she shouted hoarsely, jerking back.

The jar with the candle fell, shattering on a rail, and the darkness instantly licked out the flame.

‘No one comes back from here, can’t you understand that?’ The scarecrow gazed at her indifferently with its blank, dead lenses. ‘Your body won’t even be enough to cover the cost of my journey in one direction. Let’s say I accept it in payment of your father’s debt.’

The automatic twirled in his hands, swinging round with the butt forward, and struck her on the temple, mercifully snuffing out the light of her consciousness.

After Nakhimov Prospect Hunter had kept Homer close beside him, and the old man had no chance to examine the notepad properly. The brigadier was suddenly thoughtful and considerate: not only did he try not to leave his companion too far behind, he actually walked in step with him, although he had to hold himself back to do it. A couple of times he stopped, as if to see whether anyone was dogging their footsteps. But as the glaring beam of his searchlight was turned backwards, it always ran across Homer’s face, making the old man feel like he was in a torture chamber. He swore and blinked as he struggled to recover, sensing the brigadier’s sharp eyes creeping all over his body, probing him, searching for what he had found at the Prospect. Nonsense! Of course Hunter couldn’t have seen anything, he was too far away at that moment. He’d probably simply sensed the change in Homer’s mood and suspected him of something. But every time their gazes met, the old man broke out in a sweat. The little bit he had managed to read in the notepad was more than enough to make him feel doubts about the brigadier.

It was a diary.

Some of the pages were stuck together with dried blood and Homer didn’t touch them: he was afraid of tearing them with his stiff, tense fingers. The entries on the first pages were incoherent – the author couldn’t even keep his letters under control, and his thoughts galloped in a way that made it impossible to keep up with them.

‘We got through Nagornaya with no losses,’ the diary stated, and then immediately skipped on: ‘Tula is in chaos. There’s no way out to the Metro, Hansa is blocking it. We can’t go back home.’

Homer leafed forward a bit, watching out of the corner of his eye as the brigadier came down off his grave mound and walked towards him. The old man realised that Hunter mustn’t be allowed to get his hands on the diary. But just before he thrust the notepad into his knapsack, Homer managed to read: ‘We have brought the situation under control and appointed a commandant…’ And then immediately: ‘Who’ll be the next to die?’

And another thing: framed in a little square above the dangling question was a date. From the withered state of the notepad’s pages, anyone would have thought the events described in the diary must be at least a decade old, but the figures indicated that the entry had been made only a few days ago.

With long-forgotten agility, the old man’s ossifying brain fitted together the scattered pieces of the mosaic: the mysterious wanderer seen by the miserable tramp at Nagatino, the guard’s voice that seemed familiar at the hermetic door, the words ‘We can’t go back home…’ A complete picture began taking shape in front of his eyes. Maybe the scribble on the stuck-together pages could fill in the meaning of all the other strange events?

What was absolutely certain was that Tula had not been captured by bandits; something far more complicated and mysterious was going on there. And Hunter had spent a quarter of an hour questioning the sentries at the gates of the station – so he knew that just as well as Homer did.

That was precisely why Homer must not show him the notepad.

And it was why Homer dared to oppose him openly at the meeting in Istomin’s office.

‘We can’t do that,’ he said.

Hunter turned his head in Homer’s direction as slowly as a battleship training its main gun on the target. Istomin shifted his chair backwards, then decided to come out from behind his desk anyway. The colonel screwed his face up wearily.

‘We can’t blow up the hermetic door, there’s ground water all around, the line would be flooded instantly. The whole of Tula Station is held together by no more than a lick and a promise, they’re always praying it won’t spring a leak anywhere. And the parallel tunnel, you know yourselves… It’s ten years since…’ Homer went on.

‘So do we just knock and wait for them to open up?’ Denis Mikhailovich enquired.

‘Well, there’s always the bypass route,’ Istomin reminded him.

Astounded by that suggestion, the colonel started coughing violently and furiously accusing his superior of wanting to cripple and kill his best men. And then the brigadier fired a broadside.

‘Tula has to be cleaned out. The situation requires the extermination of everyone there. Not one of your men is left. They’ve all been finished off. If you don’t want to suffer any more losses, it’s the only possible decision. I know what I’m talking about. I have information.’

The final words were clearly intended for Homer. They made the old man feel like a naughty little puppy dog being shaken by the scruff of the neck to bring him to his senses.

‘Well, since the tunnel is sealed on our side,’ said Istomin, tugging down his tunic, ‘there is only one way to get into Tula. From the other side, through Hansa. But we can’t take armed men through that way, it’s out of the question.’

‘I’ll find men,’ Hunter said dismissively, and the colonel started.

‘Just to get to Hansa, you have to go through two stretches of tunnel on the Kakhovka Line as far as Kashira Station.’

‘What of it?’ asked the brigadier, crossing his arms on his chest.

‘In the region of Kashira the background radiation shoots off the scale,’ the colonel explained. ‘A fragment of a warhead fell nearby. It didn’t explode, but it’s quite bad enough as it is. Every second man who gets a dose of it dies within a month. Even now.’

An ominous silence fell. Homer took advantage of the hitch to initiate a furtive withdrawal – tactical, of course – from Istomin’s office. Eventually, Vladimir Ivanovich, apparently afraid that the uncontrollable brigadier would go off to demolish the hermetic door at Tula anyway, made a confession.

‘We have protective suits. But only two. You can take the most able-bodied soldier you can find, anyone. We’ll wait…’ He glanced round at Denis Mikhailovich. ‘What else can we do?’

‘Let’s go over to the lads,’ the colonel said with a sigh. ‘We’ll have a talk with them and you can choose yourself a partner.’

‘No need,’ said Hunter, with a shake of his head. ‘Homer’s the one I want.’