FINN AND I FLEW to Bucharest one early morning in July. He seemed to have very detailed instructions about how to enter Transdnestr undetected. I asked him if it was a route he’d ever used himself, but all he said was that this was one of Willy’s entry points into the Ukraine, through Transdnestr, from many years before when the Wall was still in place. And just a few days before we arrived, Willy had been back to check his old route still worked.
We stayed the night in Bucharest and watched a film and ate at a café in the vast Stalinist square that Ceausescu had built to glorify his empty rule; empire architecture without an empire. On the following day we took another plane, this time to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
The whole operation Finn had planned depended on the arrival and departure times of Reiter’s trucks. If our, or Dieter’s, information was correct, we knew the date of the next shipment that a truck of Reiter’s would be taking out of Transdnestr. What we needed to find out was where it would cross the border into the European Union.
I was accustomed to Finn’s disappearances and he left the hotel in Bucharest at nine o’clock that evening because he’d ‘run out of cigarettes’. The trip to buy them eventually took him over an hour. ‘They didn’t have my brand anywhere,’ he complained when he returned.
Maybe he had met Mikhail there, in Bucharest that night, or perhaps there was a drop arranged between them somewhere in the city.
Over supper that evening, Finn told me what little he knew of Transdnestr and I filled in the large gaps in his knowledge.
‘In London, we call it the Cuba of Europe,’ he said. ‘But I bet it’s much worse than that. Hardly anyone’s even heard of the place. It’s far more obscure than Cuba. Transdnestr doesn’t even officially exist. Even your people in Moscow who support it don’t recognise it as a country.’
The Russian puppet regime, which runs Transdnestr, issues its own currency, but it is not recognised anywhere else; it manages its own borders, even though no borders officially exist. It needs our army, which it calls a peacekeeping force, to maintain control.
‘It’s about the only place left that still looks like the Soviet Union did fifty years ago,’ I told Finn. ‘The 13th Army’s there, but we actually use the place as a secret training camp for the spetsnaz. I’ve trained there myself. But its real importance–i its raison d’être is as a marketplace for illegal arms deals, and as our “offshore” money-laundering centre.’
Up in the bedroom after supper, Finn laid out various maps of the region on the bed. Google Earth was of little use and he had an air map and another map of Willy’s from ‘a hundred years ago’, Finn said, which was probably the most useful. They showed a flat plain. To the east was the Ukrainian steppe, with Odessa on the Black Sea a mere seventy miles away: to the west was Moldova, to which Transdnestr actually belongs by international law, even though it is ignored by those who run the enclave and by Russia itself. Hence the Russian ‘peacekeeping’ force.
‘The way we control the place is by giving it free oil, gas and electricity,’ I told him. ‘The army’s there to exercise control and to ensure the necessary muscle is there if needed. Essentially the enclave’s run by our own people: former Russian special forces and KGB officers. Most of them were stationed in the Baltic republics before eighty-nine, before the Wall came down. And most of them are wanted by Interpol for crimes committed before the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’ve all changed their names now, of course.’
‘Another bad fairy tale,’ Finn said. ‘A make-believe state.’
‘Make-believe but real. There’re two thousand square miles of flat steppe and cultivated fields, from which everyone except the nomenklatura chisels a meagre livelihood for forty dollars a month,’ I said. ‘Essentially the SVR runs the economy. There are two main companies and they control everything. They’re both overseen by the self-styled “president” of the enclave. The boss of the first company is a senior commander of the MVD branch of the KGB. The second company makes arms and is controlled directly from Moscow, mainly from the Russian Ministry of Defence, but it also makes arms on the side for illegal export.’
‘And Reiter’s trucks go to one of these two companies?’ Finn asked.
‘They have to. Apart from these two companies there’s nothing else in the place except second-rate vegetables.’
We studied Willy’s map and Finn traced with his finger a small road back westwards from the so-called ‘capital’, Tiraspol, a city with no airport, towards the River Dniester, which separates the enclave from Moldova.
‘The river protects its borders, and Willy says the bridges are well guarded,’ Finn said. ‘But a river’s a river. It’s porous. This is where we cross.’
He pointed to a lonely stretch midway between two bridges.
‘There are patrols along the banks, of course, but Willy has a good record. He’s crossed here half a dozen times in the past when it was more closely guarded. He’s given me an updated study of how their patrols behave, what we can expect.’
Finn and I left Chisinau at midday and took a bus to within six miles of the river on the Moldovan side of the border and began to walk. It was a beautiful afternoon, larks sang, motionless, over the cornfields, and we stopped and ate a picnic we’d bought before we left. Then we set off again in the late afternoon.
When we were little more than a mile away, we sat on a small grassy hill surrounded by fields planted with sunflowers. It was pleasantly warm; the summer temperature lulled us.
A woman working in the fields, or maybe she was a gypsy from a camp nearby, stopped and offered us some kvint, the local brandy. We drank and exchanged nods and smiles. I didn’t want to speak Russian in front of her. We told her we were Ingliski. When she’d gone, we took the precaution of walking in the opposite direction we’d been heading, until nightfall. Then we retraced our steps to the river.
About two hours after darkness descended we reached the river and walked along the bank of the Dniester for another four and a half miles southwards, along the Moldovan side. Finn saw the small hut disguised with branches for the purpose of duck shooting that Willy had used in the past. Next to the hut, under a small cover of woven branches, was a skiff that was tucked into the bank and tied to a wooden post. It was just as Willy had described it to Finn. Two oars tied by a new rope were attached on the inside of the skiff.
There was no moon and in nearly complete darkness I slung my small backpack into the skiff and untied it from the post. Finn said the current would take us automatically to the centre of the river. I lay down inside and Finn lay on top of me. He pushed us off from the bank with his foot and we were away.
Willy was right. The current bounced off this side of the river and took whatever floated into the centre of the stream. Once we’d reached the centre of the river, we’d have to propel the boat, and using just one oar, over the stern like a gondola, Finn fought for several minutes to push us beyond the fast-flowing central stream to where the current moved us slowly over towards the far side. After about a mile, with us both lying in the bottom of the boat and Finn struggling with the oar, I sensed we were heading slowly towards the opposite bank to the place where we intended to land.
Here, the river curved away in the opposite direction and the current was in our favour again, taking us towards the bank. We drifted with our heads below the sides of the skiff.
On this bend in the river, there was thick woodland and, according to Willy, no observation post for half a mile on either side. We drifted until the skiff bounced along a high bank and Finn grabbed an overhanging branch. We lay in the boat and waited, listening for dogs or shouting or warning shots, and catching our breath. Slowly, Finn crawled over the side of the skiff and half swam, half pulled himself with the branch to the bank. I threw my backpack to him when he’d climbed up the bank and followed him. We collected stones to put in the skiff and sank it. Finn tied the painter on to a branch that dipped beneath the water; we’d be returning another way, but it was a good precaution if things went wrong.
We waited at the edge of the wood under cover until we could be sure no sentries were close or troop manoeuvres were taking place nearby and then crossed a dust track into some fields of vines. They provided the cover we needed to reach a road on the far side of several fields, where we could wait out of sight for a bus that came sometime after dawn.
It was a short journey by bus to the border town of Bendery. By mid-morning we had reached the town, with its statues of Lenin still in place, fifteen years after the Soviet Union collapsed. We were two British backpackers, fascinated by this frozen piece of history, on a walking holiday.
The town of Bendery lay further north back upriver from where we’d landed. The capital Tiraspol has some modern buildings paid for with mafia money, and a huge new stadium, but Bendery has very few modern structures. Both cities are museums of Soviet architecture, but thanks to its border position with Moldova, Bendery’s few modern buildings are paid for from legal and illegal cross-border traffic.
The two companies we were interested in, which are effectively Transdnestr’s economy, were both based in Bendery. The first place Finn wanted me to look for Reiter’s trucks was located in the barbed-wire fenced yards of Pribor, Transdnestr’s arms manufacturer, controlled by the shadow state company Salyut in Russia.
We knew we were at the point of no return, illegal entrants into an illegal country, one of us an SVR officer, and the other a British spy. There was nothing we could do now if things went wrong. I’d be escorted to Moscow. And Finn? I didn’t know what they’d do with him, but I doubted he’d choose to be captured alive.
It was in a café, about a mile or so from the Pribor factory, that Finn and I went our different ways. His job was to find a car, mine to enter the factory. A car hire company, if one existed in Transdnestr, was out of the question and he’d have to buy a car with cash.
Both of us were nervous. I saw the rationale behind the practice at the Forest- and I’m sure at MI6- that two people in an intimate relationship were never sent together on an assignment. It was distracting me now. Leaving Finn was uppermost in my mind when I should have been thinking about the job.
‘We could have a coffee, if you like, Rabbit,’ he said. ‘Or we could just go home.’
I put my arms around him and whispered in his ear.
‘I love you, Finn.’
He kissed me, squeezed my hand, and we both turned and walked in opposite directions.
I walked towards the depot without looking back and found a café a few hundred yards from the entrance. It was hard to clear my head. We had several rendezvous, depending on my timing. If I found what we were looking for at Pribor, there followed one set of rules between Finn and me: we would meet in the main square at Tiraspol. If I had to go to the second factory, there would be another day’s work at least. In this event, and with the increased possibility that the authorities would be alerted, we would head for the mountains to the north and wait for the hue and cry to die down before crossing back to Moldova.
I sat and drank a greyish coffee and watched the movement of trucks in and out of the depot’s gates, observing the procedures followed by the drivers and military personnel who checked their papers. After half an hour I had what I needed and I left. Any strip searches of the trucks must have taken place at the border.
I took a bus back a few miles or so along the main road towards Moldova and disembarked at a stop where nobody else alighted and walked towards some trees in a copse away from the road that offered some cover.
When I knew I was unobserved, I took my SVR Colonel’s uniform from my backpack and changed into it. Then I walked back to the road until I saw the truck-stop café just on my side of the river, the Transdnestr side of the border, that Willy had told us about.
There were only trucks in the car park behind the café, no other vehicles. I entered the dingy jerry-built truckstop and found more grey coffee. I took it outside to the area at the back and studied the truck plates and any logos that were visible.
There were three German trucks, all with blue tarpaulins covering their sides and obscuring anything that might identify them easily. Trucks entered and left the park every quarter of an hour or so.
I looked under the blue tarpaulins of the three German trucks but saw no insignia to say any of them were Reiter’s.
I waited for nearly two hours watching trucks enter and leave. Their drivers waited aimlessly in the café, presumably for the right time to arrive at their final destination somewhere up the road into Transdnestr.
Finally I saw a German truck enter with the usual tarpaulins covering its sides, and a young man stepped out and walked across the park to the café. Again I looked behind the tarpaulin but saw no logo.
I walked into the café, had another coffee and watched the driver. He was reading a paper and sipping something from a cup that was too hot to drink. He seemed to be in his late twenties, though he looked Russian to me and it is hard with Russian men to tell how old they are; most Russian men look at least ten years older than their real age. He had an open face and he smiled at the silent woman serving coffee and asked for a kvint, just so he could engage her in conversation. He and I exchanged smiles across the room, too, and finally I approached the table and asked him if I could join him. He seemed unimpressed by the uniform or my papers and, as long as I only needed to show my papers to those outside the Russian security services, I knew they would carry all their old influence.
‘What time are you going to the depot?’ I asked him.
‘To Pribor?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘You know more than me, I expect,’ he said, and laughed. I laughed with him and nodded in agreement.
I asked him about his life and he told me that he was scraping a living doing two or three jobs and had a wife and children in Moldova. They’d got out of Russia, and then out of Transdnestr, and he wanted to go west and make a new life for his family. I told him I could help him and asked him what he needed.
‘Asylum and money,’ he said and laughed again. ‘That’s all. I have a cousin in France, working on the roads, but we want to go to America. They say it costs ten thousand dollars to arrange a marriage there. I want to go south, to the heat. My wife, she doesn’t like the Russian cold. The winters in Krasnoyarsk made her cry.’
‘There are problems at the depot,’ I said. ‘You may know about them.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ he laughed, and put up his hands. ‘That’s your business.’
‘You may be able to help us.’
‘And why should I trust you?’ he said, smiling still. ‘Because you’re a woman, perhaps? But it’s not just the Russian winters we want to leave. We also want to say goodbye to Russian uniforms.’
‘You seem very confident,’ I said, taken aback by his lack of respect, let alone fear.
‘What do you want? I’ll help you and maybe you’ll help me too. But I don’t expect it. That way, I am always happy.’
‘I’m going into the depot, but I’m going in unannounced. You get me?’
‘Sure.’
‘How much do you want?’
‘I’ll trust you to do what’s right.’
‘You’re not like a Russian.’
‘I haven’t lived in Russia for three years, thank God.’
‘You’ll have a thousand dollars. Meet me in two minutes by the truck.’
‘No hurry. I don’t need to be there for an hour,’ he said, without reacting at all to the offer of what was so much money to him.
‘Two minutes.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said and put his hands up again mockingly.
I went to a filthy toilet at the back of the café and took off my SVR uniform and put on some dirty overalls I had in my backpack. To my surprise and relief, the driver was by the truck when I returned.
‘I’m Anatoly,’ he said, and held out his hand.
I paused, then took it. ‘Good to meet you, Anatoly,’ I said, and he didn’t ask me my name.
‘I can put you in the toolbox in the truck,’ he said. ‘I smuggled three tiger cubs across the Ukrainian border six months ago in there. There’ll just be room.’
We waited, drinking coffee and kvint in the truck’s cab for another forty minutes or so. Finally it was time. Anatoly opened the big doors at the rear of the truck and climbed in and I followed. There was an upright metal box, like a filing cabinet and maybe five feet high, and it didn’t look as if a human being would fit into it. But he cleared out some of the equipment and lashed it to the side of the truck and I stepped inside. I heard him snap the padlock and then the rear doors slammed shut.
Why did I trust him? Finn always said that most of his life was instinct and it had never let him down. I had never had so much faith in my own instincts but maybe I had never trusted anyone, except Nana and now Finn. It was easier than I thought to add one more to the list.
I listened from inside the box and felt the truck rumble along the uneven, potholed road and finally pull up at what I assumed was the checkpoint at the depot. I heard the rear doors open and felt no fear. I was committed and, of course, I had a story- not much of one but something at least- if I was betrayed. But the rear doors clanged shut again. I couldn’t hear any of the exchanges, but I felt the truck move on again and drive in what seemed to be a wide circle, pushing me against the metal side of the box. It finally came to a halt.
There was a long wait. I imagined security guards lining up with guns at the ready for the box to be opened, but maybe Anatoly was waiting for the coast to clear. I was becoming more and more cramped and started to feel a panic rising. What if something happened to him? What if he was taken away? What if the truck was taken to a scrapyard? Fear of everything began to flood into my head.
Then I heard the rear doors finally clang open and a figure walking around inside. I heard the key in the padlock and suddenly the door of the toolbox was open and I was looking past Anatoly at an empty concrete space with a barbed-wire perimeter fence behind it and, beyond that, wasteground at the edge of the town.
‘You’ve got about a minute,’ Anatoly said in an unhurried way.
‘The money’s in there,’ I said, and pointed behind me at the toolbox.
Without checking the money, he walked ahead of me and jumped out of the truck while I swung my legs over the side.
‘I’ll be leaving at five o’clock if you’re coming with me,’ he said.
‘Maybe. What’s your cargo?’
‘Spare parts.’
I looked at him.
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘That’s just what it says on the manifest.’
‘For where?’
‘Ultimately?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m taking this load to Romania.’
‘OK. You’ll be here at five.’
‘They’ll be loading inside that warehouse over there. Wait for me to pull up the truck somewhere in this area.’
‘Is there a room where the drivers go?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Round the back of that office building. It’s a bare room with dirty calendars and dirtier coffee.’ He grinned.
Finn always said that if you want something, the best thing to do was simply to ask for it. He said it worked for him nine times out of ten. I hadn’t really ever believed in his straightforward method, but I was beginning to now.
There were four and half hours until Anatoly left. It was far too long. I took a clipboard from the inside of my overalls and begin to walk, head down, around the depot. There was no uniform working clothing here and I was relieved. I blended in well enough for a long-haired woman under a pair of baggy overalls.
I walked around to the back of the office block and saw the entrance to the driver’s room. On the way, I saw a truck parked with its doors open and up against the open doors of a smaller warehouse. It was a smaller truck than the rest. Its tarpaulins pulled aside for loading, but the metal sides were still up. ‘Reiter’ was engraved on the side and there, finally, was the outsized eagle.
When I entered the room there were three drivers sitting reading newspapers and sipping from polystyrene cups. They all looked up and didn’t return to their newspapers. Their expressions seemed to suggest I’d walked out of one of the pornographic calendars stuck on the walls.
I pulled my SVR identity card out of my pocket and flashed it long enough for them not to remember the name, only the message. Their attitude changed instantly from mild lechery to embarrassment.
‘Which of you is the driver of the Reiter vehicle?’ I said.
None of them wanted to reply, to draw attention. Eventually the man closest to me, whom I chose to fix with a stare, stumbled out the information that the driver I wanted was in the toilet.
‘Show me identities,’ I said. I wanted there to be some business for them all to do while I waited.
They each showed me their grubby identity cards and the Pribor pass. And then the sound of a toilet flushing announced the return of the man I was looking for. He appeared through a door at the rear of the room still doing up his flies. I could see he wasn’t cowed like the others, and he stood looking at my SVR card without any reaction at all.
‘Your papers,’ I said.
He hesitated and then, with deliberate slowness, took them from an inside pocket. I looked at them and saw he was German.
‘What do you want?’ he said rudely.
‘Show me your itinerary,’ I demanded, ignoring his manner.
‘That’s confidential,’ he said without moving.
‘I’m a colonel in the SVR,’ I reminded him.
‘And I’m the King of Sweden,’ he said.
I tried to imagine what Finn would have done in the same situation. I tried to conjure up the flip remark, the careless, throwaway line that helped people put their guard down, but I couldn’t be Finn and I couldn’t use the full force of my position. I was hamstrung by not wanting anyone outside this room to know I was in the depot.
‘Yes,’ I said, summoning as much of a threat as I could manage. ‘It’s confidential.’
‘My papers,’ he said.
‘You’ll get them back when I’m ready.’
He took a slight move towards me, just enough to show me some aggression, and I turned around until my back was to him. Then I simultaneously cracked my elbow back into his nose and kicked my left foot into his groin as his hands went up to his face. I turned back to watch the effect.
‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ I said in a quiet voice. ‘I don’t need help to break you in two, but I can call some up and we could really do a good job.’
He was sweating, blood poured from his nose and he could barely walk.
‘Get in that chair.’
I looked at the other three men in the room and they were wide-eyed with shock.
‘Find him some shithouse paper,’ I said. ‘And some water. Clean up that mess on his face.’
‘You bitch,’ the German muttered through his teeth as he sat bent over the table, clutching his balls with one hand and his face with the other.
‘If you want to get back home this year, you’d better listen this time,’ I said.
A look of fear crossed his face.
The other three arrived through the door at the rear carrying toilet paper and several cups of water.
‘Clean up,’ I said.
I took out a piece of paper and a pen and told the German to write out his itinerary. He did so, muttering at me and what he would do to me if he ever caught me in his own country. When he’d finished, I told him to get out separate papers from his pocket with the formal itinerary printed on them and then he began to look genuinely frightened. I could see he hadn’t written the truth.
‘Give me the printed sheet.’ I placed my hand gently on his shoulder and this, I think, frightened him more than anything.
He reached inside his jacket and gave it to me. I studied the route he was to take and gave him back the itinerary.
‘What’s your cargo?’
‘Spares.’
‘Weapons spares?’
‘How should I know?’
I watched him without speaking.
‘You going to let me go now?’ he said.
‘When your papers have been checked,’ I replied.
I told the others to give me their papers too.
‘Don’t leave until I return,’ I said. ‘Or your stay here will be indefinite.’
I took the only truck that wasn’t being loaded or unloaded and got into the cab. I drove it slowly around to the back of the depot, away from the main entrance and where there were fewer people working, and parked it next to the fence.
Using the truck as a blind, I climbed up the side of the cab and took a look around while I was still invisible. Two men in uniform were walking towards the truck talking to each other, but they turned when they were a hundred yards away and entered a building. I climbed the remaining few feet on to the roof of the truck and, visible for only a few seconds, I jumped over the fence.
It was a fifteen-foot drop to the other side and should have been easy, but in my hurry I landed badly. I began to walk fast away from the depot, across some wasteland, the truck shielding me for the first few yards and then, when I was in the open, I dropped down into a garbage dump for cover and came out on the other side into trees and then a road where there were cars and buildings. I walked fast into the centre of the town and stripped off the overalls in an alleyway, replacing them with my SVR uniform.
There was a very old Mercedes parked near the second-best hotel in the town centre, which had the word ‘Taxi’ written badly on a piece of card in the front window. The driver was sitting on the pavement smoking a cigarette. With my colonel’s uniform, it was a straightforward exercise to get him into the car to take me wherever I wanted to go. That’s the advantage of totalitarian societies. Certain people make everyone afraid, unquestioning. Their own system can be turned against them far more easily than in a free country.
We drove to the nearest gas station and I paid to fill the car. Then I told the driver to head for the capital Tiraspol, further into Transdnestr, and to the rendezvous we’d arranged. Bendery and the border would be filled first with troops if the alarm were raised.
As I sat in the front seat, nursing what I feared was a fracture, I wondered whether any of this had been worth it; we had an itinerary of one of Reiter’s trucks. But if the alarm were raised they would change it. I was relying on the German driver’s unwillingness to risk admitting a mistake.
I left the taxi on the outskirts of Tiraspol. I gave the driver fifty dollars and told him there was another fifty in it for him if he went to a hotel in the city, stayed put in his room, and waited for me there for twenty-four hours. I didn’t want him on the road when checkpoints began to go up, if that was what was going to happen. I knew he’d do it for ten dollars, but fifty was more than he made in three weeks.
I then doubled back in the darkness the way we’d come and put the overalls and uniform into my backpack and wore what I had worn when I arrived across the river, ordinary clothes bought in Moldova.
Finn was waiting at the rendezvous in the main square, leaning against an old grey Subaru and I climbed into the car without speaking. We drove fast to the outskirts of the town and beyond, skirting in a wide arc that took us twenty miles to the south of Bendery. We left the car on a dirt track which had a few ramshackle houses scattered along it.
‘We should take the other route out,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ he said.
He didn’t ask me what had happened. He just held me for a few moments and then we walked towards the river.
There were barges plying the Dniester River down to the Black Sea. They stopped for refuelling by a wooden jetty on the bank. They carried grapes and other agricultural produce, scrap metal, plastic- anything that could get a better price in the Ukraine or further afield than here. Finn went and stood behind a wooden building that was boarded up.
I leaned on a fence and looked down at a man smoking on the deck outside the wheelhouse of a barge that looked as if it might make it the sixty or so miles to the Black Sea. He finally noticed me and made a lewd comment. I told him that for a couple of dollars I was his, whatever he liked. He didn’t think for long. I descended a walkway on to the deck and brought my knee into his solar plexus. I could smell the drink on him and he began to retch with the blow to his stomach.
I dragged him into the wheelhouse, tied him up to some pipes, gagged him, took his cap off his filthy head and put it on. Then I started the engine and climbed back up the walkway as Finn appeared. He cast off the two loose hawsers that secured the barge to the quay and pulled in the walkway. I took the wheel and we turned away into the current heading south towards the Black Sea.
It was getting dark and it would be as dark as it had been the night before when we had crossed the river. There was little river traffic at this hour, just the occasional barge pushing its way slowly up against the current in the opposite direction.
Finn took the wheel and we were making good way with the current in our favour. We had to be careful not to overshoot the target and become entangled with the guards who watched the bridge where the borders of Ukraine, Transdnestr and Moldova met.
I saw the pontoons first. They were over to the right-hand side of the river-to starboard, as Finn said–until I told him to talk in left and right. I realised how hard it was going to be to dock a 150-tonne barge against a pontoon with all the power of the current behind it.
Finn headed straight for the upright post at the far end of the pontoon and as we seemed to be about to hit it, he slammed the engine in full reverse and spun the wheel. The barge choked and struggled against the current coming up behind us and then slowly, its engine roaring, the barge hauled its stern towards the pontoon while the bow pressed against the post ahead.
I jumped on to the pontoon at the stern and Finn threw me a rope, which I secured, and then ran to the bow and did the same. The barge edged towards me, I hauled in the line and secured it again as we docked parallel to the pontoon.
Then I climbed back on to the barge and we picked up our packs.
As we stepped off on to the pontoon, we heard shouts from farther up the bank. I heard feet running along the pontoon from the shore and saw at least three men in uniform. We turned back, climbing on to the barge. Finn pointed into the fast-flowing black water and then we jumped.
The water was very cold, a start-of-summer temperature, and I gasped with shock. My leg hurt again where I’d fallen on it. I heard feet behind me on the wooden deck of the barge, then shouts. Finally there were gunshots ploughing wildly into the water. But we were travelling fast in the current and were soon fifty yards away, holding tight to each other, our packs gone.
Finn shouted at me to strike out for the shore. I saw, perhaps a mile ahead, twin searchlights that seemed to be coming from a bridge and which were shining their beams on to the river’s surface. It was the frontier with the Ukraine, below which was the Black Sea. The bank we were striking out for was Moldovan territory.
‘Don’t let go!’ Finn shouted, and we both struggled with one arm, inch by inch, working half with the current as we tried to cross it.
I felt nothing, no pain from my leg now, no fear, I was completely controlled by adrenalin. And I knew that this loss of all feeling would last me as long as it took to get to safety.
When we were nearly at the shore and the lights on the bridge ahead seemed dangerously close, a broken branch stretched its dead wood out from the bank and we both grabbed it and held on desperately, too exhausted to do anything else. Finally we pulled ourselves along the rotting wood until we touched the muddy bottom of the river. I hauled myself out, freezing in the cool night, and Finn followed. Without talking, we ran straight into the woods that lined the bank, hoping to avoid the patrols from the right where the pontoons were, and from the left where the bridge loomed now, close up and fully lit.
The woods ran all along the Moldovan side of the river and for several hundred yards inland. It was completely dark now. There were shouts from not far off, and dogs barking in the distance, the guards trespassing now on to the Moldovan side.
And then we suddenly came out of the trees and into a field. There was some spring-sown crop that was barely visible above the earth. We ran down the edge of this field and heard the dogs in the wood behind where our pursuers had now come far into Moldovan territory. I saw a vehicle coming down a road a few hundred yards ahead. We ran faster. We were well into Moldova now, but I knew that it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to our pursuers. I could still hear the dogs.
We ran on to the road before I realised in the darkness it was there. It must have curved sharply from where the vehicle was approaching and I fell with the shock of the drop in the ground. I heard a vehicle slamming on its brakes and then I must have passed out.