Find My Brother Read online

  Chapter Seven

  McBride finished stowing his belongings in the rucksack, keeping his anorak beside him on the bed. He was wearing his thick sweater. He expected it to be chilly in Russia at the end of September. He stood at the port hole watching as the ship approached the container port. In the distance, etched black against the cloudy sky, he saw the buildings of St Petersburg.

  The container port was laid out very similarly to the Teesport version. Container traffic had been operating since the latter half of last century, and standardisation in the dimensions of containers had spread to standardisation of the terminals.

  Half an hour later the ship finally docked, men on the dockside accepting the warps tossed to them, and securing the ship to the large bollards fore and aft.

  As McBride watched he saw a van approach the ship and a man got out, a cigarette in his mouth. He stood by until the crew lowered the gangways, and then vanished into the hull. McBride didn’t have to wait long. Within minutes, the key was turning in the door, and two crewmen appeared, one with a pistol in his hand. They stood to one side of the door, still in the corridor, and motioned for McBride to come out of his cell. McBride took his time gathering his belongings, which annoyed the men, as he knew it would. Eventually with McBride, now wearing his anorak, his rucksack on his back, they set off on the return route to the gangway.

  They emerged high up on the side of the ship, stairways zigzagging down the hull to the quayside. As McBride emerged, a cold breeze made him shiver. He was pleased that he had dressed for the colder climate. One crew member went first, then McBride, with the remaining man, the one with the gun, behind him. They went quickly down the rope and wood stair gangway. The motion set the rope and wooden construction swaying. On the quayside, the man from the van was waiting, now lighting a further cigarette, coughing harshly and then banging his hands round his chest to keep warm. He was dressed for driving in a heated vehicle, not standing around on a dock.

  McBride was ushered over to the van, the driver opened the rear doors, the crew man poked McBride in the back with his pistol and he climbed in.

  The doors were slammed shut, and McBride took off his rucksack, and sat down on the bench. He heard the driver speak to the crew, then the driver opened his door, the van shaking as he seated himself and suddenly they were driving speedily away. On the final leg of the journey, thought McBride.

  Two hours later, after driving on smooth surfaces at a speed that McBride estimated was more than sixty miles an hour, with hardly any traffic by western standards, the van slowed and turned, leaving the smooth tarmac, now on a rougher surface, and then stopping. The driver got out, and McBride heard a scrabbling sound on the metal van side, and then the gush of liquid. Even without the smell of petrol vapour, McBride would have known that they were refuelling. He heard the pump click off, and shortly the driver got back in the vehicle and drove forward for no more than two minutes before stopping again. He left the vehicle for about ten minutes. Then McBride heard footsteps approach the back of the van, the key inserted and the door opened. The daylight momentarily blinded McBride, then he made out the driver, thrusting something at him. He was amazed to see a carrier bag with the McDonald’s logo. He smiled at the driver and reached out. The driver quickly shut and re-locked the door.

  McBride felt in the bag, and pulled out a cardboard cup of coffee, complete with straw and cardboard lid. It was warm to his hands. He reached back in the carrier bag, and pulled out the polystyrene box that he knew would contain a Big Mac. The carrier bag also held a portion of chips. He was immediately hungry, and started to eat the burger, shovelling chips into his mouth, too.

  With his huger sated, he made himself as comfortable as he could on the bench and sipped his coffee. He was intrigued at the McDonald’s organisation that could make their food and coffee taste the same all over the world.

  The van was now back at high cruising speed, again on a good road surface, with very few bends. If they were heading to Archangel, or that area, they should be there before dark. The van driver pulled off the road into a layby for a toilet stop and allowed McBride to join him, although the driver had his pistol in one hand whilst they faced the countryside, side by side urinating.

  When they were driving on, McBride fell asleep, and was only woken when the van slowed and turned right along a much inferior road. Gravel was hitting the chassis, kicked up by the tyres and the van lurched in the potholes.

  About an hour later the van ground to a halt, and then moved forward cautiously, and the driver was speaking to somebody. Welcome to your new home, thought McBride. The van pulled into what must be a parking area. The rear doors were opened by two men in uniform, army uniform McBride surmised, but it was dark outside the van, and the area was lit, but quite dimly. He crouched down and pulled himself out of the vehicle, stretching and stamping his feet to restore his circulation. The two soldiers grabbed an arm each, and marched with him off to the right, where he saw a two storey brick building in very bad repair. They took him through a door with Cyrillic script on it.

  Inside, the light was much brighter, several strip lamps on the ceiling buzzing annoyingly. There were two old wooden desks, and a large man sat at one of them, writing in a bound ledger. He looked up, and McBride saw that the man was approaching sixty, and was maybe some four stones overweight. He, too was wearing army uniform, but of a better cut and finer cloth. Officer class McBride reckoned. The man stood up and walked across to the counter that was close to the door. He reached beneath his side of the counter, bringing his hand back up with a sheet of paper. A form, of course. Nothing happens in armies anywhere in the world without first filling in a form. McBride knew that from his own experience.

  The guard next to him put down a creased piece of paper, another filled in form. He glanced over and saw the name John, and the rest of the form was in Cyrillic script. The officer picked it up, screwed the sheet into a ball with one hand and then threw it in a waste basket by one of the desks. He turned the form round to face McBride, laid a pen on the desk and spoke in Russian. McBride shook his head.

  “Fill,” the officer said, pointing at the form, then the pen. McBride picked it up, and studied the form. It was in English. He was surprised. He filled in his surname as ‘McGregor’, and then the rest of the form with correct information, date of birth, address, height, weight. He turned the form the other way on the counter so that the officer could read it. The officer glanced at it without reading it, and put it into wire tray on one of the desks. He reached again under the counter, produced a green plastic disc. A number was embossed in white. 136 it read. McBride picked it up. There was a pin fastener on the back. He held it up against his sweater, looked at the officer with his eyebrows raised in question.

  “Ja,” said the officer, and watched whilst McBride affixed the badge to his sweater. Then he gave instructions to his guards. They again grasped his arms, and manhandled him out of the door. McBride saw arc lights on poles, shining with weak light, leaving large areas of shadow across the compound. Looking down he saw that it was concrete cracked and crumbling. Turning his head he saw a guard tower in a corner of the compound. He could make out a head below the roof at the top of the tower. The guards marched him along the brick building to a door at the opposite end. They passed barred windows, with electric lights visible inside. The building was about a hundred feet long, and there was another door in the middle. One of the guards opened it with a key attached to his belt. His companion guard lifted his pistol at the ready, and all three entered the dormitory.

  McBride recognised the layout that he had seen many times in the British Army. Beds were head against each of the side walls, interspersed with lockers five feet high. There were a couple of potbelly stoves in the centre aisle; chimneys of steel reaching up and through the ceiling. The floor was a composition screed. The beds had numbers screwed to the wall above the bed, and repeated on the steel locker adjacent to the bed. The guards took him down to one end, where he saw
his number on the bedspace. Bedding was neatly boxed on the bare mattress. One of the guards opened the locker, showed him the contents – two more blankets, a bar of soap, a towel, grey but no doubt it had started out as white, an army style greatcoat hanging on a rail. There was a denim uniform, black tunic and trousers. McBride nodded, thinking that’s a good colour to be wearing when I escape, providing it’s not snowing. He looked round. His bedspace was in a good position, not far from one of the stoves. There was a group of fellow-prisoners standing mostly round the stoves, smoking and talking, but also paying attention to their new companion. The guards left him, walking out of the door, and he could hear it being locked again.

  McBride threw his anorak and rucksack into a spare shelf of his locker, and wandered over to the nearest stove.

  “Hello guys, my name’s John McBride. Nice place you’ve got. Is there some-one called Ben lives here?”

  “Ben Stockton?”

  “That’s the man.”

  “He’s just over there, with his back to us,” the bearded man said, pointing to the other stove further down the room.

  “With the fair hair?”

  “That’s the one.” The man looked puzzled. “Why do you ask, when you don’t know him?”

  “I know his sister, and she asked me to find him. If you don’t mind, I’ll just go over and introduce myself.” McBride strode down to the other stove, tapped Ben on the back. Ben swung round nervously.

  “For God’s sake don’t do that. You’re new here, aren’t you? So this time I forgive you. It’s what one of the guards does, and then sticks a gun in your face. He thinks it’s funny.”

  “My apologies, it won’t happen again. Your sister is looking for you. So I thought I would join the fracking trail, and go where the Russians took me. I thought you would be there, and here you are.”

  “It won’t do a lot of good, we can’t go back.”

  “I thought we would escape. It can’t be that hard from what I’ve seen so far. Mind it was dark when I got here. But we can talk about that tomorrow.

  “Your sister said to tell you to look after yourself, and that she is okay, except wasting her holidays trying to find you. She was crying at the time, I don’t think she meant it.”

  McBride studied Ben. He could tell he was the girl’s brother, same shaped face, big eyes. He could be late twenties, he supposed.

  Ben grimaced. “You won’t be so damn cheerful when you’ve been here a week.”

  “Give me some lowdown. So far all I know is what I see, and it looks like I’ve joined the Army again. Is it tough, do they work us hard, is the food good?’

  “The food is cooked by us, but the raw ingredients are mostly potatoes, grown near the camp, rabbits shot by the guards, and the occasional deer. They planted some cabbages, but they’ve all been eaten. In the spring there will be vegetables again, I think.”

  “I don’t intend to be here by the spring,” said McBride in a positive voice. “What about fuel for the stoves? Is there enough of that for the winter, or are we all going to freeze to death?”

  “There’s a huge pile of coke in the compound.”

  “To change the subject slightly, will we be fed tonight?”

  “Tony and Nigel are in the kitchen, cooking right now. We usually eat at seven thirty.”

  “Very civilised. Are we locked in now?”

  “Yes, from six o’clock, until eight in the morning.”

  “Couldn’t be that difficult to break out.”

  “I think you should wait until you see the camp in daylight before you make those judgements, mate. There’re guards up in those towers all night, and there’s miles of flat ground with no cover, until you get to the forests.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow. Do you have some ablutions that I could use before dinner?”

  “That end. The door on the right is the washroom and bogs. The other door is into a separate bedroom.”

  “No doubt where the corporal or sergeant in charge beds down.”

  “No, in fact the Russians keep out of our way most of the time. There’s a very ill guy in there. He’s about sixty, which is a lot older than anyone else. He was ill when I got here. He looks as though he has cancer; don’t think he’ll last long.”

  “Can’t you get the Russians to move him to a hospital?”

  “Apparently not. He could do with some pain killers, but the guards say they haven’t any.”

  Ben suddenly turned to the opposite end of the room, where a door had opened and two men pushed a large trolley into the barrack room. McBride caught a fragrance of cooked food. He hadn’t eaten since he had the McDonald’s burger.

  “Smells good.”

  “Yes, they’re good cooks considering.” They both walked down the room; joined an informal queue. The cooks were handing out plates which they had filled from a huge stewpot which stood on the trolley. As soon as each man had been served, they either sat on the beds close by, or stood round the stove, with spoon in one hand, and dish in the other.

  “Could do with a table here,” said McBride.

  “I think it would be considered an extravagance by the Russkies. I’ll introduce you to some of the guys.” He banged with his spoon on the trolley. “Hey, listen up, this guy is John. He knows my sister.” He turned to McBride and said “This is Fred, with the beard. Nigel, next to him.” He continued reciting names which McBride wouldn’t remember until he’d been here a few days.

  McBride sat on one of the beds with Ben, and started to eat. The food was remarkably good, a potato and rabbit stew, accurately seasoned. Unfortunately there were no second helpings, and no further courses.