His heart pounded in his throat. At last he was called in. The office was small and stale with cigarette smoke.
The captain, a tired man with deadened, indifferent eyes and a puffy face, sat behind a desk piled with paperwork. He glanced at Mike, let his eyes rest for a second on the bandage under his cap, and showed nothing but irritation. He understood everything.
He’d seen dozens like Mike. They were problems, and he wanted no part of them. Mike held out the report with a trembling hand.
The captain took it, skimmed the standard phrase, and dropped it into a desk drawer.
— Fine, Sokolov. We’ll look into it. Get back to duty.
There was not a trace of concern in his voice. No promise. Just a wall. The wall of official indifference that so many lives broke against.
Mike walked out with a tiny, weak, almost crazy hope flickering in him. Maybe. Maybe this time. He waited. One day.
Two. A week. He listened for every step in the hallway, flinched every time the duty man shouted a last name.
But nothing happened. Silence. After two weeks, worn down by waiting, he finally asked the company clerk, who knew everybody’s business.
— Hey, anything on my request?
The clerk didn’t even look up from his papers. He lazily waved toward the trash can.
— Forget it, Sokolov. Captain tossed your little note the same day. Said, “Another smart one trying to duck service.” Who needs inspections and headaches because of you? Move along.
The words hit like a hammer blow. Forget it. Tossed it. Who needs the trouble?
In that moment Mike’s world shrank to the size of that dark, foul-smelling hallway. He stood there unable to move while the last supports inside him gave way. There was no hope left.
None. He understood with sickening clarity: he was trapped.
In a sealed, airtight trap. The system didn’t care. The officers didn’t care. Nobody cared.
He was expendable. Just a body expected to serve out its time. No one would help him. No one would save him.
He was alone with the men tormenting him. And in that ringing emptiness, where the last of his hope died, something else began to form.
Something cold, dark, and frightening. The feeling that if there was no way out, he would have to make one himself. Winter of 1987 dragged on forever.
Gray sky. Gray snow. Gray life in the barracks. Mike turned into a shadow. He moved on reflex, followed orders, but inside him there was scorched earth.
He no longer hoped, waited, or believed. He simply existed. Day after day.
Waiting for the ordeal to end. And it did end. Just not in any way he could have imagined.
In early February, a typed sheet appeared on the bulletin board in the barracks. Guard detail for escorting a special prisoner transport. Route.
The capital. Kharkov. Two weeks on the road.
Escorting convicts was considered lousy duty. But for many men it was at least a break from the routine of the post. Soldiers crowded around the list. Some were glad. Some cursed.
Mike let his eyes move down the names without expecting anything. Then he froze. The blood drained from his face. His ears started ringing.
Guard commander, Warrant Officer Belov. Senior guard, Sergeant Voronov. Guard detail, Private Gafurov, Corporal Yusupov.
He read the list again and again, not believing it. This wasn’t just a random assignment. It was his personal team of tormentors.
Every man who had made his life hell was there. The whole pack. A cold chill ran down his back.
So cold his teeth hurt. It didn’t feel accidental. It felt like a cruel joke from command.
Or a sentence. Two weeks in the sealed metal space of a prison car, completely in their hands, far from witnesses and oversight. He understood this trip might be one-way.
His thoughts raced. Fake an illness? The medics would clear him and send him right back, and then things would get worse. Run? To where? Desertion meant prison.
He was trapped, and the walls were closing in by the minute. The evening before departure, he sat alone in the cold political education room and wrote a letter. His fingers were stiff and clumsy with cold. The letters wobbled on the page.
He wrote to Susan. He lied, the way he had lied all those long, miserable months. He wrote that he was heading out on an interesting assignment, that everything was fine, that service was going normally, and he’d be back soon.
He looked at the small photo of her smiling that he kept in his pocket and understood he might be seeing her for the last time. He tried to remember her scent, the warmth of her hands, but all his mind gave him was the stink of the barracks and the cold of metal. He described made-up Army routines while the faces of Voronov and Gafurov floated before him.
He felt like a condemned man writing a last letter no one would ever really understand, full of pointless lies. When he finished, he sealed the envelope, walked to the mail slot in the hallway, and dropped it in. The metallic click of the lid closing in the silence sounded like a dry gunshot.
It was goodbye. The next morning they boarded the train. The special prison car—officially listed in the paperwork as a secure transport car—was attached to an ordinary passenger train, but it was its own separate world, like an iron coffin on wheels.
A narrow corridor painted institutional gray, guard compartments on both sides, and prisoner cells with heavy barred doors. Dim light filtered through barred windows and mixed with the yellow glow of electric bulbs. The air carried a heavy, permanent smell—a mix of metal, disinfectant, cheap tobacco, and old human misery.
The guard commander, Warrant Officer Belov, a bloated, heavy man with an indifferent face, made his attitude clear right away. He barely looked over the detail, muttered a few curse words about the trip, then shut himself in his compartment, where the smell of cheap fortified wine and fried chicken soon drifted out. Real power in the car passed, without discussion, to Sergeant Voronov. And when the train jerked forward and started carrying Mike farther and farther from the capital, he looked through the dirty window at the bleak suburban landscape sliding by and understood with absolute, chilling clarity—no one was going to help him here.
For the next two weeks, this car would be his private torture chamber. The trip began, and the car filled with new occupants—about a hundred and fifty prisoners being moved down the line. The air grew heavier with their silent, grim presence.
Voronov, enjoying his authority, immediately began setting his own rules. His first target, naturally, was Mike. They put him on guard at the far end of the corridor, the coldest and worst post. By regulation, he should have been relieved after four hours.
But four hours passed. Then six. Eight. No one came. Mike stood there gripping the cold metal of his rifle and staring into the dim corridor…
