Episode Three: The Flight

Krakow is one of the most well known cities in Europe. Despite having a population that barely touches eight hundred thousand people, eleven million people visit it each year: mostly for its beautiful historical Old Town, but also using it as a means of accessing the nearby Salt Mines, the ski resorts of southern Poland and the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

But Alexei Orlov was there for none of that.

He was there to find someone who had come to Krakow for a completely different reason.

He was Russian: tall, lean, muscly and a quite striking man. His wife, Lyudmila, was Ukrainian, with long, golden, flaxen blonde hair and the kind of figure that made men look twice and other women gossip with envy. They’d met while his company had stationed him across the border in Kharkiv. Their love was instant and passionate and fiery. It was no surprise to anyone when their dates by the Donets River – in Ukraine and Russia – turned to engagement and marriage. Their wedding was loud and boisterous and joyful. Just like their union. His business often summoned him back across the border like a yo-yo, but he was faultlessly faithful to his beautiful Ukrainian wife. That was never an issue.

But things had gotten messy. He’d been in a bar in Belgorod when soldiers started amassing – ostensibly on manoeuvres, but in reality, planning to invade his second home. He'd been drinking in peace and quiet when some loudmouth brat from a Muskovite suburb with no clue about real life, dressed in camouflage gear, started boasting about what he would do to Ukrainian women if he had the chance.

Alexei could not let that slide. He'd confronted the man. And then, emboldened by too much vodka, the two of them had fought. Furious fists had flown in every direction. They’d grappled and tussled and wrestled. At a certain moment, Alexei had had enough. He'd smashed a glass beer bottle over man’s head. The man had staggered. Alexei had shoved him. Hard. The man’s head had rocked backwards, cracked off a bar stool, and his whole body was felled like a tree.

Soldiers from the man's platoon had risen from their chairs, and, still dizzy from drinking, had staggered towards Alexei. From nowhere, men from the bar had grappled him from behind. They’d shouted in Russian that the police would deal with him. One murder was enough.

And the police did. They’d beaten him to a pulp. They'd dragged him before a judge. He’d been remanded in custody.

A long sentence had been a certainty.

But still, Lyudmila would wait for him.

Then some bald guy with a swagger that far exceeded his stature had gathered all the prisoners into the spartan concrete exercise yard, beneath the cold, teeming rain. He'd wanted murderers and violent men for an operation. A military operation. Some would not return, but those who did would be pardoned.

The destination was Ukraine.

It was then that Alexei had cooked up his scheme: get into Ukraine, desert his regiment, find Lyudmila and run away together.

Simple.

Only it wasn’t. Far from it.

It should have occurred to him that his plan had multiple, glaring flaws.

Firstly, his regiment was full of psychos and head cases – rapacious beasts who were murderous, bloodthirsty and with a licence to kill, only loyal to themselves.

Secondly, the war was brutal. Horrible. Beyond imagination. Every day they were under constant, sustained, merciless bombardment as the Ukrainian army fought like cornered wildcats to defend their homes, armed with the very latest Western weaponry. Every day his comrades were shot and blown up and maimed. Every day he saw scenes of unspeakable violence.

More than that, every day he knew that his gun could easily be turned on someone whom, before this utterly senseless war, he could have bought a newspaper or a coffee from, or passed by in the street, or greeted in his apartment building. And that disgusted him to his bones.

Thirdly, his own regiment, men he ate with and slept beside, thought nothing all of committing the most brutal, the most heinous crimes against civilians who’d wanted no part in this war. He'd personally witnessed the targeting of apartment buildings, transportation hubs, refugee columns, hospitals, schools, nurseries. And if they hadn’t targeted these places, then these soldiers had the worse aim in history.

But he didn’t just see missiles and projectiles aimed at civilian infrastructure. He also saw civilians themselves targeted for the most heinous violations: harassment, rape (of every variety), torture, execution.

This was not war. Not what he expected it to be. This was savage anarchy dressed in military garb. It haunted his every waking moment. It taunted him in his dreams. And he wanted none of it.

Worst of all, rumours spread like dysentery in a trench that the barbaric Chechen regiments had been hired to ‘deal with’ deserters.

He knew precisely what that meant.

Yet every time the Ukrainian army dropped leaflets, or made shortwave radio broadcasts asking for soldiers to desert, he had to admit, he was tempted.

One day, the bombardment fell silent for just a few moments. His captain’s attention was diverted. There were dead to be counted in the bombed out bakery they called home.

So Alexei took his opportunity.

Alexei ran.

He ran down the boulevard. Took shelter behind the remains of a bus stop. Then a tank. Then a car. He ran and he kept running.

They noticed he was gone. They opened fire.

But they were terrible shots.

He never heard one of the half-hearted shooters mutter to himself, ‘Godspeed, Alexei Orlov. I wish I had your guts.’

Alexei dashed behind a block. Then another. Then another.

And before he knew it, he was away from the line of contact. So he kept running.

He had to lose his uniform.

He ducked into an abandoned, bombed out shopping mall his own side had targeted. There had to be something there, surely. But looters had got there first. Every store was ransacked.

But not the dead.

And Alexei Orlov was desperate.

He found a bloodied victim who was almost the same size as him. He stole his clothes: his shoes, trousers, pullover and jacket. And in the jacket was a set of keys. He ran them across his finger tips.

One of them was for a car.

He had never been religious, but at that moment he prayed, really quickly, and dashed through the dusty, tumbledown mall, past fallen masonry and across tiny shards of shattered glass, which crunched beneath his feet like fresh bloodied snow, towards the car park.

Great steel beams lay in twisted agony, several resting diagonally one across the other. Concrete dust smothered the floor. Whole floors had caved in, pancaked in top of each other. Limbs still stuck out of great concrete slabs where bodies lay, but no rescuer could remove them, and so they remained, missing and slowly decaying, but not ungrieved.

Alexei was overcome. His head raised to heaven in despair. He was on the ground floor of a three storey car park, but he could see daylight above his head. A bitter, bitter tear stung his cheek.

His people had done this.

And it was wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.

But still, he had to push on. He raised his arm, more in hope then expectation, the car key fob in his hand, and pushed a button on the fob.

He heard a chirrup. An electronic chirrup. The car was here. And it was still working.

He pressed again. A click. The doors had locked.

He ran in the direction of the sound, past cars so ruined no scrapyard would accept them, beams piercing their roofs, slabs crushing them to smithereens. He tried again.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it: a blue Dacia Sandero. Ukrainian plates. The lights flashed.

And it was undamaged.

He bolted in its direction and tried the driver’s side door. It was unlocked. He slipped inside, put the key in the keyhole and turned it. It coughed into life. He checked the dashboard. All electrics were working. And he had three quarters of a tank of diesel.

Alexei had a car!

He thumped the steering wheel out of sheer, unadulterated glee, before crossing himself to a God he was starting to believe in. Something was going right for him at last.

Now it was time to get out of this hellhole, get Lyudmila and grasp their hope of a new life.

He removed the parking brake, put his foot on the accelerator and almost yelled with delight as the car lurched forward. He twisted it sharply, this way and that, slaloming past bits of debris and dead bodies scattered across the floor, until finally he was on the street. And then, with a whoop of pure ecstasy, he was on the road home.

The road from Dnipro to Kharkiv should take two and a half hours. It took him five. Not because of the car. It was fine. But because of the constant diversions: the ducking past checkpoints and convoys; the avoiding of artillery shells and gunfire and soldiers. And the terrain made it so much harder: flat, wide open, little shelter.

Not to mention the rain: the never ending rain that turned every ploughed field into an inescapable quagmire.

But just as the sun was setting, he made it into Kharkiv.

Only it was about as far as possible from the home he’d known.

The entire city was riddled with burned out apartment blocks, half-destroyed tanks, smouldering cars.

And the bodies. Everywhere he looked. The bodies. Clad mostly in civilian clothes. Innocent people. They’d just wanted to live their lives. And now because of one man’s sheer, unadulterated lunacy, they lay there, face down or face up or in the foetal position, bled out into the dust, discarded like the remnants of last night’s dinner. Just abandoned on the ground. As if no-one cared.

Alexei sniffed back furious tears. It hurt. It hurt like nothing in this world had ever hurt before.

But it wasn’t what he’d come here for.

He quickly found their small apartment block. A whisp of smoke was still rising from the sixth floor when he arrived. Their little ground floor apartment had no more front wall. Everything was open. Everything was cinders. Nothing remained.

Everything that might have survived the blaze had already been stolen.

He called for Lyudmila, tears streaming down his face.

She did not answer.

Alexei stood in the teeming rain, his tears falling to the ground, mingled with tears from heaven. He was soaked through. Exhausted. Broken. A hollow shell of man.

What had he to live for now?

Until he felt a tap on his shoulder. ‘She’s gone, Alexei.’

He spun round. Behind him stood his neighbour, Pavel: a smaller man, balding with a moustache, older than him by at least twenty years, and likely excused from military service due to terrible back pains that led him to walk with a cane and a very pronounced limp.

Alexei could not even bring himself to greet his friend of several years.

‘You mean...?’ he asked, not daring to finish the sentence.

‘Poland. Her and her friends.’ Pavel informed him, in an atypical low, hollowed-out, monotone voice.

‘Where?’

‘No idea. Try her mother.’ Pavel said. ‘Look, and I’m saying this as a friend...’ Pavel stared right into Alexei’s eyes. Uncomfortably so. ‘You cannot be here. Too many people know who you are.’

‘But I hate this. You have no idea how much I hate it.’ Alexei replied, his heart wounded to the core that anyone could associate himself with this atrocity, despite having deserted the very army that had carried it out.

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m taking a risk by even talking to you.’ Pavel spat. ‘Get out, Alexei. Get out and don’t ever come back. Please. For me. For you. And do it now, before they find you and do God knows what to you.’

‘Okay. Okay. Spasiba, moy prijetene.’ Alexei thanked him.

‘And for your own safety, ne govoryu po-russki. Not unless you want to die. Ukrainian only. You understand?’ Pavel ordered.

‘Yes. Thank you again, brother.’ Alexei told him, as he turned to leave.

‘Maybe one day. Not today.’ Pavel corrected him as he hobbled across what had been their neat front yard, but was now scattered with shattered cinder blocks and glass and wood and the general detritus of shattered human life.

Alexei walked back to his car and drove off through the streets, sodden with rain and oil and blood, until he left the charred remains of what had been a city he had loved, and, a few minutes later, came across the village where his mother-in-law lived. He pulled up outside a humble dwelling: its eggshell-tinted walls bearing cracks from the dull thud of nearby artillery fire; roof tiles having fallen like the victims of this awful war to an ignominious end in the muddy puddles that were almost a moat around the house.

He drew breath and nervously rapped on the front door.

‘If you’re Russian, you can go to hell! You've already taken so much. You’re not getting another thing from me, you bunch of...’ His small, wizened mother-in-law cursed wildly in impassioned, patriotic Ukrainian.

Alexei didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘Svekrukha, it's me: Alexei!’ he called out.

She shuffled to the door, turned her large key in the lock with a loud click and yanked open her heavy wooden door.

‘Zyat, is that you?’ the little babushka in dull, dirty, worn clothing and a headscarf asked, as she surveilled him with her age-weakened eyes. ‘Is it really you?’

Alexei sniffed back a tear of joy amidst the pain. ‘Yes, svekrukha, it’s me.’

She took a delicate step forward. He did the same, expecting a warm embrace. But instead the old lady raised her withered, wrinkled palm and struck him weakly, before slapping him several times on his chest. ‘Why are you doing this to us? Huh? Why? Why? What have we done to you? Why all this suffering? Tell me!’ she raged, before collapsing into his arms in a cascade of tears.

Alexei could hold on no longer. He sobbed so hard that evening on her doorstep. He sobbed for the victims his battalion had harmed. He sobbed for the burned out cities, reduced from vital centres of thriving humans to places of deadly despair. He sobbed for the dying and the dead and those who longed for them through boarded-up windows.

He sobbed for his nation. Both nations.

He sobbed for peace.

That evening they sat down for a basic meal of dry bread and left-over borscht. He swore he could taste some concrete or plaster in it. It had likely fallen during a bomb blast. But he could not complain. It was food. He hadn’t had anything tasting like proper food for months.

‘So, what is your plan, Alexei?’ his mother-in-law asked him.

‘Find Lyudmila. Get away from this hell. Start again somewhere new.’ he told her.

She nodded her approval.

‘Do you know where she is?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I know she took the train. Probably to Krakow. They have been good to our people there. Maybe someone there will know. But you can find her in the morning. Tonight you must sleep. You look exhausted.’

Alexei would have argued, but he didn’t have the strength.

That night, after more borscht and a little shot of vodka, he lay on her rock hard sofa, covered with a thin sheet, listening to the distant crackle of sniper fire and the occasional boom of artillery. At least it was far away.

To be honest, it was almost soothing. Like fireworks in the distance.

He awoke early the next day, before dawn. Lyudmila’s mother begged him to have breakfast, but he had to leave in haste, so she packed him a few sandwiches and what little fruit she had from her backyard, and waved him off with the words, ‘Find her, Zyat. Find her and keep her safe.’

The drive to Kyiv was awful. Flat plains. Largely featureless roads.

Nowhere to hide if trouble came.

Every thud of artillery, every whistle of missiles, every rat-at-at of machine gun fire, every hum of drones – all of it, every bit of it, played on his nerves. And the risk, that enormous risk, that he, as an ethnic Russian deserter driving a Ukrainian registered vehicle, could be discovered by either army...

He could not even contemplate it.

He was exhausted when he reached Kyiv.

A local NGO offered him a metal cot in an underground station and some hot food. He was too weak to say ‘No’.

He left again in the early morning, touched at how ordinary Ukrainians were so charitable.

Maybe they’d have been less charitable had they known who he was.

And what he had done.

He headed off again for the city of Lviv. The drive was less nerve-wracking. But nonetheless, he still thought better of making a push for the border. After the best part of a day on the road, he hunkered down in another underground station, with another donated dinner, before heading for Poland.

The drive to the border was uneventful. But when he entered the town of Hrebenne on the Polish side, he allowed himself some tears of relief and joy while the car was parked, before heading towards a refugee information centre.

They knew nothing of Lyudmila.

So he pushed on to Krakow. He parked close to Krakow Glowny Station, strolled across the huge square in front of it towards its beautiful white façade, and walked inside.

The sight he came across was still quite stunning. While most of the refugees had gone, there were still signs in Ukrainian, pointing them to food and accommodation and jobs and advice. It moved Alexei. It moved him deeply.

He asked around for information from anyone who could help: had they seen this woman? Had they heard of this woman?

A passing policeman heard his pleas. He led Alexei to one side. He sat on a plastic bench as the policeman radioed back to his station. And then he nodded to Alexei. He explained that Alexei should follow him.

And so those two men left, their vehicles in convoy, towards one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods of an otherwise beautiful city. They passed tall, beige communist pile after tall, beige communist pile until they came to a block sealed off with police tape and guarded by two stern-looking police officers.

The officer helping Alexei got out of his car. After a quick conversation with the officers on guard, he came back to his car and gestured to Alexei to follow him once more.

Alexei’s already broken heart sank to the floor. His heart pounded in his chest.

What could have happened to Lyudmila?

A few streets later, in front of a nondescript building, the officer led him into a poorly signposted police station. He told him to sit while he spoke to the desk officer. After a few torturous minutes that felt like an eternity, they brought him into an interview room, gave him a cup of tea, and then, after another twenty minutes that seemed to go on for years, sent a Ukrainian-speaking liaison officer to break the news.

And it was devastating.

Lyudmila had been trafficked. Forced into prostitution. Arrested with a number of other Ukrainian women. And their handler. She was now in police custody.

But Alexei could take no more.

He howled in desperation and despair. And then he raged. ‘Who did this to her? Who? I will kill them. I will kill them and you will not stop me!’ His rage was so much that the police officers discussed if sedation was an option.

And then he wept. For Lyudmila. For himself.

For everything his nation had done.

Thousands of miles away, still basking under his cosmetics and cucumber slices, Shiloh Stalker Valdez was still resting peacefully when his fearful assistant rapped gently on the door of his comfortable, air conditioned hotel room in the tropics. ‘Ma’am. Ma’am. I have news.’

Shiloh sighed. ‘You’ve already harshed my mellow. You might as well come in.’

The assistant stood in the doorway, ready to use the door as a shield if Shiloh threw anything in a fit of pique, which was not unknown. ‘Ma’am, the news comes from Poland. Our operations have been disrupted. Our Krakow branch has been raided.’ she informed Shiloh, wincing as she did so in anticipation of the reaction.

Shiloh sighed deeply. ‘Such a shame. The women there are so good looking. War has done wonders for their figure. And their pliability. Never mind. Let the local boys handle it. They know what to do. One door closes, another opens. Wake me at breakfast time.’ And with that, Shiloh went back to sleep.

‘Ma’am, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon.’ The assistant told Shiloh gently.

Shiloh sighed deeply. ‘Why do you only bring me bad news these days?’ they said, removing the cucumber from their eyes. ‘I guess I’ll have to eat then’.