Free Trans-Siberian Express by Warren Adler

deliberate observer. And that idea softened Godorov toward the man who had been his old cellmate with whom he had lived in the special hell of those days, the Gulag. He squeezed Platinov’s arm.
    As he stood up to go, Godorov saw the glint of the morning sunlight on the windows of Stalin’s gingerbread university. He remembered the first glimpse of Shmiot’s hated face, the imperious snarl, the cold eyes which blinked at the sudden light as the door opened and Godorov, the new prisoner, was thrust inside. The railway compartment had been specially constructed to house eight men in two tiers of shelf-like bunks. Instead, Godorov found twenty-eight men there, including himself. He was the last to enter, the last man to be pressed into the tiny metal cage by the guard who jabbed his buttocks as if he were the last pickle to be squeezed into a jar.
    He had been delivered by the black maria from the Taganka jail. People often turned away from the sight of the black maria cars, those sealed, rolling prisons which moved, always deep in the night, from place to place in the crazy-quilt pattern of the mad prison bureaucracy. As hard as Godorov tried, as they all tried, he could never discover a logic to the strange movements, the transporting of convicts sometimes across the entire length of the Soviet Union. The prison bureaucracy used the black marias and the hated Stolypin—the specially constructed railroad cars—to carry the Zaks, the prisoners, through to the endless chain of prisons, mines and farms that snaked across the face of Stalin’s terrain.
    Godorov had been in various cages of the system for two weeks and had somehow managed to keep his civilian suit, which his father had bought him to replace his lieutenant’s uniform after he had been released from the Army. He had been an artillery officer at Stalingrad; wounded and decorated, which made his parents proud. Their whole village in Georgia had turned out to welcome him home. Often in the cages of the Gulag he would remember that homecoming, the singing and dancing until the early morning, and the sweetness of Natasha’s body as it yielded its softness to him on that very first night, so wonderful a gift that he had actually shed tears of joy.
    If he had been guilty of any crime, it was the crime of temper, for he had lost his self-control when confronted with the long delay in getting his work card. It was a silly thing really, and all he had done was break a few chairs and call the clerk an ass-kisser. Not that that was a special crime in itself, except that he had specified whose ass—Stalin’s—which sent the office into paroxysms of patriotic zeal. He was a criminal against the State. He went through the whole ordeal of administrative trial and sentence, as if it were some terrible nightmare from which he would soon awaken. Of course, he never had.
    They had given him a “fiver,” five years, and he had learned quickly that they could easily tack on another five years for good measure. He had determined, therefore, to be as inconspicuous as possible, to move silently through the Gulag until the time had passed. He was only twenty-two. Surely Natasha would wait. What was five years? My God, five years! It would be endless.
    He had jumped from the black maria to the metal step of the Stolypin that would transport him to the prison camp. Briefly, he felt the clean icy air of the night. Then he was inside the compartment, and the crush of bodies was unbearable. Clutching the paper bag that contained his civilian suit, he managed to squeeze into a spot near the closed compartment door. Looking up, he discovered a strange thing. Convicts were crammed into the bottom rung of bunks, arms, heads, legs, stuffed together like cast-off dolls in a garbage can. Even the baggage rack near the ceiling was lined with convicts. But on the top tier below the baggage, one man lay stretched out in comparative comfort. Shmiot! It was Godorov’s first view of him. His head