December by James Steel

here with the other members of my team at eight o’clock tomorrow evening. OK?’
    He smiled at Alex as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

Chapter Three
    FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER
    Prisoner D-504 squinted at the harsh electric light shining into his face.
    Dogs barked, straining on leashes held by guards all around the parade ground.
    Another morning roll call in the Yag 14/10 Krasnokamensk Penal Colony. Six a.m., sky pitch-black, ambient temperature, without wind chill, minus thirty-five degrees C.
    His 868th roll call—the same every morning for over two years. He had calculated that he had 4,607 more to go in his fifteen-year stretch, although he knew that no one survived that long, so the figure was just hypothetical.
    He pushed it out of his mind and stood rigidly to attention. Any movement would earn a beating from the guards, but his eyes still darted around. They were all that showed under his padded hat, his face wrapped up against frostbite in scraps of dirty cloth that he had managed to cadge. His eyelashes were rimed with ice, and crystals clung to the cloths where his breath streamed through.
    Under the hostile acetylene light he watched a column of prisoners being led out of their overnight lock up in Barrack 7. That lot had it bad; he didn’t envy them. Glazkov,their barrack sergeant, was a right bastard and hammered them whenever he could.
    Like him, they all wore black padded jackets, hats with earflaps, padded trousers and mittens. All items were greasy and worn with age and had their inhabitant’s prison number stitched on strips, front and back, so that guards could identify them when they were bent over at work. They moved with heads down and shoulders hunched against the cold like a bunch of apes shuffling through the snow onto the parade ground.
    D-504 flicked his eyes up to the watchtowers astride the double fence of electrified razor wire. It gave no shelter from the wind that blew in from the North Pole and scoured along the rank of prisoners.
    Wind, normally such a simple thing, became so much more in Siberia. It was not the gentle breeze that had stroked his hair in the hot summers of his childhood on the Volga. This was a slashing ghoul that cut through your clothes with its ice-hard claws, screaming around the barracks at night, baying for the warmth in your blood.
    Warmth had become the centrality around which his life was lived. Just as an alcoholic craves drink, so he craved heat; hoarding pockets under his arms, trapping a morsel under his thin blanket at night.
    Cold, though, was his ever-present companion during the day, sinking its little gremlin teeth into his nose, ears and fingers, nipping and gnawing at them. Then, at night, climbing into bed with him like an unwanted lover, wrapping its arms around him and pushing its freezing hands into his bones, grabbing them and shaking him with uncontrollable shivering fits.
    He risked a sideways glance along the line of prisoners and then snapped his head back.
    Sergeant Kuzembaev was coming.
    Kuzembaev was a Kazakh, a flat-faced sadist with a horsewhip at his hip. It could rip through clothing and cut deep into the flesh if he really got some length on it. He was indifferent to the cold but seemed to take an icy pleasure in others’ pain.
    He worked his way down the line, shining his torch into each prisoner’s face to check that the man fitted the number on his strips and had not been substituted by someone bribed or beaten into taking his place overnight.
    Kuzembaev stopped in front of him; the thin slits of his eyes were implacable in the light shining up from his torch. He pulled D-504’s hat off, revealing a badly shaved head—to reduce the lice. The prisoner felt the bones of his head contract as the wind got at it. Then the guard stabbed the beam of his torch into his face and yanked the cloths down.
    The face that the sergeant scrutinised was the most famous in Russia. When he was captain of the national football team, the heavy