by Alex Dryden
She shrugged. ‘It was pitch-dark. He’d drunk a great deal. I personally saw him drink a bottle of vodka. Who knows what else he’d drunk before that. Yes, it was easy.’
‘He’s a big man. A strong man,’ the Wolf said.
‘But not a smart man,’ she replied. ‘He was dead drunk. Perhaps that’s why he attacked me. Who knows? Maybe he attacks a lot of women.’
The Wolf turned to the captain. ‘There’s too much drinking on this ship,’ he said, now wishing to find another avenue of blame.
‘Yes, major,’ the captain answered him. ‘There’s not much else.’
The Wolf looked at him angrily, as if his rank were not public property. Then he turned again to Anna.
‘Some men saw you drinking with him last night. On the deck.’
‘He threatened me. He said if I didn’t have a drink with him, he’d rape me. I was hoping he’d be too drunk by the time he’d finished the bottle he had. That’s why.’
‘What happened… when you ran away?’
‘I hid on the deck at first, to make sure he wasn’t following me. Then when I was sure he’d gone or fallen asleep, I made my way to the hold where the women sleep.’
‘You know where he is now?’
‘No. Why should I?’
‘Because he’s disappeared, that’s why,’ the Wolf snarled.
Anna looked back into his eyes.
‘Then he’s probably in the river, isn’t he.’ she said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STANDING ON TOP of the world was something Burt Miller was accustomed to, but only in a purely metaphorical sense, as the head of the world’s most powerful private intelligence agency Cougar. Actually standing on top of the world, however, above the Arctic Circle and within a few hundred miles of the North Pole, was a new experience.
Wearing a knee-length, shining dark brown sable coat from Saks in New York, Miller didn’t exactly cut the figure of an average leader, or even wealthy patron, of the geography field expedition that his presence on the uninhabited island purported to be connected with. And standing on a deserted and freezing pebble beach on this uninhabited island in the far north-east of Finland, the incongruity of his attire seemed especially glaring.
Some of his so-called ‘students’ – in reality, employees of Cougar brought on to the island – had speculated on the cost of the coat and came to the conclusion that it couldn’t have left a lot of change out of a hundred thousand dollars. One of them, a 25-year-old Jewish New Yorker with a bob of black hair and an attitude by the name of Charlie, airily claimed to have seen such coats before. But her grandfather had been in the fur trade a few streets downtown from Broadway. The other so-called geography students at Burt Miller’s icy mission HQ – and his agent ex-filtration point for Anna Resnikov – looked at the coat with a mixture of awe and ignorance.
And then there was Burt’s fur hat, similarly beyond the financial reach of a university professor – which was Burt’s current identity for the purpose of this period when he needed an uninhabited island in the north of the world. He was Professor Burt Miller (though he’d actually given himself another name, not his own); he had acquired all the fake qualifications, he had essays published in scholarly, if obscure, American journals and, to round off the fiction, he could show off the necessary plaudits of ‘fellow’ academics in the field to anyone who cared to ask. He had even taken the trouble for the most vital mission of his life, as he was letting it be known it was, to acquire a Chair at a small mid-western university.
As for his other accessories – the gold watch, for example – a keen eye might have spotted these, too, as excessive for the location, let alone for the academic profession.
But Burt Miller seemed unabashed by the figure he cut on the deserted beach and it was a mercy, Larry thought, that in this godforsaken spot at the top of the earth there was nobody outside Burt’s religiously loyal Cougar employees who could wonder at the coat and other luxuries and consequently question his boss’s false credentials.
Legs astride on the smooth, round pebbles, his fur boot-shod feet crunching the stones, and his large stomach pushing the coat out in a comfortable globe of priceless fur, Burt Miller watched through high-powered binoculars towards a line of three trawlers returning from still higher up in the Arctic. Judging by the low line of their gun-whales, he noted, they were returning with a good catch.
‘Three days…’ Burt said in contemplation, and in a repetition of the recently given answer from the man standing next to him.
Larry had arrived on the island only hours before Miller, after the urgent summons that had brought him racing to the north. Landing from Mongolia first at Ankara and from there on to Helsinki in one of Miller’s private jets, he had finally reached the island by another flight north in a small prop-driven plane and then a trawler – another of Cougar’s possessions – which was fitted out with high-powered satellite and other general spy equipment.
Larry was a heavy-set, tall brute of a figure with a crew cut and an ugly scar down one side of his face. He had eyes like diamond cutters and each of his hands, when they weren’t thrust in the pockets of an army-issue jacket, were big enough to pick up a basketball. He was always the sharp end of Burt’s operations – some might say the violent end. But this afternoon on the freezing pebble beach he looked every inch the practical and, indeed, sensible military man, down to a white goose-down polar military jacket used by Canada’s Arctic regiment. But his expression told a different story. Lines of worry and anger that betrayed a loss of control over Anna’s mission crossed his face. He sucked his teeth and wondered if Anna Resnikov had lost her mind.
‘Three days, yes, Burt. Three days if the ice isn’t too bad,’ Larry replied. ‘This time of year, it’s still tricky up here.’
‘Yes?’ Miller queried.
‘Otherwise you need an ice-breaker and only the Russians have them. The Russians have twenty ice-breakers, seven of them nuclear-powered. The US has only one active,’ he added with a trace of bitterness.
‘I don’t see any ice,’ Burt replied gruffly, waving the binoculars about wildly as if some iceberg invisible to the naked eye might hove into view.
‘Here, no,’ Larry said patiently, though a careful listener might have detected a grinding of teeth. ‘Up here in the north of Norway and Finland a combination of the tail of the Gulf Stream and a continental climate that comes in from north America keeps the sea free throughout the year. But there,’ Larry pointed to the east and south, out into the sea which had now been turned a deep blue by the cloud-free sky, ‘out there in the Barents Sea and, beyond that, the Kara Sea above the Yenisei river, none of that applies. Even though it’s slightly south of where we’re standing, the Kara’s frozen solid in winter. Impassable without a breaker. This time of year the ice is breaking up, sure, but that’s more dangerous, if anything, for a normal vessel. You still need a way cleared by an ice-breaker for an ordinary ship to get between the floes and growlers that come down from the north when the wind’s coming from up there.’
Burt seemed momentarily at a loss that his own company, Cougar Intelligence Applications, didn’t possess a nuclear-powered ice-breaker of its own. After all, Cougar produced a great deal of military hardware, including satellites and unmanned drones, as well as rivalling the CIA itself in its intelligence-gathering activities. But ice-breaking hadn’t been a necessity – until now, perhaps. A flash of anxiety at this lapse crossed his brow.
Burt lowered the binoculars. ‘So that’s three days to the mouth of the Yenisei, right?’
‘Best to allow four, probably, to the Yenisei itself,’ Larry answered, again patiently, even though this information had been conveyed to Burt on several occasions, in lengthy briefings, in the several months before they’d left American soil. ‘There’s a long run in to the mouth of the river itself. A ship comes down from the Arctic Ocean which we’re looking at now, into the Kara Sea and then the mouth of the Yenisei.’
Was the old man more
worried than he thought? Larry wondered. Burt certainly hadn’t wanted Anna in there, inside Russia, in the first place. But she’d insisted it had to be her. And now she’d gone out on her own, against all instructions, disobeying Miller openly. And with the MVD by now undoubtedly somewhere behind her.
‘Four, in case the weather’s bad,’ Larry explained. ‘And depending on which of the pick-up points she goes for.’
‘And where’s the nearest pick-up point to here?’ Burt queried. ‘That’s where she’ll go.’
Larry imagined that this statement – as if one of fact – had something to do with Burt’s self-proclaimed ‘Line to God’. But he took out of his jacket a satellite map of Cougar’s that showed the top of the world.
It demonstrated a great expanse of ice around the North Pole and, circling half of this Arctic ice-cap, was Russian Siberian territory. The other half of the circle around the ice-cap was divided roughly between the American state of Alaska, Canada, Danish-owned Greenland, and Norway and Finland.
‘There.’ Larry pointed. He pinned his finger to a point at the edge of the Kara Sea, a promontory where the northern Siberian coast turned to the right for another four thousand miles, almost as far as Alaska. Near his finger, a single town by the name of Dikson was marked. ‘That’s the northernmost port,’ Larry explained, ‘but it’s barely more than a jumble of warehouses and barracks.’
‘Dikson?’ Burt said. ‘That’s where the Russians have been building their new transportable nuclear reactor.’
‘That’s right.’
Larry now withdrew a more detailed map of the area. The pick-up point was about a hundred miles eastwards of this northernmost town of Dikson, in a small gulf.
‘That’s where she’ll go,’ Burt affirmed, without really looking at the map and certainly without inviting any possibility of demurral.
‘If she can make it that far,’ Larry replied, knowing better than to openly doubt Burt’s pronouncements. ‘And if she isn’t already in some torture cell in Moscow,’ he added cruelly. He drew himself up. ‘Look, Burt.’ He pointed at the map. ‘Norilsk and the Putorana mountains are three hundred miles south of the pick-up point. Three hundred miles of nothing that she’d have to cross. Dudinka is slightly less far than that. But it would be much more dangerous to try to pick her up from there. If she’s decided to go through with the mission as originally planned, then if she succeeds, and if she survives, she’s still got around three hundred miles to the pick-up, north all the way, nothing by way of transport and in the middle of a highly militarised and hostile territory.’
Burt thought about this, but not for long. ‘That’s where she’ll go,’ he repeated. ‘It’s the closest to us here. That’s where she’ll go.’ Then he turned sharply to Larry. ‘Now you look, Larry. She’s gone against orders. But don’t start fretting on me. We either work up a sweat about it or we work to get her out, just as planned. So let’s deal with what’s happening, shall we?’ After fixing Larry with a cold stare, his face broke into its habitual grin, as it always did when well-laid plans had broken down and improvisation was all that was left. He even clapped Larry on the back with a fur-gloved hand. ‘So. When’s the earliest possible rendezvous there?’ he said, and pointed at the pick-up point.
‘Tenth of June. After that, every three days, but it gets riskier each time.’
‘But we have that all arranged, haven’t we?’ Burt objected. ‘Nothing’s changed in terms of our plans, as far as I know.’
Larry paused to compose his answer. ‘No. Nothing’s changed. We have the three ships, two based in Hamburg, one in Svarlborg. All old tubs that have been regular visitors to the Yenisei for years in the summer months when they pick up timber there. There have been no name changes on any of the vessels, the Russians have seen all the papers they carry before. But they’re ours now in all but name. Each ship will make journeys to and fro from Hamburg, coal on the way to Siberia, timber on the return. With three ships going both ways, it means we can pass not too far from the pick-up every three days. And on each ship, of course, we have our own teams. Small boats that look like the kind of local fishing vessels you find up in the Kara, but which can travel at four times the speed and pick someone up off a beach.’ He paused. ‘So, yes, nothing’s changed.’ He looked up and out to sea to the east. ‘The first vessel should be making its way into the Barents Sea tomorrow, escorted by a Russian ice-breaker. That’s the only way they’re allowed to go. The Russians say it’s the necessity of having an ice-breaker accompany each ship, which is partly true. But they’re also there as an escort to make sure nothing happens the Russians don’t like. The route to the Yenisei will take the ship past the island of Novaya Zemlya where the Russians have tested their nuclear weapons in the past, and then into the Kara. They either pick up the timber in Dikson, or they can go on into the Yenisei as far as Igarka.’
‘Then that’s fine, isn’t it,’ Burt said, as if they were deciding on a venue for lunch.
The two men began to walk back along the beach to give the morning briefing. They remained in silence. But, to Larry, Anna’s mission now seemed little more than a suicide run.
And twenty minutes later, back at field expedition headquarters higher up from the beach, Burt also seemed deep in thought, preoccupied by the same questions, perhaps, and there seemed to Larry an uncharacteristic sense of doom about him that his best operative was now committed on Russian territory with a net that was sure to be closing around her already.
There were three prefabricated huts higher up from the beach. Against his own explicitly dictated regulations on the subject, Burt nevertheless called the geography field expedition headquarters the ‘Arctic Psy Ops’ centre. From these three huts, day and night, the members of the so-called geography field team Burt had gathered together from the youngest employees of Cougar’s Russian intelligence unit went about the normal activities of a university field trip above the Arctic Circle.
But all the time what they were actually monitoring was shipping activity across the maritime border in Russian waters, as well as Russian air presence in the area. They tapped into Russian communications signals coming from the military base near Murmansk and other places on Russian soil. They zeroed in from Cougar’s satellite on to the Russian ICBM base and nuclear research facility buried in the Putorana mountains to the east of Norilsk and the Yenisei, and they picked up snippets of coded intelligence from Krasnoyarsk that had told them, most recently, about Anna’s departure on the Rossiya. And against Burt’s explicit orders.
The geography field trip was, in fact, a full-tilt intelligence operation aimed at Russia’s northernmost territorial limits above the Arctic Circle. But these territorial limits were claims only and the government in the Kremlin wished to extend them all the time. Burt and the CIA believed, in fact, that the Russians wanted to extend them as far as and even beyond the North Pole itself. And if they did that, they would be treading right on America’s toes.
Only two years earlier, Vladimir Putin had personally ordered the Russian tricolour flag, this one made of titanium, to be planted on the sea bed directly beneath the North Pole itself. And the planting of the flag was achieved, with the mini-submersible the Russians used somehow managing to find its way back up again to the small hole in the ice where it had begun its descent. The other countries with an interest in the Arctic polar region apart from America – Canada, Denmark and Norway – were equally nervous about Russia’s latest ambitions there.
To the so-called geography students, the real purpose of Anna’s mission was concealed. It was this, Russia’s proposed and vast extension of its sovereign territory beneath the North Pole, that the team believed they were there to monitor. This, and gathering intelligence concerning the nuclear reactor the Russians had built far north of the Arctic Circle; a conventional nuclear reactor in every way, except that it could be moved across ice or sea to where it was needed to power the Russians’ proposed Arctic oil explorations.
To the team, there w
as never any mention of a Professor Vasily Kryuchkov, or of his supposed earth-shattering discovery. What they believed they were there to study on the island were Russia’s next moves up to the ice cap and over the Pole towards America. And this key point of contention between Russia and the United States was an undersea mountain range called the Lomonosov Ridge that ran from Siberia beneath the North Pole. It was said to contain a quarter of the world’s remaining oil and gas and it stretched from the Siberian mainland, under the pole, and on to America’s Arctic doorstep. The Kremlin had been proclaiming for some time now that it belonged to Russia and the international tribunals that judged the geology of territorial claims such as this one seemed to be bound to agree.
And now it had been established that Russia had built the world’s first mobile nuclear power station, the needs of the Western intelligence agencies to know if and when it began to be dragged towards the Pole had become more urgent. In summer, it was said, it could be towed across the sea by tugs to the ice cap, while in winter it was to be dragged by tractors across the ice of the Kara Sea all the way to the Pole. For the geography students, this looming international and ecological crisis was so convincing that Anna’s mission – had they known of it – could have had no greater importance. And so there had been no need to tell anyone about her real reasons to be on Russian soil, outside the closed loop of Burt’s inner circle.
And yet, despite this supposed purpose of clandestine surveillance, and despite the activities of Burt’s expedition on an uninhabited edge of the Polar ice cap, what any curious and possibly unwelcome eyes would have seen, had they been present to study the field expedition headquarters, was a meticulously collected and labelled set of specimens and samples made ready by the team to be returned to the biology, geology and geography departments of the mid-western university that was heavily patronised by Cougar and at which Burt had acquired his temporary, and fake, Chair.