Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  With the help of the university’s principal, an arrangement had been made with the universities of Tromso in northern Norway and the university of Kuopio in Finland for eighteen Cougar students to spend the late spring and summer in the northernmost regions of Europe, next to the Russian border.

  Sealed jars of different varieties of kelp, fossilised shells, the odd fragment of Ice Age mammoth tusk and bone – all these and more were stacked in an orderly way in the open area of the building, in the unlikely event that anyone came to call. There were also carefully monitored readings of sea temperature, local precipitation and even the movements of schools of fish – for which Burt had provided a ‘trawler’. But, like the building, the trawler was a festoon of intelligence-gathering equipment. Monitoring fish was simply a way to observe submarine movements on the Russian side.

  The building itself had been a real find, Larry had to admit that. The island had never in its history been inhabited, as far as anyone knew. There was no community structure to which Burt’s team would have to become attached or with which to blend in. Out on the edge of the European continent, on the far north-eastern tip of Finland, where hundreds of islands dotted the bleak seas, the existing building was an unexpected bonus. There was no human habitation for nearly a hundred miles in any direction. There were no made roads, or even government listening stations, all of which had been slowly dismantled at the end of the Cold War.

  In their long search to construct a listening and watching station in the required area, what Cougar’s planners had eventually discovered on this small island was, in effect, a set of rough stone fish-preparation sheds long since abandoned in the early twentieth century. The sheds even had their own small but natural and protected harbour.

  The discovery of the sheds was just one of his ubiquitous pieces of luck – or his line to God, as Burt preferred to put it. And the buildings on the island were within a few dozen miles of Russian territory.

  Through academic channels, Burt had lobbied long and hard with both the governments of Norway and Finland to take over the place on a temporary, summer camp basis. Large sums of money – for academic research, no doubt – had changed hands. The Norwegian and Finnish side of the deal could only wonder at the lavish expense of converting the old and crumbling stone fish sheds into a geography camp for American students. They wished they, too, could have afforded the shipload of equipment that had come in after dark one night in the middle of April. And they put all this down to the vast sums of money available to American universities, donated by their wealthy and grateful alumni, in return for an eponymous library or sports stadium.

  And perhaps also, it has to be said, the curious Norwegians and Finns assuaged their curiosity at the sums of money involved by attributing the great expense of the geography field trip to the well-known American need to bring America with them wherever Americans went. Even when Americans found themselves within striking distance of the North Pole, it seemed, Americana came along for the ride, as if their country’s familiar paraphernalia were some kind of fetish that kept them safe from harm, a womb-like comfort zone.

  Now up by the prefabs, Burt asked Larry to gather the ‘students’ in what he called the auditorium – a bare, hastily erected structure that had been added to the sheds. The great Burt Miller was to address his employees, most of whom had never met him and, therefore, their expectations were at a heightened state. Later this afternoon, a sea plane was to pick him up and take him on to Helsinki, from where he’d make his way to London by private jet, and a conference with Adrian Carew, the MI6 chief, as well as another of the few in the know about Anna’s real mission, the CIA’s head of London Station.

  The team in the auditorium were a mixed bunch, mostly in their twenties or early thirties; they had come up through Cougar’s training programmes. For most, it was their first active service mission, as Burt called it, in order to induce a sense of the drama that didn’t need inducing. There were no seats in the building and the eighteen members of Cougar’s team in the Arctic Circle sat on the floor, legs crossed, and looked up at Burt as if at some visiting Indian guru who had arrived with a message of immortality to impart.

  Burt stood at the head of the prefab and seemed to glow with a fur halo. ‘Although you don’t know all the ins and outs,’ he began in his usual chatty style, ‘you are all, each and every one of you, a part of an enterprise that is important not just to the prosperity of Cougar, but also to the very defence of your country and the preservation of the ecological purity of the Arctic.’ His eyes travelled around the building to each and every one of the rapt audience. ‘Not to mention the possibility, or even probability, that this new Russian reactor will at some time blow a fuse and inflict a nuclear catastrophe on the entire planet.’

  The only four people in Cougar who knew of Anna’s mission were Burt, Larry, Clay and Bob Dupont, Cougar’s finance chief whose well-worn joke in the corporation was that he was the only person working at Cougar older than Burt. Even the CIA wasn’t fully in on Anna’s real mission, though Burt had kept its chief – who, to a large part, was Burt’s own anointed appointment to the Agency – in the loop as to Cougar’s presence on an uninhabited island thirty-eight miles from Russian waters. The Lomonosov Ridge beneath the Pole that the Russians were claiming, he’d warned the CIA chief, was in danger of becoming the chill venue for an actual cold war.

  ‘In the coming month,’ Burt continued, ‘twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, what you do here may avert a confrontation between Russia and America more serious than anything in the Cold War. ‘He puffed out his chest and looked around the freezing room at expectant faces. ‘It used to be thought that Space was where such a confrontation would take place. No more. It’s right here, the Arctic. Luckily, Burt’s line to God’ – he chuckled – ‘has given all of us here the privilege of preventing such an event. What you do here in the coming few weeks may save your world and your children’s world. It may even save the world. Not just the lives of humanity, but also the lives of the birds on this little island of ours, the lives of the seal colony on the far side of where we sit, the life of the very moss and the molluscs which, in their own way, are the first step on the ladder of all our continued existence.’

  Burt the Ecologist meets Burt the Saviour of Humanity. Burt the Spy, whose real interest lay in Professor Vasily Kryuchkov, was nowhere to be seen. ‘Work hard and good luck,’ he intoned, as if he’d stepped on to the set of one of the melodramatic, end-of-the-world movies which he so despised. ‘I’ll leave Larry now to give you the day’s briefing and objectives.’

  There was spontaneous applause throughout the room, even though, Larry thought, by Burt’s usual standards, this was an unusually tame address. It lacked his usual fire, despite its apocalyptic scenario.

  But if anyone had known what was on Burt’s mind at that moment, they would not have been surprised that oratory was not his prime concern.

  Later, when they were on their own again and the students had dispersed, Larry saw that Burt was greatly preoccupied.

  ‘Above all else,’ Burt said quietly to Larry as they walked back down to the beach and the waiting seaplane, ‘above and beyond any other consideration, I don’t want Anna to be taken by the Russians. Even if it does mean the end of our hopes of Kryuchkov. Or the end of the damned world, for that matter.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALEXEI PETROV THOUGHT long and hard about what he was going to do, as he did about most things. Compulsive actions were not a part of his character and the chaotic thoughts that habitually precede difficult decisions he was usually able to keep under control, and then disentangle. But the presence of the three American students on the ferry – as he’d ascertained they were after a day’s journey north – was a temptation, nonetheless. He’d overheard them speaking excellent Russian in the restaurant and bar and they were clearly linguists, well-educated people, at any rate. But he was wary of easy temptations.

  The contents of the documents which,
at all times, he kept about his person were inevitably explosive, or Bachman wouldn’t have been killed, in Petrov’s belief. He’d decided almost beyond doubt that the German’s death and the concealment of the documents must be linked in some way. The disappearance of the woman Valentina Asayev, however, who was now just under twelve hours in front of the faster ferry Petrov was on, was another matter. She might or might not be a piece of the problem. Both possibilities existed and he would decide that when, and if, he caught up with her.

  But it was a fact that the American students could, in theory anyway, be approached and given a very limited sight of one or two of the equations, perhaps, that peppered the documents. Neutral, non-Russian eyes. It appeared like a gift from the skies. But before he did so he decided to look at the Russian prose the documents contained, one or two paragraphs of which he remembered were lost in the sea of equations. When he’d looked at the documents for the first time, in his apartment, he’d been so overwhelmed by the incomprehensible nature of them that he realised now he had not bothered to read the Russian writing with any focus.

  Petrov walked along the upper deck to a covered area where he kept his rucksack and where he’d bedded down in a sleeping bag for the first night on the river. Apart from those who, like himself, were travelling on the deck, the deck was packed from bow to stern with cars, containers, packages large and small, crates of vegetables and rack after rack of boxes containing mainly alcohol. The latter was the cheapest and easiest way to turn a profit in the north.

  He sat in the shadow of one of the ferry’s lifeboats, checked he was alone, and withdrew the waterproof sachet that contained the documents from his inside pocket. He took the first sheet out and put the others back. At the top of the first page, what he saw was the first of two paragraphs of prose, written in handwriting, like the equations. The actual paper itself, he now realised, was clearly torn out of a notebook. There was no sign that this was some properly prepared or academic study. It was a scribble. The whole effect was of a man in a hurry to get whatever it was down on paper before someone or something prevented him. Maybe he’d been working in a dark room, Petrov thought, or was being watched and had just minutes towrite what he’d written.

  At the top of the first page, Petrov read the Russian scrawl, first checking once again that he was alone on this part of the deck.

  As has been well known since the 1960s, Petrov read, muon catalysed fusion involves the sub-atomic particle capturing two hydrogen atoms and fusing them. What has restricted the commercial development of this process, however, has been the uneconomic nature of producing muons with pions.

  Petrov stared at the paragraph without really seeing it. His mind glazed over. He realised that he was none the wiser than before. He had no clue what a ‘muon’ or a ‘pion’ were, for one thing, and only a very hazy idea of what ‘fusion’ meant, or even ‘catalysed’.

  He withdrew the waterproof packet from his pocket, re-inserted the first page and took out the last page, on which was the only other writing in prose. But when he looked at this paragraph, all it seemed to be doing was explaining, in even more obtuse scientific language, the process described in the equation that immediately preceded it. He replaced the page in the waterproof packet and put it back into his pocket. He sat and stared over the wilderness that was sliding past the ship. An eagle was dipping its wings high up in the sky and, above it, another circled. Mates or potential mates, perhaps.

  Then he thought again of the Americans. Could he dare to ask them, perhaps, what ‘muon catalysed fusion’ meant? It seemed innocent enough, if it had been known since the 1960s. But he smiled at the prospect. It didn’t exactly sound like a topic of conversation that could be casually raised between strangers on a boat on its way to the Arctic Circle.

  But Petrov decided, nevertheless, to return below decks and see if he could at least become acquainted with the three presumed students. And then he realised that his Evenk background might be just the way to do that. They were tourists on a trip through his people’s land, after all. Educated Americans, such as they were, would surely be interested in someone who was from the sparsely populated area into which they were going. They had their own Indians in America, didn’t they? Well, maybe he could attach some of that mysticism to himself. On his way below decks, he stopped, returned to where his rucksack lay, and picked up the deer-skin drum his grandfather Gannyka had given him.

  In the bar area which was really just an extension of the restaurant on a deck that spanned the width of the ferry, Petrov found the three Americans sitting together at a round metal table, the same as usual when they weren’t gazing at the endless green panorama from up on deck. And that was seldom. For a moment, he thought about this. For tourists in Siberia, they seemed to spend a lot of their time below decks. Odd. Most tourists were out on deck the whole time. He looked at them and saw they were drinking bottled juices of different colours and, as usual too, they had their guidebooks and a map with them.

  He went to the bar and ordered a beer. When it came, he paid and remained leaning with his back against the bar and looked around the restaurant as if he were trying to find someone he knew.

  At first, he felt rather than saw the three Americans. They seemed to shrink into themselves. Their shoulders may have hunched forward infinitesimally, their heads may have bowed, or it may have been that Petrov felt – sensed – their attitude becoming more private when he was present and once he’d started to take in the whole deck, them included.

  That was strange, he thought momentarily. Vaguely he’d felt a similar sensation when he’d seen them on one or two occasions previously on the ferry. They seemed to withdraw from him, close in, put up a wall, as though it was something personal between them and him. He was alerted to something about their withdrawn behaviour, but he didn’t know to what. Theirs was the attitude of people who didn’t wish to catch his eye, and who had something to hide.

  He half dismissed the sensation from his mind. Maybe they were nervous about the trip northwards, he thought. Perhaps they realised how out on a limb they were up here and trusted no one they met. There were no other foreigners on the first ferry of the year. Yet it seemed to Petrov that it was only him and not the other Russian passengers who evinced this reaction from them. Finally, he walked across to their table, clutching the beer in his right hand, and stopped beside them. None of them looked up at first, until the woman raised her head.

  ‘Tourists?’ he said.

  The two men could no longer avoid him. They, too, looked up at Petrov now.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman replied.

  ‘From America?’ Petrov asked cheerfully.

  ‘That’s right.’ The woman again. Not unfriendly, but not welcoming either.

  ‘My name is Alexei. Perhaps I can explain something about where we’re going?’ Petrov said, and then immediately thought that they would suspect he wanted money. ‘I’m not a guide, or even a fake guide,’ he joked hastily. ‘But I saw you and thought, well, I know this country. Northern Siberia. My family is from the Evenk people who live up where we’re going. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Evenk? I’m half Evenk myself and I know the area. I’m visiting my grandfather up in their reindeer-herding lands. He’s ill.’

  He thought perhaps he’d said too much and he noted again how easily using the story about his grandfather came to him now.

  They didn’t reply, just stared at him in what seemed like either confusion or consternation.

  Petrov pulled up a spare chair. ‘May I?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ the woman replied. ‘Why don’t you join us? We’d be interested in anything about the country here. It’s a visit very few people in America have made.’

  Petrov sat down at the table. The woman seemed to be recovering her equilibrium better than the two men, he thought, though he was still at a loss as to why they were nervous of him in the first place.

  Eileen shifted her chair a little so that Petrov would have room at the table.

&nbs
p; ‘My name’s Alexei,’ Petrov repeated. ‘But my Evenk name is Munnukan. It means “hare”.’

  ‘Eileen,’ the woman said. ‘And this is Clay. And Sky.’

  ‘So what brings you here?’ Petrov asked. ‘It’s an out of-the-way place for Russians, even. We don’t get many foreigners up here.’

  ‘That’s probably because it’s so difficult to get a pass,’ Eileen replied. ‘We had the trip booked before we arrived in Russia, but then they told us in Krasnoyarsk that our passes were invalid. So we had to start over again.’

  Petrov laughed. ‘That’s typical,’ he said. ‘And you had to pay more, no doubt.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Still the woman talking, he noted, and she was tense, though less than the others. The other two hadn’t spoken, even to introduce themselves with a handshake.

  But what Petrov didn’t know was that, for the three Americans, it was indeed a moment of extreme tension. As soon as they’d seen Petrov board the boat the day before, Clay had recognised him as the cop who had first turned up at Anna’s apartment block and who had called in the MVD. Then, on watch later that night, Clay had seen the same cop return and spend an hour in the apartment, before leaving and going to an Internet café. Now he wasn’t wearing his uniform, it made them feel more uncomfortable, as if he were working undercover.

  ‘My father was Russian, but my mother’s family is pure Evenk,’ Petrov said. ‘I can show you the village where they live. Potapovo. The northern one. There’s two. Not much of a place, but if you want to get the feel of how the ethnic Siberians live up here, I’ll be happy to show you around.’

  ‘We’d be very interested,’ Eileen replied, and seemed to glare briefly at the other two, as if they were acting like rude or sulky adolescents and needed to mind their manners. The two men then made a visible effort to engage Petrov.

  He explained to them the way of life of the Evenk, their history and the current threats to their existence. ‘The huge nickel smelters at Norilsk have poisoned the land for a hundred miles around the city,’ he said. ‘The trees can’t grow there any more. But the pollution has spread far further, invisibly. It damages the moss the reindeer eat. And it’s destroying our way of life. Once the white moss the reindeer like to eat has been killed off, it takes thirty years for it regenerate,’ Petrov explained. ‘I’m afraid this pollution, along with Moscow’s attempt to assimilate the native peoples, has damaged the core of the Evenk. You’ll see a lot of drunkenness, I’m afraid, unemployment, laziness. They’ve lost their way, many of them. But my grandfather and mother and her brothers and some of their children still have a herd of deer they pasture every summer. They’ll be preparing reindeer-hide tents for the summer months, moving hundreds of miles between now and September in search of the moss. In winter they live mostly in wooden cabins back at the village,’ he added. ‘Or they travel even further north. The deer can dig for the moss beneath the snow. But now the very north too is under threat. The oil companies are starting to exploit the beds under the Kara Sea. Your companies too. American ones. And then they plan to drill even farther north up in the Arctic itself. Beneath the Pole. None of it is good news for the Evenk and other tribes.’