The First Horseman

by John Case

  5

  MARCH 23, 1998

  FRANK DALY WAS halfway into the three-hour flight from Moscow to Murmansk when the plane – an Ilyushin-86 – began to tremble. Distracted, he looked up from his laptop and glanced out the pitted window to see that the aircraft had entered a cloud. The air was nearly opaque – though he could make out the dark contour of the wing as the jet ghosted through the whiteout.

  And then the tremble intensified, becoming a heavy vibration that escalated into a shudder. Daly closed his computer, zipped it into its padded case, put the case in his backpack, and wedged the backpack under the seat in front of him. Then he sat back, thinking, It’s my fault. If we go down, it’s because I was playing Doom when I should have been working on the Spanish Lady. The Air god didn’t like slackers, and now it was he who was Doomed. Except . . .

  He didn’t believe in God. Except . . . well, under the circumstances. Being in a hurricane at thirty thousand feet – what the hell was that?

  The jet yawed to the west, shivered violently, bounced and moaned. Never play Doom in an airplane, Daly told himself, gripping the sides of his seat. What was I thinking of? How could it possibly be good luck? Thoughtlessly, he tapped the seat rest with his knuckles, three times, and again. It was a ritual he had, whose origins were long forgotten. But it seemed to keep black cats at bay. And broken mirrors, too.

  And crashing planes. At least, he’d never been in one.

  Even so, he recognized the practice for what it was, an abbreviated form of prayer, the last remnant of an early Catholic upbringing.

  From the aisle seat a powerful man with a bushy mustache produced a surprisingly feminine ‘Ooooh!’, tossed Daly a look of pure terror, then buried his face in his hands. Moments later the sky was dark, the carry-on bins were rattling open, and the overhead lights popped on and off: No smoking! Fasten seat belts! Prepare to die! A tray of drinks crashed, a man cried out, and the plane dropped, wobbled, and plunged, fighting the turbulent air around it.

  And so it went for another ten minutes, as the passenger cabin grew dense with the smell of vomit. Bottles of vodka and cans of beer and soda rolled down the aisles and under the seats, as an overhead bin popped open and suitcases tumbled out, provoking yelps of pain and surprise.

  Finally, Flight 16 banked to the east, turned tail, and headed south. People were sobbing on both sides of the aisle, while a man in the back of the plane chanted at the top of his lungs in a language that Daly couldn’t place. The smell of alcohol combined with the reek of vomit, creating a woozy miasma. After a while, the stewards gamely set about restoring order, attending to the injured, replacing errant baggage, soothing the hysterical.

  There was never any announcement. Just a ragged round of applause when, half an hour later, the aircraft slammed onto the tarmac, bounced, slammed down again, and coasted with a roar. Through the window the snow could be seen blowing sideways past a low gray terminal, stenciled with Cyrillic characters.

  ‘Where are we?’ Daly asked of no one in particular.

  The answer floated back from several seats ahead, where a florid Australian shouted over the wailing of a furious infant: ‘We’re in Archangel, mate. We’re in bloody, fuckin’ Archangel.’

  Daly spent a frustrating hour trying to find out about the next flight to Murmansk – which turned out to be anybody’s guess. The Aeroflot rep spent ten minutes on hold, only to report that the runways at Murmansk were closed. ‘Is storm,’ she explained, as if Daly could not have figured it out for himself.

  ‘So how do I get to Murmansk?’ he asked. ‘It’s really important that I get to Murmansk.’

  The agent shrugged, then wrote down the telephone numbers and addresses of two travel agencies in town – Intourist and Sputnik. They could advise him, she said, about ‘rail travel and motor coach.’

  The pay phone in the lobby was five deep with waiting customers, so Daly went outside to look for a taxi. Surprisingly, he found one almost immediately. It was a black ZIL with crumpled fenders and a heater that blew cool air at his knees. Tiny pellets of snow bounced off the windshield like BBs.

  ‘You speak English, right?’

  The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Am speaking everything.’

  ‘How far to Murmansk?’

  The driver shrugged. ‘Maybe five hundred,’ he replied.

  ‘Miles?’

  ‘Dollars. Rubles. Kilometers. Is same thing. Because you can’t get there.’

  ‘I have to get there!’

  The driver chuckled. ‘Someday, sure. Not today.’

  ‘But –’

  The driver’s smile was as wide as the road, and his eyes twinkled in the rearview mirror. ‘Welcome to Archangel,’ he said. ‘Is gateway to North Pole.’

  By the time they reached the center of town and the offices of the Sputnik Travel Agency, it was four-thirty in the afternoon and pitch-dark – not surprising, given their latitude. According to Daly’s guidebook, Archangel was only thirty miles south of the Arctic Circle.

  For a while, as he stood in front of the desk of the Sputnik travel agent, there was hope. The Sputnik agent was tossing him one hopeful grin after another as she worked the phones, trying to find a way – any way – to get him from Archangel to Murmansk. There was a moment when she seemed excited. Her professional smile softened into a grin, and it was clear that she was rooting for him, holding the fingers of her left hand aloft in a sort of twisted Boy Scout salute.

  But then the animation faded, the fingers uncurled, and her lips sagged. She made a disgusted tsk and replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. ‘The rail is closed. Between here and Murmansk, also here and Moscow, also everywhere to east. Is –’

  ‘I know: big storm’

  ‘Yes. There is too much snow.’ She shrugged. ‘So I think, maybe, you are staying here one or two days.’

  Daly groaned, but there was nothing to be done about it. ‘What about a hotel reservation? Can you –?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘Only transport.’ Daly must have looked crestfallen because the woman took pity on him. She looked him up and down, trying to reconcile the expensive boots and parka that he wore with the ratty backpack that he carried. This last was a khaki-colored object made of canvas. It had plastic snaps that were supposed to look like leather but didn’t, and a crude peace symbol had been painstakingly drawn in ballpoint on its flap.

  She gestured at the peace symbol. ‘Is for Chechnya?’ she asked.

  Daly thought about it. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Probably.’

  The woman smiled. ‘Try Excelsior,’ she said. ‘Is nice – around corner. You’ll like.’

  The Excelsior was nice, but it was also booked solid, so he sat in its comfortable lobby and consulted Russia, Ukraine & Belarus. As far as hotel rooms were concerned, the publishers were blunt. Accommodations in Archangel were either ‘cheap and nasty,’ or ‘acceptable and expensive.’ For Daly, whose expenses were covered by a foundation, this was a no-brainer, or ought to have been.

  But as he found out, the A&E hotels (which was how he thought of them) were crammed with oilmen and diamond dealers, commodity brokers and white-collar hustlers from every corner of the globe. Archangel, it seemed, was the jumping-off point for a vanguard of venture capitalists intent on ‘developing’ Siberia. He visited three A&E’s, each of which was fully booked, lugging his suitcase through the snow. Finally, he slipped a few bucks to the desk clerk at the Pushkin and asked him to find a room – anywhere.

  It took almost an hour, but in the end he emerged from the lobby with a scrap of paper in his hand: Chernomorskaya – ulitsa Ya Temme, 3.

  The doorman looked doubtful when Daly asked for a taxi, gesturing vaguely at the weather and shaking his head morosely. ‘Bus is better,’ he said, and pointed toward the stop, half a block away, where a couple of very cold-looking types stood under a flickering street lamp, stamping their frozen feet. Daly started to insist, but the doorman looked so puzzled – alm
ost hurt – that he gave it up.

  He trudged toward the bus stop, thinking: wouldn’t Dad be proud? The Old Man never tired of cautioning him that he’d never really get anywhere or ‘make something’ of himself if he didn’t learn how to ‘face facts’ and keep his temper. You got to keep your Irish down, Frankie. Look at me. He’d thump himself on the chest. My whole life I’m working for chump change, and why? Because I always have to be right. Because I can’t keep my smartass mouth shut. Because I never figured out sometimes it isn’t worth it to make a federal case out of something. It’s like that gambling song, where the guy says, ‘You gotta know when to fold ’em.’ Daly shook his head at the memory of his father’s reverence for the wit and wisdom of Kenny Rogers.

  Meanwhile, he was freezing, slowly, in all his extremities: toes, feet, and face. Stamping on the ground did no good at all. The only thing that could help was the bus itself, so that when it arrived, he hurled himself on board as soon as the mechanical doors lurched open. The driver glanced at the paper in his hand and, pointing to his watch, made a semicircle with his forefinger. Half an hour to the Chernomorskaya.

  Daly found a seat as close to one of the heating vents as he could and settled in. Rattling through Archangel in the rickety bus, its windows so fogged and frosted that he might as well have been in the clouds, Daly grimaced at his inability to suppress the song in his head.

  Like a roach in a sugar bowl, it went round and round.

  You played the hand you were dealt, which meant that you could hold ’em, fold ’em, walk away or . . .

  What? He thought for a moment, and then he remembered, Oh, yeah: you could run. That was the part he always forgot. You could run.

  By the time he got to the hotel, suitcase in hand, the snow was blowing sideways and the electricity was out. Or mostly out. A generator pounded away in the basement, providing just enough juice to see by, but not much else. The few lights that burned were supplemented by candles, which dimmed the seediness of the lobby to a sinister yellow gloom that smelled of wax.

  Daly entered with a wary look and glanced around. In a corner of the lobby a jaundiced prostitute, shrink-wrapped in polyester, perched on a red plastic couch, painting her nails. Nearby, a Japanese businessman sat in a tattered easy chair, reading a comic book, while three young men in black leather jackets argued across a bottle of vodka.

  Daly filled out a reservation card at the front desk and paid the clerk in dollars. As the Russian counted the money, Daly read the hand-lettered sign that hung on the wall behind him:

  NEED MONEY? YOU CAN SELL

  YOUR BELONGINGS TO OUR SHOP

  ON THE SECOND FLOOR. FAIR

  PRICES PAID!

  Daly was amazed by the Russian kleptocracy in which everything that wasn’t bolted down was up for grabs, or up for sale. In Moscow two people had tried to buy his sunglasses, and a kid on a moped had grabbed for his watch. Drivers took their windshield wipers with them into restaurants, laying them on the table like so much extra cutlery. After two days in the Russian capital, Daly had realized that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to kill him for his computer, so he traded its expensive, leather carrying case for a ratty-looking backpack. The laptop – a $4,000 ThinkPad – fitted easily in the canvas bag, which in an earlier life had no doubt been the repository of crayons and peanut butter sandwiches (or whatever it was that Russian children ate for lunch. Beets, maybe).

  After a while he gave up waiting for the elevator and, key in hand, headed up the stairs, which were dark enough to make him nervous. Somewhere between the second and third floors he heard shouting. The noise was muffled and panicky, distant and near at the same time. After a moment he realized that it was coming from inside the walls, and the realization made the hair at the back of his neck stand up. Then it hit him: nothing supernatural; someone was trapped in the elevator. With a sigh, he went back the way he’d come and told the clerk who, with a shrug, turned his palms toward the ceiling. ‘Every night, this is problem,’ he said in a low, gravelly voice. ‘I tell guests about conservation policy. But . . .’ He shrugged again. ‘One hour – maybe two.’

  Sucks to be them, Daly thought, resolving to stay out of elevators. His room was on the fourth floor, and it took him a while to figure out how to open the door in the gloomy corridor.

  Once inside, he tossed his suitcase on the bed and, with a sinking feeling, surveyed the stained wallpaper, cracked sconces, and scabrous ceiling tiles. A radiator rattled next to the wall, but remained cool to the touch. Nearby, the room’s only window opened onto an airshaft, which meant that the room was darker, and probably warmer, than many of the others in the hotel. Even so, the wind had muscled its way into the crack where the sill met the sash, and a little pyramid of granular snow sat on the threadbare carpet. Daly watched it for a moment, hoping for a telltale sign of moisture, but in the end decided that the snow wasn’t melting.

  Crossing his arms, he jammed his fists into his armpits and sat on the edge of the bed. Exhaling mightily, he watched his breath tumble through the air, and shivered.

  Still, he thought, however cold and uncomfortable he was, there was one consoling fact: at least, with a storm like this, the Rex Mundi wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  6

  77º30′N, 20º12′E

  ANNIE STOOD ON the catwalk, staring nervously ahead at the pack ice. Fast ice, she reminded herself. As in landfast. Which meant that it was connected to the land.

  Keep it straight, she told herself.

  She didn’t like to make mistakes. It gave the Snowmen a chance to make fun of her. Or, if not to make fun, then to patronize her with amused glances and helpful corrections. She didn’t handle that kind of thing well. It made her feel stupid, she blushed and got defensive. She couldn’t help it. She was always told ‘it ran in the family.’ Thin skin.

  And until she was old enough to understand that this was only a metaphor, she thought of it as a kind of disease, an illness that she’d inherited along with her mother’s cheekbones. Thin skin. It sounded like something that was waiting to break. Like ice on a pond.

  Fast ice. Everywhere.

  They’d outrun the storm and it was a brilliant day, with blue skies and temperatures just above zero. The Rex Mundi was grinding through the ice at a crawl, its deck and fixtures coated with frost. The ship was heading for the Storfjorden, a passage of water and ice that flowed between the glaciated east coast of Spitsbergen and the west coast of Edgeoya, a smaller island in the Norwegian Sea.

  Annie was staring at the crumpled carpet of ice that stretched ahead of the bow as far as she could see. She was looking for a dark speck, the first hint of what the Snowmen called ‘a lead’ – a break in the ice that would take them into the inky blackness of open water.

  And then they’d be able to go faster.

  Despite the extra days afforded by their hasty departure, she was worried about the time and the logistics. The first part of the voyage – north by northwest through the Barents Sea – had gone quickly. Murmansk itself remained ice-free all winter, licked by the same branch of the warm Atlantic current that kept the route to the west coast of Spitsbergen accessible by sea much of the year.

  But nearly as soon as they veered east, heading toward the Storfjorden passage, they found themselves surrounded by pack ice. And once inside the fjord, the ice was even thicker, which meant that for hours it had been fast ice and slow going. The helicopter had gone out repeatedly in search of leads that would guide them to the channels of water that ran through the ice like streams through snowy fields.

  But now the Snowmen had put an end to that. The physicist who served also as the expedition’s helicopter pilot decided they had better conserve fuel for hauling supplies to and from the site at Kopervik. Now there was nothing to do but plow through the ice, and hope.

  Apart from the ‘leads,’ there were also patches of open water, lakes of a sort, in the midst of the ‘permanent ice.’ The lakes appeared more or less regularly, she
was told, in the same locations each year. Charts with multilayered silhouettes recorded their size and position. She’d looked at one that morning. One of the crewmen had shown her exactly where they expected to find open water. It appeared on the chart as a long, feathery shape that curled inland toward one of the only black dots on Edgeoya – the Kopervik mining camp.

  The problem was that the charts had not been kept for very many years and there was no telling when one of the ‘lakes’ might disappear and revert to ice. Crunching through fast ice cut the speed of the Rex to a fraction of what it could do at full throttle. So if they had to go through ice all the way . . . well, it would take a long time.

  Then again, if they came to the open area within the next couple of hours, with a little luck they’d reach their anchorage by evening and be ashore by morning.

  She couldn’t help her impatience. The grant proposal had been her idea, and she’d been crushed when the National Science Foundation had rejected it, despite Doctor K’s support. Now that the project had actually been approved, she wanted to do the science – and she wanted to do it now.

  The idea was to extract viral isolates from the lung tissues of the miners. She and Doctor K would use a state-of-the-art technique called polymerase chain restructuring, or PCR, to re-create the virus in the lab. If they were lucky, and were able to generate enough product to culture the strain that had killed the miners, they could of course create a vaccine (in case one should ever be needed). But even more important (to Annie’s way of thinking), they’d be able to test Doctor K’s theory about the relationship of certain kinds of protein coats to the virulence of different strains of influenza. This was cutting edge stuff . . .

  It had surprised Annie to learn that at the turn of the century there were still bits and pieces of this earth so inhospitable that they were not a part of any sovereign nation. The Svalbard archipelago, which included the island of Spitsbergen, was (until 1939) one of those places. Until then, when the archipelago became a part of Norway, the islands were up for grabs. Its resources were available to anyone and everyone, providing only that they were willing to endure months of darkness and isolation, foul weather, and the constant threat of polar bear attacks. (Even now, visitors to Svalbard tended to be armed – and not with .22s. They favored high-powered rifles and .45 caliber handguns, weapons that could be counted on to drop a six-hundred-pound bear dead in its tracks.)