The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  Ben and Akiko gave them to her.

  ‘Two night?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben.

  ‘Single bed?’

  ‘Two twin beds—singles.’

  ‘You have credit card?’

  Ben held out his Visa, which she took, debited the first night’s accommodation, and then put it back on the vinyl-topped counter with the receipt.

  ‘Room 617. Give this to woman on sixth floor,’ she said, handing him a card with the number 617 on it. ‘She has key.’

  While Ben dealt with reception, Akiko wandered over to a couple of stands containing tourist information pamphlets for various activities in the area, and picked her way through them.

  ‘Do you have hot water for the showers?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the woman said, with a facial expression that implied, ‘You’ll be lucky.’

  The elevator was small and bounced on its cables.

  ‘When the KGB was dissolved, the agents who didn’t end up in the FSB must have gone into the hotel business,’ Ben observed as he watched the buttons light up for each floor they passed.

  The elevator ground to a stop and the door rattled open, revealing a woman seated at a counter, a board with keys hanging from it behind her. Ben presented her with the card and the woman exchanged it for a room key, then leaned forward and pointed down the hallway, jerking her hand back and forth in a manner that indicated their room was way down the far end.

  The hallway was carpeted in red plush pile, the walls highly polished mock wood. Chandeliers lit the space at regular intervals. Room 617 was second last on the right. Ben opened the door. It was the lightweight type, veneer sandwiching old newspapers. He noted that the door lock and handle had been sawn out at some time in the past and replaced. The room inside was small with a musty smell; two narrow beds, one each against opposite walls.

  ‘Be it ever so humble,’ said Ben, and waited for Akiko to choose where she preferred to sleep.

  He went to the window, unzipped his parka and pulled the nylon curtain aside. The windows were new and double-glazed and the room was pleasantly warm. The view was to the north and west, and took in a length of the Amur River, which was frozen solid, a wide ribbon of gray that cut through the mustard-colored winter scrub. Somewhere out there was a gulag, or the remains of one. Movement out on the river distracted him. Two individuals dressed in black were seated in the middle of the ice, hunched over a hole, hoping for dinner to take the bait. It had to be at least minus twenty out there.

  Akiko peeled herself out of several layers of clothing and went to give the bathroom an inspection.

  ‘There is no hot water,’ she said as she came out a minute later, wiping her hands on a paper towel. ‘Perhaps at night it gets hot.’

  ‘Yeah. That was the word the woman downstairs used—“perhaps”.’

  ‘I found these downstairs,’ Akiko said, splaying a selection of tourist brochures on the bed. ‘It is early. We have the whole day. We must keep moving.’

  Ben picked up one of the brochures, on the cover a glossy picture of a couple of quad bikes motoring through a snow-blanketed forest with an inset photo of a big cat captioned ‘Rare Amur Leopard’. The main headline read ‘Siberian Winter Safaris’.

  The reality was somewhat less glossy than the brochure. They found the tour company located in a garage beneath one of the old Soviet apartment blocks a mile across town. The garage reeked of petrol and burnt grease. One of the quad bikes was stripped down; two twenty-something mechanics sitting beside the dismembered machine, smoking, spitting and passing a quarter bottle of vodka between them. Their pupils were as small as needle points. Akiko spoke to them in Russian. One of them blearily motioned behind his shoulder.

  Akiko and Ben followed the direction into an adjacent garage where a middle-aged man was leaning back in a chair with his feet up on the desk reading a magazine, a half-naked teenage girl with pimples on the cover.

  ‘Are you open for business?’ Ben asked.

  The man closed his magazine and took his feet off the desk. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘American?’

  ‘And Japanese,’ Ben answered. ‘We’d like to hire quad bikes.’

  ‘Of course, yes,’ the man said.

  From this sudden overwhelming enthusiasm, Ben deduced that business had been far from brisk.

  ‘We have wildlife tour, fishing tour, sightseeing tour. What kind of tour you like?’

  ‘Do you give gulag tours?’ Ben asked.

  The man’s smile flipped to a frown. ‘Gulag?’

  ‘My colleague and I are university professors writing a book on incarceration methods of the twentieth century,’ Ben said, impressing himself with his own bullshit. ‘No such book would be complete without a few chapters on gulags.’

  The man didn’t understand, so Akiko repeated the cover story in Russian. He seemed to buy it and started talking in Russian.

  Akiko held up a hand and said, ‘In English, please.’

  ‘Okay, okay. This most unusual. You have permit?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Ben. He reached inside his ski jacket and pulled out a wad of euros, counted out 500, and placed them on the man’s table.

  The man licked his lips.

  ‘There’ll be no need for a receipt,’ Ben said.

  The man pounced on the money and buried it deep into his pants pocket.

  ‘There will be further cost for tour,’ he cautioned.

  ‘Naturally,’ Ben replied. He felt Akiko squeeze his hand.

  ‘The trip—it is not easy. When you want to go?’

  It had just gone 8:15 a.m. ‘Now,’ Ben said.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  The man mumbled to himself and then dashed about his office, pulling various folders from drawers. He tapped the keys on his computer keyboard, stood back and waited for the page to load.

  ‘Hmm. Weather report. It will get colder in afternoon.’

  ‘We love the cold,’ Ben told him.

  The man shrugged. ‘Siberian cold is different.’

  Ben shrugged back at him.

  ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘I am Oleg. I will be guide today. Excuse, please.’ He picked up his cell phone and made a call.

  ‘Food, supplies,’ Akiko translated.

  The order placed, Oleg pulled a map from one of the folders and laid it across his desk. The city of Khabarovsk sat toward the bottom left of the map, the Amur River and its tributaries snaking diagonally across the map from Khabarovsk up toward the top right.

  ‘We are here,’ Oleg said, pointing with a grease and tobacco stained forefinger. ‘We go here.’ He moved his finger a considerable distance from the city and tapped a range of hills set back from the river, out to the west.

  ‘How far is that?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Three hours,’ said Oleg. ‘First part of journey easy. Second part, not so easy.’

  ‘Were there many gulags around here?’ Ben asked.

  ‘One only.’

  ‘No others in the area?’

  ‘Yes, north. Much further. Too far for quad bike.’

  ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘Come back in hour. Bring warm clothing.’

  Ben didn’t feel like he was exactly dressed for Florida, but he and Akiko returned fifty minutes later in their warmest gear, each with a travel pack containing extra thermals, chemical warmers, space blankets, a thermos of hot tea, and chocolate bars. Two quad bikes stood abreast outside the garage, one of the young mechanics jumping on a footpump, adding air to a tire. Oleg was strapping gear into a trailer.

  ‘Ah, you are here,’ he said when he saw them, standing up and stretching his back. ‘Who will drive?’

  Ben and Akiko glanced at each other. Ben raised his hand.

  ‘You have driven these before?’

  ‘Never had the pleasure,’ Ben replied.

  ‘It is easy.’ Oleg gave him a quick lesson. ‘Brakes are here,’ he said, squeezing the levers on the handlebars. ‘Another br
ake here.’ He pointed to a pedal in front of the left footpeg. ‘This is accelerator.’ He twisted the throttle grip on the right side of the handlebars. ‘No gears. Is automatic. Easy to drive.’

  He glanced at his watch, which prompted Ben to do likewise: 9:15 a.m. ‘We go now,’ said Oleg. ‘Stay in my tracks on river. I will go slow until you are familiar with vehicle.’

  ‘How thick is the ice on the river?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Trucks use river. We have no problem.’

  The Russian pulled a ski mask from his pocket and pulled it over his head, followed by a full-face helmet, the visor replaced with ski goggles. Ben and Akiko picked up the helmets stuffed with ski masks and goggles sitting on the second bike’s seat and did the same.

  A few minutes later, they were motoring through the streets, heading generally down to the river. A boat ramp took them onto the ice, the metal nipples on the quad’s snow tires scratching for grip on the steep incline until the gradient flattened out. They bounced over water quick-frozen in the shapes of wavelets, plastic bags and booze bottles embedded in them.

  They accelerated out into the middle of the river where the ice was smoother, broken only where fishermen had cut blocks out of it with chainsaws. Oleg gave these fishing holes a wide berth and headed for the distant bridge that carried the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Amur. Once beyond it, with Khabarovsk left far behind, the fishing holes disappeared and with them all traces of human habitation.

  Their speed increased to sixty-five kilometers per hour and the wind began to find its way through the seams in Ben’s clothing. Within minutes his face and neck were numb beneath the ski mask, a crust of ice formed around his nostrils. He kept his body rigidly locked in place behind the handlebars. Moving around gave the cold opportunities to find new paths to his skin.

  They followed the river for an hour, sticking to the center. Eventually, Oleg stopped. Ben pulled up beside him. The Russian took the map from his jacket pocket and laid it across the tank. Ben and Akiko climbed off their quad as stiffly as if they’d been frozen in place. Both cracked chemical warmers and, after thawing their faces, stuffed them down inside their gloves and jackets. Ben squatted in front of the bike to harvest the warmth radiating off the idling motor. The frostiest temperatures he’d ever experienced were limited to those that blew down from the north during winter in the Keys—high fifties. All warnings about the Siberian version of cold had been an understatement.

  ‘Here,’ Ben heard Oleg say. He stood up as the Russian held a bottle toward him. ‘Vodka.’

  Ben shook his head and tried to speak, his jaw still frozen. ‘Something hot—tea.’

  ‘No, teeth frozen. Hot tea will crack them.’

  Ben pictured the windshield in their cab from the airport. He accepted the bottle. The vodka was oily and cold, but it went down warm and spread through his body. He passed the bottle to Akiko, who took a swig.

  ‘Much further?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Half an hour,’ said Oleg.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Then it will get more difficult.’

  The Russian went to the trailer behind his quad, threw back an oilskin and pulled out a rifle that looked military. ‘Bear and leopard,’ he said when he saw the look of surprise in Ben’s and Akiko’s eyes.

  Half an hour later, Akiko shouted over Ben’s shoulder that she wished they were back on the river ice. Oleg had taken them off the trunk of the Amur and into a tributary at the foot of a set of high, forested hills. The tributary eventually became a frozen rocky creek that snaked and climbed through the hills. The all-wheel-drive quad handled the terrain reasonably well. Oleg kept the going slow, picking his way up the creek bed. Eventually they had to leave it and strike a path through the pines, motoring up inclines that threatened to overturn their vehicles.

  Ben was starting to sweat. He wrestled with the quad, mimicking Oleg’s riding style, standing up on the footpegs. Akiko stayed close, also up on the pegs, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist. They stopped on a ridge line with a clear view of the river far below. Oleg got off his bike and walked stiffly to the trailer.

  ‘Food,’ he said, finding a plastic container. He pulled back the lid and offered around the contents—squares of something deep-fried.

  ‘What is it?’ Akiko asked, taking one.

  ‘Lard,’ Oleg replied.

  ‘Did you say lard?’ Ben looked at the yellow square between his gloved fingers.

  ‘Yes. Is special recipe. Fat soak in sour milk, cover in dough and fry.’ Oleg took a whole slice in his mouth and went back in for more.

  Ben took a small bite. The flavor was dense, salty and sour, and he could taste animal in the roof of his mouth. It was disgusting, but he guessed fat cooked in fat was probably the sort of sustenance you’d need to survive a vicious Siberian winter. And, in fact, now that they had stopped, the cold was again creeping over him, gnawing on his bones. He ate the rest of the slice.

  A distant movement caught Oleg’s attention. He put down the tray, picked up a set of military binoculars and trained them on the river far below.

  A moment later, he passed the glasses to Ben and asked, ‘You know these people?’

  Ben brought into view a four-wheel-drive vehicle towing a trailer with two skidoos mounted on it. Was there a tall, thin bald man behind the wheel?

  ‘No.’ He passed the glasses to Akiko.

  ‘Hunters. Perhaps they want bear,’ Oleg concluded.

  The four-wheel drive had left the Amur and was probing the riverbank for a trail up through the trees.

  ‘How far now?’ Ben asked, turning to Oleg.

  ‘Half an hour.’

  The trail worsened, becoming steeper, rockier, with drifts of snow hiding holes and fallen trees. They dipped down into a valley and climbed again, both quads having to be dug out on two occasions with trenching tools. Eventually, they made a third ridge line and Oleg stopped, Ben pulling up beside him. Out of the trees and unshielded by the valley, the wind was up and it had teeth.

  The Russian handed the binoculars to Akiko and pointed down into the valley. ‘There.’

  With his naked eye, Ben could see a very large patch of rectangular ground in the forest below, obviously cleared and reorganized by human hand. A road joined it to a vast wasteland area of dead earth, acres of poisoned forest, huge tailings cones and man-made ponds covered in ice slicks.

  Akiko gave him the binoculars. ‘There is nothing left,’ she said, her voice edged with bitterness.

  ‘What did they mine here?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Gold,’ Oleg replied.

  ‘Where are the shafts?’

  ‘Further up into the valley.’

  They took the descent down through the trees slowly, the tires pushing waves of snow in front of them. Eventually, after another short climb, they motored into the remains of what, according to Oleg, was once Labor Camp F07982.

  ‘This is all remaining of camp,’ the Russian said.

  Ben and Akiko stepped off the quad and walked through what was now no more than a cold and distant memory. This was the barracks area where, according to Oleg, the inmates were housed and fed. Part of the external wire boundary fence remained in one corner, attached to a leaning tower where guards armed with machine guns would have once kept watch. Now there was nothing to watch, except for perhaps the final collapse of a doorframe here, a brick chimney stack there.

  ‘What happened to this place?’ Akiko asked.

  ‘The communists fell,’ said Oleg with a shrug.

  ‘The people held here—what was their crime?’ Ben lifted the binoculars and surveyed the area again, looking for signs of life.

  ‘They were Koreans. Their government sent them here to work—a goodwill gesture.’

  Ben grunted. ‘I’m sure the workers felt honored. Where did they go? Home?’

  ‘Some went. Others stayed.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There is a village nearby.’

  Ben heard Akiko�
�s breath catch in her throat.

  ‘Maybe we should go take a look there?’ she suggested.

  ‘You want to make photograph for book?’ Oleg asked, his rifle slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes.’ Ben took a camera from his backpack and began snapping photos. There were appearances to keep up. ‘Who took away the camp, removed the buildings?’

  ‘Villagers use for firewood,’ said Oleg. He was walking around, toeing at the thin layer of ice and snow on the ground.

  ‘We’d like to talk with some of the former prisoners—get the human perspective,’ said Ben.

  The Russian shot him a look of uncertainty. He wasn’t happy about the idea. ‘There are FSB in village. They do not welcome visitors.’

  ‘We’ll pay extra.’

  ‘Hundred euros.’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘Okay.’ Oleg still didn’t seem happy about it.

  ‘We’ll settle up when we get back to Khabarovsk.’

  ‘Da,’ their guide replied, scanning the sky.

  Thin wisps of high cirrus clouds were arcing down from the northwest. It was after midday; soon the sun would fall behind the hill and the chill factor would increase.

  ‘How many people were here?’ Akiko asked.

  ‘Over many years, thousands.’

  ‘Men and women?’

  ‘Yes, both.’

  She walked over to an area that must have been a huge shed, the earth covered by a cracked and broken slab riddled with concrete cancer.

  Oleg took a mouthful of vodka from the bottle as he walked and passed it to Ben, who also had a belt. Akiko declined the offer with a wave of her hand.

  ‘Did they find much gold?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Not enough,’ Oleg replied.

  ‘How did they get it out? They use the same route we just took?’

  ‘Mules. There was different path. Landslide close it.’

  The Russian walked over to his quad bike and climbed on. ‘We run out of time,’ he said. ‘We go now.’

  ‘I found this,’ Akiko said when she was back on the seat behind Ben. She reached around and opened her gloved hand. In her palm was a brass belt buckle embossed with a hammer and sickle.

  It was a short ride to the village, uneven rows of dwellings tossed onto the side of the hill below the tree line. The homes were like the black wood homes they’d seen in Khabarovsk, only smaller and meaner, and each was accompanied by a miniature backyard corraling stacked firewood and scavenged, rusting, unrecognizable machinery. No lights shone from any windows. There were no power lines, no satellite dishes to be seen, and no vehicles. Movement—a black shape hunched against the cold huddled down a narrow pathway and disappeared into one of the buildings. It could have been a medieval village eking out an existence. The poverty line was something it might aspire to.