Man on Ice

by Humphrey Hawksley

  His breath lingered in the frozen air as he studied the ghostly whiteness that spread between him and the Russian base. Some areas were well-packed and hard. Some were covered with fresh snow making it difficult to tell what thin and bad ice was underneath. He strapped the harness that should have lowered the sled around his shoulders and waist, balanced his packs, and loosened the metal brakes on the ropes that would regulate his descent.

  The main thing he remembered from his first-ever visit to New York was that Little Diomede stood at about the same height as the Empire State Building. As a kid on a summer’s night, he could run up to the top in less than fifteen minutes. Ever since then, whether going up or down, Rake thought of that iconic American building.

  Treading delicately, he lowered himself to his first footfall and stopped, checking his balance and direction. Abruptly, a splutter from the radio that, for a moment, Rake thought was the wind. But it was a familiar voice. ‘Hello, yellow Yankee coward. I thought I told you to go home.’

  Rake scanned the landscape and imagined Tuuq out there somewhere, waiting. Tuuq spoke again. ‘You’re a coward who can’t protect his woman.’

  Rake had to work out where Tuuq might be. But in that forbidding moonlit expanse, he also needed to keep himself invisible. From around the headland to the south, he heard the slowing throb of a helicopter coming in to land. It meant Carrie was back on Little Diomede and safe, at least from being killed in an air crash in freezing fog.

  Just before the radio crackle faded into a static-laden calm, he heard Tuuq’s taunting voice again. ‘I will find you, yellow Yankee coward. And I will kill you.’

  Inches above the helipad, a gust tilted the helicopter to the right, tipping the rotor blades towards the ground. The aircraft jerked back upright, and a slab of ice fell off the side, shattering like glass. The skids settled. Two soldiers hacked away the ice that jammed the door shut. Vitruk removed his headset. ‘Do exactly as I say,’ he shouted to Carrie above the engine noise. She held her medical bag on her lap, looked straight at him, and didn’t reply.

  Yumatov opened the door and saluted. Spray from the downdraught peppered his face. Vitruk stepped down. Yumatov held Carrie’s elbow to help her out. A television crew was on the helipad filming them. Soldiers worked around the aircraft, clearing it of ice. A six-man Spetsnaz unit stood to one side, ready to climb in. ‘Their orders are to find your lover and kill him,’ said Vitruk.

  ‘You won’t get him,’ Carrie shouted back.

  ‘He’s not as smart as you think.’ Vitruk pointed to ice patterns on the helicopter where soldiers on stepladders were chipping it off the rotor blades. ‘He was wrong about the danger. Ice doesn’t make a helicopter drop out of the sky. The tail rotor clears because of heat from the engine exhaust. We could keep flying with even more ice than we have here.’

  As he talked, Carrie looked around for villagers and could see none, only soldiers. There were no lights on in the houses. The television crew was setting up lights and two cameras on the school veranda, which must be for a set-piece interview.

  ‘So, you still have everyone in the gymnasium?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, because your government is being difficult.’

  ‘If you left, they would have nothing to be difficult about.’

  Vitruk didn’t answer. Soldiers stared at her as Vitruk and Yumatov led her through the village. She detected anger in their gaze. Nine of them were dead and they must by now know of her connection to Rake. On a single order, they would unleash on her their violent frustration for revenge. A soldier opened the door as they approached the school. Inside they were enveloped in warm stale air and cigarette smoke. Men in the small hallway and dining room jumped to attention.

  ‘At ease,’ said Vitruk, the voice of a soldier’s soldier. He had been where they were. He had lost friends in battle. Men lining the corridor snapped their heels, and their eyes bored expectantly into Vitruk. If anyone could avenge their comrades it was him.

  Inside the gymnasium, there was a smell of sweat and disinfectant, part locker room, part hospital. A baby cried, then another. A mother scolded. From a corner, a boy aired Vitruk a high five. Vitruk told Carrie to explain to him the medical problems she had found. She took him straight to Tommy Tulamuk, the skeletal addict she had saved earlier. A television camera followed. He was sleeping, legs up in the same fetal recovery position as when she had left him. She washed her hands with antiseptic gel. She pulled gently at his right ear and placed a thermometer inside. His temperature had stabilized at 37.2.

  ‘This patient has a narcotic overdose,’ she told Vitruk in English, aware of the camera filming her. ‘With alcohol, organ destruction is slow. With narcotics, vital organs can reach fragility without warning and suddenly fail. This man is now recovering, and he will live.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Walker,’ said Vitruk smoothly. ‘Your work is invaluable to us.’

  He walked through clusters of people sitting or lying on the floor, greeting the excited children with a pat on the head or a high five. Most adults, skilled at surviving in harsh environments, didn’t meet his gaze and watched with barely any expression. Vitruk reached the wooden exercise bars which stretched right along the back wall. As he prepared to speak, Yumatov beckoned Carrie away out of camera shot.

  ‘Villagers of Little Diomede,’ Vitruk began in English. ‘Thank you for your patience. I am Admiral Alexander Vitruk and I command this military district. Those are my soldiers who’ve been watching you from Big Diomede all these years—’

  The way he spoke reminded Carrie of her father, using six words when one would do, trying to be loved while clinging on to absolute control. She worked out long ago that it wasn’t her father’s fault that he had been embedded into the Soviet mindset from birth. Vitruk recounted the emergency rescue and that now mother and child were doing well. He didn’t mention the hydrocephalus, nor did he mention Rake. He pointed out how surprised he was at the lack of health care on the island and praised ‘world-renowned trauma surgeon’ Dr Carrie Walker for helping to save lives. ‘Dr Walker’s team will make sure you have the correct supply of vitamin and diet supplements.’

  A voice broke through from the back. ‘We don’t need no more white people telling us.’

  Vitruk opened his hands in a pacifying gesture. ‘Only take it if you want it.’

  ‘Get the hell off our island.’

  Vitruk’s expression remained cordial. ‘We will, and we’ll get Akna and little Iyaroak back to the community.’

  To the left a door opened. One of the television crew tapped his watch. Without another word, Vitruk walked outside onto the veranda. Yumatov switched channels to show Vitruk lit by broadcast lamps standing against the backdrop of Big Diomede and the wreckage of the two helicopters on the sea ice.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Washington, DC

  Stephanie stamped her feet against the cold as she rang the bell to her ex-husband’s apartment. The door opened and, unexpectedly, Harry Lucas looked ten years younger and a million times healthier than when she last saw him. He had lost weight, was trim, fit, and stylishly dressed in a sleeveless green down jacket over a blue denim shirt. His dark hair touched his ears and collar, longer than his usual military cut. Marriage had suffocated him. Divorce had freed him. Whatever Harry was doing now, whoever he was with, had restored him to the person she once loved.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me,’ she said, walking briskly in. ‘I need your mind, Harry.’

  ‘And you used to want me only for my body,’ he smiled.

  As she pulled off her gloves, she couldn’t help looking around, to see how he was living now. It was an old-style first-floor apartment between Dupont Circle and Rhode Island Avenue with shabby high corniced ceilings, worn rugs from exotic places over wooden floorboards, an open-plan living room, and a kitchen chaotically filled with color and mementos. She recognized some – the mask from eastern Congo, swords from Sudan, portraits of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, and a table of photos from Harry�
��s time in Congress, posing with the Obamas, the Clintons, Nelson Mandela, Mick Jagger, and an assortment of other famous people.

  She looked everywhere except at Harry. What should she do – peck him on both cheeks as a friend? Say ‘hi’ as they did whenever they talked to each other but reined in open affection because it could be read in a thousand different hostile ways? Give him a hug for dropping everything for her, and for being lucid and sober? She had assumed he was in Kazakhstan negotiating a defense contract, but it turned out he was in DC.

  When she had told him what she needed, he replied as if she was asking for a loaf of bread from the supermarket, ‘Yeah, I should be able to do that.’ Harry had retained his high-security clearance from the military to Congress to the private defense sector. His combat and political background made him a high-worth consultant with an income many times more than hers. Stephanie had left Harry and he had left Congress about the same time, and he had concentrated on identifying fault lines in the government’s intelligence apparatus. After Nine-Eleven, the government smashed down the protective agency silos that had compartmentalized classified information so much that no one saw Bin Laden coming. War in Iraq, where Harry served, saw the outsourcing of war to defense contractors who could go into areas government was banned from reaching. Then came WikiLeaks and Snowden, and the silos got built all over again, except in different ways, off the books and deep in the Web. By now, war had changed and money, cyber and social media were superseding guns and bombs. The upshot was that Harry had better access than government to a lot of stuff, and he employed people with better skills at processing it.

  Harry led her to a side room from which came soft jazz music and the smell of coffee. He poured two cups, black, handed one to her and turned off the music.

  ‘Whatever Russia’s planning, it doesn’t stop in Little Diomede,’ she said. ‘I can’t nail it. But I sense it.’

  ‘What is the President’s view?’ Harry took her coat and folded it over an office chair.

  ‘Swain’s playing catch-up. Holland’s snapping at his heels. Half the intel community still thinks it’s fighting in the Middle East.’

  Three computers stood on a workstation that ran the length of the wall. ‘We could agree to something over Little Diomede,’ Harry said. ‘We can’t allow the bombing of the Fed. Whoever is behind it knew they were crossing a line. But you’re not here for my analysis. You have a thousand experts within a square mile of here who will give you their take on it.’ He fired up his computers. ‘You want my database.’

  Stephanie smiled coyly. ‘Right.’

  ‘And I can’t even remember if we’re divorced yet.’ Grinning, Harry sat down and opened the software with a fingerprint and iris scan.

  ‘I’m interested in Alexander Vitruk and Sergey Grizlov,’ she said.

  At the mention of Grizlov, Harry grimaced, as she suspected he would. At the lows of their worst arguments, he used to bring up her fling with Grizlov as if the affair were still alive.

  ‘Do you think Grizlov’s involved in the Fed attack?’

  ‘I hope not. But never say never.’

  ‘Clever girl.’

  She felt a spinal shiver at the thought of sleeping with a man who could have ordered anything so brutal. Harry looked at her, lips drawn in, brow furrowed in a familiar expression of concentration. His screens flared to life. ‘After you called, I did some checking.’

  He showed Stephanie files on Sergey Grizlov, much of which she already knew: the story of a clever businessman who had manipulated his way to the top through the minefields of the Yeltsin and Putin years. She was astounded at Harry’s ability to dig deep and wide. He accessed an encrypted network of databases shared by defense and security contractors. Its search engine was more powerful than anything Stephanie had seen on clumsy government systems. The quality of its raw intelligence was exceptionally high.

  Harry had found that Grizlov did have a private project that involved Little Diomede. One of his companies had a large stake in a scheme to build a tunnel across the Bering Strait linking Russia and Alaska. It involved Chinese, Russian, and Japanese money.

  ‘But that’s business,’ said Stephanie. ‘Not terrorism.’

  ‘Business and politics. Exactly. Military hostility would set the tunnel project back for decades.’ Harry brought up the file on Vitruk. ‘Compare it to this.’

  The screen showed two sets of pictures side by side. On the left were documents of mugshots and dates. On the right a video showed a younger Vitruk standing outside a low-rise building that looked like an apartment block as his men dragged people out. The date was October 15th, 1999, the city of Gudermes in Chechnya.

  ‘The second Chechen war,’ said Harry. ‘Putin crushed an Islamic insurgency. These are civilians. Now watch.’ Vitruk drew a pistol. He shot dead two women who looked like mother and daughter and then two small boys. A middle-aged man was left alive. Vitruk pistol-whipped him, left him lying in the rubble with the corpses of his family, and walked off. Harry slid to another video with an almost identical scene. Vitruk shot two women and three children and let the man live. By executing mothers, wives, and children in front of their men, Vitruk stripped out the spirit of whole communities. The men’s guilt at failing to protect their families would have an effect for generations. Simple and effective. He was cutting the balls off the place.

  ‘Incredible.’ Stephanie was unable to help herself asking, ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Please, Steph, don’t get cute and manipulative in getting me to tell you.’ Harry gave her a sideways smile. ‘I have two other things, and then we work out what Russia is up to.’

  He showed a photograph of Vitruk in Syria after breaking the 2016 siege of Aleppo. With him was a Spetsnaz explosives specialist for whom Harry had an identity. Facial imaging matched him, under another name, to one of the four Russian bodyguards who had accompanied Karl Opokin to the Federal Reserve’s Eccles Building. ‘I’m checking how he was recruited and how he got onto that detail.’

  ‘Even then, how did he plant the bomb?’

  ‘We don’t know exactly, but he had expertise, and he and Opikin are now hunkered down in the Russian Embassy refusing to talk to the FBI.’

  Stephanie took a long drink of her coffee, relieved that Vitruk, not Grizlov, was reflecting Russia’s dark side. The feel-good moment didn’t last long because she didn’t know to what extent Grizlov was working with Lagutov and how far Lagutov was backing Vitruk. Had he ordered or known about the Fed attack? Grizlov too?

  ‘One final thing on Vitruk …’ Harry pushed his chair back and waved his hand dismissively at the screen. ‘I won’t show you because it’s too bitty. A year ago, Vitruk invited a Chinese general by the name of Bu Zishan to his headquarters in Khabarovsk. Bu had just been appointed commander of Shenyang Military District, which adjoins Vitruk’s Military Far East region. Vitruk laid out the red carpet, sent a plane to pick Bu up, hosted a big banquet, caviar, vodka, women, the works.’

  ‘Not that unusual …’

  ‘No. But I checked anyway. Breaking through a near-impenetrable web of business activities, I found that after the meeting Bu and Vitruk set up a company in Panama that doesn’t do very much at all. Now people only tend to do that when they expect a shed load of money to be coming their way.’

  That too wasn’t unusual either, thought Stephanie. After the Chinese and Russian state-run command economies unraveled, private-sector business arrangements became the default of government institutions. They needed to make money simply to pay salaries and pensions.

  ‘Bu has a track record of being hawkish,’ said Harry. ‘Before moving to Shenyang he spent years masterminding the South China Sea dispute.’

  Stephanie stood up, sipped more coffee, and paced the length of the room. ‘This is great, Harry—’

  ‘But you still think it’s something else.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harry, suddenly distracted, looked up at a television running silently on the wal
l. It showed Vitruk in an Arctic combat uniform, on Little Diomede island, standing by a pole where Russian troops were raising their white, red, and blue national flag on conquered American soil.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Washington, DC

  Vitruk came across as the exact older version of the man Stephanie had just been looking at in Chechnya, with a leathered face and a smile for the camera that wasn’t enough to cover the hard cruelty in those photographs. The framing went to a wide shot of Vitruk with a Russian reporter. In the hazy distance was Big Diomede island. A logo said the interview was live, but Stephanie couldn’t be sure because Fox was taking it straight off the Russian channel. Harry turned up the volume.

  ‘Yes, of course, without doubt, Russia utterly condemns the attack on the Federal Reserve, as do I,’ said Vitruk.

  ‘Then why raise your fucking flag now?’ muttered Harry.

  ‘That was an act of horror that has nothing to do with my government,’ Vitruk went on. ‘America has many enemies, including among its own people, as we know. Everything I am doing here is being conducted under international law.’

  Vitruk spoke about the medical evacuation and the new border, and Stephanie ran scenarios through her mind. What was his endgame? The presenter even pressed him on the hostages in the school, and Vitruk insisted the villagers were there voluntarily. What exactly was he doing and why? She repeated the question to herself until it echoed like a chant. The screen split, with Vitruk on one side and shots of Carrie on the other working with paramedics in the gymnasium, blunt but effective propaganda. It switched again to the corpses on the plateau at the top of the island with both the presenter and Vitruk expressing shock and outrage. Harry’s face creased with curiosity.