by Robin White
The taxi was short. The terminal was a drab, two-story concrete-and-glass building, dirty and spalled, the windows fogged over with condensation. Old vehicles were parked in a way that suggested haste or abandonment. It could be any Russian airport, except for the sign on its roof: MIRNY. A blue-and-white bus was parked in front.
The engines died. The propellers spun down, stopped. A pair of boarding ladders thumped against the plane, one at the nose, the other at the tail.
The bus pulled up to the rear, escorted by a car. A white van hurried across the windy ramp. The forward hatch opened, and a flood of cold air swept in. The red curtain billowed. The pilots appeared at the cockpit door and stood. Usually, the crew on a Russian plane got off first, and only then the passengers. But they were VIPs, Nowek reminded himself.
He put on his heavy coat, grabbed his hat, collected his bag from the small compartment next to the door, and stepped out onto the stairs.
It was a good twenty degrees colder than Irkutsk. Cold enough to freeze skin, but not yet Mirny’s deep cold. Winter was just practicing. A fine, crystalline glitter made the very air sparkle. Not like the white frost he’d seen in the air down in Irkutsk. These were real snowflakes. Where was it coming from? There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The concrete ramp swirled with yellow dust devils kicked up by the brisk wind.
The van’s side door slid back. Nowek expected Levin, but instead, he saw a woman. She wore a scarf around her head, tied under her chin. Red, cream, white, and blue, its bright colors stood out against the vista of concrete and dust. Like those old hand-colored photographs. Everything is black, white, and gray. But here, something is different. Something is bright.
She looked up and waved. Her teeth seemed very white. You could see by the cut of the coat that she was slender. Her boots had enough of a heel to suggest fashion without hobbling her in real snow. Blond hair spilled out from around the scarf. He turned to Chuchin. “What do you think of the reception committee?”
“Her?” Chuchin lit another Prima. He was hoarding the Marlboros. Who could put a match to money? He let the smoke out slowly. “More bait.”
Sherbakov waited for the miners to gather their bags before putting on his fur shapka and making his way back to the baggage hold. Except for an old canvas mail sack, the compartment was empty. His suitcase with all his warm clothes was gone. Had someone taken it by accident? Or was it another little joke? He walked to the open hatch. It was snowing from a clear blue sky. The cold air froze the hairs in his nostrils. The blue-and-white bus was idling below.
The bus belched sooty exhaust and rolled away.
“Hey!” Sherbakov started down the stairs at a run.
Two men got out of the car to intercept him. One wore a heavy blue uniform, the other, a gray business suit.
The one in the suit was small and dark-skinned, a native Yakut. His black shoes were polished to a gloss. He disdained the cold by going without a hat, without gloves.
Sherbakov came face-to-face with the guard. “Someone took my bag.” Where was Levin? He should be here. “It has to be on that bus.”
The guard said, “Documents.” Kristall’s crystal-in-a-circle insignia was sewn to his padded sleeve.
“If anything is lost, you will be responsible.” Sherbakov handed over the papers that proclaimed him a mining engineer.
“No,” said the Yakut. “I am responsible.” He read them slowly, then handed them back. “I’m Kirillin. The mine director. Relax. Your bag is in my car. You can begin your work right away.”
“Right now?”
“We can’t afford to delay another hour. DRAGA 1 has been misbehaving. We need it back in operation. Is there something you need to do first?”
Sherbakov looked off in the direction of the terminal. Where is Levin? “No.” He slipped the papers into his coat. He’d studied enough to know that DRAGA 1 was the ore dredge at the bottom of the open pit mine. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Let’s go. You can make your own determinations.”
“Delegate Nowek? I’m Larisa Arkova from Kristall’s Technical Information Department. Welcome to Mirny.”
She was tall and slender in the Western fashion, or perhaps just naturally starved in the Mirny fashion. Larisa was in her mid-twenties. Her wide-spaced eyes were pale blue. Her hair was pulled back tightly beneath the scarf, but even so a few loose strands caught the struggling sun and glimmered like white gold.
“Ochen priyatna,” said Nowek. “This is my associate, Chuchin.”
Her eyes shifted, then returned. She made a slight motion with her mouth that hinted at displeasure. “You should know that the mine is a restricted area. It takes special permission to tour it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Nowek. “My associate would pre-fer a tour of your city.” He turned to Chuchin. “Isn’t that so?”
Chuchin spat out a jet of smoke. “I can hardly wait.”
She was relieved. “After the mine, you’ll meet with our mine director. He can answer almost any question you might have. Do you have some special area of interest?”
Nowek looked up. “This snow.”
She cocked her head slightly and tiny wrinkles appeared in the corners of her eyes. “Fairy Dust?” she said. “The winds pick loose snow up from the north and carry it here. Usually, it means there’s a storm coming.” She opened the sliding door. “Why don’t we start?”
Sherbakov was in trouble. He was supposed to be here to survey the condition of Sib-Auto equipment. Anyone could sleepwalk his way through that. But to actually fix DRAGA 1, the world’s biggest ore dredge? “I should tell you, my training was in automation.”
“My training was in law. We can’t afford specialists in Mirny. When there’s a problem, we fix it with the tool at hand. That’s you.”
The car sped along a dusty road. Mounds of broken rock blocked his view to the sides. Ahead, the road began a gradual rise. As the car neared the top, it slowed, slowed, then came to a stop at a closed gate.
Kirillin slid his card through a magnetic card reader. The gate opened and they were through. Ahead, the world ended at an impossibly sheer cliff. There were no rails, nothing to stop a vehicle from sailing out into space. They turned hard left onto a descending ramp. The view out Sherbakov’s window took his breath away. DRAGA 1 looked like a yellow matchbox. The giant ore trucks, even smaller.
He gripped the door handle. The far terraced wall of the open pit mine was hazy with distance. Black scars plummeted straight down the sides. What had fallen? Rocks? Trucks? Illegitimate engineers?
“First we have to be sure no one is coming up,” Kirillin explained. “There’s no room to pass. When a Belaz is loaded with a hundred tons of diamond ore, it can’t afford to even slow down.”
The way clear, the car headed down. The road was ten meters wide and cut into the wall of the open pit. Like the rim road, it was unguarded. Showers of loose pebbles fell in streams. The edge was eaten away in broad scallops. The whole wall looked ready to collapse.
“Normally, it takes an ore truck half an hour to reach the bottom. Go off the road and the trip is considerably shorter.”
Sherbakov could feel the tires slipping on loose gravel. He tightened his grip on the armrest and closed his eyes.
They must have taken the road at breakneck speed. It didn’t take anything like half an hour to reach the bottom. Sooner than he expected, Sherbakov felt the car slow. When he opened his eyes, a tall yellow building sat astride their path. The car rolled up to it and stopped. Then, with a low rumble, the building began to move. Sherbakov looked straight up and saw an enormous, gaping jaw. It wasn’t a building at all. It was DRAGA 1.
Chapter 17
Dirty Business
Nowek held on to the heavy, rusted chain that guarded the edge of the observation platform; a spindly structure that projected over the rim of the mine like a diving board designed for suicides. It was nearly noon, and a brisk northwest wind drew the smell of rock dust and burned explosives up from below.
The pit boss draped his heavy frame across the chain as though he couldn’t possibly imagine its breaking. Nowek had a better imagination. The bottom of the mine was half a kilometer straight down. He stepped back.
Biologists call Siberia a thin green skin stretched over immutable ice. If so, then the open pit mine was a bullet wound two kilometers across and so deep the bottom was already in shadow. It might be a crater on a dead lunar sea except for the truck parks, the equipment sheds, the ten-story tower on the far rim, the people.
A low thud shook the ground like an earthquake.
Maxim Boyko nudged Nowek and said, “Watch.”
Nowek thought the pit boss could have stepped right out of To the Diamond Frontier! Boyko was enthusiastic about nearly everything. The north wind only “cleared the air for hard work.” The movements of the ore dredge and ore trucks were “like ballet.” The deep cold of winter made “the cheeks of young girls blossom like flowers.” Nowek had met men like Boyko before. They could be counted on to point out everything inconsequential, and nothing of importance. That would be his job, and Boyko looked like a man who took his job seriously.
Nowek watched as a curtain of rock collapsed in a graceful waterfall of yellow dust. From where they stood on the rim, the ore dredges, the trucks, the bulldozers far below were battered toys. The men operating them were invisible. He watched a car go round the spiraling terrace road, a tiny black marble in a gigantic race.
A chuff of black smoke, and DRAGA 1 began to swivel.
“One bite. A hundred tons,” said Boyko. “Now you’ll see something.”
Yes, but what? Painted in rust and yellow, DRAGA 1 looked like a derelict factory riding on tank treads. Its boom rose fifty meters from the operator’s cab. Its jaws opened onto a pile of blasted ore, clamped shut, rose, and carried the load to a Belaz 7530, an ore truck the size of a house. The boom swayed. There was a moment’s hesitation before the jaws opened, and then gray boulders tumbled into the ore truck.
Nowek counted one second, two, then heard the low rumble of distant thunder as sound caught up with distance. The cold wind whipped his canvas parka. He put the fur-rimmed hood up.
“You’re cold?” Boyko asked.
“I’m adjusting.” One morning in Mirny and Nowek was already thinking of Irkutsk as the sunny south. The northwest wind was steady and strong. Northwest was the direction that went on forever in Mirny. There were no barriers, no line of trees, not even a fence to slow it down.
Boyko was dressed lightly in a wool sweater under a dark blue windbreaker that sported a white Nike swoosh on the back. He was cut from a classic Soviet mold: thick-waisted, heavy-jowled, “stylish” oversize glasses that kept slipping down a small, stubborn nose. He wore a red pin that proclaimed him a HERO OF SOCIALIST LABOR. In Moscow, young people wore them in irony. One look and you knew Boyko wore his in earnest.
Nowek’s wool pants flapped around his legs. “You blast with nitroglycerin?”
“We had to switch. Nitro burned too fast. We use Dynagel now,” said Boyko. “Dynagel burns slow. It breaks ore, not diamonds.”
“How much ore do you process?”
“The standing quota is twenty thousand tons a day.”
Nowek saw only two ore trucks. There were several derelicts and a second ore dredge, smaller and painted a different, brighter yellow, parked far from the blasting. The big ore separation plant, Fabrika 3, was about three kilometers away. Its blocky, cubic mass loomed from the dust and haze like a graceless container ship run aground on the endless marsh. A large black scar marred one face of the building. A fire? “You make your quota?”
“I wouldn’t be pit boss if we didn’t. Once, you could pretend to work and no one knew, no one cared. You know the old saying. . . .”
“I’ll pretend to work, you pretend to pay me?”
“Now everything is measured by results. No results? No pay.”
Nowek believed the no-pay part. He wasn’t so sure about results. “It looks like there was a fire at the ore plant.”
“No essential equipment was damaged.”
“What about people?”
“Mining is a dangerous business. We just have to work a little harder to make our quota. But we’re not afraid of hard work.”
Nowek was prepared to doubt almost everything he encountered in Mirny. But for men like pit boss Boyko, the quota was a holy number against which their own worth was measured.
Twenty thousand tons. Each Belaz could hold a hundred tons. That meant two hundred round trips a day. Nowek could see only two trucks. “How much diamond do you recover a day?”
“We have a saying,” said Boyko. “You have to blow up a lot of rock to find a little diamond. This pit isn’t new, so we just have to blow up even more. Each year, it gets harder and harder.”
Nowek watched a Belaz 7530 laboriously climb the perimeter road. The daily quota added up to seven million tons a year, more or less. A vast number. Or was it?
Every open pit reached an age, a depth, when it had to be abandoned. Not because the diamonds weren’t there. It was a matter of geometry. The deeper you went, the wider the perimeter had to be to keep the walls from collapsing on top of you. But a diamond pipe was shaped like a carrot, narrowing with depth. Inevitably, you spent more and more effort reaching less and less ore. At some point, you either walked away or converted the pit to underground operations.
Nowek looked off to the far rim.
The tall steel tower out there marked just such a point. Nowek could hear the throb of powerful fans, and it was a long way off. A plume of steam rose from its antenna-spiked roof. According to everything he’d read, the conversion of the Mirny pit to deep rock mining had been a victim of bad timing. Begun as the Soviet Union collapsed, abandoned when Moscow’s support dried up, the deep mine was like so many other half-built projects that dotted Siberia, a relic, a tombstone that stood over a buried time, a lost era.
Twenty thousand tons a day year-round. He knew the cartel bought four million carats of high-quality gems a year from Russia. That meant this open pit was yielding nearly two carats per ton. Not quite an impossible number. But close. “Is anyone still working in the underground mine?”
Boyko dismissed the very idea with a snort. “Only a caretaker crew to keep it pumped out.”
“Why bother pumping if you aren’t mining?”
“A lot of blood went into Mirny Deep. You don’t just turn your back on that,” said Boyko. Then “What do you think of my pit?”
“Very impressive.” The wind flattened the shock of dark hair that escaped the wolf-fur ruff. He thrust his hands into his parka pockets. “Like Lake Baikal, only without the water.”
“There’s plenty of water locked up in the eternal frost. The aquifer complex is deep. Stop pumping in summer and it would turn into a lake.” Boyko stopped, then said, “If I may ask, what is the purpose of your visit?”
Now we can start, thought Nowek. “Delegate Volsky was coming to see Mirny and bring the miners their pay. I’m here instead.”
“Without any money.”
“Without it,” Nowek admitted. “I wanted to see things with my own eyes. I’m hoping to go back to Moscow and do something to help.”
“To be frank, we try to ignore Moscow.”
“You, or Kristall?”
“Everyone thinks the same way. Moscow waters the leaves and forgets about the roots. You tell me. How long will the leaves stay green if the roots are dead? But we’ll manage. We always do.”
“You’re not worried about winter?”
“Every miner has a garden. The shops aren’t empty. Kristall makes sure they accept credit.”
The veskels. “Who arranges credit for Kristall?”
“Ask Mine Director Kirillin when you see him. I’m just a worker. I know how to break rocks. As for winter, we’re not afraid. Once the autumn snows stop and the deep cold comes, it’s like another world.”
To the Diamond Frontier!
“Life has never been ea
sy. It’s always been a place to work, not to live. But we have reasons to be proud.” He swept his arm out, with the palm open and up. The wind came up as if on cue, whipping Boyko’s jacket. “Thirty years ago this was a valley with reindeer and a few Yakuts in felt tents. Now look. Who else could have done all this?”
Boyko’s pose reminded Nowek of those classic statues of Lenin, wind-whipped jacket, upthrust goatee, arm outstretched, palm up, as though feeling for rain. “Russia leads the world when it comes to digging holes.”
“Absolutely,” Boyko said with honest enthusiasm. “You know how this pit was started? With an atomic charge.”
“A nuclear bomb?”
“It vaporized the ice. We were working with diamond ore in a week instead of a year. Talk about results.”
“What about radioactivity?”
Boyko shrugged. “First the muscle, then the hair spray. We brought in DRAGA 1 and we were storming. Tons, tons, and more tons. Even the Americans admit it’s the world’s biggest excavator.”
“They say that about our microcomputers, too,” said Nowek. Why worry about radiation when there was winter to think about? Strontium killed slowly. A deep cold could freeze your lungs with one breath. “What will you do when it really gets cold here?”
A shrug. “What we always do. Work.”
It wasn’t a boast. Steel shattered, concrete cracked, the hardest rock spalled. Everything failed under intense cold. Everything except for men. Men survived. Even in Mirny.
“Naturally, there are limits,” Boyko explained. “When the temperature reaches minus fifty-two, the engine exhaust is too thick down at the bottom of the pit. We have to stop.”
Nowek nodded at Mirny Deep’s tower. “It’s a shame the deep mine was never put into operation. You could have worked warm.”
“Below the seventh horizon the rocks are hot to the touch.”
“Seventh horizon?”
“The levels of the mine. They’re called horizons. Who knows what we might have found if we’d kept on? Mirny Deep was supposed to be the future. Of course,” Boyko continued, “the deeper we went, the more difficult conditions became. It’s not like an open pit. Deep mines are warm mines. No matter how cold it is up here, the ice melts fast down there. Imagine an iceberg one kilometer thick and it’s melting on top of you. Turn your back and it would fill with water and gas overnight. Maybe it’s all for the best that it was shut.”
