The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  Nowek saw the ruptured tank. It was peeled open, a jagged hole in its side, as though a giant had gnawed at it with a can opener.

  “I was at home and I felt it. Boom, BOOM! Two. I knew it couldn’t be from the karir.”

  “You knew the pit was already abandoned.”

  “Why blast tons when you can take a shovel and scoop up all the diamonds you’d want in an hour? Anyway, I looked out the window, I thought it was the end of the world. An atomic bomb.” Boyko turned. “Fire was everywhere. Alyosha could have jumped for it. Instead, he backed the Belaz away from the plant. There were people who would have burned to ash if he hadn’t. He made it this far before the fire got him. Maybe he was already dead when the truck ran into the ventilator. We’ll never know.”

  Ventilator?

  “It was August. People weren’t even wearing work jackets. The women’s dresses melted to their skin. They looked like black garbage bags piled up on the catwalk. You couldn’t pull them apart. They didn’t even know how many there were. You could tell the miners, though. They were cinders with aluminum hard hats, and the hard hats had all melted down over the faces like masks. They had to wait until the next shift to see who showed up to know the names of the dead.” Boyko took a deep gulp of air. “When I got here the ground was still smoking. I found Alyosha’s hands on the wheel. No flesh. Just bone. When I touched his shoulder, my hand went right through. He was hollow. My son’s bones were hot to the touch.”

  “Boyko . . .”

  The pit boss opened his door. Snow swirled in. So did the loud hum of a powerful motor. He sat there for a moment, then reached into a pocket for a cigarette. He patted his pocket. “Match?”

  “Here.” Nowek fished Chuchin’s lighter out, flipped the cap back, and snapped a pale blue flame to life.

  The cigarette flared red. “That afternoon we had lunch together. A picnic. We drove out to the observation platform at the karir and spread a blanket. It was the last time we were a family. You know how a big space swallows sound? I remember how quiet it was.”

  Boyko took a deep drag, then let the smoke out. “Some white cranes flew over. Snow cranes. People say they fly to America. Like your daughter. It was so quiet you could hear wings beating the air. Alyosha told me what he was going to do. I said wait. There’s a better way. He let me see the demands. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Pay us normally. They were willing to take veskels, but they wanted their names on those dollars.”

  “How did Kirillin find out about the strike?”

  Boyko took a sudden breath, a half-choked sob. He sucked the cigarette down to ash, then said, “At the karir, I told you there were no stukachi here. It’s not true. There was one.”

  Stukachi. Pigeons. Informers. Nowek read Boyko’s face, saw what was there, and wished he hadn’t. “You?”

  “Now you know.”

  Nowek looked at the ventilator shack. He could see another one in the dim light, dark against the drifting snow. They lined up perfectly with the headworks tower over Mirny Deep. “There’s a tunnel connecting Mirny Deep and the ore plant. It’s why you don’t need ore trucks. There’s a buried conveyor system.”

  “The real diamond line.” Boyko faced Nowek. “You put things together, Delegate Nowek. You see under things. I understand now why Arkady Vasilievich chose you.”

  Arkady Vasilievich. It was not the way a stranger spoke Volsky’s name. “You said you came here from the Kuzbass.”

  “From Anzhero. Three generations. Coal runs in the blood.”

  “Arkady Volsky came from Anzhero.”

  “We were different. All I wanted was sausage and beer. He was like Alyosha, he always wanted to change things. Where did it get either one of them? You tell me.”

  “His connection in Mirny,” said Nowek. “It’s you.”

  Boyko flicked the dead cigarette out into the snow. He checked his watch. “We still have a couple of minutes before they come for me. Let’s walk.” He got out and walked straight for the door in the concrete shack. Nowek fol-lowed him.

  The air was filled with invisible crystals of snow.

  They were under the wrecked Belaz. Though it had been months, the smell of the fire was strong and powerful. Up close, Nowek saw what he had not seen from the van; one wall of the shack was made up of metal louvers, and there was a faint light coming through the narrow cracks in the vanes.

  Boyko pulled at the door handle, leaning back, using his legs. It opened, squealed, then stuck fast. Dim yellow light showed at the crack. “Go on. Look. You’ve earned it.”

  Nowek wedged himself through the opening. There wasn’t much to see. Faint light came from a manhole in the floor. It barely illuminated unpainted concrete walls, crude graffiti scrawls. It was just a few steps to the hatch. Nowek looked down.

  It went a lot farther than he’d imagined. Or perhaps the darkness gave it depth. A ladder, and at the bottom, Nowek saw the conveyor.

  Boyko heard a sound and turned. A pair of lights appeared. A car was coming. Maybe Kirillin himself. Boyko didn’t care. “We drove the tunnel through permafrost with a steam lance. A hundred meters a day. The pilot drift was done in three weeks.”

  The two headlights slowed, then turned their way.

  “I figured that once we were in full production, everything would fall back into place. Then they started handing out those fucking veskels. Fuck. We were getting screwed and Alyosha had the balls to say so. After they murdered him it was We’re not so sure about you, Boyko. After twenty fucking years, they weren’t sure of me? I informed on my son, and I couldn’t be trusted? They pulled me out of Mirny Deep and sent me back to the pit. Pit boss. A joke.” He heard the thump of car doors. He turned.

  It was the militia jeep. The spotlight blazed to life and caught him square in the eyes. “Tell them I went crazy. Say I forced you to come here. Say anything you want. Either way, it’s finished.”

  Nowek didn’t answer.

  “Who’s there?” A shout from the jeep. “What are you doing?”

  “Nowek?” Boyko wedged his massive chest through the slim opening. “Nowek!”

  The vent shack was empty.

  Chapter 23

  The Flight

  To: wizard-private@russiamail.com

  CC:
  From: ivl-private@russiamail.com

  If you are still in Irkutsk, stay there. If you are in Mirny leave quickly. I am in Moscow, in Hospital 31. I won’t be coming to meet you. I was attacked and you can say the only accident is that I am still alive. I think it was arranged by someone in our own department. Maybe by an amphibian we both know. Until we speak, trust only the Delegate. And be cautious. If they would do this to me here, what would they not do in Mirny? There’s no time. I’ll explain later.

  Levin

  Yuri Durashenko put the sheet of paper down and turned on his desk lamp. He’d arranged for the local Internet company to make copies of anything coming or going from Nowek’s e-mail account. A friendly girl had fished it out. But what did it mean?

  The low afternoon sun sent a weak shaft of light through the cavernous hangar below his window. It was growing cool. His stylish Hilfiger sweatshirt, jeans, and Adidas, all Chinese copies of the real thing, were not enough to stop the invading cold. “When did this arrive?”

  Plet shrugged his massive shoulders. “She didn’t say.” Plet wore a silver-gray blazer over a black silk turtleneck and jeans. The effect was like chrome plating a tank. Decoration only accentuated the underlying menace. Plet was well over six feet tall. His hair was black as sable and cut very short. Before prison he’d been an interrogation specialist in an elite unit of the Red Army.

  “What’s her name?” asked Yuri, reaching for one of his five desk phones. “I’ll call her.”

  “Sabina. She won’t be there,” said Plet. “She works nights.”

  Yuri read the elektronka again. A message from someone named Levin, to “wizard.” Who was this wizard? A colleague? Someone who’d come from Moscow,
had been in Irkutsk, and was heading for Mirny? Like Nowek. But not Nowek.

  Wizard could only be the young FSB lieutenant who had been Nowek’s militia repellent. That meant that Nowek, the lieutenant, and this Levin, were working together on something, and with millions of carats of gem diamonds missing, wasn’t that interesting? “It says don’t go to Mirny. Who else left with Nowek?”

  “His driver and the fucking KGB.” A prison doctor, a KGB officer, had erased Plet’s anti-Party tattoos with acid. Plet had them redrawn, only to have them blotted out again. When he put them on a third time, right over the scars, they finally left him alone. For Plet, fucking and KGB went together naturally.

  “So Nowek really is working for the FSB.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “You’re missing the point,” said Yuri. “If Moscow is worried about one of their own, what does that mean for Nowek?”

  “That Mirny’s a bad place to go.”

  “Right. So how much is it worth to have the new Delegate in our pocket?”

  “He’s not in our pocket.”

  “I’m thinking ahead. What’s the weather?”

  “Snow by tomorrow.”

  Yuri picked up a Mont Blanc pen and tapped its heavy, reassuring weight on the polished desk. “You know the Siberian Delegate reports directly to the President.”

  Plet’s blank look went subtly, and sarcastically, blanker.

  “I know. But Yeltsin won’t last much longer. Maybe not even until the election. Maybe there won’t even be an election. Someone will make a move. Right now, that’s Putin.”

  “Fucking KGB.”

  “Right. The guy who ran the agency Nowek is working for now. It means Nowek has a solid line to the top and if we help him now, he’s going to owe us forever. It could be our big chance.”

  “Mirny is a long way to go for a chance.”

  “Then there are the diamonds. I wouldn’t mind being around when they’re found. Would you?”

  “Finding is one thing. Keeping is another.”

  “Plet, you’ve become very negative.” Yuri sighed and reached into a drawer and pulled out a small black instrument about the size of a flattened brick. A screen occupied one end, a keypad the other.

  “What’s that? Another cell phone?”

  Yuri held it up. “Global Positioning. Satellite navigation. A Garmin. Brand new. Point-to-point steering from this desk to the runway at Mirny. You know what this costs?”

  “I’m not buying.”

  Yuri switched it on. A small screen glowed. “One thousand and ninety-nine kilometers to Mirny.” He tapped a few numbers, a few letters, waited, then said, “Two hours and twenty minutes if I take the Okurok.”

  Okurok meant cigarette butt, an unflattering but universal nickname for the small, stubby Yak-40 jet. The Yak was the jewel in White Bird’s crown. Three powerful engines gave it the ability to land and take off from short airstrips. Its fat fuselage was perfect for outsized goods. A cargo ramp built into its tail could handle anything from reindeer to oil drums. Even people. It was a rugged machine perfectly suited for Siberian conditions.

  “What about fuel?” asked Plet.

  “They have fuel in Mirny.”

  “For us?”

  “We might have to negotiate something,” said Yuri. “What do you think? Is it worth it?”

  Plet considered the question professionally. “It depends on how happy Nowek is to see you, and how long he remembers.”

  “Let’s assume, very happy and long enough.” Yuri sat back in his chair. “Two and a half hours there. Refuel. We find him. Mirny is small. An hour on the ground. Then two and a half back.”

  “The jet’s expensive to fly.”

  “Plet.” Yuri tossed the pen to the desk. “Putting a price tag on friendship. I’m disappointed.”

  Plet’s expression underwent another fractional alteration.

  “Especially when he works for the FSB. Especially when the next president of Russia is also FSB. And most of all, especially because our friend the Delegate knows a lot more than he’s saying about four million carats of diamonds. It makes my blood boil to know they were running them right under our noses. We should have been in on that opportunity from the start.”

  “Like the dog skinner.”

  “Never mind. Who is this Sabina anyway?”

  “A student during the day. A dancer at night.”

  “Dancer? What kind?”

  “At Night Flight.”

  Yuri’s eyebrows went up. Night Flight was an expensive club. It hired only the most beautiful women “associates.” He checked the time. It was almost five o’clock. They could be back before midnight. “Have them pull the jet into the hangar and warm it up. I hate cold seats.” Yuri rummaged in his desk and unfurled a spaghetti tangle of wires, the cables that connected the satellite navigator to the jet’s autopilot.

  “Nowek might not even be alive, you know.”

  Yuri gave up and balled the wires up, then snapped a rubber band around the mess. “He’s only been there a day. How much trouble could he find so quickly?”

  Plet blinked, looked up at the ceiling.

  “True. He has a talent for it.” Yuri thought about it and said, “Better tell the Brothers I’ll need them tonight.” He reached down into the desk drawer and pulled out a small, yellow box. The label said CHANEL NO. 6. He tossed it to Plet.

  Plet examined it closely. The printing was fuzzy and the label proudly proclaimed it a Product of Malaysia. “It’s a fake.”

  “You’re an expert on French perfume now?”

  “Number Six?”

  “It’s the new model,” said Yuri.

  “Nowek!” Boyko’s shout echoed off walls of ice.

  Boyko. Volsky’s inside contact. Boyko, a father who had informed on his own son, and by doing so had killed him. Nowek felt for the next rung down. His boot found only air. He stopped and looked. The conveyor belt below was still a good five meters down. A long jump. He shifted his weight to get a better view, but the ladder began to slide, carrying him down, the metal squealing with rock dust and disuse. He stepped off the last rung directly onto the ore belt. Without his weight, the ladder retracted back up like a fire escape.

  It felt warmer down here, and it was. The belt was woven metal, spun from steel wire. The surface was covered with a half-frozen sludge of gray rock paste that crunched under his boots. The tunnel was big. You could almost run a metro train through it. The walls were all rough-hewn and jagged, as though they’d been cast from poor, crumbling concrete. Pale and dry, studded with ice wedges, glittering with crystals. Permafrost. Siberia’s “eternal ice.”

  “Nowek!”

  He looked up. A light was sunk into the ceiling of the tunnel. Heavy cables were strung up there, too. Blocks of blasted ore had gouged the walls. A frayed cord dangled from the final rung of the ladder. He could reach it, pull the ladder down, and climb back up.

  Or not. Volsky had said, Go to the horizon. Mirny Deep had eight horizons. It was his chance. His last. Tomorrow would be too late.

  Kirillin is connected with Hock, and Hock is connected with the cartel. Who else was bound by a chain of diamonds four million carats long? Boyko’s son. Sherbakov. All dead. And if the IMF turns away? Russia will die. It was a chain that wound its way to Moscow, maybe to the Kremlin itself. Wherever its ultimate end might be, that chain had its beginnings just ahead.

  A steady breeze flowed down from the vent shack. A distinctly stronger wind came from behind, from the direction of the ore plant. A deep mine had to breathe. Somewhere, fans were drawing fresh air into Mirny Deep’s lungs.

  Nowek put the wind at his back and started walking. The feeble light soon gave out. The belt barely deflected under his boots. What was Nowek’s weight compared with boulders of ore?

  Ahead, another dim glow marked the next light, the next vent shaft. Would someone already be there, waiting? Nowek knew that by running deeper into the mine he was only complicating Ki
rillin’s job. Not altering the outcome. One way or another, sooner or later, he would be found. And then?

  The glow grew nearer, brighter; he stopped and listened. The whistle of air, and now something else. Not the hum of a fan, nor the steady rush, rush, rush of blood in his own ears. Something more like the soft crunch of a boot in refrozen snow, coming from behind. Someone else was in the tunnel.

  If the computer doesn’t read my card in five minutes, an alarm goes off. Where is Boyko?

  He walked under the glow of the next light. Another ventilation duct, another ladder, another dangling rope. Another downward rush of icy wind. The flood of air pushed him deeper. He kept it at his back. Except for the vent shafts, lights, ropes, and ladders, it could be a treadmill. He was walking, sure. But where? The sheer sameness of it lulled him. Perhaps that was why the meaning of all those deep scars in the walls didn’t register sooner.

  He ran his hand along the side wall. The cuts had been dug by tumbling boulders of ore. The ore plant didn’t send rock to the mine. The mine sent rock to the ore plant. Nowek was walking up a one-way street, headed in the wrong direction. All someone would have to do was turn the conveyor on and wait for Nowek to be spit out of the tunnel at the plant like a piece of errant luggage.

  Ahead, the next vent shaft grew brighter.

  He could hear the hum of fans growing, as though big rapids on a wild river were drawing near. The flowing air urged him on. There was no reason to be cautious. No reason to be slow. He could run and the sound would be swallowed by the fans. He started jogging. He’d taken only three loping steps when, with a snap, the distant glow marking the next shaft went dark.

  Nowek glanced back in the direction he’d come from.

  A spark of white light flared. A flashlight, moving in slow confident arcs, the beam growing brighter. Whoever held it had the easy pace of a hunter with his quarry already cornered, who knew there was nowhere for Nowek to go but where he wanted him to be.