The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  Boyko slid Anton’s card through the reader. The red light went out, the green flashed. Boyko jammed his fist down on the topmost button. A warning horn blared.

  Whoever was coming up the conveyor belt from Fabrika 3 knew what it meant. There was another shout, then the sound of running boots, and then the low hum of powerful electric motors drowned out everything. The belt jerked as the gearing drew up the slack in the mechanism, and then it began to move. Slowly at first, but then faster. The boulders at the bottom of the chute were drawn in, allowing the ones piled up behind to take their place.

  “The belt travels at three meters per second,” said Boyko as the boulders jostled into the tunnel and vanished. “They’ll be back in Fabrika 3 a lot faster than it took us to walk.” Boyko stepped through the hatch and into the gallery beyond. “We may be able to waltz right out of this hole if we’re quick.” Boyko slipped Slava’s ID card next to Anton’s under a strap on his hard hat. “Let’s move it.”

  Like the tunnel and the chute room, the passage was cut through permafrost, with light fixtures at regular intervals. At the end was a surprisingly normal elevator door. A single round window set in the center of a tan metal panel trimmed in chrome. It wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a Moscow office tower.

  Next to it was a much larger door, the ore skip, big enough for a small truck to drive through, clearly made for transporting equipment down, loaded ore trams up.

  Boyko stood next to the small elevator. Another card reader was mounted beside the door. A yellow light blinked. Then the yellow light went out. A green light came on, the door slid open.

  Boyko motioned for Nowek to wait. He went in and started beating on something with his flashlight. Plastic crunched. Glass shattered. He looked out the door and nodded.

  When Nowek joined him, a blinded security camera hung from the ceiling from its wires.

  The car was lit by a single cold blue fluorescent tube. There was a control panel with buttons to open the door, to close it, to ring an alarm. The emergency stop button was the largest, and painted bright red. A vertical row corresponded to the working levels of the mine. The horizons. At the bottom of the row, blank holes to allow new buttons to be installed, corresponding to deeper horizons. The topmost button was marked SURFACE. The next down ORE BELT. There were eight buttons below it.

  A fan blew cool, dank air across his face. He looked down. Black drops marred the floor like spilled ink. His blood. His left sleeve was starting to soak through. He knew he should put pressure on the wounds, but the thought of grabbing his hot, swollen arm stopped him. He wouldn’t bleed to death.

  Boyko stabbed the button to shut the door. He turned and held out his leathery hand. “Maxim Ivanovich. Thank you.”

  “Gregori Tadeovich,” said Nowek. “You’re welcome.”

  Though they weren’t exactly friends, they were no longer enemies.

  “When we get to the surface, follow me,” said Boyko. “Don’t look too interested. Don’t ask questions. Just do what I do. There’s a scanner we’ve got to pass through. You’ll need one of these.” He tapped the ID cards. “Who do you want to be? Anton or Slava?”

  “Someone will see and know I’m not either one of them.”

  “The topmaster likes to drink so he might not. Besides, there’s no other way. You take Anton’s card.” He jabbed the topmost button. “I don’t want to even . . .”

  With a lurch, the elevator car began to drop.

  “Boyko!”

  All thought of ID cards vanished as Boyko punched the button again. The car had a mind of its own. It continued to descend. He hit the emergency stop.

  It had no effect.

  Nowek stepped over to the control panel. “Circuit breaker!”

  Boyko pulled open a hinged door. Inside was a reset switch that should stop everything. He threw it. The fan stopped. The light went out. The elevator continued its smooth descent.

  Boyko smashed his fist against the red stop button again, then all the buttons. He stood back. “What’s it doing?”

  Taking us to the bottom, thought Nowek. The round window flashed with light as they dropped by the first horizon. The cab continued its measured descent.

  The window flashed again as they dropped through the second horizon. Nowek got an almost subliminal view of lightbulbs receding into the distance.

  He’d been in mine hoists before. Some dropped like they’d been pushed off a cliff. Your feet levitated, your brain swam with images of an endless fall, though more miners died when their hoist went out of control on the way up. Others were slow, jerky affairs that plunged ten meters, hung up, squealed, then dropped again. This one was swift, purposeful, eerily smooth.

  Deeper, the air coming in from the vents in the wall grew wetter, warmer. It carried the smell of live rock, a smell Nowek had almost forgotten. It was to a miner what the smell of the open sea was to a sailor. Not earthy, not rich, but a pure, elemental smell unlike anything from the normal world.

  They dropped through Horizon Three. Three hundred meters underground, not yet as deep as the open pit. The shaft was still encased in ice born of a thousand Siberian winters.

  The Fourth Horizon. The Fifth. Five hundred meters below the surface. Down, away from the air, the light. Horizon Six. Beads of water condensed on the cold walls of the elevator. Seven.

  “Don’t worry,” said Boyko. “We’ll stop before we hit bottom.”

  The automatic controls should also be taking them up.

  The lights of the Eighth Horizon filled the window.

  Nowek looked at the control panel. There were no more buttons. “You said there were eight horizons.”

  “There’s still something you don’t know?”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know.”

  A low, powerful throbbing made the walls of the car vibrate, as though they were approaching an enormous, beating heart.

  “You’ve heard of diamond fissures?” asked Boyko.

  Nowek had. They were veins of diamond ore extending into the native rock, rich and highly prized. Diamonds were starry messengers from deep within the earth. The titanic heat and pressure that created them lasted longer in fissures. Up in the throat of the diamond pipe, pressures eased, allowing most of the gems to burn up like lumps of crystal coal. But they survived down in the fissures. The largest, purest, most valuable gems were fissure diamonds. “There’s a fissure system in Mirny Deep?”

  “On the Ninth Horizon. Fissures so big you can stand up and walk in them for kilometers,” said Boyko. “I told you it was possible to shovel up diamonds? It’s no joke. Mirny Deep is the richest fucking diamond mine on earth.”

  A cable brake began to grip. They were slowing, slowing. Rivulets of condensation ran down the metal walls. Gravity began to reassert itself, pushing up on the soles of Nowek’s field boots, as the hoist slowed. A final lurch, and the cage bobbed to a stop. The stink of hot iron flowed in with the warm, wet air. A curious combination of smells. Smoke, cinder, fire, water. Like being dropped down the flue of a recently drowned blast furnace.

  The window was black. Big machinery was running somewhere nearby. Boyko pounded the proper button. The door opened. The chamber beyond the door was dark. Boyko paused for an instant, then said, “Wait.” He stepped out into the Ninth Horizon, his headlamp a flashing comet receding into deep, limitless space.

  Chapter 25

  The Storm

  Yuri settled back into the pilot’s seat with a cup of tea. The Brothers had seen him leave the cockpit to fill his cup. They’d craned their necks to see into the cockpit. They knew there was just one pilot on board. So who was at the controls?

  He would have told them that the autopilot was on duty if they’d asked, but they wouldn’t. They were too fearless. It was worth leaving the cockpit empty for a few minutes just to see them exchange questioning glances and turn slightly pale.

  He took a sip and glanced at each of the instruments. Airspeed. Altitude. The three engine displays. Navigation. His
eye came to a stop on the directional gyro. It was a good ten degrees off. Had it failed? Compass systems were unreliable so far north.

  He looked out over the blunt nose and knew at once that something was wrong. Polaris, the pole star, was no longer in its proper place. A compass might wander. But Polaris? The jet was pointed too far east. It sent a shot of cold adrenaline straight to his heart, because in a place as empty as Siberia, not knowing where you’d been going was the same as not knowing where you were, and that meant you could be anywhere.

  He checked the GPS. It was on, it was still flying the Yak through a pair of wires connecting it to the autopilot. The display showed him on course, just under two hundred kilometers south of Mirny. Then why was he pointed at Alaska?

  Then he saw the speed he was making over the ground. The Yak cruised at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour. How could he be crawling across the ground at three hundred?

  The engines were in order. Either the satellites were lying, or else a wind, a very big wind, was blowing from the northeast. What had Plet said about a storm? Didn’t he say that was tomorrow?

  Was there enough fuel to make Mirny? They were still forty minutes away. A quick calculation showed that if nothing else went wrong, they’d arrive in Mirny, though they might taxi up to the fuel pumps on fumes.

  A new sound got his attention. A rasping hiss. It was coming from the windshield. He looked out. The nearest clouds were well to the north. They looked like distant mountains that blotted out the horizon. He flicked on the jet’s landing lights.

  Two beams lanced ahead into the darkness, filled with bright streaks of blowing snow. They were flying at ten thousand meters, clear of any cloud. How could there be snow?

  The GPS screen was showing more wind. His ground speed had dropped below three hundred kilometers per hour. Mirny was now forty-seven minutes away.

  His three engines pushed the Yak along at better than five hundred kilometers an hour, yet somehow Mirny was growing more distant by the minute.

  Boyko motioned for Nowek to come out.

  Deep mines are wet mines, and the Ninth Horizon of Mirny Deep was both. Nowek’s headlamp reflected off a shallow pool of standing water. The chamber looked more like the blacked-out bilge of a sinking ship than the anteroom to the richest diamond mine on earth. Everywhere was water. Raining in big milky drops from the roof, running down heavy electrical conduits, streaming to manhole-size floor sumps where it swirled and vanished. Empty ore trams were parked in a row in front of the ore skip. The water was deep enough to cover the rails, making them look like barges waiting for a tugboat.

  The water was melted ice from above, and numbingly cold. But the walls radiated heat. The air was hot.

  Boyko splashed over to a security camera. He used his battered flashlight to blind it, then slid his ID card through the reader and punched the ore skip’s call button.

  Nothing happened. The light above the wide door stayed red. Whoever had sent them down here was not going to let them leave. He let his flashlight linger on a bundle of cables that emerged from a conduit beside the elevator. The wires fanned out, draped from hangars pinned in the roof. They vanished into five tunnels set in the far wall. Detonator cables. The tunnels were drifts drilled into the ore body. Heavy blast curtains were rolled up above each one.

  Nowek pointed his headlamp up. The low roof was supported at regular intervals by stout pillars of unexcavated ore. The kimberlite was dark blue and wet, veined with white quartz, cobbled with rocks caught up in the same flow of magma that had brought diamonds up from the basement of the earth.

  A thousand meters underground. If this were a submarine, it would be a very deep dive, though a submarine wouldn’t leak this badly. At least, not one that was coming back up.

  Boyko pointed at the cables. “They’re set to blow some rooms down. They could do it whenever they felt like pushing the button.”

  Nowek could feel the rush of air. “Not with the fans running.”

  Boyko gave Nowek a nod. “You’ve been in mines, Delegate Nowek. I keep forgetting.”

  “Never with the blasting cables connected.” Nowek saw something move. He turned.

  The red light burning above the door had gone out. The yellow lamp was lit. The ore skip was coming down. “Boyko.”

  The pit boss saw it, too. He pointed at the far wall. “Get inside a drift,” he said. “Not too far. They turn into fissures at the end. If you do get into a fissure, keep the breeze at your back and walk. It always brings you back to the main shaft.”

  “Boyko, it could be—”

  “Now, Delegate Nowek.”

  The clouds on the northern horizon were no longer distant. They were growing alarmingly fast. Yuri would have to penetrate them, to find the runway still fifty kilometers away, buried somewhere underneath them. What choice did he have? Mirny was ten minutes away, and he had fifteen minutes of fuel. He would find the runway and land, or become one of the thousands of planes to vanish in the vastness of Siberia, to be discovered by some Yakut herder, a hunting party, or, more likely, not at all.

  He brought the three yellow throttles back to idle. The nose dropped. There would be no second attempts. No groping for an unlit runway in the middle of a bastard of a snowstorm. He would have to fly to the airport at Mirny directly, and land as though it were a clear, sunny day in June, as though he could look off the nose and see it. The little GPS knew where the runway was with astonishing precision. If only it could land the plane, too. But it couldn’t. That was a job for the pilot.

  Yuri could see the rising summits of the cloud mountains. Eight thousand meters. Seven. Six. Now those mountains were a wall, solid, vertical, near. They grew texture, billows, canyons. The wind became fitful, more violent in its veerings. He switched on the wing and engine anti-ice, the igniters that would keep the fires lit. The wall of cloud towered. Any second now. Any second.

  He called back to the Brothers to warn them to hold on, and then the Yak slammed straight into the clouds, the wind, the snow.

  The jet was thrown to one side, tossed up, then mashed down. The wings seemed to tumble. Yuri was a daring pilot. Daring to even be here at all. But he let the autopilot fly. He let the GPS navigate. On its screen, the tiny dark line that was the Mirny runway crept down from the top of the screen with terrifying slowness.

  Altitude, five thousand meters. Four. At least there were no mountains around to hit. The Siberian Plateau lay beneath them, high, but almost perfectly flat, minus a few man-made obstacles. Buildings, antennae. Luckily, the mine at Mirny was a pit. How tall could a pit be?

  He was still in solid clouds at two thousand meters. He switched the landing lights on. The beams were swallowed by heavy snow. He switched them off. The satellites were leading him to the runway, but at an angle made even more acute by the crosswind. Somehow he would have to line up properly. Somehow he would have to see the earth before he collided with it.

  One thousand five hundred meters. Mirny sat at an elevation of six hundred forty meters. The ground was less than nine hundred meters straight down, and the snow was falling more heavily.

  Five hundred meters to the ground. He turned the landing lights back on and let them burn. They showed only whipping clouds and slanting snow driven sideways by the wind.

  Four hundred meters to go. There were probably ten-story apartment flats at Mirny. Maybe right below him. How tall was a ten-story building anyway?

  He risked a quick glance at the GPS screen. The airport was dead ahead, five kilometers, the runway angled to the left. The wind was from the right. How the devil was he going to even see the runway, much less land on it?

  He reached over and pulled the gear handle down. With a heavy thunk, the nose wheel popped out, followed by the mains. Three green lights. Three good wheels. Fuel? The gauges were in the zone of uncertainty. The engines could flame out at any moment. He selected landing flaps. Two hundred meters. Two kilometers to the runway. It had to be there. It had to be.

  Mahm
et entered the cockpit. He had a cup of tea with him. Remarkably, it hadn’t spilled. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Get back in your seat!”

  “Are we getting ready to land?”

  “Get back now!”

  A rogue wind sent the Yak skidding. Yuri switched off the autopilot. He fought the skid with rudder and yoke. He looked down again at the screen. One kilometer. Then back up.

  The landing lights pinned a tall black building. A tower. At its top, a red beacon flashed weakly through the storm. The beacon was above them.

  Yuri yanked the yoke full over, knowing that he was giving the wind a fat target. Left wing down, down, then vertical. The black tower swept by beneath his belly. How close? Close. He fought the jet level, and when he did, the lights framed a white trapezoid of level, even ground, covered with snow.

  Mother of God!

  It was a runway.

  He nosed over, knowing it was awful technique, but he wouldn’t have a chance to try again. The snowy runway rushed him. He pulled back an instant before the nose wheel would have struck. He dipped his right wing down, down, shouldering the Yak into the howling crosswind, feeling for the ground, feeling for anything.

  The snow was light and dry. Powdery. The landing was soft, imperceptibly gentle. It was a landing that violated every one of Yuri’s hazy rules and, in the end, was one of his smoothest.

  “Mirny?” asked Mahmet. Somehow he still had the teacup.

  “I hope so.” Yuri throttled the engines back and kicked the jet around in a pivot, using the powerful landing lights to hunt for something that looked like a building. A hangar. Even better, a gas truck. The beams swept over a long, low structure. The windows were dark except for one at the far end. A light burned over a door. A bus was parked in front, its side plastered white with blowing snow. And on the roof of the building, MIRNY.

  It was absolutely black away from the elevators. Only the small circle of light from Nowek’s headlamp gave the space any dimension. His eyes were growing wider, more adapted. What was dark before became shadow, and shadow took on form and texture. He headed for the drift Boyko had pointed out. The floor of the main chamber was sloped for drainage. There wasn’t much standing water now. It barely covered the ore car rails.