The Ice Curtain

by Robin White

  He turned and saw Boyko standing in front of the elevator doors. The light above them was still yellow. But then it flickered, went out. The green lamp came on. He ducked into the drift.

  The roof was low enough for Nowek to touch. It was very quiet here, away from the hoist, surrounded by solid rock. A stiff, cool wind blew against his face as he walked deeper into the drift. He stopped and held up a hand to it. His palm grew cold. The back of his hand stayed warm. Fresh air was reaching the ends of the drift, flowing back into the main chamber and then up the shaft. If fresh air was making it down, didn’t that mean there was another way, an air shaft that went back up?

  He looked at his left hand. It was caked with dirt and dried blood. His sleeve was black. He tugged at the wrist. A drop of bright red fell, then another. He switched off his headlamp and put his ear next to the rough wall. He could hear the hum of the pumps again, and then, startlingly clear, Boyko sneezed.

  Air pressure changed. His ears popped. Elevator doors were opening. He heard Boyko say, “I thought it would be you.”

  “We found Anton and Slava. Did you think we wouldn’t?”

  Hot light washed across the wall of the tunnel, almost blinding bright. Nowek froze. Kirillin. Was he alone?

  “He murdered my son, Kirillin. But then, you knew.”

  “You could have stopped him. You could have saved him. It was your own fault, Boyko.” His bright light sent Boyko’s shadow slanting across the inner wall of Nowek’s tunnel. “You’re injured?”

  “Why don’t you come close and see?”

  The light shifted. “You used to be loyal. Everyone said so. It was something to count on. Then things began to happen.”

  “Alyosha happened.”

  “You started talking to outsiders.”

  “Long after you started working for them. How is it that you bent over and we were the ones to be fucked?”

  “You didn’t think we’d know about Volsky?”

  “You didn’t know about the strike until I told you.”

  “You should have left Mirny while you had the chance.”

  “You’re the one who is going to be running. The FSB is after you now. That boy you murdered in DRAGA 1 was one of them.”

  The light swept the cavern again. “Where is Nowek?”

  “In your pocket, taking a piss.” Then “What’s that?”

  “A Makarov pistol, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here.”

  The light swung away. Boyko’s shadow shifted.

  “What are you doing with these?”

  Kirillin said, “The question will be, what were you doing with them? The answer will be clear enough. A man who murdered his boss. An employee of Kristall with a grudge. An argument over a few hundred carats of smuggled rough. I wonder what will the FSB make of that? Careful how you handle the diamonds, Boyko. They’re excellent quality and they belong to someone else.”

  “You won’t find Nowek.”

  “I already have. Who left those drops of blood? You aren’t bleeding.”

  Nowek heard a splash.

  “That’s close enough. You’ve done us a favor by bringing Nowek down here,” said Kirillin. “You can decide where you will take your bullet.”

  Nowek expected the pit boss to leap at Kirillin. Instead, Boyko’s shadow shifted, but only a little. He didn’t leap. He didn’t run. Nowek watched his shadow change shape as the pit boss raised his arms, stretching them out wide at his sides.

  He’d turned his back to Kirillin!

  “There’s only one right way for someone like you to shoot a man,” said Boyko. “And that’s—”

  A white flash, a crack that came as a sharp pressure wave, a surprised grunt as Boyko’s breath was blown from his lungs.

  The light pointed away from the drift. A second flash, a second sharp crack!

  Then “Nowek?”

  Harsh light flooded into the drift where Nowek crouched. He moved back, away, looking for something, anything he might use as a weapon. Bare rocks. Cables slung under the roof. He reached up and tried to pull a metal hanger free, but it was pinned well. There was nothing. All he could hear was the drip of seeping water. The rattle of falling pebbles. The subliminal groan of the earth pressing in all around. There was a low opening in the side of the drift. A stope, where ore was actually collected. He bent his head low and slipped into it as Kirillin’s beam poured light into the drift.

  “Are you down this drift? Of course you are. I can see your blood. There’s no back door, so you can relax. You’ll be in there for a while. I knew right away that working with you was not going to be possible. You weren’t after money like Volsky. How could we conduct business on such a basis?”

  The light shifted. Kirillin spoke again. “You came to Mirny to learn why Volsky died. You came so much closer than I would have guessed. You could have had lunch with the man who arranged it and you turned him down. So whose fault is it that you failed?”

  Hock. Nowek held his breath, moving back into the stope. It was like crawling into a stone coffin.

  “You wanted to find out where those missing diamonds went?” Kirillin laughed. “Your Moscow friends have been selling them all along. Every gem we’ve mined for the last year has gone to Irkutsk, then out of the country. Is it our fault Petrov chose an unreliable partner? Should we suffer because Moscow sent stones to Golden Autumn and no money ever came back? Of course not.”

  Kirillin was standing in front of the drift, letting his light follow the red drops of blood. The beam stopped at the stope. “You were going to fly to Moscow tomorrow morning with one million carats of gem diamonds. True, you’d be arrested and the stones were going on, but it’s an irony I feel you would have appreciated.”

  Nowek heard a new sound. A metallic rattle.

  “Your friends in Moscow are in trouble. They’ve stolen from us for years, now someone has stolen from them. Bad things will happen to them, but we’ll survive. Why? Because our relationship with the cartel is stronger than promises. It’s made of diamond, and nothing is stronger than that. London has ordered the Ninth Horizon closed. But one day it will be opened again. One year, two. Maybe a hundred. We’ll dig you up and you’ll ride the ore belt to Fabrika 3 with the diamonds you were hoping to discover. Of course, they’ll still be perfect. Well, I’m taking up your time and you don’t have much left. I’ll leave you to your own thoughts.”

  The metallic rattle echoed down the drift, followed by the click of a lock. Kirillin had rolled the blast curtain down.

  Total blackness now. Nowek scrambled out of the stope. He switched his headlamp on and rushed to the blast curtain. It was made of thick rubberized fabric sandwiched between heavy steel netting. Kirillin might be on the other side. It didn’t matter. He shoved it hard, again. He wedged his fingers around the edge. It wouldn’t move. It was locked down tight. How long did he have? One minute? Two? As long as it took the ore skip to go far enough away for Kirillin to be safe. And how far was that?

  Nowek’s thinking slowed down, mired. Spinning in something he knew was close to panic. He was a thousand meters under the ground, trapped in a mine wired to explode.

  Wired! He looked up at the bundle of detonator cables. They were stiff and well armored. Cut through them? With what? His teeth? Burn through them with Chuchin’s lighter? Be serious.

  Nowek’s brain stumbled, faltered like an engine barely running on a winter’s morning.

  Then it caught.

  Blow down some rooms. That’s what Boyko had said. It meant that the explosion was going to take place on this level, but that the rubble would be collected below. Nowek turned his back to the blast curtain and ran deeper into the drift.

  The passage stopped at a tee. The detonator cable split; three red cables went left, three right. He turned right, pushing the darting white circle of his headlamp forward, stepping over piles of fallen rocks fractured loose from the walls, the roof.

  The drift narrowed as it plunged deeper into the ore body, the roof sla
nted down, lower, lower, until it scraped the helmet off his head and he had to stop. There was no reassuring flow of air now. The fans had stopped. He could be going in the right direction. Or not. One line of the red cable veered to his left, into another stope. Two continued deeper into the mine.

  He followed the single red cable over a tongue of loose stones that extended halfway across the drift. He was down on his knees now. There had to be just seconds left. He kept one hand on the cable, feeling for an end, feeling for something. . . .

  Nowek crawled over a sheet of heavy plywood. Above it, the blasting cable burrowed up into a drilled hole. He pulled. Something gave, slowly, reluctantly, like gum stuck to a shoe. But it moved. He pulled harder. Taffy too cold to work.

  A fat purple sausage appeared, emerged, dropped into his hands. On it, the word DYNAGEL.

  The blasting cable was attached through some sort of one-way fitting. A Chinese finger trap. He yanked at it. It wouldn’t pull out. He attacked the plastic skin with his teeth, ripping at the sausage until he tasted bitter explosive gel. He spat it out and squeezed. Purple gel thick as toothpaste. He squeezed again, but there was no time to get it all. He dropped the charge and grabbed at the sheet of plywood on the floor, thinking to use it as a shield.

  It covered a hole in the floor large enough to slip through. But where did it go? He peered down into it and saw a rivulet of water running across a rough floor studded with boulders.

  A fissure.

  The shot might bring it all down on his head. But then, it might not. How much time did he have? He lowered his boots into the hole. He started to slip, to fall. He dug his fingers in for grip, kicking his boots, wedging his legs wide.

  He heard a sizzle. The blasting cable shot out a fat spark.

  As he hit the floor a hot white light filled the space, a sharp blow knocked him down to his knees, then rammed him back against a boulder. A tremendous crack! came from somewhere inside his head. It was drowned by the rumble of falling boulders, the gagging smell of explosive, dust. The ground rolled. The blast was endless. The white light faded to orange, to yellow, to black.

  His helmet was no longer on. The light was smashed. The blackness was absolute. But in that first dazzling instant, he’d seen the walls of the fissure glimmer, nailed with the pinpoint brilliance of crystal. Nowek was at the core of a galaxy of stars. A million, million stars.

  Nikolai Tereshenko had been night manager at the Mirny airport for three years. For eight months of the year, it was a position that demanded little more than staying awake. The airport was closed to the outside world, and all night flights, even Kristall’s, were prohibited. True, there was the occasional emergency, and in the short summer there was no night at all. But winter was back and Tereshenko could sleep through it like a bear.

  He leaned back in his swivel chair, half-watching a rebroadcast of Baywatch. He had the sound turned off. He didn’t want to wake up the denizens of the monkey house, the night maintenance crew sleeping in the bunk room next door.

  He could hear wind shrieking across the open runway, the dry spatter of snow raking his window, the steam radiators ticking, the snores of men who drowned the day with the help of a bottle.

  His sole duty tonight was to determine when to wake the crew and send them out to plow the runway. There was an early flight scheduled for tomorrow morning. A Yak-40 trijet to Moscow. Moscow meant big shots. The runway could not have so much as one flake on it when they arrived at first light. Give it half an hour, he decided, and I’ll rattle the bars of the monkey house.

  Bright lights swept across his windows. His window faced out onto the runway. He got to his feet and went to the window. Who’s out driving on a night like this? The frost was too thick to see. At least the ice was still on the outside. Let another month go by and the inside would be coated, too. He had a series of nails hammered into the floor. When frost reached the fourth nail in from the wall, he could officially close the airport and . . . a soft click came from behind.

  Nikolai Tereshenko turned.

  Two men in black karakul hats and mottled snow camouflage stood at his door. They were dark-skinned. Each of them carried a stubby automatic rifle. Both were aimed at him.

  A third person appeared, shouldered by the two gunmen.

  “Good evening,” said Yuri. His leather jacket was zipped up tight to his chin. “I’d like some fuel, please.”

  Tereshenko could scarcely push the word out. “What?”

  “Jet fuel,” Yuri repeated. “And also a car.”

  Chapter 26

  The Crystal Garden

  Black, the fissure lost all dimension. Nowek might be standing on a sheer cliff at midnight. He might be drowning, sinking down to the cold, silent depths where light never penetrates. He might even be a dead man looking out at eternity, except that his scalp itched.

  He reached up and found the hard hat gone, and with it, the lamp. His hair was powdered with rock dust. The air was thick with it. Like breathing glass. His forehead felt hot, as though he’d been working too long in the sun. A flash burn. His ears felt plugged with water. More likely a ruptured eardrum. It didn’t take long before Nowek realized that waking up at the bottom of a mine, surrounded by rubble a thousand meters under Siberia’s frozen skin, was not necessarily good news.

  He moved a foot, a leg. The other. The blast had thrown him back against the fissure wall. But it hadn’t buried him. Amorphous shapes, billowing, ghostly sails, washed across the darkness. Phosphenes, illusions. They only made Nowek hungry to see something, anything, real.

  He hunted for the helmet, dislodged a silent stream of loose pebbles. They pelted down and kept coming. He was sure the whole mine would follow, but then, the rain of stones stopped. He felt for the hard hat and its light. How could it just disappear? He thought that Chuchin would say the same thing about him.

  His fingers became his eyes and ears. There was a boulder to one side. The other side seemed clear. What had Boyko said? Some of the fissures were big enough to stand up and walk in, that they went on for kilometers.

  Slowly, dizzily, he got to his feet, keeping an arm out against a wall for balance, ducking away from a roof he sensed but couldn’t see. But he could reach it. He tried to find the hole he’d dropped through just before the blast, the flash, the moment of painful white light. . . .

  Light! Chuchin’s cigarette lighter. He pulled it out of his parka, flipped back the cap, found the thumb wheel, and snapped it.

  The spark was fat and impossibly bright, the blue flame a glare he could hardly bear to look at. He held it up to his hungry eyes. The hole in the roof was plugged with rubble. A pull would bring it all down. He turned.

  The walls. My God. The walls.

  The color of the exposed ore was deepest midnight, the smell subtle, almost organic, nearly sweet, like sawn lumber so new the cut still dripped sap. Nowek put his hand out to touch the wall of the fissure, as though it might vanish. Ice-clear diamonds shimmered in the blue light of his flame. Slender triangles. Doubles. Rounded cubes and dangerous-looking shards. Diamonds in impossible profusion. Diamonds enough to collect with a shovel and a pail.

  Diamonds didn’t come like gumdrops in a glass jar. They came by the point, by the carat, each the precise weight of a tiny seed from the carob tree, wrapped in special papers, guarded with guns, locked away, meted out with microscopic care. Here were diamonds by the kilogram, by the handful. Diamonds by the ton.

  He took a step closer and kicked something, a loose pebble. There was something in the way it skittered across the stones, something almost musical in its clarity and tone. He held the flame of his lighter close to the floor. It took a few seconds to realize what he was seeing. He’d almost stepped on it.

  A perfect crystal, blasted free from its prison of ore. A clear octahedron the size of his thumb, its points new and wickedly sharp. He picked it up and felt the characteristic cold of tightly packed carbon atoms sucking heat from his skin. Even unpolished, it captured the light of N
owek’s flame. Worth what? Millions? Maybe in Antwerp, in New York. But what did it matter down here?

  He put the diamond in front of the blue flame of his lighter. The crystal filled with blue light, scattering it throughout the fissure. Shimmering images of the flame were projected on the walls.

  Shimmering?

  The blue flame was flickering. A faint breeze was blowing again.

  Nowek carefully pocketed the crystal. He could feel the air now, cool on his burned forehead. Turn, it disappeared. Turn back around and it flowed over his face like water.

  Keep the breeze at your back and walk. It always brings you back to the main shaft.

  Somewhere, a kilometer overhead, the ventilators in the headworks tower were running. Fresh air was reaching him here at the bottom of the world, in this impossible crystal garden. If it was reaching him, then there was a way up. A way out. He held out the flame and started to walk. Ten steps and the fissure angled off in a new direction.

  A maze that goes on for kilometers . . .

  Fifteen more and the roof necked down low, lower. The fissure made another twist, and he came to a wedge of rock, a keystone that had broken loose and fallen almost, but not quite, to the floor. There were cracks above, hinting at a way through. Air whistled through them. They were too narrow for even his hand to pass. He dropped back down.

  At the bottom, a narrow opening, a slot. The blue flame was pulled horizontal by the wind. He got down and looked into it. The narrow opening went as far as he could see, which wasn’t so far.

  Hock. Volsky’s death. The diamonds leaking out from Irkutsk to Golden Autumn. Everything Nowek knew would die if he didn’t make it through. Those men and women, burned up to keep the cartel’s grip on Mirny Deep, on the Ninth Horizon, intact.

  The way out lay beyond that slot. Nowek got down on his knees, then his belly, the flame danced as the moving air accelerated through the gap. It was his rush light. With it, he could break the back of any winter’s dark, even here where the night was eternal, where the icicles were made from diamonds.