by Alex Dryden
Death in Siberia
( Finn - 4 )
Alex Dryden
The Cold War is dead but Russia’s ambitions continue to rage…
The West is under threat. Russia has been granted sole access to the undersea Lomonosov Ridge in the Arctic Ocean – home to oil reserves even greater than Saudi Arabia’s. The US is determined to claim a share of the oil riches. The CIA send ex-KGB agent Anna on a mission to the brutal wilderness of Norilsk – the base of Russia’s Arctic development and a new floating nuclear station. She must disrupt their plans, but Intelligence reports that a Russian group are already planning to destroy the precious power station.
But why are they risking everything to sabotage their own country’s resources? Is the US trying to force an outcome while keeping their hands clean? With the KGB hot on their tail, it’s up to Anna and the CIA to prevent an attack that could destroy the entire Arctic region, and its oil reserves, for ever.
Alex Dryden
DEATH IN SIBERIA
To my god-daughter Daisy Bell
‘We’re not afraid to down nine shots of vodka,
Or eat cabbage pickled in permafrost.
For, you see, we’re the men,
We’re the men of the seventieth parallel’
An Arctic Siberian miner’s song
‘Trees completely ceased to grow. Grass withered. There were no animals. And no children were born.’
From a tale of the Evenki tribe in Arctic Siberia
‘The Arctic is Russian’
Artur Chilingarov, Vladimir Putin’s Arctic exploration leader and a Russian parliamentary deputy, July 2007
Russian Claimed Territory in the Arctic Ocean
PROLOGUE
THE FOOTSTEPS BEHIND him seemed to be getting closer. To Gunther Bachman – or Herr Professor Gunther Bachman, to give him his full title – they had become a constant threat.
He heard the slap slap slap of the steps again now on the wet concrete of the Siberian street. Bachman’s reaction was a constriction in his heart, a shortness of breath. For in Gunther Bachman’s alternately declining and rising tide of panic, the steps had begun to seem like the approach of his own execution.
He’d read somewhere about false executions. In Vietnam, was it? No, it was Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. They were a particularly Oriental variation of cruelty, as Professor Bachman had understood it.
But that was what this torture of the footsteps in this Siberian city had become, as night began to fall like the lowered hood of the executioner himself. He may not have been strung up with a rope around his neck, only to be allowed to fall half-alive to the ground, as they’d done to their victims in Cambodia. But what was following him in the driving rain through the ever more obscure maze of streets contained the same terrifying promise.
He turned around another corner, blindly now, and into one more anonymous street. There was the same fragmented concrete, the rain sloshing off it in rivulets on to the trash-strewn roadway.
Here he saw a row of nineteenth-century, one-storey wood houses abutting the street, some with faded paint just visible where once it had been bright – greens and blues and even pink. The houses were tilting into the ground, cock-eyed like drunks, where the Siberian earth had frozen and thawed repeatedly for more than a century and slowly sucked them into its bottomless maw.
Bachman walked on past the once pretty houses. But their strange, crooked angles seemed sinister to him now. Like something from a middle European fairy tale where the faded beauty of a woman turns out to be the harbinger of death.
And no matter how much he wanted to, he dared not look back.
The steps behind him were so close now he thought that he could hear panting. Or was it his own breath? It sounded like the panting of something inhuman that was tracking him and had been since he’d left the airport.
He patted the sides of his coat with both hands, as if he were looking for something in the pockets. His dark-blue, water-streaked raincoat from Karstadt in Munich’s Kaufinger Street swished in the downpour.
He quickened his pace. A choking noise came from his throat, and the thick, dangling craw of his turkey neck tightened against the collar of his shirt.
The brief fantasy of the civilised city of Munich – his city, his world – and the department store Karstadt where he’d bought the coat, momentarily gave him an illusion of calm; the memory of the smooth, silent elevators, the well-heeled customers, the bright lights, the friendly, caring faces of the store’s assistants, the shelves of reassuring consumer goods.
But all those comforting memories might as well have been a million miles away. He was here, not in Munich, not at home. He was walking the pitiless Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. He was in a city where life had little or no meaning. A dead dog lay upended by a car and left in the broken street. A frozen tramp with a beard like Rasputin’s slumped on a corner, looking more like a drenched and shaggy animal than a human being; sets of aggressive eyes shone in the gathering gloom – the desperate, moneyless and addicts who would cut your throat for a kopeck. Out here in the industrial wasteland of Krasnoyarsk, Munich might as well have not existed.
He thought back to his last and recent encounter with a friendly human being. It had been earlier that day, up beyond the Arctic Circle, in the city of Norilsk from where he’d taken the flight this afternoon. In his miserable prefabricated hotel room in Norilsk on this very morning, Vasily’s man was sitting across from him on the edge of the bed. It was Vasily’s man who had told him only hours earlier how to conceal the documents he was carrying. ‘Take a spare pair of shoes with you. That way you can stash your own shoes,’ he had added by way of explanation. ‘And so hide what’s in them. Then if they stop you, you’re clean.’
But he hadn’t remembered – or had thought it superfluous – to buy another pair of shoes before he’d got on the plane at Norilsk, or when he’d stepped off the plane here in Krasnoyarsk from that hellish, slave-built city up beyond the Arctic Circle. And so he couldn’t stash what he was carrying in his shoes by removing them and hiding them in some anonymous locker – at the rail station, perhaps. That was what Vasily’s man had suggested, he now remembered, the rail station.
He shuddered. He knew he was out of his depth.
The self-pity soon returned, washing over him once more, as if the acid rain of the industrial city contained it.
He wasn’t trained for this. He wasn’t trained for the management of fear, or in the art of subterfuge. He was a scientist, a professor, a respected nuclear expert on the international stage. He wasn’t a spy. How had he got himself into this? How had he agreed to be the courier? How had he come to be carrying something so valuable? Why had Vasily passed on to him the documents via his go-between, and not to some other foreigner who could have taken them to safety – and to glory?
But as soon as these thoughts surfaced he realised it had been exactly that – personal glory – which had led him to accept the documents. It was his own over-arching ambition that had prompted him to take the documents from Vasily’s man. From what he had seen of them at the hotel, before they’d been sewn into his shoes, the documents were apparently so important that they would make his whole career, right at the twilight period of it. A Nobel prize awaited him, perhaps. That was what the documents portended. Professor Gunther Bachman, Nobel laureate.
But in his denial of the risks back then, sunk in the grim, empty hotel in Norilsk where he’d been told by the go-between that Professor Vasily Kryuchkov would not be meeting him, he had suppressed the fact that the documents were also something that the Russians would kill for.
His international colleague Professor Kryuchkov’s so-called ‘inability’ to meet him had been explained to Bachman by
the go-between as the authorities’ prevention of their meeting. That should have been warning enough. It seemed that Vasily Kryuchkov was in any practical sense of the word a prisoner of his own people above the Arctic Circle. He was too valuable to be allowed out of the closed military area up there, let alone to meet anyone from the West. Bachman had been told as much, as he drained the last drink from the hotel mini-bar for courage and studied the documents. What Vasily Kryuchkov had discovered must never leave Russia. The warning came back to haunt him and it wasn’t his career he cared for any longer, Nobel laureate or not – it was his life.
Through the gloom of evening and the murk of the driving rain which the cold was now turning to sleet on this night at the start of June, he knew he was lost in this dreadful city.
He looked up and saw rail yards in the far distance, lit by high orange arc lights. Maybe he should head for the light? But the fear that had gripped him for nearly an hour as he’d tried to make it to the hotel when he couldn’t get a taxi at the airport had addled his thoughts.
‘When you reach Krasnoyarsk, get to the hotel immediately,’ Vasily’s man had told him, ‘the big, American hotel. Then call your embassy in Moscow’ – that was the second part of his instructions after the ones about the spare pair of shoes. To get his own embassy’s protection. But where was the hotel?
He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and felt his mobile phone. But who could he phone?
Then he saw a man step out ahead of him. There were two men now, ahead and behind him. He crossed the street, slipping on some mud in the gutter. He fell and felt a sharp pain in his hand. He sobbed with the humiliation of it. Scrambling to his feet, he looked at his right hand. Something sharp, broken glass perhaps, had sliced his flesh. His clothes were drenched and coated with slime and mud. His beautiful raincoat.
He wondered again if he were hearing things; if he had been hearing things all along. But slumped in the gutter, he saw behind him, from the corner of his eye, a man, his head shaven to the skull, and hands that were holding a chain. On the end of the chain was a brute of a dog.
Professor Bachman scrambled up, gripped his case, and hurried across the street, blood pulsing from his wounded hand. Then he thought he heard the man and dog step into the road’s gutter. And ahead he saw the second man who stared at him from under a broken street light. He realised he’d lost his phone. He must have dropped it when he’d fallen. He felt a sweat break out all over his body.
Before darkness had begun to fall he’d kept to the river where Vasily’s man had said it would be more open. There would be other people and cars – even police cars – which would provide some protection. And it was the riverside that led to the American hotel; lights, a cocktail bar, muzak, people with smiles on their faces, a phone line to the German embassy.
But he’d left the riverside to escape his pursuer. Maybe he should end it here, turn and face his own death. Better to look it in the face than be struck down in some fearful surprise attack.
He began to sob. Now, Bachman knew he would have turned himself in, confessed everything, betrayed his friend and erstwhile colleague Professor Vasily Kryuchkov, begged Russia for forgiveness, handed over the shoes with the incriminating evidence in them, gone to jail. If only he could have found a cop, or even one of the thugs from the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or a fully fledged KGB officer – anyone to whom he could divest the evidence of his guilt. Bachman would have given them anything, anything to escape; his own daughter, his wife.
He stopped and turned and caught the glint of the dog’s chain crossing under another flickering street lamp and the boot-shod feet of the shaven-headed man behind the beast. Bachman could hardly breathe. He shuddered, tripped and almost fell again. Then he felt an enormous explosion in his chest; he staggered on a few steps further, but fell to his knees, groping on the concrete.
He turned from his kneeling position, feeling the agony spread across his chest, and saw the eyes of evil at the level of his own. The dog was straining to get at him, its yellow teeth bared. Bachman thought he heard a man’s laugh.
He felt something else, something cold and metallic pressing into the back of his neck. But he never felt the second explosion after the one in his chest. It blew his atlas bone to pieces, severed his spine from his brain stem and ended all his hopes of greater glory, along with his life. Professor Bachman fell forward and his stricken face smashed into the gutter.
CHAPTER ONE
FOUR DAYS BEFORE Professor Gunther Bachman knelt, unprompted, for his execution, three men and a woman were approaching the steeply mountainous Russian border from the Mongolian side. Five hundred miles to the south of the city of Krasnoyarsk, the border presented its usual forbidding obstacle to anyone foolish or brave enough to attempt any crossing, let alone an illegal one. The woman, Anna Resnikov, was certainly brave enough.
Now, as May broke into June, the snow had gone from the waving sea of the lower grasslands of northern Mongolia but the night air was still icy and the soaring Tuva mountains, snow capped throughout the year, were a perfect natural fortress against incursion.
But Anna Resnikov’s was no ordinary illegal crossing. It was not a smuggling operation bringing cheap Chinese electrical goods into Russia, or a hunting party looking for rare wild animals whose body parts were destined for the Chinese medicinal markets, or even just the casual to-and-fro of Mongolians clandestinely visiting their ethnic relations across the border in Russia. This was a fully fledged act of espionage and for that an illegal crossing was of necessary importance. Anna Resnikov – formerly KGB Colonel Anna Resnikov until her defection to the West five years before – was on a mission into the heart of Siberia. It was an operation that was conceived, planned, financed, and concealed even from his CIA friends, by Burt Miller, the flamboyant multi-billionaire, one-time CIA agent, and now head of the world’s largest private intelligence company, Cougar Intelligence Applications. It was said of Burt Miller in some intelligence circles that he’d started out working for the CIA until it ended up working for him. Those in Washington who feared or hated him said that the CIA had become just an adjunct to his own mighty, private intelligence agency and military hardware supplier, Cougar. By this particular night, Anna had worked for Miller for over three years and their partnership, professional in her case, but also personal in his, was the talk of the Washington political and spy elite. Some said Anna simply reminded Miller of the huge, if reckless, success he’d enjoyed in his own youth, a youth spent as an American spy in Central Asia. Others said that Anna was more like a favourite daughter to him, even his heir. Others still, more cynical perhaps, sneered that her unparalleled skill and knowledge had become just another gold seam that Burt was so famous for exposing. But those closest to Miller pointed out that Anna Resnikov was simply the best covert agent Burt had ever met in more than fifty years of intelligence work; and that his admiration for her was as one of the few, if any, human beings, who had managed to put the great man himself in the shade.
They were still crossing the northern Mongolian grasslands but all the time they were coming closer to the mountains. The way ahead was clear of border patrols, at least on this, the Mongolian side. The recently fitted Mercedes engine in an ancient jifeng Chinese army truck was having no difficulty driving its way along the military road. The dirt track on which the truck was bumping along now was passing just to the east of Lake Uvs. Apart from pools of water with a thin layer of ice that lay sluggish in the road’s deep potholes and glinted silkily in the thin sliver of moonlight, the road was dry enough.
The track flowed up and over small hills and rose not far from the lake to the east. It would disappear altogether into darkness where a grassy bump rose in front of the truck. In the back of the truck were two special forces Americans hired by Cougar, while in the front cab sat Anna and Larry, her minder, general worrier and secret admirer for three years now. Larry was Burt Miller’s only trusted guardian of Anna. In his late thirties, the same age roughl
y as she was, he’d been a Navy Seal, then an intelligence officer in the field for the CIA, until Miller had plucked him out of government service to work for Cougar, as he had done with so many others. And they were always the best ones, as Miller’s admirers and critics both agreed on.
From inside the truck’s cab, the two occupants could make out the darker shapes of the ancient Mongolian burial mounds – the kurgans – that stood out against a purple-black sky which was perfectly printed with a linocut of stars. The grasslands around them could be felt rather than seen, the flowing grass like a living thing swaying for hundreds of miles in every direction. In the daylight they had indeed resembled the movement of waves on the sea. There was a light breeze and, despite the night’s chill, Anna had her window open three inches or so. Her head was turned towards it and up, as if sniffing the air for a trail to follow.
Larry turned the wheel to avoid a large rut and the quiet, brand new engine hauled the beast of the ancient truck up over another hill, then down again into a gully. The truck’s lights were switched off but the eyes of the man and the woman were accustomed by now after four hours of darkness and Larry saw reddish mud banks on either side. Ahead of them, the snow-capped peaks were becoming visibly sharper. The backdrop of the approaching Tuva mountains, where Mongolia gave way to Russia, and the Russian border itself, towered higher and higher from across the empty stage of grassland.
Larry looked across at Anna, over her alpine pack which was wedged between them on the middle seat of the truck. She had her knees drawn up on the seat, arms hugging them, and her long back stretched up in a gentle curve so that she was poised over her haunches – like a greyhound, he thought, waiting to seize the certain moment to spot its prey before leaping from the cab in pursuit.
