Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  Petrov stood and looked in awe that was swiftly followed by a deep trepidation. It was a scene from a war on foreign soil, but they were here, deep inside Russia, and entering the heartland of the Evenk people. Like the Wolf Dmitry felt when the ship began to ground, he somehow sensed that the arrival of so much manpower, backed by the most senior security services, must in some way be connected not to an imminent battle but to a single person. And he thought of the woman again and of who on earth she might be. But he had no idea why he thought of her or how all this could be connected to her. The idea seemed to him impossible.

  He turned away from the bank, as if to blot out the scene from his mind. Behind him, ten yards or so away on the deck, he saw that the other passengers were gathering for disembarkation at the ferry’s final stop. But they, too, were standing amazed, enthralled at the sight of the small army ashore. Then he saw the three Americans. They’d avoided him since the last conversation they’d had. They hadn’t appeared in the restaurant since the day before. But as he watched them closely, he saw they were exhibiting a different kind of nervousness than they had in his company. Theirs was a look bordering on extreme anxiety. And to Petrov it seemed that the Americans, too, felt some kind of personal significance in the events onshore. And again, it all seemed to be connected to the woman. But he didn’t know why he thought that. Why did the woman keep entering his mind, even when he was watching the Americans?

  The passengers waited on deck for nearly an hour before several more launches arrived at the same time at the ferry’s side. GRU troops climbed up the steps which the captain had dropped and they were followed by four GRU officers and some uniformed FSB men. It was unusual to see the GRU and FSB apparently working together, Petrov thought. They were the fiercest of rivals in matters of internal security.

  An FSB colonel ordered the passengers to form three lines, one for Russian citizens, another for citizens of the former Soviet republics, or ‘the near abroad’, as the Russians called them, and another line for foreigners. The Americans were the only ones in the foreigners’ line. And then Petrov saw yet another launch approaching and he saw that it contained the FSB colonel he’d seen. It was coming to a halt at the foot of the steps. The colonel stepped out of the launch and walked stiffly up the steps on to the deck.

  Petrov saw it was the Americans who were dealt with first. There was an intense scrutiny of their papers, questions on the deck first, and then they were taken below with the FSB colonel and two troopers. Then some of the passengers from the ‘near abroad’ were singled out for interrogation, first on deck like the Americans, then taken individually below decks. When it was the turn of his line, Petrov had his papers ready, the ones which showed he was a militsiya lieutenant, as well as the permit from his boss Sadko to travel to his family village and beyond. He was the only police or security individual in the line and he was at once taken below by two FSB men.

  They sat him in a chair in the ferry’s radio room. The FSB colonel sat on the far side of a table opposite him, another more junior officer beside him, with two troopers standing behind Petrov, in case, he assumed, he made a break for the door. One of the officers had both sets of his papers on the table, his militsiya identification and his special permit for travel.

  ‘Lieutenant Petrov,’ the colonel said.

  ‘Yes,’ Petrov replied.

  ‘I’m Colonel Fradkov of the FSB.’

  Petrov nodded his head in acknowledgement.

  ‘As you see,’ Fradkov said, ‘we have a serious situation. You might be of help. Where are you travelling?’

  ‘Into the mountains east of Norilsk,’ Petrov replied. ‘Around the Putorana, where my family take the reindeer in summer.’

  ‘You’ll be going there straightway?’

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  ‘You’re from Krasnoyarsk,’ the colonel then stated, looking at Petrov’s papers. He was a man in his thirties, like Petrov, with dark, close-knit eyebrows and a thin nose. His skin was very clear, no signs of a dissolute life, and he looked fit, with eyes the colour of agate.

  ‘I’m in charge of the quarter around the docks in Krasnoyarsk, yes,’ Petrov replied.

  The officer then looked at his permit.

  ‘Why are you travelling north?’ His voice wasn’t pleasant exactly, but it lacked the usual aggression Russian citizens expected. ‘Just to visit your family?’

  ‘My grandfather is ill. They say he’s dying.’

  ‘A tribal man?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Petrov replied, though it was clear from his own features that he wasn’t a Slav.

  ‘Call his commanding officer, this Sadko,’ the officer said to his second in command. ‘Tell him to text a photograph of Petrov.’

  The officer left the room and returned a few minutes later. Meanwhile Petrov and the colonel sat in silence. When the second officer returned, he just nodded.

  ‘He’s getting about it right away,’ the second officer said.

  ‘And the permit is genuine?’

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  ‘Good.’ He looked up at Petrov. ‘There was a body of a dead foreigner found in your quarter three nights ago,’ Fradkov said.

  ‘Yes. A German. I was the first to examine it – at least the first person from the security forces,’ Petrov said. ‘As it was a foreigner, I handed the case immediately to the MVD in Krasnoyarsk.’

  The officer looked questioningly at him.

  ‘A major called Robolev,’ Petrov said.

  ‘Good,’ the colonel said again.

  This time the second officer didn’t need to be told. He left the room and returned moments later with a nod to his superior. ‘It’s confirmed,’ he said.

  ‘So your papers check out, Lieutenant Petrov,’ the colonel said. ‘And your story. How are you planning to travel north?’

  ‘I’ll wait for one of the small privately owned boats that can make their way through the ice floes. There are plenty every day at this time of year. For a fee,’ he added.

  The colonel seemed to be considering whether to add anything further. Then he leaned his elbows on the table and looked into Petrov’s eyes, his own agate-coloured ones hard and expressionless.

  ‘You may be wondering why there’s so much military presence here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Petrov answered. ‘I was.’

  ‘There is a highly dangerous terrorist also apparently heading north,’ he said. ‘The eyes and ears of you and your people may be useful.’

  ‘How can I help, colonel?’ Petrov asked.

  ‘How can you help?’ The officer seemed to be thinking, but he didn’t take his eyes away from Petrov’s for a second, and Petrov saw he was only pretending to be considering his question. ‘The terrorist is a woman,’ the colonel replied and his eyes hardened on Petrov’s, but Petrov didn’t blink or look away. He managed to form a simple expression of curiosity.

  ‘All this,’ he said, ‘for a woman?’ and he indicated with his eyes upwards to the top deck and away to the shore where the army camp was forming.

  ‘She’s no ordinary woman and she may not be working alone,’ the colonel said. ‘But if she is, this is a big place for an individual to lose herself in. That’s why you – as a Russian militsiya officer – as well as your people can add your special knowledge to the search. Out in the terrain of the Putorana you may be most useful. We will hunt her until we find her.’

  ‘A terrorist?’ Petrov said.

  The colonel seemed to consider again whether to add further to the description. ‘A highly dangerous terrorist,’ he insisted finally. ‘We believe she – or they – plan to blow up a nuclear reactor outside Dikson. The papers she’s travelling under say her name is Valentina Asayev.’ He looked back at Petrov’s incredulous but steady gaze. ‘If she succeeds, your people will be wiped off the face of the earth,’ he said.

  Petrov’s detective mind tried to unravel what he was hearing.

  ‘You mean the new reactor? The one they’re planning to drag
to the Pole?’

  ‘You know about that,’ the colonel stated.

  Petrov shrugged. ‘Everyone talks about it, that’s all.’

  The colonel retrieved a mobile phone from his pocket and played with it until he found what he was looking for.

  ‘This is what she looks like,’ he said, and for the first time Petrov saw a picture of the woman who called herself Valentina Asayev.

  Then the colonel stood.

  ‘You’re to report into me personally. Every day.’

  ‘That might be difficult,’ Petrov said. ‘Communications are non-existent up there outside the towns.’

  Colonel Fradkov nodded to his junior, who left the room again and returned with a satellite phone.

  ‘You’ll take this and report to me at this number…’ he took a card from his breast pocket, ‘… every day,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll be expecting it.’

  Then the colonel placed his elbows on the table.

  ‘We also believe the dead German’s suitcase has been found,’ he said. ‘It was an expandable leather briefcase. But there’s a German maker’s mark on it. It wasn’t with the body when you found it?’

  ‘No, colonel. I’d wondered about that. Where was it found?’ Petrov asked.

  ‘On a dump, not far from where the body was.’

  ‘Did it contain anything?’

  ‘Apart from the man’s underclothes and washing equipment and so on, nothing except a bald wig.’

  Petrov looked blank.

  ‘Do you know anywhere in Krasnoyarsk where you might buy such a thing?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘No,’ Petrov replied. ‘I doubt such a place exists.’

  The colonel looked at him and then went back to his paperwork.

  ‘Every day, understand?’ he said, without looking at Petrov.

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  Petrov paused. ‘What will you do with the Americans?’ he asked, though he didn’t know why he should involve himself further.

  The colonel looked up from the papers on the table sharply. ‘You’ve met the Americans?’

  ‘Yes,’ Petrov replied. ‘I spoke to them several times.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They seemed odd, not the usual tourists you expect on the ferry. They barely looked out at all from the upper deck. They stayed below. It wasn’t… it wasn’t quite natural in my opinion.’

  The colonel regarded him for a moment. ‘Good. You’re observant, Petrov. Just as your boss said you were.’

  Petrov was surprised to hear this commendation from Sadko.

  ‘We’ll take the Americans to Krasnoyarsk, in answer to your question,’ the colonel said, looking back at his paperwork. ‘For the time being we’ll pretend they’re spies.’ He looked up. ‘Just to frighten them, you understand.’ He looked keenly at Petrov again. ‘Just so you know, Lieutenant Petrov, if you catch this woman, you will no longer be Lieutenant Petrov, but General Petrov. Understand? You’ll have an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the country. You’ll be given a pension that will enable you to live in New York, if that’s what you want. The State will be eternally grateful, in other words. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes,’ Petrov replied, but his mind was reeling.

  ‘Remember it,’ the colonel said. Then he returned to his papers again.

  The second in command now stood and issued an order to the two troopers who stood behind Petrov.

  ‘Take him ashore and make sure he sees the Communications unit and knows how to use the phone,’ he said.

  As Petrov stood on the deck waiting for the launch to arrive and take him into shore, he saw the three Americans again. They’d been brought back up on deck. He saw the woman, Eileen, look directly at him and then he noticed in her eyes that there was something urgent.

  There were a lot of people milling around on the deck and Petrov was able to move closer to her without attracting undue attention. Then he saw her drop something – a small piece of folded paper – on to the deck and she turned away immediately.

  Petrov sidled towards where she’d been standing. He watched as the three Americans were handcuffed and taken down the steps to a waiting launch. The security services were exercising their usual hard tactics, he observed.

  He watched as they were whisked across the narrow water to a smaller jetty away from the main harbour and then taken to a helicopter which immediately rose into the air and headed south. To Krasnoyarsk, he assumed.

  Petrov kneeled and picked up the paper Eileen had dropped and put it into his trouser pocket. And as he did so, he thought about his recent conversation with the colonel. If the woman – whoever she might be – was planning to blow up the reactor in Dikson, why did these security forces who now carpeted the town need the support of his people in the Putorana? The two were hundreds of miles apart. No one going to Dikson would go closer than a hundred miles to the Putorana. The only thing in the Putorana apart from the wilderness of his people were the ICBM silos and the nuclear research facility. Bachman’s visit to Norilsk was as close to the Putorana as you could get.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IT WAS DARK by the time Anna decided to pull off the forest track. The track was now an indistinct, snow-covered way that she had occasionally lost in the light of a half-moon that filtered thinly through forest branches. Twice she’d had to retrace her route to find the track again. No one had been this way since the snow had last fallen and there were no tyre marks to follow ahead. And along with the increasingly difficult progress she was making, she sensed that, even more than twenty miles north of the town, she was still being followed.

  She cut the engine and listened for sounds from where she’d come. There was nothing at first, except the sound of an owl and an answering call from further into the forest. But then she thought she heard a low, constant sound, dense and distant. It would fit the sound of a rasping jeep’s engine. She checked the petrol gauge and saw it was nearly on empty. She would have to dump the jeep now anyway and find her next route northwards.

  She started the engine and began a slow crawl through the trees to the left of the track that eventually brought her to the river. The trees finally cleared, giving way to snow-covered rock and she came out high up on a cliff face, seventy feet at a guess from the river. Here the moon was free of obstruction and she caught the occasional glint of water and the lighter shades of the remaining ice floes. Some of the floes were travelling north in the current, others were caught on the bank. She looked over the cliff and saw a way she could scramble down to the river. Then she removed the chainsaw from the passenger seat.

  She started the engine once more, put the jeep in gear, and jumped clear as it hovered, then scraped and tore at the cliff’s overhang, before tumbling to a shingle beach below.

  She followed the way back she had taken in the jeep on foot as far as the track. First she stacked branches against where she had turned into the trees and then scattered more along the track ahead of where she’d turned off. It was the only way to obscure, temporarily at least, that the jeep’s journey had ended here. She piled heaps of branches for ten or twenty yards or so ahead of her turn-off. It was a delay, but not much of one. Then she listened again. This time she heard the unmistakable sound of a grinding, tortured gear change and she knew the Wolf wasn’t going to give her up.

  She found a suitable branch for her purposes, away from the track and back towards the cliff edge, and she cut and trimmed it as she wished. Then she dragged it towards the descent to the river she’d spotted from the cliff. With the trimmed branch in one hand and the chainsaw in the other, it took her nearly ten minutes to reach the shingle bank below.

  Here in the patchy light of the silver moon she stopped and listened again. Nothing. There was no sound this time, just the cool flow of the river. She thought that either it was because sound didn’t reach over the cliff from the track or because her pursuer had already reached the blocked track and was checking the way ahead. He would soon find there were no wheel tracks co
ntinuing northwards beyond the piled branches.

  She walked down the rounded shingle bank to where the river curved away a little and saw several floes stacked against each other up against a broken tree. Then she waded out to the floe that was deeper into the river and which still floated. It was caught, pressing itself against the other grounded ones. She yanked the cord of the chainsaw twice before it started. Then she began to cut a hole the size of a human being deep into the centre of the fifteen-foot monster.

  Dmitry the Wolf halted at the obstacle of branches and carefully climbed out of the jeep. He noted that he couldn’t pursue her much further. It had taken hours to travel the distance to where he was and fuel was low. But maybe she too would be shortly running out of fuel. The branches ahead suggested that the track turned to the right, away from the river, but in the faint light all he could see were the dark silver trunks of trees that way. He walked into the forest slowly, the rifle in an attack position like a hunter. By the time he’d gone twenty yards, stopping every yard or so to listen, he knew that the branches on the track were a deliberate feint.

  He came back to the track again and walked along the edge of the forest until the way ahead was clear of branches and he saw that the track continued, but that the wheel marks in the snow that he’d been following did not.

  He carefully skirted back to where he’d left the jeep. She might be waiting for him, waiting to get a shot. They were two animals circling each other in the dark and he realised now that she had only a pistol of some kind – the shot he’d heard in the sawmill – while he had a rifle. But shooting at distance in the semi-darkness of the forest was going to be of no advantage to him. They would have to be up close just to see each other. He crouched beside the jeep and contemplated his next move. Then he saw the piles of branches to the left of the track and, walking beyond them, leading towards the river, he saw there were the marks of wheels.