Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  It took him slightly less than a day and a night to reach the meadow where he knew he’d find them. It was just as he’d thought. Before he saw the tribes’ chooms – hide tipis – ahead of him on a slight rise of meadow that led up to the plateau, he heard the barking of dogs and came across the reindeer herd feeding. There were young calves with their mothers, and the young men of the tribe were picketed at outposts long before he reached the meadow. They were there to guard against a wolf or bear attack.

  And up ahead, rising from the tundra, were the extraordinary twists and turns of canyons and tumbling rivers, falling from two thousand feet. A magic place that almost nobody knew of.

  On the journey, he hadn’t slept, just walked and stopped occasionally to fish for the easily caught Siberian char, which he ate raw. It was as if he were slowly, steadily becoming a different person from the militsiya lieutenant with an apartment in the city and a car and regular hours for sleeping and eating.

  Twice he’d stopped to call the FSB colonel from the satellite phone and now, before his arrival prompted a celebration and he was caught up with his mother and the rest of his family, he stopped again and called. The colonel answered immediately.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Petrov told him and then listened to a long, almost contemplative silence.

  ‘She’s been near Dudinka,’ the colonel said finally. ‘She shot two men – soldiers – at a dacha outside the city in the forest. Then she stole their jeep.’

  Petrov was silent.

  ‘We assume she’s going to the research facilities in Putorana now,’ the colonel said. ‘Not to the north where the reactor is. She’s in the sector where you are.’

  The sector? Petrov thought. It was hard to imagine how this empty land could be anyone’s sector.

  ‘To Putorana?’ Petrov said, but he’d known somehow that this was where she was going.

  ‘Your people are there?’ the colonel said without answering his question.

  ‘It’s where they take the reindeer herds in summer,’ Petrov answered. ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Never mind their fucking reindeer!’ the colonel snapped. And now Petrov felt a dislike for him he hadn’t felt up to now. ‘I want all their eyes and ears looking and listening. She’ll be out there. Somewhere. On foot. If she makes it past the checkpoints.’

  Petrov was about to protest that the herds were his people’s livelihood, but he didn’t. There was no point.

  ‘Yes, colonel,’ he replied.

  And then he stayed where he was, the dead satellite phone in his hand, and began to think. The incongruity of the phone out here in the wilderness, the contrast of his own existence in the wide emptiness with his existence in the city, and finally the woman. The woman. Why were they so afraid of her? An SVR colonel, the dying man in the jeep had said. A traitor. But a traitor to what? How could this woman possibly justify the scale of their operations? For some reason he couldn’t understand, he began to feel an affinity for the woman that transcended everything he’d been told. Somehow, whatever she was doing seemed to be right.

  Before he entered the camp, he felt through the padded jacket for the crunching of plastic, the waterproof package which contained the strange, incomprehensible documents that he’d found on Professor Bachman’s body. Reassured, he walked on and saw his mother emerge from the choom nearest to him. She embraced him, as if he’d been expected all along, and they went into the reindeer-hide tipi.

  There was a wood stove in the centre, and a pot boiling reindeer meat. Some berries were piled in a pyramid on a low table and round the edges of the choom were the reindeer-hide bedrolls of ten or more people. His mother, he noticed, was wearing a dress of reindeer hide. He picked up a handful of berries – he was hungry. Then he began to remember the words in his own, Evenki, language that he had told the Americans but had allowed to fall into disuse in his long years in the city. ‘The noise a bear makes walking through cranberry bushes.’ ‘The noise a duck makes landing silently on water.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ANNA PULLED THE jeep off the road and stopped. She was now just under half a mile from the checkpoint. Other vehicles continued past her towards the roadblock ahead and she waited, looking in the mirror until the road was empty of traffic.

  She could see the checkpoint with her naked eye, but there were binoculars hanging from a hook on the passenger side of the jeep and now she took them and trained them on it. First she carefully watched the troops milling around the area. She saw their attention was exclusively focused on the line of vehicles and their drivers waiting to go through. There were jittery conscripts mixed with regulars and special forces.

  Beyond them she saw glimpses of a metal barrier that was lowered across the road and which rose occasionally to allow a vehicle through. And beyond the barrier, a large spiked chain had been dragged across the tarmac in case anyone broke through the barrier. That too was hauled back each time a vehicle went through the barrier. It was the second line of defence.

  There was a line of trucks and cars and jeeps waiting to get through in the direction of Norilsk. The drivers’ papers were being meticulously noted, the vehicles searched exhaustively inside and out. Even the undersides of the trucks were being examined with mirrors. She saw that it took twelve soldiers an average of twenty minutes for a vehicle to be thoroughly checked and to pass through the two barriers. The area on and around the road was crowded with thirty or forty well-armed soldiers, with a small group of special forces troops who kept their automatic rifles trained on each driver.

  She lowered the binoculars and considered the options, and found none that had a chance of succeeding. Then she raised them again and trained them on to the guard house next to the road. It was a hastily constructed edifice put together in pre-built sections, in military fashion, and there were more soldiers she could see through a transparent plastic window. They seemed to be keeping a more distant look-out than the soldiers on the road, eyeing the whole queue of vehicles for any unusual movement. The roof of the guardhouse bristled with temporary communications equipment and there was a machine-gun emplacement next to it, surrounded by sandbags. Next to and behind the guardhouse she saw several trailers drawn up in a haphazard formation; for accommodation, perhaps, and no doubt here’d be a kitchen and a bathhouse of sorts. Between the guardhouse and the trailers, around the perimeter of the guardhouse, numerous army vehicles were parked facing in a semicircle towards the road and there was a troop carrier on the far, Norilsk, side which had a mounted machine gun on the turret.

  The whole area was a teeming melee of military personnel and equipment that would ensure no one without papers could get through and no one could break through without being instantly eliminated.

  She swivelled the binoculars again, to the right of the guardhouse.

  About thirty yards behind it on some flat ground there was the helicopter. A Kamov Ka-60 Kasatka, by the look of it. It was a relatively new design, built to replace an older model that had been in service since the Afghan war. It was a machine built for adaptability. It could be used simply as a means of transportation, or for reconnaissance work and was sometimes even employed in an attacking role. Two crew and up to sixteen men, she recalled. She trained the binoculars around the fuselage and found the two crewmen, a pilot and a navigator or gunner. They were standing beside the fuselage and smoking cigarettes.

  Anna put the binoculars down on the seat next to her and sat in the cab of the jeep, the engine still running after nearly fifteen minutes. It was still thirty miles to Norilsk and then, beyond the city, another fifty or more to the beginning of the Putorana plateau.

  She finally withdrew the Thompson Contender from her coat and armed it. Then she screwed on the silencer. She made sure the two guns she’d taken from the dead conscripts were armed also. All three guns she placed beside the binoculars on the seat beside her. Then she revved the jeep’s engine and pulled out, back on to the road in the direction of the checkpoint. If they di
dn’t yet know about the dead conscripts and the theft of the jeep, it would give her an extra few seconds. And she knew she could rely on the obsessive secrecy of the people in charge of the operation. The intelligence people were naturally miserly with information, even pointless information, and that was their weakness. And so she trusted that only the special forces troops doing the checking at the roadblock, looking at the drivers, examining the vehicles, would know they were looking for a woman.

  As she pulled on to the road, she checked the cloud cover. It was thick and grey and very low now, discharging the sheets of acid rain over the wet landscape.

  She drove at regulation speed and it was, perhaps, the longest half a mile she could remember. But her thoughts were focused, accurate, and she resisted the temptation to put on speed, to get what was about to happen over with. In fact, her mind was as close to being empty as it was possible to be. There was just action; a gear change, a foot pressing gently on the accelerator, her hands, now without gloves, guiding the loose steering wheel, her eyes watching the approaching roadblock for any movement outside the normality of a heavily armed checkpoint that she’d observed through the binoculars.

  There was the line of vehicles getting nearer, just ahead of her now, exhaust fumes twisting upwards. The rain lashed on to the tarmac. And then she saw where the military vehicles that were stationed at the checkpoint had pulled off the road two hundred yards before the guardhouse. They had created a rutted track in the snow and melting earth. The track was off to the right of the road, on the side where the guardhouse and the small encampment were, and by turning off on it – just one more military jeep – she could also turn away from joining the line of vehicles trying to make it through to Norilsk.

  She was two hundred yards from the guardhouse when she gently swung the wheel of the army jeep to the right and followed the tracks, very slowly now, no fast movement to alert anyone watching. She saw a few faces turn, recognise the military nature of the jeep, and one or two stayed watching it. But she went on, down a small earth embankment at the side of the road, swinging the wheel gently again to the right, until she’d left the guardhouse well ahead and to the left of her. With every few yards, she was coming closer to the area of ground that had been churned up by other vehicles, and the small military camp behind the road. Here she posed no immediate threat to the activities around the barrier and the guardhouse where all the attention was focused.

  She approached the trailers scattered across the area a hundred yards or so to the rear of the guardhouse, pointing the jeep away from the direction of Norilsk, away from suspicion. Unless they knew about the dead men and the jeep. But still she wasn’t challenged, the jeep bumping casually over the churned-up ground. Unhurried. All the troops who knew what they were doing there, and why, were up by the barrier, or around the guardhouse, or manning the machine gun on the top of the troop carrier. That was what she hoped.

  She finally swung the jeep over beside the second of the trailers and cut the engine. No shout, no command, no order to identify herself. She put the three guns into her jacket, keeping them below the jeep’s window as she did so. One or two men watched from a hundred yards or more away by the guardhouse and the road, but she was on the far side of the jeep from them as she stepped out on to the ground and walked with slow deliberation in a direction still further away from the guardhouse, until she was behind the second trailer. She was more than a hundred yards from the barrier and the guardhouse now, concealed behind the trailer, and her vehicle was halted and quiet. She was in military uniform, and evidently not someone trying to challenge the barrier or the troops.

  Behind the second trailer, there was another, third, trailer, perpendicular to it. It smelled of urine and there was a pit hastily dug beneath it. She ducked around behind this trailer, putting the three trailers now between her and the mass of troops up ahead and behind her on the road. Ahead of her as she walked away was the helicopter, thirty yards from where she was now, its two crewmen smoking, chatting. She put her hand in her pocket and withdrew an order paper she’d found on the lead conscript at the dacha. This she waved ahead of her, not too high, but just enough to attract the attention of the pilot, as she now saw the man on the right to be.

  He stood up from his leaning position against the side of the helicopter, a cigarette still in his hand, but which he swiftly stubbed out on the earth. There was a quizzical expression on his face. She was within twenty yards from the two of them now, when her other hand without the order paper dipped into the inside of the jacket and withdrew the Contender, its eighteen-inch barrel augmented by the five-inch silencer. It was an unmistakable intent. There was no going back. She was committed.

  But as the two crewmen first stared in amazement, then looked outraged and finally began to scramble for weapons of their own – all this taking place in a second or two – she fired twice, two dull thuds of a silenced weapon, bullets into flesh. They both dropped.

  She continued her measured stride without a pause.

  As she climbed over the bodies and into the fuselage of the helicopter, she heard the first shout, but altered nothing in the swift, smooth flow of her movements. Over the first seat, into the pilot cockpit, as she pressed the Start button, turning only briefly to the left to shoot dead, through the open door, a lone running man in uniform. Her brain now wired into the next action, and the next and the next, almost wired into the helicopter itself, as the rotors began their slow turn. It took ten to fifteen seconds to get the engines going fully, with no time to allow them to warm up, the centrifugal clutch engaging the rotors at the tail and above. She heard nothing now beyond the roar of the engines as she pushed down the feed and gave it the full blast of aviation fuel, and now the blades were whirring level and then at a steeper angle for a sudden, violent take-off, when the first shot was fired in her direction, but she didn’t duck or alter anything as the machine rose first from its nose then fell down to the ground again – too quick – then rose from its nose again and this time stayed up as the tail, too, rose from the ground, and she seemed to hover before the helicopter began its roaring motion upwards at ten metres a second, in a hail of fire now. She dipped the joystick to the right to swoop the machine low and give the shooters less of a target, no longer broadside on now, and she was suddenly in the first wisps of a low-scudding cloud that flew past the machine and then began to envelop it. The rattle of bullets, the smashing of metal against metal.

  Her first fully conscious thought was the blindness of the clouds, the zero visibility, and she suddenly realised where she was, up above and to the south of the encampment. She was airborne. And she looked down inside the cockpit and saw a constellation of bullet holes that studded the fuselage like stars, the crew door smashing loose against the sides until, in a hideous moment before she tried to reach it, it broke away from its hinges and flew spinning backwards and away, missing the tail rotor by inches.

  She steadied the machine. Lost in a greyness. Nothing she could see at all. Then she headed south at first, flying at 170 miles per hour at just over 500 feet, still seeing nothing beyond the screen, until she estimated that she was about thirty miles south of the checkpoint and the road to Norilsk. Then she swung the helicopter to the left, to the east, so that she would pass well to the south of the city. There was still nothing in view, the grey wedges of thick cloud parting with the thrust of the machine’s nose and shrouding everything. Even the nose of the helicopter was barely visible. Then it would appear again, where the cloud ahead was exploded by the motion, and disappear.

  She would keep inside the cloud cover for as long as possible. The tundra was dead flat until beyond Norilsk, where it began to rise towards the Putorana. She would leave it until the last minute before she rose above the cloud bank for the approach into the plateau. There were no power lines in the way in this north–south direction; they all led from the city to the east, along the road to Dudinka. She had a map of the whole area in her head as if it were on a screen in front of h
er.

  It took another twenty minutes before she was sure she had passed Norilsk to the north and she kept her elevation and speed the same, counting seconds now, not minutes, checking the speed, the altimeter, her hand steady on the joystick, her ears filled only with the roaring of engines and the beat of rotors.

  She dared wait no longer and began to lever the machine up – 550, 600, 670 feet – but the cloud still shrouded everything. Further, up to 800 feet, and there was still nothing ahead but the grey shroud of invisibility. Still forcing her way through at 170 mph into the dead space where, somewhere up ahead, she knew there’d be an escarpment or a sheer cliff to meet her without warning, the final embrace of twisted metal, the end. She levered up again, saw a lighter grey in the cloud, the surface perhaps, and up again twenty, thirty feet until she saw a break, then more clouds and another break and she was free for the first time in forty minutes to see half a mile ahead the flat tabletops of the Putorana, glittering in sunshine, as if the cloud dared not proceed to the mountains.

  She was heading straight at a high top, way above her, 2500 feet perhaps, and she violently sheered the helicopter to the right, passing rock 100 feet to her left and up into a thin canyon where a tumbling sodium river shone brightly from below. Cascades of water, white and green, pouring itself on to the flat tundra below. She chased the canyon eastwards, rising up with it until she broke over a tabletop thirty feet below, the engines screaming with the effort, and a huge vista opened up of broad blue lakes, ringed with black rocks and bright green vegetation, of winding narrow gorges branching away from them like fjords, and crashing waterfalls everywhere that dug deep into the mountains.

  She had minutes, maybe less, to get down before her hunters appeared. They would come from the north of where she was, from the nuclear facilities and the ICBM site.

  She spotted a narrow defile that led from a huge blue lake that reflected the colour of the sky and she dropped a little way into it, looking for a flat spot to land. Out on a small ridge that jutted from the mountain was a small green parchment of grass, a meadow inaccessible to anything but the bighorn mountain sheep, perhaps, but she would have to risk it. She took the machine down, steadying its rocking as best she could, until she saw the walls of the mountain that sealed the tiny meadow were feet away from the rotors overhead. But then she felt the skids touch and bounce, and just then an enormous blow of the overhead rotors against rock shattered the rear of the machine as they snapped and fragmented, shooting backwards into the tail, and she jumped from the helicopter as it began to settle and a roar of flame exploded upwards from the tanks. She rolled and rolled until she found herself clinging to a rock ledge over the lip of the meadow as the burning fuel ballooned outwards and up and she felt a gigantic heat even though she was protected from the direct explosion.