by Alex Dryden
‘And Kryuchkov’s discovery?’ Petrov asked.
‘… would have made the world a far, far better place for everyone except the few who go on growing richer,’ she answered him.
Petrov sat deep in thought. But he knew what he was going to do now. It had been building in him for two days.
He’d always known he was going to do it, he supposed, somewhere in the recesses of his heart. He knew the woman he’d been searching for and who now sat in front of him was somehow pre-ordained. They had been brought together for the purpose. And so finally he spoke.
‘I found something on the body of Professor Bachman,’ he began slowly. ‘It was overlooked by the killer, it was concealed too well.’ He put his hand into the inside of his jacket under the deerskin coat and withdrew the package he’d been carrying for ten days now. And he thought again of Gannyka, who’d told him that he possessed a secret that he didn’t know he possessed. He handed it to her.
Anna unwrapped the waterproofing and then found an old leather wallet, from inside which she extracted three pages of a small notebook. She stared at the first page, first with incomprehension, then amazement, and finally with a near shattering of all rational thought. What she saw was Professor Kryuchkov’s handwriting, studied and memorised by her at Burt’s Cougar Ranch in New Mexico. It was unmistakably his writing.
She quickly scanned the first page, then the second, and then the final one, and saw the jungle of equations, the two paragraphs of prose – everything that Petrov had seen but which had sent his mind into a dull waking sleep.
‘Where was it concealed?’ she asked him, not daring yet to approach the possibility that it was what she’d been sent to find.
‘In his shoe,’ Petrov replied. ‘I noticed the stitching was different on the left shoe to that on the right. More crude. Russian stitching. I cut the sole away and found it inside. Then I took it. I’d never done such a thing before in all my career in the militsiya. I don’t why I took it. But after I’d taken it, I handed the murder case over to the MVD as I had to do.’
‘So Bachman met Kryuchkov?’ Anna said.
‘I don’t know. Somehow I doubt it, though. But he met someone who knew Kryuchkov. That’s my best guess. Someone who had access to him.’ Petrov got up and sat next to Anna. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s been written extremely hastily, perhaps in a dark room, I thought. Or perhaps he was being watched constantly. But somehow he got it out.’
Petrov looked at the papers in her hand. ‘But what does it mean?’ he asked.
Anna scanned the pages again. She couldn’t fully understand them, though she’d studied everything there was to know about muon catalysed fusion. But she knew the formula in front of her was what she’d been looking for – the commercial development of a new, safe and clean nuclear technology, sprung at last from its previous laboratory-only status. A holy grail that had been pursued for more than seventy years and finally been written off.
They both sat in silence, but another question was forming itself in Petrov’s mind, and one that had been there all along, since he’d found the woman lying on the road.
‘I believe I can trust you,’ he said, ‘but what about the people you work for? Whoever they are. The “We” you talk about. Might it not also be in their interest to suppress it, just as the Kremlin has tried to do?’
Anna didn’t reply immediately.
She thought of Burt Miller, the great, grandiose and bullish multi-billionaire who’d built Cougar from nothing into the world’s largest private intelligence agency; the man who had been a star CIA agent in his youth, who’d been stationed unofficially throughout Central Asia and in the south of Russia itself more than thirty years before. She thought of the nature of Burt Miller, the man she’d known well for nearly three years now, and had worked for tirelessly against her own country. Larger-than-life was not a big enough description of Miller. He was his own man, but a man of power too, like the siloviki in the Kremlin, a man who could subtly appoint the head of the CIA from within the ranks of Cougar, in a system of revolving doors between the private and the public intelligence communities that he’d exploited to his own massive advantage; a man who had the ear of the president of the United States and knew what was discussed in each daily briefing between the President and the CIA chief. Miller was one of the elite that ruled America behind the scenes; a man with a seat at the highly secretive Bilderberg Committee, with the Kissingers and the Rockefellers and the Perles. Miller was a businessman, and his business was intelligence. He walked the same corridors with the other men of power, including the men who controlled America’s and Europe’s and Asia’s energy needs. With the formula she held in her hand now given over to Miller, would Miller the businessman stick with his own? Would he quietly file it away – and in return take a stake in the companies that it would destroy – in return for more billions, and shares and stakes in the world’s biggest companies?
But Miller, most essentially – beyond business, beyond his authority among the world’s men of power, beyond anything – was a supreme individualist. A man for whom money itself meant little. At the core of Burt Miller was a lust for personal glory, for a place in posterity, in history itself, which more money and acclamation from politicians and the great couldn’t outweigh. While they would soon be forgotten, Miller would want his place in history to be remembered for ever – alongside that of Vasily Kryuchkov; the men who changed the world, saved the world, even. That was something, Anna was sure, that he wouldn’t be able to resist, no matter what the cataclysmic effect Kryuchkov’s formula had on his business peers. Anna smiled slightly. She was imagining Miller, at some huge and extravagant press conference – with all the drama and the melodrama that he loved – announcing to the world that he, Burt Miller, had come to save it. It would be his moment of greatest glory.
Yet, as she looked at the fine-boned face of Petrov sitting beside her and saw his quiet concern, she realised she could not explain this to him, let alone convince him.
She took a notebook of her own from the pocket of her jacket and gave him a pen.
‘Copy it out,’ she said. ‘Carefully. Check it three, four times, to make sure you’ve got it right. Then when it’s done, waterproof it well, seal it in a metal box and bury it somewhere in the Putorana.’
Petrov knew he would bury it in the cave with his grandfather.
‘That’s your insurance,’ she said. ‘But I believe you’ll read it soon in the world’s newspapers, hear it on every radio and see it on every television. I’ll find a way to contact you from the West. So you’ll know.’
The journey from the reindeer meadows to the small river took them half a day. Some of Petrov’s people carried her on a stretcher, even though she insisted she could walk now.
They’d built her a boat, more of a raft, something they used themselves to hide on when they went on expeditions to shoot duck and geese. It was strongly made of crossed branches, bound with rope, beneath. But the top was a medley of brush and smaller branches and grasses set and bound with grass at odd, natural angles. From above it looked just like the normal flotsam of the river’s vegetation.
‘From the air,’ Petrov told her, ‘from a helicopter, for example, it will look the same as one of the countless bundles of foliage that the snowmelt washes down these rivers at this time of year. You’ll be concealed underneath the top layer.’
Hidden beneath the tangle of brown and green, on the actual raft structure itself, a small rudder fashioned from a branch, protruded into the water. Lying concealed on her front, she could operate it with her feet, without ever being seen.
‘It’s about twenty miles along this river before you reach a tributary that goes off to the left,’ Petrov said. ‘Follow that for another hundred miles or so and you’ll reach a larger river that will take you to the gulf you’re looking for on the Kara Sea.’
He then gave her his militsiya pistol and ammunition.
‘I won’t be needing this any more,’ he said.
A look of concern crossed his face.
‘I should come with you, Anna. It would be safer.’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘You have something far more important here… if I don’t make it.’
Petrov nodded.
‘We have an Evenki saying,’ he said. ‘“The deer and the wolf do not follow the same path”.’ He paused. Then he smiled at her. ‘I think I’m the deer.’
Finally, he gave her bags of food and then a bag made of grass. She looked inside it and saw a sea of red, with circular metal discs sewn into it, and feathers she thought were an eagle’s sewn on to the coat’s sleeves.
‘It was my grandfather’s coat,’ he told her. ‘He was a great shaman. It will keep you safe.’
And this seemed to Petrov now a perfectly natural statement.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE RUSTED HULL of the freighter Rosa Mundi, out of Hamburg, picking up timber from the port of Dikson, followed the path cut through the ice floes of the Kara Strait by the Russian nuclear ice-breaker a quarter of a mile ahead.
Larry stood at the stern, the bridge of the vessel between him and the Russian ship. The ice-breaker was certainly necessary, but he knew that on board would also be officials whose job it was to make sure nobody got on or off the freighter. They were well inside Russian waters.
On the left of the freighter now was the island of Novaya Zemlya, that curved like a dented and damaged gibbous moon towards the North Pole. Ahead was the Kara Sea and the Gulf of Yenisei. They’d reached the point.
He turned and shouted an order.
A boat was winched from the opened hold below. It was attached to the stern davits and Larry, with four other men, one a medic, the other three former special forces officers like himself, climbed up a ladder and into the boat. This was the crucial moment.
As the Rosa Mundi passed the first promontory of the long, curving island, the boat was lowered from the davits over the stern of the freighter, out of sight of the Russian ice-breaker. If the captain did his job right, and turned slightly south, presenting more of the freighter’s port side to the ice-breaker ahead of it, Larry and the others would be shielded from sight by the freighter until they could reach the cover of a rocky point on the south-westernmost part of the island.
The boat was fitted with a jet engine beneath the hull, and old twin outboards at the stern, for travelling near inhabited areas, or in case they encountered other Russian vessels, or spotter planes or search helicopters.
All five men onboard the aluminium boat, disguised as a small fishing vessel, were Russian speakers, all carried false papers that named them as five of the two thousand or so inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya, and the boat was fitted with nets, net-haulers for fishing, and the usual winches and grabbers a small fishing vessel of its kind would be equipped with. All five men were dressed in the regular gear of Arctic Russian fishermen. There was even a refrigerated hold that contained fish they’d supposedly caught. But in the false floor of the boat was an array of weapons and ammunition that could fight a small war.
It was the third attempt to pick her up and Larry had been on both of the previous ones. But Burt was determined that the northernmost pick-up point would be the one she came to. And Larry would keep returning until either he found her or he was blown out of the water by a Russian naval patrol boat.
They reached the rocky promontory of the island and saw that, every inch of the way from the freighter, they’d been shielded from the Russian vessel by the brief and tiny change of course the Rosa Mundi had made. And they now began to track their way north, as the other two bigger vessels turned south. They were making their way up the western coastline of Novaya Zemlya and towards the thin Matochkin Strait that cut the island in two. This was the slowest part of the journey, under the power of the twin outboards. But once they were through the Matochkin Strait, and to the east of Novaya Zemlya, out of sight of the island, they would enable the jet engines that would carry them through the relatively calm seas at seventy knots and weave them through the floes and growlers that were coming up from the Yenisei, or down from the Pole.
And as they made their passage half a mile off its western coast, Larry pondered the island for the third time; in 1961, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated – the Tsar Bomba – had been exploded here and caused an earthquake that reached nearly 7 on the Richter Scale. But over the years, from the 1950s onwards, nuclear weapons had been detonated on the island with a force equivalent to 265 megatons of TNT. By comparison, all the explosives used in World War Two, including the American atomic bombs, were equivalent to just two megatons of TNT. The island and its subterranean caverns had been bombed to pieces.
They reached the narrow Matochkin Strait without incident and turned to the right, making their steady way through the centre of the island until they reached its eastern shore that looked towards mainland Siberia. Then, for mile after mile, they kept their speed regular on the power of the outboards alone, the boat’s fishing nets ready to be off-loaded from side davits if they needed to look busy. But once they were out of sight of Novaya Zemlya and there were no other vessels as far as the horizon, and nothing in the air to see them, the jet engine came on. They would reach the rock and ice coastline they were looking for, to the east of the Gulf of Yenisei on Siberia’s northernmost coast, in less than four hours.
The monotony of the aluminium boat’s slamming against the light waves became a thing that was part of the men. But all the time, the horizon was scanned with high-powered binoculars in case of the presence of another vessel or plane. They encountered nothing, except the bergs and floes, some as tall as tower blocks, others that lurked dangerously close to the waterline. And finally, they saw where the coast of northern Siberia curved to the east, reaching out five thousand miles, eventually as far as Alaska. They were fifty miles north of the port of Dikson where the freighter and its escort were headed.
From here they hugged the coast, once more on the boat’s outboards even though the coastline was uninhabited. But it was too much of a risk to use the jets in sight of land. For another four hours, they dodged from bay to bay, curved from promontory to promontory, following the jagged flow of the coast and, in doing so, shielding themselves from whatever danger might lie ahead around the next corner. They were giving themselves time and the chance to see anything untoward before they were upon it.
Finally, Larry told the steersman to take the boat on to a small spit of ice-covered shingle. It was the bay before the pick-up point and he wanted to reconnoitre before exposing them to whatever lay beyond, stay behind the cover of more iced rock. He wanted to land, and look, crawl up the gentle ice and rock slope and carefully spy over the ridge at the top and survey the place where he hoped she’d be.
And, at that moment, one of the others, an eagle-eyed twenty year old with a marksman’s accuracy, saw something. He immediately waved his arm frantically downwards at the steersman, while still staring straight ahead, never taking his eyes away from what he’d seen.
The boat slowed to a near halt, the outboards quietening to a low rumble. The twenty year old gave Larry binoculars and Larry saw at once what he’d seen with his naked eye, through the glasses.
There was a chain, at an angle, coming up from the water. It was the chain of a boat at anchor, the boat to which it was attached out of sight beyond the rock wall ahead. If the wind hadn’t been blowing lightly from the north, the boat would not have been pushed inland towards the shore and they would have been seen by the people on it at the same time as they saw it.
The boat beached gently on the ice spit. Clouds were gathering in a grey mass above them and it looked like it would snow.
Larry took an automatic from the bottom of the boat. Then he began the slow walk across the spit and finally the crawl and the climb up the rock towards the ridge. He carried the SCAR-L MK16 assault weapon with a twenty-round magazine across his shoulder. After a tortuous climb over ice and rock he at last reached the peak of
the ridge.
The first thing he saw over the top of the ridge, keeping his head flat to the rock and ice, was a Russian naval patrol vessel at anchor. It swung gently on the anchor chain in the light sea swell. A Stenka class maritime border patrol boat, by the look of it. Nearly a hundred foot long and armed with short- and middle-range guns.
Then his eyes swivelled to the right, to the ice beach which was the pick-up point. There was a fire burning, he saw, two small boats beached, their anchors dug into the ice and stone. Around the fire were ten men, the crew, he assumed.
Larry tried to remember how many crew a Stenka normally carried and he cursed himself for not being certain. The men were cooking something over the fire, fish presumably. Vodka bottles lay on their side or were dug into the snow and ice. It was a party then. An impromptu landing. They were preparing for nothing but eating and drinking. They’d sneaked into the mouth of the small gulf for an hour or so, for as long as no one would notice their absence. Presumably, Larry realised, they would have a radio man, at least, still on board, just in case of sudden orders.
But what he then saw on the ice beach was the strangest sight he’d ever seen in his life. There was another figure there. It was walking slowly towards the group of men, its back to Larry, maybe two hundred yards from the men now. But they hadn’t seen it yet. The figure Larry stared at in utter bewilderment wore a long red coat.
Larry reached for the binoculars. Through the powerful lenses he now saw that hanging from the coat – the back of it that he could see, in any case – were a couple of dozen circular metal discs. They waved with the figure’s movement, from side to side, right to left with the figure’s loping walk. From the neck of the figure he saw a fur collar and from the sleeves there protruded large feathers like a bird’s wings. On the figure’s head, above the fur collar, was a hide and fur cap, pulled low against the cold. The figure walked with a slow, fatalistic and halting step towards the group of men.
