by K. T. Tomb
“What was the plan here? What were you going to do, Yuri? I heard you say that Himiko was going to buy out Multimetal, so that means you had to keep the missing freighter off shore, and moving. But the ship had been here, right? To deliver the gold in the first place, right? So where is this ship now?”
Travis mimed going for Yuri’s leg again, and the man recoiled, begging clemency.
“Yes, that was the plan. We’d keep the Novonya out to sea, and moving away from wherever the coast guard were directing the search that day. It kept everyone busy, trying to find a ship that couldn’t be found. Then after the takeover went through, it would come back to port and be registered as a new boat, and sold. Goddamn, Sergei and Korusaki left me here to die. I don’t want to die, please, don’t kill me, I beg of you.”
Yuri put his hands together in a pleading prayer to Travis, his new god, with the power of life and death in his palm.
“How did you communicate with this ship, the Novonya?” Travis slapped Yuri’s hands down.
“There’s a satellite phone with a scrambler in my pocket. Take it. There’s a piece of paper, where I wrote down the schedule for the positions it will take anchor over the next few days. If I don’t call in, the ship will know something has gone wrong. It only takes three men to pilot the ship, you see. They are loyal to our idea. They will simply come home, with a story of catastrophic engine and communications damage that took the crew days to repair.”
Travis put his hand into Yuri’s pocket and took out the satellite phone and a small piece of neatly folded paper with navigational co-ordinates typed upon it. His skills at reading them were non-existent, but Thyri would be able to interpret them with little problem; much of her business with Scandinavian oil extraction involved knowledge of shipping routes and the plotting thereof. He pocketed both items as he saw Bianca and Andrei were approaching him with the gate guard in tow.
“We will take this man into custody. We have arranged for transport of your friend’s body to the hospital in Magadan. From there, you can arrange transport back to the United States.”
Bianca was impassive, as usual. Travis guessed that this was not the first death she had encountered.
“What about the ship? What about that?” Travis said.
Bianca shrugged.
“If the coast guard captain has any sense, he will not be coming back to Russia. As for his Japanese friend, there’s not much we can do about him as a foreign national, especially if he has left the country.”
Andrei roughly hauled Yuri to his feet as he said this, and Travis had a sneaking suspicion that he knew where Korusaki, Sergei and Monica Chen would run to. He had to get Thyri, and get back to Magadan as soon as possible. There was one person who could possibly help them, who would have the motivation to do so.
Chapter Nine
Thyri was too distraught, near catatonic, to consider leaving Fiona’s body alone in the hands of the FSB agents. It would take some time for the mess at the mine to be smoothed over. Even out here in the wilds of eastern Russia, shootings were not commonplace, and regardless of circumstances, the violent death of a foreign national was likely to cause the administration significant problems. Travis found himself in the passenger seat of the 4x4 Andrei had used to approach the mine from the west, driving through the early dawn to Magadan. Bianca and Andrei had not been overly concerned with providing him with transportation, but after he had explained his plan, they had agreed to split up and regroup in town, once Fiona’s body had been made ready to travel and Yuri had stopped bleeding. Thyri surprised him in not even attempting to change his mind on the course of action he was proposing.
Fortunately for Travis, Andrei seemed as uninterested in making small talk as he was, so he eventually dropped off to sleep and woke up when dawn broke as they arrived once again at the port in Magadan. Travis yawned, and took a moment to shake off the sleepy confusion that initially fogged his mind and made him forget where he was, what had happened, and what he was about to attempt. He thanked Andrei for the ride, and got out of the vehicle. Andrei merely nodded, and drove off again, no doubt to report to his handlers about the botched investigation.
Travis made straight for the corral of frosted press vehicles that had already gathered in the area of the dockside roped off for their use. The rope perimeter was totally redundant, as the vast majority of vehicles in Magadan were kept under wraps and under cover at this time of year, with only heavy goods trucks, off road vehicles and the modern automobiles used by the press able to effectively function in the sub-zero climate. A few hundred yards beyond the condensing breath and steaming coffees of the journalists, a pair of old MI-8 helicopters sat on roughly demarcated landing pads. Antiquated and out of date by any modern standard, both vehicles lay under heavy tarpaulins to stave off some of the worst effects of cold. The thirty or so journalists and crew were essentially indistinguishable from one another under their winter clothing, and Travis had never met the man that he had gone there to find. Nor could he remember which station he was with. Forcing his way to the center of the group, he decided to take a direct approach.
“Who here is the Greenpeace guy? I need to talk to him.”
A small woman reporter in her late forties, with strands of red hair plastered to her forehead under a large bearskin style hat, looked up from her conversation with a bearded cameraman.
“You’re looking for Steve, Steve Dearden. He does some work with CNN, but they won’t be here for a few hours yet. Never get here as early as the real reporters, you see.”
She tapped a lapel pin on her coat, with the Fox News logo. Travis resisted rolling his eyes in utter disdain.
“Where does the CNN team stay? Is Steve with them at their hotel?” Travis said.
“Oh yeah, it’s the one with the faded red roof, third street on the right, past the local mechanic. I’d tell you the name of the hotel, but it’s in Russian and there’s no sign anyway.”
The woman’s voice was dismissive, as if the quality of hotel rooms booked by their respective stations conferred additional status and worthiness on the party with the best room. Travis liked Magadan well enough, for all its bleak frontier town feel, but he couldn’t see Hilton or even Holiday Inn scrambling to get a piece of the tourist trade here any time soon. The idea that the Fox News reporter was attempting to show off about the quality of living standards she was enjoying was ridiculous to the point of satire. Travis, on another day, at another time, without the important piece of paper in his pocket with a strict time frame set out upon it, would have enjoyed taking her down a peg or two, but instead he simply thanked her and walked away.
The hotel was as the reporter had said, barely recognizable as a guest house. It was still a much finer building than most of the practical, but unremarkable buildings on its street, but the red painted roof was severely weather worn and fractured in places. There was no one at the reception desk, so Travis decided to investigate the rooms himself. Of the rooms, there were only six. Of the first two rooms, one turned up no response at all and the other, a Mongolian family who regarded Travis with some suspicion but spoke no English at all. The third door was answered eventually by a man in his early thirties, scraggy bearded and looking as tired as Travis felt. Perhaps it might have been wiser to find this Steve Dearden later, after he had caught up on his sleep.
“Are you Steve?” Travis said.
“Yes, that’s right. Who are you?” Dearden replied as he rubbed crusty sleep from the corner of his eyes.
Travis pushed his way into the room and shut the door behind them, physically moving Dearden backwards with a palm of the hand pushing his chest until he was forced to sit down on the hotel bed. Dearden began to protest, but Travis shut him down.
“Last night you flew a British woman by helicopter to the site of a new mine, apparently to sabotage it. You dropped her off and left her there in the middle of winter, and flew back here and went to bed.”
He adopted Bianca’s forthright style of asserting
facts, instead of asking questions. He was unsurprised that it worked as well on Dearden as it had on himself only a day before.
“Yeah,” Dearden said, a little shamefaced. “Is she ok? Are you a cop or something? She told me to fly back, I dropped her a mile outside the mine, but we had reports of a snowstorm headed our way; if I’d have stayed, we’d have never gotten the chopper off the ground again. Well, that’s what I thought, the snow never came. Fiona said she’d hitch a ride or steal a car or something. She’s pretty hard core, you know?”
Dearden’s accent was Scottish, possibly Glaswegian to Travis’ ear.
“Well, let’s look at your questions. No, I’m not a cop. Fiona was indeed hard core, and I do mean in the past tense. She’s now dead. She came here as part of my team, and now she’s dead. I figure that you at least owe me something for that.”
Travis kept his voice at near monotone. He didn’t want to inject any more emotion into the situation than was necessary; he still needed Dearden, and he needed him in full command of his abilities and senses for what was to come next.
“She’s dead? Oh my God.” Dearden’s eyes were fully alert now. “What on earth happened? She was just going in to have a good look about, y’know?”
Travis laughed bitterly.
“You didn’t know Fiona. She always leapt before she looked, especially if she could cause a lot of righteous damage to the enemies of mother earth in the process. She got herself in over her head this time, and it cost her her life. Why I’m here is to talk to you and your journalist friends. I have something that you can do with the information that Fiona found, provided Fiona’s name is kept out of the news. I take it you’re flying one of those old crates down by the docks?”
“Yeah, the one with the red tail,” Dearden said, glumly.
“Good. Get your friends in here. We need a talk.”
Dearden crossed the hall and returned with a husband and wife team, cameraman and reporter, respectively. After introducing himself, Travis told them the story so far, from Fiona’s breakout and the interested party in Britain with a stake in Multimetal, to the story of Monica Chen and the amethysts. He told them how Chen had conspired with the coast guard captain and a low level Multimetal employee to hide a shipment of gold to collapse the company’s share price and facilitate a hostile takeover by the Himiko Corporation of Japan. He told how the coast guard captain had murdered Fiona on the orders of the executive from Himiko and then escaped with that same executive and Chen. He decided it might be best if he left out the involvement of Bianca and the FSB, at least until he and Thyri were safely out of Russia.
The journalist, a Jean Pavlowski, once of Michigan and now CNN’s go-to woman for correspondence from Russia, seemed both interested and abhorred by the events that had happened the previous night. Travis suspected that it was in good part that she had missed the events herself and therefore had not managed to scoop her competitors, but then, he wasn’t in the most generous mood when it came to other people’s motivations. He had been fed nothing but deception and lies from all angles since his arrival.
“This is very interesting Mr. Monahan, but we’re missing anything that will actually prove this version of events. If it is true, Multimetal will surely deny it. And I wouldn’t bank on too much help from the local authorities, either.”
Pavlowski was absent-mindedly twiddling her graying hair as she spoke.
“Oh, I totally agree with you,” Travis said, “which is why I came to see Mr. Dearden here in the first place. I know where the missing container ship will be in about six hours. It’s the closest it will be to Magadan, but we’ll need a Russian speaker to make a call to make sure.”
He withdrew the co-ordinates and satellite phone he had taken from Yuri at the mine from his coat pocket.
“I speak fluent Russian,” said Pavlowski. “What do you need me to say?”
Travis told her, and wrote it down for good measure, then had her repeat it back to him in English to make sure the journalist understood. Once he was satisfied, Travis pressed the re-dial key on the satellite phone, and passed it to Pavlowski. She spoke excellent Russian as far as Travis could tell, but he wouldn’t know how successful she had been until they saw the results for themselves. The call ended after only a few moments.
“They’ll be there, on time. At least, that’s what the captain of the Novonya said. What do we do now?” Pavlowski said.
Travis waved at Dearden.
“Next, our friend here takes us for a little flight over the Sea of Okhotsk. I’d advise you to bring your camera; this is going to be highly interesting viewing back home.”
Within half an hour, the news team was geared up for filming, and Travis led them back to the port. Dearden took a long time making sure that the ancient helicopter was flight worthy and fueled, which allowed Travis plenty of time to consider all the things that were about to go wrong with his latest foolish plan. What was he doing, pursuing Monica Chen again? The last time he did that, he wound up in the hospital having a bullet removed from his insides. This time would be different, he told himself, unconvincingly. This time, he had more of a plan, didn’t he? This time, there would be no mistakes. The Alpha Adventurers would not be losing two members on this mission; that he would make sure of.
Even with the equipment brought by the journalists, the helicopter was spacious. Travis didn’t quite know how to feel about that; the machine looked older than he was. Noticing his trepidation, Dearden tried to reassure him.
“Don’t worry pal, she’ll fly. We need to push the engine really hard to get in the air due to the cold, but once we’re up, she’s as safe as houses.”
The Scotsman grinned a toothy smile, but it was a fake. Travis was pretty sure that houses were not supposed to be flying over a frozen sea. Nevertheless, by midday Dearden had satisfied himself that it was safe to take off. The skies over Magadan were steel gray, but as light as they ever were likely to get at this time of year. The twin engines whined, and the rotors overhead picked up speed until they were a whirling disc of metal above Travis’ head. Feeling a little dizzy from looking up at them from his seat in the co-pilot’s chair, he looked out his window, to see the red haired Fox News reporter regarding him with suspicion from the dockside, speaking rapidly into a Dictaphone. Something told him that keeping this story a secret long enough for CNN to break it might be harder than he thought.
Chapter Ten
Flying over Nagayevo Bay, Travis could see for miles up the coast and out to sea over the icy green, still waters below. Away from Magadan, there was nothing to suggest human beings lived in this area of the world at all; no towns, no roads. There were only the rocky, permafrost-covered outcrops of land that gradually slipped under the surface of the Okhotsk. Travis imagined that it was an alien world, that the sea below was not water at all, but something like a thick, still gas, methane or argon on some remote planet or moon orbiting a gas giant, far away from the light of the sun. He thought about what it would be like to drown in such a sea if the helicopter’s engines failed. Plunging into an ocean that was a great still gas he would fall forever, slowly crushed to death or poisoned from the lack of oxygen. There was little difference, then, to what his fate would be if Dearden failed to keep the MI-8 in the air and flying. They climbed gently, and swung out to sea, leaving the spits of land behind. Apart from the rotors churning through frozen air, desperately trying to get a purchase on enough wind, clawing their way to create a downdraft strong enough to defy gravity itself, the interior of the helicopter was silent. Punctuated only by the occasional buzz of radio communication between the local air traffic control from the airport and Dearden.
Pavlowski had tried to get more details on the story out of Travis, but he wasn’t interested in offering any. All they would need in addition to the tale already told would be found at sea; provided that the captain of the Novonya bought the lies that had been told to him over the satellite telephone. Travis had banked everything on the ship’s captain not knowi
ng that Yuri had not escaped, and had instructed an assistant to relay instructions to him. It was a risk, especially as the captain had told them that the helicopter bearing Korusaki and Chen had landed on the ship itself. Travis knew that the freighter could not be too far from the coordinates specified on Yuri’s piece of paper lest they wound up being discovered by the local coast guard – a most embarrassing eventuality that Sergei, a captain of the coast guard and Fiona’s murderer, would be most keen to avoid. Being found on board the very ship you were supposed to be directing efforts to find would presumably be a very bad career move.
An hour passed. Everything was bottle-green sea and tumultuous clouds on the horizon. Dearden spoke, breaking the silence that had been only sporadically dotted by the two journalists in the rear seats talking in hushed tones and that Travis had not bothered to listen to or try to hear over the buzzing rotor blades.
“We’re about five nautical miles out. Visibility is pretty good out here for the time of year, so we should see something any minute now.”
His voice came through the noise-dampening headsets, a disconcerting effect as there was a fraction of a second delay between Dearden’s lips moving and the sound of his voice registering in Travis’ ears. He was true to his word. It felt a lifetime, but in reality, only perhaps three or four minutes passed of scanning the horizon before Travis saw a stark gray irregular rectangle on the horizon, which slowly ballooned into a shape recognizable as a large freighter, rusted in places and swaying over the light chop of the waves.
“I take it they already know we’re here?” Travis said.
“Oh yeah,” said Dearden, “they’ll have heard us long before they saw us. This thing makes a lot of noise you know.”
“Great,” said Travis. “How much fuel do we have left?”
Dearden merely tapped a dial on the dashboard and held up two fingers. Two hours, and they had been in the air for ninety minutes already. Travis just hoped that the skeleton crew piloting the ship weren’t packing automatic weapons or surface to air missiles. He tried to shake the morbid mood his mind was in, with little success. He turned back to Pavlowski and her husband, who were already setting up their camera equipment and audio recording devices.
