The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3

by Christopher Cartwright

  It wasn’t lost on him that in the harsh environment of Oymyakon any failure on his part would easily lead to their starvation or freezing to death well before his father came home. His father had grown up in the tough snow-filled lands, and accepted death with the rare equanimity of a man with a strong belief in a future already written – his boys would survive, or they wouldn’t.

  He grinned. This one would survive, even if he had to kill a neighboring household to do it. Demyan was less confident of his little brother’s survival. The kid was a runt. Tenacious and filled with a raw underlying violence in his eyes. If he made it to adulthood, his little brother would end up becoming an underground mine manager, like his dad – in a position of power over a lot of weaker men. He’d probably end up hurting a lot of people in the process. Demyan held his breath as he thought about it. His brother would most likely end up hurting the hell out of him, if he lived that long.

  But they’d both have to live that long. His mind returned to the task at hand.

  He’d promised his little brother he’d take him fishing today, in the new lake. Previously unfished, it was said to be full. Despite their differences, he’d never really wanted to hurt his little brother. He knew the kid had taken their mother’s death the worst out of the whole family. She was probably the only person who’d ever shown him any kindness.

  Demyan made a mental note to try and change that, although the simple fact in their village was that life was not kind, and the sooner Ilya learned to live with that, the better. Still, he wanted to make his life a little easier, and they needed to eat, so if the fish were indeed plentiful, it would be worth it. Let him forget their miserable existence and tomorrow they could both learn the true hardship of survival in their desolate and unforgiving land.

  The door opened again and the solid outline of his father entered the room. He picked up a second duffel bag, one he hadn’t used before. It was bigger and appeared full. Normally, everything he needed while at the mine was stored on site, so his luggage from home was generally negligible.

  Demyan watched his father reach the door, only to stop and look directly at his open eyes in the dark. “You’re awake. Good. I need to talk to you.”

  “Yes, father?” Demyan asked, obediently.

  “You’re now in charge. Do your best to keep Ilya alive. If you get into trouble, ask for help, the rest of our community will help.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good man. Next year you will be big enough to work in the mines. Maybe all three of us can move to Yakutsk. Would you like that?”

  “Yes.” The mines were notoriously dangerous, inside men died nearly every day, but until he worked in the mines, they would live permanently on the edge of famine. Demyan could think of worse directions for his life to take.

  “Good.” His father moved toward Ilya who appeared to still be asleep, and kissed him on the forehead in an uncommon show of fatherly affection. “Goodbye, my son. Obey your brother and he will look after you.”

  Demyan watched as Ilya squeezed his eyes shut. It was probably for the best. Neither of them quite knew how to take their father like this. Perhaps the death of their mother had somehow softened him.

  He watched as his father left in silence.

  The goods truck came by and picked up his father on its way to Yakutsk. He waited a full ten minutes in silence. Then removed his sleeping bag, crossed the floor of the single small room and opened the door a crack to look out. He watched the truck leave the Oymyakon village in darkness. Demyan closed the door and woke his brother.

  Ilya opened his blue-gray eyes. “Has he left?”

  Demyan nodded. “I watched the truck leave.” He looked at his little brother. The kid was a runt, but despite his frequent beatings, he was filled with a natural ability and a tendency to fight, that ran in his family. For all his faults, he had to give it to the kid, he was brave and tough to the point of stupidity. “Are you sure you still want to go see it?”

  “The mysterious lake?” Ilya sat up, now wide awake. “Of course.”

  “Good. Then get your stuff together. It’s a long walk and you know we’re not supposed to know about it.”

  *

  Ilya slipped out of his sleeping bag.

  He pulled up the two layers of thick snow-pants and slipped his arms into a fur coat. Like most people in his village, his heavy coat was long, reaching all the way to his midcalf. Below which he wore boots made of reindeer leather, with the fur still on. He grabbed his fur hat and then wrapped layers of knitted scarves around the lower part of his face. He then rolled his heavy fur coverings from his bed, and placed them inside his large rucksack. A hunter’s cabin they would use for shelter was a few miles short of the lake. They could stay there overnight and then fish tomorrow.

  Demyan had already planned it out, including packing a small bag of food and cooking equipment. At times like this, he wondered why he and his brother fought at all. They both shared the ruthless will and defiant bravado of his father, even if his big brother had the physical size to back it up. They both knew people weren’t supposed to know or talk about the new lake, because of its close proximity to Boot Lake. But he and his brother wouldn’t listen to such nonsense. The lake was thawing and there were fish, so they would go and see it.

  The lake had formed below an old ice field, twenty miles to the south-east of Oymyakon’s village. It was once used by the Alaska-Siberian air route as an airfield during World War II as a stepping stone to ferry American Lend-Lease aircraft to the Eastern Front. Now, part of the icy ground below had melted, making way for a large lake. The surface of which was still frozen solid, but below the ice, there was talk of a massive labyrinth of warm water, filled with fish.

  The lake had appeared a few months ago, thawing during the start of winter as if by magic. Ilya had no superstitious doubt about where the lake had come from. It was clearly caused by a recent shift in the Earth which leaked hot water from deep thermal springs far below. His father had talked about these ancient moving plates on which the Earth rested like a house on its piers. It was how the hot springs formed near Oymyakon, and without them, their village would have perished years ago.

  His mind turned to his father down the mine shafts. He’d once said that it was the movement of these plates that caused tremblors and mini-Earthquakes that were unable to be felt on the surface, but catastrophic to those down in the mines.

  Oymyakon had plenty of such hot water pools. There was nothing mysterious about it. The thermal springs would spurt boiling water to the surface, thawing the ice, and making it warm enough for fish to survive all year round. If there was water, there would be fish, and he was hungry. Always hungry. So, he was excited to go to Lake Mysterious, as they had decided to call it.

  It was midday by the time they reached the peak of a three-hundred-foot hill and stared down at the western edge of Boot Lake. The entire lake was approximately ten miles long from north to south and somewhere between two and five miles wide at varying parts, in such a way that it appeared to form the shape of a giant boot made of ice, superimposed on a sea of snow. The entire thing was angled downward, and a little askew. At the back of the field of ice were two smaller lakes that formed the shape of the heel. Two-thirds of the way up, an outcrop of dark igneous rock jutted out from the ice to form an island, almost in the shape of a boot buckle.

  The rocky island jutted out of the ice in sheer walls of vertical stone, at least fifty feet high. On the top of which, were two man-made structures. One was an older building made of thick concrete with a heavy dome on top, from which multiple modern antennas protruded. To Ilya, the structure looked sinister, like some sort of old prison – a remnant of Stalin’s Death Camps – although no one in his village or elsewhere had ever been able to tell him what the island had once been used for. He had no doubt the building was just the tip of the iceberg, and that a series of hollowed out stone tunnels, penetrated deeply into the stone below, where he had no doubt, many men had once lost their li
ves.

  To its right was the second man-made structure. This one much more modern. Its construction was completed nearly two years ago, and it was supposedly used for the sole purpose of producing the world’s largest geothermal power station.

  In the distance behind it, right there in the middle of the lake, a cooling tower rose out of the sheet of ice, nearly seven hundred feet into the air and over a hundred feet long in a wide hyperboloid shape. They said the station was going to power all of eastern Siberia and most of the heavily populated west, too. But that was all some bullshit story. It had been running for two years and there still weren’t even any powerlines running out from it. In fact, although steam rose from its crest, there was no sign of where the power could have possibly been going – yet still, like some sinister neighbor, the monster seemed alive, and continued to breathe dark clouds of steam into the skies.

  The lake remained frozen all year round, but the fishing used to be good in summer. The mysterious lake was somewhere on the other side of it. It would take six or more hours to go around the boot-shaped lake, but they could cross it in under an hour – that was, if it were still possible.

  Everyone knew that the story of it being an enormous nuclear power plant was just a cover, one of their mother Russia’s many disinformation campaigns. Ilya just couldn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to hide it any better. There was no doubt in his mind what it was, and he was still a kid – it was a secret military installation.

  A big fence went up right around the damned lake, too. A road was built around it and heavily patrolled during construction, but all of that had mostly ceased, since. After all, why bother? The location was secure enough in itself. No one could get there, except on foot, and those who could were too cold to do anything destructive. Ilya and Demyan stumbled their way down the hill and approached the lake’s edge.

  Ilya stopped at the fence.

  A reindeer must have taken offense to the barbed wire fence, because there was now a small hole in it. Not big, but enough for the two of them to squeeze through.

  “Do you want to take a shortcut?” he asked, out of bravado more than desire.

  Demyan wasn’t to be provoked into stupidity. “No. We’ll go around. We’re not supposed to even know about the mysterious new lake, let alone if it's guarded. We’re better off not getting spotted before we even get there.”

  Ilya felt that he’d achieved one rung above his brother on the bravery ladder, but knew better than to mention it. Instead, the two of them followed the service trail as it wrapped its way around the shore of Boot Lake.

  It took them until the late afternoon to reach the empty hunter’s hut toward the southern end of the lake. They stayed there overnight and in the morning continued along the service trail, toward the far end of the lake.

  Now on the eastern side of Boot Lake, Ilya glanced back at the old island in the middle of the sea of ice. There were no windows on the old stone prison, but somehow, he felt as though he was being watched. He’d been told since he was a kid to stay away from the place, because it was haunted by the ghosts of those who’d been imprisoned there during the reign of Stalin’s Death Camps. Ilya was old enough to know that haunted islands are nothing more than stories to frighten children, and yet he’d never heard of anyone ever going anywhere near it.

  He turned to face his brother. “Do you think they can see us?”

  “I doubt it. If they could, we’d probably already see one of their patrol cars on its way to intercept us.” Demyan turned to the east. “Come on, the old airstrip and strange new lake isn’t far now. I want to catch some fish and get back to the hut before we freeze to death.”

  Ilya nodded and followed him across the snow-covered hills to the east. He felt uneasy with his back to the strange island behind him, as though some sort of evil predator was watching him. He shook the fear off, but kept glancing over his shoulder as though he might catch something or someone.

  Thirty minutes later, they reached the mysterious new lake.

  It was approximately a mile wide by another three in length. There was very little to identify it as anything other than the remains of the old, World War II era, landing strip made out of thick ice.

  Ilya just stared at it. “We’ve been had, haven’t we?”

  “I don’t know,” Demyan replied, his eyes sweeping the entire area for signs of ice thinning. His eyes stopped at a small section toward the southern end of the field, where the icy ground had dipped, and some parts had collapsed. His lips turned upward into a smile. “There! I’d say that’s the remnants of the thin ice collapsing.”

  “You think there’s a hot spring below?”

  “Must be! But there’s only one way to find out for certain. Let’s go check it out.”

  *

  Demyan stepped onto the ice.

  His eyes swept the entire frozen lake. There were no cracks or breaks in the surface ahead of him and no flowing water at its edge. He made a mental note to stay clear of the southern end, where the hard surface of the ice appeared to dip and a small patch of white ice spread over several feet – a sign the ice had recently thawed and then refrozen, making it highly unstable.

  His boots tentatively crunched into the hard ice at the edge of the lake – often the most dangerous part to walk on any frozen lake. Ice near the shore is weakest. The shifting, expansion and buckling action of the lake or stream over the winter continually breaks and refreezes ice along the shoreline.

  The surface underneath his feet was solid.

  He took another step, followed by a number of small, slow steps toward the middle of the lake. After crossing thousands of frozen lakes and rivers he’d developed the intrinsic knowledge of what ice would hold his weight and what wouldn’t. His senses were specifically attuned to such knowledge. A skill grown over his relatively short lifetime in the harsh, Siberian landscape. Despite his confidence, his nerves were on edge, as he strained to hear the sharp snapping of ice. His center of balance told him the ground wasn’t moving even an inch.

  A third of the way across the frozen lake, he stopped and dropped his rucksack on the ground.

  “What do you think?” Ilya asked.

  “I think there’s only one way to find out if there are fish.”

  He withdrew an axe and started chipping away a six-inch-wide by eight-inch-long hole into the ice. It was a slow process, but he’d done that, too, a thousand times before.

  The ice was thick, more than a foot in total.

  Demyan could have kept going, but it would have meant widening the opening, and that would have increased their risk of falling through. He glanced at his little brother, whose face betrayed his eagerness and naïve willingness to take risks.

  “Do you want me to try?” Ilya asked.

  Demyan shook his head and picked up the axe. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll head farther toward the middle. The ice is always thinner as it approaches the center. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of water in there.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. Look at all those air bubbles. There’s flowing water down there and that means fish.”

  They both glanced into the hole.

  Water was easily visible just below the ice. It had a soft prism of red, yellow and blue. There was something unusual about that in itself. In ice, the absorption of light at the red end of the spectrum is six times greater than at the blue end. As a consequence, the ice surrounding every other opening he’d ever made for ice-fishing had always appeared blue.

  Demyan was about to make a comment about the strange prism of color, but a swift movement from down below the surface of the ice, interrupted his thoughts. A large fish swam by, providing a dark silhouette from the light below.

  “Whoa!” Ilya’s grin was visible beneath his thick woven scarf. “Did you see that fish!”

  Demyan smiled. “That’s got to be a Hucho Taimen!”

  He felt his heart race and forced himself to breathe slowly. A fish like that could be over t
wo hundred pounds. Catching it would go a long way to providing for both of them throughout the last of the winter, into early spring.

  Hucho Taimen were normally found in fresh water. They preferred cold flowing water over a stony or gravel bottom and never migrated to sea. It was extremely good luck to find one trapped in a lake.

  “Come with me, quickly,” Demyan said.

  He picked up his rucksack and ran across the ice toward the middle of the lake, in the same direction the Taimen had swum – without stopping for one second to ask why the fish should cast a shadow on the underside of the ice.

  Instead, he ran at full speed across the ice with the axe in his hand. As the ice thinned he began to be able to spot the dark outline of the massive fish, which formed a strange shadow in an otherwise light-filled lake. His chest was pounding as he sucked in the subzero air. Demyan swore out loud. If it took them a week to catch, they were going to drag the fish out of its frozen prison.

  He stopped somewhere in the middle of the lake and immediately started slamming the head of the axe into the ice. It sent hundreds of shards of ice splintering out around them. Below the rapidly thinning ice, he noticed the fish turn around in one giant arc and swim toward the opening he was trying to create.

  “Get the Mormyshka out! Quick!”

  Beside him, Ilya worked quickly to set up the fishing line and lure, known as a Mormyshka. It was named after the Russian word, mormysh, which meant freshwater shrimp. It consisted of a metallic head made of tungsten with a small piece of gold given to them by their father and soldered onto the back of the tungsten, along with a hook. In the stagnant environment beneath the ice, fish would spot the sparkle of the gold and take a bite.

  Demyan’s axe finally pierced the bottom layer of ice, into the thawed water below. The monstrous fish, swung round again, curious and interested in the sudden change to its protected environment.