by Paul Adam
‘What did you mean when you said you’d learned English in Geneva?’ Max asked.
‘Just that,’ Dmitri replied. ‘I went to school there.’
‘In Switzerland?’
‘My father was a diplomat, attached to the United Nations in Geneva. I went to an international school with kids from all over the world. The only common language we had was English.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘So how come you’re here in Kamchatka now, living all alone in a cave? Where are your parents? Still in Switzerland?’
‘My mother died when I was four. My father’s dead too. At least I think he is.’
‘You think?’
‘He just disappeared one day. I don’t know what’s happened to him.’
‘He disappeared?’ Max said, feeling a sudden empathy for Dmitri. How strange was that, both their fathers vanishing without explanation?
Dmitri pushed off across the pool, floating on his back, gazing up at the sky. He was silent for a long time, then he said: ‘My dad was very interested in environmental issues – around the world through his work for the UN, but especially in Russia. He was concerned about how much we’re destroying our environment. He made noises about it which the government didn’t like, so they sacked him. He came here to Kamchatka to run a small environmental action group and I came with him. We lived inland, about eighty kilometres from here, in a small town near the main road north. Do you know much about Kamchatka?’
‘Not a thing,’ Max said.
‘It’s still pretty much a wilderness. Mountains and forests and volcanoes and lots of wildlife – bears, wolves, sea otters, sable, beavers. My dad was fighting to keep it that way, but there were others – businessmen, corporations, politicians – who didn’t agree with him, who wanted to develop the area commercially, make money out of it.’
‘Like Rescomin, you mean?’
‘Yes. Rescomin is the worst of them. The river near their mine has become polluted with chemicals from their processing plant. So has the sea. That bear we met earlier – it would usually keep well away from people, but it’s hungry, desperate to find food. You know why? At this time of year, it would normally be fat and contented, building up its reserves for winter by feeding on the thousands of salmon that swim up the river from the sea to breed. But this year there aren’t many salmon. They’ve been declining for the past two or three years, almost certainly killed by the pollution from Zaliv Myertvetsa. So the bears are starving. Two miners have already been killed by them this summer.’
Dmitri rolled over onto his front and swam to the edge of the pool, sitting on a submerged rock shelf so only his head was above the surface. Max paddled gently to and fro. He could feel the hot water bubbling up below him, swirling around his legs. Dmitri picked up the bottle he’d brought, removed the cap and took a drink. Then he held it out to Max.
‘You want some?’
‘What is it?’
‘Vodka.’
‘No, thanks.’
Dmitri took another sip, keeping the bottle in his hand. ‘My dad was campaigning to get Zaliv Myertvetsa closed down,’ he continued. ‘Gathering evidence of pollution, of severe damage to the environment, of bribes paid to politicians by Rescomin. He left our house one morning about eighteen months ago, but never showed up at his office. He just disappeared. I haven’t seen him since.’
Max stopped paddling, a sudden suspicion taking shape inside his head. He stared intently at Dmitri. ‘What’s your second name? Your family name.’
‘Alekseev. Why?’
‘And your father’s name. Was it Sergei?’
Dmitri started, gaping at him in astonishment. ‘How did you know?’
‘I think I know what happened to him.’
‘You? How could you possibly know that?’ Dmitri said sceptically.
Max swam to the rock shelf and sat down next to him. ‘What do you think happened to your father?’ he asked.
Dmitri shrugged. He drank some more vodka and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I think he was murdered.’
‘Who by?’
‘I don’t know. He had a lot of enemies, people who didn’t like what he was doing, who wanted to protect Zaliv Myertvetsa.’
‘You think Rescomin had a part in it?’
‘I’m certain of it. But I have no proof. That’s why I came out here. My dad used to bring me with him when he came to do his research – to monitor the mine, to take water samples from the river and the sea, to collect dead fish and other animals for the laboratory to analyse for poison. We’d camp out, cook over a wood fire. I loved it. When he disappeared, there was no one to look after me. I was on my own, but as I believed in what he’d been doing, I came out here to try to continue his work, to watch what they were doing at Zaliv Myertvetsa. I even got a job there under a false name, worked all last summer and autumn in the mine. I thought I might somehow find out what had happened to my dad.’
‘But you haven’t?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About fifteen months.’
‘And you’ve discovered nothing?’
Dmitri glanced away, a look of guilt and self disgust in his eyes. ‘I haven’t been trying as hard as I could, I suppose. After Dad disappeared I was all right – or I thought I was. Then last winter I cracked up. Had some kind of breakdown. I started drinking. Couldn’t find the energy to do much. Maybe I’ve given up, I don’t know. I survive. I live off the land, catching my own food, stealing what I can’t catch. But I’ve done nothing about Rescomin or the mine.’
He took another long swig of vodka and stared into the distance, his face twisted as if he were in pain.
‘I think you’re right about your dad,’ Max said gently. ‘He was murdered. But not here. He was taken to a place in Central America called Shadow Island. The island is owned by Julius Clark, the boss of Rescomin.’
‘Shadow Island?’
Max nodded and told him about it. How he’d been held prisoner there, how Clark had been kidnapping his opponents and brainwashing them, turning them into his fifth columnists – people who would then work for him, rather than against.
‘I only saw a few of the files on the island,’ Max said. ‘But Sergei Alekseev was one of the names in them. That has to be your dad.’
Dmitri said nothing for a while, gazing down through the limpid water. Then he turned his head to look at Max. ‘So the brainwashing killed him? This drug you mentioned, Episuderon.’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ Max replied. ‘Some people – maybe a lot – survived the brainwashing. But if you haven’t heard from your dad in eighteen months, it doesn’t look good, does it? I’m sorry.’
He kept quiet then, sensing that Dmitri needed some time to himself, some time to come to terms with what had happened to his father. Dmitri gulped down more vodka, as if it were water.
‘You drink a lot, don’t you?’ Max said.
Dmitri flared up immediately. ‘So? Why shouldn’t I?’ he snarled angrily. ‘If I want to drink, I will.’
He put the bottle to his lips again defiantly and took another long gulp. When he lowered the bottle, there were tears in his eyes. He blinked a few times, then heaved himself out of the water and turned away so Max couldn’t see his face. He dried himself on his shirt and got dressed. Max climbed out too and put his clothes back on.
‘I’m sorry I got angry,’ Dmitri said eventually. ‘I was pretty certain he was dead, but, well, I suppose I hoped he might not be. That there might be some other explanation.’
‘I know,’ Max said sympathetically. ‘That’s how I felt when my dad disappeared without trace.’
Dmitri’s eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘Your father too?’
Max told him. The whole story – from his dad going missing in Santo Domingo to his own arrival in Kamchatka.
‘I think Clark has moved his brainwashing programme here,’ he said. ‘I think
my dad’s being held prisoner at Dead Man’s Bay. Probably other people too. He didn’t come on the ship from San Francisco so they must have brought him here some other way.’
‘There are other, smaller boats that come up the coast from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy,’ Dmitri said. ‘But I’d guess he came by air. There’s a helipad at the mine. The helicopters come and go all the time.’
‘I want to go over there and look for him,’ Max said. ‘How well do you know the area?’
‘What is it you say in English – “like the back of my hand”? That’s how well I know it. I’ve worked there, been there dozens of times.’
‘Can you describe it to me – the layout of the site, the buildings?’
‘I can do better than that,’ Dmitri replied. ‘I’ll take you there and show you.’
* * *
They went back to the camp first and ate some of the hare stew that had been slowly cooking on the fire, followed by a bowl of cloudberries Dmitri had picked the previous day. The stew was delicious and after a week of living on canned food and biscuits, Max relished the luxury of a proper meal. Then they went into the cave. Max was impressed by the way Dmitri had turned it into a home: he had his sleeping bag on a raised platform constructed out of pine branches, and a table and stool he’d made from a couple of thick silver birch stumps. Stacked against the rock wall were tins of vegetables and corned beef and bags of rice and flour and other provisions.
‘All “liberated” from the store at the mine,’ Dmitri said dryly.
‘How did you carry it here?’ Max asked.
‘Bit by bit, in a rucksack. I’m careful. I go in at night, just take a few items at a time. They have so much that they’d never notice any of it was gone.’
‘And they’ve never caught you? Aren’t there guards?’
‘Not many. They aren’t needed. The site’s very isolated – the nearest town is eighty kilometres away along a road that’s only passable for three months in summer. Who’s going to break in? The only secure part of the area is the store where they keep the refined platinum before it’s shipped out.’
Dmitri went to an airtight plastic container that was sitting on a rock ledge, opened it and removed a folded sheet of paper. ‘My dad had a plan of the site. We’ll look at it when we get there. It’ll make more sense then.’
He put the paper and a torch in a small rucksack, picked up his rifle and they headed off down the hill. On the valley floor, they avoided the road and kept to the safety of the forest. Dmitri said that the trucks went regularly from the port to the mine and vice versa. You could usually hear them coming, but it was better to be cautious and not get caught in the open.
They forded the river where it started to turn north and followed its bank for twenty minutes before branching off and climbing a steep incline to the top of a ridge from which they had a good view of the land ahead. The contrast with the valley they were leaving was immediately – and depressingly – noticeable. The plain below the ridge must once have been green and verdant, carpeted with grass and trees and meadow flowers. Now it was just a massive hole in the ground, a black, ugly scar on the landscape. The surface had been stripped away to form a huge open-cast mine the size of a small town. It stretched far into the distance, across the plain and into the side of the mountains whose slopes were being gradually blasted away, as if some colossal rock-eating monster were biting chunks out of them.
Max had never seen anything like it before, never seen such an awesome example of environmental destruction, of what man could do to nature when it stood in his way. It brought home to him the importance of what his father, and the Cedar Alliance, were fighting for. This mine could have been the surface of the Moon, or of Mars, it seemed so alien to the Earth. The only signs of life were the diggers scooping up the rocks and the trucks transporting them away from the mine, but they, too, were somehow alien and unnatural. The diggers were like mechanical giants, dwarfing their surroundings, and the trucks, their headlights blazing in the twilight, were like huge bug-eyed insects crawling over the carcass of a slaughtered animal.
‘That’s the platinum mine,’ Dmitri said.
Max stared across the terrain, too stunned to respond for a moment. Then he said, ‘I never imagined it would be so big. They’re taking away the whole mountain.’
‘That’s how they do it. You only get a few grams of platinum from a tonne of ore. That ring or brooch in a jeweller’s shop in London or New York, it’s taken truckloads of rock to produce. You see over there, that—’
Dmitri broke off as a siren sounded at the mine, a high-pitched whining noise that carried right across the valley.
‘What’s that?’ Max asked.
‘Watch,’ Dmitri replied.
There was a brief silence, then the sharp report of an explosion – a series of explosions really. Max saw puffs of smoke erupt in a line across the base of the mountain as a dozen separate charges detonated, then there was a roar and a great chunk of rock broke away and collapsed in a cloud of billowing dust.
‘They do that several times a day,’ Dmitri said. ‘Then the ore is taken by truck to the processing plant.’ He pointed to a complex of buildings nearer the coast, a sprawling collection of metal sheds and chimneys that was as unsightly as the mine itself. ‘They extract the platinum, then ship it out to a refinery in America where it’s purified further.’
‘It sounds complicated,’ Max said. ‘And expensive.’
‘It is,’ Dmitri agreed. ‘But worth it to Rescomin. Look at what they’ve built here. All those processing sheds and offices, but they’ve also had to build a village for the workers. You see those concrete blocks over there – that’s where they all live.’
‘What are those pipes for?’ Max asked, indicating a row of wide metal tubes that came up out of the ground and then snaked away to different parts of the site, white steam seeping out through valves in their sides.
‘Thermal heating,’ Dmitri replied. ‘Like those hot springs we were in. They pump hot water up from underground and use it to heat the offices and workers’ flats.’
‘And that metal tower with the wheel on top? What’s that?’
‘The winding gear for one of the disused mine shafts. They used to mine underground here – there are old shafts everywhere – but the seams ran out so they turned to open-cast mining. The ore is less rich, but there’s more of it, as you can see.’
Max let his gaze rove over the mine. In the gloom of dusk, the noise of the trucks and diggers echoing across the valley, smoke and steam and dust rising up to form a thick, noxious cloud, it seemed to him like a vision of hell. And his dad was somewhere in there.
He looked further east and saw high, sheer cliffs along the coast, lines of jagged rocks at the bottom over which huge waves were breaking, sending plumes of white water and spray up into the air. ‘That must be Dead Man’s Bay,’ he said.
Dmitri nodded. ‘Zaliv Myertvetsa. The first Russian settlers in Kamchatka called it that because it claimed so many lives. Dozens of ships were lost there, smashed against the rocks by the tide and currents. That’s why they built the port seven kilometres south, in a more sheltered part of the coast. Dead Man’s Bay is just too dangerous for boats.’
Max turned back to the processing plant, studying the buildings thoughtfully. ‘You know the place well. Where do you think they might be holding prisoners?’
‘I worked there for five months, went to every part of the site, but I never saw any prisoners, never heard of any.’
‘That was last year. They’ll only have been brought here in the past few weeks. Since Shadow Island was destroyed.’
Dmitri grinned. ‘Since you destroyed it, you mean.’ He looked hard at him, his eyes lighting up. ‘You want to do that here? Burn the place down?’
‘I just want to get my dad out. Are there any isolated buildings? Areas that are more secure, more closely guarded than others, maybe with cells or rooms that prisoners could be locked up in?’
Dmi
tri didn’t reply. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘Well, there is something. The bunker.’
‘Bunker?’
‘There’s been a mine here for decades, since before the Second World War. Then during the Cold War the Soviets built an underground bunker – some kind of military installation, a listening post or radio station, something like that.’
‘It’s still here?’
‘It was abandoned after the fall of communism, hasn’t been used for years.’
‘How do you know?’
‘One of the old miners showed me. Took me down a staircase. It was just a wreck, an empty concrete shell with water dripping from the ceilings, mould on the walls.’
‘Could Clark be using it again?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose.’
‘I want to take a look at it,’ Max said. ‘Can you show me?’
Dmitri nodded. ‘Wait until night. Then we’ll go there.’
NINETEEN
THE MINE HAD vanished into the darkness, the pits and quarries hidden by the night, blending in so well with the landscape that they might not have been there. Everything was black, including the sky, which was heavy with clouds. Only the processing plant and the workers’ accommodation blocks were visible, picked out by the floodlights that were dotted across the site.
Max and Dmitri climbed down off the ridge and cut through the forest to the road, which Dmitri said was deserted at night, no trucks or other vehicles moving along it. They didn’t talk as they walked, but there was a silent bond between them. The antagonism of their initial encounter had all been forgotten. They were allies now, their friendship cemented by what had happened to their fathers. They had a shared purpose – a shared determination to find Alexander Cassidy, to find out for certain what had happened to Sergei Alekseev, then take their revenge on Julius Clark.
They made good time, covering the three kilometres to the mine in under forty minutes. As they neared the perimeter, Dmitri led them off the road onto an area of rough grass and scrub and crouched down behind a boulder. He took the plan of the site from his rucksack and shone his torch on the paper, partially shielding the beam with his hand.
