The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I thought you might like to know. A Japanese woman. She was interested in the records. She said she lost her father. September 1983 was specifically mentioned. She is traveling with an American. I have their names and their hotel.’

  ‘You are legendary, Comrade.’

  The colonel passed on the details.

  ‘You did the right thing. What did you tell them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘More than enough.’

  ‘If they come back, I will let you know.’

  The retired general ended the call and pocketed his cell phone.

  ‘Something the matter?’ asked Hank, sitting on the corner of a desk, patting a golden retriever on its head.

  Valentin Korolenko wiped the frown off his face. ‘That depends. Do you agree to my fee?’ he asked.

  ‘Two million euros. That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘Plus expenses,’ Korolenko reminded him. ‘I won’t be able to do this job on my own.’ He waited for a response, but got none. ‘You terminated our previous agreement, Mr Buck, sent me the blank cigarette paper. It is about supply and demand in Russia now. You have a demand which only I can supply. My revised terms are more than reasonable. And I warn you, it will cost you far more if you walk away and come back later to restart the negotiations.’

  Hank expelled a sigh.

  ‘Why you are interested in these two?’ Korolenko enquired.

  ‘The sort of money you want comes with no questions asked.’

  ‘Knowing something about them might help me find them.’

  ‘They’re looking for survivors from KAL 007.’

  ‘And why might they be doing that when the world believes the plane crashed and everyone on board was killed?’

  ‘Because some people refuse to accept the truth.’

  Korolenko hadn’t laughed for a very long time, but it shot out of him now as if he were throwing up. Eventually, he brought himself under control. Clearing his throat, he said, ‘Well, back to my fee . . .’

  Hank scratched the general’s retriever behind its ears. ‘Those “expenses” you mentioned. I take it they’re your little helpers.’

  ‘Grisha Soloyov and Vlahd Bykovski.’

  ‘You’ve used them before, haven’t you? They like to kill people.’

  ‘They follow orders, especially ones accompanied by money.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hank, ‘we have an agreement. Two million euros, plus expenses. Half now and half when my two parties get on a plane bound for the States.’

  ‘That is only fair. And all you want is for me to find them and keep them under surveillance?’

  ‘I want to know what they do, where they go and who they meet.’

  ‘There will be a further negotiation if the terms change.’

  ‘I’d expect nothing less. If I need to communicate with you, we’ll stay with our old channel—the Chesma.’

  Korolenko nodded. He pulled out a couple of photos from the manila folder—one each of a Japanese woman and an American man—and turned them over. Their names were Akiko Sato and Ben Harbor, the names just provided to him by Popov. And they were staying at the Moscow Ararat Park Hyatt. This had to be the easiest money he’d ever make.

  May 10, 1984

  Labor Camp F07982, Siberia, the Far East. The air compressor was down. There’d been problems with this one before. A pocket of dirt was caught somewhere in the fuel system. The whole thing needed to be stripped down properly, but, through an interpreter, Nami understood that the machine had to be up and running as soon as possible. The Russian overseer wanted a quick fix rather than a permanent solution. So every few days each week, she had to remove the injectors one by one, taking this section of the mine tunnel offline while she worked in the dust and the pale light from her hard-hat lantern.

  Nami had been dispatched to this camp with six other passengers from the airliner, a journey that had involved a train ride, three months in a disgusting holding camp with murderers and thieves, and then a long journey in a closed truck across frozen rivers and lakes, a rust hole in the floor of the truck the only window on the outside world.

  The camp they eventually arrived at was mostly populated by North Koreans and was surrounded by mountains and thick forest. From what she could gather from the few who spoke a smattering of Japanese, the Koreans had been rounded up and sent here by their own government for reasons unknown. There were other Asian races here too: Mongolians and Chinese. The mine was state-owned and the camp inmates were slaves—no other word for it. The mine was worked day and night, twelve hours on and twelve off, by inmates on rations that were mostly rice, potato, some indescribable vegetable matter, sour milk and hard, insect-infested black bread. Occasionally, there was vodka. Everyone received the same rations—male or female, young or old. Food was often stolen. People killed for it. Nami had been accused of stealing food once—falsely—and had paid the consequences. They had thrown her into a stinking concrete cell, an airless, slime-covered hole too small to stand up or lie straight in. Nami knew who had taken the food, but coming forward with the culprit’s name would have signed her own death warrant at the hands of the guilty inmate’s friends. And so she had taken the punishment: three weeks on filthy water and rice rations, without sunlight and with no human contact. She had lost a lot of weight, her hipbones almost pushing through the skin. And then two of her teeth dropped out on the day before her release back into the general population. The camp administration put her in the camp hospital for four days of recovery. They wanted her back in the mine.

  There were deaths every other day: mine slips and cave-ins, accidents with the heavy machinery, exposure to the chemicals used to release the gold from the ore, disease, fights among the inmates for the few available women, general misadventure, and old age. The graveyard up on the side of a hill overlooking the camp was very large.

  The camp’s task was to mine the rock ore, extract the gold and meet some commissar’s arbitrary quota. The mine’s administration had first put Nami to work with the drill crew, one of the worst and most dangerous jobs, picking away at the seams of ore far below ground, operating heavy pneumatic machinery, the walls often trembling and groaning with the awful surrounding pressure. But then, one day, a drill broke and there was no one around to fix it. Using some initiative and a hitherto undiscovered understanding for things mechanical that turned out to be innate, Nami repaired it with tools scrounged from a nearby underground loader. Thereafter she was attached to engineering, and spent more time above ground than below it, which was a relief.

  The men shuffled past Nami, ignoring her as she got down on her knees and opened the box of tools. The last man to leave was the overseer, who yelled at her to hurry. Once he was gone, Nami could feel the heavy silence pressing down on her. It was hot in this tunnel several hundred meters below ground, the air close, compressed, as if by the millions of tonnes of rock above. Sweat trickled down her forehead and stung her eyes. Nami fixed the heavy socket wrench over the injector and tapped the end of the tool with another spanner, breaking the thread’s seal. She wound it off until the injector came free. She pulled it out and placed it on a grease-stained patch of canvas that she’d laid over the rock floor.

  The rock cracked behind her, accompanied by a slight tremble. She was used to the movement of the earth, so it didn’t concern her overly. Nevertheless, she glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the sound. It was then that the two men attacked her, appearing from behind a mound of ore and rushing her. They pushed her down on the ground and pinned her there. One of the men hit her hard across the face, dazing her, taking away her fight. Both men stood and looked down at her as she lay there, moving slowly. Nami couldn’t focus, her vision blurred by the blow. The men were miners, but she didn’t recognize either of them.

  They bent down and dragged her behind the load-haul-dump machine where the shadows were blackest. The bigger of the two began to pull open the buttons of his fly, while the oth
er leaned over her and ripped open the front of her coveralls, exposing her. He smothered a breast with a dirty hand while the tall man bent over and jerked her coveralls off her shoulders and pulled them down below her knees. Nami tried to scream, but the dust choked her throat. She gagged and began to kick and struggle. She felt a hand between her legs, groping. The men were talking to each other, laughing. It was then that she realized the ring spanner was still in her hand. She closed her fingers around the shaft, her fist tight, her heart racing, and then swung it at the man on top of her chest with all the strength she could call on. Thud. The metal head buried itself in something hard, breaking through into softness below. She swung again as the other man tried to grab the tool. He missed and it smashed into his cheek. He screamed, stood up and ran away, holding his face. Nami dropped the spanner, the end of it smeared with something wet, and kicked the slumped body off her with her foot.

  The camp police took Nami to the hut among the trees, opened the door and threw her inside. She had picked up enough Korean words to know that they called her a whore, and a few other things besides. She lay on the floor motionless, curled into a ball, until the door was locked shut. She pulled her coveralls back over a shoulder and noticed that her skin was smeared with blood and rock dust. One of her eyes was swollen almost shut.

  The air in the hut smelled revolting, of dirt and pine sap mixed with a musty human funk—urine, sweat and other bodily fluids. The steady breeze through the pine trees outside made a sound like television white noise.

  The floor beneath her was beaten earth with old rough-cut carpet not quite covering it. There were two small windows just under the ceiling, on opposite walls that were themselves made from rough-hewn logs. The striped shadows thrown by the sun coming through one of the windows told her they had bars on them. The hut was small, though bigger than the disgusting concrete cell she had recently experienced. She crawled onto the low cot, no more than bare slats of wood over a wood frame, and took in her surroundings. There wasn’t much else that she hadn’t already seen—two buckets, one for water, one for her own waste. There was no internal handle on the door. A metal plate was set in the door’s center with a spyhole. An eye blinked in it and then the hole closed.

  Nami tried her best to travel beyond her body, to take her mind elsewhere. She went on a springtime walk through the hanami displays in the Shinjuku Gyoen garden with Hatsuto and little Kimba. How Akiko’s perfect face had opened with wonder that day when she saw the sakura, the cherry blossoms. It was just before her fourth birthday, a magical day. They had all wandered for hours hand in hand through the Shinjuku Gyoen, among a thousand trees exploding in soft pinks and whites, the lake speckled with blossoms like something from a traditional Sansui painting. As the memory faded, it left Nami with questions: Would she ever see Hatsuto or Akiko again? What were they doing right now? Was it a school day? How was Hatsuto managing without her? When would Akiko stop remembering her? When would Hatsuto take another wife?

  She took the back of her lip between her front teeth and bit down on it hard so that her mouth filled with blood and the pain wiped away the tears forming in her eyes. Here, in this brutal place, weakness was despised, the weak feasted on by the strong.

  It felt like April, or possibly May. There were wildflowers blooming among the trees and the bitter winter weather was a bad memory. The plane had come down on September 1, 1983, the previous year. That much Nami was sure of, but all certainty had ended that day. If her guesswork was right, she had been in the USSR for seven months. What did the people in Japan, Korea and the United States think had happened to them? What was going on in the world beyond this labor camp? Why had no one come for them?

  Nami absently scratched her leg. When they’d thrown her in the cell, they’d told her that she was a troublemaker. They’d said she would be moved. Where would they move her to, she wondered as she scratched her ankle. Suddenly she was aware that her body was on fire with hundreds of bites. She looked at her hand and saw that the skin on the back of it, as well as up her arm, appeared to be moving. She held her hand out in front of her face, bringing it into focus, and saw that it was crawling with ticks.

  ‘Do you mind if I keep it for later?’ asked Korolenko, regarding the box of Royal Habanos Colonel Ozerov was holding toward him across the desk.

  ‘As long as you don’t mind if I have one now. Helps with my appetite—suppresses it. There is a new cook here. She spoils milk.’

  Korolenko leaned forward to take one and, through the window behind Ozerov, caught a glimpse of the Zavidovo dacha’s beautiful manicured gardens in full spring bloom. ‘Perhaps you should let her cook for your guests in the basement,’ he said. ‘Which reminds me, how is our congressman?’

  ‘Used up. The doctors believe his mind is cracking. They all do eventually, as you know. I think we’ve managed to squeeze everything worthwhile from him, though, which is just as well.’

  Korolenko ran the cigar under his nostrils. He breathed in the aroma, the rich, acrid smell of first-class tobacco leaves grown in the Cuban sunshine.

  ‘I can tell you now that the First Directorate is well pleased,’ Ozerov continued. ‘McDonald proved to be a veritable treasure chest of information. We are now in the process of winding up many counter-revolutionary cadres operating within our sphere of influence—spies who thought they had escaped into anonymity; even some sleepers personally trained by Gehlen. We also have some interesting leads in the congressman’s own world; individuals who might be prepared to work for a worthy cause.’

  ‘The revolution of the proletariat?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh, while I think of it, did you unearth the root of the One World conspiracy?’

  Ozerov grinned. ‘He says that the USSR will be finished by the end of the millennium.’

  ‘And what will take its place?’

  ‘The Chase Manhattan Bank.’

  ‘Ha!’ laughed Korolenko. ‘What will you do with the congressman now?’

  ‘There will be periods of lucidity. We will keep him for those. Oh, and I believe congratulations are in order, Comrade.’

  ‘Is the word out already?’

  ‘Yes, indeed it is. So when do we start calling you General?’

  February 4, 2012

  Moscow, Russia. Even though the hotel Ben and Akiko moved to was large, it was considered boutique. It was also half the cost of the Ararat and still expensive by any standard other than Moscow’s. There was a knock on the door. Ben looked through the security peephole.

  In a muffled voice, a young woman in hotel uniform said, ‘Excuse me, please. Your paper, sir.’

  Ben opened the door and exchanged the copy of the Izvestiya for some roubles. He took the paper and laid it out on the writing desk. As he turned the pages, scanning them, he said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise, work real hard and advertise. Do you know who said that?’

  Akiko shook her head.

  ‘Me neither, but it sounds good.’

  ‘There it is,’ said Akiko.

  ‘You want to check it?’ Ben asked. ‘I don’t read Russian, either.’

  Jerome Grundy had said it half-jokingly—‘Run an ad’—but after their experience with the creepy ex-KGB guy at the museum, it had shot to the top of their list of ideas. In fact, it was their only idea.

  Akiko read the ad aloud: ‘“Attention survivors of KAL 007. Contact Ben Harbor, Florida. Reward offered. Facebook.”’

  ‘Naïve, but hopefully effective. Shall we see what’s been caught in our net?’

  Akiko opened the laptop and waited for the connection. After a few moments, her face brightened. ‘Yes, we’ve had responses.’

  ‘Many?’

  ‘A few.’ As she read, her expectant look faded.

  ‘What’s up?’ Ben asked.

  ‘One man says he saw the plane in a dream. It was being carried to the planet Mars on the back of a flying saucer.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Ben. ‘Too much vodka, obviously. They all like
that?’

  ‘Another person says the plane crashed off Honshu, Japan, after being shot down by missiles launched by American fighter planes.’

  ‘Right. How many responses did we get all up?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Anything sane?’

  ‘They all want the reward before they talk to us. This is odd.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This one just says, “Montana Coffee, Kuznetsky Most, 7:11 a.m., February 4.”’

  ‘What’s Montana Coffee?’ Ben asked, leaning over Akiko’s shoulder to look at her email.

  ‘It’s a local chain.’

  ‘Is it an invitation to meet up?’ he wondered.

  Akiko shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It’s almost eight.’

  ‘If it is, we’re late. What do you want to do?’ Ben asked. ‘Check it out?’

  ‘Might as well. We can have breakfast there.’

  ‘And nothing else even vaguely interesting has come in?’

  ‘No.’

  Ten minutes later they were walking up nearby Kuznetsky Most, heads bent into the driving wind and snow. The café was an oasis of warmth in the frigid conditions, its windows heavy with condensation and tobacco smoke. The place was crowded, but they managed to secure a table as some customers got up to leave. Ben stood in the queue at the counter to order them coffee, while Akiko hung up their gloves and jackets, then took advantage of the free WiFi and fired up the laptop.

  ‘Anything new?’ Ben asked when he returned, putting the coffee on the table and sitting beside her.

  ‘Four new emails. They all say the same thing: don’t we know the plane crashed and everyone on board was killed?’

  They shifted their interest to the clientele, scanning the room. No one paid them the least interest. Customers came and went. The time passed slowly. At ten past eleven, Ben yawned and said, ‘I can’t drink any more coffee. I’m somewhere between having a seizure and falling asleep. Let’s go.’