Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

Once more she shuffled forward as another worker was admitted to the office.

To anyone watching her, including, she trusted, the over-curious foreman, she was just another impoverished twenty-first-century Russian citizen looking for work. But if anyone should doubt it, she had the false papers in her jacket to prove who she was. She was travelling under the name of Valentina Asayev.

She was a citizen of the Siberian city of Bratsk to the east – so the papers said, anyway. Her internal Russian passport, made dirty and scuffed with apparent use like her clothes, allowed her to move anywhere in the Krai of Krasnoyarsk that stretched from the Mongolian border to the Arctic seas. Only the Arctic city of Norilsk – the initial destination of her mission after Igarka – was a closed area. It was the second biggest city in the world beyond the Arctic Circle, and had been closed to anyone without a special pass since 2001. It was barred not just to foreigners but also to any Russian without the pass.

Anna’s thoughts drifted almost in a dream to her mission and the next journey that now lay ahead towards it. Even she, a woman of extreme courage and belief in herself, had to admit it was a desperate throw of the dice into the unknown.

But somewhere – she knew this for sure – somewhere up there above the Arctic Circle, she would find the man she was looking for, Vasily Kryuchkov. Whether it would be in the slave-built Norilsk itself – the filthy, degraded city whose pollutants had killed every tree within a fifty-mile radius – or whether it would be in the Putorana mountain nuclear facilities to the east of there, or in Dudinka to the west of Norilsk, or even further north at Dikson, the island port out on the far edge of the Gulf of Yenisei in the Kara Sea – wherever Kryuchkov could be found up there in the bitter far north she would find him and the secrets he was said to possess.

But for now, her immediate aim – her necessity – was to get the next boat to Igarka, the lumber town two thirds of the way downriver towards Norilsk. Igarka was her next base and a journey she could make with at least the pretence of legality. But to reach there, she needed to be hired.

Aside from her false identity papers, other false papers zipped in her jacket pocket declared her to be a skilled lumber machinist and maintenance worker on the type of vast saw machines that day and night cut the Siberian forest into logs or planks for export. She had endlessly studied similar Swedish saw machines back in America until she knew them back to front. She knew she could do the work for as long as she needed to remain in Igarka.

But at some moment, after she reached the lumber town outpost, she would have to break free – alone – and head north again.

Then, through these thoughts, she again felt the sudden and unwelcome presence.

‘Ivan,’ the voice said next to her suddenly, and she felt the foreman’s alcohol and onion breath wash down again on her face from above. He was standing over her, much too close to her body now. ‘My name is Ivan,’ he explained, and she saw his chipped and yellowed broken teeth and a red, pock-marked nose, with the pitted skin of childhood smallpox on his face. There was a charcoal stubble on his chin that was collecting the light particles of industrial smog.

But it was his eyes, which had a lustful, fevered and decided look about them that she liked the least.

‘And you?’

‘Valentina,’ she replied, with just enough of a pause to demonstrate she intended no further intimacy.

Suddenly he gripped her arm in his big, greasy hand. He was a powerful man. He didn’t let her go or lighten his grip and she didn’t resist. No matter how much she wanted to – and could have – throw him back on the pitted cement forecourt of the hiring office, she resisted the temptation. She might need him later, certainly. But most of all she couldn’t afford to cross him now and fail to be hired.

She had the training to break his neck in two, or drive his nasal bone into his brain, or any number of lesser moves to render him harmless. But it was certainly not the type of training she could afford to reveal here. Her real training was not the training of a machine operator at a sawmill, but of a highly decorated, former intelligence officer in Russia’s foreign service. A service to which she had become a most hated and most wanted traitor.

So for now, Ivan the foreman might be useful to her. Later, she thought grimly, I’m going to have to deal with him, one way or another.

‘Come with me,’ he said loudly over the top of her head. The volume of his voice boasted his superior, official position. ‘I’ll clear things with the office.’ But still he stood there, looking at her for too long, as before. The leer on his mouth and the glint in his eyes communicated an unmistakable and deeply unwelcome message.

‘I can wait my turn,’ she replied passively. She must be passive, she must be just like the others. She must show no knowledge, no fight, no resistance at all – and above all no special training.

His hand was still on her arm, gripping it too tightly. ‘You’re strong,’ he said, now with some admiration, and feeling the muscles under the jacket. ‘Where did you get to be so strong?’

‘Nothing but work,’ she said dully.

This time, he didn’t pose his words as a question. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and pulled her forcibly out of the line. She followed him ahead of the three people in front of her and meekly entered the darkness of the hiring office.

‘Papers!’ he commanded when they were inside.

She offered him her false internal passport and the false paperwork that qualified her for the job. He took them and threw them on to the table in front of the seated hiring officer, a man with a puffed alcoholic face and running snot on his upper lip, which he wiped from time to time with the sleeve of his coat.

The hiring officer looked bored having to deal with the sickening line of feeble losers in front of him. But she was different, he could see that at once. He looked up questioningly at Ivan with bloodshot eyes.

The foreman just nodded for him to get on with it. The hiring officer exhaled a cloud of bitter smoke from a Kosmos cigarette gripped in the gap between his two front teeth and casually looked through her papers. Then he cast his eyes up at her, lingering too long on her face and on the outline of her breasts, an outline which, despite her baggy overalls and jacket, could still be faintly seen. Finally he took out a form from a drawer in the table, copied her details, and stamped the form with the name of the lumber company. Then he scribbed his initials over the stamp. He winked at Ivan with a lascivious smile, then turned to her.

‘Where are your things?’ he said.

The others in the line mostly carried their possessions with them – as if that were some kind of reinforcement of the hope that they would be on the ship to Igarka.

‘I can get them in a few minutes,’ she said, and she said it with the tone of barely dared hope in her voice that characterised the others.

He pushed the paperwork back across the table to her and she put the documents inside her jacket, zipping the pocket.

‘The boat leaves at five,’ the hiring officer said. ‘It’s the Rossiya . Quay three.’

Just under eleven hours from now, she thought.

Ivan turned to her. ‘I’ll see you on board then.’ The foreman grinned openly now, and the suggestion was clear. But he wasn’t satisfied with just the implicit suggestion. ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ he said. ‘You can be sure I’ll look after you as a woman like you needs to be.’

Then he pushed her out of the door. It was still drizzling.

The foreman’s promise turned her attention to this new danger. If necessary… if necessary she would break his neck, fell him like a tree. She felt nothing of the doubt she had felt four days before at the border.