Alex Dryden: Death in Siberia

The Russians were apparently keeping Kryuchkov to themselves, guarding him closely, afraid perhaps that what he had supposedly discovered would find a way out of Russia. For Vasily Kryuchkov, Anna thought, his genius – if the rumours were true – meant permanent exile under guard and a denial of any further contact with the West.

Once she was rested sufficiently, she unclipped the pitons from a belt around her midriff and took some cordage in her right hand. Then she looked up at the high wall of rock above her and began to climb.

It was long and slow, but she climbed crabwise up a rock face in the darkness. Sometimes there was a ledge she could cling on to, or take a brief rest on, but mostly the face was smooth and she needed the pegs and carabiners to make the agonisingly slow progress. For an hour she ascended and when she looked up there was still a great chunk of the face still to scale. She was tired, unseeing, knowing her way up only through touch. And then suddenly her hand went over the craggy edge at the top and she hauled herself over it and lay panting face down on the ice and rock, too exhausted to think.

But down the other side of the face was another rock wall she would have to descend in similar fashion. At least here she would make progress more quickly with the aid of a rope, and below that was the river again, leveller ground for a while. She would have to do this by climbing, then abseiling, downwards several times, scaling and descending the near impenetrable vertical rock walls. Clouds had appeared. Sleet began to lance down in sharp-angled darts, stinging her face. Then, as she went higher, the sleet turned to snow and the climbing became more treacherous.

Finally, some two hours before dawn, up ahead of where she crouched low on a snowy slab of granite, she saw the black outline she was looking for against the purple sky. It was the old Czarist mud fort Larry and his team had identified from two miles back down the canyon as the border with Russia.

Towards this she now made her way, scrambling over scree slopes and down sharp drops, using the axe sometimes to arrest her accelerating slides, or hammering in more pitons for climbing. Within another hour – almost too late with the dawn beginning to show on the far horizon to the east – she saw that she was close to the fort. Down here in the dark gorge, she had, perhaps, another hour before the light could penetrate.

What she saw as the fort came nearer were its ancient, crumbling mud walls, the beams all rotted and gone long ago, just a roofless frontier post abandoned more than a century before. But it was the place. It was the border and she would get through before dawn came.

She climbed up towards the fort and approached it concealed in the lee of a large rock that towered ten times her height above and around her. When she was almost at the mud walls of the old fort, she rested for the last time behind the rock. She lay on her back behind it and looked up at the sky, where the stars had disappeared behind the low snow clouds which scudded below the higher peaks of the mountains. The clouds would delay the light of the dawn here, just as the high walls of the gorge would. That was good. She sighed with relief from the pain of the climb and with the thought that the first stage was almost done. She lay on her back in the snow and looked with almost total blankness at the snow clouds. One last rest.

It was then that she heard something. To her acute senses, it was an unnatural sound in this emptiest of places.

In the discreet still of the night before the dawn was fully dressed for her appearance, and with the river inaudible three hundred feet below, Anna heard the unmistakable click of an automatic weapon. It was muffled by the steadily falling snow, certainly, but it was a sound she’d heard a thousand times. She sat up, rolled over on her front, her gun drawn at once from its sheath in the back of her coat. The noise seemed to have come from behind her, from where she’d come, from where she’d just made the final ascent towards the fort. But perhaps the sound was reflected off the rocks. She would have to be careful of that. She had no way of perfectly telling where it came from. But the sound was the unmistakable snap of a heavy ammunition clip being shot home.

Instinctively, Anna rolled over to her left in order to avoid the burst of gunfire she expected swiftly to follow.

MILITSIYA LIEUTENANT ALEXEI Petrov opened the door to his kitchen cupboard at 5.15 in the morning, about the same time he did every day of the year. On this particular morning, from the selection of tins and packets on the eye-level shelf he chose a can labelled ‘ ryby ’ – fish – the species of which went unidentified. Probably the scrapings from the bottom of the hold in a factory ship up in the Arctic, he thought. The good stuff – the actual fish – they sold abroad.

Behind him a dented tin kettle half full of water on the gas stove was beginning to simmer and the water was destined for two spoons of loose black tea which waited in a brown china pot on the chipped, faded yellow plastic surface.

As he waited for the water to boil, he took up a stance by the window that to any observer might have had a strange, unearthly grace about it for a tough, stocky Russian police lieutenant. He looked out at the city from his cramped, one-bedroom, eleventh-floor apartment and was completely, consciously relaxed as he did so. He left his arms hanging loosely by his side, his narrow slitted eyes were focused on nothing, and he maintained a steady, almost imperceptible breathing. It was his moment of calm before the day began. Then his mind went to blank.

It was what might be called in polite Western circles his morning meditation. But Petrov had actually learned it from his native Evenk grandfather, Gannyka, a nomadic Siberian who’d lived his whole life in a reindeer-hide tent. And now, Petrov had heard just a few days earlier, the old man was dying, in a deer-hide tent just as he had lived.

It was the second day in June and the sun had already been up since 4 o’clock. With his mind in neutral, he was aware now, through the poisonous yellow smoke that belched from Krasnoyarsk’s smokestacks twenty-four hours a day, that the sun was illuminating the half-dead, polluted city with a dull haze, as if through gauze. He was aware too that the city spread out to the east of where he stood, towards the sun – known as the Eastern Gate to the Evenk people. His meditative consciousness took in the grim industrial surroundings without the judgement or anger, the resentment or bitterness it might otherwise have done.

Thus, militsiya Lieutenant Alexei Petrov began his day and, from this detached beginning, the day’s events would unfold in whatever way they did without those life-destroying mental compulsions his Slav colleagues seemed to be plagued by.

Beneath the window, this quarter – his quarter of the city from the point of view of the ment , or cop, that he was – consisted of decayed workers’ blocks from the Brezhnev era that looked like they’d been hurled petulantly on to the cityscape by dysfunctional gods; a few potholed streets, some of which were more hole than street; some broken concrete structures annexed by drug dealers, meths drinkers and various other addicts – they were decaying humans in a decaying landscape, in other words. But as the lieutenant in charge of this quarter, it was his job to know everyone as closely as he possibly could, including each former convict and each dealer or addict, in order to take pre-emptive action where necessary.

It was a rough place, even by the standards of a rough city. In his quarter, the stall-holders who elsewhere in the city sold newspapers and cigarettes by the packet, or just singly, dared not set up shop for fear of robbery or worse.