Alex Dryden: Death in Siberia

A look of concern crossed his face.

‘I should come with you, Anna. It would be safer.’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘You have something far more important here… if I don’t make it.’

Petrov nodded.

‘We have an Evenki saying,’ he said. ‘“The deer and the wolf do not follow the same path”.’ He paused. Then he smiled at her. ‘I think I’m the deer.’

Finally, he gave her bags of food and then a bag made of grass. She looked inside it and saw a sea of red, with circular metal discs sewn into it, and feathers she thought were an eagle’s sewn on to the coat’s sleeves.

‘It was my grandfather’s coat,’ he told her. ‘He was a great shaman. It will keep you safe.’

And this seemed to Petrov now a perfectly natural statement.

THE RUSTED HULL of the freighter Rosa Mundi , out of Hamburg, picking up timber from the port of Dikson, followed the path cut through the ice floes of the Kara Strait by the Russian nuclear ice-breaker a quarter of a mile ahead.

Larry stood at the stern, the bridge of the vessel between him and the Russian ship. The ice-breaker was certainly necessary, but he knew that on board would also be officials whose job it was to make sure nobody got on or off the freighter. They were well inside Russian waters.

On the left of the freighter now was the island of Novaya Zemlya, that curved like a dented and damaged gibbous moon towards the North Pole. Ahead was the Kara Sea and the Gulf of Yenisei. They’d reached the point.

He turned and shouted an order.

A boat was winched from the opened hold below. It was attached to the stern davits and Larry, with four other men, one a medic, the other three former special forces officers like himself, climbed up a ladder and into the boat. This was the crucial moment.

As the Rosa Mundi passed the first promontory of the long, curving island, the boat was lowered from the davits over the stern of the freighter, out of sight of the Russian ice-breaker. If the captain did his job right, and turned slightly south, presenting more of the freighter’s port side to the ice-breaker ahead of it, Larry and the others would be shielded from sight by the freighter until they could reach the cover of a rocky point on the south-westernmost part of the island.

The boat was fitted with a jet engine beneath the hull, and old twin outboards at the stern, for travelling near inhabited areas, or in case they encountered other Russian vessels, or spotter planes or search helicopters.

All five men onboard the aluminium boat, disguised as a small fishing vessel, were Russian speakers, all carried false papers that named them as five of the two thousand or so inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya, and the boat was fitted with nets, net-haulers for fishing, and the usual winches and grabbers a small fishing vessel of its kind would be equipped with. All five men were dressed in the regular gear of Arctic Russian fishermen. There was even a refrigerated hold that contained fish they’d supposedly caught. But in the false floor of the boat was an array of weapons and ammunition that could fight a small war.

It was the third attempt to pick her up and Larry had been on both of the previous ones. But Burt was determined that the northernmost pick-up point would be the one she came to. And Larry would keep returning until either he found her or he was blown out of the water by a Russian naval patrol boat.

They reached the rocky promontory of the island and saw that, every inch of the way from the freighter, they’d been shielded from the Russian vessel by the brief and tiny change of course the Rosa Mundi had made. And they now began to track their way north, as the other two bigger vessels turned south. They were making their way up the western coastline of Novaya Zemlya and towards the thin Matochkin Strait that cut the island in two. This was the slowest part of the journey, under the power of the twin outboards. But once they were through the Matochkin Strait, and to the east of Novaya Zemlya, out of sight of the island, they would enable the jet engines that would carry them through the relatively calm seas at seventy knots and weave them through the floes and growlers that were coming up from the Yenisei, or down from the Pole.

And as they made their passage half a mile off its western coast, Larry pondered the island for the third time; in 1961, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated – the Tsar Bomba – had been exploded here and caused an earthquake that reached nearly 7 on the Richter Scale. But over the years, from the 1950s onwards, nuclear weapons had been detonated on the island with a force equivalent to 265 megatons of TNT. By comparison, all the explosives used in World War Two, including the American atomic bombs, were equivalent to just two megatons of TNT. The island and its subterranean caverns had been bombed to pieces.

They reached the narrow Matochkin Strait without incident and turned to the right, making their steady way through the centre of the island until they reached its eastern shore that looked towards mainland Siberia. Then, for mile after mile, they kept their speed regular on the power of the outboards alone, the boat’s fishing nets ready to be off-loaded from side davits if they needed to look busy. But once they were out of sight of Novaya Zemlya and there were no other vessels as far as the horizon, and nothing in the air to see them, the jet engine came on. They would reach the rock and ice coastline they were looking for, to the east of the Gulf of Yenisei on Siberia’s northernmost coast, in less than four hours.

The monotony of the aluminium boat’s slamming against the light waves became a thing that was part of the men. But all the time, the horizon was scanned with high-powered binoculars in case of the presence of another vessel or plane. They encountered nothing, except the bergs and floes, some as tall as tower blocks, others that lurked dangerously close to the waterline. And finally, they saw where the coast of northern Siberia curved to the east, reaching out five thousand miles, eventually as far as Alaska. They were fifty miles north of the port of Dikson where the freighter and its escort were headed.

From here they hugged the coast, once more on the boat’s outboards even though the coastline was uninhabited. But it was too much of a risk to use the jets in sight of land. For another four hours, they dodged from bay to bay, curved from promontory to promontory, following the jagged flow of the coast and, in doing so, shielding themselves from whatever danger might lie ahead around the next corner. They were giving themselves time and the chance to see anything untoward before they were upon it.

Finally, Larry told the steersman to take the boat on to a small spit of ice-covered shingle. It was the bay before the pick-up point and he wanted to reconnoitre before exposing them to whatever lay beyond, stay behind the cover of more iced rock. He wanted to land, and look, crawl up the gentle ice and rock slope and carefully spy over the ridge at the top and survey the place where he hoped she’d be.

And, at that moment, one of the others, an eagle-eyed twenty year old with a marksman’s accuracy, saw something. He immediately waved his arm frantically downwards at the steersman, while still staring straight ahead, never taking his eyes away from what he’d seen.

The boat slowed to a near halt, the outboards quietening to a low rumble. The twenty year old gave Larry binoculars and Larry saw at once what he’d seen with his naked eye, through the glasses.

There was a chain, at an angle, coming up from the water. It was the chain of a boat at anchor, the boat to which it was attached out of sight beyond the rock wall ahead. If the wind hadn’t been blowing lightly from the north, the boat would not have been pushed inland towards the shore and they would have been seen by the people on it at the same time as they saw it.