Ben Stewart - Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg

‘What you doing? What is this?’

‘Cards.’

The Russian jumps down from his bed. ‘Cards? What do you mean cards? No, no, no. Nyet , nyet . Kartser . You go to kartser . Me too.’

Kartser . It’s the cooler. The punishment cell. And Boris is saying if you get found with those then we’re all shafted, we’re all going to the cooler. So the cards get put away, ten o’clock comes along, the lights go down, the road starts cooking. Frank writes a note to Dima.

Fuck man I’ve been officially fucking charged with two-two-seven. Are you charged with two-two-seven? What is it? Is it Piracy?

Ten minutes later there are three thumps on the wall. Boris pulls in the sock and hands a note to Frank.

Yeah man we’re all being charged. Everyone, all thirty. This is a good thing, this means things are starting to happen man!

Frank’s kneeling on his bed when he reads Dima’s note. It takes a moment for its full meaning to sink in. He’s not being singled out. It’s not just him. He scrunches up the note in his hand and falls forward on the mattress then pulls the sheet over his head. He’s wasted so much energy fighting the fear, thinking it’s just him, but now the panic has passed. A minute later he’s gently snoring into the pillow.

A stranger is standing in the doorway of Roman Dolgov’s cell holding a clipboard. A chubby little man with a bushy moustache. He’s not in uniform, instead he’s wearing a shiny blue acrylic tracksuit.

‘You,’ he says. ‘Stand up.’

‘I’m sorry, who are you?’

‘Popov. I’m the governor. The new chief. Arrived today. I’m in charge. And you are…’ He glances down at his clipboard. ‘Dolgov. One of the pirates, yes?’

Roman stands up. ‘No. I’m not.’

The man appears surprised. He consults his clipboard again then looks up. ‘Oh, I think you are.’

‘Have you read the law? The law on piracy?’

The man scowls. ‘Of course I have. You think they let someone run a place like this if they don’t know the damn law?’

‘I think you’ll find that law is not applicable to us.’

The man’s mouth screws up. His nostrils flare. ‘I think you’ll find I don’t give a fuck what you think. You probably think you’re going to be a handful for me. Well let me tell you, I’ve dealt with a lot worse. You lot are pussycats compared to my usual stock.’

‘That platform was not a ship. It’s attached to the seabed. Legally you can only commit piracy on a ship.’

The man nods over Roman’s shoulder. ‘But those bars are bars, and really that’s all that counts.’

He smiles, and Roman sees the flash of a gold tooth.

‘And the law is the law, no?’

‘Look, arsehole, I really don’t want to have you here for a year before you go to the labour camp, but it’s not looking good for you. And as long as you’re here, I’ll be here too. Best if you get used to the hierarchy, eh?’

And with that he raps his clipboard with a pen and swings the door closed.

SIZO-1 has its own code of ethics. A prisoner never sits down on a cellmate’s bunk. But the first thing Popov does when he bursts into Andrey’s cell is to sit on his bed and bark, ‘Why the hell did you bring these people to us?’

‘I’m sorry, who are you?’

‘I’m the governor of this place. I run this prison.’

‘Right.’

‘Why did you bring them here?’

‘To whom are you referring?’

‘The foreigners . You’ve got an American, a Brazilian, Argentines, Frenchies. Six British. Six! Why the hell bring them to Russia, eh?’

‘It was actually the authorities who brought them here.’

Popov snorts and rolls his eyes. ‘Well we don’t need that sort in Russia. Damn foreigners. What use do we have for Americans and all that lot, telling us what to do?’

A few minutes later Alex’s cell door opens. She stands up. A man walks in. He’s wearing a blue tracksuit. He looks around. Then suddenly his expression freezes, his eyes narrow, he points at the waste bin and explodes with rage. He’s screaming in Russian. Alex flinches. She looks down and sees some leftover bread she threw away. Her feet shuffle backwards but a moment later she pulls back her shoulders, takes a step forward and shouts, ‘I don’t speak Russian, okay? I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

The man sniffs. He jabs his finger at the waste bin and yells in her face. Alex feels her legs shaking. ‘It’s not a problem with my hearing,’ she says. ‘I just don’t understand Russian.’ The man lifts his chin and stands on his toes, trying to look down his nose at her, but he’s not tall enough. Instead he’s standing before her like a ballet dancer affecting the demeanour of a dying swan. He spins on the ball of his foot and flounces through the open door. A moment later it slams closed.

By the time the road is up and running, the arrival of the new governor is all anyone can talk about. The Russians say he’s been transferred from a prison in the north Caucasus, where he presided over separatist rebels from Chechnya and Dagestan. Rumour has it he ran a strict regime but got so many death threats he had to be moved.

It was a spring afternoon in 2010, three and a half years before commandos seized the Arctic Sunrise . BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform was gushing tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, [42] http://www.whoi.edu/oil/deepwater-horizon and a group of Greenpeace campaigners were meeting in a Turkish restaurant in north London to discuss their response to the unfolding disaster.

John Sauven, the executive director of the UK office, surprised his colleagues by saying the reaction shouldn’t even focus on BP or the Gulf Coast. From the inside pocket of his jacket he pulled a page from the Financial Times and unfolded the sheet of pink paper on the table. He’d circled a story detailing the plans of a British company, Cairn Energy, to explore for oil off the coast of Greenland.

‘Imagine if a Deepwater Horizon happened in the Arctic,’ he said. ‘What we’re seeing in America would be nothing compared to that. Arctic oil, that’s where the frontline is. That’s where we need to be.’

He said the lack of sunlight and the near freezing sea temperatures off Greenland meant oil spilled into the Arctic wouldn’t break down in the way it did in the warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico. [43] P.J. v Brandvik, K.R. Sørheim, I. Singsaas and M. Reed ‘Short State-of-the-Art Report on Oil Spills in Ice-Infested Waters: Oil Behaviour and Response Options’, SINTEF , 19 May 2006. When Deepwater Horizon suffered a blowout, the only way to plug the leak was to drill a relief well (a process that eventually took many weeks, by which time several million barrels of oil had been spilled [44] http://ocean.si.edu/gulf-oil-spill ). But in the Arctic, when the winter ice returns, the sea is covered in a sheet of white that would prevent the drilling of a relief well, meaning a blowout could see oil leaching into a fragile marine ecosystem for months, [45] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/13/energy-arctic-idUSL6N0NZ3GV20140513 even years. That oil would then gather in a black toxic soup under the ice and be carried by the currents around the pole, to eventually be deposited in pristine waters many thousands of miles away.

Sauven folded up the sheet of newspaper and proposed a plan. He said he wanted to requisition one of the Greenpeace ships and sail it north to challenge Cairn’s drilling programme. He wanted to use direct action to halt the company’s operations for as long as possible.