Dark Watch

13

ANTON Savich was relieved he had only one more flight to take to finally reach his destination. It had taken days to arrive at Elyzovo Airport outside Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, the regional capital of the Kamchatka Peninsula on Russia’s far east coast.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, or PK, as it was commonly referred to, had been closed to the outside world until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and the ensuing years had brought little improvement. Nearly every building was made of concrete using ash from the 1945 eruption of the nearby Avachinsky volcano, so the city of a quarter million had a drab uniformity that went beyond its boxy Soviet architecture. Its streets hadn’t been paved in decades, and its economy was in ruins because the military, which had once supported the city, had mostly withdrawn. Surrounded by towering snowcapped peaks at the head of beautiful Avacha Bay, PK was a dismal stain of a place where residents stayed only because they lacked the inertia to move.

The entire Kamchatka Peninsula had once been controlled by the Soviet military. Sophisticated radar stations dotted the rugged landscape to watch for incoming American ICBMs. There were several air force bases for intercepting American bombers, and it was the home of the Pacific Submarine Fleet. Kamchatka was also the designated landing site for Soviet ballistic missiles test-fired from the west. Today the subs of the Pacific Fleet rusted away at the Rybachi Naval Base in the southern reach of Avacha Bay; several were so badly deteriorated that they’d sunk at their moorings, their tubes still loaded with torpedoes and their nuclear reactors still fueled. The radar stations had been abandoned, and planes remained grounded at the air bases for lack of parts and aviation gas. In the wake of the military withdrawal, countless sites had been left so polluted that even brief exposure would cause severe illness.

It wasn’t the military presence that had first drawn Anton Savich to Kamchatka more than two decades ago. It was the geology. Kamchatka had risen from the sea two and a half million years ago, first as a volcanic archipelago like Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The sea quickly wore these mountains flat, but the land rose again, driven by endless reserves of molten rock from deep underground. Kamchatka was an arc within the Ring of Fire, a circle of volcanoes and earthquake zones that mark the boundaries of the vast Pacific tectonic plate. Twenty-nine of the more than 150 volcanic peaks on the peninsula were active, most notably Karymsky, which had been erupting continuously since 1996, and now an unnamed volcano in the center of the peninsula had started belching plumes of ash and steam.

Driven by economic necessity in the 1980s, the Soviet Union initiated a program of exploration and exploitation. To face Reagan’s unprecedented military buildup, the Soviets scrambled to find the raw materials to feed the growing demand of their own military-industrial complex. These were the last salvos of the Cold War, fought not with bullets and bombs but with factories and resources. It was a fight the Soviet Union ultimately lost, but huge reserves of minerals such as coal, iron ore, and uranium were discovered in the process.

Anton Savich had been a young field researcher for the Bureau of Natural Resources, the agency tasked by the Central Committee to find all the wealth buried within the Soviet borders. He had come to prospect the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1986 with two other field men under the guidance of a geology professor from Moscow University, Akademik Yuri Strakhov.

The team spent four months scouring the peninsula from helicopters and all-terrain vehicles provided by the Red Army. Because of the active geology, it was felt there might be diamonds on Kamchatka, although they found no trace minerals to back Moscow’s belief. What they found instead was just as valuable.

Savich recalled the days they’d camped at the foot of the reef, chipping samples by day and imagining the possibilities at night. They speculated as though what they found belonged to them, but of course it didn’t. In likelihood they would receive commendations for their find, and maybe vouchers for larger apartments.

He wasn’t sure who suggested it first; perhaps it was Savich himself, though it didn’t really matter. Somehow the idea came up, mentioned as a joke at first for sure, but soon they discussed it in earnest. The rain had finally stopped that night, Savich remembered, which was unusual. They passed a bottle of vodka, which wasn’t unusual. You couldn’t get decent toilet paper in Moscow, but the state could keep you well-stocked in liquor five hundred kilometers from the nearest town.

Why report the find? someone had asked. Why tell anyone about it? Only the four of them knew the truth, and no one would prospect this area ever again once they filed their reports. They could return to Moscow, go about their lives for a few years, and then return and mine the reef themselves. They’d all be rich.

Savich stepped from the Ilyushin jetliner at PK’s Elyzovo Airport, smiling as he recalled their naïveté. Akademik Strakhov allowed them to carry on for an hour or two before bringing them back to reality. He never told them it was wrong, what they wanted to do, for even the respected professor couldn’t help his greed. But he also knew what they discussed was idle fantasy. It took just a few words to explain how they would never be allowed to return to Kamchatka, and even if they managed, how it was impossible for the four of them to mine enough material to make any sort of impact on their lives. He went on to tell them how world markets actually operated and how they would never be able to sell the ore they’d dug from the earth. He’d quickly cooled their ardor and dashed their hopes. The vodka went flat on their tongues.

Savich remembered that at that very moment the rain had started again. Strakhov doused their hissing gas lantern and for a few minutes the men listened to the rain pelt their canvas tent before crawling into their sleeping bags. He was sure the rest of them continued to think of the possibilities as they drifted to sleep. Many minutes passed before he heard their breathing settle into somnolence. All except his own. He had intuitively realized that with one additional element their plan would work: Time.

They were thinking in terms of years. He knew that it would be decades before anyone could come back. No one could return until the entire communist government had collapsed and capitalism took root in the Rodina. Maybe they couldn’t consider such an event, but Savich already knew it was an inevitability. Propaganda couldn’t shorten breadlines or produce spare parts for automobiles, and eventually the leadership would just stop trying. He predicted a quiet implosion, not revolution, but eventually the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its own inefficiency. If he managed to position himself for that day, then all the other pieces could fall into place.

There was one more component that the others hadn’t envisioned — that Savich had no intention of sharing his eventual wealth with any of them.

Their extraction helicopter wasn’t due for another four days, more than enough time for him to put his plan into action. They had been assigned a sixty-kilometer-square search area and had been autonomous since their arrival five weeks earlier. When it arrived from PK, the chopper would fly box patterns across the grid and wait until the team launched flares to pinpoint their exact location.

Savich had to get the team as far away from their strike as possible, but Strakhov would want to keep them where they were until the helicopter came, ready to bask in the glory of their find. Without a weapon to compel them to move on, Savich would have to act now in order to get away from the site.

He lay in his bag for another couple of hours. It wasn’t guilt or remorse that made him wait. He just wanted the team as deep into sleep as possible. He rose at four, the night’s darkest hour, and by the glow of a penlight he opened their medical case. The supplies were rudimentary: bandages, antiseptic, some antibiotics, and a half dozen syringes of morphine.

Black flies were so prevalent that the men no longer bothered to swat them away or react to their nasty stings. Each of them was so covered in angry red welts from numerous bites that their arms, ankles, and faces were mottled red.

Savich emptied the morphine from one of the syringes into the ground and drew back the plunger to fill the cylinder with air. Mikhail was the biggest man on the survey team, a heavyset Ukrainian who had once been a wrestling champion in Kiev. Savich thought nothing of it as he sank the fine needle into Mikhail’s throat where the carotid artery pulsed faintly. He slowly depressed the plunger, sending a lethal bubble of air into the wrestler’s bloodstream. So used to the flies, Mikhail hadn’t even felt the small sting. Savich waited just a few seconds before the bubble became an embolism inside the man’s brain and he stroked out silently. He repeated the procedure twice more. Only old Yuri Strakhov struggled at the end. His eyes flew open at the prick of the needle. Savich clamped his hand over his mouth and pressed his weight on the geologist’s chest, pumping the air into his artery with a savage thrust. Strakhov thrashed for just a brief moment before he went limp.

By the light of the gas lantern, Savich thought about his next move. He recalled that about five kilometers closer to the coast was a tall, steeply angled slope covered in talus and scree. The footing was treacherous, and a careless man could slide nearly a kilometer to its base. A tumble down the slope would do enough damage to a corpse to dissuade even the most iron-stomached forensic doctor in the unlikely event there would be an autopsy.

That first night Anton Savich went through his teammates’ notebooks and field journals. He tore out any page that made reference to the strike or any observation about terrain or geology from after they’d trekked past the gravel-strewn hillside. He excised everything that could be questioned during the investigation and made certain none of the journals mentioned anything interesting in their current search grid. He doctored his own journal to make it appear they had covered more ground than they had so no one would have reason to return here. At dawn he began to carry the sleeping bags containing the bodies to the top of the slope. The Ukrainian, Mikhail, was too heavy to shoulder, so he fashioned a litter out of branches and straps from a backpack and dragged the corpse. He was exhausted and drenched in sweat and cursed himself for not waiting until the next day to move the last body. Rather than return to camp in the darkness, he spent a miserable night huddled next to his victims.

On the second day he broke down their tent and portaged all their gear to the slope. He had to repack the camping equipment and load it into the assigned backpacks before securing the packs to the bodies. He decided to wait until dawn the next day before tumbling the bodies down the slope. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to watch the men disintegrate against the sharp rocks but he needed to know where they landed. Only Professor Strakhov carried the flares he would need to alert the chopper coming in the next afternoon.

Mikhail went down the slope after Savich had a hearty breakfast of coffee, tinned meat, and a can of Crimean oranges. He watched through binoculars as the body first rolled, then tumbled, and as it picked up speed, began to cartwheel. Centrifugal forces caused blood to spray from numerous deep gashes, and limbs became rubbery after breaking against the stones. If possible, the other two were even more mutilated by the fall.

He took more than an hour to pick his way down the mountainside, scraping meat from his hands so they stung from his own sweat. Once at the bottom he removed gear and food from the packs and emptied a few tins so it would look like he’d been at the bottom of the hill for days.

When he estimated the helicopter was an hour away, he injected the two remaining morphine syringes into his arm and waited as the narcotic took effect. When he sensed a creeping numbness working its way up his extremities, Savich took a deep breath. To make things as authentic as possible it didn’t seem right that three men died during the fall while he merely scraped up his hands.

Leaning against a rock outcrop he grasped a stone nearly the size of his head and held it as high as he could. He lay his left arm against the hunk of basalt and before he could give himself time to reconsider, he smashed the stone against his arm. The radius and ulna cracked audibly, and Savich bellowed in pain. Fueled by adrenaline and morphine he then took up a smaller stone and pounded it against his head hard enough to split the skin. Spittle drizzled from his slack lips as he fought the waves of agony and prayed for the drug to deaden the pain.

He was nearly unconscious when he heard the helicopter in the distance, and it took several tries to launch the flare. The arcing ball of white phosphorus rose on a column of smoke and must have been spotted immediately. The next thing Savich remembered was a hospital bed in Petropavlovsk.

The inquiry was perfunctory. The grisly scene the chopper crew described mirrored Savich’s account of the slope giving way as the men crossed it and how they all tumbled to the valley floor. The investigator was amazed Savich had only sustained a mild concussion, a few scrapes and bruises, and a broken arm.

“Just lucky, I guess,” he’d told the man as he’d closed his book of notes on the case.

Savich rubbed his left forearm as he crossed the tarmac to the airport terminal. In the past few years it had started to ache a bit on damp days. Maybe not quite as disquieting as Poe’s Telltale Heart, but a reminder of his deeds nevertheless.

The immigration agent recognized him in the queue and motioned him to the head of the line. A few locals grumbled, but no one challenged him.

“Back again, Mr. Savich?” the friendly guard asked, pocketing the twenty-dollar bill Savich had folded into his passport.

“I could get some work done back at my office in Moscow if your damn volcanoes would stop erupting.”

“It’s the gomuls,” the guard replied with an air of mock conspiracy. “They’re the native spirits who hunt whales at night and return to the mountains to roast the meat on giant fires.”

“When I find whale bones in a volcanic caldera, I’ll blame the gomuls, my friend. For now I suspect it’s tectonic activity.”

Savich had returned to Moscow following his recovery in the hospital and lived and maintained his silence concerning his find, all the while continuing his work for the Bureau of Natural Resources. He led an unremarkable life through the waning days of the Soviet Union and managed to keep his position secure during its collapse. In the wild aftermath he had actively sought foreign contacts, cultivating some he thought would eventually allow him to see his plan to fruition.

His chance had come through a Swiss metallurgist he’d met at a symposium who in turn eventually led Savich to the banker, Bernhard Volkmann, and the current deal he had under way. Backed by Volkmann, and using the companies controlled by the loathsome Shere Singh, Anton Savich had returned to Kamchatka countless times over the past year, laying the necessary groundwork under the cover of a volcanologist. With the numerous eruptions all across Kamchatka, he had become a common sight at the airport and maintained a standing reservation at the Avacha Hotel, just a short walk up Leningradskaya Street from what was possibly the only Lenin Square in Russia still dedicated to Lenin.

He collected his bags and went straight to a counter run by a heliski company. The sport had grown popular along the rugged peaks of the peninsula, and there were several companies willing to take skiers up the mountains by chopper. The company, Air Adventures, actually did book ski trips to maintain legitimacy, but it was a dummy company Savich had funded through Volkmann in order to have rapid but unobtrusive transportation to the site. A private helicopter at Elyzovo would have drawn too much attention.

The woman behind the counter put away a Japanese fashion magazine when she saw him approach. Her smile was fake and perfunctory. He didn’t recognize her, and he certainly didn’t look like a thrill-seeking tourist.

“Welcome to Air Adventures,” she greeted in English.

“My name is Savich,” he grunted. “Where’s Pytor?”

Her eyes registered surprise, then fear, as she blanched. She vanished into a curtained-off section of the kiosk. A moment later, Savich’s pilot, Pytor Federov, stepped from around the curtain. He wore an olive drab flight suit and retained the cocky air he’d earned over the missile-filled skies of Afghanistan.

“Mr. Savich, good to see you. I assumed you’d go to your hotel for the night and we would fly out in the morning.”

“Hello, Pytor. No. I want to see this latest eruption for myself before it gets dark,” Savich replied in case anyone was paying attention.

“Say the word, and I’ll file a flight plan.”

“Consider it said.”

Forty minutes later they were a racing down a twisting valley. The rugged mountains flanking the Air Adventure’s MI-8 helicopter towered some eight thousand feet above them. Several peaks on the Kamchatka Peninsula topped fifteen thousand. The air was hazy with fine ash particles from the eruption farther north. Even with headphones it was difficult to speak in the forty-year-old chopper, so for the two hours it took to get to the site, Savich was content to let the landscape unfold around him.

He hadn’t drifted off to sleep, the helo was too loud, but his mind had gone so blank he was surprised when Federov tapped him and pointed ahead. He hadn’t been aware that they were about to arrive.

From above and at a distance, the area looked pristine except for the spreading brown stain that bloomed in the black waters of the Gulf of Shelekhov. A ring of containment booms had been strung along the coastline, but sediment from the workings drifted far beyond their reach. The reason the site looked so good was that much of it was hidden by acres of tarps strung atop metal poles. The tarps had been painted to look like snow, and the ash that had drifted onto the upper surface furthered the illusion. The ships had been beached and had also been camou-flaged, first with dirt and rock from the workings and then with more fabric coverings to break up their shapes.

The only sign of life for a hundred miles was the thin wisps of smoke that coiled from the ships’ funnels to provide heat and warm food for the workers.

Savich looked out to sea. A trawler was returning to the site, its wake a fat wedge, for she ran low under the weight of her catch.

With the ship’s bunkers full of fuel, fresh water available from a nearby glacial river, and food provided by a pair of trawlers, the site could remain self-sufficient for months, perhaps years. He was rightly proud of his accomplishment, but then he’d had half a lifetime to refine every detail.

All except one, Savich thought grimly. There was one obstacle he hadn’t been able to easily overcome, a commodity the site used up at a voracious pace and was the most difficult to replace.

Federov had radioed ahead, so the site manager was at the helipad to greet Savich when he stepped from the chopper into the biting cold wind. It was May, but the arctic circle was only four hundred miles north.

“Welcome back, Anton,” greeted Jan Paulus, a broadly built South African mine engineer.

The two shook hands and headed for a waiting four-wheel-drive. “Do you want to go see the workings?” Paulus asked, putting the truck in gear.

Savich had seen that aspect of the project just once and never wanted to repeat the experience. “No. Let’s go to your office. I have a decent bottle of Scotch in my bag.” The Russian didn’t much care for his site manager but knew he had to keep the man happy. Of course, Paulus’s five million dollar salary did more for their relationship than the occasional drink.

The three ships they’d brought north and beached below the site were all old cruise liners that Shere Singh had provided through his ship-breaking business. Though past their prime, they were functional and served Savich’s needs perfectly. Paulus had ensconced himself in the Ambassador Suite of a 380-foot cruise ship that had once plied the Aegean.

The gold and blue décor had once been considered chic, but the carpets were worn and scarred with cigarette burns, the furniture scuffed, and the fixtures tarnished. Savich used the bathroom and when he flushed, a god-awful stench erupted from the toilet. His image in the mirror appeared sepia because the glass had lost much of its backing.

Paulus was seated on the couch in the suite’s living room when Savich returned. He’d already filled two tumblers with the Russian’s Scotch. “There was an accident on one of the drydocks.”

Savich paused in mid-sip. “Which one?”

“The Maus. Two of your Spetsnaz commandos decided to ignore procedure and walk across the tarp covering the hold. The fabric gave way, and both fell to their deaths.”

The Russian took a sip of his drink. “Any sign they were, ah, helped?”

“No. Your men swept the drydock and the ship in her hold as soon as the pair didn’t return from the patrol. No one had come aboard, and there were no signs of struggle. The only vessel nearby was an Iranian-flagged freighter, so unless the mullahs in Tehran got wind of our little operation, I doubt they’re involved.”

Savich cursed under his breath. All the men he’d hired to guard the ships were ex–special forces, the vaunted Spetsnaz. It went against their considerable training to deviate from a patrol route, but he could also understand why they might. Once they’d seized their prize, maintaining a high sense of alertness guarding a quiet ship at sea would be nearly impossible. He could easily imagine them cutting their perimeter patrol by crossing over the hold. It was a careless mistake that would teach the others vigilance in the future.

He considered this an unfortunate accident and put it out of his mind. “How is everything going here?”

The South African had horrible teeth, so his smile looked like a gray grimace. “Couldn’t be better. The reef you found has the highest assay I’ve ever seen. Hell, this whole region is loaded with minerals. Production is above expectations by twelve percent, and we’re still working the alluvial beds downslope. We haven’t even started in on the main strike.”

“When do you anticipate sending out the first shipment?”

“Sooner than I expected, actually. The Souri is scheduled to arrive in ten days. Because of her cargo, she’s carrying a triple complement of guards, so I want to send it out when she heads back south.”

“That should work out. I spoke with Volkmann two days ago. The processing center is ready. The last of the correct dies and stamps came in this week.”

“And the banks will take delivery?”

“As soon as possible.”

Paulus freshened their drinks and held his glass up for a toast. “Here’s to greed and stupidity. Find that combination in the right group of people, and it can make you very rich.”

Anton Savich could drink to that.