Dead or Alive (62 page)

Vitaliy looked at the steel bulkhead forward of the wheel. It was steel, after all, and seven or eight millimeters thick. Enough to stop a bullet. Surely that was enough to stop radiation, wasn’t it? Well, you couldn’t worry about everything.

 

 

I
t was just past sunset when they arrived in the harbor, where things were shutting down. At the big-ship quay a ro-ro ship was about half loaded with cargo boxes for the oil fields to the east, and the longshoremen were walking back to their homes in anticipation of finishing up loading the next day, and water-front bars were cleaning tables for the usual evening business. All in all, a normal sleepy evening for what was, mostly, a sleepy port. Vitaliy eased his boat into the dock, the one with a ramp for loading trucks and trailers onto boats such as his. The dock looked unattended, as was normal, the dockmaster doubtless on his way to one of the bars to drink his dinner.

“Days getting shorter, Captain,” Vanya observed, standing left of the wheel. In another few weeks, they’d hardly see the sun at all, and it would be their winter maintenance period, with nobody chartering their craft. Even the polar bears would be looking for dens in which to sleep out the bitter winter, while humans did much the same, helped along the way by vodka. And one lighthouse would be dark all through the winter, not that it mattered all that much.

“So we can sleep longer, eh, Vanya?”

Always a good way to spend your time,
the deckhand thought.

The charter party was still in the well deck, standing by their truck. Not overly excited about getting back to port, Vitaliy saw. Well, they were businesslike, and that was fine with him. He had half his charter fee in his pocket, and the rest of the cash would join it soon enough, and maybe he would buy the GPS system to ease his navigation, if he could get a good deal for it. Yuriy Ivanov should have a goodly supply of the gadgets at his chandlery, and for a bottle of Starka, maybe he could get a decent bargain in what was still largely a barter economy.

“Stand by the engines, Vanya.”

“As you say, Comrade Captain,” the deckhand responded, heading aft and below.

He’d just beach his craft, Vitaliy decided. The ramp was concrete covered with dirt, and his boat was made for that sort of thing. He carefully lined up and moved it at three or four knots, just about right. The light was fading, but not that fast.

“Stand by,” he said over the intercom.

“Standing by,” Vanya replied the same way.

Vitaliy’s left hand found the throttle but didn’t move it quite yet.
Thirty meters, approach gently,
he told himself.
Twenty meters.
His peripheral vision showed only a fishing boat, sitting idle alongside, with nobody in sight.
Just about . . . now.

It was an awful noise, the sort to set a man’s teeth on edge, and his steel bottom grated on the ramp, but soon enough the noise stopped, and Vitaliy chopped the throttles back to zero/ idle. And the trip and charter were complete.

“Finished with engines, Vanya.”

“Yes, Comrade Captain. Shutting down.” And the rumble stopped.

Vitaliy pulled the wheelhouse ramp-release handle, and the bow ramp fell slowly to the dock. With that done, he walked down to the well deck. The charter party walked to him.

“Thank you, Captain,” their leader said with a smile. He spoke in English, which was accented, though Vitaliy didn’t really notice.

“All is satisfactory?”

“Yes,” the foreigner answered. He spoke in another language to one of his friends, but Vitaliy didn’t understand it. It wasn’t English and wasn’t Russian. It’s hard to identify a language you don’t speak yourself, and as the old joke went, it was Greek to the captain. One party member got into the truck and started it up, then backed it ashore, its cargo dangling from the A-frame crane on the flatbed. In the diminishing light, the triple-triangle radiation-warning label was unusually bright, which was probably intentional. A moment later another truck appeared on the dock, and the former Army truck backed to it. Another member of the charter party activated the crane controls, lifting, then lowering the cargo into the second truck’s cargo area. Whoever these people were, they were reasonably efficient. One must have used a cell phone to call ahead, Vitaliy speculated.

“So here is your money,” the leader said, handing over an envelope.

Vitaliy took it, opened it, and counted off the bills. Two thousand euros, not a bad compensation for what had been a simple enough job. And enough to buy the GPS system, plus some Starka, and a hundred for Vanya, of course.

“Thank you,” Vitaliy said politely, taking his hand. “If you need me again, you know how to contact me.”

“I may come by tomorrow, say, about ten in the morning?”

“We’ll be here,” Vitaliy promised. They’d have to start painting the deckhouse, and tomorrow was as good a day as any other.

“Then I will see you,” the leader promised. Then they shook hands, and he walked ashore.

Onshore, he talked to a companion, speaking now in his native language. “Tomorrow at ten,” he told his most senior subordinate.

“And if the port is busy?”

“We’ll just do it inside,” he explained.

“What time do we meet the plane?”

“Tomorrow at noon.”

“Excellent.”

 

 

 

T
hey showed up just before ten a.m., Vitaliy saw. With the rest of his money, he hoped. Drove a different car this day. A Japanese one. They were taking Russia over. Too many of his countrymen still disliked German hardware, a lingering attitude that probably came less from history than from the war movies that the Russian film industry turned out like cigarette packs.

He was wearing a parka, loose enough for a sweater underneath, and he walked up to the boat with a smile. So, yes, maybe he did have a bonus for him. People usually smiled before giving money over.

“Good morning, Captain,” he called, coming into the wheelhouse. He looked around. Not much activity to be seen, except over at the big-ship pier, where they were on-loading cargo boxes, half a kilometer away. “Where is your mate?”

“Below, tinkering with the motors.”

“Nobody else around?” he asked with some surprise.

“No, we maintain our own craft,” Vitaliy said, reaching for his cup of tea. He didn’t make it. The 9-millimeter round went into his back without warning and transited his heart, back to front, before exiting the chest and his coat. He dropped to the steel deck, hardly grasping what had happened, before he lost consciousness for the last time.

Then the leader of the erstwhile charter party walked down the ladder to the engine room, where Vanya, as reported, was working on the manifold for the starboard engine. He hardly looked up from his tools and never saw the gun come up and fire. Two shots this time, right into the chest, from a range of three meters. When he became certain that his target was dead, Musa pocketed the pistol and walked back up. Vitaliy’s body was facedown on the deck. Musa checked the carotid pulse, and there was nothing, and with his mission completed, he walked out of the wheelhouse and down the ladder, pausing to turn and wave to the body in the wheelhouse in case anyone saw him alight, then forward and down the ramp to where his rented car was waiting for him. He had a map to guide him to the local airport, and soon enough his time in this infidel country would be at an end.

T
HEY WERE UP SHORTLY after six the next day, gathering their equipment on deck while the grizzled old Salychev sipped his coffee and looked on. The previous day’s wind had died away, leaving the bay flat and calm, save a soft lapping against the rocks half a kilometer away. The sky hadn’t changed from the day before, however, remaining the same leaden color it had been since they’d arrived in Russia.

When all the gear was assembled, Adnan double-checked it against his mental list, then ordered everything packed into four large external-frame backpacks. Next came their two rafts, inflated. They were black and looked ancient, but the transom-mounted trolling motors were in good repair and there were neither patches nor leaks, of this Adnan had made sure when he’d purchased them. Once the rafts were up to full pressure, the men began inserting the deck planks into their notches.

“Wait, wait,” Salychev said. “That’s the wrong way.” He walked over and removed one of the planks and flipped it around, matching its end curve with the raft’s deck flange. “Like that, see?”

“Thank you,” Adnan said. “Does it make a difference?”

“Depends on whether you want to live or die, I suppose,” the captain replied. “The way you had it, the bottoms would’ve folded up on you like a clam. You would’ve been in the water before you knew it.”

“Oh.”

Five minutes later, the rafts were fully assembled. The men dropped them over the side, then tied off the bow painters to the Halmatic’s stern cleats. Next came the motors, then the equipment bags, then the men. Adnan climbed over gunwale last. “We’ll be back before dark,” he told Salychev.

“And if you’re not?”

“We will.”

Salychev shrugged. “Don’t want to get caught out there at night—not unless you got arctic gear hidden away in those bags.”

“We’ll be back,” Adnan repeated. “Make sure you’re here.”

“That’s what you’re paying me for.”

 

I
f not for the drifting growlers and barely submerged pancake ice, the trip to shore would have taken ten minutes, but it was nearly forty minutes before the nose of the lead raft scraped on the pebble-strewn beach. The rafts were pulled onto higher ground and the backpacks unloaded. In turn, Adnan helped each man don his pack, then shouldered his own.

“Inhospitable,” one of the men said, looking around.

Aside from a line of smooth brown cliffs four kilometers to the east, the ground was flat, covered in stones, clumps of brown grass, and a thin crust of snow that crunched under their boots.

“What about the rafts?” another man asked.

“We’ll tow them,” Adnan said. “The stones are smooth enough.”

“How far is it?” another asked.

“Six kilometers,” Adnan answered. “Let’s go.”

They set off, following the shoreline north and east, keeping the bay on their left until it narrowed to a mere hundred meters and curved south around the headland, where the channel turned parallel to the cliffs they’d spotted from their landing site. Up close, Adnan could see that the cliffs were actually sharply sloped hills, their faces grooved by centuries or millennia of snow runoff and wind. After another two kilometers of walking, the channel suddenly widened into a second bay, this one a rough oval measuring two square kilometers.

The ships had been moored with neither care nor order, Adnan could see, some listing against their neighbors, others with bows and sterns abutting one another at odd angles, while still others had been grounded by tugboats to make room for new arrivals. All were civilian in origin, mostly dry cargo carriers and tenders and repair vessels, but they ranged in size from thirty to two hundred meters, some so old their hulls were rusted through in spots.

“How many are there?” one of the men asked, staring.

“Eighteen, give or take,” Adnan replied.

It was a rough estimate to be sure, based on their own intelligence, but probably as close as the Russian government could itself come. This bay had become an unofficial graveyard in the mid-’80s as the arms race with the West began to take its toll on the Soviet financial infrastructure and more and more corners were trimmed in favor of military expenditures. It was cheaper to strip and abandon decommissioned ships than it was to properly scrap them. This was just one of dozens of maritime graveyards in the Barents and Kara seas, most of them full of ships that had simply been recorded in a ledger somewhere along with the notation “moored, pending dismantling.” Adnan hadn’t been told how the graveyards had come to the attention of his superiors, nor did he know the details of what would soon be seen as the most costly administrative error in modern history.