December (5 page)

Alex nodded; he could see what Sergey was saying and how it would open up conflict at an élite level.

‘OK, so who’s on your faction?’

Sergey grinned. ‘Well, officially I’m on no one’s. Krymov thinks he’s my best friend and,’ he made an equivocating gesture with his hand, ‘despite what I said, I like him. We’re drinking buddies and he laughs at my jokes, so he doesn’t take me seriously and just lets me drift around making money. I don’t harm anyone. I’m safely neutral, you see, plus I am a businessman—I started out on a market stall—so I can actually run businesses, which the
siloviki
can’t, so sometimes it’s helpful for them to put a strategic sector in neutral hands. That’s why I’ve got ownership of all the TV stations—it was easier to give them to a fool like me than start a huge fight between different groups.’

Alex saw a contradiction in Sergey’s motivation and looked at him quizzically. ‘But you’re making a lot of money out of all this?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Sergey nodded, unashamed.

‘So why are you starting a coup?’

‘Because Russia deserves better than this,’ he smiled, ‘Alexander…’ He frowned. ‘What’s your father’s name?’

Alex was momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Nicholas.’

Sergey started again in the correct respectful Russian manner. ‘Alexander Nikolayevich,’ he gave a self-deprecating smile and held up a hand, ‘all in good time. I will explain my motives later and you’ll meet our team tomorrow.’

He carried on along his former line of thought. ‘So, anyway, as I was saying, that’s the weakness at an élite level. On a
popular level it’s the same. Russia looks strong but in fact things are not so good if you look under the surface. Our main problem is the curse of abundant natural resources: we’ve got so much oil and gas that we don’t have to go through the tiresome business of actually developing a functioning economy—we just dig a hole in the ground and the money pours out. Basically we’re just a petro-state in the same way as any other Third World dictatorship. It leads to what I call the gangsterisation of the economy. You have an FSB man sitting on the board of all major companies. Now these guys are good at wiretaps, surveillance, hits—they can do that—but can they read a balance sheet? Do they have a feel for a market? Can they organise a supply chain? The fuck they can! They’re hoods, spooks! And they have successfully screwed the economy as a result!’

Sergey grew more animated, jabbing his finger at Alex, his diamond earring flashing. ‘Do we have a thriving industrial sector? Do we export any manufactured goods at all apart from weapons? No! Do we have a service sector? No! Can you name one fucking Russian company that isn’t Gazprom, Lukoil or some other natural resources producer? A software company? A clothing brand? No! Because we are a fucking banana republic run by goons! Do I want that for my country? The fuck I do!’

Sergey was suddenly disturbed by how carried away he had got, and poured out two small teas to calm himself down. He did this with a thin stream of liquid from a height above the cups, and then neatly snapped off the stream with a flick of his wrist. He put the ornate pot down and continued.

‘So, we are what you call a one-trick pony. Over half of all government revenue comes from oil taxes but they make money only when the price is over seventy bucks a barrel. When prices hit one forty-seven we were laughing, but now
they’ve crashed we’re screwed. We didn’t share out the proceeds of the wealth when we did have it, so bastards like me are rich, but if you look at the provinces and the working class, they are desperately poor. I mean, the population is actually shrinking by seven hundred thousand people a year because of alcoholism, suicide, drugs and AIDS. We’ll lose a third of our population in the next fifty years.
That’s
not a healthy country! And those stupid fucking sheep signed all their freedoms away in the good times!’

Alex frowned, unsure whom Sergey was talking about.

‘I mean the Russian people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of them, but Russians have never had much respect for democracy. They call it shit-ocracy!’

Alex recognised the Russian pun on the words
demokratia
and
dermokratia
.

‘So, they effectively signed a non-participation pact with the government that said: “You let us enjoy the material benefits of the oil price boom, and we’ll turn a blind eye to whatever political violence you want to use.” It’s exactly like that thing about “When they came for the Jews, I did not protest because I was not a Jew”, blah-blah-blah.’ Sergey waved a hand to indicate the rest. ‘So now that times are hard, there’s no one left to protest for them.

‘Now Krymov has spent all the Stabilisation Fund on rearmament so we have twenty per cent inflation—that has
really
pissed a lot of ordinary people off!’

Sergey was nearing the end of his tea ceremony now, adding salt in little dashes to the cups. He stopped to jab the tiny spoon at Alex.

‘And the final issue that will help our operation the most is the way that they have driven out foreign companies. Those are the guys that actually do know how to run a factory, a refinery, whatever.’

He grinned lopsidedly. ‘Have you heard my joke about foreign investment in Russia?’

Alex shook his head.

Sergey smiled. ‘Well, at the beginning of the process the foreigners have all the money and the experience and the Russians have nothing.’ He paused and looked at Alex with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But by the end of the process the Russians have all the money and the foreigners have had an experience.’

Alex couldn’t help grinning as Sergey bobbed his head about happily.

‘It’s good, yeah? So the
siloviki
get greedy and drive out ExxonMobil, Total, BP—all of them—so now there is no one left to run the oil refineries and we can’t even produce enough petrol for ourselves, in the largest oil-producing country on Earth!’ He was laughing now. ‘I mean, it would be funny but…’

‘You know, the same thing happened in Iran. We both had to introduce petrol rationing. Krymov used the OMON to suppress the riots when it was introduced but, believe me, with rationing and inflation, there are a lot of fucked-off ordinary people out there who want to see Krymov dead.’

He finished making the tea and put the spoon down.

‘So, comrade, in answer to your question—do we have a chance of overthrowing Krymov? It will be tough, but yes, we do.’

He picked up a small cup of tea and stretched out his arm to give it to Alex.

Alex looked at him warily, thinking over what he had said and calculating the odds in his head. It tallied with what he had read in the papers and with what Harrington had said in his briefing.

He reached out, took the cup from Sergey and sipped the bitter tea.

Sergey smiled and drank.

‘OK, good—you passed the interview.’ He paused. ‘So now you are Director of GeoScan.’

Alex frowned. What was the Russian on about now? His mind seemed to hop about everywhere.

‘It’s a UK-based international geo-survey firm. I have the details of your next survey mission.’

He jumped off the bed, took a large portrait of Karl Marx off the wall, opened a money safe behind it and pulled a black leather document wallet out. He passed Alex the bulky folder and sat on the bed again.

Alex put his tea down and took it hesitantly.

‘Go on, have a look,’ Sergey urged him. ‘There’s a lot of uranium ore in Chita province in Siberia and I want you to find the highest grade deposits.’

He reached over, pulled a map of Russia out of the wallet and spread it on the carpet between them. Alex quickly ran his eyes back and forth over it. He was amazed, looking at the Mercator projection map, how big the country was. The whole enormous mass of European Russia all the way east to Moscow only made up a tiny proportion of it.

Sergey pointed to a large highlighted area in the far east, three thousand miles from Moscow, near Lake Baikal and just north of the border where Mongolia and China met.

‘Chita is the province in Siberia that I’m governor of—it’s next to Abramovich’s patch—and it’s where Raskolnikov is in prison. Your cover for getting you and a team in there will be as geologists doing a survey. That’ll also be a good excuse for you to have access to my mining company helicopters because it’s a huge area to cover—four hundred and thirty-
one thousand square kilometres.’ He laughed self-indulgently. ‘That’s twice the size of the whole United Kingdom, and I am the sole, unelected ruler of it all—isn’t that great!’ He giggled at the thought.

‘Total population is about one million, mainly Russians and Buryats—they’re a Mongol tribe. Like Bayarmaa—she’s gorgeous, yes? God, those cheekbones!’

He clapped his hands, looked dazed for a moment, and then suddenly switched into a focused mode, pulling sheets out of the folder, poring over them and pointing things out.

‘This is the map of Krasnokamensk, the town near where Raskolnikov is in the prison labour camp. You will be able to base your team here.’ He indicated an area on the edge of town. ‘It’s the transport depot for my mining company and will be a secure base for your operations. I have a Mil Mi-17 helicopter there in a hangar for you to use and a hostel for your men.’

Alex nodded. ‘I know the Mil Mi-17 from my African operations.’ It was a very popular, robust aircraft used all around the world.

Sergey nodded but wagged his finger at him. ‘Hmm, but remember this isn’t Africa. It’s minus thirty out there at the moment.’

He pulled out more sheets. ‘These are the plans of the camp, and as much detail on the guards and defences as I can get. I got them because I run the company that supplies the camp with food, but the prison itself is run by the MVD—that’s the Interior Ministry—and they are
definitely not
on our side.’ He raised his eyebrows warningly.

‘OK, that is enough for you to start getting an initial plan together. I am giving you just twenty-four hours to do it because I know you’re good,’ he grinned encouragingly, ‘and because I
have a contact in the camp who gets messages out to me and I know that the bastards are planning to kill Raskolnikov soon, so we need to get going.’

‘Why don’t they just kill him straight out?’

Sergey screwed up his face. ‘He’s like a saint in my country. He’s too popular for them to just go out and shoot him. There would have to be a state funeral and it really wouldn’t do for his body to be on display with a big bullet hole in his head. No, it’s a lot easier for them to just trump up some tax charges, lock him up for years and let his memory fade, and then bump him off in an accident.

‘We’ll meet back here with the other members of my team at eight o’clock tomorrow evening. OK?’

He smiled at Alex as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER

Prisoner D-504 squinted at the harsh electric light shining into his face.

Dogs barked, straining on leashes held by guards all around the parade ground.

Another morning roll call in the Yag 14/10 Krasnokamensk Penal Colony. Six a.m., sky pitch-black, ambient temperature, without wind chill, minus thirty-five degrees C.

His 868th roll call—the same every morning for over two years. He had calculated that he had 4,607 more to go in his fifteen-year stretch, although he knew that no one survived that long, so the figure was just hypothetical.

He pushed it out of his mind and stood rigidly to attention. Any movement would earn a beating from the guards, but his eyes still darted around. They were all that showed under his padded hat, his face wrapped up against frostbite in scraps of dirty cloth that he had managed to cadge. His eyelashes were rimed with ice, and crystals clung to the cloths where his breath streamed through.

Under the hostile acetylene light he watched a column of prisoners being led out of their overnight lock up in Barrack 7. That lot had it bad; he didn’t envy them. Glazkov,
their barrack sergeant, was a right bastard and hammered them whenever he could.

Like him, they all wore black padded jackets, hats with earflaps, padded trousers and mittens. All items were greasy and worn with age and had their inhabitant’s prison number stitched on strips, front and back, so that guards could identify them when they were bent over at work. They moved with heads down and shoulders hunched against the cold like a bunch of apes shuffling through the snow onto the parade ground.

D-504 flicked his eyes up to the watchtowers astride the double fence of electrified razor wire. It gave no shelter from the wind that blew in from the North Pole and scoured along the rank of prisoners.

Wind, normally such a simple thing, became so much more in Siberia. It was not the gentle breeze that had stroked his hair in the hot summers of his childhood on the Volga. This was a slashing ghoul that cut through your clothes with its ice-hard claws, screaming around the barracks at night, baying for the warmth in your blood.

Warmth had become the centrality around which his life was lived. Just as an alcoholic craves drink, so he craved heat; hoarding pockets under his arms, trapping a morsel under his thin blanket at night.

Cold, though, was his ever-present companion during the day, sinking its little gremlin teeth into his nose, ears and fingers, nipping and gnawing at them. Then, at night, climbing into bed with him like an unwanted lover, wrapping its arms around him and pushing its freezing hands into his bones, grabbing them and shaking him with uncontrollable shivering fits.

He risked a sideways glance along the line of prisoners and then snapped his head back.

Sergeant Kuzembaev was coming.

Kuzembaev was a Kazakh, a flat-faced sadist with a horsewhip at his hip. It could rip through clothing and cut deep into the flesh if he really got some length on it. He was indifferent to the cold but seemed to take an icy pleasure in others’ pain.

He worked his way down the line, shining his torch into each prisoner’s face to check that the man fitted the number on his strips and had not been substituted by someone bribed or beaten into taking his place overnight.

Kuzembaev stopped in front of him; the thin slits of his eyes were implacable in the light shining up from his torch. He pulled D-504’s hat off, revealing a badly shaved head—to reduce the lice. The prisoner felt the bones of his head contract as the wind got at it. Then the guard stabbed the beam of his torch into his face and yanked the cloths down.

The face that the sergeant scrutinised was the most famous in Russia. When he was captain of the national football team, the heavy brow, strong jaw and steady eyes had been idolised by millions as the embodiment of true Slav heroism—battered but unbowed.

He was the highest scoring player ever for his country. His heavy build and low centre of gravity had helped him ride out the roughest tackles as a centre forward, never fearing to stick his head into a flurry of raised boots looking for a goal, as the large scar across his right temple proved.

The face stared back at Kuzembaev impassively just as it had when the camera zoomed in on him as he’d lined up to kick off when they were 2-2 against Germany with just minutes to go. How the nation had prayed to that face as if to the icon of St George in the days of old—the warrior of a nation.

And he had not let them down.

The commentator was hoarse with shouting as the Russians threw everything forward. The Germans dug in and defended stoically until Raskolnikov intercepted a pass.

The commentator went mad: ‘Raskolnikov intercepts! Past Shtrum! Past Weissman! Raskolnikov, our last hope!’ His voice rose to a scream, ‘Yeeess!’

That line—‘Raskolnikov, our last hope!’—became part of the Russian lexicon.

What made those moments of iconic glory even greater was the modest way that he had handled them afterwards. His quiet grin, with its self-effacing aversion of his eyes, had endeared him to millions of Russian women, but had made men trust him as well.

Two years in the camps had taken their toll, though. The bearded face was now pinched with hunger and his skin was grey and wrinkled like old newspaper.

Kuzembaev grinned mockingly. ‘Ah, Captain, it’s you! Who are we playing today then?’ he chuckled, and moved off down the line, never tiring of that joke.

Roman Raskolnikov quickly pulled his hat back on and stared ahead, pushing his anger into the vast river of patience that flowed quietly through him like the Don.

He was forty-five now but had started playing aged eighteen in his hometown for Rotor Stalingrad. After stunning success as a striker there, he had transferred to Spartak Moscow and captained them and then Russia.

He stared at the white, blue and red of the Russian tricolour flying in front of him over the platform on which Commandant Bolkonsky stood with the machine-gunner next to him, squinting down the barrel of his belt-fed 7.62mm PKM, his finger on the trigger and itching to fire into the packed ranks of prisoners.

Raskolnikov had such mixed feelings about that flag now:
he used to look at it with tears in his eyes when the anthem played at the start of matches. He still loved his country but he hated the corrupt and tyrannical government that had sentenced him to this terrible place under Article 275 of the Criminal Code on trumped-up tax evasion charges.

The real reason for his sentence was his work for the United Civil Opposition party. Both his mother and father used to talk politics at home all the time. They had been true believers under communism—somehow managing to ignore the corruption and iniquity, and maintain a belief in the ideal of social justice that the system espoused.

He had ignored politics as a child and concentrated on his football, but some of their rigid morality stayed with him. When the anarchy of the Yeltsin era broke out, pensions went unpaid and healthcare and schooling collapsed, he felt he ought to use his fame to do his bit by setting up a football academy for street kids in Moscow. This brought him great respect amongst the city’s working class, and for a time he did not take it further.

As a man of action he just wanted to do something practical to help, but gradually he was pulled into the political web. After he retired he became a sports ambassador for Russia, helping to win the hosting of the European Cup finals. He started working for Sergey Shaposhnikov’s TV station as a commentator and every political party wanted a slice of the great Roman Raskolnikov, thinking that he would just be a meathead who would boost their popularity.

However, as Putin had eroded democracy and human rights, Roman felt himself more and more outraged by what was happening. The basic human decency that his parents had insisted on was being destroyed all around him. As a smart tactician he soon realised that, if he wanted to change
the situation, he would have to do more than just run football academies, and get involved in politics properly.

The United Civil Opposition never really stood a chance in the era of media manipulation by the government; as independent newspapers and channels were gradually closed down, its activities had ceased to be reported in the press. But Roman was never one to bow to pressure. He dug deep and knew that what he was doing was right for his country. His wife, Ivana, and his two daughters, Masha and Irina, had suffered as well and that had been the hardest thing to bear. He had not heard from them directly in over two years, but his network of supporters told him that they were still alive and living in Moscow.

He tried not to think about them, it was too painful. He had to concentrate all his efforts on just staying alive in this place. It was a separate planet from the rest of humanity: oppressed by different laws of gravity, breathing harsh atmospheric gases, labouring under a different sun.

This strange world had been named ‘Honolulu’ by Commandant Bolkonsky. All the new ‘enhanced regime’ camps opened under Krymov’s orders were nicknamed by the guards after famous holiday destinations: Honolulu, Marbella, Sharm el-Sheik and Yalta.

The camps provided labour for a range of activities: logging, mining and construction. Each of the nine hundred inmates was allocated to a work gang and their numbers were now being read out over the blaring Tannoy; Roman listened carefully for his. The day’s arrangements depended on what his gang boss—Shubin—had been able to bribe the overseer with.

‘The following teams will be on forest detail: 49th, 18th, 89th, 51st and 33rd.’

That was his then—the 33rd. A whole day out in the freezing cold, logging, but better than the mines.

‘Better watch yourself out there today, Roman. Don’t want to get a nasty sliding tackle, eh?’ someone whispered to him from the rank behind and then made a strange creaking noise, which passed for a laugh.

It was Getmanov, a former FSB officer who had been sentenced for corruption and rape. He claimed he was a huge fan of Roman’s but his interest in what he was doing verged on the obsessive. Roman found him a disturbing character. He had a wide mouth that he left hanging open most of the time; one of his front teeth had been broken in half, and the combination gave him an ugly, careless look.

Roman had seen him in muttered conversations with guards occasionally, huddled around the back of the kitchens. Whenever he saw him, Getmanov always stared back and then leered as if half-witted. Roman couldn’t work out if he was just a fan, mad or something else.

Dannil Kozlov was sure he was bad news, though. Big Danni, in Roman’s work gang, was a huge Moscow thug, an armed robber, whose shaved head showed the many scars of life in Moscow’s poorest quarters.

One of the features of life in the camps was the mixture of criminals like Danni and political prisoners like Roman. The politicals were journalists, human rights lawyers and politicians who had fallen foul of the regime and been banged up for years on spurious charges, such as infringing health and safety regulations at work. Putin’s ‘Dictatorship of the Law’ had certainly been used to good effect on them.

Generally, the criminals hated the politicals as lily-livered intellectuals, and harassed and exploited them. Danni, however, had spent some time as a boy in Roman’s football academy and, although it hadn’t kept him on the straight and narrow, he still regarded Roman as a saint, one of the few people in his hard life who had actually done something
unequivocally good for him. He was also a huge Spartak fan, with the club emblem tattooed across his chest, and the combination meant that he had taken it as his life’s work to protect Roman.

Danni was standing next to Roman now and hissed back at Getmanov: ‘Go sit on a dick, head-fucker!’

‘Fuck yer mother!’ Getmanov spat back.

‘Shut up in there!’ screamed Sergeant Kuzembaev from the edge of the crowd of prisoners, raising his whip. Guards quickly unslung their assault rifles and Kuzembaev waded into the ranks with the heavy butt of his whip raised. The machine-gunner on the platform swung the barrel towards them.

Kuzembaev lashed out at a few people but the noise died down so he returned to his post at the end of the line.

They didn’t need to use much force on the prisoners. Even minor misdemeanours could be met with the threat of the
izbushka
or ‘the little hut’. It was a small wooden building by the side of the parade ground. Prisoners were dragged off there after evening parade if they had committed any faults during the day.

Inside was a line of tiny bare cells with no windows. Each was set behind two doors, one behind the other. If a prisoner was deemed to have been particularly bad then both doors were shut so that absolutely no light penetrated the cell. This was known as ‘getting the dark’. Prisoners who did days in the pitch-black soon became disorientated and unhinged.

More importantly, in winter the guards could also control the temperature in the cells by the amount of fuel fed into the stoves set in their walls at the back of the building. ‘Getting the cold’ meant little or no fuel was allowed to the prisoner, leading to hours of excruciating pain as the man was racked by shivers in an effort to stay alive.

Once the disturbance had settled down, Commandant Bolkonsky spoke into the microphone in front of him on the platform, his voice booming out over the parade ground, flexing in the wind.

‘So, men, I hope you are continuing to enjoy your stay here. It’s another beautiful day in Camp Honolulu. Whatever you’re doing today—if you are at the beach, on the golf course or in the Jacuzzi—I want you to remember one thing: work hard or you’ll get the cold and the dark!’

He chuckled heartily and the siren wailed, signalling the end of roll call.