Cold Blood Page 9

  I peeled the outer layer off one shoulder.

  ‘OK, OK. It’s – it’s something I need to do for my brother. I do him a favour, we get the cash and we’re good to go.’

  ‘Christopher? The one you went to court for?’

  ‘How the fuck—’

  ‘I do my homework. What “something”?’

  Stedman took a breath and prepared to explain. ‘He has these … There are some people he works with. They ship stuff all over. Mining machinery, industrial diamond core bits, that sort of thing. I gather they use them for exploring new seams or something. I’m not exactly an expert.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Anyhow, the Russians can’t access them that easily, because of the embargoes and whatnot over Ukraine, but Chris can, so I fixed something up with Leila’s contacts.’ He gripped my shoulder. ‘Listen, it’s OK – a little low-level sanction busting inside the arsehole of the world. Every fucker’s at it.’ Some of his trademark bravado was creeping back. I didn’t fancy being on the receiving end of too much more.

  ‘Skyship – they part of this?’

  He hesitated, then: ‘Yeah. I was supposed to make the handover at Longyearbyen, only for some reason the shipment got put straight on a heli for Barentsburg.’

  I stayed focused on him while I absorbed this, waiting for more.

  ‘Their guy should have contacted me to complete the formalities.’

  ‘And the ponytail last night?’

  ‘That’s just some shit with Leila – some twat who has a thing for her. Ukrainians …’ He grimaced, then his expression changed. ‘The walk. It’s all I care about. You get that, don’t you?’

  I eased myself onto the snowmobile and checked that the sat nav was ready to take us to Barentsburg. It was attached to the handlebars and powered like it would be on a motorbike. But this device didn’t have Delia or James explaining what road you were on and when to turn. It worked on longs and lats and gave a bearing to your destination, just like a boat’s navigation system. All I had to do was keep in the same direction as the arrow on the extremely boring grey-scale display, and if I had to deviate because of the surface conditions it would get me back on track.

  The triple made a rich, thudding growl at idle, which turned into a rasping whine when I opened it up. Stedman slotted himself on behind and I put it into gear. The controls felt vague and imprecise through the thick mittens. I took off slowly so we could both get used to it. Without two arms, he’d have his work cut out to stay on.

  29

  Early on, the hard-packed base was scored with tracks, but they soon petered out. Then all that was left was white stuff stretching into the far distance until it met the sky. A picture-postcard scene – as long as you were admiring it from the comfort of an armchair. It looked so good because strong winds had blasted the snow smooth and given much of it an icy crust. I wasn’t looking forward to getting one myself. The quicker we got there the better.

  Sat nav pointed me towards some high ground like a broken molar. Once we’d rounded it, I locked onto the tail of another snowmobile that seemed to be headed in the same direction. It was going a lot faster, probably because there was only one rider aboard, and soon disappeared.

  I kept our skis in its compacted track, so was able to get some speed up. I could feel the wind pushing against me. The microscopic gap between my hood and my helmet was enough to allow an icy blast to attack the top of my head. I couldn’t be arsed to stop, just tilted it forwards and rolled my eyes upwards so I could still see where the fuck we were going.

  It didn’t last long. Stedman hit me repeatedly on the shoulder and shouted what I presumed was ‘Stop!’

  As soon as he could, he jumped off the machine, swinging his arm about to generate some heat.

  ‘Fuck that!’

  I spotted the problem immediately. He hadn’t managed to completely fasten his outerwear. Keeping the engine ticking over, because now wasn’t the time to have it fail, I jumped off, made sure everything was zipped up and pulled tight, and sorted out my hood. Fuck knows how this lot were going to get on if they succeeded in funding the trip. There weren’t going to be enough arms and legs to go round.

  We headed west across the Longyearbyen Glacier then up over the Fadalsbakken Hill. It was just a load of white shit to me, but sat nav kept me briefed at the bottom of the screen.

  Crossing the Grondalen River presented no challenge: it was caked with layers of winter ice and snow, and indistinguishable from its surroundings. We made our way up a steep incline as the dark grey cloud blotted out the sun. With two up, it was quite a workout for the snowmobile. Neither of us attempted to speak over the steady thrum of the engine – there were limits to how much I could take of Stedman’s waffle, anyway.

  More cloud rolled in from the east and a big twin-rotor heli – a Chinook, probably – thundered through the shit that kept gathering above us.

  We completed the steepest part of the climb and I gave the machine as much power as I dared whenever the way ahead seemed smooth enough, but there were patches where holes had opened up or hard clumps of ice lay just beneath the surface, big enough to snag one of the skis and send us over. Stedman kept a steady grip on me, but he was constrained by how much he could brace himself, so I did my best not to throw the thing around.

  The wind had got up and was whipping the top layer of snow into a mist that shrouded our knees, obscured the surface and masked any obstacles. I dropped our speed as we reached the apex and kicked on to what appeared to be a straight downhill run.

  It should have been a piece of piss. Stedman shifted on his perch behind me as I steered to avoid the one rock I could clearly see and the rear track stepped out. I corrected it but Stedman had swung back the other way at the same moment. We started fishtailing and rocking. It was all I could do to stop doing a ninety straight into the rocks on our left. I held it, but the right ski started to lift. Both of us leaned the other way. It wasn’t enough. The machine bucked and our world turned upside-down.

  We landed in the snow. That should have been the end of it, but it was just the beginning. The surface was icy smooth and the incline enough to send us tobogganing down the slope. I’d stopped rolling and was on my front, facing forwards, powerless to stop.

  Something slammed into my foot and spun me sideways. Stedman, also out of control, sliding on his back, his arm flapping at the air. But that wasn’t our biggest problem. The snowmobile was catching us up fast, on its flank, propped up by one ski, doing a slow-motion pirouette.

  I reached out, grabbed one of his calves with both hands, managed to roll onto my side and curled my legs. I spotted a shallow dip to our left and steered us towards it. There was a strong chance of the hardware following us and fucking us up big-time, but it was a risk worth taking.

  We must have hit twenty, maybe thirty Ks an hour on our arses, Gore-Tex rasping against the ice. He was still yelling and trying to break free, but I held his leg firm. We rolled, one over the other, until we ground to a halt, throwing up a cloud of ice dust, which obscured my view of the slope behind us. The whereabouts of the snowmobile was all I cared about. A second later it rolled over and crashed to a halt about two metres away.

  I picked myself up and shook off the snow before it could make its way into any gaps in my clothing. Stedman hadn’t stopped yelling, which wasn’t going to get us anywhere. I screamed back at him to shut the fuck up, but at least he was conscious. After a few moments, he levered himself onto his knees, managed to shake off his mitten and pull off his helmet. ‘Fucking fuck!’ Off came the balaclava as well. Toys out of the pram.

  The wind and snow were kicking up more strongly with every passing second, so I had to yell at him at top volume. ‘Put your kit back on. It’s done.’ I picked up his balaclava and yanked it down over his eyes and ears. ‘Honking won’t change a thing. So get your act together or you’ll lose your other arm. And your stupid fucking head as well.’

  There was nothing for him to punch, apart from me, but that didn’t stop
him lashing out into thin air – until he must have realized how ridiculous he looked. He tucked his hand beneath his armpit, leaned forwards and lowered his voice to a croak. ‘What a fucking fuck-up …’

  I left him to sort out his own fucking fuck-up and stumbled and slid back to the snowmobile. It had lost a headlamp and one of its skis was bent. The control-panel housing had also come adrift and the sat nav was a little confused, but the motor was still idling. I checked that it was out of gear, then heaved it upright. It hadn’t hit a wall or a tree or an oncoming vehicle, so it was pretty much intact – and these things were built for this kind of shit.

  The cover was still on the holster, undamaged, but I still couldn’t help myself and unclipped its lid to check the weapon was still there. Inspect, don’t expect and all that?

  Weapons were part of every soldier’s routine, twenty-four/seven, and we had a strange relationship with them. We protected them more carefully than the people we loved, and kept them cleaner than we did ourselves. We had to be in control of them at all times. We never left them unattended, and in the battle-space, they were never more than an arm’s length away. But as soon as the shit hit the fan, they simply became a tool. If they worked, we kept them; if they didn’t, we binned them and reached for another.

  There was a loud pop from behind me and one of Sven’s fireworks arced through the gloom to my right. I tightened my grip on the butt and pulled the weapon free from its holster, keeping eyes on the direction the flare was heading. And there it was: a big, white, fantastic-looking monster – but too close for comfort. The bear had stopped maybe thirty metres away, nose in the air, smelling us out, wondering what we tasted like, and if it was worth the effort to come and see.

  I rested the bolt-action on the snowmobile, not looking down the iron sight yet, just at the bear. I’d never seen one so close. He reared up like a prize-fighter and gave us both a look that said, ‘Yeah, I know. I’m fucking amazing.’ As the flare died he turned slowly away and headed for the high ground in search of a less challenging snack.

  Stedman had ejected the cartridge but was every bit as captivated as I had been. It didn’t stop the soldier in him reloading though.

  ‘Our lucky day, Nick.’

  I had to agree with him on that. But that was as close to a bear as I wanted to get.

  He heaved himself up, replaced his crash helmet and slapped off some of the ice particles that had gathered on his legs and arm as he moved back towards me.

  ‘What’s his name? The guy you’re going to meet.’

  ‘Khorek.’

  ‘That’s not a name.’

  He glared at me. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘It’s Russian for “ferret”.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He hesitated. ‘How d’you know that?’

  From Nicholai’s book, about Khorek the naughty ferret who wouldn’t brush his teeth. They all fall out in the night – a nice story for kids. It was sitting in a box in the apartment, with the other parts of me that weren’t here.

  ‘So it’s a nickname. They’ve all got these long fucking Russian names.’

  ‘That still doesn’t tell me who he is.’

  He shrugged. ‘One of Leila’s cousins. He’s on maintenance or something.’

  He slipped over and landed on his arse. This time he didn’t swear. I helped him up.

  He waved his stump. All meek now. ‘Look, I really appreciate this, OK?’

  ‘Sort your glove out and let’s crack on.’

  ‘Whatever you’re thinking, it’s all completely OK. Just a neat way round the sanctions. No one cares.’

  Whatever.

  We got back on the machine and headed into the great white void.

  30

  Barentsburg

  Latitude: 78.0648

  North Longitude: 14.2335 East

  The first we saw of the place was a charred, semi-derelict building at the top of a slope, though how anything could burn in that cold it was hard to imagine. The soot-blackened walls contrasted starkly with the fluffy white drifts that had collected against them.

  We crested the hill and the settlement materialized through the gloom below us. I didn’t slow now. A kilometre-high wall of nimbostratus had cut out much of the remaining light and was preparing to take another massive dump.

  Either side of our route down to the cluster of buildings on the shore were slag heaps, white-coated but unmistakable by their angular shape: shards of scrap metal, bits of decommissioned equipment from the mine, massive rusted wheels that had once sat on high steel platforms to lift and lower miners through the shafts.

  A towering chimney chucked out a steady plume of smoke, pockmarking its surroundings with grime. A few of the houses had evidently been abandoned long since, wooden skeletons crushed by the weight of snow from above and the shifting foundations beneath.

  Then, as if a sudden splash of colour had been beamed in, Star Trek style, we came to a gleaming red steel, one-storey structure, the sort no modern industrial estate could live without, with two equally shiny red GAZ-71s sitting on the spotless concrete outside it.

  The Russian Army all-purpose machines were mounted on tank tracks, with a forward cab and a big deck at the back that could be adapted to carry troops or lug loads. They weren’t fast, but could travel over anything, including ice, deep snow or water. These had had their rear platforms converted to carry a massive foam tank and fire hose. Maybe they were a present from Putin to brighten up the town’s favourite family destination.

  The colour fest didn’t go on for long. More empty buildings were sinking on their stilts further down the slope, and behind them a row of concrete barracks that looked like part of a Soviet gulag.

  In fact the whole town looked like a penal colony, and might as well have been one. Even its welcome sign, in Cyrillic, was pitted with rust and decay. All I knew, from checking out my places to run to, was that it was a freak of history. The Russians had mined there since the early 1920s, before the archipelago had come under Norwegian sovereignty. Keeping hold of it had appealed to them more for strategic reasons than profit, and it was still administered through state-owned Arktikol. From our vantage point, it was no more than a haphazard huddle of buildings ripe for closure.

  We dropped our speed and coasted into town like Eskimo versions of Clint Eastwood. Some kids pulling a homemade sledge waved at us, until a man with a cigarette stuck in the side of his mouth barked at them through a window and they scattered.

  We passed what looked like a clinic, daubed with a red cross and murals of Red Square and the Mr Whippy domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, then a sports centre complete with peeling Soviet-era posters showing the cream of Russian youth reaching for the red socialist sky. A game of volleyball inside was its only sign of life.

  There was none of the bling of modern Russia, just the crumbling substrata of the old Soviet Union, which were never far below the surface of Putin’s utopian dream. How handy it was for him to have a foothold already established in a NATO outpost.

  The imaginatively named Barentsburg Hotel looked more like a prison, a brutal concrete monolith with small, slit-shaped windows that would probably have been listed if it had been built in the UK. It glowered over the jumble of surrounding buildings, some of which had tried to cheer themselves up with paintings of the bumper Siberian wheat harvest of 1963.

  The jewel in its crown, at the centre of what passed for the town square, frowning down from a corrugated grey stone column resembling a giant radiator, was a bust of Lenin. The Arctic blast had chomped away at the face of the long-dead leader – an enduring reminder that if anyone was going to inherit the earth, it was probably the weather. This was the USSR’s graveyard, and in a few decades’ time the whole settlement might well have slid into the sea.

  We came to a stop beside an ancient blue Russian-made UAZ-452 four-wheel-drive minibus, with chains round its tyres, in front of the hotel steps. It was abnormally pristine in contrast to the grubby building behind. Every
thing else had a permanent coating of dirt and frost.

  We dismounted and gave our legs a shake in an attempt to get some life back into them. I hefted the bolt-action’s sling over my shoulder, helped Stedman remove his helmet and we went up the steps.

  ‘He said to wait in the lobby and they’d fetch him.’

  ‘Why not call him?’

  ‘They said just wait.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘His people. The ones I was on the phone to at the airport.’

  We went through two sets of glass doors and into the deserted foyer. It was straight out of The Shining: worn wooden walls, flooring that creaked and no one at the desk. Our only welcome was the blast of dry heat, and the glimmer of brightness from a family of Russian dolls in a glass display case.

  I suddenly pictured Anna giggling with delight as she held up the set she’d bought me when we’d first moved in together – all her nation’s leaders from Lenin through to Medvedev. She’d hidden Putin, pretending they hadn’t dared include him.

  A couple of old, duveted men had sauntered up to the parked snowmobile and now stood beside it, smoking. Stedman glared at them through the window.

  ‘Just curious. It’s a small town.’

  He shook his head at his own paranoia.

  ‘You’re here now, Stedman. Just do what you have to do, yeah?’

  He nodded, but I could feel the tension coming off him in waves.

  After a few seconds a pale, round-faced teenager – it was hard to tell which gender under the parka and hood – appeared from a side door and stared at us.

  ‘We … are … here … for … Khorek.’ Stedman was from the speak-slowly-and-loudly-and-they’ll-understand school of international communication.

  The kid looked blank, hesitated a moment, did a U-turn and exited without a word.

  ‘That went well.’

  He ignored me.

  Through a glass door I saw what might be the dining room, if greasy spoons could be called such.