The Ice Curtain (26 page)

“You won't find Nowek.”

“I already have. Who left those drops of blood? You aren't bleeding.”

Nowek heard a splash.

“That's close enough. You've done us a favor by bringing Nowek down here,” said Kirillin. “You can decide where you will take your bullet.”

Nowek expected the pit boss to leap at Kirillin. Instead, Boyko's shadow shifted, but only a little. He didn't leap. He didn't run. Nowek watched his shadow change shape as the pit boss raised his arms, stretching them out wide at his sides.

He'd turned his back to Kirillin!

“There's only one right way for someone like you to shoot a man,” said Boyko. “And that's—”

A white flash, a
crack
that came as a sharp pressure wave, a surprised grunt as Boyko's breath was blown from his lungs.

The light pointed away from the drift. A second flash, a second sharp
crack!

Then “Nowek?”

Harsh light flooded into the drift where Nowek crouched. He moved back, away, looking for something, anything he might use as a weapon. Bare rocks. Cables slung under the roof. He reached up and tried to pull a metal hanger free, but it was pinned well. There was nothing. All he could hear was the drip of seeping water. The rattle of falling pebbles. The subliminal groan of the earth pressing in all around. There was a low opening in the side of the drift. A stope, where ore was actually collected. He bent his head low and slipped into it as Kirillin's beam poured light into the drift.

“Are you down this drift? Of course you are. I can see your blood. There's no back door, so you can relax. You'll be in there for a while. I knew right away that working with you was not going to be possible. You weren't after money like Volsky. How could we conduct business on such a basis?”

The light shifted. Kirillin spoke again. “You came to Mirny to learn why Volsky died. You came so much closer than I would have guessed. You could have had lunch with the man who arranged it and you turned him down. So whose fault is it that you failed?”

Hock.
Nowek held his breath, moving back into the stope. It was like crawling into a stone coffin.

“You wanted to find out where those missing diamonds went?” Kirillin laughed. “Your Moscow friends have been selling them all along. Every gem we've mined for the last year has gone to Irkutsk, then out of the country. Is it
our
fault Petrov chose an unreliable partner? Should
we
suffer because Moscow sent stones to Golden Autumn and no money ever came back? Of course not.”

Kirillin was standing in front of the drift, letting his light follow the red drops of blood. The beam stopped at the stope. “You were going to fly to Moscow tomorrow morning with one million carats of gem diamonds. True, you'd be arrested and the stones were going on, but it's an irony I feel you would have appreciated.”

Nowek heard a new sound. A metallic rattle.

“Your friends in Moscow are in trouble. They've stolen from us for years, now someone has stolen from them. Bad things will happen to them, but we'll survive. Why? Because our relationship with the cartel is stronger than promises. It's made of diamond, and nothing is stronger than that. London has ordered the Ninth Horizon closed. But one day it will be opened again. One year, two. Maybe a hundred. We'll dig you up and you'll ride the ore belt to Fabrika 3 with the diamonds you were hoping to discover. Of course, they'll still be perfect. Well, I'm taking up your time and you don't have much left. I'll leave you to your own thoughts.”

The metallic rattle echoed down the drift, followed by the
click
of a lock. Kirillin had rolled the blast curtain down.

Total blackness now. Nowek scrambled out of the stope. He switched his headlamp on and rushed to the blast curtain. It was made of thick rubberized fabric sandwiched between heavy steel netting. Kirillin might be on the other side. It didn't matter. He shoved it hard, again. He wedged his fingers around the edge. It wouldn't move. It was locked down tight. How long did he have? One minute? Two? As long as it took the ore skip to go far enough away for Kirillin to be safe. And how far was that?

Nowek's thinking slowed down, mired. Spinning in something he knew was close to panic. He was a thousand meters under the ground, trapped in a mine wired to explode.

Wired!
He looked up at the bundle of detonator cables. They were stiff and well armored. Cut through them? With what? His teeth? Burn through them with Chuchin's lighter? Be serious.

Nowek's brain stumbled, faltered like an engine barely running on a winter's morning.

Then it caught.

Blow down some rooms.
That's what Boyko had said. It meant that the explosion was going to take place on this level, but that the rubble would be collected
below
. Nowek turned his back to the blast curtain and ran deeper into the drift.

The passage stopped at a tee. The detonator cable split; three red cables went left, three right. He turned right, pushing the darting white circle of his headlamp forward, stepping over piles of fallen rocks fractured loose from the walls, the roof.

The drift narrowed as it plunged deeper into the ore body, the roof slanted down, lower, lower, until it scraped the helmet off his head and he had to stop. There was no reassuring flow of air now. The fans had stopped. He could be going in the right direction. Or not. One line of the red cable veered to his left, into another stope. Two continued deeper into the mine.

He followed the single red cable over a tongue of loose stones that extended halfway across the drift. He was down on his knees now. There had to be just seconds left. He kept one hand on the cable, feeling for an end, feeling for something. . . .

Nowek crawled over a sheet of heavy plywood. Above it, the blasting cable burrowed up into a drilled hole. He pulled. Something gave, slowly, reluctantly, like gum stuck to a shoe. But it moved. He pulled harder. Taffy too cold to work.

A fat purple sausage appeared, emerged, dropped into his hands. On it, the word
DYNAGEL
.

The blasting cable was attached through some sort of one-way fitting. A Chinese finger trap. He yanked at it. It wouldn't pull out. He attacked the plastic skin with his teeth, ripping at the sausage until he tasted bitter explosive gel. He spat it out and squeezed. Purple gel thick as toothpaste. He squeezed again, but there was no time to get it all. He dropped the charge and grabbed at the sheet of plywood on the floor, thinking to use it as a shield.

It covered a hole in the floor large enough to slip through. But where did it go? He peered down into it and saw a rivulet of water running across a rough floor studded with boulders.

A fissure.

The shot might bring it all down on his head. But then, it might not. How much time did he have? He lowered his boots into the hole. He started to slip, to fall. He dug his fingers in for grip, kicking his boots, wedging his legs wide.

He heard a sizzle. The blasting cable shot out a fat spark.

As he hit the floor a hot white light filled the space, a sharp blow knocked him down to his knees, then rammed him back against a boulder. A tremendous
crack!
came from somewhere inside his head. It was drowned by the rumble of falling boulders, the gagging smell of explosive, dust. The ground rolled. The blast was endless. The white light faded to orange, to yellow, to black.

His helmet was no longer on. The light was smashed. The blackness was absolute. But in that first dazzling instant, he'd seen the walls of the fissure glimmer, nailed with the pinpoint brilliance of crystal. Nowek was at the core of a galaxy of stars. A million, million stars.

Nikolai Tereshenko had been night manager at the Mirny airport for three years. For eight months of the year, it was a position that demanded little more than staying awake. The airport was closed to the outside world, and all night flights, even Kristall's, were prohibited. True, there was the occasional emergency, and in the short summer there was no night at all. But winter was back and Tereshenko could sleep through it like a bear.

He leaned back in his swivel chair, half-watching a rebroadcast of
Baywatch
. He had the sound turned off. He didn't want to wake up the denizens of the monkey house, the night maintenance crew sleeping in the bunk room next door.

He could hear wind shrieking across the open runway, the dry spatter of snow raking his window, the steam radiators ticking, the snores of men who drowned the day with the help of a bottle.

His sole duty tonight was to determine when to wake the crew and send them out to plow the runway. There was an early flight scheduled for tomorrow morning. A Yak-40 trijet to Moscow. Moscow meant big shots. The runway could not have so much as one flake on it when they arrived at first light.
Give it half an hour,
he decided,
and I'll rattle the bars of the monkey house.

Bright lights swept across his windows. His window faced out onto the runway. He got to his feet and went to the window.
Who's out driving on a night like this?
The frost was too thick to see. At least the ice was still on the outside. Let another month go by and the inside would be coated, too. He had a series of nails hammered into the floor. When frost reached the fourth nail in from the wall, he could officially close the airport and . . . a soft
click
came from behind.

Nikolai Tereshenko turned.

Two men in black karakul hats and mottled snow camouflage stood at his door. They were dark-skinned. Each of them carried a stubby automatic rifle. Both were aimed at him.

A third person appeared, shouldered by the two gunmen.

“Good evening,” said Yuri. His leather jacket was zipped up tight to his chin. “I'd like some fuel, please.”

Tereshenko could scarcely push the word out.
“What?”

“Jet fuel,” Yuri repeated. “And also a car.”

Chapter 26

The Crystal Garden

Black, the fissure lost all dimension. Nowek might be standing on a sheer cliff at midnight. He might be drowning, sinking down to the cold, silent depths where light never penetrates. He might even be a dead man looking out at eternity, except that his scalp itched.

He reached up and found the hard hat gone, and with it, the lamp. His hair was powdered with rock dust. The air was thick with it. Like breathing glass. His forehead felt hot, as though he'd been working too long in the sun. A flash burn. His ears felt plugged with water. More likely a ruptured eardrum. It didn't take long before Nowek realized that waking up at the bottom of a mine, surrounded by rubble a thousand meters under Siberia's frozen skin, was not necessarily good news.

He moved a foot, a leg. The other. The blast had thrown him back against the fissure wall. But it hadn't buried him. Amorphous shapes, billowing, ghostly sails, washed across the darkness. Phosphenes, illusions. They only made Nowek hungry to see something, anything, real.

He hunted for the helmet, dislodged a silent stream of loose pebbles. They pelted down and kept coming. He was sure the whole mine would follow, but then, the rain of stones stopped. He felt for the hard hat and its light. How could it just disappear? He thought that Chuchin would say the same thing about
him
.

His fingers became his eyes and ears. There was a boulder to one side. The other side seemed clear. What had Boyko said? Some of the fissures were big enough to stand up and walk in, that they went on for kilometers.

Slowly, dizzily, he got to his feet, keeping an arm out against a wall for balance, ducking away from a roof he sensed but couldn't see. But he could reach it. He tried to find the hole he'd dropped through just before the blast, the flash, the moment of painful white light. . . .

Light!
Chuchin's cigarette lighter. He pulled it out of his parka, flipped back the cap, found the thumb wheel, and snapped it.

The spark was fat and impossibly bright, the blue flame a glare he could hardly bear to look at. He held it up to his hungry eyes. The hole in the roof was plugged with rubble. A pull would bring it all down. He turned.

The walls. My God. The walls.

The color of the exposed ore was deepest midnight, the smell subtle, almost organic, nearly sweet, like sawn lumber so new the cut still dripped sap. Nowek put his hand out to touch the wall of the fissure, as though it might vanish. Ice-clear diamonds shimmered in the blue light of his flame. Slender triangles. Doubles. Rounded cubes and dangerous-looking shards. Diamonds in impossible profusion. Diamonds enough to collect with a shovel and a pail.

Diamonds didn't come like gumdrops in a glass jar. They came by the point, by the carat, each the precise weight of a tiny seed from the carob tree, wrapped in special papers, guarded with guns, locked away, meted out with microscopic care. Here were diamonds by the kilogram, by the handful. Diamonds by the
ton
.

He took a step closer and kicked something, a loose pebble. There was something in the way it skittered across the stones, something almost musical in its clarity and tone. He held the flame of his lighter close to the floor. It took a few seconds to realize what he was seeing. He'd almost stepped on it.

A perfect crystal, blasted free from its prison of ore. A clear octahedron the size of his thumb, its points new and wickedly sharp. He picked it up and felt the characteristic cold of tightly packed carbon atoms sucking heat from his skin. Even unpolished, it captured the light of Nowek's flame. Worth what? Millions? Maybe in Antwerp, in New York. But what did it matter down here?

He put the diamond in front of the blue flame of his lighter. The crystal filled with blue light, scattering it throughout the fissure. Shimmering images of the flame were projected on the walls.

Shimmering?

The blue flame was flickering. A faint breeze was blowing again.

Nowek carefully pocketed the crystal. He could feel the air now, cool on his burned forehead. Turn, it disappeared. Turn back around and it flowed over his face like water.

Keep the breeze at your back and walk. It always brings you back to the main shaft.

Somewhere, a kilometer overhead, the ventilators in the headworks tower were running. Fresh air was reaching him here at the bottom of the world, in this impossible crystal garden. If it was reaching him, then there was a way up. A way out. He held out the flame and started to walk. Ten steps and the fissure angled off in a new direction.

A maze that goes on for kilometers . . .

Fifteen more and the roof necked down low, lower. The fissure made another twist, and he came to a wedge of rock, a keystone that had broken loose and fallen almost, but not quite, to the floor. There were cracks above, hinting at a way through. Air whistled through them. They were too narrow for even his hand to pass. He dropped back down.

At the bottom, a narrow opening, a slot. The blue flame was pulled horizontal by the wind. He got down and looked into it. The narrow opening went as far as he could see, which wasn't so far.

Hock. Volsky's death. The diamonds leaking out from Irkutsk to Golden Autumn. Everything Nowek knew would die if he didn't make it through. Those men and women, burned up to keep the cartel's grip on Mirny Deep, on the Ninth Horizon, intact.

The way out lay beyond that slot. Nowek got down on his knees, then his belly, the flame danced as the moving air accelerated through the gap. It was his rush light. With it, he could break the back of any winter's dark, even here where the night was eternal, where the icicles were made from diamonds.

Yuri stopped at the door to the maintenance crew's bunk room. He listened to the snores. They were deep, loud, untroubled. “How many are in there?” he asked the terrified airport manager. “It sounds like a dozen.”

“Only three,” said Tereshenko. “They'll give you no trouble. Trust me. It usually takes an explosion to wake them.”

“We can arrange that, too.” Yuri nodded for Bashir to wait by the door. “Where's the fuel stored?” he asked Tereshenko.

“The truck is in the garage. Straight ahead. Through that door.” Tereshenko was trying hard to sound helpful, but he was running out of room. At some point Kirillin would be more of a threat than these terrorists. You
helped
them? You
gave
them fuel? Who are you working for, Tereshenko? It was a conversation Tereshenko wanted very much to avoid.

Mahmet motioned with the AK and said, “Open the door.”

What was he going to say? No? A Chechen with an assault rifle was very convincing. How was he going to deflect the blame? Who would have expected a plane to land in the middle of the night, in the middle of this bastard of a snow? Chechens, in
Mirny
? He opened the door, reached in, and switched on the lights.

The garage was cold, but not bitterly so. A single hot radiator kept the fuel tanker from freezing, but you could still see breath.

A row of heavy arctic oversuits hung from hooks on the wall. Each had a blazing orange panel sewn on the back, with smaller stripes on each cuff. Designed to allow out-side work in a Mirny winter, they looked like space suits.

“How much fuel is in the truck?” asked Yuri.

“It's always kept full. How far are you going to fly?”

Yuri jumped up into the cab. “All the way. Let's go.”

Tereshenko climbed in after him. He opened an air valve to engage the starter.

Mahmet opened the outer doors. Snow swept in on the wind. If anything, it was coming down harder.

Tereshenko reached down to switch on the headlights. As he did, he saw the tiny red eye of the portable radio glow from beneath the dashboard.
The radio!
He'd been lost at sea in a raging gale. Rocks here, towering waves there. But the radio was his lighthouse. His salvation. His way into a safe, snug harbor. He put the truck into gear and moved out into the storm.

Mahmet jumped onto the truck as it rumbled by. The wind buffeted them.

Tereshenko saw the jet. A Yak-40.

“The fuel point is under the left wing,” said Yuri. He got out and Mahmet eased in to take his place. “Watch him.”

Tereshenko knew that it took two men to fuel a jet. One at the nozzle, one at the pump control panel. He reached down to find a pair of heavy gloves kept under the seat.

“What are you doing?” the Chechen demanded.

“It's cold.” Tereshenko showed him the gloves, and then pulled them on. There was no more reason to mention the emergency pump cutoff located below the seat than there was to call attention to the radio.

Yuri pulled the black hose out to the wing. He jogged back quickly, his leather jacket no match for the wind and snow. “Ready!”

“Someone has to operate the controls at the pump,” Tereshenko told the suspicious Chechen. “Do you know how?”

Mahmet seemed to be looking at something inside Tereshenko's head. “Go,” he said. He opened his door.

Tereshenko put up his hood and trudged back to the rear of the fuel truck. At least he was protected from the wind. Still, snow swirled over the top with enough force to sting exposed skin. He engaged the pump clutch. A red light burned. He closed the switch, then flipped it again. Still red.

Yuri opened the fuel port and thrust the nozzle up against the seal. His ears were burning with cold. He looked back and saw the red light. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

Tereshenko pointed at the light.

Yuri's fingers were going numb. “What's the problem?”

“The emergency cutoff switch. It's stuck.”

“Where is it?”

“In the cab.” Tereshenko stood stock still.

“What are you standing there for?” Yuri was shivering. “Hurry up!”

“Absolutely,” said Tereshenko. “It will only take a second.” Mahmet watched him closely when he reached his right hand under the driver's seat for the cutoff switch. A gust filled the air with fine snow. Tereshenko used his left hand for balance, brushed the radio with his glove, and switched it on.

Nowek slipped off his parka, balled it up and shoved it into the slot, then crawled in after it. The roof pressed down on him. One tiny shift, an inconsequential shrug of the earth, and he would be pinned here until someone mined the fissure and found him. Of course, the cartel had no reason to mine the fissure and flood the market with gems from the Ninth Horizon. It would be Nowek's grave.

His chest was hard against the floor. He let his breath out. The rocks dug at his ribs. He no longer felt the buckshot in his arm. He turned his head sideways and pushed, like a baby struggling to be born. He moved, gained ground, pushed the parka ahead. The rocks scraped his cheek. He could feel the wind blow over fresh blood.

Keep the wind at your back. . . .

It was odd how Boyko's voice came to him, how he and Volsky seemed to merge in Nowek's memory. Nowek had been so sure the pit boss was an enemy. And yet he'd been Volsky's eyes and ears in Mirny. Two men, two miners. They'd faced death courageously. With dignity, with purpose. Both had died in different ways, different places, by different hands. But behind that hand?

A million carats leaving for London in the morning . . .

Somehow, he was going to stop them. Somehow, he would rise from this mine, pass all those scanners, even without an ID card. Somehow he'd live.

Nowek tried to bring his arm around, but it was stuck. He stopped his brain from racing to obvious conclusions. He slowed his breathing. He couldn't go back.

Nowek turned his wrist, flattened his arm, relaxed his shoulders and squeezed a few millimeters of freedom from his aching joints. It was enough to free the arm. He brought it up to his face, then squeezed it ahead. His fingers found his parka, the ruff soft as sable. He pushed it ahead. It moved more easily. He reached for it, and it was gone.

He strained his fingers out and came to a ridge, an edge.

Nowek got his hand around it and pulled. He won half a meter and felt like cheering, felt like he'd run a marathon. He pulled again, and his head was free. A kick, and he was through.

His parka was a heap beside him. Ahead, the fissure narrowed to an impossible vertical crack. It was a dead end. The fissure had closed off. He'd sit here and wait, using his light sparingly, but all the same it would run dry. Then there'd be nothing left but the hope that he'd die before going mad from the dark.

But it wasn't dark. Chuchin's lighter was still in his parka pocket but he could
see
the walls, even the soft, nebular glow of exposed diamonds. He looked up.

A golden outline, a soft rectangle of light.

Nowek stood. His hands were shaking. There was a way out. How far didn't matter. There was a way. He reached up and pushed the plywood hatch open.

Golden light flooded down. He tossed his parka through the open hatch, then pulled himself up into the light. He wasn't out of this mine. For now, being alive was enough. Nowek had been swallowed like Jonah. And like Jonah, he was coming back.

The raw kerosene gushed out over Yuri's hands. He tried to release the trigger on the hose, but his fingers refused to cooperate. The jet fuel felt warm on his skin. “Stop it!” he barked at Tereshenko, who was only too happy to comply.

The gusher ebbed. Yuri was shaking as he carried the nozzle back. He couldn't close the fuel door. He'd have to get warm first.

The winds were really picking up, tearing black holes in the clouds. A few cold, hammered stars burned down through the rips.

He hurried back to the truck, blowing warm breath into his cupped hands. They felt like claws. “I'm going inside. You're okay watching him a little longer?”

“The
Kavkass
are much colder,” Mahmet said disdainfully.

“Keep looking on the bright side.” Yuri hurried back into the warm terminal building.