December. James Steel

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.

       Chapter Three

      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