meters uphill. Vitaliy and Vanya sat in the wheelhouse swivel chairs and watched their progress through binoculars, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, and wishing for more food, while the music on the radio got worse. Fred’s watchdog stood at the rail, watching them both. To the east was kelly-green tundra, and the view was as featureless as what a mouse might see when contemplating a green carpet.
Vitaliy watched as two of the charter party stepped out of the truck, then used hand signals to direct the driver to back up to the steel shed.
Vitaliy had never seen one of the generators that ran the lighthouses. He’d heard they contained radioactive material, though how they worked was beyond his knowledge. He’d heard also that some had disappeared, but if so, it hadn’t happened to an important lighthouse on his part of the coast. As far as he knew, they might well be small diesel generators. The lightbulb on the house was usually a small one, hardly ever more than one hundred watts, a fact that surprised-indeed, amazed-those who didn’t know about it. The Fresnel lenses focused the light into a small, pencil-thin beam whose effective range was determined by the height of the house, and any light showed up brightly on a dark night. Lighthouses, he told himself, were an obsolete leftover from earlier times, hardly necessary anymore in the age of electronic aids. So what damage might he be doing, really? His charter party would themselves finance his acquisition of a modern GPS system, probably one of the new Japanese ones that sold for five or six hundred euros, cheaper than the new car he coveted. And what the hell did it matter?
That this could kill thousands of people never occurred to him for a moment.
It took four hours, far less than Fred had suggested. It might have gone faster still if they’d simply demolished the corrugated shed, but evidently they didn’t want to do that. The lighthouse would look entirely normal in daylight (with the sun fully up and out, it was difficult to tell if the light was on or off), and at night, few came into this gulf to notice. And even if they did, so many things in Russia didn’t operate as designed that one more would hardly be seen as headline news. Two cups of tea and five cigarettes after they’d started, the truck rumbled back to life and started driving down the gravel driveway to the boat. It wasn’t until they reversed direction to back in that Vitaliy saw something dangling from the crane, about a meter, roughly rectangular, but with curved edges that suggested a cylinder inside, maybe the size of an oil drum. So that was a lighthouse battery? He’d wondered what they looked like, and wondered how they worked. It seemed awfully large to power such a small lightbulb. That made it typically Soviet, of course: large, clunky, but generally functional.
One of the party walked backward behind the crane truck, guiding it back onto the boat, and after three hours, when the tide was again right, it was time to raise the ramp and depart. The man in the truck’s cab worked the crane controls to lower the generator to the deck. The colleagues didn’t secure it in place. They were not seamen, but they had a lot of euros.
Vitaliy set the engines in reverse and backed away into deeper water, then spun the wheel to head back northwest for the Kara Strait. So he’d earned his two thousand or so euros. In the process he’d burn perhaps a thousand of that in diesel fuel-actually less, but his charter party didn’t know that-and the rest was wear and tear on his T-4 landing craft, and his own valuable time, of course. So a task halfway completed. On getting back to port, he’d unload them and let them go wherever it was they wanted to go. He didn’t even wonder where that might be. He didn’t care enough to want to know. He checked his chronometer. Fourteen hours exactly. So he’d not make port before the end of the day, one more day to bill them for, and that was fine with him.
Unaware that there was a complementary mission under way three hundred miles away, Adnan and his men were preparing to leave the relative comfort of the boat. The captain, Salychev, was maneuvering the Halmatic into a cove on the island’s western coast. Adnan stood on the afterdeck, watching the snow-encrusted arms of the inlet close in around them until the passage was no wider than a kilometer. The fog continued to build over the water’s surface until Adnan could catch only fleeting glimpses of the cliffs, erosion- slashed brown escarpments studded with scree and boulders.
The Halmatic’s diesel engine chugged softly while in the wheelhouse Salychev whistled to himself. Adnan walked forward and stepped inside.
“How far are we from the settlement-”
“Belushya Guba,” Salychev finished for him. “Not far. Just up the coast-a hundred, hundred-fifty kilometers. Don’t worry yourself. The patrols don’t come into the coves; they stick to the shoreline. Might hear them if the wind is right, but this close to land, their navigation radars get jumbled. Couldn’t see us unless they bumped into us.”
“Were there detonations in this area?”
“Some, but that was back in ’60 or ’61. Small ones, too. No more than fifteen kilotons. Just babies, nothing to worry about. Now, up the coast, maybe three hundred kilometers north of Belushya Guba, is Mityushev. That’s where they did a lot of them. Dozens upon dozens, all in the hundreds of kilotons, a couple of megatons, too. If you want to see what the moon looks like, that’s the place to go.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Offshore I have. Not enough money in the world could get me into those bays and channels. No, this place we’re headed is paradise compared to Mityushev.”
“It’s a wonder anything lives here.”
“Everything is relative. You’ve heard of the Pak Mozg, yes?”
“No.”
“The English translation is ‘brain crab.’ It’s supposed to be about half a meter tall, with a shell that’s split along the bottom and its nervous system exposed, sort of hanging out the gap in the shell.”
“You’re joking with me.”
Salychev shrugged. “No. I’ve never seen one, but I’ve got a friend who swears he did.”
Adnan waved his hand dismissively. “Nonsense. How long until we reach the shipyard?”
“Two hours, give or take. Going to be dark not long after that, so you’ll have to wait until morning. Don’t want to be stomping around in the dark.”
“No.”
“You never did say exactly what you’re after. Samples, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Soil and rock samples. That’s what most of you types come here for: dirt. Testing it for whatever.”
“That’s right,” Adnan replied. “Dirt.”
54
THE ONE DRAWBACK might be that people would notice the cars coming in and out.
Arnie came in first. Former President Ryan met him and walked him into the living room.
“Ready?” the former Chief of Staff asked.
“Not sure,” Jack admitted.
“Well, Jack, if you have any doubts, you’d better exorcise them today. Do you want four more years of Ed Kealty in the White House?”
“Hell, no,” Jack replied almost automatically. Then he thought it over again. Was he so arrogant that he thought
“Kealty is-or at least that’s the image he projects. He’s got chinks in his armor, Jack, and we’ll find them. And all
“You’re not asking much,” Ryan groused. “A lot of things to fix.”
“George Winston and some of his Wall Street friends. George’ll be your finance chairman.”
