Kolymsky Heights (3 page)

‘Yes. I see,’ Lazenby said, frowning. What he principally saw was a time-waster of prodigious proportions here, if allowed to develop.

‘Can Miss Sonntag get at it right away?’

‘I will certainly ask her.’

‘It’s a matter of the greatest urgency. There is another question. Has something like this ever happened before – that is, some other envelope that has turned up with apparently nothing in it? It probably wouldn’t have been from Gothenburg. More likely Rotterdam or Hamburg, Rotterdam the likeliest.’

‘I could ask that, too. Why?’

‘I can’t tell you that now. I will as soon as I am authorised – together with a great deal of other information. Of course, if you have any thoughts yourself, Prof, I hope you will contact me right away.’

‘Certainly, certainly, Philpott,’ Lazenby said, and allowed the subject to drift at once out of his mind. There would not
be
any other thoughts, he was quite clear on that. Secret codes, unknown establishments … All that, they could get on with very well by themselves.

And this, as a matter of fact, they were doing.

The unknown establishment was assumed to be biological and its work to do with military biology. This was the first point of interest for the CIA and at their headquarters in Langley, eight miles from Washington, a team of specialists was engaged in hunting it down.

They started by assuming that it must have independent sources of water and power; also chemical stores, animal pens, cleansing stations, and various kinds of security arrangements. All this needed people, and places for them to live, and some means of access, probably a landing strip. Above all, it needed isolation.

The ‘waste howling wilderness’ of the ‘north country’, evidently Siberia, remained even in modern times unmatched for isolation. Its forested area alone was one and a third times the size of the United States. Over the land lay deep snow and ice all winter, and quaking bogs in summer. This made for a road system so rudimentary that transport went mainly by air or river, with access to security areas available only on official permit.

This provided the first problem. If the place was so hard to get at, why should the unknown correspondent suppose anyone from outside could get at it? Just as important, how had he got anything out of it himself?

Specialists in global transportation put up a possible answer to this. The Siberian inland waterway system was very extensive. Two rivers in the north-west alone, the Ob and the Yenisei, had some dozens of ports with several others under construction. The reason for this was the extension of the huge natural gas deposit, the biggest in the world, which lay between the two rivers. As Russian oil production declined, the gas was due to replace it, both for internal energy and for external trade. For both purposes the product was urgently needed; and as satellite observation showed work was going on round the clock to get it.

To finance the project (which included a tunnel to west Europe 3000 miles long), massive foreign loans had been negotiated. The loans would be repaid in gas and were being supplied in the form of equipment. The amount of equipment was staggering. Apart from the rigs and drilling gear, there was all the piping to go inside the tunnel. There were giant compressors and pumping stations at intervals along it. There were thousands of earth-moving machines, tens of thousands of tractors.

In the lively scramble for orders, western shipping companies had not been backward. The equipment for the original field had been carried largely by ships of the old Soviet Union, but for the new deal the managing consortium had specified that new equipment, wherever possible, should be transported in vessels of the countries supplying it.

The countries supplying the new equipment were Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Holland. Ships from all of them were now ferrying loads along the Arctic sea route. Russian icebreakers were guaranteeing the route from early June to early October, the latter date varying with the ice pack: a fact that led the experts to a prediction.

It was now the first week of July, and the ice was building early. The prediction was that nothing could be expected from the unknown correspondent after the end of August. Western shippers, reluctant to hazard their vessels even in a ‘guaranteed’ September, were handing this slice of business to Russia’s own merchant fleet. It was not thought that a member of this fleet had posted the message. A foreign seaman, more familiar with foreign ports, and with greater privacy to fiddle with ambiguous cigarettes, had done it. He would not therefore be doing it after August.

But this raised other questions.

The ports opened to the foreign vessels were Dudinka and Igarka on the Yenisei, and Noviy Port and Salekhard on the Ob. Because they were guaranteeing a quick turnaround at these ports, the Russian authorities had provided no shore facilities for foreign crewmen. None of them was allowed ashore anyway.

If sailors were not allowed ashore, how had one of them got the message?

Tentative answers were provided for this, too. An intermediary had given the sailor the message. The intermediary
must have had time to establish a relationship with the sailor. The sailor had to be a regular on the route. However regular he was, the only local citizens he could meet were those allowed on his ship – in the normal way port officials or dock workers. But the area was a security area, which neither port officials nor dock workers were free to move in and out of at will. The intermediary had to come from outside. He had to have access to the ship – and also to the research station. What kind of intermediary could this be?

The experts proposed a transport worker. The foreign ships were not leaving Russian ports unladen. Some carried specialist return cargoes, of a kind which might afford access to the ship of a specialist worker. A closer examination of the ports concerned showed Dudinka, on the Yenisei, as the likeliest to have specialist return cargoes. Dudinka was the port for Norilsk, a large mining and industrial centre, and its main business was nickel and precision nickel-alloy parts.

A report was called for on the handling of nickel-alloy parts, and meanwhile three working propositions were set out:

1. The message had been posted by a sailor who regularly worked the Arctic route,
   
2. It had been given to him by an intermediary with access to his ship.
   
3. The intermediary was a specialist worker whose duties allowed entry to the research station and to the port.
   

These propositions (every one of them accurate, as it turned out) were then addressed very vigorously.

Let me hear thy voice concerning this matter the first day at
midnight
, VOA, the unknown correspondent had asked. The Voice of America was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA, so there were no problems with this one. The first day, in biblical terms, was Sunday, and the VOA had a taped religious
programme that went out then. A substitution was made and a man with a powerful voice preached a sermon on communication and identity. He used Exodus, 12.3: ‘I have heard thy voice’, and also Samuel, Joel and Esther: ‘Where art thou?’, ‘Who art thou?’ and ‘What is thy request?’ and he said these questions needed plain answers from everyone, particularly those in the waste howling wildernesses of life.

On the message itself were the prints of the man who had written it, and who had evidently rolled the cigarettes. They were on the address paper too, but not on the envelope or the tape. On all these appeared another set of prints, some very smudged and fragmentary, but similarly traceable to a single source: evidently the sailor.

For the reasons agreed, the sailor had to be a regular on the route. He was the postman. His regularity had to be relied on. From the internal evidence of the message –
Wherefore do you
n
ot answer me
? – he had been used before. It was not possible to say when he had been used before, or where he had posted the message before. But it was known where he had posted it this time.

The global list of ship movements showed three vessels from the Arctic as having been in Gothenburg around the date of the postmark. One of them, a Japanese tramp which had merely used the Arctic as a cheap delivery route for a random load to west Europe, could be discounted; but the other two, a Dutch ship and a German, were of greater interest. Both were in regular service on the Siberian run, and the Dutchman had returned with a cargo of nickel parts.

Gothenburg was not a regular stop for this ship but part of its nickel had been consigned there, and it had put in to the port for twenty-four hours: ample time for someone to slit cigarettes, buy an envelope and post the letter. This ship had then sailed for Rotterdam. The German had gone to Hamburg.

CIA officials in Holland and Germany were instructed to
obtain, by any means possible, fingerprints of the crews of both these ships. But it was known already that the Dutchman had come from Dudinka. The origin of its cargo was not in doubt either.

Between Dudinka and the nickel mines of Norilsk was a road forty-five miles long, and the cartographic department had every inch of it mapped. Most of Siberia was similarly mapped. The maps came to them from the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center at St Louis, and they were updated every few weeks. They showed not only geographical features and roads but the progress of all building works, both above and below ground.

The area around Norilsk was covered with a network of minor roads linking its industrial centre with outlying districts. The roads were well maintained, summer and winter, and heavily used.

Although the complex was large – the largest in the Arctic circle – it was still only a dot on the vast expanse of taiga surrounding it. Much of this area had been under regular surveillance for years, large numbers of ‘objectives’ being in it. The purpose of most of them was known but a few still remained in doubt. These were the ones that came under scrutiny now.

The major requirements for the secret establishment were still as specified; but in analysing satellite photographs a few other features were added. It had to have buildings whose precise function was still uncertain. It had to have barracks, probably with separate areas to accommodate scientific, maintenance and security staffs. And it had to have a road: to accommodate the transport worker.

Shortly afterwards, in a flurry of activity, St Louis was being urgently asked for further information: analytical material, to determine the mineral content of two lakes in the area, and gazeteer material to support the words ‘dark waters’ as a local name for them.

Miss Sonntag, while this work proceeded, was getting on with her own.

Something had come to mind after her cold. She had an idea that an envelope without a letter had appeared once before – she did not exactly remember when. But she didn’t associate it with Sweden. There was not much correspondence with Sweden. Her impression was that it was from Holland. In the same post, if she was not mistaken, there had been a number of circulars from there – academic book promotions from Amsterdam or The Hague or Rotterdam, most addressed with bits of stuck-on paper. Quite often these mailings were duplicated. She had thought that one was duplicated. Nothing in the envelope and she had shot it into the bin and thought no more about it. But after her cold she thought about it.

She had mentioned it to Lazenby, and seemed to catch him by surprise.

‘
Holland
, you say?’

‘I think Holland.’

‘Ah … Rotterdam, would you think?’

‘I can’t be certain Rotterdam. Perhaps Rotterdam.’

‘Well, I was supposed to … Hmm. I wonder,’ he said, and was thoughtful for a moment. ‘When are you off, Miss Sonntag?’

‘Off? On holiday? Next week,’ she said in surprise.

Next week was the middle of July, and every year she went off on holiday then; this year with Sonya to Florence. The flight was booked and the pensione was booked. ‘If it is quite convenient,’ she said, anxiously.

‘Oh, yes, rather. Still,’ he said, and produced a list. ‘I wonder if there’d be time for you to look out some letters. It shouldn’t take for
ever
.’

It didn’t take for ever, but it took four solid days, and it took place in the basement. And by the time she got down to it she had the building to herself, even Lazenby having gone off. He had left her his telephone number on the Spey.

He had not mentioned why the letters were needed, but evidently it was his work on cell structures at low temperature. The low-temperature aspect, which was the only subject of correspondence with the Russians, he had given up eight years ago. Everything before eight years ago was in the basement.

The basement was exceedingly dusty, and ill-lit and hideous. Hundreds of thousands of papers were there, in spring-lock boxes: lectures, reports, lab books, all mixed in with the correspondence. These days she kept an index of everything, but the only index for this heap of archive was what was on the box labels – dates and subject categories. That was what he had wanted when she had joined him fifteen years ago.

At that time his wife (his former secretary) had just died, and he had had the institute for only a year. And in the very earliest box Miss Sonntag had come, with a pang, on condolences from foreign colleagues. They had been written to the institute – he had not encouraged correspondence to his home, always a private man. With the years he had become, if anything, even more private – detached, sardonic. But never with her. With her he had always been warm, playful. In the early years indeed she had wondered … she had still been in her forties, he was not a
young
man, quite bald even then … But that was all nonsense. It was nonsense but yet she thought with a pang of this also.

And meanwhile read on, very diligently, abstracting a paper here, a paper there. These she read out to Lazenby every night
at his hotel on the River Spey. She had read out twenty-four by the end.

‘I have gone through two years more, Professor, after the last,’ she told him, ‘and found nothing. Do you wish me to continue?’

‘No. That will be the lot. That fellow can have them now – the personal ones included. Tell him to send a courier. I suppose nothing of the – of the other kind has turned up in the post, has it?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘Hmm. You are going off when?’

‘In two days. Unless you want me,’ she said, with extreme caution, ‘to wait on until you come back?’

‘No, no. I’m coming now. Nothing doing here. No fish. But you’ve done a grand job, Dora. Really very good of you. Many, many thanks indeed, Dora.’

Dora, Dora! She put the phone down, with mild rejoicing, and forgave him the four days in the basement.

Then she took off to pack her sandals and other sensible Shoes; and for the rest of July walked about Florence with Sonya.

Nothing happened while they were away. No messages turned up in the post. Nothing of value had come from the basement.

By the end of July plenty of answers had turned up at Langley, and they were bad answers.

No vessel at Dudinka had been boarded by anyone but port workers. No special handling was needed for nickel-alloy parts. No fingerprints supplied by the station chiefs in Holland and Germany matched the ones on the envelope. And no name resembling ‘dark waters’ was known for the two lakes near Norilsk; which furthermore were bituminous and of no use as a water supply.

All this was discouraging and something obviously wasn’t right.

In England, Lazenby had come early to the conclusion that things were not right. He had come to it actually in Scotland, listening to Miss Sonntag on the phone. He had let her read everything out, but even after the first few boxes he had known that something was wrong. There wasn’t anything from Rogachev. Rogachev had been one of his earliest correspondents, and should have turned up early. But he hadn’t. And as the boxes continued he had not turned up at all.

Lazenby had only the sketchiest recollection of the man: a red-haired fellow, jokey, rather too personal, and a drinker. Most of the Russians were drinkers, and Lazenby was not – a small Scotch occasionally, a glass of sherry. And they had got him drunk. At a conference somewhere. At night. He had a confused recollection of lurching down a street with a number of them, Rogachev making jokes. There was something else in the scene that was disreputable, but he couldn’t place it.

This he did not manage to do until weeks later, back in Oxford, when he had to get up in the middle of the night. Advancing age made it necessary for him to get up in the night sometimes now. He was urinating away, half asleep, when the impression came back. Urinating against a wall. With Russians. All jabbering in Russian. Rogachev on one side of him and a young Asiatic on the other. The young Asiatic, when not talking Russian, had been talking a transatlantic kind of English. He had been talking about Siberia.

Lazenby knew this was important. A number of things seemed to come together here – of relevance both to the message and to the murky episode itself. He couldn’t recollect more of the episode, and in the morning still couldn’t. But it still seemed important, so he wrote it down. He didn’t write anything about urinating against walls. That was personal and of no importance to anybody. But Rogachev obviously was. And the young Asiatic might be.

This happened in September, when it was known that no further communication was possible, but he completed his statement and passed it on anyway.