‘You want tea, coffee, water?’ said Winter.
‘Tea, thanks,’ Gallen croaked.
Shaking out the report on Operation Nanook, Gallen sipped as he read: Rurik ‘Reggie’ Kransk, born 1952 in the Arctic Siberian city of Naryan-Mar; son of a visiting Russian scientist and an Inuit woman who died young from alcohol-related illnesses when Reggie was four; raised by his uncle as a fisherman; left school aged twelve, became captain of a fishing boat when he was sixteen, bought his own boat when he was eighteen.
Never a dissident in the strict Soviet sense of the word, Reggie was nonetheless associated with organised crime in the major cities. Under the Soviet commissars, all produce had to go through the state-owned agencies for distribution to shops and restaurants. Local gossip said Reggie got rich fast because he supplied the mob-run restaurant trade of Moscow and Leningrad with the best seafood, without it having to spend days in a ministry warehouse while the paperwork was completed.
By the time he was twenty-five, he owned a flotilla of fishing boats and a fleet of planes that flew the catch directly into Moscow. Taking advantage of Moscow’s indifference to its Inuit citizens — known as Nenets in Siberia — and its desire to ‘autonomise’ them out of sight and out of mind, Reggie Kransk established the Gruppa, a collection of Nenets families around the Barents Sea who had long attempted to keep their fishing grounds free of Soviet control and commercial intrusion, and now had a focal point with Reggie’s money and his influence in Moscow. With the Gruppa, Reggie controlled a million square miles of Arctic fishing grounds by the mid-1980s.
Gallen speed-read the details. He chuckled as the writer of the report noted that Reggie had skilfully cultivated the West’s adoration of ethnic minorities by getting the Gruppa included in various United Nations and World Bank development programs. Greenpeace had made them immune from protests about whales and seals, because they were an oppressed ethnic minority; the Soviet Union had honoured their claim on ‘traditional’ fishing grounds, largely under pressure from the UN; the British television network ITV had made a documentary on the Nenets, and Reggie’s cohorts had flown in from their villas in Monaco and Sardinia to dress up for the cameras.
At one point Gallen laughed out loud.
‘What is it?’ said Winter.
‘This writer has it in for poor old Reggie,’ said Gallen.
He skipped to the part headlined Perestroika. In 1988, said the report, as the Soviet Union was collapsing from within, the Gruppa’s identity changed from a simple business box at the Naryan-Mar Post Office to a corporate address in Zurich, with Swiss lawyers, accountants and bankers. On the same date as the corporate shift, the Gruppa was renamed the Transarctic Tribal Council and was registered with the United Nations Development Programme.
‘Holy shit,’ said Gallen.
‘What?’
‘That Transarctic Tribal Council? It’s owned by Reggie Kransk.’
‘You can own something like that?’ said Winter.
The report’s author concluded with a mix of facts and speculation. From Gallen’s perspective, it looked as though Reggie’s move to Zurich had thrown a veil over his and the TTC’s affairs.
There was a final paragraph which surmised that the TTC had started as a group of Nenets fishing families, defending their ethnic rights from an oppressive regime, but had morphed into a powerful front for the Bashoff crime family. The Bashoffs were a Moscow-based operation that throughout the 1970s and 1980s had run the unlicensed restaurants, nightclubs, casinos and brothels frequented by the Soviet elite. They had formed a company called ProProm, taken over a small Siberian state-owned oil and gas company in 1990, renamed it Thor Oil, and promptly secured the sea-bed drilling rights in the fishing grounds once controlled by the Gruppa. As the Arctic Ocean opened up with the melting ice caps and the increased viability of the North-West Passage and Northern Sea Route, the Bashoffs used the Inuit territorial claims via the UN not simply to secure drilling rights across the Arctic Ocean, but to shut out the companies that comprised Big Oiclass="underline" Shell, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Total.
Effectively, Reggie Kransk’s connections with the gangster-owned nightclubs and restaurants under Soviet rule had turned into a force to rival the world’s largest oil companies. Most of this extraordinary expansion had been hidden behind the Inuit claims of the TTC, claims willingly taken up by the West.
The final line of the main report said it alclass="underline" It is the view of this firm that Oasis Energy — by entering into heads of agreement with the TTC — is not securing cooperation from the true tribal inhabitants of the Arctic Ocean, but is an unwitting participant in the true aim of this agreement: Russian domination of oil-drilling rights in the Arctic Ocean.
An appended report at the back was called Risk Assessment; Gallen skimmed it. It was only three pages and was filled with small sub-heads entitled Personnel Risk, Finance Risk and Political Risk. It was Newport summarising the obvious: partnering with people like Reggie Kransk and the Bashoff family delivered a lot of power to the partners who controlled a flawed or corrupt political process. Just as such connections could aid Oasis Energy, so too could they scuttle their plans without legal recourse.
Gallen flipped to the final page and was about to close the report when he saw a hand-scrawled notation in the margin, just below the sub-head Technology Risk. Turning the page on its side, he saw the words Star Okay and a line drawn from those words to underline a phrase in the risk assessment. The underlined words were strategic power source and negative potential.
Gallen dropped the report on the bed. He was too exhausted even to feel outraged by what he’d just read. Outrage would have to take a back seat while he let the fear sink in.
‘This isn’t the kind of thing we can speak about,’ he said, almost in a whisper.
Winter nodded. ‘I know. We go to all this trouble to grab something, and it’s no better than a death warrant.’
‘This goes straight to Florita and Aaron. It’s now their headache.’
‘No arguments here,’ said Winter.
‘By the way — thanks, Kenny,’ said Gallen. ‘For, you know, back there and all.’
‘Gave me a scare, boss,’ said Winter, sipping on his beer. ‘When I found you in that cave, you were like dead but still standing.’
‘I think I was hallucinating,’ said Gallen, his own voice sounding far away.
‘I know you were.’
‘How?’ said Gallen.
‘You were talking to your mom,’ said Winter, avoiding Gallen’s eyes.
CHAPTER 51
Gallen watched a replay of the Bruins and Maple Leafs on the hotel TV while sipping herbal tea to stay warm. Winter got off the phone to Calgary and shook his head. ‘Can’t get the Challenger up here till seven tonight at the earliest. Larry’s saying it’ll be more like nine.’
The alternative was a ten-hour milk-run flight that hopped to either Edmonton or Winnipeg before catching a jet into Calgary. In Canada’s north, cold wasn’t the only problem; distance was equally daunting.
‘Well, maybe that gives us a chance to look into something,’ said Gallen.
‘Like that Jackie?’
‘I think we can assume Jackie didn’t own that house, and that Jackie isn’t a tribal elder in the National Geographic sense.’