Ben Stewart
DON’T TRUST
DON’T FEAR
DON’T BEG
The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30
‘Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.’
For the families of the Arctic 30, and for my own
MAP
FOREWORD
Hi, Paul McCartney here.
1968. That was quite a year. The people were on the streets, revolution was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William Anders. It was Christmas Eve. Anders, his navigator Jim Lovell and their mission commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft, their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility. ‘Oh my God,’ Anders cried. ‘Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’
‘You got a colour film?’ he asked the others. ‘Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you…’ For a minute or so, three human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometres from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of film into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that it’s credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement – with changing the very way we think about ourselves. That was nearly half a century ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but something quite remarkable has happened since then. For as long as humans have inhabited the Earth, the Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites have been measuring a steady melting of that white blanket. Much of it has now gone, and it seems possible that for future generations the North Pole will be open water. Think about it. Since Earthrise was taken we’ve been so busy warming our world that it now looks different from space. By digging up fossil fuels and burning our ancient forests we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere that today’s astronauts are looking at a different planet. And here’s something that just baffles me. As the ice retreats, the oil giants are moving in. Instead of seeing the melting as a grave warning to humanity, they are eyeing the previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed at the top of the world. They’re exploiting the disappearance of the ice to drill for the very same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. That’s why, in summer 2013, thirty men and women from eighteen countries sailed for a Russian Arctic oil platform, determined to focus global attention on the new Arctic oil rush. They saw how fossil fuels have come to dominate our lives on Earth, how the energy giants bestride our planet unchecked. They knew that at some time and in some place somebody had to say, ‘No more.’ For those activists that time was now and that place was the Arctic. Their ship was seized, they were thrown in jail and faced fifteen years in prison. Millions of people from across the world raised their voices in support of the stand they took, including many from the great nation of Russia. The tale you are about to read is extraordinary. It is one of fear, hope, despair and humanity. But we still don’t know how it ends. That is up to all of us. Including you. Please encourage your friends to help bring a hopeful conclusion to this moving story.
INTRODUCTION
Frank Hewetson is lying on the upper bunk of a prison cell in the Russian Arctic, waiting impatiently for the effects of a Valium tablet to kick in. He’s wearing woollen tights, two pairs of socks, three T-shirts, a pullover, a skull-gripping hat and earplugs. The hot incandescent bulb dangling from a wire above his head has just been switched off by the guards, and Murmansk SIZO-1 isolation jail is stirring.
He can hear boots stomping on the floor above his head, prisoners thumping the walls in cells down the corridor, the distant sound of screaming. Across the prison, windows are swinging open and ropes are being fed through bars, then lowered down the outside walls or swung from cell to cell.
Frank pulls a blanket up around his neck and holds himself against the cold biting air. He is forty-eight years old, he has a wife and two children back in London and he’s charged by the Russian state with piracy – a crime that carries a minimum sentence of ten years in a country where 99 per cent of all trials end in a verdict of guilty.[1]
He opens his eyes into narrow slits and looks down. One of his cellmates, Boris, is bent at the waist and pressing his ear against the plughole of the sink, an expression of strained concentration on his face. Boris is a short man with olive skin, muscles like marble, a permanent wrap of stubble on his face and a forehead so narrow that his hairline nearly merges with his eyebrows.
He’s charged with double manslaughter.
Frank’s other cellmate, Yuri (multiple counts of assault by Taser), is feeding a rope out of the window and whistling to himself. He’s younger than Boris, not much meat on him, sallow skin and greasy black hair. Minutes from now this rope network, known as the doroga – ‘the road’ – will connect almost every cell along the outside walls of the jail, allowing the prisoners to communicate with each other and share contraband. It is a physical internet through which power is projected and justice dispensed by the mafia bosses who control much of this place.
With relief, Frank senses his mind becoming foggy. The air no longer stings his cheeks and he can’t feel the wire mesh digging into his back through the thin mattress. Thank Christ for those drugs. Every night when the prison awakes the pills allow him to slip into something approaching sleep. He secured the Valium prescription five weeks ago after experiencing what the authorities thought was a cardiac arrest but which was, in reality, a panic attack brought on by the prospect of spending ten to fifteen years in a Russian jail. He was sped to hospital and bundled into a wheelchair then pushed through the corridors at breakneck speed by an armed guard. Patients and doctors dove into doorways to avoid being run down as Frank careered towards an emergency consultation, wires trailing from electrodes stuck to his bare chest, the guard singing lines to himself from the back catalogue of Depeche Mode.
Boris stands up straight and looks at Frank quizzically. ‘Frank,’ he hisses. ‘Come come come. Frank!’
Frank closes his eyes, pretending to sleep, but a moment later he can feel Boris’s breath on his face. It smells of potatoes and fish-head soup.
‘Fraaaank. Come come.’
‘Boris, piss off and leave me alone, all right.’
‘Come, Frank. Come.’
He’s pointing towards the sink. Something in his voice is utterly, irresistibly insistent.
‘Frank!’
‘Jesus, Boris. What?’
‘Come!’
Frank rubs his eyes, pulls out the earplugs, swings his legs over the edge of the bunk and grudgingly jumps to the ground. Boris slaps him on the back then leads him over to the sink. Yuri ties off the rope, crosses the cell, kneels down under the sink and starts unscrewing the U-bend. Boris kneels down next to him and together the two Russians strain hard, pulling the pipe away from the wall until – with a scraping metallic pop – it comes clear.