An idea began slowly to dawn.
Tell me, ‘he said humbly to the Russian,’ were you ever in Mitlakino?’
‘Yes, I’ve been in Mitlakino.’
‘As an educated man — excuse me, I’m ignorant — is it on the sea, the Arctic?’
The Russian thawed slightly. ‘Not on the Arctic, no. Inland a little. From a cape — Cape Dezhnev. The sea there we call a strait — the Bering Strait. You’ve heard of it, perhaps?’
‘Ah, no.’
But ah yes. Christ Almighty, yes! It hadn’t shown up on the airport map, all peeled away there. But of course the Bering Strait. Go far enough east and you … He couldn’t wait to get his hands, on the little atlas. He couldn’t get at the atlas, stuck in the backpack with a great pile of other luggage. He waited for the first stop and the plane to thin out.
To Mys Schmidta was an hour’s hop, and the Russian got off and others on, in the same confusion; then on to Polyarnik, another forty minutes, and more off and none on. And at last, with the upheavals over and the plane thinned out, he got at the backpack, and the atlas, and hungrily turned east.
Page after page, and there it was: end of the peninsula, Cape Dezhnev. End of the peninsula but not of the map, or of Russia. For the deeper knowledge of Kolymsky students the school atlas showed the boundary of Russia, and of its nearest neighbour. The boundary was in the sea, eighty-five kilometres wide at this point: the Bering Strait. The neighbours had forty-two and a half kilometres each and the boundary ran through the middle. It ran between two islands. The Greater Diomede Island was Russian, the Lesser Diomede American. Only four kilometres between them …
He absorbed this and looked back at the mainland. Inland from Cape Dezhnev, the Russian had said. Mitlakino didn’t show up there. Just a wilderness, with a marsh, a lake, a small mountain range. North of the cape a coastal dot said Uelen, and south of it Lavrentiya. There would be others in between. At the place itself there’d be a bigger scale map, a work map.
Soon enough a dim haze of light below showed the place itself, with the straight line of an airstrip.
They landed on it at nine o’clock and snow tanks were waiting to take the forty-odd men to the workers’ barracks. The journey was short, but snow was now falling quite heavily.
He got himself into the last of the tracked vehicles. No one had questioned his presence so far and the absence of the other man had not been noticed, but it was as well to see what happened ahead. As they neared the building the first arrivals were already filing in, the lead tank moving on to an adjoining shed. Again he positioned himself as last man in the mob outside. Some hold-up was going on inside, and presently there were complaints, and a great heave and they were all in.
Inside, in the tightly packed lobby, an angry telephone conversation was going on. A wrong permit had been provided, and the matter was being checked with Baranikha. An official barked to the clerk at the desk that papers would be processed in the morning, and the mob began to thin. Again he saw to it that he was at the end. The men were being handed tags — for their skis and bunk numbers — in exchange for their documentation. He had his papers in his hand but was not anxious to have the name overheard by the man’s comrades.
Now he felt himself on edge; time going fast. Nine-thirty. Four and a half hours since the Chukchee had taken a sleep. He could be waking up.
He gave in his papers at last — the very last — and was allotted a bunk and a locker. ‘Just dump your stuff and go right to supper. The kitchen will close.’
He found his bunk, looked into the dining room and saw that tags were being shown for meals. He went outside again.
The telephone line was coated with snow and he’d seen it on the way in. It disappeared into a plastic conduit and he traced it down the log-built structure to the junction box. With his knife he prised apart the join where it met the box, cut the wire, and pressed the conduit back in place. No more talk with Baranikha. He decided to skip supper.
56
In the air the general was in heated conversation with Tchersky. They’d garbled the story; it was obvious now. The Chukchee found at Baranikha was not the Chukchee he was after. The man at Baranikha had been found in the airport’s boiler room, drunk. From his incoherent account it seemed that some other native had stolen his flight ticket and papers and flown off with them. He had flown off with a gang of native workers to a construction site. The location of the site was now providing a problem.
The name of the place was Mitlakino, and it was not on the general’s maps. It was not on Tchersky’s, either.
‘What the devil! Doesn’t Tchersky supply this place?’
‘No, General. According to Baranikha, Magadan does.’
‘Magadan? Is there an air service from it to Magadan?’
Yes, apparently there was.
‘This bastard,’ the general informed his staff, ‘is making for Magadan. He’ll go south from there. Now listen,’ he told Tchersky, ‘that airstrip at Mitla — at that place — is to be closed down. Issue the order at once. Will he have landed there yet?’
Yes, he would have landed there. The plane had reported landing two hours ago, at 9 p. m., and was staying the night due to heavy snow. There was now no radio contact with it, or with. the small control tower which had also gone off for the night. And the telephone line at the camp was out of order; Baranikha was still trying to get through.
‘Goddam it!’ the general said. ‘Well close it down when they do get through. That plane is not to take off, whatever the weather, and nothing else is to be let in except military craft. Contact the nearest airbase to it. Get a clear location for them from Baranikha — a precise map reference with co-ordinates. I’ll talk to them when I land. He’s bottled up there, at least. That’s one thing. Now here’s another.’ The general took breath.
‘This bobik. He went through Bilibino in a bobik. He will have arrived in Baranikha with it. How the hell is it that a bobik has not been reported missing? What details have they given of it in Baranikha?’
Baranikha had not given any details of it. They hadn’t found it — not at the airport, or as yet anywhere in the town. They were still looking for it.
In that case, the general thought, they weren’t going to find it. He had got rid of it; no evidence left. Increasingly it was looking as if he’d left Tchersky in the bobik. He might have used the Tatra to get to the Bilibino highway, and there snatched a bobik, a likelier vehicle for mountains than a farm truck. But there was no stolen bobik on the Bilibino highway: his officers had earlier covered it intensively, had covered every long-distance route. In which case where had the bobik come from?
Tchersky. He hadn’t simply picked one up on the way. The man was a planner. He had planned the bobik. In his workshop. Had taken some wreck there, and then the spare parts to rebuild it. Where had the spare parts come from? The Tchersky Transport Company. Where had the wreck come from? Same place. Not a Tatra. A bobik. Any number of crocks must be hanging about there — a big garage, for God’s sake. But with big garages there were routines. Was this just sloppy supervision or had someone actively … Who was responsible for such things? And who was responsible for parts?
‘Tchersky — are you there?’ The general had brooded for some minutes, only a discreet crackle coming from the other end.