Dead or Alive (63 page)

The ship probably had a name and a designator, but those particulars had also been excluded from Adnan’s briefing report. What he did have was a map with the ship’s anchorage coordinates and a roughly sketched blueprint of the cargo hold and deck entrances; clearly, the blueprint had come from neither Atomflot nor the manufacturer, but rather a firsthand source, likely one of the crew. Adnan also knew the vessel’s history and how it had come to rest here.

Commissioned in 1970 as an Atomflot nuclear tender, it had been designed to offload spent fuel and damaged components from nuclear-powered civilian vessels at sea and transport them back to shore for disposal. In July of 1986, overburdened with high-level reactor rods from a damaged icebreaker, the ship lost steerageway in heavy seas and foundered, spilling seawater into the cargo hold and breaking loose the reactor rods. So severe and immediate was the contamination that the ship’s crew, forty-two in all, died before rescue vessels could reach the scene. Anxious to avoid revealing to the world another Chernobyl-level disaster, which had happened just three months earlier, Moscow ordered the ship towed to a secluded cove on the eastern coast of Novaya Zemlya and abandoned in place.

The error that had allowed other vessels to be deposited here was monumental, but such was the nature of bureaucracy, Adnan reasoned. Surely at some point the government had realized its error, but by then little could be done. The bay was designated a restricted area, and the secret was kept. On occasion, teams were likely sent into the bay to check the ship’s hull for leaks or signs of intrusion, but as time passed and priorities changed, the incident would have faded into the secret pages of Soviet Cold War history.

Out of sight, out of mind
was the phrase, Adnan believed.

 

 

T
he ship was anchored on the north side of the cove, fifty meters offshore and sheltered from view by a pair of bulk carriers. It took them another forty minutes to circumnavigate the cove.

They began unpacking their equipment. First came the rubber-impregnated L1 chemical protection suits, followed by the rubber boots and gloves. Like most of their equipment, the suits were Army-issue: olive drab and stiff, and stinking of new dye. After making sure zippers and snaps were sealed, each man donned a Soviet-era GP-6 rebreather mask.

“How much good will these do?” asked one of the men, his voice muffled.

“They are rated for short-term exposure,” Adnan replied. Part of him regretted the lie, but there was nothing to be done about it. Even if the suits hadn’t been twenty-plus years old, they would be of little use against anything other than chemical and biological agents.

If told the true extent of the danger before them, the men would likely go anyway, but it was a chance he couldn’t afford to take. “As long as we’re out within an hour, there will be no long-term damage.” This, too, was a lie.

They pushed the rafts into the water, then piled in and set off across the water, heading for the ship’s midships accommodation ladder, which was extended, coming to within a foot or two of the water. Why this was Adnan didn’t know; none of the crew had made it off. Perhaps the government had performed some sort of inspection in the past.

They tied the rafts to the ladder, then started upward. The ladder shook and clanked beneath their feet. At the top they found the railing gate closed, but after a few smacks of his palm, Adnan was able to dislodge the latch and push through.

“Stay together and watch your step for weak spots in the deck,” Adnan said. He checked his sketch, then faced aft to orient himself.
Second hatch down,
he thought,
down one ladder, turn right . . .

They set out, walking stiffly and slightly bowlegged, the fabric of their suits rasping at armpits and thighs. Adnan kept his head moving, checking both the deck beneath his feet and the overhang above. He tried not to think of the invisible particles bombarding his suit and penetrating his skin. Like the railing gate’s latch, the dogging lever on the hatch was rusted and resisted his first tug. Another member of the team joined him, and together they heaved back on the lever until it screeched open.

Each man clicked on his flashlight, and one by one they stepped through the hatch and started downward. At the next deck they turned left down a passageway. They passed three side passages, each lined with cabin doors or hatches. Pipes and electrical conduits crisscrossed the ceiling like veins. At the fourth intersection, Adnan turned left and stopped at a door. There was a porthole window at eye level. He peered through but could see nothing.

He turned around. “There will likely be water on the deck. That will be our biggest risk. Don’t rely too much on the handrails or catwalk. If something starts to give way, you must freeze and not panic. Is that understood?”

He got nods all around.

“What does it look like, this container?”

“An oil drum, but only half as tall. If Allah wills it, it will still be secured to the wall of the containment vault.”
Better that Allah will that the containment door still be shut and locked,
Adnan thought. Otherwise, they had no chance of finding what they came for before the radiation killed them. “Any other questions?” he asked.

There were none.

Adnan turned back to the door and tried the knob; largely protected as it was from the salt air, it turned freely. He slowly pushed the door open until it was wide enough to accommodate him but kept a hold of the knob so the door wouldn’t swing shut as they entered. He took a tentative step forward, placing his foot flat on the catwalk and slowly shifting his weight forward until certain it would hold him. He took another step, then turned left, then two more steps. He looked over his shoulder and nodded. The next man entered.

As cargo spaces went, this one was small, measuring roughly one hundred square feet and twenty feet deep. The catwalk on which they stood extended the length of the bulkhead and ended at a ladder. Once the rest of the men were through the door, Adnan started down the catwalk. At the halfway point, he stopped and stepped to the railing, taking care not to bump it. He shined his flashlight at the overhead and could see the twenty-foot by twenty-foot square outline of the loading hatch; along one edge he could see a sliver of gray light. This is where the seawater had entered, he knew. The loading hatch had torqued during a starboard roll and the seal had given way. He shined his flashlight downward. As he’d feared, the deck was awash, a slurry of black seawater and radioactive dust and chunks of spent fuel rods, several of which he could see floating on the surface. Somewhere down there were the lead-lined containment “sarcophagi.” How many of the lids had broken free during the accident? he wondered. How many fuel rods remained locked in the caskets?

They proceeded to the ladder.

“Is that it?” one of the men asked, shining his light down the steps.

At the bottom, across six feet of flooded deck, was a bank vault-style door secured by eight dogging levers, three to each side and one at the top and bottom. At waist height along the left-hand jamb was a latching mechanism secured by a padlock.

“Allah be praised,” Adnan murmured.

T
HE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT outside Archangel mainly handled domestic flights, and few enough of those, except in the summer. More took the train south, which was cheaper and more accessible to the local citizens. Aeroflot hadn’t quite shaken its long-held reputation for substandard flight safety. But there was a rather more active air-freight terminal, used largely for fish that needed swift transport to various international restaurants. And so the package was loaded into the forward cargo hatch of a forty-year-old DC-8 belonging to Asin Air Freight. It would fly to Stockholm, and from there, with a new crew, it would fly farther south, stopping at Athens before its final leg to Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates.

“What’s this?” a customs officer asked, looking at the recently painted “battery” casing.

“Scientific gear, X-ray equipment, something like that,” his partner replied.

The official saw that the paperwork was properly filled out, and that was, really, all he cared about. It wasn’t a bomb. Those required different forms. So he signed on the long green line and affixed a stamp that made it official. Nobody even had to bribe him for this. For munitions, they would have, but this was not obviously any sort of weapon. He didn’t ask, and they didn’t offer. To their relief, and his indifference. A gas-powered forklift hoisted the package—it weighed about seven hundred kilos—and drove it to the platform sitting outside the cargo hatch. There it was manhandled aboard and tied down firmly to the aluminum deck.

The pilot and copilot were preflighting the aircraft, walking around, checking for fluid leaks, visually inspecting the airframe for anything amiss. The air-freight business was not known for the quality of its maintenance procedures, and the flyers, whose lives rode on the flight deck, did their best to make up for that troubling fact. The left outboard main-gear tire needed replacement in ten or so cycles. Aside from that, the airplane looked as though it would fly for the next eight hours. They walked back inside to the crew lounge to try some of the (miserable) local coffee and (pretty decent) bread. Their box lunches were already aboard, already stacked by their flight engineer, who was busily prepping the engines.

They walked back out thirty minutes later and climbed up the old-fashioned boarding ladder to get under way. That took another fifteen minutes, and then they taxied to the end of runway one-eight to start their takeoff roll. The old aircraft had thirty-seven thousand hours on the airframe—it had begun life as a passenger liner for United Airlines, mostly on cross-country runs from the East Coast to the West, along with a few stints as a Freedom Bird out of Saigon, which the aircraft, if it had a memory, would recall with a smile. It climbed to its assigned cruising altitude of thirty-two thousand feet, and headed west before turning south over Finland, slowing as it crossed the Baltic Sea, then descended to land at Stockholm. It was all entirely routine, ending on runway two-six and turning left for the cargo terminal. A fuel bowser pulled up at once to refuel the wing tanks, and a minute later came the relief crew, asking how things went and how the aircraft was. All answers were within acceptable limits, and the inbound crew walked down the steps to a car that would take them to the local hotel that flight crews used. It had a pub, they were pleased to see, with cold beer on tap. The relief crew had the DC-8 back in the air before they’d finished their first pint.

 

 

B
ack in Russia, Musa was at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in the main terminal building, the one that looks like an alien spacecraft (but it was an improvement on Stalin’s beloved wedding-cake school of design), on an international call to a friend in Berlin. When the connection was made, he told his friend that the car had been properly fixed, and that he would accept payment when next they met. His friend agreed, and the call was terminated. Musa and his men then walked to an airport bar, where they indulged freely in overpriced shots of Russian vodka, which was, at least, of a premium brand, as they waited two hours for their KLM flight to the Netherlands. The bar also served them cucumber slices and bread to accompany the vodka into their stomachs. They paid the bar bill in euros, leaving a niggardly tip for the bartender before boarding the KLM 747, in the first-class cabin, where the liquor was free, and they indulged themselves there, too. For his part, Musa’s thoughts did not linger on the two murders he had committed. It had been necessary. He’d accepted that part of the mission before traveling to Russia and chartering the infidel’s boat. Looking back, he was surprised that he and his friends had not indulged in drink while aboard, but there was an old adage about not mixing business with pleasure, and not mixing alcohol with business was surely even a more intelligent rule. Had that Vitaliy fellow remarked on his charter with some local friends? Impossible to know. But since he didn’t know their names or addresses, and no one had taken any photographs, what evidence had he left behind? Northern Russia had looked to him like old movies of the American West, and things there were manifestly too casual for a proper police investigation. The pistols used had been disposed of, and that, he figured, was that. With this decided, he rocked his seat back and let the alcohol take him off to sleep.