Dark Watch

It wasn’t the military presence that had first drawn Anton Savich to Kamchatka more than two decades ago. It was the geology. Kamchatka had risen from the sea two and a half million years ago, first as a volcanic archipelago like Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The sea quickly wore these mountains flat, but the land rose again, driven by endless reserves of molten rock from deep underground. Kamchatka was an arc within the Ring of Fire, a circle of volcanoes and earthquake zones that mark the boundaries of the vast Pacific tectonic plate. Twenty-nine of the more than 150 volcanic peaks on the peninsula were active, most notably Karymsky, which had been erupting continuously since 1996, and now an u

Driven by economic necessity in the 1980s, the Soviet Union initiated a program of exploration and exploitation. To face Reagan’s unprecedented military buildup, the Soviets scrambled to find the raw materials to feed the growing demand of their own military-industrial complex. These were the last salvos of the Cold War, fought not with bullets and bombs but with factories and resources. It was a fight the Soviet Union ultimately lost, but huge reserves of minerals such as coal, iron ore, and uranium were discovered in the process.

Anton Savich had been a young field researcher for the Bureau of Natural Resources, the agency tasked by the Central Committee to find all the wealth buried within the Soviet borders. He had come to prospect the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1986 with two other field men under the guidance of a geology professor from Moscow University, Akademik Yuri Strakhov.

The team spent four months scouring the peninsula from helicopters and all-terrain vehicles provided by the Red Army. Because of the active geology, it was felt there might be diamonds on Kamchatka, although they found no trace minerals to back Moscow’s belief. What they found instead was just as valuable.

Savich recalled the days they’d camped at the foot of the reef, chipping samples by day and imagining the possibilities at night. They speculated as though what they found belonged to them, but of course it didn’t. In likelihood they would receive commendations for their find, and maybe vouchers for larger apartments.

He wasn’t sure who suggested it first; perhaps it was Savich himself, though it didn’t really matter. Somehow the idea came up, mentioned as a joke at first for sure, but soon they discussed it in earnest. The rain had finally stopped that night, Savich remembered, which was unusual. They passed a bottle of vodka, which wasn’t unusual. You couldn’t get decent toilet paper in Moscow, but the state could keep you well-stocked in liquor five hundred kilometers from the nearest town.

Why report the find? someone had asked. Why tell anyone about it? Only the four of them knew the truth, and no one would prospect this area ever again once they filed their reports. They could return to Moscow, go about their lives for a few years, and then return and mine the reef themselves. They’d all be rich.

Savich stepped from the Ilyushin jetliner at PK’s Elyzovo Airport, smiling as he recalled their naïveté. Akademik Strakhov allowed them to carry on for an hour or two before bringing them back to reality. He never told them it was wrong, what they wanted to do, for even the respected professor couldn’t help his greed. But he also knew what they discussed was idle fantasy. It took just a few words to explain how they would never be allowed to return to Kamchatka, and even if they managed, how it was impossible for the four of them to mine enough material to make any sort of impact on their lives. He went on to tell them how world markets actually operated and how they would never be able to sell the ore they’d dug from the earth. He’d quickly cooled their ardor and dashed their hopes. The vodka went flat on their tongues.

Savich remembered that at that very moment the rain had started again. Strakhov doused their hissing gas lantern and for a few minutes the men listened to the rain pelt their canvas tent before crawling into their sleeping bags. He was sure the rest of them continued to think of the possibilities as they drifted to sleep. Many minutes passed before he heard their breathing settle into somnolence. All except his own. He had intuitively realized that with one additional element their plan would work: Time.

They were thinking in terms of years. He knew that it would be decades before anyone could come back. No one could return until the entire communist government had collapsed and capitalism took root in the Rodina. Maybe they couldn’t consider such an event, but Savich already knew it was an inevitability. Propaganda couldn’t shorten breadlines or produce spare parts for automobiles, and eventually the leadership would just stop trying. He predicted a quiet implosion, not revolution, but eventually the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its own inefficiency. If he managed to position himself for that day, then all the other pieces could fall into place.

There was one more component that the others hadn’t envisioned — that Savich had no intention of sharing his eventual wealth with any of them.

Their extraction helicopter wasn’t due for another four days, more than enough time for him to put his plan into action. They had been assigned a sixty-kilometer-square search area and had been autonomous since their arrival five weeks earlier. When it arrived from PK, the chopper would fly box patterns across the grid and wait until the team launched flares to pinpoint their exact location.

Savich had to get the team as far away from their strike as possible, but Strakhov would want to keep them where they were until the helicopter came, ready to bask in the glory of their find. Without a weapon to compel them to move on, Savich would have to act now in order to get away from the site.

He lay in his bag for another couple of hours. It wasn’t guilt or remorse that made him wait. He just wanted the team as deep into sleep as possible. He rose at four, the night’s darkest hour, and by the glow of a penlight he opened their medical case. The supplies were rudimentary: bandages, antiseptic, some antibiotics, and a half dozen syringes of morphine.

Black flies were so prevalent that the men no longer bothered to swat them away or react to their nasty stings. Each of them was so covered in angry red welts from numerous bites that their arms, ankles, and faces were mottled red.

Savich emptied the morphine from one of the syringes into the ground and drew back the plunger to fill the cylinder with air. Mikhail was the biggest man on the survey team, a heavyset Ukrainian who had once been a wrestling champion in Kiev. Savich thought nothing of it as he sank the fine needle into Mikhail’s throat where the carotid artery pulsed faintly. He slowly depressed the plunger, sending a lethal bubble of air into the wrestler’s bloodstream. So used to the flies, Mikhail hadn’t even felt the small sting. Savich waited just a few seconds before the bubble became an embolism inside the man’s brain and he stroked out silently. He repeated the procedure twice more. Only old Yuri Strakhov struggled at the end. His eyes flew open at the prick of the needle. Savich clamped his hand over his mouth and pressed his weight on the geologist’s chest, pumping the air into his artery with a savage thrust. Strakhov thrashed for just a brief moment before he went limp.

By the light of the gas lantern, Savich thought about his next move. He recalled that about five kilometers closer to the coast was a tall, steeply angled slope covered in talus and scree. The footing was treacherous, and a careless man could slide nearly a kilometer to its base. A tumble down the slope would do enough damage to a corpse to dissuade even the most iron-stomached forensic doctor in the unlikely event there would be an autopsy.