“What’s the issue there?” Katie asked.
“We’re standing roughly ten miles from the airport, so they should have been lined up for landing. But the airport is over there.” With his other hand, he pointed forty degrees to the left.
Katie tried to map it out in her head. “So they weren’t lined up with the runway.”
“At the moment of impact, they were way off—which should have resulted in other warnings.”
The Air Force lieutenant beckoned Carter, who climbed back up toward the tail.
When he was out of earshot, Conza said to Katie, “Sounds like we’ve got a few things that don’t add up.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Carter seems to know his stuff.”
“Agreed.” His gaze drifted over the hillside. “I feel like we should be doing something to help, but I don’t know where to start.”
“The colonel said he’d put us to work—I’m sure he’ll come up with something.”
Conza reached down, picked up a jagged piece of metal, and began inspecting it.
Katie’s attention settled on the shattered fuselage. That was where the passengers would have been. She thought about John Moore, and also the Navy commander who’d been on board. Yet for reasons she didn’t understand, her thoughts then veered away. Back to the distant airport and the dirty-white Learjet.
“I’m gonna head back to the car,” she said to Conza.
“Why?”
“The phone reception was better on the hill. I need to do a little research.”
11
Bol’shezemel’skaya Tundra
Komi Republic, Russia
90 Nautical Miles North of the Arctic Circle
0410 Local Time
The heater on the small bus worked like those on every Russian-manufactured vehicle, which was to say, hardly at all.
The old man tried to shrug his blanket higher over his shoulders. He was wearing only a thin prison jumpsuit in what had to be subzero temperatures. An hour ago, with his hands and feet going numb, one of the four guards, the least sadistic of the bunch, had tossed a blanket on his seat. With both of his arms and one leg chained to the frame, he’d wrapped it around himself with a contortionist’s agility. The threadbare layer was hardly worth the trouble—less a source of warmth than a reminder that it existed.
They had been on the small bus for roughly twelve hours, three stops made for piss breaks and gas. His back ached from the constant rocking and his wrists were raw from the manacles. Sleep was all but impossible. The bus had departed properlypaved surfaces hours ago, and the gravel road they were on was rutted with spine-jarring potholes. It was drivable, but barely, one winter storm away from closure.
The reason for this road’s existence had been on display for the last hundred kilometers—a high-volume crude-oil transmission pipeline tracked along the left shoulder. During the night he had seen a number of trucks pass in the opposite direction; all had been hauling oil drums and machinery. The West Siberian basin was one of Russia’s most productive oil fields, although the yields were steadily declining. The old man knew a lot about petroleum extraction. It had once been his area of expertise, although admittedly his information was dated.
In a roundabout way, that knowledge was the reason he was here, chained to a frozen bus seat and desperately hungry. The majority of the inmates at Penal Colony 18 were simple murderers and cutthroats, but a small subset were different. His file attested that he had been sentenced to life at hard labor for strangling a prostitute. It was, of course, a complete fabrication. As the Russian saying went, “Give us a person and we’ll find the infraction.”
His true crime had been a string of blog posts that were critical of the regime. He had worked as a geologist at the influential Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas. When his research proved definitively that Russia’s oil fields were drying up, he published a series of articles suggesting that diversification of the economy was critical for the nation’s long-term future. True as his conclusions might have been, they diverged from the party line. In those fractious years, with the economy stagnating, he’d faced a crossroad decision: do what was best for his country or shut up and move on. In a fit of academic pique, one final blog post had become his personal waterloo. He regretted it now, hiscrisis of conscience, but at the time it had seemed like the right thing to do.
The bus jarred suddenly, nearly bouncing him out of his seat. The chassis groaned and the engine sputtered, but the driver didn’t slow. The old man looked through a window rimed in frost and saw a world without color. Only shades of gray. Shades of cold.
He had asked the guards where they were going, but they’d only ignored him. He knew it was north, based on the fringe of light on the horizon behind them and to the right. He’d performed calculations in his head—long one of his tricks to maintain sanity in surroundings designed to extinguish it—and he decided they had to be getting close to the Kara Sea.
“Where do you think we are going?” growled the prisoner in the seat behind him. The formerbratvahit man was obviously entertaining the same question.
“I have no idea,” the old man said.
“You worked in these places, did you not?”
