December by James Steel Read Free Book Online Page B

smiled and drank.
    ‘OK, good—you passed the interview.’ He paused. ‘So now you are Director of GeoScan.’
    Alex frowned. What was the Russian on about now? His mind seemed to hop about everywhere.
    ‘It’s a UK-based international geo-survey firm. I have the details of your next survey mission.’
    He jumped off the bed, took a large portrait of Karl Marx off the wall, opened a money safe behind it and pulled a black leather document wallet out. He passed Alex the bulky folder and sat on the bed again.
    Alex put his tea down and took it hesitantly.
    ‘Go on, have a look,’ Sergey urged him. ‘There’s a lot of uranium ore in Chita province in Siberia and I want you to find the highest grade deposits.’
    He reached over, pulled a map of Russia out of the wallet and spread it on the carpet between them. Alex quickly ran his eyes back and forth over it. He was amazed, looking at the Mercator projection map, how big the country was. The whole enormous mass of European Russia all the way east to Moscow only made up a tiny proportion of it.
    Sergey pointed to a large highlighted area in the far east, three thousand miles from Moscow, near Lake Baikal and just north of the border where Mongolia and China met.
    ‘Chita is the province in Siberia that I’m governor of—it’s next to Abramovich’s patch—and it’s where Raskolnikov is in prison. Your cover for getting you and a team in there will be as geologists doing a survey. That’ll also be a good excuse for you to have access to my mining company helicopters because it’s a huge area to cover—four hundred and thirty-one thousand square kilometres.’ He laughed self-indulgently. ‘That’s twice the size of the whole United Kingdom, and I am the sole, unelected ruler of it all—isn’t that great!’ He giggled at the thought.
    ‘Total population is about one million, mainly Russians and Buryats—they’re a Mongol tribe. Like Bayarmaa—she’s gorgeous, yes? God, those cheekbones!’
    He clapped his hands, looked dazed for a moment, and then suddenly switched into a focused mode, pulling sheets out of the folder, poring over them and pointing things out.
    ‘This is the map of Krasnokamensk, the town near where Raskolnikov is in the prison labour camp. You will be able to base your team here.’ He indicated an area on the edge of town. ‘It’s the transport depot for my mining company and will be a secure base for your operations. I have a Mil Mi-17 helicopter there in a hangar for you to use and a hostel for your men.’
    Alex nodded. ‘I know the Mil Mi-17 from my African operations.’ It was a very popular, robust aircraft used all around the world.
    Sergey nodded but wagged his finger at him. ‘Hmm, but remember this isn’t Africa. It’s minus thirty out there at the moment.’
    He pulled out more sheets. ‘These are the plans of the camp, and as much detail on the guards and defences as I can get. I got them because I run the company that supplies the camp with food, but the prison itself is run by the MVD—that’s the Interior Ministry—and they are definitely not on our side.’ He raised his eyebrows warningly.
    ‘OK, that is enough for you to start getting an initial plan together. I am giving you just twenty-four hours to do it because I know you’re good,’ he grinned encouragingly, ‘and because Ihave a contact in the camp who gets messages out to me and I know that the bastards are planning to kill Raskolnikov soon, so we need to get going.’
    ‘Why don’t they just kill him straight out?’
    Sergey screwed up his face. ‘He’s like a saint in my country. He’s too popular for them to just go out and shoot him. There would have to be a state funeral and it really wouldn’t do for his body to be on display with a big bullet hole in his head. No, it’s a lot easier for them to just trump up some tax charges, lock him up for years and let his memory fade, and then bump him off in an accident.
    ‘We’ll meet back