Mountain of the Dead Read online

  Would the ice hold?

  It should. It only needed to support my weight. Disco and the snowmobile, on the other hand, must have topped more than half a ton.

  Anger boiled in me, anger at Fyodor. What the hell was he thinking taking us on this river? He obviously didn’t know the thickness of the ice, never tested it. He was our damn guide. He should have known better.

  And where the fuck was Disco? Why hadn’t he resurfaced? He knew how to swim. I’d been in the ocean countless times with him, usually surfing, but sometimes just goofing around. I’d seen his long stroke propelling him through the water like a sleek fish. So what happened? Did the freezing water lock up his muscles? His heart? Had he sunk to the bottom of the river like a rock?

  I could see the jagged, teeth-like edges of the hole now, and I was wondering how much farther I could continue without falling in myself when abruptly Disco’s face and hands materialized directly beneath me. The ice must have been four or five inches thick, but I could still see him, an opaque representation, more colors and shapes than any clear details. His eyes appeared to be bugged wide, his mouth pressed closed against the freezing water. His right fist banged the transparent roof over his head silently.

  “Disco!” I shouted. He must be disorientated, didn’t know the window was only a few feet away. I pointed toward it. “There!” I scrambled recklessly forward.

  Disco followed me beneath the ice, like some kind of drowning doppelganger on the other side of the looking glass.

  At the lip of the window, I plunged my right arm into the freezing water. The cold easily penetrated my mitt and the sleeve of my jacket, burning my skin like a thousand hot needles.

  A moment later Disco seized my hand, tugging it so hard I almost slid through the broken hole after him. Then, as if climbing a ladder one rung at a time, he clutched my forearm, then my bicep, then my shoulder, until his head burst through the black surface of the water.

  “Disco!”

  He heaved air into his lungs a moment before he began to hyperventilate, breathing in fast, short bursts, a sputtering engine. At the same time he continued to clutch wildly at me, searching for better purchase.

  I caught his flailing arms by the wrists and tugged as hard as I could, yet this proved futile. I had no leverage to pull him up onto the ice.

  Olivia appeared behind me, on her knees, hands around my calves.

  “I have you!” she said. “Pull!”

  “He’s too heavy!”

  “Help!” It was Disco, the word a cracked plea.

  I returned my attention to him. His blind panic seemed to have passed. He’d gotten control of his breathing, and he’d stopped struggling, though his eyes remained strained with terror.

  “You have to get your upper body on the ice,” I told him, “then kick with your legs.”

  “I’m trying!”

  “Get horizontal.”

  He got his elbows on the ice and wiggled his body back and forth. But he was too heavy, the ice too slippery, and he slid back into the water.

  I cursed in frustration. If it were Olivia in the water, I was sure I could have heaved her out without too much trouble. Disco, however, was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound deadweight.

  My grip on his wrists weakened. Disco freaked, tearing an arm free and clawing at me, his fist accidentally clocking me in the jaw.

  Blinking stars away, I reaffirmed my grip on his wrists and yanked as hard as I could, bellowing in the process. Disco’s body flopped up onto the ice—

  Crack!

  I froze, waiting to crash through the ice into the freezing water.

  That didn’t happen, and I redoubled my efforts.

  Cra-ack!

  “Corey!” Olivia yelled. “Let go! You’re going to fall in!”

  And I knew she was right. The ice continued to splinter. It would give at any moment. Yet I couldn’t let go of Disco. I couldn’t watch him drown before my eyes.

  Then Olivia was hollering in Russian. A moment later Fyodor on his dogsled flashed past my peripheral vision. What felt like ages passed before the tip of his leather whip smacked the ice next to me.

  Fyodor shouted at me to grab hold of it. I was in such a state I barely registered he was speaking English. I gripped the length of cord just above the braided cracker.

  “Wrap around wrist!” he said.

  I did as instructed, while securing my hold on Disco with a forearm handshake.

  “Ready?” Fyodor said.

  “Okay!” I said.

  Pain flared in my left shoulder, but then I was moving, and Disco was moving, crunching up onto the ice, and then we were picking up speed, leaving behind the toothy mouth that had nearly swallowed us both.

  ⁂

  At the riverbank Fyodor helped me lug Disco onto solid ground. Then he and Olivia went to work building a fire, while Vasily and I stripped Disco of his wet clothes. When we got him down to his boxers—his taut and toned body had broken out in an epidemic of goosebumps—I retrieved my rucksack from the snowmobile and upended it next to him. Getting his wet clothing off his stiff and uncoordinated limbs proved easier than getting dry ones on them, and I needed Vasily’s help again to manipulate his arms and legs. On top of his clothes we added most of my spare ones, piling layer upon layer, the seams stretching to accommodate his larger size.

  “How do you feel?” I asked him. He continued to shiver, and his rime-flecked lips had turned a bluish color.

  He blinked torpidly at me. “Huh?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Dizzy.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Hell.”

  “Hell would be warm.”

  He smiled thinly, which I took to be a good sign. I felt the pulse in his wrist. It seemed normal.

  Using saplings, I constructed a crude tripod over the fire, filled a billycan with snow, and hung it above the flames to boil.

  “So you speak English?” I said to Fyodor. He stood nearby, snapping branches into smaller sizes.

  “Da,” he said, his voice deep and gruff.

  “That’s a yes?”

  “Da.”

  I looked at Vasily. “You knew this?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “You never told me.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Because old Fido’s been pretending he doesn’t speak English.”

  Fyodor frowned. “Fido?”

  “It’s a generic name for a dog,” Olivia supplied helpfully.

  Fyodor’s frown became a scowl in his unruly beard. “I pretend nothing.”

  “Why not speak English to us then?”

  He glared at me. “Why not you speak Russian?”

  “How often do you come out here?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re our guide, and I would have thought you might have known how thick the ice was before taking us out on it.”

  He shrugged. “Yesterday, I check. Six inches.”

  “Hope you had insurance on that snowmobile.”

  “Nyet,” he replied. “You pay.”

  “Me?”

  “Your friend.”

  “I ain’t paying for no snowmobile,” Disco muttered.

  “Da, you pay.”

  “Nope.”

  Fyodor said something in Russian to Vasily, who replied, shaking his head.

  The water in the billycan, I noticed, was boiling. I snatched it from the fire, filled an aluminum mug with steaming water, and dropped in a tea bag. I passed the drink to Disco, who cupped it with both hands. Then I filled a hot-water bottle and set it on his groin.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” he said, coming alive. “What the hell, Whitey?”

  “Major arteries there. Your blood will warm quicker.” His shivering had stopped, though his lips hadn’t yet returned to their normal color. “You still dizzy?”

  “I feel better.”

  “Good thing you’re so big. You take a long time to freeze.”

  “Damn
right.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fyodor can take you back to Ivdel in the dogsled. I’ll meet up with you in a few days.”

  Disco shook his head. “I ain’t going back, neg.”

  “It will be dark in a few hours,” I said. “You don’t have a tent or a sleeping bag.”

  “He can use mine,” Olivia said.

  “Then you won’t have a tent or a sleeping bag.”

  “I’ll share yours,” she stated.

  Disco’s amusement sputtered into asthmatic coughs.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Disco is too big to share a tent with you or Vasily. I’m small.”

  “Not small enough to fit in my sleeping bag with me.”

  “We’ll unzip it, use it as a cover.”

  I looked at Disco’s wet snowsuit. It lay in a tangled pile on the snow, arms and legs pulled inside out.

  “We’ll hang it by the fire,” Olivia said. “It’ll be dry by tomorrow.”

  “His food is gone,” I said.

  “We’ll ration the rest of ours. We have plenty.”

  “And Fyodor and I have rifles,” Vasily said. “We can hunt.”

  I contemplated this. I didn’t want to part with Disco if I didn’t have to, but I’d read about people feeling fine after an accident or injury one day, then dropping dead the next due to some complication or another. It was why hospitals often held patients overnight for observation.

  If we continued to Kholat Syakhl, and Disco broke into a fever or caught pneumonia or suffered some other medical exigency farther away from civilization than we were now...

  I was about to mention this when Disco spoke up with the last word.

  “I appreciate the concern, Whitey,” he said, “I do, but I’m good good. I ain’t going back. And that’s the end of it.” Smiling confidently, he added, “Now, what we got for dinner? I’m starving.”

  CHAPTER 12

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  SIX DAYS TO LIVE

  At a little past one p.m. the hikers piled into the bed of the woodcutter’s truck that had been arranged to take them to Sector 41. Yuri Yudin knew the three-hour drive would be not only cold but bumpy as well. Such inconveniences usually did not concern him. But sniffles and coughs now accompanied the chills that had afflicted him in the cafeteria. Moreover, his rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps taking advantage of his rundown immune system, was causing more discomfort to his joints than normal.

  This concerned him greatly because if the symptoms continued to worsen, he would slow down his comrades and become a liability, which meant his only option would be to turn back to Sverdlovsk.

  Pushing these thoughts aside, he folded his arms across his chest and tucked his chin against the wind and tried to sink deeper into the corner of the cargo bed.

  The others seemed oblivious to his plight, occupying themselves with singing and cerebral discussions. At one point, however, Lyuda noticed him coughing and moved some rucksacks so she could sit beside him. She asked him if he was okay, and when he told her he might be getting sick, she unfurled the tent and lay the tarpaulin over him like a blanket. He immediately felt warmer. Then, to his surprise, she climbed beneath the canvas and shimmied close to him, so their shoulders touched.

  “How are your joints?” she asked softly.

  She, like everyone, knew of his medical condition.

  “Hurting,” he admitted.

  “You will feel better when we get to Sector 41. You will be warm. You can lie down.”

  The truck hit a bad bump and Yudin grimaced. “Anything would be better than this road.”

  Lyuda’s hand found his and squeezed. The gesture, hidden from the others by the tarpaulin, felt more intimate than friendly. Yudin’s heart stuttered. He had always harbored a crush for Lyuda, though he had never thought she felt anything for him.

  Was he reading too much into the contact?

  Was she doing little more than comforting a sick friend?

  He glanced sidelong at her. She smiled. He smiled back and looked away.

  And right then, despite the cold and his ill-health, Yudin felt energized to be young and alive.

  This was his life right then. These were his friends. This was where he belonged.

  ⁂

  The truck arrived at Sector 41 just as the swollen red sun began its descent in the western sky. Dusk’s purple shadows lengthened across the dozen or so pine cabins that comprised the tiny settlement. Out front the largest cabin a group of woodcutters had gathered, no doubt curious by the truck’s approach. They would not be accustomed to visitors.

  The young men wore trapper’s caps and quilted cotton jackets that had originally been designed for the Red Army. They had hard faces and lean bodies and all their eyes seemed focused on Zina and Lyuda, as none of them had likely seen a woman for months.

  Lyuda found the attention intimidating—but also exhilarating. She knew she was not beautiful like Zina. In contrast to her friend’s exotic looks, Lyuda had straw-colored hair and plain features. She did not usually inspire lust in men. On this trip, for instance, Igor and Doroshenko and Georgy, and perhaps Zolotaryov, all had eyes for Zina, even if none of them would come out and say so, as all good Communists knew not to show special interest in one person only. Yet nobody ever looked twice at Lyuda. She was always just “one of the guys.”

  Except now. Except in the company of these woodcutters.

  They saw her as a woman, perhaps even an attractive one.

  She held back the slightest smile.

  One of the woodcutters stepped forward and spoke. “My name is Yevgeny Venediktov,” he said cheerfully. “Welcome to our little piece of paradise!” Unlike his comrades, in place of a cotton jacket he wore a smart blazer over a checkered shirt and loose, Cossack-style breeches bloused into his boots. His dark hair was slicked back, his red beard neatly trimmed and shaped.

  Igor shook his hand and said. “I’m Igor Dyatlov. We’re students from UPI in Sverdlovsk. We were hoping you might have somewhere we could spend the night? We don’t need much room—”

  Yevgeny waved him silent and declared with aplomb that the seven male hikers would share one cabin, the two females another.

  Grateful for the hospitality, Lyuda and the others dropped off their rucksacks and skis in their lodgings and returned to the main cabin. Most of the woodcutters were there, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.

  Yevgeny—or “Beard,” as his friends called him—went about preparing dinner, which included freshly baked bread. After the meal, everyone sat on the floor around the stove as the room did not contain much furniture. The hikers attempted small talk with the woodcutters, and vice versa, but the efforts were awkward and forced. The woodcutters came from poor, rural families. They did not attend university. They cared little for literature or social philosophy or science.

  With the exception of Beard.

  After Zina had foolishly asked one woodcutter where they kept all their books (and was greeted with embarrassed silence), Beard said loudly and clearly: “‘Goodbye, my friend, goodbye my love, you are in my heart. It was preordained we should part. And be reunited by and by.’”

  “You know Yesenin?” Igor said, impressed.

  Beard nodded. “My father had a small library in my birth house. His books were his prized possessions. He never let me touch them, of course. But rascal that I was, I would sneak one to my room after he and my mother retired to bed each night.”

  “Have you read Alexander Pushkin?” Zina asked.

  “‘A magic moment I remember: I raised my eyes and you were there, a fleeting vision, the quintessence of all that’s beautiful and rare.’”

  “Yes!” Zina gushed. “That’s one of my favorite poems. It’s so wonderful, isn’t it? How he completely captures the essence of love—”

  Doroshenko chuffed. Everyone turned to look at him.

  He sat apart from the group, his back against a
wall, his arms folded across his chest. “Allergies,” he mumbled.

  “Are you allergic to love, Yuri?” Rustem asked, laughing.

  Doroshenko looked away.

  “So tell us of your trip,” Beard said to Igor. “You will only be staying one night with us?”

  Igor explained their route, the difficulty, what they hoped to accomplish.

  “It must be nice to be a tourist,” Beard mused. “To have all that money and time that you do not need to work.”

  “We are members of the Sports Club at the university. They are funding the hike.”

  “Yes, of course. But still—fourteen days to go frolicking in the woods?”

  Lyuda frowned. Frolicking?

  “We do not frolic,” Igor said tightly. “It is not merely skiing. It is a very difficult undertaking—”

  “Much more difficult, I presume, than chopping and hauling lumber from dawn until dusk seven days a week.” Beard still smiled pleasantly, but it hid none of the contempt in his words. “And when you finish frolicking in the woods,” he went on, “you will return to the university to study. I am sure that is very difficult too. Sitting in warm classrooms and reading books. Yes, it must be very difficult to be a student.”

  Igor appeared flustered. “It might not be work like you do, but it is still work. And we are not all students. Georgy works in a plutonium plant. Kolya and Rustem are engineers. And Sasha—”

  Zolotaryov held up a hand to silence him. He sat next to Zina, his expression unreadable.

  “Semyon Zolotaryov, isn’t that right?” Beard said, his green eyes glinting dangerously. “I must say, I’m curious as to your relation to these students. Surely you’re too old to be a student yourself?”

  “I’m a guide,” Zolotaryov said simply.

  “A guide? No, I don’t think you are. Something tells me there is more to you than that. Perhaps it is that silly mustache of yours?”

  The room went grave silent. Lyuda couldn’t believe how quickly and completely the mood had changed. She wanted to say something to reverse the course of the conversation, but she didn’t know what.

  Zolotaryov smiled. “My mustache certainly does not compare to your beard, comrade, which is quite magnificent. In fact, it is a shame to boast such a magnificent beard yet have no one around to admire it save your fellow woodcutters. Unless, of course…you fancy other men?”