Mountain of the Dead Read online

  Shielding my eyes with my hand, I was scanning the area for a taxi rank when a grizzled, middle-aged fellow with a cell phone dangling around his neck approached.

  “You need taxi?” he asked.

  “No,” I told him bluntly.

  “You crazy, neg?” Disco said, hugging himself. To the man, “Which way’s the taxi?”

  The guy frowned at him, clearly not understanding his obtuse accent.

  “Wid way de tazzi?” I repeated, making the words extra sloppy.

  Disco glared at me; the man clued in and led us to a car parked illegally in a pickup/dropoff zone. It definitely wasn’t a regulated taxicab. No yellow livery, no top lamp on the roof. Just a puke-green sedan that had seen better days.

  “How much?” I asked him.

  “Where you go?”

  “The Hyatt hotel. It’s by the—”

  “I know, I know. Five hundred.”

  I had no idea whether this was a fair price or not. Common sense told me it probably wasn’t. I said, “Two fifty.”

  The man shook his head. “Four hundred.”

  “Three hundred.”

  He snorted. “Four hundred.”

  It was too cold to argue, so Disco and I tossed our rucksacks into the trunk and got in the back seat. While we were pulling onto a slushy, traffic-clogged street, Disco nudged me with his elbow and nodded to the front of the vehicle.

  “What?” I said.

  “No meter.”

  “It’s a gypsy cab,” I told him. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, official taxis dwindled in numbers, becoming few and far between, not to mention expensive. So industrious citizens in the nascent Russian Federation, who possessed a car but not much money, often moonlighted as taxi drivers, picking up anyone on the street who waved them down.

  “Feels like hitchhiking,” Disco said.

  “Except you gotta pay,” I said. “Uber without the police checks on the drivers.”

  I turned my attention to the snowy scenery passing outside my window. Yekaterinburg was a big city in the middle of nowhere, sort of like all of Russia’s metropolises, I suppose. It ranked largest after Moscow and St. Petersburg and perhaps one other. Historically an industrial center, a kind of Russian Manchester, it made the leap in recent years to tourist chic thanks to its abundance of theaters and museums, as well as an edgy experimental music scene.

  As I watched the mélange of old and new buildings flash past—classical churches and chapels, trendy-looking restaurants and shops, and shabby Soviet apartment blocks—I couldn’t help but think about Igor Dyatlov and his friends, all of whom had set out from here on their ill-fated expedition in 1959, blissfully unaware that they would never reach the summit of Mount Ortoten, that they would die sad, and for some, very gruesome deaths, which would spawn more than a half century of lurid conspiracy theories.

  A chill feathered my spine, and not for the first time since I’d decided to come to Russia, I wondered what the hell I was doing. Research, yeah. But I’d already gathered a plethora of information from the internet and other sources, in both English and Russian, on the Dyatlov expedition. This would have been sufficient for my book; it had been for all my others. Was it foolhardy to follow in the footsteps of the doomed hikers? And was I putting Disco and myself in danger? For good or bad, I believed in Murphy’s Law, and we were going to be in a very remote, very cold location for several days. If something unforeseen were to happen, we could find ourselves up shit creek with no paddle.

  The driver mumbled to himself in Russian.

  I said, “Something wrong, boss?”

  “Can you hear?” he said.

  “Hear what?”

  “Car problem.” He swung to the curb and put the transmission in Park. “Wait here. I check.” He rounded the car to the trunk. I turned to watch him through the rear window before the raised trunk lid blocked him from view.

  “That skinny mullet freaks me out,” Disco said.

  “The phone around the neck?”

  “Everything ’bout him. He’s like a little Bond villain.”

  “Maybe he’s getting a tire iron. Gonna come back and bash our heads in?”

  “No joke. What’s he doing back there? What engine trouble is in the trunk?”

  “Shit!” I said, epiphanizing. I threw open my door, jumped out, and went to the rear of the vehicle. The driver’s upper body was cantilevered over the open trunk. He stood up quickly.

  I said, “What’s the problem, boss?”

  The man shrugged. “There was noise. Tick, tick, tick.”

  “From the trunk?”

  Nodding, he gripped the trunk lid, to close it. I gripped it as well, keeping it open.

  Disco appeared on the other side of the car, frowning. “What’s going on?”

  I pointed to his suitcase with my free hand, the unzipped front pocket. “The troll was going through our stuff.”

  “Motherfuck!”

  I hiked my rucksack out of the trunk, plunking it down on the slushy road. “Get our carry-ons from the back seat,” I said.

  Swearing in French, Disco went to retrieve our stuff.

  “Four hundred,” the driver said to me, holding out his hand.

  “You gotta be fucking joking,” I said.

  “Three hundred.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.”

  He glowered at me, apparently decided he had no right to be the angry one, and stormed back to the front of the car. The driver’s door slammed shut. Disco appeared again, our carry-on bags slung over his shoulders. I reached into the trunk, for his rucksack, when the taxi’s tires squealed, and the car shot off down the street.

  “Arrête!” Disco shouted.

  “Hey!” I said.

  The gypsy cab accelerated into the dark, snow-veiled night.

  ⁂

  Once Disco calmed down somewhat—one consolation was that he’d tucked his passport and wallet into his Roman duffle, not his stolen rucksack—we spent the next ten minutes on the street waiting for a legitimate taxi to come our way. When we didn’t spot one, we hailed passing cars. Although hesitant about getting into another gypsy cab, we were still dressed in our LA clothes in subzero temperatures.

  Thankfully a silver Lada soon pulled over. We climbed in the backseat of the little Russian-made car—I crammed my rucksack onto my lap this time—and discovered the driver was a female. She wore a fur-lined hood so I only got a quick glimpse of her face when she asked us where we were going, but she seemed to be in her mid-forties, handsome rather than pretty.

  The ride passed in silence, or near silence, because every now and then Disco would grunt something derogatory about gypsy cabs.

  The woman dropped us off at the Hyatt’s valet parking and asked for one hundred rubles. I gave her two hundred, but if she appreciated the tip, she didn’t show it.

  The hotel lobby was modern and quiet, and with the unusual egg lights dangling from the high ceiling, and the sleek reception counters, it almost resembled the interior of a Starfleet spaceship. While we checked in, the receptionist, a pretty blonde sporting a Tasha Yar boy-cut, told us the spa was out of order and gave us each a voucher for a complimentary massage. Not a bad perk since I’d never had any intention of using the spa.

  A flat-footed, rolled-shouldered bellhop set my rucksack on a birdcage trolley wagon, telling me in thickly accented English he would bring it to my room.

  In the elevator, I could tell Disco remained bummed over his lost possessions, and I said, “At least you don’t have to tip Igor.”

  He raised a hand. “Watch the slap, Whitey.”

  “Here.” I handed him my massage voucher. “Get two hours instead of one.”

  The elevator pinged, the doors opened, and we ventured down the carpeted hallway to our adjacent rooms. I said, “So I’ll knock at, what, nine tomorrow morning?”

  “I might be out,” he said. “Shopping, you know.”

  “We can’t be late.”

  “Gypsy
cabs,” he grunted for the umpteenth time. “Better be no gypsy chamber maids in my room tomorrow.”

  I opened my door with the provided keycard and stepped inside the dark entryway. The lights blinked on automatically, revealing a spacious and clean room featuring an Art Deco vibe. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered views of the Iset River, as well as the Church on the Blood, christened so because it stood on the site of the former residence of the last Emperor of Russia, who was slaughtered there alongside his family and household staff by the Bolsheviks during the 1918 revolution.

  Dumping my rucksack on the king bed, I beelined to the minibar. I’d managed to down five beers before falling asleep on the LA-Moscow section of the flight. I’d had another during the jaunt up to Yekaterinburg, but it had made me feel sluggish and I’d stopped after one.

  Now I knocked back an overpriced miniature of whiskey in a single gulp. With a satisfying burn in my gut, I carried two bottles of Heineken to the ergonomic work desk, where I set up my laptop so I could look over my notes a final time before the meeting at the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation tomorrow morning.

  Clicking away at the laptop’s trackpad, I navigated to my research folder, which I’d named “Mexico 2010” to throw off any Russian officials that might not have bought my story at immigration. Maybe not 007 in cunning, but I’d figured a little subterfuge bested none at all.

  I opened a PDF file labeled “1.” It was the first of twenty-three files that comprised the nearly five-hundred pages of the 1959 Dyatlov criminal case file. The Soviet authorities had ordered the original file be kept in the classified section of the Sverdlovsk regional archive of criminal files until the 1990s, when parts of it were allowed to be photocopied for public consumption. Since then most of the rest had been smuggled out, though many Snowden types believe several key pages remain missing. To my knowledge, I held in my possession the only English translation, which I’d commissioned from a professor of Russian studies at UCLA.

  As my eyes flicked over the translated passages from the Dyatlov group’s journal entries, I could sense their high spirits as they set out on what would be a one-way journey. There existed a vibe of anarchic excitement as they wondered whether they could play the mandolin on the train, or whether anyone had remembered to pack the salt or the measuring scale, or where the communal knife had gone. Their venturesome zeal impressed on my mind any number of road trips I had embarked on in my youth—only heading off into the stark Russian wilderness during winter was not my idea of fun. Nevertheless, the young hikers had lived in a vastly different time. The Cold War had been at its height, and the Communist Party dominated almost every aspect of an individual’s life in the Soviet Union. Consequently, many citizens turned to sport, one part of which they termed “tourism,” though not in the traditional Western sense of the word. Instead the term covered organized outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, rock climbing, and skiing. It grew in popularity because it meant a party of friends could escape the day to day grind of their lives and let down their hair, so to speak, without worrying about the eyes and ears that might be monitoring them.

  Igor Dyatlov was the leader of the ski group. With a receding hairline, wide-spaced eyes, and a gap between his front teeth, he was not leading-man handsome, but he possessed a quick intellect and commanding presence that encouraged people to follow him. Having been on three previous trips to the Northern Ural Mountains, he would have known the area better than anyone else would. He was also a stickler for details, and when in the mountains, it was often his way or the highway.

  By some accounts, he harbored a secret crush on one of his two female companions, Zinaida Kolmogorova, and indeed investigators had discovered a photograph of her tucked into his private diary. Zina, as her friends called her, was a dark-haired and dark-eyed beautiful woman who had previously dated another member of the group, Yuri Doroshenko.

  Yuri Krivonischenko, Rustem Slobodin, and Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles were all UPI graduates and qualified engineers. The group called Krivonischenko “Georgy” to differentiate him from the other two Yuris they traveled with, while they called Thibeaux-Brignolles “Kolya” due to the difficult pronunciation of his foreign surname, as he was the son of a French Communist executed by Stalin. Kolya had promised his widowed mother this would be his last trip into the mountains, and you could say that was a promise he had kept.

  Every group of friends had its nerd, and Alexander Kolevatov filled that role. Before pursuing a degree in nuclear physics at UPI, he had been in Moscow working in a secret laboratory organized within Department 9 of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, the forerunner of the KGB. He composed meticulous notes in a private diary on every expedition he embarked on, and so it was unclear why nobody recovered his diary in the abandoned tent.

  The second female in the group, Lyudmila Dubinina, was strong-willed and outspoken, known as a stalwart Communist fond of patriotic phrases such as “For Stalin!” and “For the Motherland!” With her straw-colored hair and plain appearance, she reminded me of the woman with the red kerchief standing before the bayonet wall on the infamous 1941 Russian “Motherland is Calling!” propaganda poster.

  Semyon Zolotaryov, a last-minute addition to the group, didn’t know any of the others and inexplicably introduced himself under the false name “Sasha.” He was an older army veteran who had fought in the Second World War, attaining the rank of sergeant and earning four medals. He served in a military engineer unit—what you might call a suicide unit—as they were the first to clear enemy defenses and suffered horrific death rates to hostile fire. In the battles for Konigsberg and Berlin, up to eighty percent of these soldiers perished within the first few days of fighting. I guess you could consider Zolotaryov a lucky guy, though his luck did not extend to the Dyatlov expedition, as his death came early on the morning of his thirty-eighth birthday, and it would be neither quick nor kind.

  The final member of the Dyatlov group was twenty-two-year-old Yuri Yudin. However, he returned to Sverdlovsk halfway into the trip due to a painful bout of rheumatoid arthritis. He would be the only survivor.

  I would have given anything to have interviewed him, but he passed away at the age of seventy-five in 2013. He was interred in Michailovskoe Cemetery alongside seven of his old hiking comrades, taking whatever secrets he knew to the grave.

  ⁂

  As a radio engineering student, Igor Dyatlov was an expert at designing and assembling his own radios. Even so, he didn’t bring one on the expedition to Mount Ortoten. In the 1950s a radio would have weighed a hundred pounds, far too heavy to carry on such a difficult hike. Consequently, the only way to contact Sverdlovsk had been by telegram, and on February 12 he had intended to do exactly this: send a message via telegram from the village of Vizhay to the Ural Polytechnic Institute, confirming he and the others were on their way back.

  When no telegram arrived, the families of the hikers called officials at UPI, who sent an inquiring telegram to Vizhay. The response came the following day: “The Dyatlov group did not return.” A search party comprised of volunteer students from the university hastily set off by train to the Ural Mountains to look for the missing hikers, while the UPI Sports Club director flew by airplane and helicopter. They were soon joined by prison guards from the gulag camps around Ivdel, local Mansi tribesmen, police officers, and specialists from Moscow.

  Four days later two students, Boris Slobtsov and Mikhail Sharavin, discovered a tent on the western slope of Kholat Syakhl. Slobtsov immediately recognized it as belonging to Igor Dyatlov, as he had helped Igor construct it years earlier by stitching together two smaller tents.

  The support poles and the south-facing entrance remained standing, though snow had covered and collapsed much of the roof. Using an ice axe left in the snow, Sharavin sliced open one of the tent’s canvas walls. The interior recalled the Mary Celeste. No hikers, but all their gear undisturbed. Packs and jackets spread over the floor in preparation for sleeping, personal items next to bedrolls, boots lining t
he entrance. You could almost imagine the hikers had stepped out for a morning stroll and would return at any moment.

  The following day several search teams arrived at the tent. Professional investigators they were not, and nobody thought to preserve or record the scene. Most notably they destroyed the original footprints surrounding the tent. Further down the declivity, however, they identified tracks made by eight or nine people wearing no footwear. These continued in two single-file lines toward the Lozva River valley in an orderly fashion. After a half mile they vanished completely.

  There were no return tracks.

  ⁂

  A mile away, a pair of students were scouting the same valley for a new, flat spot to serve as a central base for the growing number of search parties. Around midday, near a tall cedar, they discovered the bodies of two men partly buried beneath the snow. They lay side by side, stripped almost to their underwear, their feet bare. Close by, the charred remains of a fire and, inexplicably, a stack of dry firewood. The men had clearly frozen to death—burn marks disfigured their hands, indicating they had been so cold they had likely stuck them over the flames in a desperate attempt to warm them up—so why had they left perfectly good firewood untouched?

  The students identified the dead as Yuri “Georgy” Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko.

  ⁂

  The next day the search-and-rescue operation shifted from the slopes of Kholat Syakhl to the Lozva River valley. A thousand feet from the cedar a Mansi tribesman uncovered the body of Igor Dyatlov beneath a foot of snow. He lay on his back, his frozen arms folded in front of his face, almost as if he had been defending himself from someone or something when he died. Dressed better than the two Yuris, he wore a sleeveless fur vest, a sweater, and ski pants, though he also lacked a hat, mitts, and boots. His watch had stopped at 5:31, though this meant little. Watches during the 1950s needed to be wound, and his could have stopped before his death, and he hadn’t bothered to wind it.