Mountain of the Dead Read online

Given the location and orientation of Igor’s body, it appeared he had been trying to return to the tent. Believing some of the other hikers may have attempted the same feat, searchers fanned out from the cedar in the direction of the tent. The strategy paid off. Some eleven hundred feet past Igor’s body, where the land angled up the mountain slope, a policeman’s German shepherd sniffed out the body of Igor’s secret crush, Zinaida Kolmogorova, beneath half a foot of snow. She wore a hat, two sweaters, and ski pants. Yet she too lacked mitts and boots.

  Some of the searchers wrapped the four dead hikers in a tarpaulin and carried them to a large boot-shaped rock appropriately named “Boot Rock,” where the bodies would be out of sight and out of mind. Meanwhile, other searchers continued to scour the area between the cedar and the tent, using steel poles to plumb the depths of the snow for more bodies—for it now seemed clear it was no longer a rescue but a recovery operation.

  On March 1 the senior regional prosecutor in Sverdlovsk, Lev Ivanov, whose name would become inextricably linked with the Dyatlov incident, took over as the lead investigator of what had become a criminal case. The next morning some of the volunteer students, frustrated by the last several days of futile searching, returned to Sverdlovsk to continue their studies. The specialists from Moscow left also. Their short report summed up what happened as an open-and-shut case of misadventure in blizzard conditions—though, conspicuously, they wouldn’t or couldn’t explain why the hikers had abandoned the tent so poorly dressed in said conditions.

  On March 3 the corpses of Krivonischenko, Doroshenko, Igor, and Zina arrived at the morgue in Ivdel. The pathologist who conducted their autopsies, Ivan Laptev, concluded Krivonischenko’s and Doroshenko’s clothing had been removed after they’d died, ruling out paradoxical undressing, which describes the phenomenon in lethal cases of hypothermia whereby a person removes all of his or her clothing shortly before death. Moreover, a foamy gray discharge from Doroshenko’s mouth covered his right cheek, which Laptev likened to an injury sustained by someone pressing hard on another person’s chest cavity. Although he didn’t state as much in his forensic report, discharges of this kind had been common during forceful interrogation by the NKVD.

  Igor’s postmortem examination revealed dark red scratches on the lower third of his right forearm and the palms of his hands. Defensive wounds? It also revealed bruises in the area of the metatarsophalangeal joints, or knuckles, of his right hand, a common result of fistfights. Blood pooling in the dependent parts of his body following death caused blotchy discoloration in his face and chest, which meant he had died lying on his front. Unaccountably, he was found on his back.

  Zina suffered bruises and abrasions to her face, hands, and palms, as well as a long liver-red bruise along her lumbar region, almost as if someone had struck her with a baton, or had been hugging her very tightly. One of her sweaters was torn, and her ski pants and trousers appeared to have been loosened. Given her exceptional beauty, I had to wonder whether someone had been trying to take her clothing off her. Yet whether this had been the case or not, they had failed or given up in their attempt. Laptev determined she had died a virgin.

  ⁂

  At the same time the four autopsies were being conducted, two searchers recovered the body of Rustem Slobodin. He was in the same general line between the cedar and the tent, six-hundred feet ahead of Igor and five-hundred feet behind Zina. He wore a hat, a sweater, ski pants, several pairs of socks, and one valenki, or felt boot.

  His postmortem examination would reveal abrasions on his face, a bloody nose, swollen lips, and bruises to the knuckles of both hands. This led to the question: Had he and Igor been fighting? Or had they been fighting someone else? His skull had also been fractured. Like Igor, his corpse had been turned over.

  It seemed to me that someone had been checking the bodies.

  But who? And why?

  Despite the suspect injuries and unanswered questions, hypothermia was ruled to be the official cause of death of all five hikers.

  ⁂

  In mid-March, a respected UPI alumni overseeing the search party operations named Yevgeny Maslennikov testified before the Search Commission in Ivdel. He explained the difficulties the squall winds and myopic visibility posed to the recovery operation and recommended the search be suspended until April to allow some of the snowpack to melt. The commission not only denied the sound advice, they made the unusual decision to replace Maslennikov with a military man, Colonel Georgy Ortyukov.

  They then urged the parents of the hikers not to bury their children in Sverdlovsk but in a mass grave in Ivdel. The parents were understandably furious; they wanted to be able to visit their children’s graves. Eventually the authorities allowed the hikers to be laid to rest in Sverdlovsk only if the memorial service was not one event but two, held on separate days, and the procession of caskets from the morgue to the cemetery took the least conspicuous route, namely not past the university.

  If they intended to downplay what happened in the mountains, they clearly failed. Not only did a vast number of mourners turn out, they began talking about the strange discoloration of the hikers’ bodies, which appeared to be a brownish-brickish color. This, combined with hundreds of eyewitness sightings of strange orange orbs in the sky over Kholat Syakhl and Mount Ortoten throughout much of February, got the rumor mill churning, and soon there were whispers spanning everything from top secret military tests to UFOs.

  Lev Ivanov also got caught up in this line of inquiry, and he altered his investigation accordingly. However, after being summoned to Moscow for reasons he would not disclose to anyone in the prosecutor’s office, he returned a changed man, and never spoke of orbs in the sky again.

  ⁂

  The search for the remaining four hikers continued throughout March and April, though it wasn’t until the spring thaw in May that their corpses were discovered—and what they revealed changed everything.

  ⁂

  Buried beneath fifteen feet of snow in a ravine about two hundred thirty feet from the cedar, the bodies were at various stages of decay and promptly transported to the morgue in Ivdel. This time the pathologist was Ivan Laptev’s colleague, Dr. Boris Vozrozhdyonny, who had performed Rustem Slobodin’s autopsy. According to his forensic report, three of the four hikers—Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles, Lyudmila Dubinina, and Semyon Zolotaryov—had not died of hypothermia.

  Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles wore a full set of outerwear, as well as boots, which suggested he had likely been prepared to go outside the tent, or was already outside it, when the unexplained event happened, and not just to urinate, but to remain there for some time. He had suffered cuts and bruising on his arms and multiple fractures to his skull.

  Lyudmila Dubinina wore Krivonischenko’s brown sweater. She also wore a hat, burned ski pants, and socks, but no boots. Her injuries included massive thoracic damage, nine fractured ribs, and internal hemorrhaging, including in the right side of her heart. Most disturbing—her tongue was missing. Coagulated blood in her stomach implied that her heart was beating and blood was flowing when the organ was removed. This ruled out predatory culprits such as birds or mice, or the micro fauna in the melting snow that had covered her.

  Army veteran Semyon Zolotaryov wore two hats, a scarf, a short-sleeved shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a black cotton sweater, a flannel jacket, a sheepskin fur vest, long johns, two pairs of pants, ski pants, woolen socks, and burkas, or warm leather shoes—in other words, the guy didn’t die from the cold. He died from massive trauma to his chest, which was crushed so badly several shattered and bloodied ribs pierced the flesh. According to some of the searchers, Zolotaryov’s frozen corpse clutched a stenographer’s notebook in one hand and a pen in the other, and Colonel Georgy Ortyukov had immediately grabbed the notebook, read it, and cursed Zolotaryov, saying, “He’s written nothing!”

  Yet was this really the case? Or did he not want to reveal what was on the paper?

  The fourth and final hiker recovered from the ravine was A
lexander Kolevatov. He had somehow escaped the violent deaths of his comrades and was presumably the last to die. Oddly he did not strip Zolotaryov or Thibeaux-Brignolles of their warm clothes or footwear after they’d perished. To the contrary, he had unbuttoned his own jacket.

  Knowing what had killed the others, had he chosen suicide rather than suffer their same fate?

  ⁂

  Although Dr. Boris Vozrozhdyonny wasn’t able to answer who or what had caused the lethal injuries to Zolotaryov, Dubinina, and Thibeaux-Brignolles, he felt comfortable enough to state what did not cause them, which included a fall into the ravine or another human being. Neither, he believed, could generate the required force, which he compared to what you might witness in a high-speed automobile accident.

  This conclusion didn’t sit well with Lev Ivanov, and despite no longer officially entertaining links between the strange orange orbs in the sky and the hikers’ deaths, he still privately pursued such a possibility, and four days before the hikers were to be buried he ordered radiological tests on their organs and clothing. This was by no means standard operating procedure, and the instrument needed, a Geiger counter, was not part of any investigator’s toolkit then or now. Eleven days later a senior municipal radiologist concluded the hikers’ organs contained traces of the radioactive substance potassium-40, while Krivonischenko’s brown sweater evinced double the normal number of beta-particle contamination.

  Nevertheless, these results would ultimately have no bearing on the Dyatlov case. The existing Code of Criminal Procedure allowed for two months for the prosecution to investigate a crime. An additional month could be added by the prosecutor of the Sverdlovsk region. The clock started ticking February 26. By May 27 the deadlines had passed, and on May 28, a day after the radiological experiments were completed, Lev Ivanov closed the criminal investigation as unsolved, as it seemed there would be no perpetrators to prosecute.

  ⁂

  Two hours later, a half-dozen dead soldiers standing watch next to my computer, I glanced one final time over the questions I’d scribbled down for Vasily Popov the next day, then I flopped spread-eagle onto the plush bed and drifted off to sleep, my last remembered thought:

  What the hell happened to those people?

  CHAPTER 2

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  NINE DAYS TO LIVE

  Now we can finally relax, Zina thought with relief as the train trundled out of Sverdlovsk on the way toward the mining town of Serov. They had left the chore of packing their backpacks until this morning and had rushed to make frantic last-minute preparations, all under the watchful eye of the head of provisions distribution, who had kept shouting, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Then on the way from the university to the train station they’d gotten mired in heavy traffic and had to run to board their car before it left. Zina was still going over in her head everything they’d brought, hoping they hadn’t forgotten anything. Because soon they would be cut off from civilization. A shortage of sugar, or a missing pickaxe, might not be a calamity, but it certainly wouldn’t be ideal.

  Even so, she didn’t brood on this for too long. She didn’t want to worry about what could not be changed. She had been on expeditions into the wilderness before. She knew you had to take each day at a time, and everything would work out in the end. Besides, even if they had forgotten something crucial—say, the batteries for the flashlights—she had faith in Igor’s leadership abilities to muster a solution. There was nobody at the university more capable of surviving off the beaten path than he.

  And speaking of Igor, where was he?

  They were packed into the platzkart, or third-class compartment, which was one step lower than four-person cabins, and one step above sitting on a hard metal seat. Given the cramped conditions, there were four rules you had to abide by. Don’t get drunk or rowdy or else the babushka will yell at you. Don’t eat smelly food or the children will yell at you. Don’t try to steal someone else’s bunk or the rightful occupant will yell at you. And finally don’t fart or everyone will yell at you.

  Zina’s eyes settled on Yuri Doroshenko. He sat across the aisle from her, looking stoically out his window. That was so like him. He would probably spend the entire train ride watching the snowy scenery pass and not say a word to anyone. It wasn’t that he didn’t get along with the others. He did. He was simply reserved and comfortable with silence. This quiet strength was one of the qualities she had admired most about him when they had dated.

  Zina still didn’t understand why he broke off their relationship. She thought things had been going so well between them. She had even invited him to her hometown in Kamensk-Uralsky to meet her parents. He had been so cute! As they’d walked up the street to her house, he had been so nervous, repeating their names over and over again so he didn’t forget them, brushing his sweaty palms on his trousers, asking her if he looked okay in his threadbare coat. He had always been self-conscious about his coat. He’d had it for years now, and you could see its age. But his father had died in 1954, the year before Doroshenko graduated high school, and his mother didn’t have much money. So she was still saving up to buy him a new coat. He hoped he might have it by next winter.

  Could he have met another girl? Zina wondered. This would break her heart. It was silly, of course. There was no rule that said he could not see somebody else. After all, she was with Igor now. Well, secretly. They didn’t want to tell anybody they were spending private time together for fear of hurting Doroshenko’s feelings.

  Still, she missed Doroshenko tremendously. Tall and handsome, he was also intelligent, thoughtful, kind, and a good listener. And of course a good kisser! Zina could not say who prevailed on this account—Doroshenko or Igor—as she had only kissed Igor a couple of times now, while she and Doroshenko must have kissed…oh, she couldn’t even count.

  Zina pushed aside the memories. As pleasant as they may be, they hurt too. Because Doroshenko would never kiss her again.

  From the far end of the car Igor appeared, accompanied by a man at least ten years his elder. The man had a stiff posture and quick eyes that made Zina think of a soldier. Yet at the same time he carried himself with an easy confidence. He had brown hair and a matching mustache, the tips waxed into upward curls.

  Georgy stopped playing his mandolin. Yuri Yudin woke from his light doze and elbowed Kolevatov awake as well. Lyuda set aside the tin of money she was counting for the umpteenth time. Even Doroshenko turned away from his window. Everyone looked at the newcomer.

  “This is Semyon Zolotaryov,” Igor announced. “He’s a local guide. He’s going to be joining us on the trip.”

  The man smiled, revealing a mouthful of gold teeth. “Just call me Sasha,” he said.

  ⁂

  Zina stifled a yawn. It was very late now, or, more accurately, very early. She had the group journal open to the first page. She’d already penned a few sentences while back in her dorm room, and once she’d gathered her thoughts, she picked up where she’d left off. Here we are on the train, she wrote. We sang all the songs that we knew, learned new ones, everyone went to sleep at three in the morning. I wonder what awaits us on this trip? What will be new? The boys solemnly swore not to smoke. I wonder how much willpower they will have? Everyone is sleeping and the Ural taiga spreads away in all directions.

  As if to verify these last few words, she glanced out her window at the Russian wilderness.

  She could see little apart from her ghostly reflection in the glass, and the grave-blackness beyond, but the emptiness captivated her nonetheless, and she didn’t turn away. And then she found herself thinking about her hometown and her parents, missing them, and Doroshenko and Igor, confused by her feelings for them, and the mysterious man with the mustache…attracted to him?...and then the journal slipped from her hands to her lap, and her heavy eyelids slid closed, and she sank into a fitful and dreamless sleep.

  Ural Polytechnic Institute where the Dyatlov hikers attended university

  Zinaida “Zina�
� Kolmogorova

  CHAPTER 3

  After a hot shower, I met Disco in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock sharp. The front desk organized us a taxi, which dropped us off at our first stop, a large army-navy store. In the week leading up to this trip I had spent hours online determining the supplies I would need for the trek into the mountains. Now I proceeded confidently from aisle to aisle, checking off items on my list, while Disco searched for a new sixty-liter rucksack, thermal underwear, gloves, a hat, and all the other accoutrements to replace those the taxi driver had stolen. Unfortunately, the store didn’t stock snowsuits in his size, and as we were running late for the meeting with Vasily Popov, we put off finding one for the time being.

  Back in the waiting taxi, we traveled past the Yeltsin Presidential Center, then turned right across the Iset River. Uninspiring buildings and denuded trees lined the streets, while alongside us honking cars and trolleys sluiced through the dirty sludge. Pedestrians marched along the slush- and ice-covered sidewalks with their heads down in grim determination. The only hint of color visible in the drab winter morning came from the traffic lights and the storefront signs displaying Greek-looking Cyrillic lettering.

  I withdrew a silver flask from a zippered pocket in my polar fleece jacket, unscrewed the cap, and took a sip of Jack Daniels, courtesy of the Hyatt mini bar.

  Disco was watching me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Did I say something?”

  “You’re judging me.”

  He looked out his window. “Nope, not doing that.”

  I offered him the flask.

  “Get that outta my face. It ain’t ten in the morning.”