Mountain of the Dead Read online

  “Besides,” I said, “there were no reports at the time of prisoners having escaped from any of the surrounding camps.”

  Vasily turned down another street, smaller than the last. “We’re almost there,” he said.

  “What do you know about this guide we’re meeting, Vasily?” Olivia asked. She had been nodding off for the last hour or so and had just woken up.

  “His name is Fyodor. He took me to the Dyatlov Pass a number of years ago in the summertime. He knows this land like the back of his hand. There—that should be it.”

  We came to a long driveway that wound snake-like into a copse of trees. Vasily wheeled onto it, the SUV bumping over snow-filled potholes and ruts. The spindly limbs of the trees knitted around and above us, fashioning a dark tunnel. I could see little in the sweeping headlights except tall, pale trunks and the empty, ebony night between them.

  “May, maybe we should stay somewhere else,” Disco said. “Come back in the morning.”

  “You see any hotels around here?” Olivia asked.

  “I’m getting a bad vibe, sha.”

  The trees thinned and opened to a small glade in the middle of which sat a log cabin. No lights glowed behind the windows. No flicker from a television set.

  I started to get a bad vibe too.

  Vasily parked next to an old sedan half buried in the snow and killed the engine. A dog barked from somewhere behind the cabin, then another, then what sounded like an entire yapping pack.

  We got out of the SUV. The cold hit me like a blast of liquid nitrogen, searing my nostrils and lungs and stiffening my joints.

  “Damn,” I said, hugging myself.

  “Welcome to Siberia,” Olivia said.

  Collecting our gear, we climbed the icy porch steps and knocked on the cabin door.

  No answer.

  “Where’s he at?” Disco asked, rocking from foot to foot impatiently.

  “I can’t feel my face,” I said, plumes of frost accompanying each word.

  Vasily, an old rifle slung over his shoulder, tried the door. It opened without protest.

  “Whoa—what you doing?” Disco said.

  “We can’t remain out here.”

  “We can’t break in.”

  “His car is here, Mr. Brady. He must be around somewhere.”

  We stepped inside and found ourselves in a cramped anteroom.

  “Anyone home?” Olivia called.

  No reply.

  “I have his number,” Vasily said. “I’ll call him.” He took out his phone and pecked the display with his finger.

  “Maybe he had a heart attack?” Disco said.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said—a heart attack, or some type of accident. Out here, isolated, who would know?

  A heavy curtain obscured the doorway that led to the rest of the cabin, likely to block ice-cold drafts. I ventured through it into a pitch-black room. I stopped beyond the threshold to wait for my pupils to adjust. The dogs out back continued to bark, though less enthusiastically than before. A deep musky scent mixed with that of aged wood and fireplace smoke, and beneath this, sour body odor.

  “Hello?” I said.

  A surprised grunt, then movement. Fast. Something in Russian.

  “Hello?” I repeated, taking an alarmed step backward. I didn’t know what else to say.

  A rough male voice: “Amerikanski?”

  “I’m with Vasily—Vasily Popvov?” I raised my hands in a non-threatening manner, even though the man could not see me. “Dyatlov Pass?”

  Vasily pushed through the curtain behind me. The light from his phone faintly illuminated the ascetic room. The man I’d been speaking with sat upright on a cot in the far corner, his features diced into shadowed slabs. He sported a wild beard and a flannel jacket.

  A rifle lay across his lap, the barrel pointed toward me.

  Vasily spoke quickly in Russian. The man mumbled something in return before lying down once more, his back to us.

  “He forgot we were coming today,” Vasily explained. “He said we should get some sleep. We’ll be leaving at first light.”

  CHAPTER 6

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  EIGHT DAYS TO LIVE

  The ten members of the Dyatlov group trudged down a snowy street bordered by log cabins. As soon as they were out of earshot of the police officers, Georgy began performing impressions of them.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get locked up,” Zina scolded him. “You would have missed the train this evening.”

  Rustem lost his balance and nearly fell over. “Damn street is covered in ice,” he complained. Then he eyed Zolotaryov suspiciously. “So you fought in the war, huh?”

  “He was awarded four medals,” Igor said.

  Zina said, “That’s amazing!”

  Zolotaryov seemed uncomfortable. “Yes, well—”

  “You must have been so brave—”

  “So where exactly are we going?” he said, changing topics. “I don’t think we’re going to find anywhere to rest down this street.”

  “What about that?” Kolya pointed to a large three-story concrete structure featuring red-framed windows and a blue fence.

  “Is that a school?” Zina said. “Yes, it’s a school. There’s a sign. School Number 41.”

  “Wonder where School Number 42 is,” Rustem remarked.

  “It won’t be open,” Igor said dismissively. “It’s too early.”

  “Perhaps a teacher has come early to prepare her lessons,” Zina said. “I’ll check.”

  She led the way up the shoveled walk and knocked on the front door. A grandmotherly steward wearing a kerchief around her head and a heavy jacket opened the door. “Yes?” she said, eyeing their skis with curiosity.

  Igor explained their predicament and asked if they could rest inside for a couple of hours. She fetched the schoolmaster, who arrived a few minutes later, a tall, neat man with impeccably combed hair and a closely shaven jawline. After a short discussion it was agreed the hikers could spend the morning in a spare classroom provided they gave a presentation about tourism to the students in the afternoon.

  Once they reached their improvised accommodation, Kolya and the others quickly found spots for themselves on the floor. Igor and Zolotaryov remained standing. They both made casually for an empty space next to Zina, reaching it at the same time.

  An awkward moment passed with Zina looking up at them expectantly, perhaps amusedly. Then Igor mumbled something and settled down next to Rustem, while Zolotaryov, smiling, sat next to Zina.

  ⁂

  After a warm lunch the schoolmaster led the Dyatlov group to a classroom where roughly thirty-five students aged seven to nine had gathered wearing expectant looks on their faces. The schoolmaster introduced the hikers, and then Zolotaryov stepped forward a moment before Igor to lead the discussion. Kolya caught a dark look flicker behind Igor’s eyes before he shuffled back with the others.

  “Today, children,” Zolotaryov began in a loud voice. “I’m going to tell you about tourism, and why it’s an important passion of ours.” Despite his self-assurance, he came across as stiff and uninteresting as he rattled off words and ideas the young children could not comprehend.

  At one point Doroshenko yawed loudly.

  Zolotaryov glanced at him in irritation. “Am I boring you, comrade?”

  Igor seized the moment and said, “I bet you kids want to see what’s in our packs, huh?” Excited cheers went up, and he passed around maps, the Zorki cameras, tinned food, the Chinese torches, et cetera.

  After Igor’s show-and-tell concluded, Zina took over—and the children fell immediately in love with her. This did not surprise Kolya. Not only was she beautiful with strong yet feminine features and penetrating eyes, she had an outgoing personality and a heartwarming laugh that always made her a pleasure to be around.

  Later that afternoon, while the hikers were boarding the train to Ivdel, Kolya said to Zina, “Those kids took a real liking to you. I can’t b
elieve they followed us all the way to the station.”

  “I love children,” she said. “I’d like four, maybe five of my own someday.”

  “You would make—”

  Someone seized Kolya’s shoulder. He turned to find a stout man with rheumy eyes and a bulbous nose glowering at him.

  “Yes?” Kolya said, frowning.

  “You took my vodka, and I want it back!” the man slurred.

  “You must be confused—”

  “You stole it from my pocket!” He shoved Kolya hard in the chest.

  The others, who’d already taken their seats in the sparsely upholstered carriage, cried out in alarm. Zolotaryov leapt to his feet, and with a few quick, precise moves, he forced the drunk facedown in the aisle, where he blubbered to be let go.

  Zolotaryov bent the man’s arm farther, causing him to cry out.

  “Sasha!” Kolya said. “That’s enough.”

  Zolotaryov didn’t let go, and the drunk was still crying out, gushing apologies, when a policeman hurried toward them.

  “You there!” he said to Zolotaryov. “What are you doing? Let him go!”

  Zolotaryov released the drunk and stood straight. He tweaked the waxed ends of his mustache into upward curls. “This man accosted my friend,” he said. “He accused him of stealing a bottle of vodka when he did no such thing.”

  When the hikers and the other passengers who’d witnessed the scene confirmed this, the policeman heaved the drunk to his feet and escorted him from the train.

  Zolotaryov retook his seat, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

  Kolya glanced about the carriage at his comrades and saw astonishment on their faces, as if they all wondered the same thing.

  Who was this soldier traveling with them they knew nothing about?

  Igor Dyatlov and Zina on a weekend hiking trip in 1957

  Igor with Yuri “Georgy” Krivonischenko’s mandolin above his head

  CHAPTER 7

  I woke to the quiet black of night, my heart in my throat. Arming a patina of cold sweat from my forehead, I sat up on the hard cabin floor, a nightmare I couldn’t quite remember fleeing farther and farther into the dim recesses of my mind.

  A light winked outside the window.

  Frowning, I looked around the cabin. I couldn’t see any of the others in the dark, but I could hear them: Olivia breathing softly to my right, Disco and Vasily a bit more noisily to my left. Our host snoring in his corner of the room.

  So who was outside? The cabin was in the middle of nowhere. There hadn’t been any neighbors as far as I recalled.

  I kept watch on the window for another minute or so, but when I didn’t see the light reappear I began to wonder whether I had seen it at all.

  Lying back down, I closed my eyes. I listened to the wind batter the log walls and rattle the windowpanes. The cold stung my nose and ears and cheeks, and I wanted to fall back to sleep, to wake and for it to be morning, yet I believed this possibility remote. My internal body clock was wonky, wound to a time zone a world away. I would likely remain awake, counting the minutes until dawn.

  And how long would that be? We went to bed before six p.m. Perhaps it was only midnight.

  Was I going to lie here stiff and miserable for hours on end?

  My bladder ached too. I needed to get up and relieve myself…

  I must have fallen into a semi-doze, because the next thing I knew I was drifting out of another dream—a mundane one involving my life in LA, an argument about tackle and bait with a childhood friend—and heard boots on the floor. A door clattered shut.

  Squinting, I made out faint gray light filtering through the iced window.

  Dawn, thank God.

  I sat up, my back popping silently. Vasily and Olivia were still sleeping. Disco, however, was rubbing his eyes.

  “Good sleep?” I asked him.

  “Worst ever,” he mumbled.

  “I second that,” Olivia said, her voice muffled. She had tightened the drawstring of her sleeping bag’s insulated hood to such an extent only her nose poked out from a tiny opening in the gathered synthetic material.

  “You look like an inchworm,” I told her.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I need the bathroom.”

  “No running water out here,” she said. “But if you’re lucky, there might be an outhouse in the yard.”

  “And if I’m unlucky?”

  “Write your name in the snow.”

  ⁂

  There was an outhouse after all, complete with half a roll of toilet paper. I urinated into what must have been a six- or seven-foot hole in the ground—my sleepy imagination wondering if urine could freeze mid-flight—then returned inside to find our bearded host, Fyodor, starting a fire with a butane torch in a rudimentary cement-brick stove. Stout ochre flames bound to life, impervious to the frigid air.

  Fyodor said something to Olivia in Russian. She nodded, then said to me in English, “I’m going with Fyodor to get the snowmobiles. We’ll be back in a bit.”

  “What about breakfast?” I asked.

  “Save me something.”

  We boiled snow in a billycan and prepared instant coffees and instant noodles with desiccated veggies. Disco added a spoonful of peanut butter to his noodles, declaring, “Pad Thai!”

  Seated in caribou hide chairs around a scarred wooden table, we ate quickly, speaking little.

  After I finished, I said, “Did either of you see a light outside last night?”

  “A light?” Vasily said, looking at me curiously.

  I nodded at the east-facing window. “I thought I saw a light out there, like a flashlight. Late. After we all went to sleep.”

  “You must have dreamed it.”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

  “Who would have been out there at that time, Mr. Smith?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe little green men,” Disco said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Or whoever killed them hikers.”

  “That was almost sixty years ago,” I reminded him.

  “Zombies don’t die. They already dead.”

  “Aliens and the undead.” Vasily snorted. He went to his rucksack and returned with the criminal case file he’d showed us in his apartment. He smacked it on the table. “There are photographs of the hikers in there that have never been released to the public. You might find them interesting.”

  Pushing aside my empty bowl, I opened the dossier and flipped through the Russian-filled pages before coming to several elastic-bound bundles of photographs perfumed with the smell of old chemicals. I retrieved one set and handed another to Disco.

  The top photo in my bundle portrayed Zina in a chair. She wore a checkered shirt and a wool scarf wrapped around her head like a kerchief. Given the hint of surprise in her dark eyes, and her slightly parted lips, it seemed the shot was snapped as she turned to face the camera. A handwritten label read, “Krivonischenko, film No.6, frame No.11,” indicating it came from Yuri Krivonischenko’s camera and constituted the eleventh shot taken on the sixth roll of film which investigators had catalogued.

  The next photo also came from Krivonischenko’s camera. It reminded me of da Vinci’s “Virgin on the Rocks,” but in place of the Virgin Mary was Igor. Gazing to the left of the camera, eyes downcast, his face articulated a maturity that surpassed his young age, a brooding intelligence and determination, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have made of himself had he not died on that night in 1959.

  The following few shots comprised a hodgepodge collection revealing a complicated group dynamic. The buccaneering hikers piled into the back of a truck as they departed Vizhay for Sector 41, everyone wrapped in their cold-weather gear; Zolotaryov, Zina, and Lyuda loitering by wooden contraptions that might have been used for drying fish, Zolotaryov and Zina chatting and smiling to one another; Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles on the ground, laughing, after having tripped over a sawhorse, bamboo ski po
les pointed at the sky; Zina and Yuri Yudin about to embrace outside a log cabin before Yudin headed back to Sverdlovsk, Zolotaryov passing behind Yudin, his attention clearly focused on Zina; Igor and Zolotaryov seeming to argue about something, Kolevatov looking on while the others attempted to distance themselves; nine dark figures skiing in single file above the tree line, disappearing into a haze of grainy and ill-defined snow as they began their ascent up Kholat Syakhl.

  Disco grunted. He was focused on a photo in his bundle showing two bodies lying side by side in the snow, facedown, frozen solid, and nearly naked.

  “Yuri Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko,” I told him.

  “Where their clothes?”

  “They didn’t leave the tent wearing much. After they froze to death, the others took what they needed.”

  “Why’s their skin orange?”

  “It was actually more of a brownish-brickish color. The photographs are old. The sepia pigments have aged.”

  “D’accord, but why do white folks have brown skin in the middle of winter?”

  “Aliens,” Vasily remarked caustically from the sink, where he’d gone to scrub the breakfast dishes. “Ray beams.”

  I said, “The bodies would have been lying in the sun for several days before snow covered them. They got burned or severely tanned. Frostbite exacerbates the process.”

  Disco shuffled to the next photo. Zina lay on a wooden table, her eyes mostly closed, her hair sticking up, runnels of blood and dark splotches marring her face, her slender hands clutched in front of her chest, her legs bent at the knees and turned to one side, stiff from rigor mortis. The image contrasted horribly with the earlier ones of her, smiling, laughing, a beautiful and kind soul.

  Disco shuffled again. Another body on a wooden table, more mummy than person, hair wispy and missing in places, hideously grinning mouth open to reveal the top set of teeth. It would have been impossible to recognize the victim, though I knew it to be Lyuda. Much of her sad state was due to decomposition. It was no wonder her father, who had demanded to see his daughter’s body before it was interred, had fainted on sight of it.