The Ice Curtain by Robin White

Author:Robin White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780440334033
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The Mine Director

“Director Kirillin? I’m Gregori—”

“I know your name.” Kirillin had a telephone pressed to his ear. His hand covered the mouthpiece. “Now I’m learning who you are. Give me a moment. I wouldn’t want to miss anything.”

His name might be Russian but the mine director looked like a Korean businessman, dressed in a silver-gray suit, white shirt, and striped tie. In his mid-forties, the native Yakut had nut-brown skin, a black helmet of hair streaked with silver, and the compact, muscular frame of a boxer. With his telephone, his brace of pens, Kirillin could have stepped out of the pages of To the Diamond Frontier!

Nowek looked for a place to sit. No chairs. Apparently, Kirillin wasn’t fond of long meetings.

There was a bookshelf with volumes so neatly arrayed you knew they hadn’t been touched in years. There wasn’t a hint of anything personal, anything that suggested a world beyond the immediate grasp of the mine director. A map of the Mirny pit occupied one wall. A polished silver hard hat hung from a peg. Next to it, an overcoat smeared with grease. A window framed a view of drab concrete walls. A snowflake tumbled by.

“That’s the general view of the situation,” said Kirillin. He glanced up at Nowek. “When can I see a copy of the decree?”

Nowek thought, There are two kinds of meetings in Russia. The first, when something is actually expected to happen. There will be a table covered in green baize, one glass for water that no one will touch, one for syrupy sweet soft drinks for sipping, and a small tumbler for endless congratulatory rounds of iced vodka.

Then there is this kind of meeting.

“Tomorrow is soon enough,” said Kirillin. “We have weather coming in. Yes. I know. It’s Mirny. Pakah.” Kirillin hung up and pushed back from his desk like a man finishing a meal. “You were with Boyko a long time.”

“Like you, I didn’t want to miss a thing.”

A quick flash of anger radiated from the mine boss, then vanished. Kirillin pressed a buzzer on his phone and said, “Bring in a chair for Delegate Nowek.”

Outside, the snowflakes fell like fat confetti dumped from an upper-story window. “It’s snowing.”

“It can snow any month of the year in Mirny. You found Boyko informative?”

“Not especially. But I found him reliable.”

Kirillin turned slightly, as though trying to catch a faint sound with a bad ear. “Reliable?”

“Like DRAGA 1,” Nowek explained. “He told me how long it’s been at work.”

“Decades.”

“And how the American machine broke days after it arrived.”

“He said the Caterpillar broke?”

“It didn’t?”

“It was sabotaged. You want to know why? There was an instrument on it, a kind of a clock that measured the hours of operation. You couldn’t run it four hours and get paid for eight, so Boyko’s men made sure it didn’t run at all. That’s how reliable he is.”

“Well, he didn’t go into details.”

“Allow me to,” said Kirillin. He nodded at the phone. “That was Moscow. Nobody seems to know why you were appointed to be the new Delegate.

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