In the pre-dawn twilight two thousand miles north and east of Mirgorod, Professor Yakov Khyrbysk stepped over the coaming and out into lamplit fog on the deck of Vlast Fisheries Vessel Chaika. Sub-zero air scraped at the inside of his nose and throat. Despite the two sweaters under his oilskin slicker the freezing cold wrapped iron bands round his ribcage and squeezed. He dug out his petrol lighter and a packet of Chernomors, cupped his hands to light one and inhaled the raw smoke deeply.
The Chaika stank of diesel and fish. During the night sea spray had frozen in glassy sheets on every surface. Ice sheathed nets and hawsers and hung like cave growths from cleats, winches and davits. Crewmen, working under lamps, waist-deep in thunderous clouds of steam, were hosing the ice off the deck with hot water from the boilers. The men wore mountainous parkas and wrapped scarves across their mouths to keep from inhaling the foul spray. They sent gleaming slicks of slime, fish guts and oil sluicing across the planks and out through the bilge holes. Citizen Trawlermen, you are frontline workers! By feeding the people you strengthen the Vlast! Strive for a decisive upsurge in the production of fish protein!
The Chaika heaved and dipped, her hull moaning with the low surge of her engine. Khyrbysk threaded his way across the treacherous deck and climbed the companionway. Captain Baburin was waiting up on the platform outside the wheelhouse.
‘There is low pressure coming in, Yakov Arkadyevich,’ said Baburin. ‘Then it will be cold enough for you, I think.’ In the yellow light from the wheelhouse his heavy black beard and the folds of his greatcoat and cap glittered with frost.
‘Is she there?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Can you see her yet?’
Baburin shrugged towards the starboard bow.
‘She’s there,’ he said. ‘Exactly where she should be. We’ll come up with her soon enough.’
Khyrbysk peered in the same direction. Fog and black water were emerging out of the night. The glimmer of scattered pieces of ice.
‘I can’t see anything,’ he said.
‘She is coming,’ said Baburin.
Khyrbysk waited, leaning on the rail, smoking and watching the grey dawn seep out of the fog and the sea. The day came up empty and sunless. Fog blanked out distance and brought the horizon near. Coalblack swells rose, marbled with foam, and surged forward, shouldering the Chaika’s prow upwards. She heaved and dipped. Rafts of sea-ice scraped against her hull. Every so often she hit a larger piece and shuddered. This was the grey zone: the crew of the Chaika might see the sun once or twice in three months. If they were lucky. Khyrbysk felt an involuntary surge of excitement. Was he himself not the igniter of a thousand suns?
‘There!’ shouted Baburin from the wheelhouse, pointing. Khyrbysk could just about make out a wedge of darker grey in the fog, a triangle embedded in black water. The triangle loomed larger and resolved itself into a head-on view of the factory ship Musk Ox steaming towards them, twin stacks brimming dark heavy smoke. The blunted prow and swollen skirts of an icebreaker.
Ten minutes, and Baburin had swung the Chaika right in under the lee of the factory ship. The Musk Ox’s huge hull towered overhead, a sheer and salt-scoured cliff of bleeding rust, battered and dented from twenty years of unloading trawlers in bad weather. Khyrbysk stared down into the narrow channel between the two vessels. The water was so cold it had a thick, sluggish sheen, laced with soft congealing slushice. A shout from above told him the Musk Ox’s side crane was ready.
The transport cage was descending, swinging gently from its cable, four tyres fixed to the underside to soften the landing. In the cage, Kolya Blegvad rested one gloved hand on the rectangular wooden crate that stood on its end beside him, taller than he was, and with the other he kept a tight grip on the cable chain. A crewman on the Chaika leaned out with a gaff to guide the cage in.
Khyrbysk went to find Zakopan, the Chaika’s mate.
‘I want the box in my cabin,’ he told him. ‘And quickly. The machinery is delicate. It will not tolerate the cold on the deck.’
In Khyrbysk’s overheated cabin, the crate took up all the space between his bunk and the pale green bulkhead. Khyrbysk locked the door, drew the curtain across the porthole and lit the oil lamp. From the same match he lit another Chernomor. Kolya Blegvad watched him with clever soft brown eyes.
‘You came to meet me, Yakov,’ he said. ‘I am touched.’
‘Were there any difficulties?’ said Khyrbysk.
‘With transit papers signed by Dukhonin himself? No. How could there be? Our friend in Mirgorod was as good as his word.’
‘I want to see it,’ said Khyrbysk. He produced a crowbar.
‘Now?’
‘Now,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Yes. Now.’
He prised off the lid. Inside the crate was thirty million roubles in used notes of miscellaneous denomination.