Out in the bay the crew of the tugboat had succeeded in ballasting the huge drydock so that the ship in its hold could be floated free. The rough seas had caused numerous delays in the tricky operation, which explained why the evacuation had gone slower than Eddie had anticipated. He had seen a young turbaned Sikh arguing with the Russian, Savich, and assumed that he was refusing to sacrifice the expensive drydock when the volcano finally blew. Unloading the ship meant they wouldn’t have any incriminating evidence when they sailed away.
Like the other ships already littering the beach, the newest vessel brought to Kamchatka was a cruise liner. At around four hundred feet it wasn’t large, but she had rakish lines, a classic champagne-glass stern, and balconies for nearly all the cabins. In her prime she would have filled a niche market for only the wealthiest passengers, those willing to pay anything for a chance to visit the Galapagos or explore the Antarctic wastes.
Today she was just another derelict, her once bright hull smeared with the excrement of those poor souls who’d endured the harsh journey to Russia. Hundreds of Chinese immigrants crowded the rail as the cruise ship was left to drift in the bay. Because her engines had been removed and she was unballasted, she rode so high that a thick band of antifouling paint could be seen above her waterline. Even the smallest waves made her roll dangerously. Eddie could hear the cries of the people trapped aboard her when a big wave sent the vessel reeling.
Fortunately, the tide was coming in, and it drove the ship closer and closer to the beach. With the winds whipping up the frigid bay, Eddie knew that a storm was coming. Hopefully the vessel would soundly ground herself onshore before it hit; otherwise she would drift back to sea. If that happened he knew the liner would turn broadside to the wind and capsize when the swells hit above ten feet. She carried no lifeboats.
Eddie switched his attention from the drifting cruise ship back to the drydock. Her massive bow doors had been closed once again, and water jetted from pump outlets along her hull. It would take several hours for her hold to be drained of seawater and make her light enough for one of the tugs to take her away. The second of the two tugs that had brought the drydock north had been maneuvered into position about a hundred yards from the ore processing building.
As Eddie had noted earlier, the processing plant had been built on a flat barge that had been towed to the bay. They had used heavy equipment to drag the large structure high above the tide line. Under the watchful eye of armed guards, workers were now clearing debris and rocks that had washed onto the beach behind the plant so the tugboat could haul it back into the sea. Drums of machine oil were standing by to be poured onto the rocky shore to ease the barge’s progress back to the water. Paulus, the South African supervisor, had ordered that all the excess mercury be dumped in an area beyond the processing plant. Lakes of shimmering mercury collected in pools that eventually drained into the sea. Already wave action had claimed hundreds of gallons of the toxic metal.
The Chinese laborers given this dangerous job were those who had already been exposed to fatal doses of mercury vapor working in the plant. Most moved like zombies, their brains destroyed by the cumulative effects of mercury poisoning, while others were so afflicted with tremors they could barely stand. If by some miracle they survived the next few days, they would never recover from the exposure. And even if they did, they had received such high doses that generations of their children would suffer unspeakable birth defects.
Eddie burned the image of the brain-damaged workers splashing about amid the mercury puddles into his mind. He was so intent that he didn’t realize the wor
ker next to him had finished filling his plastic bucket with muddy ore. The young Chinese tried to catch Eddie’s attention, but a guard noticed the lapse first. He lashed out with a weighted piece of hose that caught Eddie behind the knee. His leg buckled, but he refused to allow himself to fall. He knew not to even glance at the guard, because such defiance would send the Indonesian into a frenzy that in his condition Eddie didn’t know if he could survive.
He hoisted the fifty-pound bucket onto his shoulder, smearing old abrasions that wouldn’t heal in the constant damp. Eddie’s roommate from the cruise ship, Tang, had timed his work so the two of them would trudge down the hill together. Of the original ten men crammed into the cabin when Eddie first arrived, only he and Tang were still alive.
“I think they are leaving today,” Tang said out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes downcast on the treacherous footing.
“I believe you’re right, my friend. The drydock will be empty soon, and it won’t take them long to drag the processing plant off the beach. And have you noticed the fishing boats haven’t been around for a while?”
“How can I not?” Tang replied with a sparkle in his voice. “The only thing worse than ground-up fish paste is three-day-old ground-up fish paste.” They maneuvered around a particularly tricky spot before Tang remarked, “There is also what is happening around the ship the guards use as their dormitory.”
For the past few days a double-ended tender had been making trips between the dormitory ship and the tug they were going to use to take away the processing plant. The area around the dorm ship had always been off limits to the Chinese, but since the transfer had begun the number of guards had doubled. Most of them were Indonesian, but there were also a handful of hard-looking Europeans who reported to Savich and not the Sikh. Judging by their discipline, Eddie thought they were ex–special forces, Russia’s elite Spetsnaz. He could also tell that the Russians were as suspicious of the Indonesian guards as they were the laborers.
It didn’t take a genius to know that they were transporting the gold they had already processed. Judging by how low the thirty-foot tender was in the water when she motored out to the tug, Eddie estimated they’d moved a hundred tons of bullion. The gold was being stacked in two shipping containers lashed to the tug’s deck.
“What do you think will happen to us?” Tang asked.
“I told you what I heard Paulus tell Anton Savich, that they’re going to leave us behind.”
“So, we die on this forsaken stretch of coast whether they are here or not.”
Eddie could tell from the sorrow in Tang’s words that the younger man had reached his emotional and psychological limit. Like in any survival situation, keeping a positive attitude was half the battle to stay alive. In the past week Eddie had seen people endure unbelievable hardships because they would not let it penetrate their souls, while others had died in a few days, almost as if they willed their deaths to come quickly. Eddie knew that if Tang lost hope now, he wouldn’t last the day.
“Listen to me; we are not going to die here.”
Tang shot Eddie a wan smile. “Thank you for your strength, but I am afraid your words are empty.”
“I’m not Chinese,” Eddie said, and then corrected himself. “Well, I am Chinese, but I was raised in NewYork City. I am an American investigating illegal immigrant smuggling. There is a team of people looking for me right now.”
“Is this true?”
Using his best De Niro, Eddie said in English, “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?”
Tang stopped and stared, unable to believe what he’d just heard. “I know this movie!” he exclaimed.
“You’ve seen Taxi Driver?”
“Yes! We were shown it in school because it was so decadent that it drove one of your people to try to kill the president.”
Eddie chuckled, imagining some Communist party official putting a spin on how Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan related to a breakdown of our running dog capitalist ways.
“You really are an American?”
“Yes,” Eddie said. “And very soon a ship’s going to enter the bay.”