Ice Curtain

Chapter 1 The Dead Zone Blue, white, gold, and black. In Siberia, the seasons are colors, though not the ones you'd expect in a land the imagination keeps buried under eternal ice and endless snows. The sunless days of black winter yield to blue spring when the new shoots of larch, cedar, and pine emerge, their pale leaves the color of an arctic dawn. By July, Siberia steams under a sun that hardly sets before rising again. The sky hazes to humid alabaster, and from Novosibirsk to Magadan, white summer has begun. Summer teeters on a knife edge in the far north, where it can snow any month of the year. The calendar might say August, but the hard frosts have already arrived in the arctic mining city of Mirny. In Mirny, summer is an incandescent flash of light and heat. In Mirny, the ground stays frozen to the depth of a kilometer. The people marooned there call the rest of Siberia The Earth. When the world hears Siberia's name and conjures up a desolate, treeless hell of ice and barbed wire, it's Mirny they're imagining. Alexei checked his watch. The crystal was covered with the same gray dust that covered everything in Mirny. It was shattered kimberlite, a soft volcanic rock in which diamond, the hardest of gems, was found. He licked his thumb and rubbed the face until the numerals appeared. Nearly three. Alexei had a commanding view of the world from the cab of a Belaz 7530, an ore truck the size of a three-story house. From up here he could look over the motor pool's barbed-wire fence, across the roofs of the old log cabin dormitories to the lip of the open pit mine and beyond, all the way to a sunset horizon fired deep ceramic red. It was August nineteen, Alex's twenty-first birthday. His mother had prepared a picnic lunch with good bread, cheese, and smoked fish. Even his father, a big boss at the company, had taken off work to join them. Alex had told him the truth and now it terrified him to think it had been a mistake. After all, Kristall owned everything in Mirny. Everything and everyone. He flicked his cigarette out the window. The third shift at the mine came up at three. Any minute. A Belaz 7530 was more like a ship riding on giant wheels than a truck, and Mirny was more like an island than a city; a remote atoll of dirty, spalled concrete surrounded by a sea of tundra as dangerous as any ocean. It was an impassable mud bog in summer and absolutely lethal in winter when deep cold shattered rubber tires as though they were made of glass. No one would live here if it weren't for the diamonds. A quarter of the world's supply came from the mines of Mirny. Not that the miners saw much in return. In Soviet times, Mirny had been a "chocolate city" where luxuries that were scarce even in Moscow could be found. There were no shortages, no black days when the central generating plant was shut down to save oil. Movies played in the theater. The clinic was well equipped. Best of all, miners' pay was "double arctic." Back then, a miner earned more than an army general. More than even a Moscow bureaucrat. All of that ended when the Soviet Union died. The state diamond enterprise became a private company named Kristall, though the same men still ran it. Their faces were about the only thing that hadn't changed. First, fresh produce disappeared from the company stores. Then the theater was shuttered. Electricity became unreliable. The clinic ran out of antibiotics, out of everything except aspirin. Then aspirin became rare and even rubles fled, replaced by company scrip worth only what the company said it was worth, and only in Mirny. Meanwhile, diamonds were leaving by the ton. Call it inertia. Call it stupidity. Call it hope. People stayed on. Mirny was stuffed with diamonds. If things seemed bad here, what musWhite, Robin is the author of 'Ice Curtain' with ISBN 9780440226246 and ISBN 0440226244.