of order, but now the law was Darwinian and held in the hands of the ruthless and the violent on the street instead of in the hands of the ruthless in the government. Fortunately, ruthless and violent were the byways Sergey and Yuri had been walking most of their lives. They had the skills well developed to survive on the new open range.
When finished reading the reports, Sergey got up to take another look through the facility. He went down the stairs past the Security Control Centre that was on the third floor. Once more through the facility with his boots on the ground wouldn’t hurt.
He continued on down the stairs to the second floor where the analysis laboratory sat above the port. Sergey planned to check out the new analyst, Katya Bodnarchuk, later the next day. Though he had avoided her during the week, he heard from Yuri that she was young, good looking and competent.
“You are going to like this woman,” Magda warned him.
Yuri & Magda would love to find a companion, maybe even a love, for Sergie. They had brought relatives to dinners to meet him, but Sergey was cut off – dead emotionally - the extent to which they gradually came to understand. With every new prospect, he was as courteous as the occasion demanded, but nothing more. He knew Magda and Yuri were disappointed, but out of respect, they tried not to interfere. However, with Yuri’s interest in this woman, Sergey looked forward to meeting her.
As he passed her office, he was surprised to see her looking intently at her monitor. What is she working on at that hour, and what was she looking at? From the shadows he peered through the office window. She’s watching Elovach, for goddsake. She had noted his car, and now she was spying on him. Was she attracted to the man? Maybe she is a woman who likes reckless men, men they can rescue. Or are they working together and she doesn’t trust him?
Sergey found Elovach to be a shabby piece of a man, but he knew that people can have many different faces for many different people. One person’s nemesis is another person’s hero.
Did she come to Seytchan because she knew he was here? Or did they both have another reason to be here?
Sergey’s soft-soled work boots made no echo, and he ducked down the stairs to the main floor without being seen.
In the next few days, as he examined the plant, he hummed and sang his way around, committing to his visual memory everything he saw: the special air handling systems that filtered and refreshed the air trapping even the smallest grain of radioactive debris, and the one-way valves that brought in filtered outside air, preventing any inside air from escaping, even under the pressure of an explosion.
Chapter 5
“Hello,” Sergey called to Maria, his neighbor two doors over, who was sweeping her little porch. Maria Bratnikova was a plump older graying woman with a pleasant face marred by a pulpy goiter at her throat. The goiter, from a lack of iodine, rested across the right side of her neck. Initially, it was startling but soon one stopped noticing. The day he had moved in, she had come over with a still warm babka, the Easter bread, to welcome him to the neighbourhood. Why not have such a wonderful treat all year round? she explained.
Hers was a weathered wood house like the one Sergey was renting, with the pipes above ground wrapped in insulation, and the outhouse and shed at the back of the yard. Only the doors and window sashes were painted, Sergey’s blue and Maria’s green.
Her little Yakutsian cow was in the fenced yard rooting in the thin layer of snow for the grass underneath. It was a black beast with a white dorsal stripe along the back and stored fat under its skin in the summer to survive the poor conditions of winter. The little cows produced milk high in fat content, meat with natural marbling, and were often used as draft animals as well.
Maria’s children had grown up in Zhigansk but as soon as they had the freedom to leave the Siberian town, they left their parents to eek out their own lives in a more hospitable climate. When her husband got on at the ceramics factory, they left Zhigansk and moved up to Seytchan. After the factory closed and his job vanished, he retired, and they lived on the pension the government provided. Now, however, pensions had been cut, and Bratnik took on the tasks of running the town garbage truck, the bulldozer, and the snowplow grader.
The husband, a stocky unsmiling man, was stacking wood to the side of the house without gloves covering his beefy hands. He was missing two fingers on his right hand, probably frost bite. Not such a rare occurrence in those who had lived in such conditions for years. The man looked up briefly but didn’t speak. Sergey realized this was the incredibly slow grader operator that had taken forever in his ancient snowplow to clear the snow from the parking lot at the plant. Sergey now noticed his painstaking effort at stacking the wood, evening out each pile and straightening each piece of wood on the pile, then going back and realigning any piece not exactly to his liking, over and over. Sergey realized he was staring at the man, and turned his attention back to Maria.
Maria had understood on their first meeting that Sergey was not a man who welcomed uninvited company, and Sergey was grateful that they took to looking after him without ever pressing in on him. Seeing that he was alone, however, Maria took to regularly dropping off what she called her "extra". She would leave a double stacking glazed iron pot with a wire loop handle against his door. Its compartments were crammed with delicious food; dumplings and sauerkraut with pork, or borsht and fresh bread, or deer stew. It was always very good and there was always more than he could eat at two sittings.
“Hello,” she called back as he got closer. “Are you finding what you need?” she asked.
“Just walking down to the shop for some cigarettes, thanks.”
She stopped sweeping. “This is my husband, Standa, Colonel.” Standa took another quick look at Sergey, barely nodded and turned back to the pile. “If you need anything just ask,” she smiled, moving the broom again.
The village, receiving few strangers, had taken note of the arrival of Sergey, the newly appointed Director of Security, who effected to be a man used to power but disgruntled with his apparent exile. The locals looked at newcomers, but made allowances for differences because this was a country that was often a harbor for misfits, the paranoid, the obsessive, the bipolar, minds that were locked into dark places looking for threats every minute of every hour. Many were trying to hide, hoping to find some peace of mind away from the demanding and disapproving conformity of their families and friends in the urban centers.
Looking at Yuri they saw a tall curly haired good-looking man with a moustache, who looked to be a dependable family man carrying out his gate guard duties conscientiously but did not have the skills or ambition to go higher. He was thought to be a bit of a clown. Didn’t he show some of the kids how he could juggle Indian clubs? Obviously, he was skilled manually and liked fun, interested in his home life, motorcycles, and hunting. Yuri's wife, Magda was seen to be a well-dressed Russian city woman. She was seen walking down the rocky side of the road in high heels, making them smirk. But Magda’s interests seemed, nevertheless, centered on her family; cooking, sewing, and socializing as any Russian wife would.
Often, in these remote regions people made up stories about themselves. They left whoever they were behind in whatever world had not been good to them, and sought out the places where they could be someone they wanted to be or at least stop being someone they didn’t want to be.
One man Sergey met in Zhigansk had simply stopped being a mechanic in Petrograd and had become a handyman in Zhigansk “I love it, not working for the man, choosing who I want to work for and choosing what work I want to do.” Sergey thought this may have been the reason he wanted people to hear, but suspected that the man was probably deserting a woman he didn’t love or a family that destroyed his self worth for some reason or debts he couldn’t pay. Not many of the troublesome would want to bother looking for them this far north.
In truth, Sergey was a skilled and clever intelligence agent who thrived on his work whether it was in a metropolitan centre or a village. Yuri, also, was a versatile, agile, intelligence agent and