That first night Anton Savich went through his teammates’ notebooks and field journals. He tore out any page that made reference to the strike or any observation about terrain or geology from after they’d trekked past the gravel-strewn hillside. He excised everything that could be questioned during the investigation and made certain none of the journals mentioned anything interesting in their current search grid. He doctored his own journal to make it appear they had covered more ground than they had so no one would have reason to return here. At dawn he began to carry the sleeping bags containing the bodies to the top of the slope. The Ukrainian, Mikhail, was too heavy to shoulder, so he fashioned a litter out of branches and straps from a backpack and dragged the corpse. He was exhausted and drenched in sweat and cursed himself for not waiting until the next day to move the last body. Rather than return to camp in the darkness, he spent a miserable night huddled next to his victims.
On the second day he broke down their tent and portaged all their gear to the slope. He had to repack the camping equipment and load it into the assigned backpacks before securing the packs to the bodies. He decided to wait until dawn the next day before tumbling the bodies down the slope. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to watch the men disintegrate against the sharp rocks but he needed to know where they landed. Only Professor Strakhov carried the flares he would need to alert the chopper coming in the next afternoon.
Mikhail went down the slope after Savich had a hearty breakfast of coffee, tinned meat, and a can of Crimean oranges. He watched through binoculars as the body first rolled, then tumbled, and as it picked up speed, began to cartwheel. Centrifugal forces caused blood to spray from numerous deep gashes, and limbs became rubbery after breaking against the stones. If possible, the other two were even more mutilated by the fall.
He took more than an hour to pick his way down the mountainside, scraping meat from his hands so they stung from his own sweat. Once at the bottom he removed gear and food from the packs and emptied a few tins so it would look like he’d been at the bottom of the hill for days.
When he estimated the helicopter was an hour away, he injected the two remaining morphine syringes into his arm and waited as the narcotic took effect. When he sensed a creeping numbness working its way up his extremities, Savich took a deep breath. To make things as authentic as possible it didn’t seem right that three men died during the fall while he merely scraped up his hands.
Leaning against a rock outcrop he grasped a stone nearly the size of his head and held it as high as he could. He lay his left arm against the hunk of basalt and before he could give himself time to reconsider, he smashed the stone against his arm. The radius and ulna cracked audibly, and Savich bellowed in pain. Fueled by adrenaline and morphine he then took up a smaller stone and pounded it against his head hard enough to split the skin. Spittle drizzled from his slack lips as he fought the waves of agony and prayed for the drug to deaden the pain.
He was nearly unconscious when he heard the helicopter in the distance, and it took several tries to launch the flare. The arcing ball of white phosphorus rose on a column of smoke and must have been spotted immediately. The next thing Savich remembered was a hospital bed in Petropavlovsk.
The inquiry was perfunctory. The grisly scene the chopper crew described mirrored Savich’s account of the slope giving way as the men crossed it and how they all tumbled to the valley floor. The investigator was amazed Savich had only sustained a mild concussion, a few scrapes and bruises, and a broken arm.
“Just lucky, I guess,” he’d told the man as he’d closed his book of notes on the case.
Savich rubbed his left forearm as he crossed the tarmac to the airport terminal. In the past few years it had started to ache a bit on damp days. Maybe not quite as disquieting as Poe’s Telltale Heart, but a reminder of his deeds nevertheless.
The immigration agent recognized him in the queue and motioned him to the head of the line. A few locals grumbled, but no one challenged him.
“Back again, Mr. Savich?” the friendly guard asked, pocketing the twenty-dollar bill Savich had folded into his passport.
“I could get some work done back at my office in Moscow if your damn volcanoes would stop erupting.”
“It’s the gomuls,” the guard replied with an air of mock conspiracy. “They’re the native spirits who hunt whales at night and return to the mountains to roast the meat on giant fires.”
“When I find whale bones in a volcanic caldera, I’ll blame the gomuls, my friend. For now I suspect it’s tectonic activity.”
Savich had returned to Moscow following his recovery in the hospital and lived and maintained his silence concerning his find, all the while continuing his work for the Bureau of Natural Resources. He led an unremarkable life through the waning days of the Soviet Union and managed to keep his position secure during its collapse. In the wild aftermath he had actively sought foreign contacts, cultivating some he thought would eventually allow him to see his plan to fruition.
His chance had come through a Swiss metallurgist he’d met at a symposium who in turn eventually led Savich to the banker, Bernhard Volkmann, and the current deal he had under way. Backed by Volkmann, and using the companies controlled by the loathsome Shere Singh, Anton Savich had returned to Kamchatka countless times over the past year, laying the necessary groundwork under the cover of a volcanologist. With the numerous eruptions all across Kamchatka, he had become a common sight at the airport and maintained a standing reservation at the Avacha Hotel, just a short walk up Leningradskaya Street from what was possibly the only Lenin Square in Russia still dedicated to Lenin.
He collected his bags and went straight to a counter run by a heliski company. The sport had grown popular along the rugged peaks of the peninsula, and there were several companies willing to take skiers up the mountains by chopper. The company, Air Adventures, actually did book ski trips to maintain legitimacy, but it was a dummy company Savich had funded through Volkmann in order to have rapid but unobtrusive transportation to the site. A private helicopter at Elyzovo would have drawn too much attention.
The woman behind the counter put away a Japanese fashion magazine when she saw him approach. Her smile was fake and perfunctory. He didn’t recognize her, and he certainly didn’t look like a thrill-seeking tourist.
“Welcome to Air Adventures,” she greeted in English.
“My name is Savich,” he grunted. “Where’s Pytor?”
Her eyes registered surprise, then fear, as she blanched. She vanished into a curtained-off section of the kiosk. A moment later, Savich’s pilot, Pytor Federov, stepped from around the curtain. He wore an olive drab flight suit and retained the cocky air he’d earned over the missile-filled skies of Afghanistan.
“Mr. Savich, good to see you. I assumed you’d go to your hotel for the night and we would fly out in the morning.”
“Hello, Pytor. No. I want to see this latest eruption for myself before it gets dark,” Savich replied in case anyone was paying attention.
“Say the word, and I’ll file a flight plan.”
“Consider it said.”
Forty minutes later they were a racing down a twisting valley. The rugged mountains flanking the Air Adventure’s MI-8 helicopter towered some eight thousand feet above them. Several peaks on the Kamchatka Peninsula topped fifteen thousand. The air was hazy with fine ash particles from the eruption farther north. Even with headphones it was difficult to speak in the forty-year-old chopper, so for the two hours it took to get to the site, Savich was content to let the landscape unfold around him.