‘Frank, sit.’
Frank scratches his head. The air is filled with thumping and banging as the rope network comes alive. Soon the prisoners will be using it to share illicit letters, sugar, mobile telephones, an underground satirical newspaper and perfumed cigarettes given as gifts by prisoners to lovers they have never met and never will.
His cellmates are staring up at him with imploring eyes. Boris is clutching the liberated U-bend like it’s a glass of beer. Slowly, hesitantly, Frank lowers himself to the ground then Boris pushes Frank’s head down, at the same time twisting the U-bend until it’s pressed against Frank’s ear. Frank’s eyes swivel in their sockets; he stares at Boris and he’s about to say something when he hears a faint tinny voice.
‘Allo? Dis is prisoner boss Andrey Artamov in cell four-one-zero. Is dat the Arctic firty?’
Frank gulps. ‘Er…’ He hesitates then puts his mouth to the end of the tube. ‘Yes, hello?’
‘Is dat the Arctic firty?’
‘Er… yes. Well, one of them.’
‘I have friend of you here.’
‘Right. Okay.’
Silence, then, ‘Hello, Frank?’
‘Yes?’
‘Frank, this is Roman Dolgov, your Greenpeace compatriot from the cell above you.’
‘Er… hello, Roman. You seem to be somewhere in my U-bend system. How did you fit down there?’
‘Ha ha, yes, this is funny, Frank. What you say is funny.’
‘Roman, is this… are we talking on… is this a telephone?’
‘This is prison telephone. I have to tell you, Frank, we have a problem.’
Roman is a 44-year-old campaigner from the Moscow office of Greenpeace, arrested with Frank and twenty-eight others when their ship was stormed by Russian commandos seven weeks ago. They’d held a protest at an Arctic oil platform operated by President Putin’s state-run oil company, Gazprom, and now they’re facing the full fury of the Kremlin.
‘Roman, what’s going on?’
‘I speak with respected prisoners, Frank. They tell me you must talk to cell three-one-six. The cell opposite yours.’
‘Okay. Why?’
‘They say you must get the names of the Russians in that cell. They do not give their names, they do not go to gulyat’ – the hour of exercise the prisoners are granted each day – ‘and they have broken the doroga. They do not co-operate. The rope network on one wall is broken. Big problem.’
‘Er… okay, Roman. So… so… I’m sorry, say again, what do they want me to do?’
‘Francesco is also in their cell. You must ask him, what are the names of the Russians?’
Frank thinks for a moment. He rubs the fuzz on his head. His blond hair was closely cropped on the ship but now it’s growing out. He hands the U-bend to Boris, stands up and opens a hatch in the door.
‘Frankie!’ he shouts.
In a door across the hallway a hatch opens and the face of 38-year-old Frenchman Francesco Pisanu – another of the Greenpeace detainees – appears.
‘Yeah?’
‘Francesco, what are the names of the Russians they’ve just put in your cell?’
‘One moment.’
His face disappears. A minute later he returns.
‘They will not tell me.’
‘Francesco, you must find out the names of the Russians.’
‘They will not tell me. They are scared to tell me.’
‘Really?’
‘They say they are scared.’
Frank kneels down, takes the U-bend and speaks into it. ‘Roman, they won’t say.’
‘They will not say?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
At the other end of the pipe a conversation is conducted in Russian, before Roman returns.
‘Okay, Frank. Good night.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Good night, Frank.’
‘Er… okay. Night, Roman.’
Frank leans back, still holding the pipe, tapping the end with a finger and biting his lip. Boris shrugs. Yuri grunts and pushes himself to his feet. Frank stares at the pipe for a moment before handing it back to Boris, then he stands up, sniffs, clambers back onto his bunk, pulls the blanket right up to his neck and lies there, staring at the ceiling.
An illegal telephone network fashioned from the prison plumbing system? Mafia bosses issuing orders through a U-bend? And this isn’t even the strangest thing that’s happened in the last two months.
‘Christ,’ Frank whispers to himself, shaking his head. ‘How the fuck did I end up here?’
ONE
He lifts the binoculars, narrows his eyes and twists the dial to focus. His vision is flooded with blurry scarlet red. Frank turns the dial again and the view sharpens. He can see large white Russian letters, a helicopter deck protruding far over the water, the drilling tower standing out crisply against a blue sky.
He must have stared at that oil platform fifty times in the last twelve hours. It looks like a football stadium floating defiantly in the ocean, 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A half-million-tonne square block of metal and concrete with sheer red sides.[2] It’s called the Prirazlomnaya.
Frank is standing at the bow of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise. Three miles of ocean separate him from the platform. He turns his head and the view through the binoculars fills with sweeping open water then the dark blue hull of another ship. It’s a Russian coastguard vessel – the Ladoga – and it’s slowly circling the platform, protecting it from protesters. Specifically from Frank Hewetson and his friends.
He sucks his teeth and lowers the binoculars. It won’t be long now. Soon he’ll know if his plan is good enough. Earlier today he launched a flotilla of RHIBs – inflatable speedboats – from the Arctic Sunrise. It was a dummy run to test the Russians’ reaction time. The coastguard took five minutes, maybe six, to launch their own boats. Frank watched them from the deck of the Sunrise. They were slower than his team. Slower than the Greenpeace crew.
We’re ready, he thinks. It’s going to happen. First light tomorrow.
There are two RHIBs on the Russian ship. Tomorrow morning he’ll launch five from the Sunrise. He’s got them beaten for numbers, but he’ll need to surprise them too.
He lifts the binoculars and surveys the steel skeleton beneath the helicopter deck. That’s where he needs to get the lines up. The team practised for days in a Norwegian fjord before they set sail. They constructed a fake helideck and attached it to the crow’s nest of the Arctic Sunrise then bobbed in boats for hour after hour, firing ropes over it with catapults. After four days they were looping lines over the target nearly every time. But tomorrow morning they’ll have to hit piping forty metres above their heads, with the Russian coastguard barrelling down on them in speedboats.
He turns the binoculars back to the Ladoga and blinks at a glint of brilliant reflected sunlight. He squints. Nearly three miles away a man in a blue blazer and peaked cap is standing at an open door, holding his own binoculars, watching him.
Frank Hewetson has been sailing with Greenpeace for two decades. He’s been banned from the United States for crimes of moral turpitude, he’s broken into seven polluting power stations in four countries, and he once blocked the take-off of a British Airways jetliner at Heathrow airport in a protest against climate change. Three years ago he was skewered by a grappling hook thrown by a French sailor while he was protesting against illegal bluefin tuna fishing. The hook passed cleanly through his left leg, then the Frenchman pulled on the rope, dragging Frank along the floor of a boat. Frank had to cut the rope with a knife to stop himself becoming the fisherman’s latest illegal catch.