“Gershon, what I don’t get is: they rushed, they rushed, they rushed. And now… nothing?”
“Odd, isn’t it? Represents a kind of mind that wants everything under control, overthinks, overprepares.”
“Gershon, you’ve just described the director of the institute, the prime minister, the entire cabinet and, God rest her soul, Golda Meir.”
“I know. Psychology gets you nowhere in this game, because everybody in this game is already crazy, including me and Cohen. But especially Cohen.”
So it was odd that Cohen came up with an idea. “Gershon,” he said, “considering your platinum mystery.”
“Yes.”
“If we’re monitoring the plant by satellite and secondary intelligence sources and our friends at Precious Metals Industry Reporter, and there have been no large-scale, industrial-appropriate raw materials shipments to the plant, then would it not seem possible that whatever else they’re using in their manufacturing process would be available locally? Perhaps that’s why they located there, because whatever else they needed was abundant, and anyone ordering large supplies of it would not attract suspicion.”
“What a horrible idea,” said Gershon. “So stupid, so useless. I wish I’d thought it up.”
What was abundant in Astrakhan besides fish eggs? It turned out only gas and oil; the Caspian Sea was a vast body of water sitting on a concentration of unpleasant-smelling substances that were of extraordinary value in the world’s energy market. Pipelines already ran from Azerbaijan to Turkey; drilling stations already dotted the coastline. The spindles and turrets of refineries already rose against the sky, and noxious fumes already clung miasmatically to all nine ports that ringed the world’s largest lake. How the fish survived to lay strings of the little black eggs that people gobbled on wafers with champagne seemed a minor miracle, one that perhaps did not bear investigating too closely. The caviar still tasted great, and the oil and gas still powered many of the civilizations that flourished in the fertile crescent.
Gershon ended up with a list of raw materials, chemicals, enzymes, compounds, end products, by-products, and waste products that such aggressive siphoning of the planet was known to produce. Natural gas alone was not an industry but a mother of industries: its product list included engine oils, industrial coolants, compressor oils, bearing greases, endless varieties of fuel and energy, fertilizers, fabrics, glass, steel, plastics (endless), and paint. It went on and on. My head, why does it hurt so? My indigestion, why does it burn so? It was too much stuff. It was as if the stuff had won. He, mighty Gershon, defeated by the abundance of stuff!
Since it was late and Cohen wasn’t around to provoke him, he tried a last exercise, the dullest form of investigation known to man, requiring no IQ, no education, no sensibility for the game, no experience: the good old random stab.
He went to his good friend Dr. Google.
He entered: “platinum.”
Then he entered the name of a substance that the Caspian was known to produce in copious quantities. The result, for minute after minute, clicking drearily into the night, was gibberish, nonsense, pointless.
I must be cracked, he thought.
If I am, it’s all right with me.
He tried one more. What the hell?
PLATINUM + METHANE
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, more gibberish until…
What on earth was ANDRUSSOW OXIDATION?
Another question for Dr. Google.
Ultimately, in Gershon’s mind, Dr. Google, the world’s greatest spy, loafed and dithered, took time for a shit and a nice bicarbonate of soda, and then answered. It must have been quite obscure, because it took Dr. Google.0742 seconds to answer, instead of the average.0181. Reading quickly, Gershon learned that the Andrussow Oxidation seemed to be a process invented by a Leonid Andrussow at IG Farben in the ’20s that enabled methane (Caspian-abundant) and ammonia (Caspian-abundant) in the presence of oxygen (world-abundant) at a temperature of about 1400 centigrade over (imported at great cost and under serious security) platinum to oxidize, if he understood it, into something called hydrogen cyanide, sometimes called Prussic acid, which, when combined with a stabilizer and an odorant, became…
He gulped, he swallowed, he reached for the phone to call his department head because the situation had just become an emergency and he wondered how soon it would become a catastrophe.
The end result was Zyklon B, the killing gas of Auschwitz.
Someone was making a lot of it.
CHAPTER 45
They climbed the scree, picking their way among lumps of rock, twisted juniper bushes, the occasional stunted and un-stunted pine, and at about the two-thirds mark, despair set in.
“Suppose we get up there,” she said, “and there’s no cave. Then what?”
“There’ll be a cave there.”
“How do you know? Maybe the container is a mile away. She just carried the gun up here to get the thousand yards, shot it, zeroed it, and then walked the mile back.”
“This was a good place to hide ’em. If they dug a hole, they had to figure out some way to mark it and register it on a map. This place, easy to ID, being at the top of the scree, and if you’re a young partisan, instead of two broken-down old cripples, it’s easy to get to.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
I do, too, he thought.
She fell twice, cutting her knee badly the second time. She had gone from gray to ashen to something like the color of wax. He helped her over some of the rougher spots, but it disturbed him that her fingers were cold to the touch.
“How’s your hip?” she asked.
“It’s fine, no problem,” he lied. His hip hurt like hell. It hurt more than his lungs did, but it felt better than his throat did; he could feel the gunk of phlegm drying into something like pottery on his lips. Then there was his elbow, which was bleeding again. Goddamn that bastard’s sharp teeth! Then he thought, I am too old for this shit, for about the thousandth time.
“Maybe they’ll miss us,” she said. “Maybe they’ll keep going.”
“They won’t. They have a dog.”
“Oh, that’s right. That kid said so, didn’t he.”
“They think of everything,” Swagger said.
“Well, do me a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Please kill the dog,” she said.
“Ain’t the dog’s fault. He’s just trying to make a living.”
“Kill him anyway. On general principle.”
It was rocky and slippery, and the incline decided to get serious at a certain point and jutted more pugnaciously vertical. The new angle slowed them even more, but they never saw any pursuers. If there was a view — and there was — they didn’t see it. If there was beauty — and there was — they didn’t see it. If there was the same huge blue lake of Ukraine sky that overwhelmed the world out to the horizon anywhere you looked — and there was — they didn’t see it.
“Maybe they’re not following us?”
“Oh, they are. They won’t let us see them. They will have reached the edge of the scree, hung back, and got us marked by binoculars. They’ll come up through the trees on the right, out of sight. Tougher climbing because there ain’t no handholds and the footing is much less stable, but they’re young guys.”
They climbed, they climbed, they climbed. It ached, it hurt, it distracted, it disoriented, it robbed vision and imagination. Nearly everything hurt.