Polar Shift

21

Ten thousand years after the last woolly mammoth shook the earth beneath its feet, its bones and tusks are providing the fuel for a booming international trade. The center of that trade is the city of Yakutsk in East Siberia, about six hours by plane from Moscow.

It is an old city, founded in the 1600s by a band of Cossacks, and was long considered the last outpost of civilization for explorers. It gained later fame, or notoriety, as one of the islands in the Gulag system, where enemies of the Soviet state found ready employment as slave laborers in the gold and diamond mines. Since the nineteenth century, it has been the world capital for the woolly mammoth ivory trade.

The Ivory Cooperative is one of the prime distributors in the ivory trade. The cooperative is housed in a dark and dusty warehouse, surrounded by crumbling apartment buildings that go back to the time of Khrushchev. Behind the nondescript, concrete walls and steel door are thousands of pounds of mammoth ivory worth millions of dollars, waiting to be shipped out to China and Burma, where they will be carved into trinkets for the thriving Asian tourist market. The white treasure is contained in crates that are stacked on shelves running from one end of the warehouse to the other.

Three men were standing in one of the aisles. They were Vladimir Bulgarin, the owner of the ivory business, and two helpers, who were holding each end of a huge mammoth tusk.

"This is beautiful," Bulgarin was saying. "What's its weight?"

"One hundred kilos," one of his helpers said with a grunt. "Very heavy."

"Wonderful," Bulgarin said. Prime ivory was going at one hundred dollars a kilo.

A third helper was hustling down the aisle. "Your partner is here," he said.

Bulgarin looked as if he had bit into a lemon. He instructed his helpers to load the tusk into a sawdust-filled crate and to set it aside. He might have the tusk carved into little ivory mammoths or earrings rather than send it out as raw ivory, increasing the value even more.

As he headed back to his office, he had a frown on his fleshy face. His so-called partner was what they called a "bagman" in the United States. He was a Mafia thug who showed up once a month from Moscow to collect a percentage of the take, accuse Bulgarin of holding out and threaten to break his legs if he was.

It was inevitable that the Russian Mafia would find a way to get its sticky fingers into the profitable mammoth tusk trade. Business was booming, thanks to the international ban against the sale of ivory from the African elephant herds that had been decimated by hunters. Inhabitants of Yakutsk had a history in the mammoth trade going back hundreds of years, and, with an estimated ten million mammoths buried under the Siberian permafrost, a vast source of material.

Political change had boosted the ivory trade as well. Moscow had always regulated commerce in Yakutsk, and still controlled the diamond and gold business, but the local inhabitants had been trading with the Chinese for two thousand years, and they knew better than anyone how to make money off the bones of ancient, dead giants. The ivory first had to be worked in order to be exported legally under the law, but some distributors, like Bulgarin, ignored the law and sent raw ivory directly to the buyers.

When Moscow stepped out, the Mafia stepped in. The previous year, the cooperative received an unannounced visit from a group of the most frightening men Bulgarin had ever met. They wore black turtlenecks and black leather jackets, and they spoke softly when they said they were becoming partners in the business. Bulgarin was a petty thief, and he rubbed elbows with the more violent elements of the Russian underworld. When these hard men said he and his family needed protection, he knew exactly what they meant. He agreed to the arrangement, and the people from Moscow installed the two guards with machine guns at the door to protect their investment.

Bulgarin was puzzled as well as annoyed at the timing of the visit. As regular as clockwork, his partner showed up on the fourth Thursday of every month. This was the second Wednesday. Despite his annoyance, when he entered his tiny, cluttered office near the entrance to the warehouse he wreathed his face in a broad smile, expecting to see Karpov, the usual representative from Moscow. But the man dressed in the black suit and turtleneck was younger, and, in contrast to Karpov, who stole money with a tough-guy affability, his expression was as cold as Yakutsk on a winter night.

He glared at Bulgarin. "I don't like to be kept waiting."

"I'm very sorry," Bulgarin said, maintaining his smile. "I was at the far end of the warehouse. Is Karpov ill?"

"Karpov is only a money collector. We have serious business. I want you to get in touch with the men on Ivory Island."

"It's not easy."

"Just do it."

Several days before, Moscow had called, and told him to assemble a team of his most hardened ivory hunters and send them to the island. They would find a scientific party working there, and were instructed to hold a woman scientist named Karla Janos. They were to hand her over to a team coming in from Alaska.

"I can try," Karpov said. "The weather-"

"I want you to change their orders. Tell them to take the girl and transport her off the island."

"What about the Americans?"

"Their people are unable to come. They were willing to pay a great deal of money for the job, so she is evidently of some value. We will talk to her, to see what she has to say, and hold her for ransom."

Karpov shrugged. It was typical of the Moscow Mafia. Double cross. Crude and direct.

"What about the other scientists?"

"Tell your men, no witnesses."

A chill ran down Karpov's spine. He was no angel, and had broken a few heads as a young smuggler. Ivory hunting was a cutthroat business. After the Mafia got into ivory hunting, they had recruited men who could be charitably called "scum of the earth." Some of his competitors had conveniently vanished.

At the same time, he was smart enough to know that, as a witness, he too would be in line to be eliminated. He would do as the man said, but his mind was already working on ways to fold his business and leave Yakutsk. He nodded, his mouth dry, and opened a cabinet that housed a state-of-the-art radio.

Within minutes, he had contacted the ivory hunters. Using a carefully crafted code in case someone was listening, he called the leader of his team, a violent man named Grisha, who was a Sakha descendant of the Mongols that had lived as ivory hunters going back hundreds of years. He relayed the instructions. Grisha asked only for clarification to make sure he had heard the order correctly, but otherwise had no questions.

"It's done," he said, replacing the microphone.

The Mafia man nodded. "I will come back tomorrow to make sure."

Karpov wiped the sweat off his brow after the man left. He didn't know which was worse, dealing with the cutthroats from Moscow or the cutthroats who worked for him. What he did know was that his days in Yakutsk were numbered. He would be safe until they brought someone in to replace him, but, in the meantime, he would activate plans made long ago. He had millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts.

Geneva would be nice. Or Paris or London. The gem business would be profitable.

Anything would be preferable to a Siberian winter.

He smiled. The Mafia may have done him a great favor.