Fifty Below (A Winter's Tale)

By Yuri Vinokurov

It's Christmas time in Yakutsk, the coldest city on the Earth, and Captain Tsoi of the Moscow police is looking forward to visiting his parents. On the night of his arrival, the city is sent into a blackout and a deep freeze by a gang trying to get away with an unprecedented bounty of diamonds. (Fifty Below. A Winter's Tale).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yuri Vinokurov
• Release date: Dec 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301054381

Yuri Vinokurov

I was born in the Soviet Union and had spent most of my life in Russia before relocating to Vancouver, British Columbia. I have been writing - and discarding - little bits for almost as long as I can remember myself. "Firebird" (2013) is just out. It's an attempt in the retro spy-action genre, set in the 1980s Hong Kong. There's a bunch of bad guys, a slightly less bad guy, a muted love interest, - and a black box that everyone thinks is so important. I started drafting it as a low-budget film script back in 2007-2008 and then abandoned it until late last year. "Fifty Below" (2012) is a short novel, a winter action thriller in Siberia, and an obvious attempt in the Die Hard I, II tradition. "The Colonists" (2012) is the first novella I have completed to a somewhat publishable state. I was vaguely planning to get back to and fix the bugs. "Barbershop Otto and Other Mysteries" - in progress, sort of. The first story is already available to download as a free sample. A few more stories are coming soon, and the collection will be uploaded when I have about 10-12 short stories. They're going to be mostly dark, Twilight Zone kind of stories. At the rate I am writing it could take a couple of years. A few more ideas are in the pipeline. I like hiking, drawing sketches, exercising, punching the bag, eating well (but not a foodie). I don't really enjoy running long distances but that's another thing that I do.

Book preview

Fifty Below

A Winter’s Tale

By Yuri Vinokurov

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 Yuri Vinokurov

This is a work of fiction. Only some place names and some geographic facts are real. Any reference to real persons and real events is a coincidence.

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Moscow, Sheremetyevo, 02:00 - 0:400 Moscow time

Yakutsk airport, 19:00 – 20:00

Yakutsk, downtown, 20:00 – 20:30

Yakutsk, downtown, around 20:30

Yakutsk, downtown, around 21:00

Yakutsk, downtown, around 21:30

Magan, Yakutsk secondary airport, around 22:30

Magan, second airfield, around 23:00

Yakutsk, 22:00 – 00:00

Over the Kolyma Road, near Khandyga, 01:00 – 02:00

Over the Khandyga - Okhotsk Road, 03:00 – 04:00

Yakutsk, 06:00 – 09:00

The Okhotsk Road, 06:00 - 11:00

The Sea of Okhotsk off Vostretsovo, around noon

Prologue

The temperature of the air in the capital and in the central districts will remain at forty-three to forty-six degrees Celsius throughout the day and may drop to forty-nine to fifty-two at night. Moderate northwesterly wind, relative humidity sixty-six percent, said the same familiar voice Anton had been hearing for, hmm well, he guessed, ever since he remembered himself. A lot of things changed in the past couple of decades but the radio voices somehow remained.

The weather changed as well, the winters were no longer as cold as he could remember from his childhood. This one was considered as a very cold one in the past five or six years, with temperatures rarely rising above forty but it would be quite normal twenty years ago, he recalled. In primary school they had a weather observation activity, and little Anton would write down the readings from a thermometer his dad installed just outside the frosty window. So, yeah, some kind of global warming was happening, he thought.

So, this year it was unusually cold or more like the old normal, depending on your perspective. Anton preferred to think of it as of just a normal Yakutian winter, like the ones he had as a kid. At below fifty, - or was it fifty six? – school would be cancelled and the kids would get a welcome day off. These days it was sometimes even so ridiculously warm he could walk to a lunch break across the street in his slippery office shoes without having to change.

Anton was a junior manager at the KDM which stood for Komdragmet which in turn was an abbreviation for the Precious Metals and Gems Commission, a government-owned diamond-trading outfit that controlled a smaller half of the trade in the remote Siberian province. Another half was controlled by the Central Sales Department, a distribution branch of Alrosa, one of the largest diamond-mining companies in the world.

Gold and diamond mining was the mainstay of industry in Yakutia, this largest and the coldest province of Russia that produced almost a quarter of the world supply in the precious stone. The world economic crisis, while good for the gold prices, badly hit the diamond-mining industry with sales dropping around the world, but in the tightly concentrated industry the major producers were able to prevent further price erosion. In the past, Anton and his colleagues would usually accumulate a large stock of polished diamonds received back from the local factories, to send overseas in November for the Christmas markets and then for the Valentine Day, but this year the piles were growing scary as the many earlier parcels were still sitting in the vaults.

Still, there was a big shipment planned for the customs in Moscow and today was a busy day for Anton who had to personally check every new parcel and then double-check the spreadsheets. Then the finished diamonds would find their way to the jewellers in Antwerp, New York, Tel-Aviv and Hong Kong. There were cut and polished diamonds in smaller packets, sometimes in cardboard boxes. One of the local factories had a habit of sending polished goods in tin cans. There were also rough diamond parcels right from the mines in the province, in large grey cloth bags. These were supposed to be sold or leased to nearly a dozen of local manufacturers. Most of the time, Anton had at least a few million dollars worth of diamonds in his care, and a lot more in the autumn and winter months.

The Central Sales office was just a few buildings away from the KDM compound. Anton reckoned that at the moment there could be as least a couple of millions of dollars worth of diamonds between the two offices, possibly a lot more. It was quite a bounty.

Moscow, Sheremetyevo, 02:00 – 04:00 Moscow Time

It was late December, the New Year’s days, and Tsoi’s was trying really hard to get into the festive mood. Obtaining a leave from the unit at this time of the year was difficult enough, buying tickets to fly home was another thing: all these university students going for holidays, stuff like that. He literally had to beg the salesgirl to sell him a ticket from the secret stash for the company’s own VIPs, provincial brass and such. Then the usual holiday mess at the airport and the flight was being delayed by a couple of hours for sure, due to the fog at the destination, in Yakutsk that is. For as long as he could remember in December there was always fog.

So, by the time he got to the Sheremetyevo domestic terminal, Tsoi was already pretty cranky and tired. Perhaps it was good luck that he got stuck in the traffic; that helped kill part of the time. He normally preferred flying through Domodedovo and in anything but Tu-154, but