Belly of the Beast Read online

  a novel

  by

  Douglas Walker

  This is a work of fiction set during the collapse of the Soviet Union, December, 1991. References to the Kyshtym disaster of 1957, Lake Karachay, and other locations are basically historical. Other events, characters, character names, and business names are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual people or businesses are purely coincidental.

  Cover art by Jeroen Ten Berge

  jeroentenberge.com

  Revised Edition 5.15.2011

  dwwbooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 Douglas W. Walker

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1461099552

  ISBN-13: 978-1461099550

  To Anne,

  best friend, partner, and indefatigable advocate.

  FOREWARD

  I first met Douglas Walker eight years ago when I joined a writers group in the small, mountain town where I live in Colorado.

  We would always read our week’s work aloud to the group, and I will never forget the first time I heard Walker read.

  His prose was simply astonishing.

  Gorgeous sentence after gorgeous sentence that begged to be read aloud. Mind-blowing attention to detail that could have only been achieved by an author who had visited the places he wrote about.

  I still remember hearing Doug read the opening to Belly of the Beast for the first time. My jaw dropped. His virtuoso writing had melded with a thriller that tapped into his passion for and impressive knowledge of Russia.

  About a year later, the completed manuscript showed up in my inbox...

  At the time, I thought, “If the rest of the book is anywhere near as good as that first chapter, it’s going to be a spectacular ride.”

  And boy was it...

  The description does not do what lies ahead in these pages justice. This is an epic tale about what a mother will do to save her dying son, about desperation, and the inescapable pull of the past.

  And it has everything...

  The swirling, freezing intrigue of a Russian family saga...

  A touch of classic espionage driven by one of the most chilling villains you’ll ever read, Victor Malenkov...

  And a basis in historical fact that will terrify you.

  The research is perfect. The writing is glowing. The story is magnetic and unforgettable.

  Dive in.

  -Blake Crouch, April 2011

  (Blake Crouch is a top selling mystery and thriller author.)

  PROLOGUE

  2003

  Durango, Colorado

  The smells of wood smoke and hot chocolate drift through my head. They bring me back to a perfect time. I was ten.

  Mother was up before me, she usually was on cold winter mornings. I smell the hot chocolate and sit up. Frost laces the window top to bottom. I listen to the fire crackle and the pot whistle as I dress.

  Mother fills my cup as I walk to the wood stove, my cold feet sorting out the rough floorboards.

  The cup warms my fingers. It’s my favorite with a ski trail winding up a snow-clad mountain on one side. Mother had helped me paint it.

  She opens the woodstove door to add another log. The fire’s orange glow fills the room and reflects from the window frost. “There’s something for you by the door,” she says, her smile warm as the fire. I spin about. Half hidden by her worn coat is a pair of red Rossignol skis. The floorboards creak as I bound to the door. I pick one up, astonished by its feather weight. “For me?” I slide my fingers along the smooth bottom. “My old skis could last a little longer,” I offer half–heartedly. She closes the stove door, smiles again, and takes a picture with her plastic camera.

  We skied a lot then. Mother took me down valleys and up mountains. “Slide on the glide, stick on the kick,” she’d always remind me as I waxed the ski bottoms. Once we climbed up the back side of Purgatory Mountain and skied down the alpine runs. Texans in their tight ski pants pointed at our baggy woolies and smirked. Mother took off down the steep slope and out skied all of them on her skinny skis. I did my best to keep up. She looked back and smiled. It didn’t matter what others thought. We had each other.

  I suppose my father pitied us. He had a big house, a big truck, and lots of toys. He didn’t understand why I’d choose to live in a cabin and ski with Mother rather than suck gas fumes on the back of his snowmobile.

  I was eleven when I got sick, really sick. Cancer. Mother tried to keep her smile, but it was only a thin layer of wax over her pain. I was the cause.

  Just before Christmas, she left me at my father’s house. I was twelve by then. Mother was supposed to return in two days to take me Christmas shopping. She never did.

  “Your mother had to go away because you’re sick,” said my father. He was always short on words.

  “I’m sure Niki loved you,” said Lisa, my stepmother. “Don’t blame your sweet little self over what happened.”

  They thought they had handled the situation quite well. To be fair, what was said, and what my child’s mind heard and remembered could have been quite different.

  This story might have ended right there, but for three things. First, two years after my mother left, my father rounded Elmore’s Corner at eighty and rode his Harley to the hereafter. Second, in my parents’ absence, I substituted skiing for most everything else in my life. That led to a night job grooming ski trails, which led to writing trail reports, which led to my book Trails on the Dark Side: A Guide to Skiing the Edge. Third, Lisa willed her house to me, and then drank herself to death. I was twenty-four by then.

  Not one of the events was significant by itself, but together they were the combination to unlocking my past and future. It began in the house where I had lived with my stepmother until I was old enough to escape.

  The clapboard house on lower East Third was one of those Sears and Roebuck house kits built a hundred years ago on a crumbly stone foundation. Except for at least thirteen coats of paint (I counted where woodpeckers had pecked holes under the north eave), not much had been done to it. I’m sure it would have been bulldozed long ago, but it was protected by some protective heritage thing. Apparently, the old house had things new houses didn’t—leaky pipes, a leaky roof, and a hundred year collection of coal soot as far as I could tell. Anyway, I got it, mortgage and all. A gift for the troubled boy, said my stepmother’s handwritten will. Some attorney gave me the keys. After my first look inside, I decided no one should ever be allowed to die before cleaning the basement. The real estate agent agreed.

  “You won’t be able to sell this place until you muck out all the junk,” she said, “and don’t expect to pocket more than few thousand dollars after you pay off the mortgage and my sales commission.” She’d make more than me, but a few thousand was better than nothing. All I had left from my book advance was a big Ford pickup, a bottle of Jim Beam, $293 in gas money, and, of course, the latest in ski equipment. I invested $12.98 of the gas money in trash bags.

  I had lived in the house until I was sixteen, but no familiar odors rose from its basement. The single overhead bulb lit a jumble of worn-out tires, broken popcorn poppers, shelves of mayonnaise jars, and piles of cardboard boxes added since I had left.

  I wiped out a jar, poured a few inches of Jim Beam into it, and began. At first, I carefully opened each box, but after finding nothing but TV dinner trays, old magazines, and soiled clothes, I started tipping them unopened into a restaurant dumpster down the alley. At the bottom of one pile, I lifted a box cleanly from its contents, the cardboard bottom having rotted completely. Inside was a stack of notebooks cemented to the floor with mold. I shoveled most of the mess into a trash bag, but one book fell to the floor. It was hand-writt
en in Cyrillic letters, the strange words bursting past the margins. I added it to the others and carried the bag outside. On a later trip up the stairs, I noticed a cookie tin tucked between two floor joists. I recognized the Christmas trees my mother had painted around the side thirteen years before. I almost stopped breathing.

  When my mother hadn’t returned, I had fire-walled my brain—Father said it was best to forget the past. I thought he had thrown out all her stuff, but somehow the tin and my memory of it had survived. I went up to daylight and pried it open, half-expecting to smell freshly baked cookies. Instead, a sexy young woman stared into my eyes, a blond ponytail bobbing from her ski hat. I lifted the photo. Below it was another showing a tiny kid in a knapsack peering over the shoulder of the same woman. I realized it was me even before I saw Niki and Alex, 1981 written on the back. The woman I had just ogled was my mother, probably only nineteen years old. She was only seventeen when I was born.

  As I dug deeper, the pictures plucked out more memories: Moses, Mother’s saved-from-the-river cat; our old Datsun truck with me trying to steer; and Mother standing in the doorway of our little cabin. I sat down on the front porch stairs and looked at my first missing tooth, first step, first fish, first skis, even a picture of the cup when I was painting it. Tears trickled down my face. “I want you back,” I said, without knowing where it came from.

  The evil seed my stepmother had planted—I’m sure she loved you instead of She loved you—must have taken root during my teenage years because I was always trying to convince myself my mother really did love me even though she left me. I knew I’d been a lot of work the eleven months I was sick with leukemia, but why would someone keep first-tooth photos of someone they didn’t love?

  Near the bottom of the tin was an essay: Niki Michaels, Perfect Mom. It ended with because she is always there when I need her. I remembered rewriting it three times so she’d think it was perfect too. I read it several times and saw my mother hiking beside me, teaching me to ski, and holding me in her arms when I was sick. I cried out loud, realizing that my father had been wrong about burying the past. Maybe I could have loved my stepmother if she had let me love my mother’s memory. After a while I dried my eyes, but tears kept flowing.

  Below the essay was a page torn from a notebook. Yuri 921-5555 was written at the bottom, but the rest was like the writing in the moldy notebook. The Cyrillic characters were suddenly connected to my mother. I ran to the dumpster, waving off the truck that had come to collect it. I carefully retrieved all the books while the truck driver rolled his eyes at my dumpster diving.

  At the kitchen table, I re-opened the first book I had found. The handwriting was definitely the same as that on the note from the tin. The other notebooks were similar, though one was only a spiral-bound pocket pad. Every space in it was crammed with tiny writing.

  The bottom of the last book was just pulp, but I eased apart a few molded pages at the beginning. I expected more odd writing, but it was neatly printed in English, every word within the margins. It was not my mother’s hand, but I definitely heard her voice. I devoured every word but didn’t know what to make of it; it read like a novel. Toward the end, the pages were inseparable. I was angry then that my father had never told me about my mother’s stuff and furious that my stepmother had let them rot.

  I sat back down. It didn’t help being mad at the dead. I eased a couple more pages loose, read what I could, and let it sink in that I didn’t know what happened to my mother or who she really was.

  That afternoon I took one of the notebooks to a Hungarian guy I knew at the Alpine Ski Shop. He said it was Russian, a journal. From the little he was able to decipher, there was little doubt my mother had written it. That was confirmed by the margin violations; she always lived outside the boundaries. But I couldn’t have guessed she knew anything but English, really. She had taught me a little French and cussed in some other language, but I had no clue she spoke Russian.

  I spent the last of my gas money to hire a translator, and then I moved into the house for a few days, just until I got to read the journals, I thought.

  From my mother’s writing, I began to understand she had hidden other things from me. I learned she was deathly afraid of open water, which explained her panic the time I fell into the creek. And I never knew she was terrified of closed spaces. As I read on, I realized she struggled with even bigger monsters to protect me. I wanted to tell her I was okay. I wanted her to know.

  I also realized I had become quite like my self-centered, heavy-drinking father. I symbolically emptied what was left of a new Jim Beam bottle down the drain. I needed to be more like my mother.

  I traded my big Ford for an old Datsun truck and used some of the profit to buy a laptop. I had learned how to write with the ski book, but now I had a real story to tell. With a ten-cup pot perking coffee, I began writing about my mother’s life just as it was revealed to me: the incomplete last journal first and what I could deduce from the translated journals next. For the first time since my mother left, something was more important than drinking and skiing. I was discovering who my mother was, but just as important, I was discovering who I was. In the end, however, I was missing final chapters to both our lives—the answer to that was beyond the journals.

  Alex Michaels, November 20, 2003

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was an unlikely sight, a bedraggled American woman and a fourteen-year-old Russian girl trudging across an arm of the frozen Baltic Sea in the dead of night. Just ahead, a split in the ice blocked their escape. Open water spilled fog into the dim moonlight.

  Katrina, the young Russian, stopped and studied it.

  Niki Michaels, racked with pain, stared at the ice on the other side. Finland was somewhere beyond. She turned on her skis and looked back toward Russia. At least their ski tracks were imperceptible on the hard ice and wind-packed snow, or so she thought.

  The distant groan of a snowmobile engine gave testimony to Victor Malenkov’s KGB training. He could see what Niki couldn’t.

  “It’s him again,” said Katrina. She knew how ruthless Malenkov could be. “We have to jump to the other side.”

  Niki turned back toward the open water. “No. We’ll ski along the edge. Maybe it will close up.”

  Katrina knew her own judgment was better. Niki was barely conscious. The young girl grabbed Niki’s arm. “We can’t outrun a snow machine. The open water is a gift, Niki. We can jump it; I don’t think he can.”

  Niki looked at the water, almost indistinguishable from the clear ice that lined its sides.

  “It’s only a couple of meters wide,” Katrina continued. She pulled an empty water bottle from her pack and placed it at the edge of the ice. “I’ve done this with my father on the lake by my—” Katrina felt her gut wrench at the thought of her father. His body was barely cold. Tears welling, she threw the packs across the open water. “I won’t let him die for nothing. Follow me.” Katrina skied across the glare ice by the crack until she was back where wind-packed snow covered the frozen sea. She counted her steps out loud.

  Niki robotically followed. Cold and fatigue numbed her mind. Her burned feet were frozen—mercifully—and her leg oozed blood between crude stitches. Skiing on flat ice was difficult at best; jumping was not an option Niki would consider. “You go on,” she said when she got to Katrina. “I’ll stall Malenkov. I’m the one he wants.”

  “I’m not going without you.”

  “You have too. You have to save yourself.”

  “No. I won’t let you give up on yourself, or your son.”

  “When you get to the other side, take my pack,” said Niki. “You can save Alex. Try to get the pack to—”

  “Deliver it yourself,” said Katrina. “If you stay, I stay. That’s final.” Katrina slammed the points of her ski poles into the hard snow.

  The pain in Niki’s legs rose to her heart. She tried to make out Katrina’s face in the dim light. “I love you, sweetheart. I wish—”

  The glow
of a headlight lit the fog.

  “Go now,” demanded Katrina.

  Niki knew Malenkov well enough to know he would kill them, but not quickly. He would want to see them suffer, plead for mercy, beg. Niki’s memory flashed to Hunter Creek. Malenkov had pushed her head through the ice and held her under water. She was eight years old. Now, more that the freezing water, Niki feared what Malenkov would do to Katrina. She turned toward the wide crack in the ice.

  “Eight strides,” said Katrina. “Plant your poles at the water bottle. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Niki still hesitated.

  “You know what he’ll do to us,” said Katrina. “Go.”

  Niki kicked off.

  After the sixth stride, hard-packed snow turned to black ice. Niki raised both arms to plant her poles for the lift off.

  Niki Michaels skied well, though never well enough to have pleased her mother. But what she lacked in confidence, she had made up for in years of practice. She knew it was critical to plant the points of her poles precisely at the bottle marker. It was a long jump and she was weak. If she started too soon, the jump would land short and she’d end up in the water, but starting too late and missing the ice with either pole would send her headfirst into the water as well, certain death under the circumstances.

  Niki’s right point stuck eight inches in from the water’s edge, the left knocked over the bottle. Her muscles responded with all the strength that remained in her damaged body.

  Lifted by her poles and carried by momentum, Niki’s ski tips hit the far side, the tails hit the water. The arches of her skis slammed into the edge of the ice. The impact tore open stitches in her right leg. Her body crumpled forward, hit the smooth ice, and slid to the safety of the hard-packed snow. Stifling a scream, Niki looked back.