Mammoth Dawn (9 page)

Next, Senator Karl Fitch makes a passionate speech in favor of the Evos, and of caution. Alex suspects that Fitch, who has always argued against Helyx’s work, may be the high government figure supporting his enemy Kinsman—because plainly, somebody powerful is. Fitch rants, but fumbles to a halt every time Alex presses him for hard data to support his grand pronouncements. Most of the spectators see him as a spiteful bag of wind.

As the highly emotional hearing winds down, Senator Chesney sides with the Resurrection Preserve—it is, after all, an engine that drives part of her state’s economy, just like the oil pipeline—and she chews Kinsman out for shoddy science. “This Committee must base its conclusions on
facts
rather than fantasies, however plausible you may consider them to be.” The Committee itself is about to enter a two-month recess, and the Senator is returning to Alaska.

O O O

In a sudden transition, we next see Senator Chesney sweating, laughing, making love—with Gregor Galaev. They are in his big estate house. This is clearly not the first time they have been lovers.

Though he at first planned this to be an affair of convenience, Gregor has become involved with the Senator. Sylvia Chesney was married to a millionaire who supported her run for the Senate. He died shortly into her first term, and now she knows that in a year she will face a tough reelection. In Washington she has gotten caught up in the thrill of power. She wants more, but she is from a minor state. “Alaska is so huge yet insignificant at the same time!” She sees Gregor as a way to help her ambitions; for him, Sylvia is the essence of America.

The Senator is cagey. She has to be careful with her public responses to the controversial Resurrection Preserve, of which Gregor is a major partner. She dons a fine Chinese robe and joins Gregor and his charming teenage daughter Raisa for a nice lunch. Raisa knows about her father’s affair and doesn’t mind at all; she and Sylvia get along like good friends, unlike Raisa’s relationship with her real mother back in distant “civilized” Moscow.

We also meet the henchman Psyk’s teenage son Nikolai (whom Psyk has taken from his mother in the US). Nikolai is a young copy of Gregor’s lieutenant, very much in awe of his father; he is quite devoted to young Raisa, like a bodyguard. (He adores her, but like a medieval knight devoted to the queen, not in a realistic romantic sense.) Inside Gregor’s house are numerous stuffed animals, hunting trophies from his expeditions—including a beautifully mounted (and highly illegal) Siberian tiger, the same endangered species Cassie was trying to rescue in a previous chapter.…

Later that day, on an outing, when the Senator is ready to return to Juneau, Gregor’s security screen picks up two curious telejournalists who are trying to expose the Senator’s liaison. She is furious at how much incriminating evidence they have captured with their high-tech microcameras. Gregor is just as upset; he has much to hide, many crimes in his past, many prices on his head.

He uses the old Siberian solution, arranging for the telejournalists to end up in a “new gulag” mining camp across the Bering Straits, for good. Sylvia is mesmerized by his casual use of power, which to her has a sexual edge. She knows about his former identity in the Soviet Mafia, but even though there are international warrants out for his arrest, Sylvia thinks she can take advantage of his connections and power base. The Senator secretly believes she has a chance to be chosen as the state’s next governor, if she finds her own “big issue” that a lot of people can get behind. Gregor has a way to give her that Big Issue.

O O O

After the Senator rejoins her staff back at the capital, Gregor goes into his private sitting room with a roaring fireplace, stuffed bears and lions, carved elephant tusks, the horn of a rare white rhinoceros. He takes a seat next to one of his ferocious-looking trophies, leans back, and closes his eyes—but not to relax. He is preparing himself to “hold court.” He has not hurried himself with Sylvia, but he knows other people are waiting for him, important men who are owed favors … or who owe him favors.

The first man to come in looks rail-thin and weak, gray-skinned, on death’s doorway. Gregor is shocked to see how much the man has changed. This is Commissar Stepan Orkov, Gregor’s former Soviet boss, who has fallen into political obscurity and become the mayor of a polluted Siberian town. The Commissar is riddled with cancer. Gregor makes no comment on the man’s appearance, pours them both a snifter of expensive Georgian brandy (though Orkov only looks longingly at his and does not take a drink).

He explains to Gregor about his hellish, ineffective cancer treatments. He is dying. He begs Gregor for help. This is a telling scene, demonstrating that Gregor Galaev is so powerful in his own microcosm that people believe he has the power of life and death.

Gregor (which is not his real name) came across to the US from Siberia as a “worker” in the usual crime industries—trading everything from assault carbines, drugs and medicines, machine guns, and the ever-popular Kalashnikov, on up to helicopters, anti-aircraft missiles, submarines, enriched uranium, and plutonium.

More intelligent and more ambitious than his comrades, he understood the demands of the trade. He once forced a woman to eat gravel, to show respect, after she had stolen tip money from the strippers in a club. He learned how to stash gold and diamonds in bootheels or in hollows specially worked into pianos and chairs. Slowly and quietly, “Gregor Galaev” made a name for himself.

Now, he explains that he can do nothing to cure the old commissar’s cancer, but Orkov only asks if he can ease his pain, make his miserable life tolerable. He has tried the regular painkillers, even illegal drugs, but they are either too weak or make him feel even sicker.

Gracious and smiling, Gregor brings out a container of moist chopped plant material, dense and aromatic, like a kind of hashish. “Let me give you something very rare, old friend. Potent and remarkable. It will let you go calmly to the end.” It is a legendary shamanistic drug made from a nearly extinct fern that still grows around isolated high Siberian villages. These ferns are greatly sought after by native Yakuts for hallucinogenic cultural ceremonies.

Thanks to the Resurrection Preserve, these ancient bog ferns are now thriving, due in part to a symbiosis with mammoth dung, an ingredient that has been missing from the landscape for nearly ten thousand years. Gregor hopes there will soon be a burgeoning supply for the black market. While Alex Pierce dabbles with his high-minded ideals, Gregor intends to make a lot of money from the Preserve.

Grateful, the old Soviet boss departs with the narcotic fern. Gregor has just enough time to compose himself again and sip his expensive brandy before a smartly dressed Chinese businessman—Hector Chu—is ushered into the fire lit trophy room. From his expression and demeanor, Gregor can tell immediately that the businessman is going to request something very difficult.

But Gregor will manage it, as always.

O O O

Returning from Washington, DC, Alex has a regular business meeting with his investor and partner, Gregor Galaev. Both men are powerful and rich, but come from utterly different cultures. Instead of sitting in a boardroom and talking like businessmen, they ride horses to one of the lakes in the great preserve. Alex raises an automated bridge that makes a path across the water, and they cross to the island habitat where the dodos and moas live.

Theirs is a complex relationship, based at first on a simple trade of favors. Each holds a different type of power, and a hidden admiration for the other’s kind. Alex knows that Gregor works both sides of the law and both sides of the Bering Straits, but since Alex has had his own extreme disappointments with US government and law, he does not pass judgment on the Siberian.

The two men met over twenty years ago, when Gregor Galaev was selling bits of frozen mammoth and sabretooth tissue that Helen and Alex first analyzed (in their famous genome-sequencing paper that neglected to include Geoffrey Kinsman as a coauthor). Since then, they have forged a good working relationship. Politically savvy and happy to do deals behind closed doors, Gregor knows how to smooth ruffled feathers. Hard-driven Alex is focused on his grand goal and not concerned about stepping on toes. He doesn’t care about the Luddite Evos, but Gregor understands “the power of ignorance.”

As they look at the exotic once-extinct birds, Gregor subtly reminds Alex of all the favors he’s done for the Resurrection Preserve. Unfortunately, Gregor makes calm assumptions that a person should repay one favor with another, while Alex is much more of a “face value” sort of man and expects his peers to talk straight with him.

Then Gregor drops his bombshell: He would like to kill one of the mammoths in the herd so that he can obtain a pristine set of fresh
mammoth tusks
. It is simply a business proposition, for which they will be well paid. Gregor has all the details worked out. Perhaps they need to thin the herd, or a specimen for dissection and study? Gregor can think of many customers who would pay a premium for a sample of mammoth steaks, too—a caveman banquet!

Alex is offended, appalled, and turns him down flat. “What on Earth could you want the tusks for?” Gregor is surprised that Alex doesn’t have some inkling about how valuable such things are in the black market.

“It was a request someone made of me.” A request Gregor cannot deny, and it would be in terribly bad taste for Alex to ask about details. They are business partners, and Gregor has never denied Alex any reasonable request.

Upset, Alex says he could never shoot down one of his prize beasts just so some collector can have a trophy! It goes against the principles of the Preserve. Gregor is just as annoyed. Does this hugely wealthy man know nothing of how power is used? Incredible! “Now that we have brought back these creatures, why can we not benefit from them? You have a herd of a hundred mammoths—why is it wrong to profit from one?” It is idealism versus commercialism, and Alex doesn’t realize what an affront he has just given Gregor.

Alex, after having defended his work to the Senate Committee, after facing down a nutcase like Kinsman, now can’t believe that his own business partner wants to start killing off their Pleistocene specimens. He says absolutely not, in a tone that allows no argument … but Alex doesn’t even realize that it is Gregor who runs the Preserve behind the scenes, while he buries himself in his Library of Earth work. And Gregor Galaev is not a man who takes
No
for an answer.

O O O

Inside the fabulous Main House, Cassie studies detailed projection maps of the Resurrection Preserve, ecosystems in progress. She is working on adding minor bits of the ecosystem: extinct plants, fungi, ferns, birds. Alex calls it “background detail,” the brushstrokes that paint an ancient landscape.

Cassie avoids personal problems by submerging herself in work, as if hoping to impress Alex with her abilities. In her heart, she has loved him for a long time, but Alex is too wrapped up in his mission. He hasn’t even bothered to notice her as a woman, probably still remembers her as the spunky ranch hand.

She wanders among the various plants in the greenhouse, new flowers, herbs, and weeds under development from La Brea and Mammoth Falls samples. There is a new worry: allergies and hay fevers have sprung up in and around the preserve. Workers and visitors to the Resurrection Preserve often suffer from new allergies, sniffles, and sinus infections. Alex once jokingly called it the “Pleistocene flu,” hay fever from the last Ice Age. But Geoffrey Kinsman and his Evos had vehemently cited this as proof that people are already vulnerable to resurrected plants and their toxins.

Cassie is interrupted by Zach Browder, ostensibly for business reasons to discuss the scheduling and staffing of several new Helyx-sponsored Library of Earth specimen-gathering missions. Cassie has compiled databases of desired samples, sending requests to zoos around the world that have rare animals in captivity. Saving the world is a full-time job.

But there is also romantic tension in the air. As far as Cassie is concerned, their relationship is over, but Zach doesn’t want to let it go.

O O O

Now that Kinsman has spoken to the Senate Committee—a showcase speech, from which he expected to make no tangible progress—he understands that he must take his Evos into a new phase of active sabotage again.

He has
had it
with politicians and lawyers, though some of them do see his side of things. It was no accident that he was never charged with the murder of Helen Pierce at the Montana Ranch. Kinsman has tried to go through regular channels, but in his mind the government wants to hold meetings to discuss the dangers of fire, while the resurrection work is already a blaze out of control. Luckily, many of the Evos feel the same way. The front is
here
, in the corrupted Alaskan wild, the only place where they can make the necessary impact.

A low-flying unmarked plane drops Kinsman and his team into the wilds, decked with new outdoor gear and wilderness survival supplies (surprisingly modern military gear, more than any group of protesters should be able to afford). Kinsman follows a tracker signal and discovers a mysterious stash of air-dropped crates in the dense forests outside the Resurrection Preserve.

Kinsman is accustomed to roughing it, to slipping through the wilderness, leaving no trail. Opening the crates, the Evos find sophisticated and expensive state-of-the-art weapons, along with plenty of ammunition. The reader will suspect that this equipment is far better than anything this small fringe group should have; much of it is not even on the market (black market or otherwise).

Kinsman distributes the stash of weapons to his teammates. “We can be a thorn in Alex Pierce’s side … and then a stake through his heart.”

O O O

Zach Browder runs the perimeter fence line of the Preserve, upset with Cassie’s growing coldness and subconsciously resenting Alex. As he has done many times before, Zach easily finds ways to justify his actions.

His job is to keep watch, to make immediate repairs, to check the security zones. He flies in a small “chopter,” a lightweight 2-person helicopter, on his patrol. Setting down near one of the fence substations, he goes out to tinker with the generators, and it soon becomes apparent that he is subtly sabotaging it; he sets a specific delay to bring down a certain section of the sonic fence for a limited time. He changes the frequency on his radio and transmits a brief OK signal. “Mr. Galaev, your people will have an hour before the fence goes back up. Don’t be late.” “Acknowledged.”