The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

“It was,” King said sharply, hoping to deflect her somewhat. “I saw a man on a snowmobile, though. A Sami like them.”

“Oh, then you should say,” she said. She coughed and addressed the owner in Finnish. She spoke for a few seconds, then looked back at King and said, “Please, tell Mister Huss and these people what you saw…”

King stepped towards the desk and said amiably, “I saw a man dressed similarly to these people…” he motioned towards the Sami. “He was heading south fast on an old-style snowmobile. It was a noisy machine, more squared than the modern snowmobiles. He had a rifle on his back.”

“When was this?” Huss asked. His English was excellent, and King noted how self-assured he was.

King backed-up an hour to allow for any disparity. “About one-thirty. I tried to flag him for a lift. My vehicle was blown off the road.” He shrugged like it was no big deal and said, “He didn’t stop.”

“And he was on the road up here?” Huss asked, somewhat incredulously.

“No. Quite a way south-west of here. On the road. Like I said, he was heading south.”

King watched the man. He could tell Huss knew he was lying. That suited King, because the man would have to have a reason for this. He knew more than he had admitted, and certainly more than he had told the irate and impatient Sami.

Huss conversed with the Sami and the man nodded.

“Are you going to call the police?” King asked. “A man is clearly missing. But I suppose if he was heading south, he would be in town by now.”

Huss shook his head. “I fear it will endanger further life. We must wait until the storm has passed.” He looked at King. “There is much danger on the way.”

King nodded, looking the man in the eyes. His stare was cold and unwavering. “Then we must be ready for it.”

Huss smiled. “Always.”

Caroline caught King by his elbow and peeled him away. “Well, that was awkward,” she whispered. “He certainly didn’t believe you’d seen him on the road,” she said.

“I know,” said King. “So, let’s find out why.”

33

The Inari Falls Paatsjoki River Hydroelectric Plant

Russia

The plant made up a string of hydroelectric plants on the Paatsjoki River, owned by Norway and Russia in a shared usage agreement dating back to 1957. The first in the line, and situated at the falls of the Inari River, the plant produced electricity from the torrents of water and sent it back to St. Petersburg via the northern grid. Natalia Grekov though, knew this to be nothing more than a front. The plant did produce electricity, and it did supply much of St. Petersburg as a privately-owned enterprise with its registered offices based in the city. But she also knew that the secondary plant built twenty years ago, and operated by a separate tier of personnel, was a secret Russian government department producing something completely different.

Natalia pulled the hood of her jacket over her head and opened the door to the gantry. The windchill clawed at the exposed parts of her face, and her eyes watered. Barely twenty-feet across the gantry and she could feel the crustiness of the tears freezing to her eyelids. She blinked hard, softening her eyelids. She breathed hard through her nose, felt her nostrils stick together. As she walked swiftly onwards, keeping her right gloved hand on the rail to steady herself, she negotiated the three steps down to the next gantry. Thankfully, the designers had not put in gradients due to the build-up of ice and snow, and every fifty feet or so, two or three steps dropped to a lower level gantry, until by the time she reached the next building, she had dropped some fifty-feet in elevation. The route was more difficult on the way back, especially as she would be walking into the wind as well as climbing all the way. There was no underestimating how difficult even moderate exertion made breathing at these temperatures.

She reached the entrance to the turbine regenerator house and pulled down on the metal full-section handle. Because of the harshness of the environment and the fact that everybody wore gloves for seven months of the year, the ergonomics of the plant had been thought through with fire escape style pull down bars on the doors, wider doorways to accommodate bulky clothing and two people entering at once. Nobody wanted to form an orderly que at -30°C.

The regenerator turbine was not in use when the hydroelectric dynamos were actively spinning to generate electricity. Each time they stopped for routine safety checks or maintenance, the gas operated regenerator would fire-up and run, bringing the prop-shafts up to twenty-seven-thousand revolutions per minute, before the hydroelectric dynamos essentially geared in and took over the flow of the water. Once up to speed and running for ten minutes, the regenerator turbine shut down slowly over a twenty-minute period and finally disengaged gearing so that the only element driving the dynamos was the crashing waters of Lake Inari river falls forming the Paatsjoki River. From its elevation of almost seven-hundred feet above sea level, the river was a torrent of powerful white water all the way to the mouth of the Varangerfjord, which emptied its water into the icy saline of the Barents Sea, where the mix of waters formed mini icebergs that collected along the shoreline.

Natalia worked her way down the spiralled staircase of metal grating and descended the one-hundred feet or so to the rock-lined cavern. Now seventy-feet under the river bed, the rock walls were covered with a sheen of ice which did not defrost through the summer months. The rock had been blasted and bored, with water used to cool the blades of the boring machine that had frozen solid on the rock. A layer of permafrost which