Dark Watch

ANTON Savich was relieved he had only one more flight to take to finally reach his destination. It had taken days to arrive at Elyzovo Airport outside Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, the regional capital of the Kamchatka Peninsula on Russia’s far east coast.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, or PK, as it was commonly referred to, had been closed to the outside world until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and the ensuing years had brought little improvement. Nearly every building was made of concrete using ash from the 1945 eruption of the nearby Avachinsky volcano, so the city of a quarter million had a drab uniformity that went beyond its boxy Soviet architecture. Its streets hadn’t been paved in decades, and its economy was in ruins because the military, which had once supported the city, had mostly withdrawn. Surrounded by towering snowcapped peaks at the head of beautiful Avacha Bay, PK was a dismal stain of a place where residents stayed only because they lacked the inertia to move.

The entire Kamchatka Peninsula had once been controlled by the Soviet military. Sophisticated radar stations dotted the rugged landscape to watch for incoming American ICBMs. There were several air force bases for intercepting American bombers, and it was the home of the Pacific Submarine Fleet. Kamchatka was also the designated landing site for Soviet ballistic missiles test-fired from the west. Today the subs of the Pacific Fleet rusted away at the Rybachi Naval Base in the southern reach of Avacha Bay; several were so badly deteriorated that they’d sunk at their moorings, their tubes still loaded with torpedoes and their nuclear reactors still fueled. The radar stations had been abandoned, and planes remained grounded at the air bases for lack of parts and aviation gas. In the wake of the military withdrawal, countless sites had been left so polluted that even brief exposure would cause severe illness.

It wasn’t the military presence that had first drawn Anton Savich to Kamchatka more than two decades ago. It was the geology. Kamchatka had risen from the sea two and a half million years ago, first as a volcanic archipelago like Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The sea quickly wore these mountains flat, but the land rose again, driven by endless reserves of molten rock from deep underground. Kamchatka was an arc within the Ring of Fire, a circle of volcanoes and earthquake zones that mark the boundaries of the vast Pacific tectonic plate. Twenty-nine of the more than 150 volcanic peaks on the peninsula were active, most notably Karymsky, which had been erupting continuously since 1996, and now an unnamed volcano in the center of the peninsula had started belching plumes of ash and steam.

Driven by economic necessity in the 1980s, the Soviet Union initiated a program of exploration and exploitation. To face Reagan’s unprecedented military buildup, the Soviets scrambled to find the raw materials to feed the growing demand of their own military-industrial complex. These were the last salvos of the Cold War, fought not with bullets and bombs but with factories and resources. It was a fight the Soviet Union ultimately lost, but huge reserves of minerals such as coal, iron ore, and uranium were discovered in the process.

Anton Savich had been a young field researcher for the Bureau of Natural Resources, the agency tasked by the Central Committee to find all the wealth buried within the Soviet borders. He had come to prospect the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1986 with two other field men under the guidance of a geology professor from Moscow University, Akademik Yuri Strakhov.

The team spent four months scouring the peninsula from helicopters and all-terrain vehicles provided by the Red Army. Because of the active geology, it was felt there might be diamonds on Kamchatka, although they found no trace minerals to back Moscow’s belief. What they found instead was just as valuable.

Savich recalled the days they’d camped at the foot of the reef, chipping samples by day and imagining the possibilities at night. They speculated as though what they found belonged to them, but of course it didn’t. In likelihood they would receive commendations for their find, and maybe vouchers for larger apartments.

He wasn’t sure who suggested it first; perhaps it was Savich himself, though it didn’t really matter. Somehow the idea came up, mentioned as a joke at first for sure, but soon they discussed it in earnest. The rain had finally stopped that night, Savich remembered, which was unusual. They passed a bottle of vodka, which wasn’t unusual. You couldn’t get decent toilet paper in Moscow, but the state could keep you well-stocked in liquor five hundred kilometers from the nearest town.