The Siberian Incident Read online

  Contents

  THE SIBERIAN INCIDENT

  Copyright © 2019 by Mystic Lion Publishing

  Chapter One - The Story

  Chapter Two - Packing

  Chapter Three - The Trip

  Chapter Four - Vladivostok

  Chapter Five - The Mansion

  Chapter Six - The Man in the Snow

  Chapter Seven - The Crash

  Chapter Eight - The Hunt Day 1

  Chapter Nine - Night in the Cabins

  Chapter Ten - The Hunt Day 2

  Chapter Eleven - Into the forest

  Chapter Twelve - The Encounter

  Chapter Thirteen - Night Two

  Chapter Fourteen - Walk to the Snowmobiles

  Chapter Fifteen - Anatoly's Fate

  Chapter Sixteen - Night Three

  Chapter Seventeen - The Hermit

  Chapter Eighteen - Hunting Again

  Chapter Nineteen - The Camp

  Chapter Twenty - Captured

  Chapter Twenty-One - Rescue

  Chapter Twenty-Two - The Return

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Aftermath

  THE SIBERIAN INCIDENT

  © 2019 Andrew Gille

  To: My Uncle Mark

  A great man, a great hunter, a great mentor, a great uncle and friend.

  Copyright © 2019 by Mystic Lion Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Mystic Lion Publishing

  PO Box 32

  Wausau, WI 54402

  Cover Photo by Andrew Gille

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Gille, Andrew

  The Siberian Incident / Andrew Gille.

  1. —Sci/Fi —Horror.

  Edition 1

  Rev 6-19-19

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Story

  IN A HOUSE along the North Branch Kalamazoo River, east of Morrow Lake, Mason Brubeck sat in his study. He had built the house ten years before he’d retired from a job as a manager at Fleischer Group in Chicago. The study was a place of refuge for him when he was working, and it continued to be a place of peace. He’d come here to reflect and read. Several mounted deer heads hung on the walls from his favorite past time, hunting in lower Michigan and Wisconsin. There was also a mounted boar head, a turkey, a mountain goat, and a heavy bearskin rug sat in front of the fireplace of the study. Aside from his hunting trophies, this room was also the place where he kept his collection of good single malt whiskeys.

  His grandson Scott was now 21 years old and in his final years at nearby Western Michigan University. Mason was quite proud of the man Scott was turning out to be. In school for accounting, Scott had a serious girlfriend that looked like she was going to be more someday and he was already being recruited by several accounting firms around the country due to his high marks. Scott was conscientious, polite, intelligent and reserved.

  Mason pulled out a bottle of George Dickel Barrel Select, this was his kind of whiskey. Made in Tennessee, Dickel was something he enjoyed straight out of the bottle when he was younger. The Barrel Select was just more of everything he liked about Dickel. It had the right oak flavor and a taste of smoke. Mason didn’t really overthink these things. He was not the kind to put his pinky in the air and comment on the “bouquet” of his whiskey. He knew what he liked, and this was it. He got out two glasses and poured a quarter glass for both himself and his grandson.

  “It's great to see you again grandpa,” Scott said as he tucked himself into a leather chair, one of two that sat before the mighty oak desk that Mason had been gifted by his former employer. The desk was in the office vacated by his predecessor who had spent a lot of money on office amenities. It remained Mason’s desk for the entirety of the time he worked there, starting in Kalamazoo and then moving to Chicago for about twenty years before he returned to Kalamazoo for a few years before retirement. Around the time the house was built an interior decorator was hired to redo the Kalamazoo office and she told Mason that the desk had to go. She got a smaller, sleeker one for him that had much less storage. Mason just put up with it for the final years of his employment and moved the old desk, with his boss’ permission, to the study.

  “Always good to see you, Scott,” Mason said, handing the young man the tumbler of whiskey, “You take anything with that?”

  “No, grandpa, just neat, like you taught me,” Scott laughed.

  “Good man!” Mason replied.

  Mason took a sip of the strong brown liquid, it burned just perfectly as it sat in his mouth. Thick and viscous it was almost like a ball you could roll around with your tongue before swallowing it down to feel the warmth on your throat. It was truly pleasurable. He watched his grandson’s expression as he swallowed his sip. A slight grimace perhaps, it was okay, appreciation of a whiskey this good was something that took many years and at least Scott was trying.

  The end of summer was near, and he remembered that he had always looked forward to the crisp air of fall when he was younger as it meant he could get into his tree stand and bow hunt for the big bucks that roamed the area of Southwest Michigan on his parent’s farm near Otsego. They had sold the farm and the farmhouse years ago, but they’d kept a 100 acre woods adjacent to the farm. It was here that he’d continued to hunt and to pass down the tradition of hunting. His nephew, his daughter and now his grandson had learned from him, just like he had learned it from his grandfather.

  His father worked hard as an electrician and a farmer, and he rarely had time for extraneous activities like hunting. So Mason spent time in the woods with his grandfather, learning the signs of deer, looking for hoof prints, finding the best places for tree stands, stalking deer and tracking deer. He still remembered his grandfather’s old Savage Model 99 rifle. He’d used it to shoot the biggest doe ever shot in Otsego County. A 180-pound monster, she fed the family during an especially tough time during the depression.

  In recent years, the deer he’d pulled out of the woods in Otsego had gotten smaller and less plentiful. The land had gone from a few farms to many, many subdivided 40 and 80-acre plots and you saw a lot more orange than brown when you drove out to the woods. Still, he was proud that his grandson had taken to hunting and enjoyed it. He had shot a six-pointer with his bow a few years earlier which was the largest deer to come out of the woods in many years.

  “Are you ready for hunting season this year?” Mason asked his grandson.

  “Yeah, grandpa, I’ll don’t have classes on Tuesday or Friday afternoons so I thought I’d come up Monday night and on Friday and stay the whole weekend until we reach our limit,” Scott answered taking another small sip of the whiskey and grimacing involuntarily.

  “That’s great, that will be wonderful, I’m retired now so I can be up there with you. I told grandma I’d be doing that,” Mason’s wife Diane hadn’t always been so tolerant of the hobby that took him away from her for most weekends and evenings in fall, but she saw the joy that hunting with his grandson gave him, and it irked her less to be without him. She never enjoyed the woods or the cabin they’d built on the land across from the farm, and she generally spent most of the fall doing crafts and making dinners with her sister Connie in Battle Creek.

  Mason started to feel warm and euphoric from the fine whiskey, and he could tell that his grandson was getting the
same feeling.

  “That buck came from Otsego?” Scott said, pointing to a twelve pointer on the wall.

  “Yeah, they used to get that big out there,” Mason answered.

  Scott looked around, the night hadn’t been all that cool, and the window was open, but Mason had turned on the fireplace in the study. He’d always liked the ambiance, especially in winter as the snow came down outside. Scott looked at the flames rising in the fireplace. They were still a little blue from the gas log within but did a pretty good job of mimicking a real wood fire right now. Mason had built the home when he moved back from Chicago, and the insurance requirements for a real wood fireplace were a little astronomical, especially for a retiree.

  “And that’s the bearskin rug from hunting bears in Russia with Colin right?” Scott excitedly said getting up from the chair with his glass to kneel down and look at the massive brown bear rug.

  “Yes,” Mason said.

  “What happened to the full mount, the one standing on its legs, that thing terrified me and I was twelve years old when you got it!” Scott exclaimed.

  “It’s downstairs,” Mason said quietly.

  “Why do you keep it downstairs grandpa? I’d want that up here, front and center! That is the crown jewel of this collection as far as I’m concerned! That was an awesome story, it stood up like that when you shot it right? Colin told me that story when I was talking to him a while ago,” Scott said as Mason became uncomfortable. He didn’t like to lie to his grandson.

  “Right,” Mason said looking down into his glass.

  “Tell me that story grandpa, I’d love to go hunting there! We should ask Colin if…”

  Mason cut the boy off, “No, we’ll never go back to Russia, and you don’t ever go there with your cousin. I know he wouldn’t take you there because he knows I wouldn’t let him.”

  “What? Why grandpa? Was it that whole Russia investigation about him? I thought he got cleared of all of that,” Scott said referencing a scandal in the national news about six years earlier involving his nephew.

  “Well he was Scott, I’m just not sure he should have been,” Mason swished the whiskey around in his glass, the viscous fluid stuck to the sides of the glass and dripped back down in thick rivulets.

  Colin Crossfield was Mason’s nephew by way of his sister Elaine. When Colin was in college, he and his two roommates had invented some kind of compression software which Microsoft had purchased from them. The software was no longer in use, but Colin had taken the $34 million dollars he’d been paid for it, avoided the dot com bubble burst and become a VC just when the second generation of internet companies were coming into maturity. He owned a piece of every major player in Silicon Valley and the biggest stocks on Wall Street. He was definitely the most successful of his roommates, and there were rumors that he hadn’t even had anything to do with the software and that his roommates had merely allowed him to be included in the payout to avoid any future lawsuits.

  Colin was a weird kid, and Mason had wondered how he’d turn out, never in a million years did he think that he’d be an infamous tech billionaire. The trip to Russia had been one of the last things he’d done with Colin. Mason wasn’t sure if he was scared of Colin afterward or just so disturbed by the trip, that merely associating with Colin made him relive the events that he was never really able to reconcile. Mason was always polite and friendly to Colin at family events, and he’d even traveled up to his mansion in Minneapolis for family gatherings. He’d been to one reunion and a Christmas party that happened there, but he hadn’t gone on any more trips or spent time alone with Colin. He had never discussed what happened in Russia with Colin and truthfully, he was scared to. The Russian President had told them to never talk about it, that was probably a good enough reason.

  Now, however, with Scott staring him in the eyes and wondering why what should have been the ultimate hunting trophy was relegated to a mostly unused fourth bedroom in the basement, he felt that maybe just this once his silence could be lifted. Scott was an accountant, he saw all sorts of confidential information, salaries, profit margins, settlements and he never spoke a word. If he couldn’t trust Scott to keep his mouth shut then who could he trust? He never wanted this story to go to the grave with him, and when he thought realistically about his mortality, he knew that it was only going to be at most a few decades away.

  “There’s something I should tell you about that trip to Russia,” Mason started.

  “Really? Yes, Colin and I talked about it for a long time during the fourth of July, he had fireworks over the lake by his house and we….”

  Mason again interrupted the young man, “What Colin told you isn’t the truth. In fact, I’d probably believe very little of what Colin says, he’s not what he seems.”

  “Oh really? I mean grandma said that you guys haven’t really gotten along for a few years,” Scott said taking another sip of the whiskey.

  “Well, what I’m going to tell you is something you can never tell anyone else, it could be dangerous for you and me, not to mention Colin. Can you swear to me that you will never reveal anything that I’m going to tell you?” Mason laughed, “Not that anyone would believe you anyway.”

  “Of course Grandpa, I swear,” Scott said, Mason could see Scott’s heart beating in his neck. Mason’s tone and demeanor had changed so quickly and were now so severe that Scott seemed shocked.

  “Well, you’re a good an honest man Scott, and when you swear to me, that means something. This story should be told, but you have to wait until Colin is dead and it would probably be a good idea to wait until you die to let it out there. Of course, it might just make you look like a crackpot. Hell, you might even think I’m a crackpot after I tell you, but that’s fine. I need to get this off my chest, and you’re the only person I trust with it.”

  “Okay grandpa, what happened?”

  “Let me pour you another whiskey, and we’ll get to that,” Mason said, uncorking the short round bottle and pouring more of the strong Tennessee product into each glass.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Packing

  IT WAS SUNDAY and I had to catch a flight to Vancouver in the morning. I couldn’t figure out why Fleischer was so hot on me going to this conference, he usually wasn’t one for unnecessary trips, and this really seemed superfluous since we’d just got back from the National Retail Federation’s big show in New York. The Fleischer Group sold cash registers and point of sale systems, and I was the head of the support division that fixed all of the problems. Around that time, mobile payment systems were just starting to become popular, so I figured he wanted me to stay on top of emerging technologies and things were moving so fast that we’d be behind if we waited until the next NRF conference. I had very little information about the Vancouver show, I had a brochure and it looked like the conference was put on by someone called the American Retail Alliance. That should have tipped me off, but Fleischer's insistence and the fact that he was putting up the money to send me to this thing made it legitimate in my book. Fleischer was not a man who shot from the hip, and if he said this conference was necessary, you could be sure he’d done his research.

  I put the last of four pairs of dress socks into my bag, I was planning on a three-day trip and liked to have extra everything just in case. I would wear the suit I was taking and just change my undershirt, dress shirt, socks and underwear each day. At these conferences, I never saw the same people twice anyway and to haul two or three suits halfway across the country seemed unnecessary. Fleisher did this when he attended conferences of course, but he never said anything about me wearing the same suit, and I never said anything about it.

  I zipped the bag shut, and your Grandma Diane came into the room, she seemed unusually happy that I was going to a business conference. Usually, she lamented these long business trips and sort of gave me a hard time about it. This should have been another clue that something was off. I was thinking about one hundred things at the time, I was contemplating the move back to Kalamazo
o or taking a job in our Madison, Wisconsin office and I really just didn’t put it together that this was out of the ordinary.

  Oblivious to all of this, I was making sure that I had the things I needed for a business conference, I always made lists and checked them off right before I left. I usually get up pretty early, always around 6, but the next day I’d have to get up at 4:30 to catch my flight out of O’Hare. I had the boarding pass in my briefcase along with my laptop and everything else I was going to carry on the plane. So I checked everything off that I could that night. Then the stuff you can’t pack until right before you leave, you know phone charger and things like that, I would get in the morning. I went to bed that night thinking about what I was going to do at the conference. I hadn’t received any information on it, and the scant website gave only basic details about the conference and its schedule. This again should have been a red flag, but your grandpa just wasn’t on the ball at that night.