A Second Sun
- Jimmy Woodman
- May 5
- 15 min read
Maxwell searched Ulaanbataar for a guide to take him north. He had arrived from Budapest a week ago and spent that week scouring the windblown streets, wending between tower blocks that reminded him of home and through the camps of yurts in the outskirts. Every lead he had come with turned up a dead end. He felt twenty or thirty years out of date, buying endless rounds of Chinggis vodka for ex-interior ministry guys, old intelligence assets, oil and gas speculators, all for them to shake their grey-white heads and wave their wrinkled hands at him. “Too dangerous”, no matter how many dollars, yuan or bitcoin he waved under their noses. Blinking into the white sun, one old man croaked out in broken Russian and Mongolian that Maxwell needed no guide. Stand out on the steppe with a half-full jerry can of petrol and he would hear them coming before he saw anything. He laughed mirthlessly and emptied his glass of arkhi. All the help they offered was to confirm that Maxwell’s quarry was somewhere to the north in Russian Siberia, and that this somewhere was between three hundred and fifteen hundred miles from Ulaanbataar. Gambling on the former, he traded a shoebox of Tögrög and his DSLR camera for a faded white Toyota Hilux pickup, six jerry cans of diesel, a month's food, freeze-dried and tinned, water and a case of vodka. Bartering away the camera stung a little. It was a non-AI assisted model and had served him well shooting in Palestine for National Geographic. But, unable to charge the bloody thing on the road, he traded a bottle of vodka for a 1980s Soviet Lomo camera and five rolls of film.
The Hilux was thirty years old but ran like new, save for the suspension. After five hundred bone-rattling miles in a day and a half, across cracked blacktop turned stony dirt paths, he crossed the unmanned Russian border. As night was falling, the sun bleeding red across the endless, yawning steppe sky, Max wrapped himself up in his sheepskin coat, quite like the one John Motson used to wear, and fell asleep across the backseat. He dreamed of his goal, the new horde of the eastern steppe, and he saw a burning wheel, tens and tens and tens of thousands of vehicles glowing, light shimmering off their chrome and windscreens, tires kicking up city-sized clouds of dust, thundering the earth as the hoof-borne nomads before them had done.
That morning, almost as predicted, they found Maxwell. Four young men, split across two ATVs, pulled up alongside the Hilux just as the sun was rising. Stirred by the sound of engines, Maxwell saw them approaching and left the Hilux still wrapped in his coat, unused to the April chill. He clocked the pistols at their hips, and one had slung a scoped rifle across his back. They cycled through greetings in the region’s varied lingua francas before landing on Russian. The spokesman, himself a Siberian Russian with a pair of shining Oakleys across his broad, tanned face, asked him how much fuel he was carrying. Maxwell swallowed drily and responded he had five full cans of diesel and one half empty. “Good enough, follow us to camp. You’ll be very welcome. We’ll set you up. Do you like music? We have lots of musicians, you look like one.” He grinned, white and yellow teeth flashing, and waited for Maxwell to climb back into his pickup.
