Chapter 30: Taking Charge
A minute before 16:00, Maksim tromped up the steps, breathing heavily. He poked his blocky head in the trailer. “The men are here,” he said.
Rudy looked at Galina, who looked back at him expectantly. He took her cue and spoke directly to Maksim. “The crew chiefs?”
“Everyone,” Maksim gasped out before turning and leaving the doorway.
Rudy and Galya had heard the increasing noise of workers outside, parking big machines, gathering in the lot beside the trailer, but they had remained focused on their discussion of excavation, machinery (and missing pumps), power requirements, and budget. Rudy looked out the trailer window now and saw the large mass of muddy coveralls and hardhats. “Galina Filipovna, do you want—“
She waved off his question. “Hand me the binder. I have notes to make. Speak to your men.”
Rudy set the binder gently in her hands as he stepped past her out onto the trailers tiny porch. He held a clipboard with a roster. With a couple stragglers hurrying over from the machine shed, Rudy guessed the crowd matched pretty closely the roster’s tally of 152 workers on the excavation detail. He’d never spoken like this to an audience in Russia, in Russian. He‘d never addressed a crowd like this in New Jersey, either, just little speeches back in school to 20 or other kids, but those didn’t really count, because in school, in class, you never really said anything important or said it to people; you just tried to remember everything and get to the end so you could go back to your seat and no longer be the center of wavering but still oppressive attention.
It flashed into his mind that maybe this attention wasn’t such a great idea. People knew him on campus; the staff knew he was Galina Filipovna’s man, and they followed his directions to get things done. But he didn’t lead meetings or make presentations. He made pitches to one or two people or the occasional committee on the road for clients, but aside from the occasional party, as in Kyzyl, he did his work and slipped away without much notice, by design.
He looked back in the trailer. Galina Filipovna showed no sign of concern. She was already hunched over the binder, making notes in the margins and on her own notepad.
Rudy looked back out at the crowd. The sun was breaking through clouds every now and then; when it shone, it glared in his face. The shaded faces of the men—and the crew was all men, not a woman in sight—generally scowled back, not at him personally, but at the hour, the fatigue of a nearly full day, perhaps the uncertainty of the moment, and the general suspicion of a new man on site who, like his predecessor, wasn’t as dirty and sweaty as they themselves were.
“I’m your new foreman,” was all the introduction Rudy offered. He turned immediately to necessary tasks. He told the men that primary excavation more than three klicks from the Ring base would pause and that all labor would be turned toward redoing ventilation shafts and installing new fans and air quality monitors. “You matter. And your work matters.”
Rudy knew it would take more than one introduction to disinfect the crew and the site of Isaac Gennadyevich’s apathy. But he had to start somewhere, and as far as he could tell under the shifting afternoon light, the men’s scowls at least did not deepen.
Rudy called forward three crew chiefs from the roster. “The rest of you, secure your tools and machinery and go home for the weekend. Come rested and ready to work Monday.”
Rudy spoke briefly with the crew chiefs about operations. He asked Maksim to find a spare door or a panel of plywood or something he could use to keep bugs and varmints out of the trailer, and remarkably, within minutes, Maksim was back with a solid construction door, complete with hinges and handle, and a drill that he used to hang it. Maksim adjusted the catch so the door could close and lock, then pointed to the broken header. “You want a new board there?” the big workman asked after Rudy finished with the crew chiefs.
“No,” Rudy said, latching the door and shaking it. The lock held. “Thank you.” Rudy opened the door and looked at the other men departing. “Head home, Maksim.”
“Thanks, chief!” Maksim pointed to a ring of keys hanging from a nail in the wall near where the desk had blocked movement a couple hours earlier. “Spare keys for the compound are up there. See you Monday!” The big man trotted away.
Galya had remained on the couch through Rudy’s conversations with the crew chiefs and Maksim. Now she snapped the binder shut and stood. “Good work. Now take me back to the city.”
Rudy drove Galya back to the Institute, where she had left equations on her boards that needed balancing. She was pretty sure she’d figured them out in the van, but she told Rudy she wanted to test them on the big boards before going home for the day.
Rudy had resolved to work late as well, though he said nothing to Galya about it. He stopped by his apartment for a change of clothes and camping supplies. The sky was clear in Irkutsk. The wind was chasing the clouds away to the lake. Rudy rolled his motorcycle out of the garage and followed the wind back to Goryachiy Klyuch.
Rudy spent his first night as foreman of the Ring on site, studying by the trailer office. He planned to camp out on the couch in the trailer, but he sat outside past sunset in the cool evening air—cooler than in town, as they were up in the hills—studying the TSK. As the stars came out and the twilight deepened past readability, he closed the binder, sticking a yellow notepad between pages of Chapter 7: Computing Facilities. He had filled six yellow sheets filled with notes, questions, and terms to look up. Tomorrow he would tour the grounds by himself, noting where things were and where they ought to be and figuring how many men and hours it would take to straighten things out… and looking for a decent board he could use to fix the door header.
Before he closed the trailer door, he heard an engine groan and tires crunch on the road. From the trailer threshold, Rudy saw a big truck with a canvas-covered bed turn off the main road and approach the chain-link gate. Rudy had locked the gate after walking his bike in over the soft gravel. The bike was now out of sight behind the trailer. A man stepped out of the truck and came forward into the headlights—somehow there was no security lamp at the gate. That man undid the lock and swung the gate open. The man propped the gate back with a plank and pointed the truck toward the warehouse.
Rudy set his binder down on the trailer floor and grabbed the long wrecking bar he’d set by the door for the after-hours meeting he’d suspected would happen. He walked across the muddy gravel toward the truck, right into the headlights, making sure the driver could see both the wrecking bar in his right hand and his open, outstretched left hand. The brakes creaked. The truck stopped, but the engine kept running. Rudy stepped out of the glare to meet the man coming around the passenger side. Enough spare light spilled from the front of the truck to let Rudy recognize Isaac Gennadyevich, his thin, clumsy frame, and his pale, peeved face. The former foreman stopped beside the truck, two meters away from the man who fired him, the man with the iron bar.
Rudy stepped forward, wrecking bar gripped in his right hand, claw end up. He held out his left hand. “Thank you for returning your keys.”
Isaac Gennadyevich’s hand still clutched the keys he’d used at the gate. His eyes went from left hand to iron bar to truck window. Rudy’s eyes followed. The driver wasn’t moving; his eyes were wide and white in the glow from the dashboard. One hand was on top of the steering wheel; Rudy hoped the other was frozen on the gear shift and not reaching for something else.
In thievery as in his day job, Isaac Gennadyevich was a man of words, not action. “Who the fuck do your think you are?” he said, but in a tone that signaled more surrender than challenge.
“I’m the man who gets the keys,” Rudy said. He gently tapped his predecessor’s chest with the rounded heel of the claw. “You’re the man who goes home… in one piece or several, I do not care.”
Isaac dropped a small ring of keys in Rudy’s hand. He stood still while Rudy put the keys in his jacket pocket. Isaac’s eyes flitted around in the middle of his sour face, to the driver, the tool shed, and back to Rudy, as if he might find some way to salvage his objective. Rudy kept his eyes on Isaac and silently counted five heartbeats. Isaac started to say something, but Rudy counted through it and then Rudy smashed the wrecking bar into the truck’s nearer headlight. Glass shattered, and the light went out. Isaac jumped back. The driver recognized before Isaac did that leaving empty-handed was their only safe option. Rudy didn’t say another word, just watched Isaac scrambling after the truck, shouting but unable to get the driver to stop, only getting back into the cab outside the gate when the driver paused between reverse and first gear. The driver ground gears as Isaac Gennadyevich slammed the door, and the truck chased its single weak beam back to the highway.
Rudy locked the gate and put the keys in his jacket pocket. He wrote “Locks” on his list of things to order in town Monday and slept soundly on the couch all night.
* * *
Monday all digging and construction paused at Goryachiy Klyuch. Rudy directed half of the men to retrieve all machinery and tools from the tunnel and bring everything in for inventory and maintenance. He dispatched the other half to clean out the old logging warehouse and the junk-piled garages and make racks and spaces where they could organize and secure all the materials, tools, and heavy equipment that the men brought from around the compound and the depths of the tunnel. Rudy supervised cleanup and established the inventory protocols he wanted. When those operations appeared to be proceeding satisfactorily, Rudy pulled a couple crew chiefs from cleanup and inventory to explain to him how the current ventilation shafts were dug and what time and resources it would take to redo them and finish the dig properly. By the end of the day, at 18:00, Rudy had his plan for the week and the staff assigned to carry it out.
The crew chiefs responded favorably to the regime change, as did most of the workers. Five out of 152 did not return the next day, and Rudy replaced them within a week simply by telling his crew chiefs to spread the word that men who recruited reliable workers from among their brothers and friends would get bonuses and that everyone on site would have steady work for at least two years, if they could keep up the pace he set.
Rudy secured the men’s favor with clear instructions and real expectations. Maksim said as much one day in passing as he came back from his truck with his lunch pail: “Damned nice to know what we’re doing for a change.” Rudy also helped his own cause by being open about all he didn’t know about the project and throwing himself into the work to learn it. He spent two days at the site of the nearest ventilation shaft, moving dirt, changing augurs, bolting more pipe onto the shaft as they dug deeper, feeling the machinery, and asking the regular workers all sorts of questions. He installed and calibrated air quality monitors. After he was satisfied with the improved ventilation and green-lit real digging again, he helped two other men strip down and reassemble a boring machine that had sat idle for six months (“this isn’t boring at all,” Rudy said to himself, wishing the wordplay would translate from English to Russian). When they got the massive blades turning again, Rudy drove the machine into the tunnel entrance and roughed out a cavern for a lab and storage area that were in the blueprints but hadn’t been started. He then turned the machine over to the men who would drive it to the far end of the south tunnel to join the digging of the last stretch. When the men radioed back (Monday’s inventory had produced only eight working underground radios; Rudy called Vitaly and got him to scrounge up fourteen more in town, then placed an order for twenty more, with a goal of ensuring that any team anywhere on the compound or in the dig could communicate instantly with headquarters) that the machine continued to operate as expected, Rudy decreased his estimated dig completion time by 10%.
As much as Rudy enjoyed the physical work, he set aside an hour each day to organize the files and business processes at the dig site. Paychecks had been delayed because Isaac didn’t sign and submit time cards on time. Rudy would automate time cards and paychecks later; this first week, he gathered time cards from the past month, took them to campus personally, and generated over 300 checks for the past pay cycle and back pay due from cards Isaac hadn’t processed. On his first full Friday on site, Rudy handed out paychecks from the trailer, saying each man’s name and thanking him.
On Monday morning, Maksim strode by the trailer in new brown leather boots. “Hey chief!” he shouted, and when Rudy waved, Maksim paused mid-stride and proudly slapped the thick, solid sole of his right boot.
Rudy immersed himself in the work and the puzzle of understanding and completing the Ring. It helped that each work day started and ended with a brisk ride through the countryside, the hills, and the forest. Instead of a few minutes walking or riding through the heart of the city, Rudy got almost an hour each way to himself, commuting against the rush, processing his plans each morning and his progress each evening. The evening ride also gave him valuable time to decompress from the anger and frustration he felt with each new discovery of waste and likely theft by the previous foreman. There was no evidence to prove Isaac Gennadyevich had stolen or resold items purchased for the Ring; in the messy and incomplete records, Rudy merely found references to equipment and materials that were nowhere on site. Tracking down evidence wasn’t worth the effort: even if there were reliable investigators and prosecutors in the region, the Ring Group was better off not inviting investigations that could catch a glimpse into its finances.
He resisted the temptation to camp out at the trailer full-time—spending day and night at the office was not healthy, and the long daily rides were good for his soul—but at night, Goryachiy Klyuch was mostly silent, restful, dogs barking occasional sentry reports to each other across the road in the village, but hardly any traffic. Rudy could sleep on the couch in the trailer with the windows open as comfortably as back in his apartment in the city, and a couple rainy nights he did. One Friday he brought his camping gear and at the end of the day rode on east to Bolshoe Goloustnoye on the western shore of Lake Baikal, went hiking and camping for a couple days, then came right back to work Monday morning, refreshed and ready to plan and dig.
At the end of May, 14 days after he became foreman, Rudy cleaned the grit from under his fingernails, gave himself a good clean shave, and reported to Galina’s office. It was only the second time in two weeks he had been on campus. He affirmed Galina’s 30-month projection, but emphasized that that included two months of remediating the previous foreman’s laziness. Doing that work right would cut two months from the installation phase, maybe more, but Rudy didn’t want to promise beyond unforeseen supply chain hiccups.
Galina Filipovna listened to Rudy’s brief presentation and grilled him about details she’d highlighted in his lengthy e-mailed report. Finally she asked, “Can you stand to stay in one place for that long?”
“You’re not revoking vacation time, are you?”
Galina smiled. “Do you think you can take vacations and still finish in 30 months?”
“My 30 months assume all of the men get regular vacations. If they don’t rest, they won’t finish in 30 months.”
Galina nodded. “But it will be a change for you. You’ve been on the road a lot for the last several years.”
“Yes, I have.” But being on the road included the best road trip, to Galich, and the worst, to Astrakhan. He wasn’t over Astrakhan; he just wasn’t thinking about it. Maybe staying off the road for a while would keep him from thinking about it.
“But not now.” Rudy said. “I’m here for the duration.”