All this made it the ideal spot for the Soviets to build a supermax prison in the early 1970s, a prison meant for the most dangerous criminals—the political kind. God and a few bureaucrats alone knew how many souls had perished behind the bleak concrete walls. The prison was built to hold five hundred men, and until it was shuttered in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a steady stream had been trucked in on the isolated access road to replace those who had succumbed to the cold and deprivation and brutality.

There were no graves to mark men’s remains, only a pit of ashes from their cremated bodies—a very large pit—that now lay buried in the permafrost a short distance from the main gate.

For twenty years the facility remained abandoned and left to the vagaries of the weather, though Siberia’s notorious winters could do little to erode the cement-and-steel structure. When people returned to reopen the prison, they found that it was exactly as it had been when it closed, immutable, impenetrable, and, most of all, inescapable.

A lone truck painted in matte green military livery wound its way toward the penitentiary that sat in the shadow of a singular mountain that looked as if it had been cleaved in two, with a sheer vertical face to the north, the Arctic Ocean some thirty miles away. The road was heavily rutted because in the summer parts of it turned into a swampy morass, and if crews didn’t smooth it before the frosts came, it retained a corrugated texture. Blowing snow drifted across it in places where the plows hadn’t opened the pathway far enough.

The sun hung low on the horizon, cold and distant. In a few weeks’ time it would make its final plunge over the rim of the world and not reappear until the next spring. The temperature hovered just a tick above zero Fahrenheit.

The truck approached the slab-sided prison fortress, with its four guard towers rising like minarets. An outer ring of chain-link fence with razor wire circled the entire two-square-acre building. A sentry box sat just inside of the fence to the right of the access road. Between the box and the prison sat a humpbacked heavy-transport helicopter painted arctic white.

Only when the truck had come to a stop did a guard, bundled against the cold, waddle out of his little heated hut. He knew the truck was expected, but peering through the windshield he didn’t recognize the drivers. He kept his AK-74, the updated version of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s venerable AK-47, within easy reach on the strap dangling from his shoulder.

He motioned for the driver to step out of the cab.

With a resigned shrug, the driver opened his door, and his boots crunched into the compacted snow.

“Where’s Dmitri?” the guard asked.

“Who’s Dmitri?” the driver replied.