On the Scene: 13 Hours East of Moscow

Siberia

SIBERIA is not an obvious place togoata moment’s notice—but early this spring a friend asked me to help him look at a gold mine m one of the autonomous regions bordering on Mongolia. It was a 13-hour flight east of Moscow, and the Soviet Union’s answer to the Lear Jet—a Yak-40—was supposedly already standing by for takeoff. So, one day we were lunching in a French restaurant in South Kensington, and the next, our van was wading through snowdrifts on an airfield an hour’s drive past the remotest outskirts of Moscow. We passed vast, seemingly abandoned, military transport planes, helicopter gunships with their rotor blades tied with ropes to their wheels, and several large civilian Tupolevs, some still with the old Soviet flag on their tail. The van could not make it all the way to the snowbound jet, and so the whole team—my friend, two other investors, two Belgian geologists, a translator, and an Australian bodyguard—waded through the last hundred yards of snow carrying our own luggage.

Siberia

SIBERIA is not an obvious place togoata moment’s notice—but early this spring a friend asked me to help him look at a gold mine m one of the autonomous regions bordering on Mongolia. It was a 13-hour flight east of Moscow, and the Soviet Union’s answer to the Lear Jet—a Yak-40—was supposedly already standing by for takeoff. So, one day we were lunching in a French restaurant in South Kensington, and the next, our van was wading through snowdrifts on an airfield an hour’s drive past the remotest outskirts of Moscow. We passed vast, seemingly abandoned, military transport planes, helicopter gunships with their rotor blades tied with ropes to their wheels, and several large civilian Tupolevs, some still with the old Soviet flag on their tail. The van could not make it all the way to the snowbound jet, and so the whole team—my friend, two other investors, two Belgian geologists, a translator, and an Australian bodyguard—waded through the last hundred yards of snow carrying our own luggage.