Read Online Black Flagged Redux by Steven Konkoly - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Konkoly
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interest loans to clean up Monchegorsk.
By that time, the Monchegorsk plant had launched nearly one million tons of heavy metals into the air each year, including nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium, platinum and palladium. The ground concentrations of platinum and palladium in the soil near the plant were so severe that mining of surface soil for these metals had become economically feasible in the past five years. Add decades of concentrated acid rain to the mix, and the health effects on the Monchegorsk population were devastating.
Anatoly grew up in a poverty level neighborhood wracked with stunted growth, pediatric and early adult cancers, severe mental disabilities among adults and children, neurological disorders resembling early onset of Alzheimer’s, and frequent unexplained seizures. The local hospital was owned and administered by Norval Nickel, which only served to compartmentalize and minimize the problem.
Reznikov had been lucky to join his aunt and uncle well past his early developmental years. He had been spared eight years of toxic exposure, and the results were dramatic. In the ten years he spent with his new family, he watched everyone in the filthy, cramped apartment suffer from Norval Nickel's irresponsibility. His aunt died of pancreatic cancer five years after he arrived, and he experienced the daily sadness and brutality of his uncle slowly losing all semblance of mental function. Less than one year after his aunt's death, his uncle had been banished to a local mental hospital.
His three cousins, two boys and one girl, all younger than him by a few years, never grew at the same rate as Anatoly and barely progressed in school past a fifth grade level. They had all been remanded to state care when his uncle had been institutionalized. When Anatoly graduated from secondary school and left for Moscow University, his cousins resembled drones: void of personality, intelligence and drive. Ten years earlier, they had been drastically different, similar to him in so many ways. He had painfully watched them suffer under Norval Nickel's reign of terror in Monchegorsk, transformed into empty shells, unfit for employment outside of Norval Nickel's mines.
That was the cruel irony of life in Monchegorsk. They had been placed into the custody of mother Russia to live in a state sponsored orphanage, but the orphanage was funded by Norval Nickel, and the children were funneled back into the very jobs that put them there in the first place. Anatoly's case had been different. He showed strong academic promise in science and math, so he was awarded a place at Moscow University to study biological engineering and chemistry, compliments of Norval Nickel, with the understanding that he would return to the corporation to work as an engineer. Reznikov never fulfilled his obligation, though he was seconds away from observing a promise he had silently made to his cousins and his own parents.
By honoring his father's legacy, Anatoly Reznikov had discovered the perfect way to exact revenge upon a corporation that had slowly destroyed his adopted family and a government that had brutally murdered his parents. He would also make a fortune. If everything went according to plan, his payment from Al Qaeda would look insignificant compared to the series of increasingly larger payments he could demand for his services or his product.
He walked briskly across the long, grated catwalk toward a sizable brick building on the other side of a vast sea of light green, flattened metal domes. The domes capped immense underground tanks, which housed the disinfectant side of the Monchegorsk plant's treatment process. The other side, located uphill, utilized a rapid sand filtration system, combined with a state of the art membrane filter. The combination of the two ensured the removal of any suspended particulate matter, including heavy metals, before the water was finally transferred to the field of tanks he now crossed, for the final step
By that time, the Monchegorsk plant had launched nearly one million tons of heavy metals into the air each year, including nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium, platinum and palladium. The ground concentrations of platinum and palladium in the soil near the plant were so severe that mining of surface soil for these metals had become economically feasible in the past five years. Add decades of concentrated acid rain to the mix, and the health effects on the Monchegorsk population were devastating.
Anatoly grew up in a poverty level neighborhood wracked with stunted growth, pediatric and early adult cancers, severe mental disabilities among adults and children, neurological disorders resembling early onset of Alzheimer’s, and frequent unexplained seizures. The local hospital was owned and administered by Norval Nickel, which only served to compartmentalize and minimize the problem.
Reznikov had been lucky to join his aunt and uncle well past his early developmental years. He had been spared eight years of toxic exposure, and the results were dramatic. In the ten years he spent with his new family, he watched everyone in the filthy, cramped apartment suffer from Norval Nickel's irresponsibility. His aunt died of pancreatic cancer five years after he arrived, and he experienced the daily sadness and brutality of his uncle slowly losing all semblance of mental function. Less than one year after his aunt's death, his uncle had been banished to a local mental hospital.
His three cousins, two boys and one girl, all younger than him by a few years, never grew at the same rate as Anatoly and barely progressed in school past a fifth grade level. They had all been remanded to state care when his uncle had been institutionalized. When Anatoly graduated from secondary school and left for Moscow University, his cousins resembled drones: void of personality, intelligence and drive. Ten years earlier, they had been drastically different, similar to him in so many ways. He had painfully watched them suffer under Norval Nickel's reign of terror in Monchegorsk, transformed into empty shells, unfit for employment outside of Norval Nickel's mines.
That was the cruel irony of life in Monchegorsk. They had been placed into the custody of mother Russia to live in a state sponsored orphanage, but the orphanage was funded by Norval Nickel, and the children were funneled back into the very jobs that put them there in the first place. Anatoly's case had been different. He showed strong academic promise in science and math, so he was awarded a place at Moscow University to study biological engineering and chemistry, compliments of Norval Nickel, with the understanding that he would return to the corporation to work as an engineer. Reznikov never fulfilled his obligation, though he was seconds away from observing a promise he had silently made to his cousins and his own parents.
By honoring his father's legacy, Anatoly Reznikov had discovered the perfect way to exact revenge upon a corporation that had slowly destroyed his adopted family and a government that had brutally murdered his parents. He would also make a fortune. If everything went according to plan, his payment from Al Qaeda would look insignificant compared to the series of increasingly larger payments he could demand for his services or his product.
He walked briskly across the long, grated catwalk toward a sizable brick building on the other side of a vast sea of light green, flattened metal domes. The domes capped immense underground tanks, which housed the disinfectant side of the Monchegorsk plant's treatment process. The other side, located uphill, utilized a rapid sand filtration system, combined with a state of the art membrane filter. The combination of the two ensured the removal of any suspended particulate matter, including heavy metals, before the water was finally transferred to the field of tanks he now crossed, for the final step
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