He leaned into the aisle again and directed his voice toward the cockpit door.

“Hello?” he said.

Even when he raised his voice to a shout, nothing happened. Rangle got up and started through the galley. When he got halfway through, he realized one of the pilots was sitting in the front chair. A mountain of a man in a white shirt and dark slacks.

“I know this sounds crazy,” he said, putting on a foolish grin and reaching out to touch the pilot’s shoulder, “but aren’t we going the wrong way?”

When the man shifted his bulk around, Rangle clutched his briefcase and stepped back.

“What are you… you’re the Indian,” he said, his voice pitched.

Bert grinned up at him and pointed to the back of the plane with his thumb. “You better go sit down. We’re going right.”

“This is my charter,” Rangle said in a screech. “I’m going to the Caymans.”

“You’re going someplace a little chillier than that, old weasel,” Bert said, shifting around in his seat. “Now go sit down or I’ll make you sit down.”

“I can pay you,” Rangle said, raising his eyebrows and nodding his head, fumbling to open the briefcase. He loosened the neck of the velvet bag and took out a stone about the size of a half-karat. He held it up in the light so that the rays of its glitter dodged back and forth across Bert’s fat cheeks.

“That’s ten thousand dollars right there.”

Bert reached out and took the stone, then dropped it into his mouth and swallowed. Grinning he said, “You know what your stones mean to me? Shit. It’ll be a frozen shitsicle where we’re headed… I hope you packed warm.”

MY G-V ISN’T BACK for more than two days before I use it to head north across Canada, the Hudson Bay, the polar cap, and finally to Uelen on the Chukchi Peninsula in the farthest corner of northeast Russia. A couple hundred miles across the Bering Strait is Point Hope, Alaska, population 794. But for Bob Rangle, those 794 Americans may as well be on another planet.

I’m excited, but partway through the trip I take a pill, pull the shades on the unending sun, and sleep. When I wake up we’re in a place where the only person who speaks English is a hunting outfitter, Alexi Fedorovich. He meets us on the abandoned military runway twenty miles outside of town in an old Soviet helicopter. The runway itself is lined with the empty skeletons of the once-proud Soviet air force. Some are twin-prop babies from the Second World War and some are the sleek MiGs they pestered us with during the cold war.

Alexi is a thick-chested Russian with a full red beard and sharp green eyes. With his ship and his weapons he is a law unto himself in this region. The men who work for him are Chukchi natives, distant relatives to the Eskimos. They are here to take us to his northern base camp, the one they use to hunt polar bears, a hundred and fifty miles to the north. I shake his hand, then zip up my fur-lined parka. The sun is about to dip just below the horizon, so it’s colder than it will be in a couple hours, when the sun will reappear for the remainder of the long summer day. I tell my pilots to stay with the jet, and Alexi hands them a loaded Kalashnikov that he takes from one of his men.

“For wolf,” he says.

My pilots are both former navy fliers, so they do nothing more than shrug and accept the gun. I know wolves are a problem here, but also that the people in this forgotten corner of the former Soviet Union have become as desperate as the wolves themselves. We board the patchwork helicopter and strap in. Alexi flies the machine himself and soon we’re tilting away from the airfield to the deafening sound of the chopper blades. Alexi’s three men are grim-faced. They don’t smile and they don’t talk.

Even though the sun is down, its glow lets me clearly see the landscape below. The evergreens grow shorter and shorter until they give way to the low rocky brush and finally to the snow itself. After a time, a finger of jagged black rock appears up ahead, an island in the frozen plain. Just beyond it is the dark gray roiling Chukchi Sea. In the center of the windblown rock formation is a low cabin with smoke pouring up out of a galvanized pipe stack. We land in front of the rocks on a sheet of ice. The men hop out and make right away for the cabin. Alexi and I follow, in less of a hurry because we are outfitted in better gear.

The big Russian slaps his arm around me and hugs me to him as we walk.

“You make many people live good with this diamonds,” he says.

“Does he have any left?”

Alexi shakes his head no. He pats his coat and I hear the distinct crunching sound of a bag of small stones.

“When?”

He looks at the plastic watch on his wrist and says, “In morning. Five hours he no fire.”

“Alexi?” I say, grabbing his arm and looking up into his face.

“He no dead,” Alexi says, showing me a mouthful of yellow and gold teeth. “I tell my man, he no moving, you giving wood. When he coming here, one hour he no spending diamonds. Then, very very spending. He spending every diamond. Every food and every firewood we having. Big fire that day. Very stupid man.”

“Greedy,” I say to myself.

“Yes, very greedy like you say.”

“That’s what got him here.”

We reach the path that leads through the spiny rocks and the packed snow squeaks under our feet. The door to the cabin opens and I see Bert’s big round face in a halo of fur. His expression is as empty as those worn by Alexi’s men, and the only welcome he gives me is a grunt as he raises his heavy mitten. Alexi puts his hand on the door and offers me coffee.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Thank you. I want to see him.”

Bert grunts again and starts down another path that goes around the back side of the cabin. I follow him. There is a snowdrift piled up in the lee of the towering rock protecting the cabin, but a narrow path has been cut through it. When we round the rock, the wind hits us in the face and we have to lean into it until we come to a switchback path that takes us down into a small bowl in the snow whose lip is a semicircle of squat black rocks. White powder snakes along the ground like fast-moving smoke. In the center of it all is the blackened pit of a burnt-out fire.

Bob Rangle is burrowed down into the ashes as far as he can go. Beside him is the open Louis Vuitton suitcase. Every article of clothing that was inside is either on or somehow wrapped around his body. He looks like a homeless man you might see under a frozen bridge.

Bert stops at the lip of the bowl and looks out over the frozen wasteland. The pale disk of the sun is resting on the horizon like a child’s flashlight being shone through a bedsheet.

“I know now what kind of animal I was in my last life,” Bert says, his eyes narrowed at the sun.

“A turkey?”

“A bird, anyway,” he says without cracking a smile. “Maybe a hawk. Something that flies high and brings death like a lightning bolt. I have no stomach for this.”

“I know,” I say, patting his back.

But Bert only turns and heads back up the path, saying, “I’ll leave you to your game.”

I grab the sleeve of Bert’s parka and pull him around.

“Let me tell you something,” I say, looking up at him with clenched teeth. “That piece of shit down there put me in a place where men live like animals.”

“And this is what it taught you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Three rules, and the third was the most important. Without it, you were done. Exact revenge. Someone does you wrong, you exact revenge. You make it ten times worse for them. A hundred times. That’s what he taught me, Bert. He and his friends. And now that’s what he’s getting.”

I let him go and I tramp down the path into the bowl. Rangle can barely move, but when he hears his name, he rolls on his side, rattling the chain that is attached to a post Alexi has driven six feet down into the ice. Rangle looks up at me with empty eyes through a slit in the hat he has made out of six pairs of underwear and three pairs of tennis shorts. His mustache and eyebrows and lashes are white with crystals, and when I yank the clothes off his head I see that the end of his sharp nose, like most of his ears, is black and frosted with ice.