9 The FemanShenka was as cold as any place on earth, in more ways than one. The town supported the sizeable workforce of the livestock farm nearby and many workers from the encircling mineral mining industry. New faces came and went all the time and no man ever really got to know any other; an ideal situation for a female partisan infiltrate and obtain the information that the commune needed. A light grey dust fell unseen every minute of the day, caused by the vast surrounding mining operations. This gave the town, even in summer, the look of a well-used ashtray. It was made up of mostly prefabricated buildings, scattered amongst the ash, like extinguished cigarette butts, all clinically built on the twenty-five square miles of concrete base that had been laid many years before.
The drug
