If you crave money, you'll only work harder.
Besides, Ivan's men had already given the Mel brothers a beatdown. There was definitely bad blood between them, so they would never naturally side with each other.
Su Chen wasn't going to stay in Irkutsk forever, so he needed someone to keep an eye on the undiscovered gold mine. Ivan and the Mel brothers were the natural choices. Pitting the two teams against each other would create a system of mutual surveillance.
"I found a gold nugget!"
"I've got one over here, too, but it's tiny!"
The men spent over an hour toiling in the river. They barely panned a few grams of gold, so they all shifted their focus to finding nuggets. In the end, they actually found three of them. Two were found by members of the patrol team, while the third was discovered by Hiri in the mud along the riverbank.
