by Dale Brown
“One thousand. But we give you lunch, too. Biggest restaurant in Balti.”
Danny worked the price down to seven hundred dollars, with lunch and breakfast in the morning, assuming he was still in town. Joe also promised to give him a ride to the airport, no charge.
Whatever family member was cooking did a much better job at the stove than Joe did behind the wheel. Under other circumstances, Danny might even have stayed for dessert. But he had a lot to do before dark.
Besides the possible DNA match, there was circumstantial evidence of a link between the area where Stoner had crashed and Russian experiments with various physical “enhancements.”
The Soviet Union had run a sports clinic in a small town two miles away during the 1970s and early 1980s. The clinic had specialized in a number of techniques for athletic enhancement, including training in special aerobic chambers and rigorously supervised diets.
It hadn’t been secret—there were several stories about it in the Western media. It closed quietly sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, never officially linked to the controversies then swirling about steroids and various stimulant use, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to make a connection. Anyone looking back would conclude that while those techniques were never mentioned in the press coverage, they were surely being practiced there as well.
It was rumored to be the site of other experiments as well. MY-PID located an article in Le Monde published in 1987 about the site that stated there were a number of rumors that the plant was aiming at producing “super athletes” and was investigating “genetic techniques.” They weren’t detailed in the story, but the hints were tantalizing enough for Danny, who asked MY-PID if it could track down the writer.
He’d recently retired from the French newspaper. When Danny, driving in the car, called the number MY-PID had discovered, the man answered on the second ring. Danny told him he was working on a book about old Olympic stars and had come across the article.
A white lie compounded by exaggeration, but harmless all around.
Flattered to be contacted, the former reporter told Danny what he could remember of the trip to the facility, describing what looked to him like a horse farm that had been “gussied up” with a pair of massive gyms in the old barns. He’d seen perhaps fifty athletes altogether, and interviewed a dozen. All spoke in glowing terms of the various methods that were used.
“A lot of emphasis on mental techniques,” said the man, whose English was heavily accented but fluent. “Positive thinking, we called it at the time. Of course, now we know they were probably just using many steroids. It was part of the culture of deception. So many athletes ended up doing this. My report was in the very beginning of the time.”
“Do you remember when it closed?”
“I wouldn’t know. We were invited—it was while the Eastern Europeans were winning all those medals, you understand. People thought the success was something to do with the mind. A fantasy.”
“So they did it with drugs?”
“Steroids, certainly. Now I realize what I should have looked for. They claimed they took a vitamin regime. Of course. And positive thinking. Well, you believe what you want to believe, as you Americans would say.”
MY-PID couldn’t locate any records showing whether the facility was operating when the helicopter went down in 1998, though the Frenchman’s account made it seem likely that it had. As of now, satellite reconnaissance appeared to show that it had been abandoned.
Danny decided to check for himself.
He followed the computer’s directions, taking a slight detour from the highway that led to the crash site. Dotted with small farms and houses built two or three centuries before, the countryside seemed almost idyllic, more a backdrop for a movie than an actual place.
A small village sat two miles from the complex. Dominated by a small church that hugged the road, it was home to less than two hundred people. Aside from the church, its central business section held only a pair of buildings; between them they had five shops: a bakery, tobacco shop, small grocery, clothing store, and a store that sold odds and ends.
A few local residents stood outside the tobacconist, watching Danny as he passed. He smiled and waved, and was surprised to see them wave back.
A mile and a half out of town, he turned to the right to head toward the facility. An abandoned house stood above the intersection, its siding long gone and its boards a weathered gray. A horse stood in a rolling pasture on the left, quietly eating unmowed grass as Danny passed.
The double fence that surrounded the place during its heyday was mostly intact, though weeds twined themselves through the links. The gates were pushed back, still held in place by large chains, now rusted beyond use.
Danny drove up the hill into the complex, feeling as if he was being watched.
He was: a large hawk sat serenely on the cornice of the main building at the head of the driveway, its head nestled close to its chest. Its unblinking eyes followed him as he got out of the car and walked across the small parking lot to the building. The Le Monde story fresh in his mind, he walked to the large gym building on the right. This was a steel structure, more warehouse than traditional gym. It had large barnlike doors on the two sides facing the rest of the complex. Both were locked, as was a smaller steel door at the side.
Danny walked back along the building, looking for the other gym, which according to the story, sat catty-corner behind the first.
It had been razed, replaced by an empty field. There were no traces of it.
A set of old dormitory buildings sat at the very rear of the site. Danny went to the closest one. The door gave way as he put his hand on the latch.
He stepped into a small vestibule. There were posters on the wall, faded but still hanging perfectly in place. The words were in Russian. He activated the video camera on the MY-PID control unit and had the machine translate them for him:
“Train well!
Your attitude is your ally!
Think, then perform!
Whatever you dream, you will live.”
The vestibule opened into a corridor on the left; an open staircase was on the right. Danny walked down the corridor slowly. Small rooms lined the hallway. Some had doors, some not; all were open. There were no furnishings in any of the rooms, nothing in them but dust, a few old shades, and in one, rolled rug liners. The place had a musty smell, the scent of abandonment.
Upstairs it was the same. He went into one of the rooms and looked out the windows. He couldn’t quite imagine what it would have been like—a hundred jocks and their trainers, always running, working out, practicing their various sports.
Getting injections and God knew what else.
How did that relate to Stoner?
The athletes were just a cover for an experiment to create supermen?
And Stoner… became one of their experiments?
It didn’t sound plausible. What Danny saw instead was more benign—people trying to help him back into shape after being broken. The downside of steroids and other drugs wasn’t understood at the time.
Or maybe he was being too naive. Maybe the doctors knew exactly what they were doing.
But steroids weren’t evil. He’d known guys who took them back in the nineties. Amateur bodybuilders trying to get ahead. An almost pro wrestler hoping to get the “look” so he could land a job with WCW, back in the day. Not evil guys.
Did they help? He couldn’t even say. But it didn’t seem to hurt. He didn’t buy the “ ’roid rage” hysteria.
Maybe he just didn’t have the right information. And maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what they were doing here, as Breanna had implied.
But could Stoner have survived the crash? Not from what he saw. No way.
Danny went back outside. Walking through the grounds, he could tell without even referring to the Le Monde story that several other buildings had been removed, bulldozed without a trace.
The remarkable thing, he thought, wa
s the lack of vandalism. Granted, the population in the surrounding area was small, but there must be kids somewhere, and he’d have thought at least the windows would have been tempting targets on a boring Saturday afternoon. He was tempted to put a rock through one himself, right now, just for the hell of it.
Going to his car, he caught a glint of light, a reflection of the sun sinking toward the nearby hills. Once again he had the sensation of being followed. But it was distant, and even MY-PID couldn’t detect anything. He stared for nearly ten minutes; unable to detect any movement, he got into the Renault and headed back for the main road.
Danny followed the road south to a slightly larger village about two miles away, driving through a bucolic countryside of rolling hills and farm fields. Small corners of the fields were cultivated, here and there. The idle land was a sign of the country’s current economic woes, where farmers couldn’t afford the money for seeds and new tractors, but from the distance, driving by, they only made the place more beautiful.
This area had been used by the rebels during Romania’s troubles. A good portion of the people here were ethnic Romanians, and in the wake of the Soviet collapse, there had been active attempts toward unifying the country with its neighbor. The Romanian rebels, however, were aligned with the Russians, who were at odds with the Moldovan government as well as the Romanians.
The politics were complicated, tangled in family relationships and issues that stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years. An American had no hope of untangling them, not even with MY-PID’s help, and Danny treaded lightly when he stopped at the police station and asked if he could speak to the police chief.
The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand—the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.
“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.
“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Danny. “A friend of mine died here fifteen years ago. I think he was buried here.”
“Your car stolen?”
“No, my car isn’t stolen.”
“A friend took your car?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Danny took out the MY-PID, telling the chief it was a translating computer. He struggled with the words at first, but the more he spoke, the easier the pronunciation became.
When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.
That confusion cleared, the chief invited Danny to dinner with him. Danny wanted to see the cemetery before nightfall, and with the sun on the horizon, tried to pass.
“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.
“But—”
“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”
“I—”
“Come, come. Not far.”
The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Danny agreed.
It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Danny explained why he had come—a friend of his had died in a helicopter crash some fifteen years before. He didn’t mention that he’d been working with the Romanian army, or even that he was an American, not knowing how those facts might be received.
“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”
“He was an American,” said Danny. “He was an advisor. Helping them.”
“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”
“Like brothers.”
“And brothers with America.”
“I hope so, yes.”
“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”
“Allies, brothers—whatever words.”
The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.
“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”
The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Danny couldn’t finish the entire shot in one gulp. This amused the chief, who refilled his glass.
“I was a young officer then,” he told Danny, leading him over to a pair of overstuffed chairs in the living room. His son came, too, standing by his father’s side and translating. “Fresh on the force. The state police. We were arranged differently—my supervisor was from another region. I came to the crash. It was a bog. Two miles from here.”
“I see.”
“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”
“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Danny.
“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon—it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think there were any survivors.”
“Would you know where they were taken?”
“The bodies? Buried.”
“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”
“One was. But the others stayed.”
“Why?” asked Danny.
The chief shook his head. Danny knew from the records MY-PID had found that three Romanian soldiers’ bodies had been repatriated within months of the end of the coup. But a combination of politics, ancestry—at least one of the soldiers’ families had come from this part of Moldova during the 1960s—and the difficulty of working with distant relatives had prevented all from being repatriated. The records were vague, but there were at least two soldiers still buried in Moldova.
“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Danny. “Could you give me directions?”
“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that dinner was ready. “Here, we will have another vodka before eating.”
It was dark by the time they were finished dinner. The police chief offered to let Danny stay at his house, but it was clear he would be displacing someone, probably the son. Danny begged off, and the chief recommended a small guest house run by a widow on the other side of town. As the town consisted of only six blocks, it was easy to reach, and Danny was sleeping by eight.
He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.
The chief insisted on running his blue emergency lights as they drove out to the swamp where the helicopter had crashed. It took less than ten minutes, a bumpy ride up and down a medium-sized hill into a narrow valley parted almost exactly in the middle by a meandering creek.
According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years—the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.
“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.
Danny stared at the area. He’d seen a number of helicopter crashes during his stints with Air Force special operations and Dreamland. He saw them all now, flickering through his head like ghosts combining into a single image: a Marine Whiskey Cobra merging with a mangled Blackhawk, half morphed into a Comanche test bed whose rotor was the only surviving part. Beneath them all were the pancaked remains of a flattened Chinook, the wounded passengers still crying for help.
Danny looked at the nearby woods and trees.
The helo would have come in low, skimmed down when it was shot—the report said the chopper pilot was trying to attract the interceptors’ attention to help the others get away.
If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.
Would that make it survivable?
He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.
“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.
The police chief described the process—they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.
“Three?” asked Danny, making sure he understood. “Only three people?”
“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”
There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Danny didn’t correct the police chief. He said that tents had been set up near the road. They were brought in under the pretense of being an aid station to help the wounded, though it was far too late for that.
“Then what happened?” asked Danny.
“To the cemetery.”
Danny nodded. “Can we go there?”
“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”
The cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.
There were three dozen headstones, most pockmarked with centuries of wear. The bodies of the men found in the helicopter were together at the side, three marked by wooden crosses and one by a stone that lay flat against the ground.
“Once they were white,” said the chief, referring to the worn wood. “But given their age, they have done well.”
