“Just in case,” she said. “Good luck.”
There was about a half-mile's walk to the concrete entrance of the bunker and on either side of the broken tarmac road were stone huts and class rooms which must have been part of the original purpose of the compound. I walked slowly, scanning the ground and looking for any sign that wasn't my own. There were a few small animal tracks, some droppings, but nothing out of the ordinary for a place this old. The air was thick with a musty, earthy smell and as I got nearer to some of the crumbling buildings I noticed old papers and wrappings that had blown around, eventually becoming trapped between gutters and railings. Some were over thirty years old.
“Can you hear me okay?” came Riley's voice over the radio. It was quite clear and had very little interference in it.
“Yeah, I hear you,” I replied, carrying on towards the main complex that was sign posted with fading plastic notices bolted to the walls here and there.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just signs of animals, nothing serious. I think we're wasting our time.”
“Probably,” she replied. “You never know, you might find some loot.”
“Yeah, that would be swell.”
I examined the steel doors mounted on the outside of a sloping grey concrete building no bigger than any of the classrooms I'd seen. It's importance was glaringly obvious though - the doors were marked with top-level clearance-only signs and the card reader still glowed with power.
“The doors are still active,” I said, rather puzzled. “I thought they'd have long since run down by now.”
“Some of them are meant to last for fifty years or so,” said Riley. “Some run on solar.”
The lights coming from the card reader were all green and so I tried the door, pressing the main switch. There was a whirring somewhere behind it, then a grinding noise as the two doors parted in the middle. I instinctively took a step back, poised to defend myself for reasons that were beyond me. What was I expecting to come out?
“Was that you?” she asked.
“Yeah. The doors are working. I'm going inside.”
“Be careful.”
I found my head torch and fitted it in place, turning it to the brightest beam setting. I shone it down the long corridor that seemed to go downwards slightly until it reached a room at the end. I went in, but before going too far I found a large rock outside and jammed it between the two doors in case it decided to close on me.
The room at the end of the hallway was in fact an open lift, fully lit and decorated with simple pastel colours that hadn't faded nor lost any of their life. I stuck my head inside, noticing that there was only one button to press.
“There's a lift,” I said. “I'm taking it down. It looks to be in working order.”
“Okay, just keep me informed. It's all quiet out here.”
I stepped into the lift and pressed the button. The doors closed almost silently and there was a sudden drop downwards as the little box lurched into life. A speaker above my head attempted to play music but it came out as a squealing mess.
After a few moments the lift stopped. The doors opened and another hallway, wider than the entrance, opened up before me and overhead lights flickered into life. There was the smell of age and dust and at once I noticed the stench of decay. It was clawing its way to me as I stepped out of the lift and looked around.
“What do you see?” asked Riley.
“Death,” I replied. “And it looks like he's clocking up some serious overtime.”
Beyond the nice carpeted floors and behind a glass partition were piles of the dead, strangely preserved perhaps by the lack of air in the place, but dead none the less. They were all in a twisted state of despair and the glass was scratched by the many fingernails that had tried to claw their way through it to the lift.
I dropped my pack into the elevator doorway to stop it closing on me and walked slowly over to the wall of dead, taking in each and every terror-etched face, every frozen scream of horror and panic. The partition must have been some kind of defence, maybe to lock in a contagion or something, or perhaps to keep one out. Either way it'd doomed those trapped on the other side of it, say fifty or so souls, all dead either from being crushed or from suffocation. The air must have failed pretty quickly for some reason, perhaps starting the panic in the first place.
“What's happening, Miller?” she asked.
“Not a lot,” I replied. I looked around for anything else of interest but there was nothing. There was only a single control for the glass partition and it was behind an emergency glass screen. I was tempted to press it, to release the dead from their transparent prison, but I didn't. There could have been some deadly virus behind there and I would release it, no doubt killing myself and Riley in the process. Or maybe not. Perhaps this had been done on purpose. Murder. I'd never know now. “I'm coming back up.”
I took the lift back to the surface and hurried to breathe in some fresh air, closing both the lift door and the main steel doors behind me. I walked towards the gates, sucking air into my lungs to try and get the stench out of my nose but it wasn't for moving.
I thought at first that Riley had come down to meet me at the gate because there was a shape stood near the woodland a few hundred yards from there. When I got nearer I realised that it wasn't Riley at all. It was a man, tall and gaunt with a bald head and he was carrying a rifle in the crook of his right arm.
“Riley, wait for me to contact you. I’ve got to check something out,” I said.
“What are you on about?”
“Just trust me. Wait there.”
I began walking slowly towards the man who didn't so much as move an inch until I was within talking distance. I turned off the radio and put the earpiece in my pocket.
“It's been a long time, brother,” said the man in broad Russian.
“You gave me a heart attack, Piotr,” I said in the same tongue. “You could've been shot.”
“By her? Pah, I doubt it. She's good, I'll give you that, but blonde hair tends to stand out in the woods. Even here.”
I offered my hand and we shook, leaning forward to embrace. Piotr was one of my Father's closest friends and we'd met often. He was a tracker from the cold north of Russia and had often been tasked with a similar job to ours - hunting and recovering missing persons in England who'd fled from Russia, though in his case more often than not they were escaped criminals. My Dad had helped him in the past and they'd become good friends, exchanging advice and tips and the occasional bottle of vodka.
“How long has it been? Eight, maybe nine years?” I asked.
“Easily. NSU have had me scouring the taiga looking for an escaped prisoner these last three years. They call this winter here? Ha, try Siberia my friend.”
“It's not cold enough yet,” I replied, glad to see a familiar face. “We actually managed snow last year. It's a little weird actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“The weather is changing, Piotr. I can't put my finger on it but I’ve never seen such cold in this country before. You haven't heard of anything going on, have you?”
“You mean nuclear? No, my dear, we would all know about it by now. You would have as much hair as I by now.”
“I suppose,” I said. “Piotr, why are you here? I mean, I'm glad to see you, but I suspect your timing isn't coincidence.”
“You know why already. The same reason you're out here with your Yankee friend. You are looking for Alex and Saska.”
“Saska? You must mean the girl. We didn't know her name.”
“Now you do,” said Piotr. “Saska Ibromavich. She is here with the soldier, Alex DuPont.”
“Do you know why?” I asked.
“I was hoping you did. When I heard they'd fled here I assumed you'd be the one sent to find them. I went to your house but you'd already left.”
“Yeah, we've been out here for the last few days. Was that one of your drones that went by?”
“
Not mine. NSU intelligence maybe. They know you're here and probably wanted to see if you'd gone looking too. That's why they sent me, to maintain relations, so to speak.”
“Diplomatic as always,” I replied. “How much searching have you done?”
“Not much, I only arrived a few days ago. They dropped me near Newcastle so I’ve had to walk the rest of the way. Caught plenty of game. Did you know how much deer you have in the north? It is good to see, my friend.”
“No, I’ve not been up there for a while. They're breeding well, even here. You know what I did see last year?”
“No, tell me!”
“A bear - a big one, the biggest I’ve seen in a very long time. Probably a second or third generation zoo animal, but there it was, as large as life. I nearly walked right into it.”
“We'll have to go and find him,” said Piotr, visibly excited. “There might be more of them and I would very much like to know it's breed.”
“We will - once we find these two runaways,” I said. “For now come and meet Riley.”
“I do not like Americans,” he said. “But I guess we have no choice, eh?”
“She's a handful but pretty harmless,” I said.
“Aren't they all?”
6.
Riley came down from her look-out post and was stunned when she saw Piotr and I waiting for her.
“Who is he? How did I not see him?” she said.
“Riley, this is an old friend of my Dad's and one of mine too. Piotr, meet Claudia Riley, formerly of the US Rangers.”
“Are you NSU?” she said.
“Not as such,” replied Piotr in broken English. “But I work for them, much like Miller here works for the US.”
“Can we help you with something?” said Riley making no effort to hide her anger.
“Riley, he's an old friend. Not all Russians are your enemy. He's here for the same reason you are - to find Alex and Saska,” I said.
“Saska? Is that her name?”
“Yes,” said Piotr. “Saska Ibromavich. Her father would like her back in Russia safe and sound. It would appear that we both want a similar outcome to this adventure, don't you think?”
“Do you know what they're looking for?” she asked, calming down a little.
“I don't know and neither does the NSU but they are curious. I guess the bunker over there was empty?”
“Sort of,” I replied, seeing the faces of the dead in my mind once again. “Enough to tell me they're not in there.”
“What's your next move?” he asked. I got the map from my pocket and showed it to him, angering Riley further.
“Our plan had been to search these bunkers that we guessed the drone we saw had passed over. Our assumption was that the NSU already knew where they were, or at least had a good idea where to look. So that narrowed our search.”
“Why a bunker?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, “you haven't seen the letters.”
“Letters?”
“From Saska to Alex. She managed to smuggle them through US channels to Alex when he was stationed abroad. They mentioned a bunker - just not which one. There's so damn many of them we could be looking for a lifetime.”
“And when you find them?” asked Piotr.
“Alex will be arrested for going AWOL, Saska is all yours I guess. Are you okay with that, Riley?”
Riley shrugged. “I'm here for my nephew. The girl can hang for all I care.”
“He is your family?” asked Piotr.
“Yes. I came here on behalf of my sister. I just want to take him back safe. I don't know what it is they're looking for but I'm not interested - I'm just here to fly him out.”
“Well then,” he said with a grin. “We'd better work together, yes? Combine our resources.”
“This gets better every day,” muttered Riley.
As we walked through the woods back towards my house, Riley marched on ahead - within earshot but refusing to get too close to Piotr. She had her rifle cradled in her arms and her dark sunglasses on, scanning the way ahead as if on patrol. I left her to it, I couldn't expect her to give up an in-bred hatred of Piotr's people overnight. It'd take time, but if the mission was to be successful then she'd have to find a way - and pretty damn quickly.
Saska Ibromavich was the third daughter of General Marcus Ibromavich - the famed war hero of the first Syrian conflict and Piotr began filling me in on her importance to her father.
“The General had three beautiful daughters but only two survived to this day. The first and the eldest, Alia, and of course Saska.”
“The middle one?” I asked.
“Died at eleven years old, drowned in a pool at a friend's party. The General has never come to terms with it and as such treats the other two as if they were precious artefacts, strangling the life out of them with his protection. For this reason I was amazed to hear she'd managed to leave the country without him knowing but it would seem that she was able to bribe one of the home security guards and make her escape.”
“What happened to the guard?”
“I'm sure you don't really want to know. Anyway, the General has a lot of influential friends in NSU command and a country-wide alert was put out for her. By then, I suspect, she had already managed to leave the country.”
“So we know how she left, but we don't know why.”
“I have only a handful of clues to go off. First of all her computer revealed a third party, someone she was in contact with who we suspect told her about this 'thing' they are looking for here.”
“You mean the emails didn't say?”
“No, they were heavily scrambled and most of them had been deleted before she left. She also spoke in code and expected the person at the other end to understand her.”
“Piotr,” I began, “Are you telling me that Saska, a young woman, is capable of all this? To hide it from her Father? To scramble computer messages and speak in code? It all sounds like a ridiculous spy novel.”
Piotr laughed. “Miller, you have been raised by your Papa in the woods. What you know of the world came from books or soldiers who came for training. There is still much you do not know. At their fingertips, children can learn anything they want to learn. It is all there. You need only a computer and the drive to sift through all the junk to find what you need. It is very plausible, my friend.”
I felt a little put out, but I knew what he was saying was true. A lot of my understanding of the world came from Dad's books or from the technology the soldiers sometimes brought with them. I wasn't in touch with the world that continued to exist outside - my own world had ended and was now being given over to decay.
“So okay, there is Saska, Alex and now...?”
Piotr shook his head. “A mystery. It could have been an ex-pat of yours, someone who fled after the Panic and set up somewhere else. He may have worked in this bunker and is offering the information to Saska in return for she and Alex to go there and get something for him. At this point, we are both at a loss.”
“You mentioned other clues?” I asked.
“Yes. My next clue came in the form of an invoice the General discovered in his accounts. It was for items ordered from a pharmaceutical company and shipped to Paris to be collected by a Mr. Duphrane.”
“The order?”
“Various things. Not what you would expect. The bio-hazard suits we did expect - a great number of people believe your nuclear plants must be leaking radiation by now.” Riley muttered something under her breath but I didn't catch it. I could guess though.
“They're not - the US checked them out as soon as they could,” I said. “They claimed they were all in shut down and that the rods had automatically been submerged during the Panic. I know something is leaking into the water supply further north, but that's another matter.”
“So so. Still, it is a misconception and so once we'd established their destination we thought nothing of the suits. The other items were far more worrying.”
“In what way
?”
“Chemicals. Compounds. Various drugs and agents. Not enough to alert the supplier to any kind of terrorist plot, but to a trained eye they could be used in a few different ways. Firstly, as an antidote to...” He paused. For the entire conversation, in fact, since we'd met up with Riley, he'd spoken in English and I'd admired his consideration for her. But now he looked at me, then her, and shook his head. I stopped walking. I'd been so involved in Piotr's story that I hadn't noticed us moving past a village sat at the bottom of the valley and Riley was scanning it with her binoculars. She turned, noticed that the tension had risen, and removed her glasses.
“What is it?” I asked.
He turned to Riley and said, “I struggle to trust Americans. It is part of our culture in Russia. I'm sure you can appreciate that.”
“Yes,” she replied. “I can.”
“Then what I am about to tell you puts my life at risk. I know I have Miller's trust and he, mine. But you, former Ranger Riley, do I have yours?”
Riley looked pained by the openness of Piotr. He was bearing his heart and she didn't know how to handle it. Eventually she was able to reply.
“I no longer work for the US government and as such I have no ties to it nor obligations. I worked for a private security firm that did things the US would never sanction. You have my trust. But let's understand each other - if it jeopardises the lives of my people or any that I love then there will be a reckoning - do we understand each other?”
“I think we do,” he replied. “You would make a good Russian.” Then, to me, he said, “The drugs are a possible antidote for a virus we suspect the United States Government developed and chose to hide on British soil, knowing that the Panic would come and hide their mistake.”
Riley's face turned crimson and she cocked her rifle. “What did you say?” she yelled.
“Riley - calm down!” I said.
“I want to know what this Communist bastard just said!”
Piotr simply stood there, his arms at his side, a man too mature and too seasoned by life to respond to such a threat. My own insides had knotted up though.
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