The lake remained frozen all year round, but the fishing used to be good in summer. The mysterious lake was somewhere on the other side of it. It would take six or more hours to go around the boot-shaped lake, but they could cross it in under an hour – that was, if it were still possible.
Everyone knew that the story of it being an enormous nuclear power plant was just a cover, one of their mother Russia’s many disinformation campaigns. Ilya just couldn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to hide it any better. There was no doubt in his mind what it was, and he was still a kid – it was a secret military installation.
A big fence went up right around the damned lake, too. A road was built around it and heavily patrolled during construction, but all of that had mostly ceased, since. After all, why bother? The location was secure enough in itself. No one could get there, except on foot, and those who could were too cold to do anything destructive. Ilya and Demyan stumbled their way down the hill and approached the lake’s edge.
Ilya stopped at the fence.
A reindeer must have taken offense to the barbed wire fence, because there was now a small hole in it. Not big, but enough for the two of them to squeeze through.
“Do you want to take a shortcut?” he asked, out of bravado more than desire.
Demyan wasn’t to be provoked into stupidity. “No. We’ll go around. We’re not supposed to even know about the mysterious new lake, let alone if it's guarded. We’re better off not getting spotted before we even get there.”
Ilya felt that he’d achieved one rung above his brother on the bravery ladder, but knew better than to mention it. Instead, the two of them followed the service trail as it wrapped its way around the shore of Boot Lake.
It took them until the late afternoon to reach the empty hunter’s hut toward the southern end of the lake. They stayed there overnight and in the morning continued along the service trail, toward the far end of the lake.
Now on the eastern side of Boot Lake, Ilya glanced back at the old island in the middle of the sea of ice. There were no windows on the old stone prison, but somehow, he felt as though he was being watched. He’d been told since he was a kid to stay away from the place, because it was haunted by the ghosts of those who’d been imprisoned there during the reign of Stalin’s Death Camps. Ilya was old enough to know that haunted islands are nothing more than stories to frighten children, and yet he’d never heard of anyone ever going anywhere near it.
He turned to face his brother. “Do you think they can see us?”
“I doubt it. If they could, we’d probably already see one of their patrol cars on its way to intercept us.” Demyan turned to the east. “Come on, the old airstrip and strange new lake isn’t far now. I want to catch some fish and get back to the hut before we freeze to death.”
Ilya nodded and followed him across the snow-covered hills to the east. He felt uneasy with his back to the strange island behind him, as though some sort of evil predator was watching him. He shook the fear off, but kept glancing over his shoulder as though he might catch something or someone.
Thirty minutes later, they reached the mysterious new lake.
It was approximately a mile wide by another three in length. There was very little to identify it as anything other than the remains of the old, World War II era, landing strip made out of thick ice.
Ilya just stared at it. “We’ve been had, haven’t we?”
“I don’t know,” Demyan replied, his eyes sweeping the entire area for signs of ice thinning. His eyes stopped at a small section toward the southern end of the field, where the icy ground had dipped, and some parts had collapsed. His lips turned upward into a smile. “There! I’d say that’s the remnants of the thin ice collapsing.”
“You think there’s a hot spring below?”
“Must be! But there’s only one way to find out for certain. Let’s go check it out.”
*
Demyan stepped onto the ice.
His eyes swept the entire frozen lake. There were no cracks or breaks in the surface ahead of him and no flowing water at its edge. He made a mental note to stay clear of the southern end, where the hard surface of the ice appeared to dip and a small patch of white ice spread over several feet – a sign the ice had recently thawed and then refrozen, making it highly unstable.
His boots tentatively crunched into the hard ice at the edge of the lake – often the most dangerous part to walk on any frozen lake. Ice near the shore is weakest. The shifting, expansion and buckling action of the lake or stream over the winter continually breaks and refreezes ice along the shoreline.
The surface underneath his feet was solid.
He took another step, followed by a number of small, slow steps toward the middle of the lake. After crossing thousands of frozen lakes and rivers he’d developed the intrinsic knowledge of what ice would hold his weight and what wouldn’t. His senses were specifically attuned to such knowledge. A skill grown over his relatively short lifetime in the harsh, Siberian landscape. Despite his confidence, his nerves were on edge, as he strained to hear the sharp snapping of ice. His center of balance told him the ground wasn’t moving even an inch.
A third of the way across the frozen lake, he stopped and dropped his rucksack on the ground.
“What do you think?” Ilya asked.
“I think there’s only one way to find out if there are fish.”
He withdrew an axe and started chipping away a six-inch-wide by eight-inch-long hole into the ice. It was a slow process, but he’d done that, too, a thousand times before.
The ice was thick, more than a foot in total.
Demyan could have kept going, but it would have meant widening the opening, and that would have increased their risk of falling through. He glanced at his little brother, whose face betrayed his eagerness and naïve willingness to take risks.
“Do you want me to try?” Ilya asked.
Demyan shook his head and picked up the axe. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll head farther toward the middle. The ice is always thinner as it approaches the center. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of water in there.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. Look at all those air bubbles. There’s flowing water down there and that means fish.”
They both glanced into the hole.
Water was easily visible just below the ice. It had a soft prism of red, yellow and blue. There was something unusual about that in itself. In ice, the absorption of light at the red end of the spectrum is six times greater than at the blue end. As a consequence, the ice surrounding every other opening he’d ever made for ice-fishing had always appeared blue.
Demyan was about to make a comment about the strange prism of color, but a swift movement from down below the surface of the ice, interrupted his thoughts. A large fish swam by, providing a dark silhouette from the light below.
“Whoa!” Ilya’s grin was visible beneath his thick woven scarf. “Did you see that fish!”
Demyan smiled. “That’s got to be a Hucho Taimen!”
He felt his heart race and forced himself to breathe slowly. A fish like that could be over two hundred pounds. Catching it would go a long way to providing for both of them throughout the last of the winter, into early spring.
Hucho Taimen were normally found in fresh water. They preferred cold flowing water over a stony or gravel bottom and never migrated to sea. It was extremely good luck to find one trapped in a lake.
“Come with me, quickly,” Demyan said.
He picked up his rucksack and ran across the ice toward the middle of the lake, in the same direction the Taimen had swum – without stopping for one second to ask why the fish should cast a shadow on the underside of the ice.
Instead, he ran at full speed across the ice with the axe in his hand. As the ice thinned he began to be able to spot the dark outline of the massive fish, which formed a strange shadow in an otherwise light-filled lake. His chest was pounding as he sucked in the subzero air. Demyan swore out loud. If
it took them a week to catch, they were going to drag the fish out of its frozen prison.
He stopped somewhere in the middle of the lake and immediately started slamming the head of the axe into the ice. It sent hundreds of shards of ice splintering out around them. Below the rapidly thinning ice, he noticed the fish turn around in one giant arc and swim toward the opening he was trying to create.
“Get the Mormyshka out! Quick!”
Beside him, Ilya worked quickly to set up the fishing line and lure, known as a Mormyshka. It was named after the Russian word, mormysh, which meant freshwater shrimp. It consisted of a metallic head made of tungsten with a small piece of gold given to them by their father and soldered onto the back of the tungsten, along with a hook. In the stagnant environment beneath the ice, fish would spot the sparkle of the gold and take a bite.
Demyan’s axe finally pierced the bottom layer of ice, into the thawed water below. The monstrous fish, swung round again, curious and interested in the sudden change to its protected environment.
“Holy shit!” He turned to his brother. “He’s coming back!”
Ilya fed the line through the small hole of the tungsten and handed it to him. “Here.”
“Forget the Mormyshka, just pass me the hook. I’m going to snatch this monster the next time it comes around for another pass!”
Ilya handed him the fishhook. “Here.”
Demyan drove the axe as hard as he could against the remaining sheet of ice at the bottom of the hole he’d dug. In his haste, he’d carved a much larger hole in the ice than he’d meant to. It was closer to ten or twelve inches wide by an equal length.
The fish snapped around, toward the opening. An ancient predator at the top of the food chain inside the confines of the frozen lake, the creature swam to the opening, unable to grasp the risk that it might not be the deadliest beast in existence.
The predator reached the surface of the opening Demyan had created. Its giant mouth opened, ready to feed on whatever it discovered, and Demyan ran the large fish hook through the side of its body, and pulled.
The Hucho Taimen weighed more than he expected. At least two hundred pounds. More than he could pull out of the hole without his brother’s help. The problem was that it would place more weight on the precariously thin ice than it could take.
Demyan racked his brain, trying to come up with a solution before he lost the best catch of his life. Something that might just keep him and his brother from starving to death.
An instant later, the damned fish turned its head, as though no longer interested in whatever it had found in the outside world, and simply dipped back into the icy water and disappeared.
Demyan ran his gloved palms across his forehead and cursed loudly. They’d lost the fish, and by the looks of things, it wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.
He and Ilya glanced down into the opening. Like the previous one he’d made, the ice appeared to reflect a prism of reds, yellows, and blues.
“What the hell is that?” Demyan asked.
Ilya carefully stepped closer. “I have no idea.”
Demyan stared at the clear waters of the freezing world beneath the ice. What stared back up at him, made him instantly forget about the loss of the fish.
An eerie glow distorted his vision. He blinked and he started to make out a series of shapes and colors he’d never seen before. Something moved from below the ice. It was too big to be a fish. Too fast to be anything human. It glowed with a radiant color of the morning sun, and then it was gone. In its place, the water was clear enough now, that Demyan could make sense of what he was seeing.
A strange city, filled with refractory metallic structures he’d never seen before, in books or anywhere else – like crystals set at unique angles and fractals, jutting out like a giant city of another world. A world filled with fractals and prismatic crystals.
Ilya took a deep breath. “What the hell is that?”
“Beats me.” Demyan remained staring at the strange city, entranced, as though he’d just witnessed the opening of a gateway to another world. He swallowed hard. “But whatever it is, I’m certain we’re not supposed to find out!”
He took a step back. There was nothing specifically to be frightened of from down beneath the ice – certainly nothing that could swim out of the freezing water and attack him – but he still felt the instinctive need to place some sort of distance between him and the opening. That ancient part of his brain that had developed out of necessity to predict danger, was acutely aware of his entire surroundings.
His pupils dilated, and his vision widened. His heart pounded and chest burned. Adrenalin surged through his body, giving him the superhuman strength required to fight or run from his predator.
Ilya kept his feet planted where they were on the edge of the opening in the ice. His eyes fixed on the strange city, and his lips curled in the tight smile of a man who knew he was witnessing the most extraordinary event of his life.
Demyan took his eyes off the opening and swept their surrounding landscape. The surface of ice remained solid throughout the lake. The edge met an area of at least a hundred feet of snow-covered hills, before a forest of stunted pine and spruce trees blocked his vision. Their environment was silent. He could hear the sound of his heart pounding in his ears, and his breath crystalized in front of him – before everything changed.
A beam of light shot up through the opening in the ice. It sent a glow hundreds of feet into the gray and somber sky. Simultaneously, an old air-raid siren started to wail.
His head snapped to the right, where half a mile away, a white military truck came charging out of the ground beyond the tree line.
Demyan yelled, “Run!”
*
Ilya turned and ran.
Behind him, the siren kept wailing. He kept running. He’d never seen that type of armored truck before, but he’d heard about it and his brother had previously mentioned that the occasional one had been spotted near Boot Lake. The VPK-3927 Volk was legendary in Russia. Designed as a tactical high-mobility multipurpose military armored vehicle, it was renowned as a legend among Russia’s armored division.
But why was it even here?
One thing was certain, such a truck was unlikely to have a legitimate purpose for guarding a nuclear power station in the remote wilderness of Oymyakon. And it certainly wasn't approaching them for anything positive.
They headed toward the frozen bank of Boot Lake. It would be impossible to outpace their pursuers, but if they could reach it they might be able to cut across it.
It took ten minutes exactly to reach the barbed wire fence along the eastern edge of the Boot Lake. Ilya glanced over his right shoulder. The massive VPK-3927 Volk, rounded the bend and drove straight toward them.
He hacked at the fence with his axe. It took a few strikes and part of the fence broke apart. He pulled at it with his hands, and the gap opened large enough for him to squeeze through. “Come on! Let’s cross the lake.”
Demyan looked over his shoulder. Their pursuers were driving hard in the snow-covered truck. There were no longer any other options. “All right.”
Having squeezed through the narrow opening Ilya and his brother started to run across the frozen lake. It was only a little over a mile wide where they were crossing and nearly twenty for the truck to get around the lake following the service trail. If they could reach the opposite side before their pursuers, they could flee into the snow-covered forest, where it would be impossible for the truck to follow – they just had to reach the other side in time.
About half a mile across, Ilya allowed himself to glance back across the lake. The Volk was traveling fast, making good time around the lake, but there was no way it was going to reach the other side before either of them.
He grinned. His heart pounded and his chest burned, but he felt amazing. A certain euphoria was rising quickly, as he realized they were going to make it. They’d lost the fish, but they were going to live. Having gained nothing, he w
as now far better off than he could have ever wanted to be. They would go hungry, but the experience had somehow brought him closer to his brother than he would have ever predicted – they were both tough men, and they would survive.
Ilya heard the shattering of thin ice, and instantly knew its cause. His euphoria was immediately replaced by fear as a sharp crack echoed away from his feet. Instinctively, he threw himself flat as the ice disintegrated under his weight. Panic gripped him as his hands slipped away from the ice and the icy water took his breath away.
His head dipped under.
The bite of the icy water was fleeting. Instead, the pain was replaced by the terror of drowning. Growing up in Oymyakon, neither he or Demyan had ever learned to swim. Controlling his fear, Ilya concentrated on trying to achieve some form of coordinated movements with his arms to pull himself to the surface. He cupped his hands and pulled the water from above downward, as though he was climbing an invisible ladder.
It was a cumbersome movement. One that produced a disjointed and fragmented progress, but eventually his head broached the icy surface.
His eyes swept the surface. An area of several feet had shattered and he was surrounded by icy water. His head dipped under again, and he fought to pull his mouth above the water again. On the third go, he spotted Demyan at the edge of the ice, lying prone, reaching out with his arm.
“Grab my hand!” Demyan shouted, his green eyes fixed with terror.
Ilya didn’t have the breath to respond.
His head dipped under again, and again. Each time he kicked and fought to reach the surface. It was a painfully slow process, and with each subsequent dip, he sunk deeper and struggled harder to reach the surface, as his heavy clothes gathered weight from soaking through with water.
Something kept dragging him downward. By the time he realized it was his fur boots that had become heavy weights under the water, he no longer had the strength to do anything about it. He tried, but his hands couldn’t even reach the latches, and instead, he concentrated his remaining efforts on reaching the surface.
Code to Extinction Page 2
