The Man of Bronze

by James Alan Gardner

  I sighed. “All right. What parts are missing, and where are they?”

  Father Emil pointed to the man of bronze. “As you can see, he’s missing the left leg. It will be in three parts: the upper leg from hip to knee, the lower leg from knee to ankle, and finally the foot.”

  “The toes aren’t cut off separately?”

  “No. The toes can be cut off—we, uhh, tried that as an experiment with the right foot—but the evil Set didn’t bother. With the rest of the body in so many pieces, he must have decided that cutting off the toes was a waste of time.”

  Note to self: evil gods are lazy and slapdash . . . but then, that’s exactly what mythology said, wasn’t it? Evil gods were constantly being tripped up by their own careless mistakes, misinterpreting prophecies, or underestimating the abilities of heroes. “Who was this Set anyway?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Father Emil said. “Probably just some Stone Age criminal Bronze tried to apprehend . . . a bandit who snared Bronze in a booby trap, or an evil king whom Bronze was trying to neutralize. All it would take was a bit of bad luck—getting caught in a rockfall or surrounded by too many opponents to fight off—and Bronze could be immobilized long enough to get chopped up. Mind you,” Father Emil added, “the chopping-up process couldn’t have been easy. Some parts can be cut off readily, but others are practically impossible to sever by conventional methods. I have no idea how Bronze’s head was originally detached from his torso. We tested it a few decades ago during one of Bronze’s dormant periods. Nothing we had could make the slightest dent. Perhaps the mysterious Set had some kind of magic at his disposal.”

  “But even if Set magically sliced Bronze up, how could anybody from the Stone Age scatter bronze body parts all around the world?” I asked. “You said pieces ended up in the Far East . . . Northern Europe . . . the Americas. No one back then could possibly travel so far afield.”

  “No single person did,” Father Emil replied. “The pieces were probably scattered among the tribes in a small area, and over time, those tribes dispersed outward. If Bronze was dismembered in 8000 B.C., the pieces had thousands of years to be carried elsewhere . . . and of course, fragments thrown into the sea might wash up on the other side of the ocean, especially if they got swallowed by migratory whales.”

  I thought about that. Given enough time, nomadic tribes and marine mammals might transport bronze body parts far beyond their starting point. Still, I wasn’t convinced. Some instinct told me the truth was more complex than Father Emil believed.

  I glanced at the bronze figure sitting in his steel chair . . . a metal man watching monitors, analyzing data in search of “evildoers.” What was he really? If we put this bronze Humpty Dumpty back together again, would I regret it?

  Worry about that later, I told myself. My foremost priority was dealing with Lancaster Urdmann. If the best way of catching up with Urdmann was hunting bronze pieces, I’d go to where one was hidden and wait. “Where are these pieces you’re looking for?” I asked Father Emil.

  “You’ll retrieve them for us?”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  He held out his hand. I shook it. Bargain sealed.

  6

  SIBERIA: THE PODKAMENNAYA TUNGUSKA RIVER REGION

  Twenty-four hours later, my teeth were being rattled by a decrepit Mi-28 Havoc helicopter flying over Siberia. The land below was snow-smacked wilderness—lots of trees, a few outcrops of granite, and vast stretches of bog/swamp/lake that were frozen ten months of the year. The sun crouched tepidly on the horizon, working its way up to subarctic dawn. In December at this latitude, the feeble light would last less than four hours before subsiding again into darkness. Weather reports said the day would be clear and windless with temperatures low enough to make a brass monkey sing soprano.

  I had on a new cold-weather outfit, well insulated for heat but not so bulky that it would slow me down. It’s nice to know a Paris couturier who’s willing to work with advanced thermal-locking polycarbonates and who can cut R-factor-18 fabric on the bias. What I liked most about the suit was its reversible outer layer—white on one side for blending into snowy backgrounds, black on the other for after-dark ops. I’d spent time practicing quick-change maneuvers: zipping and unzipping until I could switch from black to white in under thirty seconds.

  Speaking of reasons to get in and out of clothing . . . piloting the chopper was my longtime friend, Ilya Kazakov: ex-cosmonaut, ex–air force captain, ex–aeronautics engineer, ex a lot of other things that are none of your business. Now aged a dashing forty-five, Ilya had abandoned space-program life and retired to his native Siberia, where he worked as a bush-pilot/guide. If anyone asked why he lived a thousand miles from nowhere, he’d invent some story about hiding from the CIA . . . or a Mafia vendetta . . . or a jealous husband.

  But I didn’t believe such excuses. Deep in his soul, Ilya was a brooding Siberian mystic—never at ease in the city, always searching for something no man or woman could give him. When he wasn’t flying customers across the tundra in his armored copter gunship, he hunkered down alone in his log cabin, where he read morose Russian poetry and filled thick journals with Reflections on Life. I wouldn’t be surprised if he held long conversations with reindeer or danced naked under the northern lights; but perhaps I’m just fantasizing about that. Ilya was a big handsome man . . . and as I remembered vividly from an evening in St. Petersburg, he was an excellent dancer.

  I’d contacted Ilya the previous day, calling him directly from St. Bernward’s Monastery. According to notes in the metal attaché case, Reuben Baptiste had traced Bronze’s thigh to central Siberia—specifically a region near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River—and nobody sensible ventured into the Siberian wilds without Ilya Kazakov as guide. In fact, when I talked to Ilya, I learned that he’d served as escort for Reuben a few weeks earlier. The two men had flown across the virgin pine forests, landing at native encampments to talk with elders and listen to folktales. Kazakov had served as Reuben’s translator, and therefore knew something about what I was chasing: the biggest thing to hit Siberia in recorded history. Literally.

  “Just over that rise,” Ilya told me, “you’ll see the edge of the blast radius.”

  Given so much snow, I doubted I’d see a thing. But when the Havoc crested the hill, I found Ilya was right. Even after a century, no one could mistake the devastation.

  On the morning of June 30, 1908, something over Siberia went boom. The force of the blast equaled fifteen megatons of TNT: comparable to the A-bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Seismographs around the world registered what was called the Tunguska event; but the site was so remote, twenty years passed before scientists arrived to investigate. They found half a million acres of forest flattened by the explosion—a circle thirty miles across wherein every living thing had been crushed and scorched.

  Surprisingly, the ground at the heart of the blast had suffered little damage. In particular, there was no impact crater . . . which argued against the easy explanation of a meteor strike. No human had been within fifty miles of the epicenter, but distant hunters reported seeing a fireball on the horizon, followed by an earthquake and gusts of hot air strong enough to knock people off their feet.

  The cause of the destruction was never established. Conspiracy theorists claimed it had been a flying saucer crash or a nuclear detonation thirty-five years before the Manhattan Project. Even respectable scientists proposed far-fetched theories: for a while, some thought it had been a miniature black hole piercing the Earth at close to the speed of light. More cautious researchers suggested a comet fragment had disintegrated high in the atmosphere with a titanic burst of energy . . . but the evidence was still disputed. All anyone knew for certain was that something tore a million trees up by the roots and charred a million more into black burned-out husks.

  Almost a century later, the damage below our copter was still obvious. Scrub and spindly birch trees had sprung up amid the fallen pines, but they didn’t come close to filling th
e mown-flat swath of forest. This close to the Arctic Circle, nothing grew quickly—not even the bacteria and fungi usually responsible for rotting wood. In a tropical jungle, trees begin to decay even before they’re dead . . . but here in the far north, thousands of toppled pines remained intact long after their demise. Most had simply dried out and shriveled like driftwood. Where the wind blew strongly enough to clear away snow, bark-stripped trunks lay like parched bones on the thin Siberian soil. Elsewhere, the trees were vague lumps under drifts of white: corpses beneath a vast shroud.

  Every one of those corpses pointed toward the heart of the devastation. They’d all been knocked back, instantaneously pushed down and outward so their roots aimed directly at the source of the blast. Scientists could easily pinpoint the epicenter; but all they’d found in that heart of darkness was a boggy marsh, fed by the nearby Tunguska River and two small lakes.

  No crashed alien spaceship. No secret lab run by Nephilim. Nothing but otters and minnows, with wolves, hares, and foxes occasionally coming to drink. The scientists took photos and soil samples, interviewed tribespeople who witnessed the event from afar, scratched their heads wondering what really happened, then hurried home before some unexpected blizzard trapped them for months in the icy armpit of nowhere.

  None of the investigators thought to ask the natives about a remarkable fact: not a single human had been killed in the blast. Why had there been no hunters—not one—in a huge region filled with game? Why no reindeer herders letting their animals graze beside the river? Why no fur trappers, no berry gatherers, no herb-seeking grannies, no fishing parties, no loggers, no amorous couples searching for privacy—nobody nearer than fifty miles on a pleasant morning in June? Wouldn’t people spread across the countryside, making the most of the brief Siberian summer?

  Unless, of course, local tribes avoided the area for reasons they didn’t mention to strangers.

  “Look there, Larochka,” Ilya said. “Someone’s camping at ground zero.”

  He was right. Four tents squatted at the edge of the epicenter’s marsh: blue vinyl beehives perched on the bright white snow. No one came out to look at us as the rattletrap Havoc flew overhead. “Seems like nobody’s home,” I said. “Do you know whose camp it might be?”

  “Not locals,” Ilya replied. “The tents are too fancy and expensive.”

  “Maybe visiting hunters?”

  “It’s the wrong time of year; most animals are hibernating. Might be curiosity seekers—they come now and then, thinking they’ll find a piece of the comet or whatever it was. But even crazy tourists know better than to visit Siberia in December. Besides, I’m always informed when company’s coming; every outfitter from Moscow to Vladivostok sends people to me because I’m the best guide in the district.”

  “How much does that cost you?” I asked.

  Ilya grinned. “This is the new Russia, Larochka—all is open and honest. We no longer bribe each other for the privilege of fleecing rich foreigners.” He looked down at the camp. “On the other hand, if some outfitter neglected to inform me of a lucrative business opportunity, I should learn who it was so I can correct any flaws in my marketing outreach.”

  In other words, he’d paid under the table for exclusive rights to this territory, and he wanted to find out who was making deals behind his back. “So you’re going to land?”

  “Just to look around. See what outfitter’s name is on the equipment.”

  “All right, Ilyosha. But let’s be careful.”

  I said that from habit, not because I anticipated trouble. In all likelihood, the camp belonged to the sort of people Ilya expected: curiosity seekers touring the site of a famous explosion. Who else could it be?

  Not Lancaster Urdmann. He’d stolen Osiris only the previous day. How could he decipher the coded hieroglyphics, arrange a Siberian expedition, and still arrive in Tunguska ahead of me? True, he’d gotten a head start: he’d taken the statuette from Reuben before I landed in Warsaw—and the time I spent driving to the monastery and back added several hours more—but could Urdmann decrypt ancient writings so quickly? It seemed far-fetched, even if he had a team of skilled Egyptologists already assembled.

  Besides, the statuette gave locations for dozens of bronze body parts all over the world. Urdmann wouldn’t know which parts had already been retrieved by Father Emil’s Order; he’d waste considerable effort chasing after segments that were no longer where the hieroglyphics said. It might take weeks for him to get around to Siberia.

  But he’d come here eventually—I had no doubt. Urdmann might be vile, but he wasn’t a total fool. He must have heard of the Tunguska explosion; and when the ancient inscriptions told him a chunk of Osiris was hidden on this site, Urdmann would choose this as one of the first locations to investigate.

  Which is why I’d come here. Lancaster Urdmann would show up, and sooner rather than later. I expected to wait less than a month before he arrived . . . and I’d spend that time well, living in a tent or a cave and deciding exactly what to do with Urdmann when he got here.

  Ilya set down the Havoc on a patch of level snow just behind the camp. As we got out, I saw we weren’t the first to land a helicopter in that spot. Five paces away, the snow was dented by the skid rails of another chopper the same size as ours . . . probably another Havoc. Old Soviet copters weren’t hard to acquire—you could buy them officially from the cash-strapped Russian military or unofficially from a chap named Sergei who ran a strip club in Novosibirsk—but the majority of Havocs were purchased by third-world nations to beef up their air defenses. The remainder went to large corporations, especially companies that did business in war zones. Ilya’s Havoc was the only gunship I knew of in private hands, and it was a special case: “a gift from the grateful Russian people” for reasons he’d never explained. I didn’t know whether Ilya had stolen the aircraft, blackmailed some top official, or gotten it fair and square as payment for secret services on behalf of the motherland. Frankly, I preferred to remain in ignorance; the truth was bound to be less interesting than the scenarios I imagined.

  Ilya noticed the tracks of the other copter too. As he bent to examine the marks, I asked, “Anyone you know?”

  He shrugged. “Mining companies sometimes fly Havocs. They come here occasionally to prospect.”

  I looked around at the snow covering the area: only a few inches of white, but it would make life difficult for anyone looking at rock formations, taking drill samples, and all those other things prospectors do. “Wouldn’t it be smarter to come in summer?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ilya said. “Prospectors know better.”

  “So we’re back to curiosity seekers?”

  “Who knows?”

  He headed toward the campsite, walking easily on the hard-packed snow. When he got to the nearest tent, he reached toward the entrance flap; but I stopped him.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  He raised his eyebrows in question. Once more, I thought through my arguments why this couldn’t be Lancaster Urdmann’s camp—why it didn’t make sense that he’d beaten me here. But if these tents did belong to Urdmann, he was just the sort to prepare for intruders.

  “Back up,” I said. “Let’s try an experiment.”

  We retreated a dozen paces. Ilya wore the look of a man humoring a woman’s whim. I picked up a handful of snow, made a snowball, and threw it full strength at the entrance flap of the nearest tent.

  Boom. Or rather boom, boom, boom, boom, as all four tents detonated simultaneously.

  “Well, well, well,” I said. “Mr. Urdmann has developed a definite fondness for explosives.”

  Ilya picked himself up off the snow. Unlike me, he hadn’t been ready for fireworks; he’d dropped to the ground from sheer startled reflex. He dusted himself off and said, “You have rough friends, Larochka.”

  “Not friends, Ilyosha,” I told him. “Definitely not friends.”

  And definitely unexpected. How could the loathsome Urdmann have r
eached Tunguska before us? Even if he’d had a top Egyptologist ready to translate the statuette’s hieroglyphics, why go to Siberia first? Why not start the hunt for bronze fragments someplace warmer and easier to reach? Did Urdmann know exactly which body parts were missing?

  Maybe. The Order of Bronze could have tipped their hand. If they’d been too aggressive in acquiring bronze pieces, a dealer like Urdmann might have noticed. He may have started doing research . . . asking questions . . . laying out bribes and threats . . . perhaps trying to identify members of the Order . . .

  If Urdmann had found a member of the Order, he wouldn’t hesitate to use extreme measures to wrench out the truth—kidnap the target; use torture, drugs, whatever. Once he’d learned what he wanted, he’d kill the poor victim and dump the corpse where it would never be found.

  So Urdmann might have known about Bronze before he got the statuette. I could imagine the arrogant blackguard, bloated monster that he was, sitting in a private jet with his mercenary lackeys, waiting to hit the runway as soon as they learned where the missing leg parts were.

  Which is how he reached Tunguska first. Even so, he didn’t have much of a head start. A few hours at most.

  “Our enemies have to be close,” I said. “Wherever the bronze thigh is, Urdmann camped here because it’s ground zero. Then he coptered to the actual site. We can use the Havoc to search—no, wait, that’s a bad idea.”

  “What’s the problem?” Ilya asked.

  “Urdmann used to be an arms dealer,” I said. “Guns mostly but also weapons with more kick.”

  “You mean surface-to-air missiles?”

  I nodded. “Urdmann might have brought shoulder-mounted heat seekers to shoot down unwanted visitors. He enjoys blowing things up. Can the Havoc withstand rocket fire?”