Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  He believed it was scientifically possible to bring back a Woolly Mammoth. But why would you want to?

  Why would you need to?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  April 23, 2011

  KOLYMA REGION, EIGHTY KILOMETERS WEST OF CHERSKY.

  It happened so fast, Nikita Zimov never had time to react.

  The heavy front tire of the two-and-a-half-ton GAZ Sadko 33081 cargo truck Zimov was driving hit a patch of black ice, its giant treads spitting up plumes of gravel and frost as the rubber spun frantically, trying to find purchase. The truck’s 117-horsepower diesel howled like a speared animal; then the nose of the truck twisted hard to the right, and the enormous chassis suddenly reared up, perpendicular to the road. A second later, all four tires were back down on the ice and the metal beast was spinning toward a massive snowbank, not skidding, gliding, toward what seemed like certain disaster.

  Inside the truck’s front cabin, Nikita’s eyes went wide as he fought with the oversized steering wheel. His face was so close to the iced-over front windshield that he could see his breath on the interior of the glass. His foot was on the brake but he knew the damn thing was useless, now. Twelve thousand kilometers into the cross-country trip, traversing the largest landmass in the world, he already knew all there was to know about hydroplaning. Hell, he’d driven over so much ice in the past twenty days he might as well have replaced the tires with skates.

  The first thousand kilometers of his journey had been on actual roads—real asphalt, street signs, on and off ramps, and even a handful of traffic lights. That had been a learning experience for Nikita, since, growing up at the Chersky Science Center, he hadn’t had much experience with paved streets or traffic laws. Just seeing another car on the highway had caused butterflies in his stomach, and the handful of encounters he’d had with the police during the first quarter of his trip—stops for vague, seemingly arbitrary violations, most of which had ended with a warning, as well as a few crumpled rubles changing hands—had made him grateful when he’d finally reached the Ural Mountains, even though bandits frequented the roads there.

  But nobody had tried to rob him, not that he’d had much for anyone to steal. Growing up in Chersky, he’d had more than his share of run-ins with thieves and was held up at gunpoint a few times, even shot at once. His father had barely seemed disturbed when Nikita had returned to the Science Center, a tear in his winter jacket from the bullet. Sergey Zimov wasn’t the sort of scientist who bumbled around test tubes in a white lab coat. Doing the kind of science he did, where he was doing it, sometimes you’d get shot at.

  Now Nikita was more than his son, he was his father’s partner, on a multigenerational quest.

  The farther east he’d traveled, the less traffic he’d seen—and the fewer people of any kind. For the past few days, the route had been empty save for him and a handful of other truckers, carting goods to the towns and cities that pockmarked the vast wilderness surrounding Kolyma and the Siberian steppes.

  Nikita wasn’t sure how other truckers handled the snow- and ice-covered, packed-mud trails that counted as roads here in the east. He’d had to pull over countless times already, to dig paths with the shovel he kept on the passenger seat when the snow had gotten too high, or to heave fallen tree branches and shrubbery out of the way when things looked too dense for his heavy truck to get through. And even so, the Sadko had taken so much damage along the route, it was leaking all sorts of fluids as it went, coloring the snow with oil, radiator juice, and God knew what else.

  Hell, the entire truck was basically held together by duct tape at that point. There was a hole in the oil well, which he’d plugged ten days ago with a piece of wood he’d fashioned from a fence strut. Shortly after that, he’d found that one of the pneumatic brake lines had been cut by broken glass he’d driven over, which caused a major loss of air pressure. Crawling under the truck, he’d managed to seal it closed.

  Nikita was desperate to get home before the old beast collapsed entirely.

  But at the moment, he was fighting wildly with the steering wheel, fearing that he was going to die so close to home. A bare eighty kilometers, and he might as well have been on the surface of the moon. He had no phone in the truck, and the CB radio had conked out four thousand kilometers ago. The speedometer and mile counter had both frozen and become useless, he had no headlights or brake lights, and so much ice was caked on the bottom of the chassis that the steering had become sluggish, even under the best of conditions.

  Spinning across the ice, rapidly approaching a six-foot bank of heavy snow towering above what looked to be a deep drainage ditch, was not one of those conditions.

  Nikita used both hands to pin the wheel as far into the turn as he could, then continued pumping the impotent brakes. Even as he continued to spin, he grinned ruefully. His father had warned him that twelve thousand kilometers alone on the road could drive even the strongest man a little bat-shit crazy. To be honest, most people would probably have agreed that Nikita and his father, Sergey, were already far along the spectrum from oddness to madness. Nikita thought of the Sadko as an iron-and-steel version of his dad, protecting him, but certainly not coddling him, on his wild expedition. And the journey itself was a perfect analogy to the dream his father and he shared, the project that had brought Nikita—with his girlfriend, now wife, in tow—back to the Arctic Circle five years earlier, despite his every effort to stay away.

  Keeping that truck alive and the journey moving forward was akin to keeping his father’s dream alive, and there was no damn way Nikita had come so far only to die here, along with their dream, in a snow-filled ditch.

  With his jaw clenched so tight his teeth hurt, he focused on a point in the snowbank, coaxing the steering wheel another few inches into the turn. If he hit the bank just right, maybe he would keep the truck from flipping over. Even without the speedometer he knew the beast had picked up speed once the tires had touched the ice. There would be no slowing until the crash. But if he was lucky, the Sadko would stay upright. That was really all that mattered.

  Even as he spun wildly across the ice, Nikita could feel the weight of the cargo shift in the truck’s bed behind him, separated from the back of his head by thick metal. The cargo was so heavy that the front tires were riding slightly higher than the rear, certainly affecting the four-wheel-drive suspension. There had been no way to secure the cargo once he’d loaded the flatbed, around the halfway point of his trip. For much of the time—and mostly at night—the freight stayed toward the back of the bed, putting much of the weight on the Sadko’s tail. But when the ride got agitated—well, it was like driving a truck full of wild animals.

  Nikita grinned at his private joke. Even as he headed toward the ditch, he recognized the absurdity of the situation. Many young Russian men of his age went on cross-country road trips, to see the great nation, its incomparable landscapes, big cities, and the modern world that had replaced the staid Soviet era. The gray authoritarian state had turned into a vibrant, culture-filled country.

  But Nikita hadn’t set off on his long trip to see the world. He had set off to save the world.

  He had begun his adventure with a sense of happy anticipation. Flying from St. Petersburg to Nizhny Novgorod via Moscow, he’d gone from one Soviet-era airport to another, marveling at the terminal buildings of stone, matching spiral staircases, and balconies that had once been emblazoned with enormous posters of Lenin and Stalin. But in Novgorod—a large city on the banks of the Volga River that was a tourist destination—most of the terminals were stark and modern, with flashes of Western-style advertising, touting products like soft drinks and cell phones. Shortly after landing in Novgorod, he’d picked up the truck, which his father had reserved and paid for.

  When Nikita had first seen the Sadko, parked in an alley behind a dealership trading in old army castoffs and heavy construction material, he’d nearly wet his pants: five thousand intimidating pounds of military-grade diesel charm, with tires that came up to his waist
and faded, dull green paint. A huge flatbed made up most of the truck’s length and was covered in a tight canvas tarp, which stretched at least six feet high over several curved iron bars.

  When Nikita first climbed into the truck, he’d felt twice as tall as usual, and strong as a musk ox. It took him most of the first day of driving the beast to learn how to control it, but once he was out on the roads, he quickly got used to the strength of the engine and the pull of the manual steering.

  Luckily, by the time his cargo joined him, he’d mastered the truck and its idiosyncrasies and steeled himself for the possibility of encountering bandits in the desolate mountain roads of the Urals.

  Nikita closed his eyes and yanked the wheel the last few inches, just as the first tire slipped off the edge of the road and into the ditch. He felt a sudden, frozen moment of weightlessness, and then the truck was pitching to the left, the right tires lifting off the ground. Nikita started to scream, but was cut short by a hard thud as the Sadko slammed back down and skidded into the bank. The truck came to a hard stop, two tires sunk in the ditch, the other two spinning in the air.

  Nikita opened his eyes. The front cabin was tilted forty degrees, and his body was jammed against the driver’s-side door, which was flush with the snowbank. His hands ached where they had gripped the steering wheel, his knee was going to have a nasty bruise from slamming into the door handle, but nothing felt broken. Hell, better than that, he was alive.

  And then he heard the banging from behind him in the flatbed, followed by an eerie, high-pitched scream.

  His cargo.

  Nikita hoisted himself across the front passenger’s seat and kicked open the door. Then he took hold of the door frame to pull himself out of the cabin. He balanced on the rim and dropped down onto the ice. His boots hit with a satisfying crunch as he stuck his landing and stood up.

  Then the cold and the wind hit him, and he shivered violently, from the adrenaline as well as the temperature. It had to be below freezing outside, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. But he didn’t care; his mind was entirely on his cargo. Besides, he couldn’t have felt more Russian than at that moment, standing on the edge of an icy Siberian road, his truck in a ditch, wind whipping through his hair. He only wished he had a bottle of vodka to finish the picture. There were very few moments that a bottle of vodka wouldn’t make better.

  Nikita moved quickly along the side of the tilted truck, until he was parallel with the cargo bed. The canvas tarp was torn in many places, but was mostly held intact by the iron bars. Only a small section near the front cabin seemed to be tearing loose from one of the bars.

  Nikita braced one foot on the tire guard and pulled himself up the side of the truck. He reached both hands out toward where the canvas had come loose, his fingers getting closer—when suddenly, the sharp point of a huge antler tore through the tarp just inches from his chest. Nikita twisted out of the way just in time, but as the antler pulled back into the flatbed, it pulled more of the canvas with it, opening a large hole in the covering.

  Now Nikita had a full view of the interior and the six enormous elk huddled together near the back of the bed. The bull elk—the dominant male—was standing in front of the others, balancing its three-hundred-pound frame against the tilted truck bed on long, almost spindly legs, looking up at him from beneath a huge rack, his eyes wild. Condensation clouds curled up from his arched nostrils, and saliva dripped from his mouth.

  The attempted goring hadn’t been malicious. The bull was simply protecting his herd and posturing to keep his position.

  With a loud grunt, the bull elk leaped forward again, its horns coming straight at Nikita, who lurched backward, putting himself behind one of the curved iron bars that kept the canvas in place. The antlers hit the bar and the animal fell back again, shaking the entire truck as he landed.

  Okay, maybe the bull was trying to kill Nikita, but it had pretty good cause. For twelve days, Nikita had been carting the six elk across the Russian continent, feeding them, cleaning out their waste, keeping them healthy as best he could. Driving seventeen, eighteen hours a day, stopping only for brief periods of sleep and to buy food, fix the truck, acquire diesel—and now he’d nearly killed them all on a patch of ice.

  The elk didn’t have the capacity to understand, but their trip and their relocation were integral to Nikita and Sergey’s mission.

  Nikita stretched forward again, pinning the canvas as tightly as he could against the iron bar. Again, the bull elk came at him, those sharp antlers slamming into the iron, sending up icy sparks. Nikita laughed out loud, from adrenaline and joy. The bull was perfect, indomitable, strong like Nikita and Sergey. The Arctic Circle—the permafrost steppes where he and his herd were headed—was not a place for the weak. Only the strong could survive there; only the strong could help rebuild what once was, to help turn back the clock . . .

  Ten thousand years.

  The elk bugled—something between a high-pitched scream and a howl—as it pounded up the truck bed again. Nikita howled back at it, holding the canvas with all his strength. No matter how long it took for another trucker to drive by or for his father to come looking for him—no matter how long it took for help, in some form, to arrive—he’d hold that canvas and keep the six elk safe and secure. Nikita would deliver them to the refuge he and his father were creating above the Arctic Circle, and together, these elk, Nikita, and his father would continue working toward saving the world.

  Hell, even vodka couldn’t have made this moment more exhilarating.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  October 24, 2012

  HUBBARD HALL, THE CORNER OF SIXTEENTH AND M STREETS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  On the second floor of one of the most significant buildings in the history of science, an elegantly appointed conference room and meeting hall were tucked between a pair of libraries. Their huge arched windows looked out past austere Doric stone pillars to the busy streets of the nation’s capital below. Parquet hardwood floors gleamed, polished and smooth, beneath a fifteen-foot ceiling of ornate plaster moldings and marble. Gathered together in groups of three, four, and five were thirty-six of the smartest men and women in biology and conservation, many meeting each other for the first time, to talk shop.

  Church could think of no more fitting setting for inspiration. In 1909, Hubbard Hall had housed the first headquarters of the National Geographic Society, and it was still the philosophical center of the organization that had been at the forefront of scientific exploration for well over a hundred years. That National Geographic had invited Brand and Phelan to hold their conference in such a legendary place signified that they were conducting groundbreaking science. The workshops and presentations Church had taken part in so far had stoked his enthusiasm for resurrecting extinct species, and he couldn’t help thinking that the energy in the place was reminiscent of those days in Alta, where the Human Genome Project was hatched.

  When Phelan and Brand had first set up the conference, they had billed it as a private workshop involving the top scientists working on de-extinction and related projects. The goal was to continue the conversation that they had started in Petaluma, melding molecular biology with conservation biology to see where such a marriage could lead.

  Church had gone into the conference with an open mind. He didn’t necessarily expect to find a reason for turning his imaginings about resurrecting Woolly Mammoths into something concrete and real, but if a reason for de-extinction existed, he knew he’d find it here, by mixing with some of the world’s top biologists and geneticists. Church’s daughter, Marie, now a professional photographer, was present for the event and had generated the official photograph that went out to the press afterward.

  For two days, he had attended a cavalcade of fascinating presentations, beginning with Alberto Fernandez-Arias, a veterinarian who was also the head of the Hunting, Fishing, and Wetland Department in Aragon, Spain. Fernandez-Arias spoke about the only true successful cloning of an extinct species, the Pyrenean ibex, to date. Th
e story was both stunning and frustrating.

  In 2003, a Spanish team had managed to clone a recently extinct Pyrenean ibex—a sort of mountain goat—from a tissue sample that had been frozen in liquid nitrogen since the last of its species had died in 2000. Placing the genetic material into the eggs of domesticated goats, they’d managed to get a single pregnant mother to term, and a living baby Pyrenean ibex had been born. Unfortunately, the animal had lived for only ten minutes, before suffocating because of a deformed lung. But for those ten minutes, an extinct species had indeed lived again.

  Of course, at the time, the ibex had been extinct for only a little over three years, and its genetic material had been carefully preserved in a laboratory. This was no ten-thousand-year-old Mammoth carcass dragged out of Arctic ice. But it was an impressive accomplishment, nonetheless. To Church, it was on par with the much more famous cloning of Dolly the sheep—the first mammal ever cloned. Although Dolly had lived seven years—and had even given birth to seven lambs before dying of lung cancer at the age of seven—Dolly had not been a member of an extinct species, nor had she been cloned from tissue preserved in a lab.

  Church’s own presentation was relatively down-to-earth, although it was a surprise to many of the attendees. Onstage, he reiterated much of the conversation he’d had with Brand and Phelan, telling the gathered scientists how far his lab had come in rapid genetic sequencing and cheaper, faster genetic engineering. Within the next five years, he explained, they would be able to make over a dozen edits to a three-billion-base-pair genome for only thirty thousand dollars. His lab’s DNA editing breakthrough—called MAGE, for Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering—would eventually allow them to replace genes in a living species with similar genes from an extinct one, and this would one day make it possible to implant Woolly Mammoth genes into its closest relative, the elephant.