The Last Oracle: A Sigma Force Novel

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The Last Oracle: A Sigma Force Novel Page 38

by James Rollins


  “Pyotr, thank God.” Monk scooped him up and sat with the boy in his lap. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

  Small arms wrapped around his neck. Monk felt the burn of the boy’s skin, even through his clothes.

  Pyotr spoke, at his ear. “Go…”

  Monk felt a chill pass through him. The tone sounded deeper than Pyotr’s normal tentative falsetto. Maybe it was the dark, maybe it was the boy’s raw fear. But Monk felt no tremble in his thin limbs. The single word had more command than plea.

  Still, it was not a bad idea.

  He stood and lifted the boy up. Pyotr seemed heavier, though Monk was past the edge of exhaustion into a bone-deep fatigue, near collapse. Marta helped guide him to the door. He jumped out and landed hard. With the boy in his arms, he hurried back toward the front of the train. He had brought one rifle with him, but he’d left the other in the front cab.

  Reaching the car, Monk asked, “Can you—?”

  Even before he finished the question, Pyotr clambered out of his arms and gained his own feet.

  “Stay here.” Monk quickly climbed inside, grabbed the second rifle, and slung it over his shoulder.

  He returned to Pyotr. The boy took his hand.

  Monk expelled one hard breath. Which direction? The train had stopped halfway along the tunnel. They could either return to Konstantin and the other children or continue ahead. But if they had any hope of stopping this madwoman, Monk saw no advantage in going back.

  Perhaps Pyotr thought the same thing. The boy set off in that direction. Toward Chelyabinsk 88.

  With two rifles strapped to his back and a boy and chimpanzee in tow, Monk marched down the pitch-black tunnel. They had come full circle and headed back home. But what sort of welcome would they face?

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry, General-Major. I don’t know what’s wrong with the children. They’ve never demonstrated this type of catatonia before.”

  Savina stared across the room. A pair of nurses and two soldiers had helped spread the ten children on the floor, lined up like felled trees. They’d brought in pillows and blankets from the neighboring bedrooms. Two medical doctors had been summoned: Dr. Petrov specialized in neurology, and Dr. Rostropovich in bioengineering.

  In a sheepskin-trimmed jacket, Petrov stood with his fists on his hips. The medical team had been in the process of evacuating when called over here. A large caravan of trucks and vehicles was already lined up for departure.

  “I’ll need a full diagnostic suite to better understand what’s happening,” he said. “And we’ve already dismantled—”

  “Yes. I know. We’ll have to wait until we reach the facility in Moscow. Can the children be transported safely?”

  “I believe so.”

  Savina stared hard at the doctor. She did not like his equivocation.

  He nodded his head with more certainty. “They’re stable. We can move them.”

  “Then make arrangements.”

  “Yes, General-Major.”

  Savina left further details to the medical staff and headed back down to the control bunker below. While dealing with the matter here, Savina had also been in contact with her resources in the Russian intelligence and military communities. The information gridlock at Chernobyl seemed to finally be loosening. Contradictory reports and rumors swirled around events at the ceremony: everything from a full nuclear meltdown to a foiled terrorist attack by Chechen rebels. The firming consensus was that there had definitely been a radiological leak, though the extent remained unclear.

  And why had Nicolas remained silent?

  The worry gnawed a ragged edge to her temper and patience.

  And now the strangeness with the children.

  Savina needed to clamp down on the chaos and focus on the matter at hand. No matter what the circumstances were at Chernobyl, Operation Saturn would proceed. Even if Nicolas had somehow failed, she would not. Her operation alone would unsettle the world economies, kill millions, and spread a radioactive swath halfway across the globe. It would be harder, but with the savant children still under their control, they would persevere.

  With such a focus in mind, she cast aside the confusion and sought the cold dispassion of the resolute. She knew what she must do.

  Reaching the bunker, she found the wall screens still dark, except for the grainy view of M.C. 337. She studied the spread of small bodies on the rocky floor. There was still no sign of movement over there.

  She turned to the two technicians. “Why aren’t the other cameras back online?”

  The chief engineer stood up. “The diagnostic reboot finished a few minutes ago. We were waiting on your orders to power systems back online.”

  Savina sighed and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Did everyone have to be dragged by the nose? She motioned to the board. “Do it.”

  Despite her desire to snap at the man, she kept her voice even. While she had ordered the shutdown, she had indeed left no standing order regarding the power situation.

  To avoid any further misunderstanding, Savina pointed to the view of M.C. 337. “Keep the power cut off to the other substation. All except its camera.” She didn’t want any more surprises from that side.

  As the two technicians set to work, lights flickered across the board, and the dark screens filled with images of the tunnel and the heart of her operation. Everything appeared fine—except for one glaring exception.

  The train was no longer parked beside the mining site.

  Savina pointed to the screens. “Bring up the cameras, sequentially down the tunnel. Find the train.”

  Fingers punched keys at the master control, and snapshots of the tunnel flipped across the screen, dizzying her head. Then halfway down the passage, the train appeared. It sat idle on the tracks. Savina stepped closer to that monitor and studied the ore cars and cabs. She saw no movement. Someone could be hiding, but Savina didn’t think so.

  “Continue down the tunnel,” she ordered.

  More digital images flowed. She spotted movement on one.

  “Stop!”

  A single wall lamp lit this section of the dark tunnel. It lay about a quarter klick from the blast doors. As Savina watched, figures appeared out of the darkness, walking into the light from the deeper tunnel.

  Savina’s fingers tightened on the edge of the control board.

  It was the American…leading a child by the hand.

  As they drew farther into the glow, Savina recognized the boy.

  Pyotr.

  Straightening, Savina glanced to the grainy image from M.C. 337. All the children remained collapsed. So why was this one boy still up and moving?

  “General-Major?” the engineer asked.

  Savina’s mind spun but failed to settle on any explanation. She shook her head. As if sensing the eyes upon them, the pair stopped in the light. The American looked behind him. His eyes narrowed with confusion.

  As the power returned and pools of lights flickered into existence, Monk knew the cameras must also be online. Without much reason or ability to hide, Monk continued several steps, heading toward the nearest lamp. It was only then that he realized something was amiss.

  Or rather missing.

  He searched behind him. Marta was gone. He had thought she had been following him in the dark. She moved so silently. He stared back down the throat of the tunnel. He saw no sign of her. Had she remained back at the train? Monk even searched ahead, thinking maybe she had gone scouting in advance of them. But the tunnel ended in two hundred feet at a set of tall blast doors.

  Marta was nowhere to be seen.

  Speakers off by the doors spat with static, then a crisp voice spoke in English. “Keep moving forward! Bring the boy to the door if you wish to live.”

  Monk remained frozen, unsure where to go from here.

  12:35 P.M.

  Kyshtym, Russia

  Seated in an old farm truck, Gray led the caravan through the gates of the airstrip and out onto a two-lane road that he
aded off into the mountains. Walls of towering fir and spruce trees flanked the road, creating a handsome green corridor.

  In the rearview mirror, Gray watched the small mountain town of Kyshtym recede and vanish into the dense forest. The town lay on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, only nine miles from their destination, Chelyabinsk 88. Like the entire area, the town was not without its own legacy of nuclear disaster and contamination. It lay downwind of another nuclear complex, designated Chelyabinsk 40, also known as Mayak, the Russian word meaning “beacon.” But Mayak was not a shining beacon to Russian nuclear safety. In 1957, a waste tank exploded due to improper cooling and cast eighty tons of radioactive material over the region, requiring the evacuation of hundreds of thousands. The Soviets had kept the accident a secret until 1980. As the road turned a bend, the town vanished, like so much of the Soviet Union’s nuclear history.

  Continuing onward, Gray settled into his seat. The road crossed a bridge with guardrails painted fire-engine red. A warning. The bridge spanned a deep river that marked the former boundary of restricted territory. The road wound higher into the mountains.

  Behind Gray trailed a dozen trucks of different makes and models, but all well worn and muddy. Gray shared the front seat with Luca and the driver, who were conversing in Romani. Luca pointed ahead and the driver nodded.

  “Not far,” Luca said, turning to him. “They already sent up spotters to watch the entry road. They report lots of activity. Many cars and trucks heading down the mountain.”

  Gray frowned at the news. It sounded like an evacuation. Were they already too late?

  In the bed of the truck, four men lounged, half covered in blankets. Gray had been impressed with their arsenal hidden under the blankets: boxes of assault rifles, scores of handguns, even rocket-propelled grenades.

  Luca had explained the lax control of such weaponry on the Russian black market. The small army, gathered from local Russian Gypsy clans, had met them in Kyshtym. They swelled the ranks of the men Luca had brought with them from the Ukraine. Gray had to hand it to Luca Hearn: if you needed to gather a fast militia, he was the Gypsy to call.

  In the trucks behind them, Kowalski and Rosauro followed. They had left Elizabeth back at the jet, safely out of harm’s way, guarded by a trio of British S.A.S soldiers.

  Everyone had to move swiftly. Speed was essential. The plan was to strike the underground facility, lock it down, and stop whatever was planned. The nature of Operation Saturn remained a mystery. However, considering it was in the heart of the former Soviet Union’s plutonium production facilities and uranium mines, it had to be radiological in nature.

  Senator Nicolas Solokov’s words still haunted him.

  Millions will still die.

  Gray had learned the man was born about ninety miles from here, in the city of Yekaterinburg. This was the region the man represented in the Russian Federal Assembly, which meant he knew the area and its secrets. If someone wanted to plot a nuclear event, here would be a great place to do it.

  But what was planned?

  Back in Kyshtym, Elizabeth paced the length of the jet. Her arms were folded over her chest, her chin low in concentration. She was worried for the others, fearful after hearing what Gray and the others sought to stop.

  Millions will die.

  Such madness.

  Anxiety kept her on her feet, for the team, for the fate of millions. She had a laptop open on a table. She had tried to work, to keep busy. She had begun downloading her digital pictures from her camera. Professor Masterson had kept her camera safe after she was kidnapped by the Russians. He had returned it to her following their escape from the jail in Pripyat.

  On the screen, the photos scrolled as they downloaded into the laptop.

  Pacing past, she caught a glimpse of the omphalos, resting at the center of the chakra wheel. Despite her worry, her heart still thrilled at the thought that the stone was the original Delphic artifact. For two decades, historians knew the smaller stone at the museum was a copy, the fate of the original a mystery. Some scholars hypothesized that perhaps some oracular cult had survived the temple’s destruction and that they’d stolen the stone for their secret temple.

  Elizabeth drew back to the laptop. She stared at the omphalos. Here was that proof. She sank into the chair as a sudden realization struck her. She remembered what was carved inside the museum’s copy: a curving line of Sanskrit.

  It was an ancient prayer to Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom and secret knowledge. No one knew who inscribed it there or why. But it was not unusual to see religious graffiti from one religion marking another.

  Still, Elizabeth began to suspect the truth. Perhaps the copy of the omphalos had been left behind like a road marker. She scrolled through the images and came upon the photo of the wall mosaic, depicting a child and young woman hiding from a Roman soldier underneath the dome of the omphalos, where the Sanskrit poem was written. It read, “She who had no beginning, ending, or limit, may the Goddess Sarasvati protect her.” It could definitely be referring to the last Oracle, a prayer to protect her lineage. Lastly, the goddess Sarasvati herself made her home in a sacred river. Many religious scholars believed that this mythical river was the Indus River, where the exiled Greeks made their new home.

  Elizabeth suspected that someone had left that secret message for others to follow. As she and her father had.

  She brought up the image of the original omphalos again. She had taken several pictures, including the triple line carved upon the stone that warned of the trap—written in Harappan, Sanskrit, and Greek. She brought up that image.

  There had been another example of this triple writing on the chamber walls. Beneath the figure of the fiery-eyed boy. She brought that up, too. Beneath the mosaic, the line of Harappan was intact, but half of the Sanskrit and Greek and been worn away. Only a letter or two remained legible.

  She read what she could. “‘The world will burn…’”

  The line nagged, reminding her of what Gray and the others sought to prevent. She stared at the image of a boy rising in smoke and fire from the omphalos and felt a chill of concern. But what was the rest of the message? The only intact line was the one written in indecipherable Harappan. It was a challenging word puzzle.

  Unless…

  Elizabeth jolted upright and leaned closer, her earlier worries forgotten. She glanced between the two images on the screen. She began to understand what she was looking at. She had lines of Harappan translated into Greek and Sanskrit. Translated. She breathed harder. On the computer, she had the beginnings of a digital Rosetta stone for this lost language.

  She returned back to the broken line of passage beneath the smoky boy. She studied it, compared, and pulled up pictures of the writing on the stairwell wall, too. She began to spot commonalities.

  Could she translate it?

  Sensing something important, she set to work.

  12:45 P.M.

  General-Major Savina Martov studied her adversary. She stared at the American on the screen. He remained stopped within the pool of light by the tunnel lamp. She lifted the microphone to her lips.

  “Move to the doors now!” she barked sharply.

  From the way he jumped at her words, the man had heard her. There was no problem with the speakers near the blast doors.

  “General-Major,” the engineer said. “I have a priority call for you from the Arkhangelsk Missile Base.”

  Savina tilted back and picked up the handset. One of her contacts was established at the base there. “Martov here.”

  “General-Major, some disturbing intelligence is coming out of the Ukraine. It seems that Senator Nicolas Solokov is dead.”

  Savina inhaled sharply. She kept any stronger reaction in check. Still, her throat tightened. Her contact did not know Nicolas was her son, only that he was intimate and supportive of her operations here.

  The contact continued speaking. “Rumors are still swirling as to the details surrounding the events. Some say he
was killed by terrorists, while others say he may have had a hand in the actions there. All that is certain is that he is dead. Cameras from inside the sealed Shelter show his body, along with his assistant. He was shot in the head. Radiation levels are still too high to safely remove his body, but measures are under way. I can’t say…”

  The man’s words droned on, but Savina had stopped listening. Tears welled up in her eyes. She tilted her head back to keep them from spilling. As the man finished, Savina thanked him for the call and hung up.

  She turned her back slightly from the technician and engineer.

  Nicolas was dead.

  Her only son.

  Maybe a part of her had known this already. For the past hour, she had been unable to shake a pall of despair. Her breathing had grown heavier. Nicolas…

  “General-Major?” the engineer asked softly.

  His gentleness only angered her. She turned her attention to the screen. The American still hadn’t moved. As if her grief were oil, her frustration set flame to it. A fury built inside her. The American had been thwarting her all day, and now defied her.

  No longer.

  Tears dried in the heat of her vehemence.

  Her son might be dead, but she had given birth to another child, to the dream that would rise out of the ashes here. Family blood was not the only way to leave behind a legacy. She would finish what had killed her son. She would find another figurehead to take his place. It might take longer, but it would be done. The world had stolen her son. But she had the power to strike back.

  A fierceness entered her voice that made the engineer take a step back. “Enough!” She pointed to the two screens on the left. They depicted the heart of Operation Saturn. One displayed a view up the shaft toward the planted charges; the other centered on the iris set in the floor. “Initiate Saturn! On my mark!”

  The engineer and technician swung to their stations. They tapped furiously.

  Savina stared at the man on the screen. If he wouldn’t bring Pyotr to her, she would light a fire under the man. There would be no retreating, no escape.

 

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