Cold War p-2

by Nathan Archer

  Cold War

  ( Predator - 2 )

  Nathan Archer

  Cold War

  Nathan Archer

  Chapter 1

  Pale emptiness stretched from horizon to horizon before him. Despite the night and the heavy overcast, the world was dimly lit by reflected glow, trapped between clouds and snow; the sun would not be seen here again until the approach of spring, but there was still a faint light.

  A strong wind was blowing down from the north, howling like a living thing, as if the air itself were in pain from the cold. Fine powdered snow, frozen as hard and sharp as ground glass, whipped across the icy gray desolation in bitter swirls and eddies.

  Taro kept his head bent, shielding his face from the wind and cold, as he trudged across the wasteland. He didn’t need to see very far to know where he was going; despite the drifting, blowing snow and the dim light, he could see the tracks of his runaway.

  The snow was packed down by wind and frozen into ice, so that Taro walked on a surface as solid as bare ground, and his prey’s tiny hooves hadn’t pierced it any more than his own heavy boots did. The sharp tips, though, which had evolved to keep reindeer from skidding on the ice, had chipped at the surface here and there, and the tiny marks had caught the snow as it blew across. Miniature drifts had formed in shifting chevrons a few centimeters across, growing from the chips like crystals growing in a supersaturated solution.

  At the end of the trail Taro knew he would find his missing reindeer. He suspected that he would not find it alive-a healthy animal would not have wandered off aimlessly into the taiga, leaving the herd behind, and Taro expected to find this one dead or dying.

  Still, it was his duty to find it and to retrieve whatever might still be of use. If the meat was unfit to eat there would still be the hide and bone.

  If he lost the trail he would turn back, and hope to stumble across the carcass on some other, warmer day.

  Another man, accustomed to a warmer climate, might have worried about spoilage ruining the meat, or about pilferage, if he left the carcass for a week or two, but Taro had grown up in this Siberian wasteland, had spent his life here; nothing ever spoiled here, nothing rotted, and there was no one, no thief or predator, to steal anything. The dead could lie untouched for millennia. Mammoths found in the ice near here had still been fit to eat.

  He glanced up as something caught his eye, a glimpse of movement, a flicker across the ice. He blinked and peered upward.

  Something was moving across the sky above the clouds, something that glowed brightly enough to be seen faintly even through the gray overcast.

  A new American plane, perhaps, testing the borders? There had been rumors for years of a craft the Americans called “Aurora” that could evade every Russian defense-but that was supposed to be invisible from the ground, flying too high and too fast to be seen.

  The glow was brightening steadily, descending through the clouds and moving nearer at a fantastic speed.

  It had to be Aurora, Taro thought; what else could move so fast? He had seen Russian planes many times, on patrol, on maneuvers, bringing in the men and equipment for the pipeline and the drilling sites and the pumping stations all along the Assyma section of the Yamal oil fields, and none of them had ever moved anywhere near so fast as this.

  And then the thing burst out of the clouds in a ball of brilliant orange flame, washing the pale landscape in vivid color. It roared overhead before Taro could see it clearly; the air itself rippled visibly with the ferocity of the thing’s passage.

  It was huge, and made a sound louder than anything Taro had ever before heard, far louder than the howl of the worst storm he could remember. In its wake the air seemed warmer-but what sort of craft could warm the Siberian winter itself? That had to be an illusion, Taro told himself.

  And then the thing crashed, with a boom that made the roar of its passage seem a mere whisper.

  Taro turned and stared after it.

  The horizon glowed orange, and again he thought he could feel heat, as if from an immense fire.

  That had been unmistakably a crash, not a mere landing. If that had been the American Aurora spy plane, then it was down, and the authorities in Moscow would want to know-the long Cold War might be over, but that didn’t mean the Russian authorities would pass up a chance to get a good close look at some top-secret American technology. The Russian government wouldn’t mind a chance to score a few moral points against the Americans, either-a polite complaint about Americans spying on peace-loving post-Communist Russia might coax a few face-saving trade concessions out of somebody.

  There might even be survivors, and a heroic rescue could be very good not just for Russia, but for Taro. He might be famous, might be taken to Moscow and given a medal or something. While he was reasonably content as a reindeer herder, he wouldn’t mind a taste of city life, or at least a chance to pick up a few modern comforts.

  If he headed back to the village and the radio there was working, he could contact the army squad stationed at the Assyma pumping station, and they could send out a truck or helicopter-but that would take three hours back, and at least an hour for the truck or copter to find the crash site.

  If he headed for the site directly, though, he judged that he could reach it in an hour and a half to two hours. If there were injured survivors that extra hour or two might be crucial. If there were valuables to be salvaged, he wouldn’t mind getting to them first rather than merely guiding in a bunch of soldiers.

  He set out across the ice, walking straight toward the orange glow and abandoning his hunt. His lost reindeer would keep.

  In the Siberian cold anything would keep.

  After he had been walking for a little over an hour Taro began to notice the warmth more than ever. At first he still told himself it was his imagination, that he was dreaming that cookfire heat; after all, the glow had faded away, and he was steering now by more ordinary landmarks. He couldn’t really be feeling any heat from the downed aircraft, not when he was still, so far as he could judge, about two kilometers away, and when the craft had been down for so long.

  Ten minutes later, though, he could no longer deny it; he was sweating in his heavy furs. He threw back his hood, and meltwater dripped down his brow.

  He blinked it away and stopped in his tracks.

  He was still a kilometer or so from the long, crooked ravine that cut across the icy plain, but he could see it ahead. That wasn’t what troubled him; he had known the ravine was there. No, he stopped because the ice between himself and the ravine didn’t look right; it glistened, not with the hard crystalline glitter it ought to have, but with a slick wet gleam.

  Taro frowned, took several steps, then carefully knelt down. He put a gloved finger to the ground, then picked it up and looked at it.

  The tanned leather of his glove had darkened with moisture. The ice was wet.

  He wasn’t dreaming the heat. It was real.

  He didn’t like that at all. A thaw in the Siberian winter? Something melting the permafrost? Even the American Aurora superplane surely couldn’t generate that much heat!

  The rifle he carried on his back was rarely used. He had it not because he really needed it, but as a mark of status among his people, a reminder that his grandfather had fought the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War. There were few predators to defend against out here on the ice, either human or beast; the stories of wolves prowling the vicinity dated mostly from his grandfather’s time and might just be the lies of old men who wanted to reaffirm their own claims to manhood when they could no longer act as men.

  Taro had on occasion fired the rifle in celebration, he had fired it several times in target practice, and twice to put injured reindeer out of their suffering, but he had never used it in self-defe
nse. He had never had any need to defend himself with anything more than words or fists.

  Now, though, he pulled the weapon from its fur-lined sheath and checked it over carefully. It seemed to be, as always, in perfect condition.

  With the rifle ready in his arms, he advanced cautiously toward the ravine, careful of his footing on the melt-slicked ice.

  The thing that had fallen from the sky in a fireball had landed inside the ravine ahead, he realized. He frowned. He knew that crevasse; he had lost a yearling there once. It was a long, narrow, rocky canyon; in the summer thaws it carried a trickle of meltwater north to the sea. In winter it was as dry and frozen as anywhere else, but too wide and deep for the snow to bury it completely.

  The edges of the canyon were treacherous-drifted snow and built-up ice would extend out beyond the supporting rock, and a man or reindeer who got too close might well tumble in and be unable to climb back up the icy sides.

  If the fallen object was down there, any investigation would be difficult. Taro frowned and slowed his pace.

  Something flickered, just at the edge of his vision. He turned, startled, and brought the rifle to bear…

  On nothing. There was nothing there, just the empty plain of ice.

  Taro blinked and thought he saw a shimmer in the air somewhere to one side. He jerked the rifle over a few centimeters, thinking he must have caught a reflection on the ice-but a reflection of what?

  Then a light sparkled, three moving dots of red that skittered across the ice almost too fast to follow, then skimmed up his body and settled onto his forehead, the three of them wavering about until they settled into a tidy little triangle. Taro could feel them as tiny spots of warmth, could see the red beams, but he could not make out where they were coming from, could not think what they could be. They seemed to be coming from a patch of empty air.

  Then something flared blue-white, lighting the snow on all sides, and Taro knew no more.

  Chapter 2

  Lieutenant Ligacheva was six months into her first command, and felt that she had settled in nicely. She was the lone officer in charge of the enlisted men of the little guard detachment at Pumping Station #12 on the Assyma Pipeline on the eastern fringe of the Yamal oil fields, and as such, she was responsible for making sure that the dozen pipeline workers at the station didn’t go on strike, that the local reindeer herders didn’t get into fights with anyone at the station, and that the Americans weren’t going to invade across the polar ice. If anyone tried to sabotage the pipeline, it was her duty to make sure the attempt failed.

  The men weren’t interested in striking, though, nor were there any terrorists or invading Americans to be seen, and the villagers were more concerned with cadging liquor off the workers than in fighting with anyone.

  Her job therefore was not particularly demanding-but then, she was a newly promoted lieutenant, and she couldn’t expect anything more. She hadn’t yet proven herself capable of handling duties beyond the drudgery of a routine guard post on the northern frontier.

  The easy job didn’t mean that she hadn’t had any trouble at all, though. She was the only woman in the entire place, and when she first arrived, she had feared that that might cause problems-the old Soviet Union had paid lip service to equality of the sexes, but modern Russia didn’t even do that much. A woman alone among so many men, a woman in a position of authority, could expect to encounter a certain amount of unpleasantness.

  Her sex had indeed made a few difficulties at first, but she had handled them, and they were past and done. She had avoided being raped, which she had seen as the most basic part of establishing herself; she had managed it by maintaining a fierce, asexual front. To do so she had had to give up any hint of romance and remain strictly celibate, of course, but that was a price she was willing to pay for her career.

  The facade had worked. As they had before her arrival, the men took any opportunity they could get to visit the accommodating, if expensive, widows in the nearby village of aboriginal reindeer herders; they left Ligacheva alone-or at any rate, they left her alone sexually. She wasn’t socially isolated, thank heavens. Loneliness would be far worse than mere sexual abstinence.

  She dealt with the men, both workers and soldiers, as if she were one of them-as much as they and her rank would allow her to. There had been a few incidents, but her refusal to be offended by coarse behavior, her calm flattening of the occasional rowdy drunk, and her prowess on the soccer field behind the motor pool had established her as deserving of respect.

  She was fitting in, and was pleased by it. No one tried to go around her or subvert her authority; anytime a military matter came up, she was informed. When the station’s seismometers picked up a disturbance not far from the main pipe, she was summoned immediately.

  She did not see at first why this disturbance concerned her-how was an earth tremor a military matter? When the messenger insisted that she had to come at once and talk to Dr. Sobchak in the little scientific station she was tempted to argue, but then she shrugged and came along; after all, now that winter had closed in and it was too cold even between storms to want to go outside, there wasn’t all that much to do at Station #12. Last summer’s soccer games were nothing but a fond and distant memory, and she had long since gone through everything of interest in the pumping station’s tiny library. Even though she didn’t like Dr. Sobchak, talking to him would at least be a break in the routine.

  She did pull on her coat first, however, ignoring the messenger’s fuming at the delay, and she took a certain pleasure in keeping the annoying fellow waiting while she made sure she had everything straight, the red bars on her collar perfectly aligned.

  When she was satisfied she turned and marched out immediately, almost trampling the messenger, who had been caught off guard by the sudden transition.

  The coat was not merely for show. The maze of tunnels that connected the station’s buildings-the separate barracks for soldiers and workers, the pump room itself, the boiler plant, the extensive storerooms and equipment areas, the scientific station-was buried three meters below the snow, but was not heated; the corridors’ temperature, midway between buildings, could drop well below freezing.

  The lieutenant walked briskly as she strode down the tunnel, partly to maintain the proper image, but partly just to keep warm.

  The scientific station was at the northernmost point of the complex; Ligacheva had plenty of time, walking through the corridors, to wonder what had Sobchak so excited. “A seismic disturbance,” the messenger said-but what did that mean? Why call her? If there had been a quake, or an ice heave, or a subsidence, that might threaten the pipeline, but a threat to the pipeline didn’t call for the army; Sobchak would have called Galyshev, the crew superintendent, to send out an inspection squad or a repair team.

  And if it didn’t threaten the pipeline, who cared about a seismic disturbance? Ligacheva had heard Sobchak explain that the instruments detected movement in the permafrost fairly often-usually during the summer thaw, of course, which was still an absolute minimum of two months away, but even in the dead of winter, so what made this one so special?

  She stepped down a few centimeters from the tunnel entrance into the anteroom of the science center. The antechamber was a bare concrete box, empty save where small heaps of litter had accumulated in the corners, as cold and unwelcoming as the tunnels. Half a dozen steel doors opened off this room, but four of them, Ligacheva knew, were permanently locked those sections of the station were abandoned. The days when the Soviet state could afford to put a dozen scientists to work out in the middle of the Siberian wilderness were long gone; Mother Russia could not spare the resources, and only Sobchak was left. The other scientists had all, one by one, been called away-to homelands that were now independent nations, to better paid jobs in the wider world outside the old Soviet bloc, or to more important posts elsewhere in Russia, posts deserted by Ukrainians or Kazakhs or Lithuanians, or by mercenaries selling their talents abroad.

  Only Sobch
ak was left.

  The official story behind keeping Sobchak was that Russia’s oil company did need one scientist, one geologist, to remain here to monitor the equipment that watched over the pipeline, but the lieutenant suspected that the truth was that no one else wanted Sobchak. The little man with the thick glasses and ugly mustache was sloppy, pompous, vain, and aggravating, and Ligacheva wasn’t especially convinced that he had any great abilities as a scientist, either.

  She opened the door to the geological monitoring station, and warm air rushed out at her Sobchak kept his tiny kingdom as warm as he could, and old orders giving the scientists priority on the steam output from the boiler plant had never been rescinded, so that was quite warm indeed.

  The geologist’s workroom was good-sized, but so jammed with machinery that there was almost no space to move about. Exactly in the center sat little Sobchak, perched on his swivel chair, surrounded by his equipment-meters and displays, switches and dials on every side. He looked up at her; the fear on his face was so exaggerated that Ligacheva almost laughed. His beady little eyes, wide with terror, were magnified by his glasses; his scraggly attempt at a mustache accentuated the trembling of his upper lip. His narrow jaw and weak chin had never looked any worse.

  ”Lieutenant Ligacheva!” he called. “I’m glad you’re here. Come look at this!”

  Ligacheva stepped down the narrow space between a file cabinet and an equipment console to see where Sobchak was pointing. It was a paper chart, unscrolling from one drum and winding onto another. A pen had drawn a graph across it, a graph that had suddenly spiked upward not long ago, and was now hovering well above where it had begun.

  ”This is your record of seismic activity?” Ligacheva asked, unimpressed.

  Sobchak looked up at her, startled. “Seismic activity? Oh, no, no,” he said. “That’s over there.” He pointed to a large bank of machinery on the other side of the room, then turned back to the first chart and tapped it. “This chart shows radiation levels.”