He glanced up at the pipeline, more out of habit than concern, and froze.
”Holy Mary,” he said.
Not all of the spots on the floor, Galyshev realized, were water or oil.
Three headless corpses were dangling by their ankles from the steel framework overhead, dangling and dripping blood into puddles that were slowly oozing down across the floor into the waiting drains.
”So much for finding them alive,” Leskov said, with no trace of humor in his voice.
”But who killed them?” Shaporin asked. “And where’d the killers go?”
”There,” Galyshev said, pointing. “Rublev, you did your rounds?”
”Yes,” Rublev said, trying to see where Galyshev was pointing.
”See the boiler-room door?”
Rublev and the others looked. The boiler plant was just the other side of the maintenance area, closed off by a simple wooden door, a door that was supposed to be kept closed at all times. Whoever had the duty of making the daily security round was supposed to check that door.
”But that was closed!” Rublev protested. “I tried it myself! “
”I’m sure it was,” Galyshev said. “Come on.”
”But there aren’t any lights on in there,” Shaporin said as the group began advancing across the concrete.
”I’ve heard that the Americans use infrared goggles to see in the dark,” Leskov said. Galyshev glanced over at him, expecting the comment to be turned into a joke, but Leskov wasn’t smiling.
Galyshev remembered who had had watch duty in the boiler room that shift-Dmitri Vesnin, Leskov’s best friend. Vesnin had presumably gone to see what was happening at the east door, and now his body was one of the three dangling in the maintenance area.
”Americans?” Shaporin said. “You think Americans would hang them upside down like that?”
”Who else could it be?” Leskov asked.
”Or what else could it be,” Rublev said. “How could it be anything human? How long would it take to climb up there and hang them up like that?” He gestured with the barrel of his weapon.
”Let’s take a look in there and find out,” Leskov said, taking a step toward the boiler plant.
”Whoever did this may still be in there, or they may not,” Galyshev said, moving along with Leskov. “You wait here-cover me.”
”The others can cover us both,” Leskov said. “Those were my friends.”
”Mine, too,” Galyshev said. “Come on, then.”
Side by side, the two men advanced across the maintenance area, stalking as if the boiler room were the lair of some dangerous beast-which, Galyshev thought, it might very well be. He had talked bravely about how there were no monsters out there on the ice, but he knew they weren’t all that far from the old nuclear testing ground on Novaya Zemlya, and visions of horribly mutated polar bears were lurking somewhere in the back of his mind.
Sobchak had said something about higher-than-normal radiation levels back when all this trouble first started, Galyshev remembered that all too well. The scientists all said that the stories of radioactive mutants were nonsense, bad American science fiction-but the scientists had lied before or been wrong before.
And why would any human being hang those corpses up like that? It had to be some sort of beast!
He crept up to one side of the door, while Leskov took a position at the other. Galyshev waved to Leskov to wait, then leaned over and slid one hand through the door, groping for the light switch.
”They’d have an advantage with the light behind -me,” he whispered to Leskov. “I need to see them.”
Leskov nodded.
Galyshev’s fingers found the switch. He tensed, braced himself-then flicked the switch and burst through the door, AK-47 ready.
It took him a moment to understand what he saw.
The door opened on a short passageway, a meter or so long, that led into the main boiler room. That boiler room was not well lit, even with the four ceiling lights on; it was a shadowy place of hissing pipes, black dust, and the orange glow from the burners.
This was the heart of the heating system for the entire complex-here oil was burned to boil water into steam, which was circulated through a network of pipes and radiators to every inhabited portion of Station #12. The oil came straight from the fields, so it was heavy, dirty stuff, and despite the chimneys and blowers soot seeped out into the boiler plant, covering everything with black grit.
The room was sweltering hot, of course, despite the biting cold outside the station. The heat radiated off the main boiler in waves of rippling air. The metal sides of the boiler were too hot to touch, new workers arriving at the station sometimes put themselves in the infirmary with second-degree burns while discovering this.
Galyshev had been working in Assyma for years; he would no more have touched the boiler than he would have thrust his bare hand into live coals.
It took him a moment, therefore, to realize that he really did see three big, man-shaped creatures leaning up against the boiler, their backs pressed tight to the unbearably hot metal.
He couldn’t shoot them, he realized; his fire would hit the boiler. The metal walls were thick, but the boiler was old, and was designed to hold pressure in, not to keep bullets out. It might explode if he shot at it.
These things were unquestionably the killers, though. They held things like spears, there were jagged blades on their wrists ...
And they weren’t human at all, he realized. Not only could they press up against metal heated to 120 degrees Celsius without being burned, but they were huge, their skin was yellowish, their nails black and hard and pointed, like claws. They wore strange metal masks that hid their faces completely, while elsewhere much of their inhuman flesh was exposed.
They not only weren’t burned, they seemed to relish the heat.
”My God,” Galyshev said as it sank in just what he was seeing.
The three masked faces turned to look at him. Something moved-not one of the creatures themselves, but something on the shoulder of the one nearest Galyshev, something humped and black that lifted up and pivoted to point at him.
Three red dots roved briefly before settling onto Galyshev’s face.
A weapon, Galyshev realized, and he started to duck, to point his own weapon, but the blue-white fireball tore his head off before he had had time to fully react.
Leskov had not yet looked into the room, though he had been tempted upon seeing how Galyshev was staring; he was holding himself back, staying in reserve, letting Galyshev take the lead here. Galyshev was the superintendent, after all.
Then something flashed blue-white, momentarily blinding Leskov. Galyshev’s AK-47 stuttered briefly as the superintendent’s finger squeezed the trigger in a dying spasm, and when Leskov could see again Galyshev’s headless corpse was falling to the floor.
Leskov let out a wordless scream of rage and fear and swung himself into the doorway, firing wildly.
He never even saw them. He saw a blur, and then felt the hot shocking pain of a blade ripping through his belly, and then Leskov died, falling beside Galyshev, the AK-47 spraying bullets across the boiler-room ceiling as he toppled backward.
On the other side of the maintenance area the others watched in horror. They saw the blue-white flash, saw Galyshev and Leskov fall, but they didn’t see the enemy, didn’t see what had killed the two.
”What happened to them?” Shaporin asked. He raised his voice and shouted, “Who are you? Who’s in there? Why are you doing this?”
No one answered.
”I don’t like this,” Rublev said. “I’m no soldier.
I’m getting out of here.” He began creeping backward up the corridor.
Then there was another blue-white flash, this one tearing across the full width of the maintenance area, and Shaporin crumpled to the concrete, his chest blown apart. Rublev turned and ran.
None of the men ever got a clear look at their attackers; the things moved too fast, the light w
as poor. A few fired their weapons wildly into the darkness, hoping to hit something, but without effect.
Five more men died before they could even attempt to flee; Rublev was the only one to make it as far as the main corridor. He didn’t turn to see if anyone was pursuing him, didn’t turn to see what had happened to his comrades.
He didn’t see the spear until it had punched through his body. Then he glimpsed the barbed, red-coated blade for only an instant before he died.
Rublev’s body hung limply on the spear for a moment as the creature looked around, scanning the corridor for any further sign of life.
Then it flung the corpse aside and returned to the warmth of the boiler plant.
Chapter 14
James Theodore Ridgely, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had never trusted the Russians, hadn’t trusted them when they called themselves Soviets and preached their Communist bullshit about historic inevitability, and he didn’t trust them now when they called themselves Russians again and talked about the brotherhood of nations.
He didn’t mind if they knew it, either-in fact, he took pride in thinking he was doing his bit to let the Russkies know they weren’t fooling everybody. That might, he thought, help keep them in line.
And someone, going by the intelligence report he’d just received, was sure as hell out of line now. Four hundred percent increase in background radiation in the Assyma region on the Yamal Peninsula? Huge localized rise in temperature? That didn’t happen by itself, or because some factory worker dropped a canister.
He had had to check a map to be sure just where the hell the Yamal Peninsula was. Northwestern Siberia, on the Arctic Ocean-not that you were ever likely to see any open seawater that far north! That was hundreds of miles from the border with the Norwegian part of Lapland, thousands of miles from the Bering Strait.
The middle of fucking nowhere, that’s where the Yamal Peninsula was.
So of course this Assyma place was an oil field. One of the coldest, most barren places on Earth, colder than the North Pole itself, and the Russians were pumping thousands of barrels of high-grade oil out of the ground there.
Ridgely sometimes, in his more profanely imaginative moments, thought that God had been playing games when He decided where to put petroleum deposits. It seemed as if He had gone looking for the most miserable, useless places He could possibly put the stuff, godforsaken deserts, icy hellholes, underwater ... maybe God just didn’t like oil, so He tried to put it in places where He wouldn’t have to look at it, places that belonged to the most unpleasant people available.
So, of course, the Yamal Peninsula was just filthy with the stuff.
Oil wasn’t radioactive, though. That wasn’t any oil spill or wellhead fire that the satellites had spotted. And there weren’t supposed to be any nuclear power plants anywhere around there.
There probably weren’t any power plants. Building a nuclear plant in the middle of an oil field a thousand miles from the nearest city-now, that would be way up there on the stupidity lists. It was a safe bet even the Russians weren’t that dumb. Ridgely wouldn’t have put it past the Iranians or the French, but the Russians knew better.
The flare-up was too far inland to be a grounded submarine with reactor trouble. The Russians still had plenty of subs cruising the arctic, but there wouldn’t be any reactor leaks a hundred miles from the coast.
Not natural, not a power plant, not a sub-that left weapons.
It had to be weapons, and messing around with nuclear weapons there was definitely out of line. The Russians swore they were disassembling nukes, not building them, and that sort of radiation and heat spill could equally well have come from an accident in either assembly or disassembly, but all the official disassembly was going on in the south, not way the hell up in the arctic.
So somebody was up to something.
Ridgely wasn’t entirely convinced it was the boys in Moscow. It could just as easily have been one of the various loony factions that were causing trouble over there, the nationalists or the leftover Commies or the local mafias, but whoever it was, Moscow had to know about it, and they should have passed on a quiet word or two to someone, just so no one would get too upset.
They should have told someone, and most likely, they should have told him.
Ridgely had gotten a few sub-rosa reports from his Russian counterparts in his day, and had now and then passed them along a few little warnings of his own. Just because he didn’t trust the sneaky bastards was no reason to risk letting the whole fucking world blow up in his face over some trivial little misunderstanding.
He hadn’t gotten any word on this one, though.
He dropped the printout, picked up the phone, then hesitated.
These were nukes they were talking about. This was the big time. And on the arctic coast, the only logical place to aim nukes was over the pole at North America. If this was a bunch of Islamic terrorists or some African government trying to pick up a little atomic blackmail fodder on the cheap, those readings would have been down in the Caucasus or central Asia somewhere, not in Siberia.
It might be Zhirinovsky’s crazies or something, but by God Moscow should have told them by now; they’d had a couple of days, and Ridgely hadn’t heard a peep. A phone call just wasn’t going to do an adequate job of expressing American displeasure at that silence.
This called for a personal visit.
A public personal visit.
He picked up the phone after all and punched the button for his secretary.
”Yes, Ambassador?” she said instantly. Ridgely smiled. He appreciated competence.
”Steffie, honey,” he said, “I’m going to be paying a little visit on the Russian ambassador at..” he glanced at the clock- “at about two, I’d say.” That would be after Grigori got back from lunch, but before he got busy, and if his lunch ran late, then Ridgely could camp out and make a show of it. “I think that if some of our friends from the press happened to come by about then, they might be interested in what I’ve got to say to the old boy.”
”On or off the record?” Steffie asked.
”Oh, I think this’ll be on the record,” Ridgely said, leaning back in his chair. “Nothing official, though, just a chat we don’t mind having reported.”
”Got it, Ambassador,” Steffie said. “So is this a surprise visit, or should I tell Mr. Komarinets’s staff that you’re coming?”
Ridgely considered that. He noticed that she didn’t bother asking if she should try to make an appointment; Steffie knew her job.
”Make it a five-minute warning, maybe,” he said.
”Yes, sir.”
Ridgely hung up the phone and smiled a tight little smile of satisfaction.
Those bastards weren’t going to get away with anything on his watch!
Chapter 15
“My government knows nothing of any clandestine activity of any sort in that area, Mr. Ambassador,” Grigori Komarinets had repeated, speaking not to Ridgely but directly into the CNN camera.
General Mavis stood with his hands clasped behind his back as he watched the report on the big TV in the situation room. This Ambassador Komarinets was good, no question--or maybe the folks in Moscow had lied to him, and he honestly didn’t know what was going on.
”Meeters,” he said, “call someone, make sure Ridgely gets a cookie for helping us out on this-an assignment in Vienna, a shot on Larry King, whatever makes him happy.”
”Yessir, “ Meeters replied. He stood where he was; Mavis hadn’t said to call now. And there wasn’t any hurry; these things were best done discreetly, not making the connection too obvious. Mavis glanced at him.
Meeters looked uneasy, preoccupied-but then, why shouldn’t he? According to CNN, they might be working up toward World War III.
And they might be, at that, but not the way any of these people thought.
Mavis turned back to the screen and watched for a few seconds more, until CNN cut to a commercial. Then he turned and headed down the co
rridor toward his office.
Meeters, after an instant’s hesitation, followed; when they were out of earshot of the officers still watching the TV, he jogged a few steps to catch up and said, “Excuse me, sir-might I have a word with you?”
Mavis glanced back at the other, then led the way into his office.
”Close the door if you like,” he said as he sat down on a corner of his desk. “What’s on your mind?”
Meeters stepped in and closed the door. “Sir,” he said, “I was there when the preliminary satellite reports came in-I was the one who released that first report, and at the time I was sure someone was hauling warheads out there.
”And?” Mavis said.
”Well, sir, I was wrong,” Meeters said. “I’ve been looking at the technical reports, and I don’t think we’re seeing missiles out there. The figures don’t add up.”
Mavis nodded. “You figured that out all by yourself, did you?”
”Yessir,” Meeters said. “And if those aren’t bombs or missiles, then Ambassador Ridgely and the rest could be stirring up a hornet’s nest over a threat that doesn’t even exist. We might be ...”
Mavis held up a hand and cut him off. “Stop right there.” He stood up. “I like you, Meeters, you’re a good man, you take orders but you’re not afraid to make decisions. You’ve got a good brain. And that’s why I’m not going to have you arrested and thrown into protective custody.”
Meeters blinked. “Sir?”
”All right, that hot spot isn’t any Russian -missiles,” Mavis said. “Think it through, then. There’s something there, so if it isn’t nukes, what is it?”
Meeters looked blank.
”Think, man,” Mavis said. “What might it be?”
”I don’t know, sir.”
”Whatever it is, there’s a lot of energy being thrown around, right?”
”Yes, sir ...”
”Well, then, maybe it’s something our weapons people wouldn’t mind getting a look at.” He decided to go ahead and let Meeters in on it if he picked up the clues.
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