by Greig Beck
The pair stood and began to follow the tracks.
“That bear…” Mitch spoke without turning.
“What about it?” Red asked.
“… you think it’s as Carter said; you know, it being like a ghillie suit?”
“Impossible.” Red blew air between his pressed lips. “That’s just dumb.”
“What do you think happened to all those bear guts then… and the brain?” Mitch frowned. “That was some weird shit—I don’t even think it was a real bear.”
Red snorted. “’Course it was a real goddamn bear. Wolves must’ve got it—got some huge ones around here; Siberian wolves are big suckers… get to 150 pounds.” He chuckled. “And guess what? They don’t hibernate, so there’s your suspects, not some dumb-ass mutant bear.”
“Yeah, sure, okay.” Mitch nodded. “Wolves I can deal with.”
The pair continued to follow the tracks. The prints curved inland about a quarter-mile and then headed back… toward their compound.
A light snow began to fall again, dampening the last sounds of the forest and also slowly filling in the tracks. In another hour, they were beginning to close in on where they started out.
“I don’t believe it; this fucker is heading right toward our base,” Mitch said.
“Well then, we better head it off. Come on, let’s move it.” Red picked up the pace, forcing Mitch on as well.
They tracked it all the way back to the small hill overlooking their compound, and soon located an area where there were multiple indentations in the snow that made it look all churned up.
Red saw how the prints seemed to become closer together before the area of disturbed snow. “Whatever it was, it sped up.” Red walked in a little closer. “Then something went down here.”
He turned, slowly scanning the surrounding forest, and then noticed something on the tree just in from the skirmish of marks. He quickly crossed to it and lifted a finger to wipe it across the mark, then brought it to his nose.
“Ash. Someone was smoking here.” He turned about and then pointed. “Hang on; more tracks leading in.” He walked toward them and crouched. “Human, single person, probably a guy in boots.” He rested his forearms on his knees. “It all came together right here, and went bad for someone or something.”
Red stood up and turned. “Then the big tracks go that way.”
They followed the bigger tracks all the way to the frozen lake. They didn’t stop. But at the water’s edge, there was a broken-open hole in the thick ice as if something had burrowed in.
“It went swimming? After it punched a big hole in the ice.” Mitch shook his head. “Why would it do that?”
Red exhaled, blowing a long cloud of steam. “Fucked if I know. But remember what we found after the bear guts went missing? Same thing.” He turned back. “What worries me more is that this fucker was up at the tree line watching us.”
Mitch turned. “A scout?”
“What do you think?” he replied.
Mitch gritted his teeth. “Fuck me. Gives me the willies thinking these things are watching us.”
“We need more kit,” Red said. “Let’s get that fat Russian, Yuri, to order us some motion-operated spy cams we can plant around the camp perimeter. If they’re watching us, I wanna be watching them right back.”
“Works for me,” Mitch said.
“We can put it on Carter’s tab.” Red took one last look around. “Come on, we’ve been out long enough.”
CHAPTER 29
Federal Agency for Fisheries and Conservation—Moscow
Mikhail Ivanov whistled an old Russian folk tune as he opened the package from the mill house fish farm in Siberia. It was sent from Carter Stenson, the brother of Marcus Stenson who had mysteriously disappeared.
He was glad when the wife and brother had decided to take over, and more so when they brought in some good people to assist them with the technical side of the breeding program.
For the most part, breeding and raising sturgeon was expensive, time-consuming, complicated, and given there was no return on any investment for at least five years, no one wanted to be involved. Having the American couple invest was a stroke of good fortune.
Besides that, he liked them and wanted them to be successful, so he gave them his full support. Mikhail was a proud Russian, and he knew that Beluga sturgeon caviar was a national treasure and must be preserved for future generations. If it took an American to help them do it, then so be it.
He was the lead fisheries’ scientist at the department and took charge of the program personally, so when anything arose, he ensured it was forwarded directly to him so he could smooth out bureaucratic hurdles or any action requests for assistance before they landed in some administrator’s top drawers where they simply went to gather dust and die.
Mikhail finished opening the package, working slowly as his fingers suffered from a little arthritis now, and then held up the small test tube sealed with tape and wax. There was a freezer pack included to keep it cool and he quickly discarded that. He frowned and shook the tube, seeing the glutinous dark liquid slop back and forth.
He opened the accompanying letter, saw it was from Nikolay Grudinin, and began to read.
Good morning or afternoon, dear Mikhail,
I have enclosed a sample of some biological material we retrieved from the carcass of a bear in the Lake Baikal Forest. The bear was not healthy—far from it—and we found some unusual characteristics that warranted further investigation.
This sample was extracted from its cranial cavity and could not be identified with our limited resources.
Hope you can shed some light on it. Thank you for your assistance.
P.S. The bear was found far from the lake, and the fish and the compound area are not contaminated, and we simply wish to know if the substance might be rabies.
Your friend, Nikolay Grudinin
The Mill House, Lake Baikal, Siberia
“Hmm.” Mikhail closed the letter and held the tube up again. “Well, what are you? Not bear bile, and not Arctic rabies. Maybe some necrotized brain tissue from a form of meningitis type infection, perhaps?”
The department had a complete laboratory that extended to electron scanning microscopes, gene sequencers, and a DNA database of nearly every creature on the planet.
The unfortunate aspect of this sample was that Mikhail lacked important information, like how long was the bear dead? What was the state of the brain? And most importantly, how long was it exposed to the external environment? This could itself have contaminated the sample.
Mikhail prepared a glass dish and stuck a label on the top, marking it “Sample 01: Siberian” and the date. He then used a scalpel to cut the seal open as he walked to a standard microscope. He first upended it into his dish and used a long, glass rod to pick up a drop on its end for him to smear on a tiny glass pane. He sealed the dish and then pushed the slide pane into the viewing aperture of the scope.
He lifted his glasses to his forehead and looked down the eyepiece, gently moving the focus for a moment. He concentrated as he increased the magnification.
There were certain things he was expecting as it didn’t really matter how diverse the cells were because they had certain parts in common—cell membranes surrounding a cell, forming the physical boundary between the cell and its environment. Then, inside the cell’s skin, there was the cytoplasm, which was the watery substance called cytosol, which contains other cell structures such as ribosomes, where proteins are made. Finally, there was the DNA, a nucleic acid found in all cells holding the genetic instructions cells needed to make proteins.
These were the things that were parts of all cells and the characteristics Mikhail expected to see. After all, they were in the cells of organisms as different as bacteria and human beings, and in fact, all known organisms had such similar cells, and these similarities showed that all life on Earth had a common evolutionary history.
Mikhail lifted his head, blinked a few times, and then
looked back down into the scope. The problem was the cells he was looking at had none of those characteristics. That in itself was outstanding and a little alarming, but what was even more astounding was the cells were still alive.
“What the hell are you?” he breathed out and straightened.
Options flooded his mind that worked a mile a minute. He took the sample from under the microscope and prepared it for the spectrometer and the electron microscope. He also used some in the DNA sequencer, even though there seemed no evidence of nucleic acid for it to test.
It took him several hours before the full results started feeding in, and all of them just left him more and more baffled. There was one final analytical tool at his disposal, and it was when he used the images and analysis results from the sequencers and spectrometer in the global gene database, that he finally got a hit.
Mikhail stared at the screen for many minutes, almost trance-like, before his lips formed the single word: “Tunguska.”
He sat down slowly, before his legs gave way. All Russians knew of the event that occurred near the Stony Tunguska River in Yeniseysk. It was in 1908, over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga, where 770 square miles of forest was flattened.
The explosion was generally attributed to the airburst of a meteor, and even though it was classified as an impact event, no impact crater had ever been found. The suspected object was thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of around five miles over Siberia rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth. To this day, the Tunguska event was and is the largest modern impact occurrence on Earth in recorded history.
All Russians were aware of the event, but only a few scientists knew of the analysis done in 2013 of the micro-samples taken from a Siberian peat bog near the center of the affected area, showing fragments that may be of meteoritic origin.
They also showed up something even more interesting—biological material. Not truly cellular, as there was no defined internal structures as we knew them. They were an anomaly and a paradox, and to this day, they remained unique and a mystery.
The known data was kept in a secure file named: THE SIBERIAN INCIDENT—TUNGUSKA. And another thing the researchers did was they entered the biological analysis results into the genome database, in the event more of the material was ever found. And Mikhail had just done that now.
Tunguska was nearly 1,000 miles from Lake Baikal so there was no way they could be from the same event. So something else had occurred there. Something new… or perhaps something very old that’d just reappeared?
Mikhail got to his feet, his eyes still staring. Professional scientific curiosity burned within him.
The scientist grabbed up the packaging Carter Stenson had sent and read the phone number attached. He lifted the phone and his fingers flew as he dialed. He waited, listened, then hung up and dialed again, and again—it was the same every time: no connection.
Mikhail slammed the phone down and quickly glanced at his watch—he had a hundred things to do, and if he hurried, he could still make the midnight flight to Listvyanka.
The Russian scientist spun on his heel and headed for the door.
CHAPTER 30
Carter came to the door of his cabin rubbing his eyes and looked out over the frozen compound. Last night, Red and Mitch had come to see him and babbled about following some tracks, and then seen some sort of skirmish area up at the tree line. For a few moments, he could barely focus. And that, he knew, could be deadly.
For the sake of himself, Sara, the business, and every person at the mill compound, he needed to be laser-focused and razor-sharp.
Carter wanted to pool what they knew, so he had called a get-together down at the mill house for this morning and had Mitch send word to Yuri and all the Russian workers —it was time for a good old-fashioned management meeting.
As he headed down along one of the snow trenches they’d dug as pathways, Sara caught up with him, so heavily rugged up her arms stuck out from her side.
“What’s happening?” she asked him.
“Just getting everyone together for a general update. Share what we know.” He snorted. “What little we know.”
“Good plan; we should do it often, maybe twice weekly,” she declared, and then looked up at him. “Got a message back from Moscow; they’re coming. Then lost comms before I could ask any questions.”
“Really? What did they say?” Carter stopped just outside the heavy double doors.
“I’ll update everyone.” She nodded to the door. “Thank you.”
Carter pushed one of the heavy doors inward and Sara went through.
“Everyone,” Carter said as a greeting to the group.
There were nods and muttered replies to both him and Sara.
There was coffee on, and Pavel had made some pryanika, soft cookies spiced with honey and cinnamon. The group stood or sat around the large entrance room that they had originally brought the bear carcass into. It was large enough for all of them, but the downside was it wasn’t fully heated.
Dmitry, Pavel and his son, Nikolay, plus Stefan, all stood on one side; Yuri, Red, and Mitch closer to Carter and Sara. Their combined body heat began to warm the room.
“Okay, it’s time to share information. It’s no secret that there is something out of the ordinary going on.”
Yuri’s eyes widened for a moment and his lips hiked up at one of the corners.
Carter grinned and waved him down. “Yeah, yeah, I know; that’s an understatement. But I believe we have everything covered for now.” Carter half-turned to Sara. “As our company president is here, it’s a good time to share what we’ve been doing, progress, and any other things the group should know about.”
“Everything? About time.” Stefan’s gaze was flat.
“If it’s relevant to the group, then yes,” Carter said, knowing full well that gave him an out not to share anything he thought might stampede the horses, as they say.
Before Stefan had a chance to question him, Carter pointed to the big Russian. “Yuri, why don’t you give us an update on the pens?”
Yuri grunted. “All good so far. The ice has covered over the pens so they are safe… from above.” He eyed Carter knowingly before going on. “The adult fish are bedded in, and the sprats are feeding, growing, slowly, but growing. I think we have good progress here. No problems.” He stopped and waited.
“Very good, Yuri, thank you,” Carter said.
“Yes, that’s very good to hear, as they’re the foundation of our entire business, so thank you,” Sara said.
Pavel raised his hand.
“Yes, Pavel,” Sara asked.
“We are running low on meat. Dmitry and I should do some hunting again soon. There are seal colonies to the north and reindeer herds still in the forest. Is good time.” The older Russian waited.
“How far in the forest?” Sara asked.
Pavel bobbed his head. “Depends what we hunt.”
“No seals,” Carter said. “Two days, hunt together, do not split up, and not near the lake. Only hunt inland for now, okay? The, ah, bratva may still be hanging about. Doubtful, but best to be careful.”
Carter bet no one in the room thought it was the Russian mafia he was concerned about, but no one pushed him on it. The men nodded, and Pavel said something quickly in Russian to Nikolay who nodded.
The young man turned to Carter and cleared his throat. “My father wants to know if there are still booby traps in the forest.”
“No,” Carter said. “We’ve taken down the claymores in the forest, but there are several along the lake line. So you must avoid them. At the perimeter, we have installed motion and thermal sensors, and Red and Mitch requested motion-triggered cameras so we’ve got them to install as well. So like I said, stay away from the lake, and we’re all good.”
Carter saw Red raise his eyebrows, maybe asking should he share why they wanted the motion sensors, but Carter almost imperceptibly shook his head. Red nodded and just continued to watch the gro
up.
“Sara,” Carter asked. “Moscow development?”
Just saying the Russian capital’s name focused everyone.
“Thanks, Carter.” She looked across the group. “And thank you, everyone, for the progress and hard work.”
Sara stepped into the center of the group. “A while back, we sent a biological sample to the Federal Agency for Fisheries and Conservation for analysis. Well, they’ve answered us, more emphatically than I expected.” She half-smiled. “They’ll be paying us a visit.”
The group muttered and shifted their feet. Stefan tilted his head.
“They? Who is coming?”
Sara turned to him. “Mr. Mikhail Ivanov, and he’s also bringing another scientist as well, this one an evolutionary DNA specialist.”
Stefan’s eyes widened slightly. “It is unexpected, and highly unusual that Mikhail Ivanov, the lead scientist in the ministry, will be coming in person. Is this a good thing?”
“I thought we’d just get some sort of report back on what was in that stuff we sent. This might be a problem? What did he say?” Carter asked.
“Not much really,” Sara replied. “But he seems a supporter of ours, and I can see in Marcus’ notes that he worked with him before.”
Carter sighed. “So he wants to take a look for himself, huh?”
Sara nodded slowly. “It’ll be fine.”
The group shuffled and many of the Russians muttered amongst themselves about not liking Moscow bureaucrat’s onsite.
“I’m sure it’ll be okay,” Carter added loudly.
“Sure it will. Told you we should have burned or buried it.” Mitch sneered. “Now we’ve got the Russian authorities breathing down our necks.”
“No, he simply has an enquiring scientific mind and is coming to investigate the sample, and probably where it came from.” Sara turned to him. “He’ll help if we need it.”
Carter glanced at Mitch. “We might be able to get some government assistance with our potential mafia problem as well. Nothing makes the local authorities more responsive than a visit from Moscow.”
