Page 64 of Stars
“And we’ve got ours.” Ethan patted his chest and the radio clipped there. “Let us know if anything comes up.”
They should be fine, this deep into the interior, but they’d thought that before and been wrong. Officially, they were only sightseeing in Russia, chartering a private helicopter for a tour of the Tunguska meteor crater. Sure, Jack was best friends with the Russian president, but with the current calamities in orbit, Sergey was hard to get hold of. Jack had decided to slip into Russia undercover, playing up their wealthy-tourist facade. If a Krai governor or a local FSB chief got grouchy with them, well, then they could bother Sergey and smooth it all over. But if they could get in and get out without adding to Sergey’s satellite-sized ulcer, all the better.
Ethan and Welby confirmed their heading on the GPS. Pete and Blake took up the rear as Jack fell in with Ethan, and the five slipped into the Siberian forest.
Darkness wreathed them, the branches of the pine and elm weaving together like a bower. Beneath the thick canopy, the sunlight strained to touch the ground. Perpetually wet earth nurtured moss and lichen, fungus and scrub crowding at the base of massive tree trunks, desperate to siphon a taste of sunlight from the trees’ roots. A chill hung in the air, even in summer, like snow was a whisper away. Their breath fogged in front of their faces, made the air even more humid.
Like the first time they’d crawled through Siberia, the place gave Ethan the creeps. It was too quiet. Pete was right: it was primordial. It was raw, nature so crisp and unrestrained that they were merely animals in its vastness. As Milo had taught them years before, in Siberia, one challenge took priority: survival.
The shadows between the trees seemed to slide between the trunks, teasing at the edges of their vision. Ethan kept his hands on the compact MP5 sling-loaded on his chest. Pete and Blake were quiet as they covered the rear. They were alone, according to the FLIR camera and everything they’d seen, and yet—
He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was out there.
Fucking Siberia. Why did they always end up circling back to the shittiest places?
Jack had persuaded Siddiqi to part with the journal he had used to try to hunt down the mysterious Soviet weapons lab. “It was far, far outside ofBiopreparat,” Siddiqi had told Jack.Biopreparathad been the Soviet Union’s bioweapons research organization. “Biopreparatwas civilian.”
Jack had scoffed. Maybe on the books it was civilian. In reality, the Soviet government used to love to hide weapons production within legitimate pharmaceutical facilities, in rings of increasing levels of lethality until, at the very center of each lab, the hottest viruses and pathogens were created.
Siddiqi had shaken his head. “The webs nations weave. Your country is adept at the very same thing. ButthisSoviet lab, and whatever they made there… It wasmilitary. And the militaryneverdies. Soviet, Russian, whatever they want to call themselves, they are always the same beasts.”
The lab was small and, as Siddiqi had said, not one of the knownBiopreparatfacilities. “The Soviet military simply took over isolated villages and towns, buried themselves there, and pretended no program existed at all, Jack. Where do you begin to search for such a thing?”
“Where were you shot?”
Siddiqi had grudgingly told Jack he’d been searching in Krasnoyarsk Krai that fateful day.
That dropped their search area to only one million square miles.
They looked for a closed military town, now abandoned, inside Krasnoyarsk Krai. There were only three, according to the files they had access to through the CIA.
All three had been a bust. Two were above the Arctic Circle in frozen wastes, unlike the description of the lab in Siddiqi’s journal. The third was a nuclear town that had opened itself to the West in the late nineties in a scientific exchange with the promise of a reciprocal visit to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Ethan and Welby had analyzed the journal itself, uncovering clues Siddiqi had overlooked. Idle mentions of transport times from Krasnoyarsk to the lab and how many days it took for mail or shipments to arrive. Comments about the weather, moaning about snowstorms or freezes that matched up with specific dates in the eighties. It was oblique intelligence, puzzle pieces out of sequence they could use to build a map through weather satellites and distance measurements.
They’d been left with a five-hundred-square-mile area, deep in the heart of Siberia in the Evenkiysky District. Then they started in on satellite photos. They searched for ruins, for decayed towns and decrepit leftovers. Any hints of something long buried or forgotten. The region was home to native reindeer herders and tribes. Any military structure, even one that was abandoned, stood out like a beacon on modern satellites. Whatever the Soviets had tried to hide, they would find.
A burned-down husk of a village named Uchami tumbled out of their searches after days of studying satellite images. It was nothing but a scorch mark and a few steel beams on the bank of a river. It could be nothing. It could be a long-abandoned Evenki town.
Or it could be the lab they were looking for.
Forty years after rumors of the lab had evaporated, they weren’t likely to find any virus incubators left lying around. But it was their first lead, and they had to follow it.
Five miles passed in a jade blur, in ashen fog and an ice-tipped chill that stabbed their lungs with every inhale. They moved fast to stay warm, and soon they were at the bank of the Tunguska River, staring across the burbling current at the remnants of Uchami.
“Suit up,” Jack said. “We’re not taking any risks. We don’t know what’s over there.”
They donned white Tyvek coveralls and rubber boots, goggles, and face masks before helping each other tape thick rubber gloves over their forearms.
The Tunguska carved a wide trench through Siberia’s heart, but by Uchami, sand bars and shallow currents lapped against muddy shores. They picked their way across the river slowly, the black water sloshing around their calves and the frigid mud sucking at their boots.
The land around Uchami was barren for a half mile in all directions, the trees long dead and stripped by the wind or fallen to the ground and decaying into fungus and dirt. Their soaked boots sucked up dirt as they climbed the river bank toward the remnants of Uchami.
As they crept closer, the dirt turned to ash.
“This is recent,” Ethan said. He had to talk loudly, almost shout over his mask. His voice was still muffled. “Something burned here within the past few months.”
“It couldn’t have been our mystery lab. Siddiqi said the rumor was it vanished at the fall of the Soviet Union.” Jack pushed ahead, stepping carefully into the center of a charred ring of blackened metal. “And this isn’t enough debris for a lab manufacturing virus.” Kneeling, Jack hefted one end of a scorched metal tube from the ashes. “What is this?”
