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“Bones,” Ethan said. He looked up. Met Jack’s gaze. A hundred human skulls lay at his muddy feet, empty eye sockets staring up at him, dislocated jaws spilling from the mud walls of the trench. Femurs and scapulas, ribs and wrist bones, pushed up out of the earth. “This is a fucking mass grave.”
“Over there,” Welby called. “Another one.”
Jack and Blake helped haul Ethan out of the grave, grasping him with both hands and dragging him up the frost-covered muddy trench. Ethan fell back as he reached the top, leaning against Jack. A slender tibia stuck to the bottom of his boot. He pried it off, turned it over. It was light, almost like a bird’s, and brittle.
It was a putrid mustard-umber, tinged with soot along the ends. “Someone tried to burn them. Years ago.”
“They didn’t do a very good job.”
“Guys,” Pete called. He and Welby crouched at the rim of a second trench. “Take a look at this.”
Ethan hesitated before looking, expecting to see more piles of eyeless skulls and unhinged jaws, as if the dead were still locked in the throes of excruciating deaths. Had they been alive when they were burned and buried? Or did their burial take place after some bioweapon had destroyed their lives? Who were these people who’d been reduced to charred bones and ash?
“Look.” Pete pointed.
A single skeleton lay intact in the trench, its jaw unhinged from its skull, its empty eye sockets staring skyward. Rotten clothing disintegrated around him, threads like worms weaving through the mud. “That looks like a Soviet military uniform,” Ethan said.
“There’s something in the mud. What is it?”
Blake, Pete, and Welby shared a silent battle of wills, aYou go—Fuck you, I’m not jumping in there—No, youbefore Welby checked his gear, then slid on his butt into the trench and landed in a squat over the skeleton’s legs.
“He wasn’t burned,” Welby called. “His bones are intact.” He reached for the uniform, awkwardly fingering the moldering, disintegrating fabric, his hand made clumsy by the thick gloves. “This is definitely Soviet. And this,” he said, reaching for an eight-pointed blue-and-gold star on a lone piece of green wool, “is anOrder for Service to the Homeland in the Armed Forces, first class. It’s one of the Soviet Union’s highest military honors. Only thirteen were ever awarded.”
“Why does a corpse in an unmarked grave in Siberia have one? Whoisthis guy?” Ethan grimaced. “Luke, what’s that? Something’s between his ribs.”
Welby picked his way forward, the mud sucking on his rubber boots as he tried to avoid stepping on the skeleton’s delicate finger bones. He reached into the collapsed rib cage and fished out a rusted scrap of metal. “It looks like a name tag.”
“What’s it say?”
Welby tossed the name tag up to Ethan, and Ethan held it up so Jack could try to read the faded Cyrillic letters. Since he’d left office, Jack had taken it upon himself to learn Russian, the language of his best friend. He hadn’t had a chance to try it out with Sergey yet, but he and Ethan had visited Sasha in Houston a handful of times, and Sasha had been as joyous as they’d ever seen him when Jack surprised him with his new language. Sasha had been able to relax and fall back into his native tongue at times as they sipped wine and spent an evening talking about NASA and his training and how he and Sergey were holding up long distance.
“It’s definitely a name tag, probably from the guy in there.” Jack frowned, rubbing at one corner and trying to tease out the nearly vanished letters. “It’s… Jesus, he’s a general. General Igor Sevastyanov.”
“Why is a Soviet general buried out here?” Ethan asked.
“And what did he do to deserve it,” Pete said.
Jack’s face was framed in Tyvek, his eyes hidden behind his goggles, but still, Ethan saw his determination. “These graves are freshly dug.”
“Who comes to an old bioweapons lab and digs up mass graves?” Blake asked.
“Someone looking for something,” Jack said.
“Did they find it?” Welby’s question hung between them, heavy on the frozen air.
“We’ll have to figure that out. But now, I don’t think a reindeer herder stumbled into this place. This feels different. This feels like a mission. An operation. Besides, if this was just a coverup of an accidental outbreak, why is Moscow shutting down Dr. Mendoza? Why is someone keeping all this from Sergey?”
“Let’s pull him out,” Jack said, “carefully. Everyone check your suits. We don’t know that this corpse is General Sevastyanov. But we need to find out if it is. And we need to learn everything about him.”
Ethan tightened his mask and goggles and then checked Jack’s gear. Siddiqi’s words came back to him. The taut, frightened tone he’d never heard from the playboy terrorist before.Whatever they made there, it crawled straight out of Hell.
He stared into the trenches at the brittle, charred bones.
What had happened to those villageswasn’tan accident.
Something had crawled out of Uchami.
And someone came and took it—for a purpose.
