Page 30 of Ascendent
Ilya held up his gloved thumb in return.All good.
“Yuri is waiting for you inside.” Ruslan handed him a flashlight and pulled back the first of the plastic drapes the emergency response team had erected outside the GRU’s Chimera lab. The lab, nestled within the closed town of Solnechny and isolated on Gorodomyla Island on Lake Seliger, in the Tver Oblast, was northwest of Moscow, buried in the wilderness. The town was small, a military intelligence secret enclave nestled in a forested island slightly less than five kilometers square. A hundred years before, the island had been home to one of the first biological weapons facilities in Russia. In the 1950’s and 60’s, rocket engineers poured onto the island, trying to manufacture a specialized delivery system for the horde of bioweapons the Soviet Union had manufactured. After the millennium, nerve agents autopsied out of murdered spies the world over traced their pathological origins to this tiny island in the middle of nowhere.
Ilya had hoped, Christ, he had hoped, that Solnechny had been ignored during the coup. Moroshkin and his minions weren’t fucking stupid enough to mess with biological agents, he’d thought. Moroshkin was the former head of Western Military Region HQ. He knew what fucked up shit lay in the deceptively idyllic town.
The first reports of strange deaths had started coming in from the towns around Lake Seliger, from the towns downwind of the biological weapons base. People were dying of hemorrhage, of strange coughs, of pustules that looked eerily like pox.
Moroshkin, you fucking animal. You moron. You let that mad American general manipulate you into this?
Ilya slipped through the plastic sheeting and headed down the sealed polyurethane tunnel to the secured airlock covering the door of the lab. Fans blew air inward, toward the doors. If there was a breach, overpressure would blow any biological agents deeper into the lab, not allow them to disperse into the outside surroundings. Hopefully they could contain whatever had already gone so fucking wrong.
Inside the giant warehouse, generators hummed, a dull cacophony that stretched through the twisting isolation rooms, the clean rooms, the laboratories. Power to the island had been cut during the coup. Getting the refrigeration units back on, the isolation chambers powered up, had been Ilya’s first order.
A flashlight beam bounced into his face shield. He waved it away, snapped at the suited officer shining the light.
“Sorry, sir.” Yuri, a hulking yeti in his isolation suit, dropped the light. “Just checking.”
“Who the fuck else would it be?” he grumbled. “Where the hell did they get a suit that would fit you, you animal?”
Yuri grinned. Ilya could see it through the mask, his square teeth reflecting like lanterns. “I make my own. From the Army.”
Ilya snorted. Yuri and Ruslan had been special weapons operators in the Russian army before being recruited out of the military, first to the SVR, and then the FSB, Ilya’s organization. He kept their specific backgrounds off the official books, away from the oversight of the Federation Council. And, away from Sergey’s prying eyeballs, his picky protestations about openness and transparency. He didn’t want to justify his private secret police force that mirrored Russia’s military in might and specialties. His paranoia had been justified, hadn’t it? It had been the FSB and the federal police who had secured Russia after the coup. Who had retaken the country from the traitors, most of whom came from the military.
Sergey, whether he wanted to believe it or not, needed a loyal personal army.
In the old days, when the Tsars still ruled from St. Petersburg, each emperor—or empress—had their own personal imperial guard, the Lieb Guard, who protected their rulers. They were the elites of the military, the best of the Russian army, for the rulers alone. That was what Sergey needed. And, as Ilya had always done, he delivered to Sergey what Sergey needed most, without any messy questions.
Of course, it was the Pavlovsky Regiment who was the first to mutiny against the Tsars and join the Bolsheviks, decapitating the empire in a brutal, behind-the-back blow, a hundred years before.
Who could you ever truly trust in Russia?
Ilya marched behind Yuri through the dark corridors, stepping over debris and ducking past fallen fluorescent light cages. In the center of the warehouses, cages of dead animals sat in the dark. Even through the suit, through the seals and the fresh oxygen, Ilya could almost smell the heavy stench of putrefaction. The animals—mice, rats, and monkeys, used in each of the labs—had been left to die weeks ago. Maybe months ago.
Four labs ran around the perimeter of the warehouse, each quadrant separated by locked gates and the kind of heavy metal door he saw on submarines. The airlocks were supposed to be dogged shut, the locking wheel spun all the way closed. Everything was broken, gates hanging ajar, airlocks broken open and the heavy metal doors off their hinges. Labs within the broken containment quadrants were in total disarray. Tables overturned, vials shattered, centrifuges smashed to smithereens.
“These were the level two labs,” Yuri said. “Ahead are the level three labs.”
They passed through a broken double airlock and into a charred, blackened space. Burned remnants of biosafety cabinets, where lab workers and scientists had conducted their work behind thick screens of protective glass, lined the walls.
“You mean, what’s left of the level three labs,” Ilya growled. Dammit, he wanted a cigarette. This was worse than he’d thought.
“Wait until you see the level four labs.” Yuri led him back out to the main hallway, the rectangle that looped through the giant warehouse. Ahead, double airlock doors lay in a heap on the floor. Something had drilled through the locks, through the hinges, and ripped the airlocks clean away. Blast holes ripped through the walls, as if someone had taken an RPG to the lab’s superstructure. A destroyed decontamination room appeared through the wreckage, the positive pressure suits burned to a crisp.
“Fuck.”
Yuri nodded. He guided Ilya through the destruction, holding debris out of the way so Ilya could bend through the blast holes, pick his way past the destroyed decon chamber.
They stayed out of the level four biocontainment lab.
Everything was broken. Isolation cabinets were torched, centrifuges destroyed. Even the isolation vents were destroyed, the separate air circulation units that kept the level four lab separated from the rest of the warehouse. The floor was a carpet of broken glass, a thousand shattered vials spilling blood and plasma and cultures across the linoleum. Petri dishes bloomed bacteria colonies, spores quivering in the circulating air, the fans now blowing thanks to the power Ilya had turned back on. Burned black air hoses hung limp from the ceiling. Char marks lined the walls, places where fires had burned white-hot, eating the lab’s alcohol and solvents.
Level four biolabs held the most dangerous pathogens, the world’s most lethal agents. Biological and virological agents that had no cure, and no vaccine, and that could wipe out a population.
Ilya knew the suit was sealed. He knew he had his own oxygen. He could feel it on his face, the cool rush of his private, clean, uncontaminated air.
He watched a colony ofsomethingshiver out of a petri dish, lying meters away on the floor.
A monkey, long dead, long turned to putrefaction, oozed in a cage in the corner of the lab.
