Page 31 of Ascendent
Yuri’s flashlight scanned the wreckage. “We think they stole from the level four lab, then destroyed everything to cover their tracks. With this destruction…” He sighed. His entire suit inflated and deflated. “We can’t tell what was taken.”
“What about the vaults?” Ilya choked out. The refrigerated vaults that held the samples of hot agents the laboratory scientists and GRU special officers had worked on, were they empty? Had everything been cleaned out? His gaze fixed on the quivering spores of the petri dish, on the blood and congealing slime beneath the dead monkey’s cage.
“The vaults are intact. Whatever they stole came from the labs.”
Ilya tipped his head back. One tiny reprieve. “With the labs trashed, we won’t be able to easily identify what’s been taken and what was destroyed. We’ll have to do a complete inventory. Everything in the system that is registered to each lab, and everything that is physically present in the vaults. We have to go line by line, find out exactly what’s unaccounted for.”
Yuri nodded. “Should I call my old unit? They can process the labs. They’re good men. I trust them.”
“Who is your former commander?”
“Konstantin Lavrov. He fought against Moroshkin.”
Ilya nodded, his lips pursing as his brain tumbled. “Call them up.” Yuri’s old unit was based in the Caucuses and oversaw the main base that held the country’s stockpile of chemical weapons. Yuri had been the senior noncommissioned officer, Ruslan his best sergeant. Thank fuck they’d joined the FSB. “Where are the scientists? The lab workers? Is there anyone who can tell us what happened?”
“We’re pulling bodies out of the harbor. A dozen have washed up on the beach. There were only twenty-five who worked here.”
Ilya cursed. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They wound their way back to the main airlock carefully. Ilya snapped photos of the destruction, the ransacked labs, the shattered vials and dried blood and the petri dishes with their colonies. At the entrance, Yuri radioed Ruslan, and they waited as Ruslan prepped the mobile decontamination tent. Four showers later—two in the suit, to sterilize the suit’s exterior, and another two in the nude, first with chemical wash and then with water—they changed into new uniforms and stepped out of decon.
Ruslan waited for them, tablet in his hands. “Sir, I have the results from Dr. Biryukov.”
Dr. Biryukov was Ilya’s chief medical officer in the FSB. A man who kept more secrets than even Ilya did, Dr. Biryukov was the single most dangerous man Ilya knew. He was an iron safe. Nothing that went into Dr. Biryukov ever came out again. Not secrets, not confidences, not classified intelligence, nothing. When Ilya needed to scream, rant and rave and roar to the sky, when he wanted to shake Sergey’s idealism out of him, remind him that this was Russia and Sergey was being a damn fool, he ended up on Dr. Biryukov’s doorstep with a bottle of vodka, sometimes two.
He knew every secret of the FSB, every pus-filled sore, every painful urination, every sex disease he’d ever cured from every agent. He was the only man Ilya trusted with the corpses from Lake Seliger. Dr. Biryukov had collected the corpses and the mysterious dead bodies from around the lake and the surrounding towns.
Ruslan flicked through photos sent from Dr. Biryukov. In the first body, the cause of death was painfully obvious. “That’s anthrax.” Dark lesions, black sores across the neck and the shoulders, stared up from death-pale skin. Rot had already started to set in. “These are the oldest corpses. The first ones who died, during the coup.”
“The first ones infected.” Ilya pulled out his cigarettes, lit one, and inhaled deeply.
“The next to die, a week later. These corpses came from towns downwind of the lake, to the south.” Ruslan swiped to a new set of pictures. Bodies in a line, each with swollen lymph nodes, hard protrusions of buboes from the groin and the armpits, dark blood clots beneath the skin of the hands and the arms, tissue death on the noses and fingers.
“That is plague,” Yuri said.
“And more.” Ruslan flicked to another series of images. Corpses that had hemorrhaged, who had bled from their eyes, their noses, and their mouths, even their ears. Evidence of bloody vomit and diarrhea stained their bodies. “Dr. Biryukov says these bodies were left untouched in their homes. No one wanted to go near, not after people recognized the symptoms of hemorrhagic fever.”
“Thank fuck for that,” Ilya growled. “Are there any people in the area who show signs of hemorrhagic fever?”
“Dr. Biryukov is still calling around. So far, nothing.” Ruslan flipped to the last image, a map with an overlay of the diseased corpses and the direction of the prevailing winds, pushing south from the Arctic and spreading whatever had risen out of Solnechny over the isolated forests and hinterlands sandwiched north of Moscow and south of St. Petersburg. Four concentric rings expanded from Solnechny and the island, time stamped at weekly intervals. Clusters of markers, each identifying a corpse, a mode of unusual death, rode the rings.
“We need to keep a watch in this area.” Ilya dragged his finger south, tracing the path of the wind through the forests. “Looks like there’s not much out here. We might get lucky, contain this to just these deaths.”
Something caught his gaze. Frowning, Ilya took the tablet from Ruslan. His cigarette dangled from his lips as he pinch zoomed, peered at the screen. Something to the south, buried in the trees.
“Fuck me,” he cursed. “It’s not just the wind. The bastards who broke into the lab were going somewhere. And, dammit, I know where they went.” He cursed again, exhaling smoke around his words. “There’s going to be more bodies.”
“Where?” Yuri and Ruslan exchanged confused looks.
Ilya mashed his finger on the screen, pointing to the isolated base nestled in the forest’s depths, a hidden fighter base for a quick reaction strike against NATO, or for aerial defense over the Arctic. The best pilots were stationed there, the ones who were on their way to aviation special forces, or beyond. A place he’d been to before, for a very different reason. “Andreapol Air Base. These fuckers flew whatever they took out of that base on a MiG.”
Chapter Seven
Exhaustion pulledon Sergey’s bones. Was he more or less tired now than when he was on the top of the world, fighting madmen and clinging to the edge of life? More, he thought. At least then there was adrenaline to keep him going.
But now, there was Sasha. Sergey smiled. The detritus of Sasha’s life was collecting in his apartment. Sasha’s NASA briefing binders were spread out on his dining room table, five of them flipped open. He spun the nearest. Sasha’s medical brief, the information on the stem cell spleen replacement surgery and NASA’s physical requirements. A bunch of medical mumbo jumbo he couldn’t parse. And a workout regimen, minimum fitness standards for astronaut entrants.
Sergey scoffed. Sasha could blow their fitness standards out of the water.
