Page 39 of Ascendent
“We’ve secured Tver Oblast. Complete lockdown. Complete quarantine. No one is getting in or out. We’re going through the entire area, checking every village, every town. Every square meter!”
“Nowit’s locked down! But what about before? Where did these idiots go after breaking into Solnechny? Where did they take what they stole?”
“Dr. Biryukov says whoever robbed the lab is most likely dead. They probably infected themselves with whatever the GRU was cooking up in there through their own stupidity, and we’ll find their bodies in the woods.”
“Like Moroshkin ismost likelydead? I’m sick of being surrounded by ghosts! By madmen with their fucking plans! What do these idiots want to do,hmm? Release plague in Moscow? Hemorrhagic fever in St. Petersburg? Burn the sky to the ground? Eradicate humanity through some bioweapon?”
Ilya pursed his lips. “The pattern of infection and the corpses we’ve found stretch in a cone, from Solnechny to the south. To an airbase.” His foot tapped on the floor. He squinted. “Andreapol.”
Sergey’s gaze slanted sideways to Sasha’s surgical suite. He exhaled, rubbed his eyes, covered his mouth with both hands. “Did the thieves fly out? Did they escape Tver with these pathogens? With a fucking bioweapon?”
“We haven’t reached Andreapol yet. We’re moving carefully. But overflights show no movement on the base. We can’t raise anyone on the radio.”
“Abandoned?”
“Or, everyone is dead.”
“Govno!” He paced again, his hands on his hips, his heels snapping against the tile floor. “What about flight records? Anything leave Andreapol recently that you can track?”
“There’s nothing on record since the coup. But locals say the base has been active. There have been flights. We just don’t know when, or where to.”
He should call Jack. No, not Jack, not anymore. President Elizabeth Wall. He should ask President Wall to look at her spy satellites, see if the Americans had tracked any activity coming from Andreapol for the past two months.
Yeah, right. The Americans would want to know why.Pah, no reason. We just suspect biological weapons were stolen from a lab that doesn’t exist, in violation of international treaties. There may be pathogens on the loose, and more might have flown out on a MiG to God knows where. So, how about those satellite images?
“We must get to Andreapol, quickly. We have to know.”
“It will take us a few more days. We have to be careful.”
“Are there any reports of illnesses anywhere else? Any possible outbreaks? Any other place they might have gone?”
“Dr. Biryukov is searching. He’s calling hospitals and morgues around the country, but… You know how things are. You know how easy it is to disappear in Russia.”
Did he ever. Sasha had vanished on him only months before. How many settlements were there in the Russian wilderness, cut off from the world of hospitals and morgues and mandatory public health reporting? Would a doctor calling from Moscow truly be able to find a suspicious death in the taiga? In the Far East? Especially if someone didn’t want to be found?
Runaway members of the military. Moroshkin’s missing corpse. Bioweapons taken in a smash and grab secret lab attack.
What was out there in his country? What was hiding just out of reach? Beneath the parties, the ridiculous movies and the t-shirts with him riding a polar bear to victory?
Who and what was still working against him?
“This is our highest priority.” Sergey leaned into his friend, crowding him. “Preventing an outbreak. Finding these people, these traitors.”
“I know,Seryozha. I—”
“Mr. President?”
Sergey twisted. The surgeon, a man only slightly older than Sasha, leaned out of the surgical suite. “We’re through. We’re about to bring Mr. Andreyev out to his recovery room.”
His heart coiled like a spring. “How did it go? Is he all right?”
“It went perfectly.”
* * *
Sasha was stillout when they wheeled him into his private recovery room. He had IV lines snaking into his neck, wireless EKG leads on his chest that fed into a portable monitor. A hockey-stick-shaped line of dark Frankenstein stitches ran from below his sternum, under his ribcage, and down his side. Thin surgical tape covered the stiches. Iodine stained his pale skin, washed his chest in rust and pomegranate splatter. Sergey hovered, ached to touch.
Dr. Voronov bustled in with a trio of nurses. They checked his lines, his leads, his pulse and blood pressure. “Everything looks good, Mr. President,” Dr. Voronov said. “In a few hours, we’ll know if we can bring him home.”
