Page 60 of Ascendent
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It took hours,but they cleared each building, each barracks room, each office. They found six more bodies. Most everyone had locked themselves in the hangar, it seemed. All the cars from the base were piled at the main entrance, a barricade to prevent entry.
At dawn, they laid out the bodies on the helicopter landing pads. Ilya had a roster of base personnel, cross referenced with those who were in prison after the coup and those who had been killed in the fighting. He passed out sheets to everyone. They went line by line down the rows of corpses, checking dog tags and scratching names off their lists.
Almost everyone was accounted for.
Sergey sat on the steps of a barracks building, far away from the corpses, the concrete rows of death. Dr. Biryukov assured them all they were safe beyond a line he spray painted on the concrete. Past that neon line, they had to wear their suits and respirators. Go through full bleach decontamination. At least until the bodies were burned.
Ilya collapsed beside him. Ragged, he looked beyond exhausted, like the strain of the past several weeks had caught up with him all at once. “I did some digging. Mount Yamantau recorded a jet passing over, a MiG-29, coming from the flight path of Andreapol. Five weeks ago.”
“Fuck.” Mount Yamantau was Russia’s nuclear command and control bunker buried in the Ural Mountains. The fully automated Dead Hand switch was kept there. Passive sensors in the bunker constantly checked for nuclear detonations, measured the radiation in the air. If the Dead Hand detected a nuclear strike, and couldn’t reach anyone in Moscow, or in command authority, Russia’s nuclear weapons launched automatically. The system was a relic of the Cold War, but it still was operational. And it maintained passive sensor arrays throughout the Urals, the spine of Russia. “Someone did fly out of here?”
“There’s one pilot unaccounted for. Flight Lieutenant Grisha Utkin. He…”
Sergey glared. “What?”
“He was in Sasha’s unit. They were wing mates. He would have flown a MiG-29, like Sasha. He could have flown out of here, on the course Mount Yamantau picked up.”
Ilya’s words repeated on a loop, a typhoon in his mind.He was in Sasha’s unit. They were wing mates.
Who attacked you?He’d asked Sasha once.
They were my wing mates. I thought they were my friends!
“The flight path looks like Utkin was going to Krasnoyarsk or Irkutsk.”
“What?” Sergey’s throat clenched. “Krasnoyarsk?”
“Most likely, yeah.” Ilya stamped out his cigarette. “The trajectory of the flight path, his descent after the Urals. Heading to Krasnoyarsk, I’d put money on it.”
Sasha. Sasha, fuck, where are you?Panic gripped his bones, raked down his spine. Made his guts churn, his breath run ragged.He’s out there, Sasha!
Flight Lieutenant Grisha Utkin. Sergey clenched his hands, fisted his rage. His fury spiked, white hot, a blaze of wrath that speared him. Flight Lieutenant Grisha Utkin had turned against Russia. Had conspired to steal biological weapons. Had contributed to the murder of hundreds of people.
And he’d attacked the love of his life. Had almost killed Sasha.
Sasha… Where are you my love?
“Find Grisha Utkin,” Sergey snapped. “Find him now! Find his MiG. Find where he went, and then drag him back to Moscow! Drag him back tome.”
Chapter Twelve
Sasha clungto the neck of the reindeer he rode, laying his painted chest along the animal’s broad shoulders. The reindeer chuffed, tossed her head. Sasha’s fingers tightened in her short summer fur.
He could barely see Kilaqqi ahead, riding his reindeer, wearing a hide cape, and carrying a torch. Firelight flickered off the iron antlers of Kilaqqi’s headdress. It was just the two of them, riding south, completely naked save for their furs.
Kilaqqi had pulled him from the helicopter earlier that afternoon, tumbling him to the grass, and had stripped him immediately. His coat, sweater, shirt, boots, trousers, underwear, socks. Everything, all the way down to his bare skin. Sunlight washed him, parts of his body that had never seen the light exposed for the entire settlement to see. He’d heard a child laugh. He hadn’t cared.
Kilaqqi had rubbed his chest, brisk movements that felt like his skin was crackling awake after burning with frostbite. “We must wash you in the sun,” Kilaqqi had said. “Bathe you in light for the rest of the day.”
Eventually, Kilaqqi helped him to his yurt, supporting almost all of Sasha’s weight. He’d spread a fur pelt on the grass beneath three totems, fierce carvings of bears on the top of giant pine trunks, and then had laid Sasha down. “Rest. Allow the sun into your body.”
He’d fallen in and out of consciousness, lying naked on the fur in the middle of the tribe. Once, he’d awoken and Kilaqqi was painting his chest, drawing a giant tree down his sternum, stars on his pecs, animals on his belly. Kilaqqi had a fire burning in an iron bowl above Sasha’s head. He could just make out the edges, could smell the same pungent smoke, the pine and moss and decay. He fell back into a dreamless, boundaryless sleep.
When he woke again, he was staring into the trees, the pine and spruce and alder that surrounded Kilaqqi’s yurt. There was drumming somewhere nearby, and chanting. Kilaqqi was out of sight.
Above him, hanging in the branches, bones hung from leather cords. Bones of animals. Long bones, their legs and ribs, the narrow, elongated pelvises. Skulls of bears and reindeer, of birds and wolves.
