Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Marianne watched Max sleep next to her. His two-day beard looked prickly, but he looked fantastically handsome in a fresh uniform and after taking a shower. She, on the other hand, had been forced to put the dirty clothes she’d been wearing back on… but at least the shower had been wonderful and the troops had even closed off an entire shower room for her use, posting a guard on the other side of the closed door to ensure her privacy.

  Seriously, she probably would have taken the shower even if the whole base had been watching her. It ranked almost as high as food—which she’d also received—on her list of priorities. A point in favor of the Russians is that they’d let them get cleaned up and go to the infirmary before putting Max to the question. She didn’t think an American CO would have acted the same way. It would probably have gone against some process or other.

  She watched him sleep for a few minutes, just enjoying the sensation of having him beside her while not running from anything and not being hungry and afraid. On one hand, being there with him felt perfectly safe, but in some corner of her mind, she half-expected to be attacked by an escaped dinosaur or a rogue soldier working for that crazy bitch Selene.

  Nothing happened and she began to get sleepy. She put the gear lever in reverse.

  But she didn’t start the car. Instead, she put the lever back in neutral and took off her belt. She leaned over into the passenger seat and brushed her lips against Max’s.

  He woke with a start. “Is everything all right?”

  She smiled. “Remember that thought you’ve been holding?”

  He looked confused for a second but then returned her smile and pulled her closer.

  Marianne kissed him hungrily.

  ***

  Dawn was breaking over the city as they entered Yekaterinburg. Max was wide awake now, and he directed her towards the hotel.

  “Isn’t it still dangerous to go there?” she asked.

  “With Selene dead, we’ll be fine. Besides, someone way up in the government has your back… they want you out of the country as soon as possible.”

  “Will they let me back in?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to come back?”

  She thought about it. “To be a soldier’s girl? I don’t know if I could live with the uncertainty. Knowing what you do…” She sighed. “But yeah. I guess I’d want to give it a shot. Maybe.”

  He nodded and they pulled up in front of the hotel and parked in one of the reserved spaces. The bellboy who emerged to tell them they couldn’t park there took one look at the insignias on Max’s uniform and decided he had more important things to do than enforce parking restrictions.

  The front desk informed them that her room was being held just the way she’d left it, on orders from the government. Marianne asked about Veronica’s room and was given the same answer.

  “Let’s go there, first.”

  The room held very little. A laptop, some clothes. Like most hotel rooms, it was devoid of human warmth. And worse, the clothes looked like they’d been purchased at a bad charity sale.

  Marianne stood very still, surveying the contents. After some moments, he began to feel uncomfortable invading her grief, but remained silent.

  “What do I do?” Marianne said.

  “Did she have any family? A husband?”

  “I don’t think so. No. I’m not really sure if she even liked men. Or women for that matter. She seemed mostly turned in on herself.”

  “Isn’t there anyone to tell?”

  “I suppose Terrence would know that.”

  “Then let it go. Mourn her for yourself, not for others.”

  The silence stretched out for a long time. Finally, Marianne gave him a wan smile. “Again, you’re failing at being a caveman.”

  “That’s because I don’t have the luxury of mourning my men, my friends, that way. When you have to tell a wife and two aging parents that their beloved isn’t coming home… you appreciate being able to mourn for yourself.”

  She hugged him, then looked over the stuff in the room again. “What do I do with all of this?”

  “Forget about it. I’ll have someone ship it back to your editor. If I have to, I’ll pay for it myself, but I’m pretty sure I won’t have to. I think Russia wants to forget any of this ever happened, and that means they won’t balk at a shipping bill.”

  “I wish I could forget,” she said, before stepping out of the room.

  It hurt for a second, that quick dismissal of the fact that there was some good in even the evilest of situations. But maybe Americans saw things differently. Russians always expected the world to try to crush them, so when something like Marianne appeared in the middle of a catastrophe, it was natural for Max to count himself lucky. He wouldn’t have traded it for anything except maybe to have Yuri and Ivan back.

  He closed the door softly behind them.

  Marianne was looking up at him. “This is why I didn’t wait to get back here before we… well, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” he replied. The memory of watching the sun come up and illuminate her naked skin would stay with him forever.

  “I wouldn’t have been able to… not with her things there. I can’t even think of anything else now. Only Ronnie.”

  “I understand.”

  “Will you take me to the airport?”

  “Do you have a booking?”

  “I’ll buy a ticket on the first flight out of here. I don’t care. Just help me pack and get me there.”

  He nodded. He didn’t ask when he would see her again. It wasn’t the time.

  Besides, she wasn’t difficult to find. Famous journalists never were.

  ***

  Terrence Vaidal was waiting at the airport. The man himself, not one of his flunkies. And he was on the inside of the security perimeter, flanked by a couple of uniformed immigration people and someone in a suit-an airport official, judging by his badge.

  “How did you even know I was coming?” she asked him.

  “Everyone knows. Your story went out yesterday morning. It made a bit of a splash, and there are actually demonstrators looking to grab you and take you to a protest outside the Russian embassy. I thought it would be easier if we could dispense with that.”

  “But how could you know what flight?”

  “That was the easiest part. And I’m not the only one who found out.”

  One of the uniformed officials held out her hand. “Ma’am, could you please let me have your passport and come with us?”

  Terrence nodded and smiled. “It’s fine. They’re here to help.”

  They ushered her out of the flow of people and into a back room where a computer scanned her passport and took her picture. “You’re good,” the officer told her. And then, in a quieter voice, she continued. “And I wanted you to know what an honor it is to be the one to welcome such a brave woman back to the States. We’re proud to have you here.”

  They entered a long hall that led to an elevator which, in turn deposited them in an underground parking facility. “Terrence,” she said. “What did you print?”

  “Nothing you won’t approve of. Only what you said over the phone, and I licensed some of Tatiana’s images. You couldn’t have done a better job yourself.”

  “Then why is everyone gushing? Why am I suddenly the darling of the protest crowd and the TSA?”

  “Those weren’t TSA.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  They entered a limousine that Terrence had waiting, a long, black one with tinted windows.

  “It’s that no one has been able to get a journalist into the area. Everyone’s being stonewalled, and the Russians are denying everything. They even denied that you were in the country at all. If they could, they’d disavow any knowledge of your existence.” He paused and looked out the window as the car exited the tunnel and merged with airport traffic. It was a bright day, and Marianne couldn’t believe she was back and alive. Terrence went on. “And since no one could get the news straight, I allowed them
to use your prose.”

  “I didn’t write any prose.”

  “Yes, you did. It’s on the front page of today’s New York Times, under your byline. You are due a pretty fat check. How is it you didn’t see that? Is your phone broken?”

  “No. I just didn’t turn it on. I want to be left alone.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I got to you before the mob.”

  “Is it?”

  “They weren’t going to take no for an answer. These are hardcore human rights activists, and they wanted to use you for their purposes. Have you ever seen that type listen to reason or excuses?”

  “All right. Thank you for that, then.”

  He sighed. “I know when I’m not wanted, although, dear woman, it wounds me to the quick. As soon as we get to Manhattan, I’ll get out and take the subway to the office. You must be really tired.”

  “Thank you.” They motored on for a few more blocks. Morning traffic was heavy that day. What was it? She thought it was a Thursday. No. Friday. No wonder. “Have you run the obituary for Ronnie?”

  Terrence shifted in his seat. “No. I mean we thought about it, but she wasn’t anyone people knew about. We thought it would look like navel-gazing when huge stuff was going on all around us.”

  “You mean it wouldn’t have brought any more readers to the page.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You’re a bastard, Terrence.”

  “I have a business to run. Ronnie isn’t news, no matter how tragic this is. We reported her death, of course, and a small résumé, but that’s all we could justify.”

  “Oh, then I’ll sell the obituary to the Times.”

  Terrence sighed. “Is it really that important to you?”

  “Don’t be a dick.”

  “All right, we’ll take it. But it runs under your byline.”

  “Still thinking of the bottom line?”

  “I said we’ll run it. So write it and send it over.” He had the look he always had when arguing with Marianne. A kind of dazed, glazed defeat.

  She usually felt like smiling in his face in these situations… but today, she didn’t feel like smiling at all. There was nothing to smile about.

  Terrence must have noticed. As he descended from the limo, he turned back to her. “This time you’re going to get the Pulitzer for sure.”

  “Fuck the Pulitzer,” she replied as he closed the door.

  ***

  Marianne sat at the computer, staring at the blank document in front of her. She didn’t know what to write. All she had was the title: “Veronica Bee, an Appreciation of an Important Life”, but now she couldn’t think of how the hell she was going to be able to put all her rage into words.

  It was more than just about Veronica. It was about the modern world, where Marianne, a famous name, would have merited the better part of a page, above the fold, if she hadn’t made it back from Russia, while Ronnie only rated a tiny square and a quick mention because she was an American killed in the mess. Why did Marianne’s fame make her more worthy of note than Ronnie’s gentle, civilized obscurity?

  She knew the answer. Famous names, especially when they got themselves killed in a dramatic way, sold newspapers.

  This wasn’t about selling newspapers. It was about acknowledging that Ronnie was chasing the same story as Marianne. And as Tatiana and the other journalists who’d died, all of which had merited rivers of ink in their respective countries. Caipi, Tatiana’s news site, had a fully black homepage with only a photo of Tatiana to break the darkness. It made Marianne tear up just to look at it.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t help her write the obituary, and neither did the canned bio that HR had sent her. Who cared that Ronnie had spent her career as a research assistant at a museum or that she’d worked as a fact-checker for the Washington Post before joining Update!? No one, that’s who. Not even Marianne.

  The problem was that she didn’t have anything else to fall back on. Like everyone else at the magazine, she’d had a cordial relationship with the weird girl from research… but not a deep one. She had never spoken to Ronnie outside work, and the longest conversation she’d ever had before the trip was the one that led to Ronnie accompanying her on the trip to Russia.

  Guilt hit her like a hammer between the eyes. This wasn’t working. She didn’t have anything to say. She needed to figure out who Ronnie’s friends had been, and that meant calling the office.

  Marianne didn’t want to call the office.

  She wanted to call Russia.

  But it wasn’t time for that. Not yet.

  Chapter 15

  This was more like it. Helicopters and a large group of men, including zookeepers specialized in working with large animals, was the right way to hunt dinosaurs. Especially since the government had, over the past month, given up on trying to contain the story and decided that, if the dinosaurs were there, they would make excellent zoo exhibits.

  The current official story was that a private company had created them for profit and that they had been unable to control the result. Conveniently, the people responsible for the disaster had been killed, so there was no real reason to investigate much further. All that remained was to round up the surviving specimens and get them to a safe place.

  Precisely zero people believed it, but that was the story and everyone was sticking to it.

  Or else.

  Besides, that story had gotten Max cleared to participate in the operation to clean up the valley. The doctors had removed the cast and pronounced him fit just three days before, along with recommendations that he take it easy and…

  He’d ignored them completely. If he sat this one out, Vasily would never let him hear the end of it.

  So he was where he was meant to be: hanging out of the door of a helicopter and looking down at a herd of large dinosaurs. He knew that certain sectors had opposed the roundup, saying that this was a unique opportunity to study the creatures in the wild, but the last thing the government wanted was tourists poking around in a Cold War development zone and getting eaten by velociraptors.

  “I think those are the ones we’re supposed to be going for,” he said, pointing out the window at a herd below them. “Try to put down on the other side of those trees so we don’t spook them.”

  “Yes Captain,” the pilot replied.

  It took Max a moment to realize the man was talking to him. From being a possible traitor, Max had, instead, received a medal for his team’s actions at YekLab and a promotion for the situation in the mountain complex and the valley.

  It was a bribe, of course. Since no one really knew what had happened—the security video from the complex had been disabled—Max’s story had become the official version, and he and Selene were being treated as heroes, while the North Korean and Orlov were being bandied about as the culpable parties. But since there was still some doubt, Max had been promoted hard to ensure he stuck to his story. He now had much more to lose.

  Hell, they’d even made Vasily a sergeant, upping him three grades in the process. No one was going to contradict the official story.

  Max had also been allowed to lead the first roundup, which was much better than being left behind at base wondering how things were going and whether Vasily would screw everything up.

  This first strike had been designed to pick up five herbivores the size of hippos in cargo nets slung under the choppers, but to do that they had to tranquilize them and then defend the sleeping dinosaurs from carnivores… which meant tranking the carnivores, too… and that meant defending them from other carnivores. All in all, the operation was going to call for a lot of soldiers on the ground, armed with modified grenade launchers that shot extremely large tranquilizer darts.

  It had all the hallmarks of an operation that could get out of control very quickly. If it did, the choppers were to be used as gunships. Fortunately, Spetsnaz Mi-8 helicopters were well armed, and the dinosaurs would find it unhealthy to do anything too chaotic.

  But the idea was to kee
p the creatures alive, not mangle them with heavy machine guns.

  The warm breeze and the smell of the grass reminded him of the last time he’d been out here, and that, in turn, brought back memories of Marianne, of his dead soldiers, of desperate days. He smiled. Those were nearly good memories now that time had done its thing. In ten years, he’d be looking back and wondering why disaster scenarios had been so much better when he was younger.

  “All right,” he told Vasily. “Use the trees for cover and see if we can get these things down before they spot us. Otherwise we’ll have to use the drones.” He turned away and then turned back. “And try to stay downwind of them.”

  Vasily rolled his eyes and went off to gather his men. For a few, it was their first time in the field, which might not be a bad thing. Dangerous enough that they needed to obey orders and take care, but at the same time, devoid of anyone shooting at them. A perfect way to blood the troops.

  He let Vasily’s squad get into position before standing beside a tree to watch the situation unfold. Each soldier took aim at one of the targets and, to his surprise, four of the men found their marks—the adapted launchers, he knew from personal experience, were inaccurate as hell.

  Vasily ordered the man who missed to reload and try again, but Max stepped in. “No. I want to try the drone.” He turned to the soldier. “I’m sorry about this, I know it won’t be much consolation when you have to buy the rest of your team a beer because you missed, but it truly is necessary.”

  The soldier, dejected, just nodded and removed the trank dart from his weapon and stowed it in its assigned pocket. Max turned away and smiled. A conscientious kid like that would take this badly, but then he’d double up his range time and try harder. In a year, he would likely be the best shot in his unit with any sort of weapon, able to take down a tank at four hundred meters with his handgun… and he would be the most respected man in camp.

  But Max still felt bad for the guy. The road to being a valuable soldier could be rough.

  The drone was already in the air, so Max told the operator. “Wait for my signal. I want to see what you can do.”