Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

CHAPTER 13

  There was one more part in the beautiful epic of the Island, never completed for Kalitin, that he would happily have excluded. The final years. The chapter of collapse and betrayal. Black, unwanted pages. Kalitin tried not to remember them. But today one, the very first, came on its own.

  He had been given a sign that the Island would no longer be the same. But Kalitin didn’t see it, didn’t understand its significance. Perhaps because the first to feel the underground din were not humans but animals—like the secret pulse of a coming earthquake that humans could not sense.

  It was the Island’s golden period, the zenith of its capabilities. Unfortunately, Zakharyevsky, its founding father, had died suddenly. And soon after, like a faithful dog, the old head of security died.

  Kalitin became head of the main laboratory, the heart of the Island. He could not aim for Zakharyevsky’s position due to his young age and administrative “weight.” The nominal head was one of Zakharyevsky’s deputies, a gray man strong in bureaucratic dealings; like that minion of the General Secretary Andropov who was half-dead but took the throne of his deceased master for a year. Everyone understood that Kalitin was next in line for the throne; it was a required exchange, an intermediate move.

  The new security chief, the head Cerberus, seemed good to Kalitin at first. He had been friendly with the predecessor, but he had been a dinosaur, a relic of the cannibalistic times, who knew nothing about science. The new fellow represented a different generation; he had a degree in chemistry and let him know that he supported him, understood, would facilitate things and wanted to be friends.

  It was the Island’s golden time, the season to harvest glory. The closed city had grown. Thanks to Zakharyevsky’s efforts, there were several more laboratories. New residential buildings were rapidly rising.

  Research was conducted on a broad scale. Zakharyevsky had taken over several promising areas that were not exactly suited to the Island’s original profile—well, so what, everyone took as much as they could, and Kalitin didn’t have a problem with that.

  The army was fighting for the umpteenth year in the East, bogging itself down ever deeper into a partisan war. The scientists were reading intelligence materials stolen from the United States about Korea and Vietnam; the distant hills in Afghanistan did not have jungles, so defoliants were useless, but the experience of smoking people out was helpful—out of caves, tunnels, culverts that the mujahedeen had turned into cover and supply lines.

  The Island had specialists in air, atmosphere, and ventilation; architects, technicians, and speleologists working on what to release and how to release it into an enclosed space with a complex configuration so that the substance would easily be diffused with a natural or forced air stream without collecting only in the upper layers or precipitating only to the lower ones.

  Kalitin made a proposal. It was effective but expensive. The military wanted something cheaper. They brought in a group of specialists in biological weapons and suggested holding comparative field tests. This was a crude violation, for the Island testing field was not intended for that kind of experimentation.

  Zakharyevsky would have been able to fend them off. But they hammered his former deputy and got through him.

  At the edge of the field, by the river, there were karst caves and sinkholes. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of doing the tests there in conditions that were exactly like the battle areas. They found two noncontiguous caves, sealed all the exits, measured the volume, set up compressors by the entrance, and ran the hoses. The outside specialists, who knew the economy and effectiveness of their substances, were certain they would succeed. The idea was to seal the caves after the substances were pumped in and open them the next day, sending a team in hazmat suits to tally results.

  They trucked in the monkeys. Usually the experienced soldiers guarding the zoo culled the most violent and the weakest, shooting them. But here they used them all—the military wanted a large-scale experiment, and the lab didn’t want to waste its best material on an experiment that might interfere with their own project.

  The monkeys were pushed into the caves and then they waited an hour. They assumed the primates needed time to find levels and holes for themselves, and then they started pumping. The generals, professors, the entire retinue were ready to leave. The tables were set at the Island hotel and the steam baths were heated in the cottages. A yellow cistern of beer—an Island specialty—was cooling in a special chamber, and waitresses and women skilled in revelry, brought in by the security department, were waiting.

  The alarm was raised by Lieutenant Kalimullin, an old-timer on the Island, commander of one of the guard units, a steppe dweller by lineage and the nature of his wild soul, who considered the Island supernatural. He once brought Kalitin—for no concrete reason—some steppe foxes caught in a snare, shedding, bald, vicious, gnawing at the bars of the cage.

  Kalimullin pulled his machine gun off his shoulder, fired the obligatory shot in the air, and then aimed at something in the distance. As the lieutenant later recounted, at first he thought some people had gotten into the testing ground and were headed to the wire fencing. Someone with sense at the nearest watchtower turned on the projector and ran the spotlight over the karst sinkholes—it was getting dark, the technicians had spent a lot of time plugging in the compressors and making sure things were hermetically sealed—and in the bouncing light they saw five monkeys running to the fence, swaying, but—so it seemed to Kalitin and not only him—supporting one another, like wounded soldiers unwilling to surrender.

  Kalitin understood at once. The soldiers—dolts, jackasses—had not checked the caves properly and had missed a crack. Or maybe the monkeys had dug themselves out, the land was friable, soft, the limestone washed away.

  No one had made maps of the underground passages. They had measured by sight. And now tried to figure out where the fugitives were coming from: the cave where they were testing Kalitin’s substance, which was not contagious, or the cave full of the army’s poison—in which case the monkeys could be walking biological weapons. They hadn’t died yet, but that didn’t mean anything, the virus could be in their blood.

  Kalimullin, good old Kalimullin, was already shooting in short bursts. One monkey fell, then another. They were having problems with the machine gun on the tower: it must have gotten stuck. The men who were armed took guns out of their holsters.

  The fence was supposed to stop them, the barbed wire was high tension. But Kalitin sensed failure and realized something incredible would happen. Where the wire lay along the edge of a karst sinkhole, one monkey pushed another. It fell and burned in a violet flash. Two others slipped outside, as if they knew the short circuit would make the bottom row of the barbed wire safe.

  Amazingly, no one panicked, Kalitin recalled, even though they all understood that they could lose not only their army and civilian rank, but their heads as well. The old general, who had taken Königsberg as a senior sergeant and had commanded a regiment in 1956 in Hungary, activated the closest garrison—allegedly for an unplanned training session. They used secret telephone lines to reach a zoologist in Moscow, the best specialist in primates. He didn’t understand the question at first—where will a monkey run to hide in the conditions of central Russia?—but then, after the general roared out a concise and useful description of the locale, the specialist commanded them somewhere unexpected: not into the woods but into the rushes, into the marshes.

  So the wild hunt began. They were under the spell of primitive thirst for revenge. Motorboats rushed up and down the river, searchlights checking the river reaches, scaring off fishermen from favorite spots. Cars raced along the banks, twin beams of headlights bouncing, and helicopters buzzed overhead. Military trucks spread out in a wide arc, dropping off groups at intersections with instructions to canvass residents about anything unusual and moving out in search parties. The soldiers either joked or moved in silence, obeying the strange order: find and destroy a monkey, the reward a medal and
ten days’ leave, and for privates—sergeant’s stripes.

  Crackling voices and static came over the walkie-talkies. They had already driven away two fishermen. They wounded a thief stealing kolkhoz hay. Two trucks collided, six wounded.

  Voices interrupted their communications: the police, the second secretary of the oblast party committee, even some bum from the fishery management office, who somehow got on the closed line—What’s going on?

  The generals pressured them with their big stars, insisted on secrecy, sent them to the commander of the okrug for information. The helicopter shook, Kalitin wanted to throw up. They dragged him into the Mil copter, as if to demonstrate that they were all in the same boat. The pilots were just back from Afghanistan, the very mountains where the army planned to cleanse the caves, and now they were showing off, practically shaving the tops of trees with their propeller, hugging the dark water, sliding the belly along the craggy banks, and chasing an untended flock into the night—the fat white sheep scattered in every direction. The copilot laughed—he should have taken one for shashlik, but there was no time to land.

  The airwaves whistled after midnight: got ’em. The copter dropped, making a U-turn, and howled as it accelerated. They landed, creating waves, on a stony spit. The soldiers ran into the night and using a waterproof sheet—another smart command—carried in a twisted body powdered with chlorine, as if with white snow. Strawberry pink spots of blood appeared on the chlorine. No gas masks, no protective gear, no time to put them on—only the desperate hope that the monkeys were from Kalitin’s cave, had sensed the stinking, powerful chemicals, huddled in a far corner and accidentally found a way to the surface.

  Kalitin took the blood sample himself; a Mi-2 helicopter flew to the laboratory with it.

  Then there was another flight, and Kalitin could no longer tell if he or the propellers were spinning. A signal from the other direction, thirty kilometers away. A spurt of the helicopter on its last liters of fuel. A heavy landing. A pale, hungover dawn. Lieutenant Kalimullin’s predatory, triumphant face. A long narrow break in the rushes, the slurp of smelly stagnant water, and there at the end, on broken reeds, a deformed monkey cut down by a long burst of bullets. The first one, the one that had led the others and had knocked one into the electric fence. It had almost made it through the last ring, but Kalimullin up on a cliff saw movement in the rushes and shot from afar, counting on luck rather than accuracy.

  Kalitin barely held back the nausea. For a second he thought they had killed the ancestor of all humans. Kalimullin’s shooting had been guesswork, he couldn’t see what was in the rushes, ape or man, a stranded poacher, for instance.

  The hunters stood quietly, drained. They cupped lit cigarettes in their hands, warming their chilled fingers.

  Kalimullin recognized the monkey, a large combative male with a torn left ear. The male had been in the cave pumped with Kalitin’s chemicals. He thought that the ape must have swallowed some of the substance and it had worked; the bullets finished what the gas had begun.

  No one celebrated the salvation, no one cursed out loud—dozens of armed men, exhausted by the night’s work.

  The helicopter remained on the bank. They promised the pilots a tanker barge would come for them. They returned in Kalimullin’s open-top jeep. They tossed the dead animal wrapped in a tarp into the trunk.

  The driver, worn out, drove carefully but still managed to hit potholes. Kalimullin frowned but said nothing. It was this sergeant who drove the car up the hill, reversed, and braked so that the lieutenant could fire his successful round. Next to Kalitin in the back seat dozed Kazarnovsky, senior scientific fellow of his laboratory.

  Some time back, Zakharyevsky chose him to partner with Kalitin, but Kazarnovsky did not live up to expectations, he did what he was told, no more. Twice he had asked for a transfer, and the chief of security informed Kalitin that Kazarnovsky had twice made suspicious requests to the special section at the institute library for books that did not always entirely correspond to his research topic; for example, a foreign scientific encyclopedia volume requested by Kazarnovsky allegedly for its article on structural modeling also contained an article on Andrei Sakharov.

  Actually, Kalitin was less bothered by Kazarnovsky’s halfhearted dissident behavior—he defended it to the security chief—than by his passivity. After all, their late patron Zakharyevsky was a very ambivalent ideological communist. There were times he said outright treasonable things, knowing that the room was probably monitored. But how Zakharyevsky worked! He was forgiven all for that, and that’s why Kalitin respected him so much; Kazarnovsky was a wimp.

  They drove a long time, wandering on bad country roads. Kalitin looked around with unexpected interest; essentially, this was the first time he had seen the areas around the Island, the life of ordinary people outside the protected territory. The harvest was in, the fields were empty, with birds pecking at the last of the grain. Smoke rose from the chimneys in villages. Thousands of ordinary, sad sounds of life, forgotten by Kalitin, came from them. Lulled by the sounds, he daydreamed. He thought that they had just saved this sweet, peaceful life from an enemy threat, and that all their efforts ensured that stoves would burn, dogs would bark, well water would pour into empty buckets, and sleepy children would get ready for school.

  He awoke near a village general store. Kalimullin stopped to get something for breakfast. The store had just opened, but there was a line outside, waiting for the bread truck to unload.

  The lieutenant and his driver waved away the outraged women and went inside. The dusty and branch-whipped jeep was surrounded by curious boys. They should have been at school at that hour, but apparently the mothers had sent them for groceries or kept them with them, so that they could get bread and grain for two.

  Kalitin felt uncomfortable. The pushy women, the noisy, grumbling line, the obnoxious kids annoyed him. The boys suddenly ran off and whispered to the adults, pointing at the car. Kalitin turned around and saw that the bouncing ride had loosened the tarp. The sun shone on the monkey’s dead face, yellow teeth bared in the pink mouth; shiny chrome-green flies crawled over the black fur.

  Kalitin knew from the regular reports of the security department that the locals remembered many things. For instance, the Germans who had worked there before the war—some of the old men in the village had worked hauling water, others had been carpenters in the barracks. There were also rumors in the area that the bulldozers digging foundation pits for new buildings opened up holes filled with bones, both animal and human. Other rumors maintained that on the Island they made zombielike soldiers from dead criminals. The rumors were faithfully reported by informers.

  Kalitin considered them amusing, a rudiment of the archaic peasant mind. He knew for certain that no bones had been dug up by bulldozers and no supersoldiers were created in the labs. Of course, he was surprised that despite all the secrecy measures, information still leaked out in a thin stream, as if these backward people had their own informers—animals, birds, dew, trees, grass. But that was the guards’ problem. He liked the image of the mysterious, terrifying citadel that wielded power over the region. It would be a shame if the locals knew nothing at all. It would remove some zest from his life.

  But now Kalitin was wary. The people had crowded together, whispering. Trouble emanated from their poses, their faded clothing, weary faces, neutered figures that had lost male and female characteristics, retaining only the traces of heavy labor.

  Faces, faces—Kalitin suddenly saw them in extreme proximity, screaming about the hidden pains of their bodies, stretched, squashed, asymmetrical, with hairs on warts, bushy eyebrows above dead eyes. The faces mocked him, danced around the car, peered into his pupils, bared yellow pointy teeth, like the monkey’s.

  “That’s our work, you know,” Kazarnovsky said calmly, his tone cool.

  Kalitin noticed what he meant.

  At the end of the line were a mother and daughter. The girl had a bloated, lumpy figure, faded eyes with
huge whites, thin grayish hair. Her heavy body was poised on thin, bird-like legs, toes without nails visible through the torn straps of her sandals.

  “That’s just an illness,” Kalitin replied, trying to sound indifferent. “You’re tired.”

  “Just an illness?” Kazarnovsky asked loudly, too loudly. “The girl’s around four. Four years ago they repaired the filtration system of the exhaust ventilation. Remember? They took off the old filters but did not replace them. The suppliers messed up the invoice. Zakharyevsky ordered the testing to continue. According to the prevailing winds, everything would be scattered above the river. We were inside. The exhaust fan blew everything away from us. That continued for two weeks. There’s your damned prevailing winds. Look. Look around you!”

  If not for the night that drained his strength, Kalitin would have cut off his subordinate on the spot. But Kalitin sat there like a sack. Kazarnovsky had energy somehow, as if he was getting it from the people in line, the dead ape, the rising sun.

  His words had turned the world inside out, revealing the hidden side. Kalitin no longer saw the pastoral landscape, the glowing light of life, the healthy flesh of the universe, but the dark spots of diseases, the ulcers of postponed death sprinkled on the foliage, in people’s bodies and faces, in the crooked letters of the GROCERY sign, in the potholed asphalt, in the cracked windowpanes of listing huts.

  “I don’t know about the enemies, but we’re doing a very good job of destroying ourselves,” said Kazarnovsky. His voice trembled.

  Kazarnovsky turned away and froze in a tense pose.

  If he could, Kalitin would have killed him then. But Kalitin’s vision was still blurred by the dark spots of death: the whole world was mottled, as if eaten by black aphids.

  Kalimullin and the driver came out of the store. The crowd calmed down at the sight of military uniforms. Everyone looked only at the head of the person in front. The lieutenant handed Kalitin half a loaf of freshly baked bread and a bottle of milk; Kalitin dove into the fragrant mass, swallowing without chewing and washing it down with milk. A rich stream dribbled into the collar of his checked shirt.