50 km
The deceleration continued as the inferno subsided; the aeroshell’s fire now an ember halo. The suit’s swelter settled back to its swampy 35º C as the mesosphere faded to cool black. With the steady airflow of terminal velocity, Uri floated up and away from the carbon-striped pod. Its drogue chute shot past him and pulled taut, easing the turbulence.
10 km
A laughing camel icon cued him to pull the release. He jettisoned the pod and watched it sail off into gray cloudscapes. Fawzi had assured him his trajectory would follow Zliva and Pravo through the flight’s last segment after separation. Uri wasn’t so sure.
He tumbled to gain bearing, flapping his arms like a bird. Torrents of wind replaced the airless quiet. Monsoon nimbus scattered until water-filled curtains merged, then dissolved to reveal a murky green coastline. The orange circle of the pod’s parachute opened up, its cyclopean vent eyeing him from below.
2 km
A snoring crocodile warned of main chute release. The meteoric ride was over. Uri felt the snap of suspension lines and the soft bounce of reinforced nylon. Steam wafted off the soot-stained white of the suit’s thermal armor. Cool relief. A purge of fluorescent glycol squirted down his legs from the overworked condensers. Uri decoupled the slung coolant tank and let it plummet.
He closed his eyes, desperately wanting a cigarillo and a nap. He thought of the treacherous overland journey short-circuited by the ludicrously risky jump. Smug, he couldn’t wait to send a communiqué to Sayyid.
Cockiness vanished as he clumsily steered the ram-air into the coastline’s wall of jungle. He looked around. The deflated titian of the pod’s parachute was nowhere. A rain-soaked gust funneled him into a limestone cleft of the mountainous cliffs. He flipped up his visor and scanned the gloom for anywhere to land. A perch of Hellenic ruins offered level ground.
Touchdown.
Uri’s chute snagged a tree branch. The limb dragged him over limestone toward the precipice. Just shy of the edge, Uri half-dangled from his harness like a spastic marionette, finally catching a foothold. Clambering back, he collapsed underneath a copse of palms near an ancient marble pillar.
He pulled his helmet off and inhaled the rainforest’s coolness. Resting on a bed of leafy ferns, he looked out over drizzle-swept Aegean one thousand meters below.
“Beautiful dirt!” He picked up a handful to the smell the loam. “I never thought I’d miss goddamned dirt.”
Half a kilometer away, beyond the mussel-encrusted shore, sat a treeless islet encircled by mats of kelp. The pod’s shredded chute was draped over the sea rocks like a flag, the pod bobbing in the idle surf.
The comfort of solid ground would be short-lived.
CHAPTER SIX
December 2163 C.E.
Mount Beerenberg loomed out from the sour mist like Dante’s Purgatory, a yellow half-melted heap of snow and soot. The landing strip was strewn with the rusted husks of previous failed visits to Jan Mayen. A few klicks past the potholed runway stood the vault’s goiter-like seamount, jutting into the sickly sea. Nicknamed the “Crown of Thorns” by Sava’s men, the redoubt’s spiny iron clung to the basalt tooth. The one-year contract charged Sava’s men with defense of the citadel, a long time to be stuck on a four-hundred-kilometer square island.
Alkonost renegotiated the contract after the loss of the squad in Kharkov, to assure the client—whomever they happened to be—that the vault would be adequately defended. Alkonost included extra auto-cannons, remote sentries, and radar trackers as part of the deal to compensate for the lack of manpower. Though grateful for the additional hardware, Sava would rather have had the company.
Sava’s squad spent the rainy afternoon unloading the Antonov, a job made miserable by the breakdown of the island’s propane loader. Mach salvaged a wheelbarrow from a derelict shipping container, but the going was slow and painful. The installation crew helped only as long as it took to clear the plane’s cargo bays, anxious to leave Jan Mayen.
“Ugly place, this,” Sava said to the pilot as he walked around the plane for the pre-flight check.
“What’s that?” the pilot replied, checking the forward landing strut.
“Have you ever flown here before?”
“Once, a couple of years back. The weather was different then—colder, windier, wet sloppy snow,” he said, looking at the jaundiced flanks of Beerenberg.
“A bit more challenging aviation-wise?”
“We had it easy this morning. The wind patterns at the high latitudes have stagnated this month. Visibility’s crap, but flying below the deck is never a problem,” the pilot explained.
“Then how’d that happen?” Sava pointed to a crashed Halo with Alkonost markings near the end of the runway, its eight rotor blades contorted and snapped like a smashed spider.
“Haven’t a clue,” shrugged the pilot.
“When did it happen?”
“Good question. It might have been under an escort contract.” He nodded toward the Crown of Thorns. “Norsk-Statoil was the prime contractor for that thing.”
Sava headed down the gravel ramp to the ruined vehicle, curious flotsam among what he considered to be typical jetsam. The beast lay on its side, the cockpit glass splintered into eggshell cracks. He pried open a shredded belly hatch and climbed into the wreckage.
A jungle of frayed wiring dangled from panel covers. Sava crawled forward into the cockpit. The back of the pilot’s seat was a constellation of bullet holes, yellowed stuffing pulled out by the island’s rodent population. Sava guessed the Mi-26 hadn’t been airborne long, the crash not severe enough to kill the whole crew. There was a struggle right before it went down; detritus and shriveled offal were everywhere, and it looked as if a body exploded in the navigator’s seat. The instrumentation was smeared with the baked-in residue of bloody handprints from an electrical fire.
Sava kicked around the pile of debris in the bottom of the upended hull. A spent halon canister lay near the pilot’s seat. A shadow of the uncharred panel marked where it’d been used. The crew and cargo compartment were stripped. The extra fuel pods were bone dry as well as the hydraulic reservoirs; the salvage team was a highly efficient bunch. He knocked a floor grate loose and pulled the high-G case from its rack. The flight-log cartridge was missing, along with everything else of value.
Draped by a cargo net, Sava uncovered a jump seat and noticed its tangled harness. The tamper-proof buckle remained intact, its wireless lock still engaged. He fingered the frayed nylon, a nice clean cut. It was a typical transport seat used to move prisoners around the battlefield. Sava glanced around the dim fuselage, looking for the knife. Several pairs of shiny rodent eyes peered up at him with suspicion. He found nothing. Lighting a cigarette, he pondered the scene but was interrupted by someone calling his name outside.
“What brought this down?” Mach asked.
“Not sure,” Sava replied, climbing out a gunner’s hatch. “Probably a mechanical failure. Maintaining the Mi-26s is always touch-and-go; spare parts hard to come by . . . or . . . “
“Yeah? Or?”
“Or someone broke loose from the inside, grabbed a firearm off a guard, and killed the crew.”
Mach laughed. “You’re a conspiracy nut.”
“This rotor-craft was at low elevation when it went down,” Sava continued, ignoring the jab. “Not much bulkhead damage. Even the landing struts are intact. The prisoner probably had a knife hidden, cut through the straps, and took out the crew with a small firearm.”
“Yeah, maybe. The brief didn’t say anything about prior incidents on Jan Mayen,” Mach said.
“It didn’t, eh?” Sava said, pointing his cigarette at the spiny fortress. “Do you know what we’re supposed to be guarding? Did they brief you?”
“No. It was blacked out in the mission dossier. You know that.”
“They don’t tell us a lot, do they?” Sava winked.
“Good point. How long do you think it’s been here?”
S
ava shook his head and shrugged. “Hard to say. By the looks of those other heaps,” he said, nodding at the bent and twisted aircraft carcasses littering the field, “the salt fog and egg stink of this place can turn metal to slag in short order. Nothing but a little rust on this Halo; it hasn’t been here long, maybe a month or two.”
Mach’s radio crackled to life, informing them the Antonov was about to take off. The massive transport wobbled as it taxied to the gravel ramp, its four turbofans screaming like banshees as it revved for takeoff. A spray of grit and vapor engulfed them as they shielded their eyes from the jet wash. The last time Sava remembered a takeoff so hurried, he was shuttling Moldavan diplomats out of a besieged airstrip in the Carpathians. The threat of a direct shelling was understandable there, but on Jan Mayen, the only mortars were delivered by the ass-end of guillemots.
“Didn’t know we were such shitty company.”
“Don’t take it personally, Mach,” Sava smirked. “Maybe they’ll circle around, come back and bomb us. Do us a favor, eh?”
Mach laughed.
The plane disappeared into the tea-green haze, wispy contrails marking its wake. Mach checked the orbital weather report from Al’ Madina, a world-service provided by the mysterious caliphate. A brief dead zone was forecast for the Denmark Strait. Anoxic levels were predicted to hover below a hundred feet for a week or more, an asphyxiating inconvenience.
A rainsquall moved in from the northeast. They hurried to move their heaps of gear up to the thorny fortress, trying to stay ahead of the front. Lugging a few tons of hardware while wearing bulky hoods was a misery best avoided.
“At least we’ve double rations . . . for awhile,” Mach said, trying to bring levity to the situation.
Sava said nothing, staring into an algae-filled lagoon nearby.
“Lonely place.”
“We can only hope, eh? Maybe they just hurried our retirement, a bunch of weathered vets gone to seek their island paradise. Hell, they’ve already given us a lethal dose of arthritis, or whatever this shit is.” Sava pointed at his scars.
“Almost healed?”
“Whatever ‘healed’ means.”
Sava looked at his arm. The marks were raised and rigid, but the irritation and erythema was gone. Despite Alkonost’s official briefing, Sava found it hard not to think about the surgery and Morosov’s hand in the matter. Experimental inoculations were risky, and the corporation had a spotty track record for prototyped biologics, as Sava had witnessed firsthand. Against doctor’s orders, he’d drunk a half-bottle of Stolichnaya the night before they’d flown to Kharkov from Tiraspol. It’d made the recovery a painfully disorienting ordeal, but it eased the dread.
Sava wondered: If a microbial menace existed on Jan Mayen and it was lethal, why would someone need Alkonost to guard it? A few warning signs painted with the universal skull-and-crossbones would have easily done the trick, a symbol even the most devolved primates would heed.
“Let’s move in.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
February 2156 C.E.
Lieutenant Uri Vitko lit a cigarillo and ran a hand over his shaved head. The rainy season had brought lice, and with them came mandated haircuts and carbaryl showers. After the outbreak and delousing, he’d decided skinhead was worthy haute couture for the Carpathian muck. The utility of the style—or lack thereof—had grown on him. Every week he lathered and shaved himself bald, a ritual as routine as cleaning his rifle. Vanity, Uri concluded, was a Pre-Shock commodity.
He squinted and peered into the field scope, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Through the saffron haze of wood smoke, he saw the outline of the dam. A mortar barrage had chipped away the superstructure’s flanks. Black water from the reservoir sluiced over a line of jagged concrete and protruding rebar, streaking the mottled gray with foam.
No longer a living lake, the reservoir was choked with timber and manmade debris, an effective barrier against the enemy. The logjam was a graveyard for those misfortunate enough to have fallen into the armada of deadfall. Most were tribal scavengers—some women and children—tempted by the floating junkyard’s salvage. A few were barbarian saboteurs, eager to rupture the dam’s foundation with depth charges. Fortunately for Alkonost, none were successful.
Occasionally a bloated body, tangled in the rotting snarl, would slip over the spillway and tumble into the estuary below, contaminating it. Recruits were assigned to dislodge the corpses from the lower riverbank. The stench of decay was nauseating. For weeks after, the taste of the mercenary’s meals would be ruined, his palate corrupted by the putrid taint.
The monitor’s parabolic dish detected an acoustic anomaly above the dam. From the vantage of Uri’s bunker, little could be seen through the foothills’ cloud forests. Raspy wheezing and throaty gurgling, the sounds were semi-human. The larger fauna of the Ceahlau Massif, wild boar and the wolves that preyed on them, had vanished into higher altitudes. This was something else, possibly bait for a Carpi ambush. Someone was going to have to reconnoiter: cross the dam’s rickety catwalk and hike up to the ridgeline. Uri needed a “volunteer.”
“Let’s head out,” Uri ordered, strapping on his ammo vest.
“You’re serious, just the two of us? What about the rest of that lot?” Krajnik pointed to the room full of intel grunts, eyes glued to screens of colorless flicker.
“Three’s a crowd, and I don’t want to draw attention,” Uri said, stuffing a few clips into empty pockets. “We’re mission intelligence; it’s our job.”
The two mercenaries left the stuffy bunker and its LED glow of humming radio receivers and computer racks. The misty air turned to a steady drizzle. Uri and Krajnik put on their berets and set out down the muddy switchbacks for the dam.
Specialist Krajnik was wary. “Did you hear about Lieutenant Sava Valis a few weeks ago? The Carpis laid a trap and captured him along with a couple of other guys. Mach and I broke free, then doubled back to rescue them. This could be the same trap. It’s happening more often, a new tactic.”
“I’m well aware.”
“You should’ve seen how they tortured them . . . grisly business,” Krajnik continued, shaking his head.
“I’ve read the reports.”
“Sava is still recovering. He hasn’t been quite right—” Krajnik tapped his temple, “—in the head.”
“I know. I get the briefings.” Uri hiked ahead of his comrade.
The spillway’s footbridge swayed under the mercenaries’ weight. Violent jostling slowed their pace to baby steps. Uri tried not to look down at the rushing cascade, instead focusing on the dam’s far side. He reached for the rusted railing—careful not lean into it—and advised Krajnik to do the same. Flaked carnelian coated his fingerless gloves. They needed to hurry; the banshee screechings were fading to moans as night fell.
“Where’s it coming from?” asked Krajnik.
“About two kilometers along the shore and up to the right.” Uri pointed into the gloom. “That’s where it was the loudest.”
They crossed to the generator powerhouse, and then paused at the dam’s administrative building to meet a shivering duty sergeant. Uri informed him of their intent, then asked him about enemy activity.
“A Second Brigade half-track passed through on the ring road earlier this afternoon to lay mines. But they didn’t look like demolitions to me,” the sergeant said, his caffeine-fueled eyes blurred with exhaustion. “Relief’s supposed to come in an hour along with a hydroelectric team to repair turbine five. Other than that, it’s been quiet.”
“Can you monitor this encrypted channel?” Uri said, pointing at his console screen.
“Why?” the sergeant asked, squinting at the frequency band.
“Just in case. We’re going to check something out.”
“What exactly?” the sergeant asked, slumping against a pile of sandbags.
“An acoustic disturbance,” Krajnik smirked.
The sergeant glanced up the hill. “I’ve been hearing weird things
all afternoon. Screams, low howls—it’s hard to tell with the smog.”
Uri nodded. “We picked it up on the monitors.” He pointed back at the bunker, a dab of gray on the eastern hill’s olive drab. “When did it start?”
“Hard to say. After the mine detail came back through sometime.”
“Interesting,” Uri paused. “Thanks, soldier.” He pulled out a half-ration of cigarettes and set them next to the sergeant. The man thanked him with a tip of his cap, and they were off.
They followed the tracks of the APC’s twin herringbones, its path swerving to avoid the husks of ancient automobiles. Little remained of the road past the dam. Collapsed culverts left only a single lane, the adjacent asphalt broken and brittle. Twilight shadows spilled into narrow ravines, shapes fading to stenciled black. Uri flipped on his shoulder lamp and panned the road’s mossy carpet. Above, yearling alder crowded the road like a tunnel, the lumber-choked reservoir barely visible beyond.
Half a kilometer from the roadblock the tracks stopped, surrounded by the tread of combat boots. Krajnik walked a few meters further with his magnetometer and adjusted its sensitivity. Idle pings suggested the area was free of land mines.
“There’s a footpath just off the road, up the hill here,” Uri said, unclipping his lamp. He waved the torch’s white cone past the ditch.
“No dubious potholes, no suspicious branch piles, and the magnetometer isn’t picking anything up. They might have deployed ceramic mines, but I doubt it,” Krajnik reported, folding up the detector’s wiry inductors.
“The whole mine thing is probably a cover. They were up to something else.”
“Why don’t we radio command, get the scoop on operations near the reservoir?”
“Those guys don’t know shit.” Uri motioned for Krajnik to follow him. “Shall we?”
Rooted streambeds served as a trail, faint animal paths providing portage in between the gullies. The going was hard, and the elevation gain was cruelly efficient. Uri looked for clues of Carpi movement: bivouacs, campfires, a deer carcass . . . but saw nothing. Besides the odd divot, the forest floor’s pine needles were pristine.
Nova Byzantium Page 7