“That’s it,” Mach said, cocking the brushed steel of 9mm semi-automatic. “You die.”
“But who will be around to beat you at chess and smoke your cigarettes?” Sava laughed, smashing out his butt. “It won’t be Yakiv; that kid’s an idiot.
“So what kind of favor did this Oksana do for you?”
“I find it odd you can make jokes about chess, after Turkmenbashi.” Mach turned serious.
“That was ugly, wasn’t it,” Sava waxed nostalgic.
“What’s this?” Mach pointed at one of the monitor screens and flipped it to long-wave infrared.
Sava squinted at the ghosted blur on the security monitor. Mach’s finger tracked a white blob as it scrambled across the black cold of a jagged boulder field. It wasn’t a bird, and the Jan Mayen’s stagnant seas were too rich with sulfides for any wayward seal; it had to be a man.
“It’s not responding to friend-or-foe interrogate, and it’s too dark for visual,” Mach said, fingering the auto-cannon arming switch. “Shall I?”
“Hold tight, I’m heading out to investigate,” Sava said, pulling out his enrichment hood. “Get on the intercom, see if anyone’s missing. I’ll radio back.”
The dead zone was receding, leaving behind a foggy inversion layer. Crouching, Sava looked through his Vepr sight, the lowlight enhanced to penetrate the aerosols. The setting sun cast a pall over the sweating sea rock, movement scrambled by waddling auks incubating their thin-shelled eggs.
“All’s clear so far,” Sava radioed. “I’m about a klick northeast of the Crown.” Sava waved.
“I see you,” Mach radioed back.
He headed inland, up the guano-streaked cliffs, across the muskeg toward a claw of basalt. He launched a parachute flare to have a look. Under the potassium glow slumped a lethargic man wearing mud-caked trousers and nothing else. His hair was high and tight, face cleanly shaven: Alkonost.
“Yakiv, you stupid bastard! What the hell are you doing out here?”
The recruit was delirious, mumbling and drooling, his eyes dilated and twitchy. He was hypoxic and in the initial stages of pulmonary edema. Sava needed to get him to the med station. He lifted Yakiv to his feet and wrapped his frigid arm around his shoulder to support him.
“Mach, tell the doc to get a bay set up, we’ll need oxygen and IV fluids. It’s Yakiv. He’s out of his mind,” Sava radioed, dragging the private down the scree slopes.
The Crown’s auto-cannons exploded in a lightning crack of fusillade. Sava dropped Yakiv and dove into the hollow of an upturned clod. The radio was inundated with the popping hiss of outgoing auto-cannon rounds. Fifty-millimeter shells streaked the gloom with tracer fire. A nearby ridge plumed with black smoke, the explosions’ dust fires reflected in the slurry of a nearby tidal lagoon.
“Mach, hold fire!”
Static.
Sava waited. Yakiv’s eyes were glazed, lips purple with oxygen deprivation. If the barrage didn’t cease soon, the mercenary would be brain dead. Sava stayed low and waited. The bursts from the gun emplacements grew sporadic with the passing minutes, until at last, the redoubt’s gunmetal faded to shadow.
“Mach! Goddamn it!”
“Sorry, boss,” Mach radioed back, the interfering sputter dissipating. “Is your friend-or-foe beacon active?”
Sava checked his forearm console and saw the pulsing icon of a green shield. “IFF is on. What’s the system locked on to?”
Mach groaned in frustration. “I released the arming switch when you found Yakiv, then the tracker picked up another target almost instantly. Automated, I couldn’t stop it. I’ll explain when you get back.”
“Send some guys out here, I need help bringing Yakiv in. We’ve got to get him on oxygen, stat.”
Under the fluorescent lights of the triage bay, the squad’s medic wrapped Yakiv in the foil of a thermal blanket and fitted an oxygen mask over his face. An amyl nitrite mixture was bled into the oxygen to offset the mild sulfide poisoning. Despite his physical state, he was lucid and able to talk.
“Yakiv!” Sava snapped his fingers in front of the mercenary’s nose. “Can you hear me?”
Yakiv nodded weakly.
“What the hell were you doing out there without a hood and filter? Who were you after?”
“No one, lieutenant,” Yakiv slurred. “This past week . . . I’ve been sleepwalking. Cleaning my weapon, walking the inner cordon aimless, showering until I’m pruned . . . But the strange thing is . . . ” the mercenary trailed off.
“Yes?”
“The strange thing is . . . ” Yakiv looked into Sava’s eyes. “I’m not a sleepwalker, never have been. Could it be the treatment?”
Sava shook his head. “Don’t know, but we’ve all been suffering nocturnal anomalies lately. Haven’t we, Mach?”
Mach shrugged.
“Did you see anyone else out there?” Sava asked.
Eyes darting, Yakiv pondered as Sava waited impatiently. He repeated the question again. “I . . . I . . . I thought I saw someone, a ghost, like a man, but different . . . not sure.”
“He’s out of it. Take him away.”
The medic and another recruit lifted Yakiv’s stretcher and carried him off to sickbay. Sava set his Vepr down and sat next to Mach at the monitoring station. Pulling the data cartridge from the Crown’s northeastern cameras, Mach scanned the previous hour’s footage.
“When you found Yakiv, I armed the auto-cannon’s IFF. I thought it might’ve been a setup or an ambush,” Mach explained, tracing Sava’s outline on replay. “Ridiculous, considering the desolation of this inhospitable atoll, but paranoia got the best of me, so I took precautions.”
“The trackers found something else, didn’t they?” Sava asked, lighting a cigarette. “Yakiv’s ghost?”
“See,” Mach pointed at the black outline of Jan Mayen’s volcanic spine. “There’s something running along the crest of the ridge, just in range. Something large. The system’s been dialed back to filter out indigenous critters: birds, iguanas, rats . . . this was bigger.”
“Did we hit it?”
“Not sure. Besides some brush burn from the incendiaries, the infrared’s picked up nothing.” Mach replayed the video, outgoing drumfire streaking the screen. In between the muzzle flash, Sava spotted a jittery flyspeck traced by an orange targeting triangle. It could’ve been anything.
“Who else could be on this island?”
“Why so sure it’s a who, maybe it’s an it?” Mach speculated.
“You and I’ve been at this long enough to know when we’re being stalked. Someone’s probing our defenses. It looks like our hardened hugger-mugger talents might be needed on this rock after all.”
Sava remembered the downed Mi-26 out on the runway. Its escapee could be wandering the Beerenberg’s yellowed escarpment, cranky and starving, looking for revenge. Jan Mayen brimmed with skullduggery; Sava felt it. They were ignorant pawns in someone’s covert machinations.
“What do you think we’re supposed to be defending?” Mach asked, taking a swig from his Kevlar canteen. “You know . . . down in the vault?”
“Why don’t we take a look?”
“Good idea.”
The vault’s portal mimicked an ancient design. The faceted door was a woven stainless alloy, heavy and impossible to drill. A knife tap revealed no acoustic depth. Solid as quarry marble, the builders of the portico must have intended for it to last for millennia.
Concentric dials, unmarked and featureless, functioned as the door’s sole locking mechanism. Sava spun the device and felt the supple clicks of its well-oiled spindle and drive cam. Alkonost’s data logs showed no record of the cryptic combination. Blindly guessing, the number of permutations needed to produce the correct combination—even if it was hooked to a supercomputer with a robotic spinner—would exhaust the geological age of the Post-Holocene.
“Not in our lifetimes,” Sava said, idly pounding on the door’s metal slab. “Whatever’s inside here might as well be on th
e Moon.”
“Maybe it’s all for show, an illusion, a prop.”
A closet-sized pit beneath a floor hatch worked as the vault’s antechamber, just large enough for two people to shift awkwardly. The cramped space was engineered to hinder the deployment of hydraulic safe-cracking gear. Sava put his ear to the vault and felt warmth against his cheek. He heard a faint electrical buzz indiscernible from the drone of the Crown’s filtering systems.
“It’s so tight, air molecules couldn’t leak out, let alone killer germs,” Mach said, tracing the door seal with his fingertips. “That Morosov treatment . . . ” he paused. “What the hell was it supposed to protect us against, anyway?”
“Don’t know,” Sava shrugged. “Maybe they’ve trapped some cyclopean sea god in here and built this sarcophagus around it,” he joked. “Now it’s escaped and running amok.”
“If only,” grinned Mach. “You know the Crown’s power comes from inside, probably a thermo-voltaic generator tapped into a geothermal well. Jan Mayen’s a tectonic hotspot. There’s a manifold just under operations, under the floor grating. The conduit runs through the vault’s core, right through here,” he said, slapping the metal.
“Is there any way to get into it from above?”
“Not physically. But we could cobble together a fiber endoscope and worm it along the power cables.”
“Might be interesting to have a peek,” Sava said. “One has to wonder, if this vault’s so watertight and impossible to open, why did they bother hiring us?”
Mach raised his eyebrows. “Good question.”
Sifting through company mission reports bore little results. The only details of the vault’s contents were small sidebars noting that “Cargo A-2,” weighing forty kilos, was received December 2 and introduced into “Chamber C-12” on January 8. In the past five years, this routine had been completed piecemeal with the last of the cargo delivered a month prior to the team’s arrival.
“Someone in Alkonost knows what’s in here.”
“Got their long-wave encryption key? I’ll dial them up,” Sava joked. “I’m sure they’d be more than eager to divulge.”
Disseminating classified information would get an Alkonost mercenary imprisoned, exiled, or executed. Transnistria’s Smirnov Legal Code was strict, prosecuting such transgressions as highest treason. Alkonost was Tiraspol’s pride, the fountainhead of its treasure. If rumor spread that the mercenary company was nothing more than thieves—corruptible and untrustworthy—Nova Byzantium would pull their contracts. Denied revenue, the Free State of Transnistria would wither.
“For now, it all pays the same, eh?” Sava said.
Mach pulled out his flask and waved the vodka under Sava’s nose. He took a sip, then handed it back to Mach, his jaw clenched with fiery alcohol.
“A game of chess?”
Sava nodded.
CHAPTER TEN
October 2163 C.E.
Uri had hydrated and donned the strange mask again . . .
He found himself on the outskirts of Baku: he’d been there before, but as a man, not as a woman. For a woman, it could be a far crueler place . . .
A mob pressed in around him . . . no, her, a young woman. Above the throng, the omnipresent oil derricks jumbled with Baku’s blackened tenements. A knock to the head caused her to fall. Dribbling kicks scooted her along through the oily mud as she tried to stand. A hand with sharp fingernails grabbed her clothing, ripping. She screamed, defiant and shrill.
Shredded clothing dangled from her body like streamers. The mob reached in and snatched away the last shreds until she was completely naked. A downward glance: this was a girl’s body, maybe fifteen. Her partially developed breasts were small against her slight ribcage, hips still narrow; more of a child than a woman. A piece of metal sailed in and hit her, slicing her scalp and causing it to bleed. The mob pushed and shoved, the girl’s feet barely touching the road as they carried her along. The mad parade pushed on, the mass reeling with vicious energy.
“Witch!”
Uri’s grasp of Azeri was good enough to understand their chants. Gaining focus, his mind reoriented. Devoid of reason, superstitious people easily reverted to manias regardless of continent or century. In dark times, female sexuality, like booze or a drug, was a powerful and misunderstood intoxicant to the primitive mind, a volatile force to be feared.
Whatever this girl’s crime, sleeping with a teenage lover, spurning the advances of a village elder . . . it had raised the ire of the people in this Baku backwater. Now they were going to exorcise the demon, a public shaming followed by the ultimate punishment.
Brine flies swarmed, hatched from petroleum pools on the Caspian’s salty shores. They were everywhere, in every breath. Oil fires ringed the city’s peninsula, the carbon smoke an attempt to ward off the insect plague.
The girl was asthmatic. Every wheezy breath of particulate-heavy air was a struggle as she sobbed. They cinched a rope around her neck as the ringleaders yanked her, stumbling and tripping, down the rutted road.
“Help me!” Her pleas were muted by the mob’s rage.
The citizens of Baku continued to taunt. The cruelty was astonishing, bloodlust whipped into an insane fury. Uri’s callused emotions were raw.
Beyond the crowd was a hill dotted with derricks like crucifixes atop Golgotha. Torches sailed in, the flames singeing her hair as they hit her shoulders. The crowd was trying to burn her. Another yank of the rope and she fell flat as the mob dragged her the last hundred meters.
“Kill the witch! Burn her!”
Filthy hands stood her to face the crowd as she tried to cover her nakedness with shaky hands. Uri felt the chill of humiliation, waves of it wringing her with shame. Next to a gang of henchmen stood the agitator. Dressed in black robes, he wore the garb of an orthodox priest.
Nova Byzantium was the confederated capital of the outer provinces, but had no local authority to intervene. Uri was disgusted by the Bakuvian’s barbarian nonsense. Baku was “civilized” in name only.
The girl’s eyes darted through the crowd, desperate for mercy. Uri focused through her bloodshot view. Through the particulates, he saw the city and its main access road. Far from empty, the avenue was choked with Alkonost’s armored vehicles as Hind gunships circled the Baku skyline. The mechanized column was close. Uri was stupefied; none of the mercenaries had bothered to stop the attack.
Baku was the staging point for Alkonost’s Operation Alexander, a massive amphibious assault on the Caspian’s eastern shore over two hundred kilometers away. A warlord in Turkmenbashi had made an alliance with Constantinople, and they’d contracted Tiraspol to purge the Turkmen city of the tyrant’s enemies.
Off in the distance, Uri was smoking a cigar, napping on an APC maybe, waiting for mission orders, and bored. Through the girl, he felt his doppelganger like a ghost. The burnt salt, the sting of petroleum, watery rust, Baku’s reek was inimitable. He had shrugged off the Dagestan stoning as coincidence, but this was a conspiracy. Held hostage by the horror, Uri awaited for the conclusion.
Groping hands threw the girl against the A-frame of a pumpjack. Thin cables, torn from the derelict rig, were wound tightly around her ankles and wrists. The barbed frays sliced through soft flesh, the pain acute. Below, toppled barrels spilled crude into a shallow moat. A grinning man in overalls stood nearby, eagerly stroking the flint of a naphtha lighter with his thumb.
Labored breaths lapsed into suffocating gasps. Uri hoped the girl would simply pass out, fade away, avoid the fiery excruciation, but her tormentors were too efficient; they were practiced hands at burning the community’s “unclean.”
The priest approached, eyes ablaze under the brim of his petrol-stained klobuk. He hollered an indignant screed. In between breaths of hate-filled baritone, Uri heard the girl whisper an inaudible prayer.
With a nod from the holy man, the lighter dropped to the ground.
Uri felt the flash of pain; the shock was a small death in itself. Smoke plumed from
her feet, sealing her eyes, nose, and mouth with choking soot. She exploded in a fit of strangling coughs. The burn was conceivable at first: the cauterizing of a blowtorch, the sear of a stove element, radiator steam . . . but then it mutated into the unimaginable. Blind and asphyxiated, she started to lose her mind.
Uri was desperate to unchain himself from the dying girl; every immolated second was a universe of pain. With her skin gone, he felt nothing but the dull roast of dying organs. Like a singed caterpillar, the girl’s body convulsed and contracted. And with the heat, Uri felt her cerebellum hiss and pop, veins bursting inside gray matter. The flames consumed her.
The mask released him.
It fell to the floor, shriveling limp as it crawled away. The adrenalin rush he remembered from Soqotra was gone, no euphoria or endorphin high this time. In its place was nausea and disgust. Uri took a swig of water, then lit his cigarillo.
Miriam was still out on an errand.
He never saw the girl, but looking through her eyes, he understood her beauty. Uri could only wonder who she was. She must have had a name; everyone had a name. Did her parents mourn her, or were they part of the mob? Was there a body left to bury? Uri dabbed out his cigarillo and covered his face with sweaty hands. Snot, vomit, and saliva poured down his chin as he wept.
The angst, just one fully loaded APC would have made quick work of the mob, he brooded.
Sobbed out, he stood and wiped his nose with a shirt cuff. The floor was a mess. He’d knocked over the tea bowl, the brown liquid spilt over the loft’s Persian carpet mixing with a puddle of vomit. The mask had finished its desiccation, wrung free of its fluid. The tea broth tasted earthy, like composted leaves. What purpose it served—beyond the mask’s hydraulics—wasn’t obvious: some chemical cue, a catalyst or a polymer kernel.
Uri reclined on a leather bench and relit his cigarillo when Miriam walked in. Infuriated, she threw her satchel to the floor.
“That’s it! I warned you, no smoking in my office! You will not stay here anymore,” she roared.
Lacking the will for protest, Uri tossed the butt into the water decanter. Miriam’s eyes gravitated to the Kali mask, vomit and spilt tea scattered over the tessellated carpet.
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