Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  And in one corner of the dugout…Jake saw a white-limed area of floor, where two humped human figures lay still, stiff, and obviously very dead.

  While Turchin went to the bomb and wiped moisture from its casing with his handkerchief, Jake stepped into the corner and shifted lime about with the toe of his shoe. For all his enhanced sense of smell, the resultant odour wasn’t too potent. But it was, of course, the stench of death…

  “When you’re quite finished over there,” said Turchin, “all that remains for us to do is to wheel this thing into your Möbius Continuum, and transport it back to E-Branch HQ.”

  And Jake, speaking almost to himself, as if he hadn’t heard what Turchin had said, muttered, “And here’s a man who talks so eloquently of ruthless opponents.”

  “Eh? What?”

  The Necroscope looked at him, his eyes burning. “I was just wondering how men who were attacking you got shot in the back,” he said.

  “Does it matter?” Turchin looked surprised. “I mean, aren’t you forgetting something? These men were from that same suicide squad whose leaders planned to reduce Moscow to so much rubble! If they had succeeded they would have died in the blast. And if they had failed they would have been shot anyway. So what’s the difference?”

  “When all of this is over,” said Jake, “we can no longer be friends.”

  “Really?” said Turchin. “Well, the way I see it—when and if ever this is all over—we’ll each and every one of us need all the friends we can get!”

  Jake thought about that and said, “I’ll take the bomb while you go back out, close the door and pile the logs. You wouldn’t want anyone else to come in here, now would you?”

  Turchin narrowed his eyes, for several long moments remaining silent before answering, “Very well. But don’t make me wait too long.”

  Jake said, “No, of course not.”

  But back at E-Branch HQ, he took his time drinking a mug of hot black coffee, leaving Turchin on his own at the woodshed in Zhukovka for a full twenty minutes before going back for him…

  The winter-warfare kit was delivered, with black leggings to go under the white trousers. This last had been Trask’s idea based on what the precog had told him: that their last stand would be made in a dark place. For Trask knew that while outside the Perchorsk complex—in the deep Urals ravine that housed it—it would be white with snow from the sky, or frozen spray from the dam, inside was a place of shadows, of gloom, and frequently of Stygian darkness. White clothing would make good camouflage for the ravine, but it wouldn’t work inside the complex itself.

  As the team examined and prepared their weapons, dressed in their assault gear, said various farewells over the telephones, intercom, and Internet, so the Duty Officer John Grieve came to the Ops Room door and asked to speak to Trask.

  “What is it, John?” Trask asked him at the door.

  Grieve barely glanced at Trask’s sunglasses, before answering, “David Chung was on the blower again. He asked if we could fax him some recognition diagrams, photographs, schematics of a Russian MIKE-class sub. He believes that’s what they’re chasing and needs to take this stuff with him. They’ll be taking off in just over half an hour’s time. I have a disk with the information he requires, but I’ll have to use the big screen to be sure I get a printout of the right stuff. Or, if you’d prefer not to have me in there, you can perhaps do it for me?”

  “No, I can’t,” Trask answered. “We’re pretty busy. So you’d better come in and do it yourself.”

  “You’re sure the others won’t mind?” Grieve was very diplomatic about it, or perhaps he was simply being cautious.

  “We’re a bit of a mix in here, John,” Trask told him. “Nothing seems to have changed…not yet, anyway. No one will mind as long as you don’t.”

  With which Grieve entered and went to the big wall screen’s console. The screen was no longer in use; the Perchorsk schematics had been studied as best possible in the time allowed, and in a few moments more the screen was displaying a concise history of late twentieth-century Soviet submarine technology.

  Grieve began printing out the photographs and other details that Chung needed, and as the various frames were displayed, so they attracted Ian Goodly’s attention. Frowning, and very obviously perplexed, he moved closer, stared hard at the screen for a long moment…then staggered!

  Having seen what had happened, Trask went to Goodly, steadied him, and asked, “What is it now, Ian? What did you see this time?”

  The precog took a moment or so to compose himself and think about it before answering. Then he said, “Cast your mind back a few weeks, to a day or so before we went after Vavara on Krassos. We were in your office, you, me, and David Chung. The usual ritual: you asked me if I’d foreseen anything.”

  “Refresh my memory,” said Trask.

  “I had been having a string of glimpses, flashes, day-dreams—call them what you will,” said Goodly. “At the time they were more or less meaningless. They didn’t relate to anything.”

  “Because they were scenes from the future,” Trask answered. “Yes, now I remember. You mentioned black-robed figures, drifting or floating: Vavara’s nuns, as it turned out, their flowing gait. And you spoke of a warren of burrows like giant wormholes in the earth, all filled with loathsomeness, like ‘morbid mucus in a cosmic sinus.’ I remember that well enough! And I know now what it meant: that place under Palataki.”

  “Yes,” said the precog. “That’s right. But as I recall it I saw something else, something that really didn’t seem to relate to anything at all. And just a moment ago, looking at this wall screen—these schematics, pictures, diagrams of a Russian submarine—suddenly I saw it again.”

  And again Trask remembered, and was able to repeat Goodly’s precise words from that earlier time: “You saw ‘something sinking, deeper and deeper into groaning abysses of water.’”

  Jake had come to stand with them, joining Grieve, Trask, and Goodly where they stared up at the schematics. And now he said, “You were seeing this boat that Chung is looking for going down into the sea. But you’re a precog. Isn’t it to be expected that you’ll envisage things like that, in connection with what we’re doing?”

  “But that’s just it,” said Goodly. “I mean, this isn’t what ‘we’ are going to be doing. None of us will be involved with it in any way. It’s Chung’s thing, not ours. Which makes it rather unusual. My visions usually relate to me and the people immediately surrounding me. It’s our future, after all. Mine and whoever happens to be there to share it with me. On this occasion, however, Chung won’t be there. And we can’t be at Perchorsk and with him at the same time.”

  At which the Necroscope remembered something, went to where his discarded clothes were piled on a chair, and took the fragment of hairbrush that Chung had given him—Harry Keogh’s hairbrush—from his inside jacket pocket. The thing was quiescent now, just a shard of broken wood and a few pig bristles, but he would keep it with him anyway if only as a good-luck piece. And then he returned to the others where they were still looking at the big screen.

  Millie Cleary had joined them, and so had Gustav Turchin.

  “All long out of date,” the latter wasn’t overly impressed with what was on the screen.

  “It is now,” Millie told him, “but it was pretty new stuff some fifteen years ago. This is a MIKE-class vessel, twin nuclear reactors using liquid lead coolant.”

  “Oh?” The Premier looked at her curiously, and said, “Tell me, my dear, in addition to being a powerful telepath, are you also an expert on submarines?”

  “Millie is expert in a good many subjects,” Trask told him. “She’s a walking current affairs manual. And like she says, all of this stuff was current affairs, certainly to the British and US secret services some fifteen to twenty years ago.”

  Now Turchin was impressed. “A secondary talent?”

  “No,” Trask answered. “Millie is a very quick study, that’s all, and she has a head for details.”r />
  “Er, such as?” Now Turchin spoke directly to Millie. It was like a challenge.

  “The liquid-metal coolant system was first used in the ALFA-class attack subs,” she answered. “But it was very dangerous. I mean—without wanting to be impolite—those nuclear submariners of yours paid for that coolant in a lack of lead shielding. In fact most of those Soviet subs were noisy, dirty, and lethal to the poor men who went to sea in them. The first of the MIKEs is a case in point. She’s almost a mile deep southwest of Bear Island, where she’s lain for the last twenty-odd years.”

  “Do you recall her name?” said Turchin.

  “The Komsomolets,” Millie told him. “She went down due to a fire in her aft compartments…the propulsion system.” And:

  “Best not to try testing her, Gustav,” Trask grinned at his astonished guest (grinned wolfishly, Turchin thought), “or just like that sub you’ll find yourself well out of your depth…”

  John Grieve had got what he wanted, and knowing it was very nearly time for the team to be leaving, he shook hands all round and left.

  Minutes later, looking at his watch, Turchin said, “By now my enemies are well established in Perchorsk, while yours—or rather, the world’s—will soon be landing there. Isn’t it time we were on our way?”

  Trask agreed, saying, “Anyone who wants out, now’s the time to speak up.”

  But no one did, and Ian Goodly said, “See what I mean?”

  And yes, they all knew what he meant: that the future would not be denied…

  27

  Perchorsk

  IN PLAN, VIEWED OR PHOTOGRAPHED FROM space—which it had been, often, in a perilous earlier time—the Perchorsk ravine was a darkly enigmatic gash in the tortured landscape. Lying parallel with the mountains north to south, in a huge fold in the Northern Urals, the ravine was flanked by close-packed, white-capped peaks reminiscent of the shattered, fossilized spinal plates of some primal stegosaurus.

  The bottom of the ravine had been a watercourse subject to severe seasonal flooding, but some thirty years ago it had been dammed to provide hydroelectric power for the disastrous Perchorsk Projekt. Upriver, the man-made lake was full, its surface leaden in starlight. But the moon was up and climbing, and soon the lake would gleam silver. Three-quarters of the waters stood open to the night, the rest lay hidden under a vast platform of reinforced concrete. During the Projekt’s early days this domed canopy had supported a roof of massive lead, protection against radiation reflecting back from the sky; but since the Projekt’s failure, and in the interests of the faltering Russian economy, the valuable lead had since been stripped and transported away for use elsewhere.

  While the lake appeared calm on its surface, underneath it was a raging torrent. Channelled under the roof through sluice gates, the water reappeared in four shining spouts that issued from conduits in the dam wall. Flung spume, rising up from the deluge, froze, fell, or drifted back, coating the ravine’s bed in feathery snow and decking its walls in curtains of glittering ice. With the bulk of its contents restrained, only a much reduced stream now followed the ancient course downriver.

  On top of the dam wall, four blockhouses stood guard, each housing the controls of its respective turbine. Three of these squat sentinels stood silent and unmanned, their turbines long since fallen into disrepair. Only the fourth—the one closest to the complex—was still working, and then only very inefficiently, feeding a sporadic stream of electrical power to the complex.

  Some sixty or seventy feet back from the dam wall, a dully glinting army jet-copter stood waiting on the faded yellow X of a helipad landing zone, its black-, grey- and green-mottled camouflaged shape like that of some alien dragonfly perched on the concrete canopy. The cold unblinking eyes of cabin windows stared out over the dam wall towards the yellow glow from huge steel doors in the wall of the ravine: the entrance to the complex. Behind the plane’s black windows, the pilot and copilot had their orders. They had been sitting there for close on two hours now, and would continue to do so for two more if necessary, before issuing their first threats over the plane’s loud-hailer.

  The armour-piercing 15 mm cannons in the jet-copter’s nose were also trained on Perchorsk’s doors, but independent of the air mobility of the chopper, they could very quickly switch to the blockhouse. At what amounted to point-blank range, weapons like this could reduce the structure to so much smoking rubble in seconds. In which event the energy that powered the complex would be gone along with the blockhouse.

  Armed night patrolmen, keeping watch from a road dynamited out of the solid rock of the mountain—the ramp that serviced the complex—shivered uncomfortably in their parkas and kept moving, making sure they weren’t in the line of fire and staying well back from the light that came flooding from the half-open doors.

  Inside those doors in a cavernous service bay, Perchorsk’s “bosses” and their VIP visitors from Moscow sat around a blazing brazier locked in conversation, or rather in negotiations.

  The three VIPs, though dissimilar in appearance, were very much of a sort in their ambitions. The only difference lay in how they would use their wealth-based power, if or when such power became available. Communist hard-liners in their time, and still hard in their hearts, they had seen their political ideologies and aspirations whittled away, Russia’s status as a world leader diminished, and her armed might depleted to the point of decimation. They wanted these things back and power returned to them. And if that wasn’t possible then the next best thing must suffice: personal wealth beyond all dreams of avarice. In which case let Mother Russia go to hell, for they would be out of it.

  The speaker for the three was ex-General Nikolai Korolev, a big-boned, square-headed bear of a man in polished boots, a fur hat (which he persisted in wearing embellished with four stars, the insignia of his ex-rank), and a fur-lined leather overcoat. Holding his hands out to the brazier, and rubbing them briskly, he said, “So then, comrades Galich, Borisov, and Kreisky—good fellows all—allow me to thank you on behalf of my colleagues for the grand tour you have afforded us. What’s more, I commend your patience in waiting out these three long years in so desolate, so isolated a place as Perchorsk. I’m sure that your, er, benefactor, my old friend General Suvorov, will be most appreciative…that is, of course, if ever he returns.”

  “Oh, really?” a man called Karl Galich, seated on the other side of the blaze, replied in a voice like the purring of a big cat. “You doubt that he’ll return? But why wouldn’t he? He made us several promises and kept at least one—the most important of all, to set us free—else we wouldn’t be here in Perchorsk now. So why should he renege on the others? It seems to me that explanations are in order: for instance, why the delay? Why has it taken you so long to begin looking for him, especially since the General was such a ‘very good friend’ of yours?”

  Galich was a tall, slender, handsome man, very effeminate in his looks and sensuous movements…but he was also a psychopath, a serial-killer axeman, who but for Suvorov’s intervention would still be serving out his triple life sentence in the Ukhta penal colony.

  “Patience, Karl, patience!” Korolev held up a hand. “Unwise to go rushing at things, and jumping to wrong conclusions. Yes, Mikhail is—or perhaps was—our mutual friend, and he left a trail of clues for us to follow in the event of any unfortunate accident, or even more unfortunate demise. Finally, we have put it all together and tracked him down; we now know where Mikhail went, if not why he’s still there. Now you must allow us a moment or two to think things through. For after all, you’ve given the General three whole years! As to why he hasn’t yet returned—and probably never will—we’ll reach a mutually satisfactory conclusion, certainly. In view of your loyalty, your dedication to this dear old comrade, you may not like that conclusion, but we’ll get there in the end nevertheless. And then we’ll come to a decision on what to do for the best. Only rest assured, Karl, we shall honour the General’s promises down to the last rouble or very last ounce of alien gold,
whichever.”

  But as he quit rubbing his hands, sat back and appeared to engage in quiet contemplation, in fact Korolev’s thoughts were elsewhere; he was reflecting on everything that he and his colleagues had seen during the course of their guided tour of the Perchorsk complex. Especially he considered the heavy rings of crudely hammered gold plainly visible, gleaming on the fingers of this cutthroat trio—Galich, Borisov, and Kreisky—self-appointed leaders of the ex-convict factions now in control of the three-dimensional labyrinth that was the Perchorsk complex. And “complex” was the right word for it, indeed the only word…

  Korolev’s coconspirators were Igor Gurevich—a physicist-cum-senior officer in the almost destitute Russian air force; a man who believed that the ill-fated Perchorsk Projekt should be resurrected as a shield against American air superiority—and Admiral Maxim Aliyev, a sailor from the cold-war school of Soviet heroes, who for his pains had been given responsibility for the “safe” decontamination and disposal of an era’s once-mighty nuclear fleet. But Aliyev’s mad answer to that specific problem was the reason why David Chung was currently out over the North Atlantic Ocean, his mind focussed on probing for massive radiation leaks.

  Both of these men—who, along with Korolev, made up Premier Gustav Turchin’s trio of military opponents—were in their early sixties. Gurevich was small, sharp-featured, ratlike, and swift in his movements; Aliyev was fat, bowlegged, bearded, and slow-moving, and when he walked had a sailor’s swaying gait.

  And right now both men, in parallel with their burly, often bullying industrialist colleague Nikolai Korolev, were thinking back on what they’d seen here…

  The complex: roughly spherical, like a giant bubble scooped out of the bedrock, with its many levels, zones, and sectors—areas both safe and unsafe—some physically dangerous, by reason of residual radioactivity, others made fearful and mentally destabilizing, by virtue of sights best left unseen. Korolev and his party had “inspected” once-immaculate barrack rooms…pigsties now for the convict scum who inhabited them; they had visited a laboratory, once equipped with the apparatus of modern science, where nothing of value remained except some abandoned junk that Perchorsk’s current crew had cobbled together into a still producing lethal potato vodka. They had seen various demarcations, signs and sigils like so much graffiti painted on the perimeter corridor walls and bulkhead hatches, offering stark warnings of passage from one “boss”-controlled zone to the next. The inhabitants of Perchorsk had separated themselves into factions, not always as mutually cooperative as now.