by Anders Blixt
I remembered what he had said earlier – we can’t say no – and phrased my comment accordingly: “The Russians will hardly welcome us. How are we supposed to handle that?”
“Post 14 is lightly defended. The Russians don’t want to attract attention and they are also short of troops in Alba, particularly after the Japanese intervention. Our ursine allies will attack with a clear numerical superiority and seize the place. Then we humans will enter it and uncover whatever is hidden there. Since I now have your assistance, Terakh, Trishkin, Khader and Rlishi have decided to approve of the raid.” Lee sounded like a business manager instructing his staff.
“And if there will be fighting deep inside that mountain?” I said.
“We’ll deal with such matters there and then, but I am sure that both Miss Connor and you know how to handle a rifle.”
I nodded. Firefights in confined spaces are always deadly. I had not fired a gun for a long time, but no words from me would be able to make Lee revise his plans, so I stayed silent. That man held his abilities in too high esteem.
Lee and the ursines started to discuss tactical issues with the help of the blackboard. Linda did her best to make summarizing translations. The arrows drawn with chalks showed that the ursines understood the military problems they faced. These fellows were combat veterans, not reckless braves.
After the evening meal Linda and I huddled together on my bed in our room. It had been a strenuous day. After lunch, Lee had ordered us to prepare the Proteo for the raid and we had stowed fuel barrels, food and tools in its spacious cargo compartment. The wound in my chest ached after all the lifting.
“Lee deceives us.” Linda’s voice spewed venom. “His gestures and mimics stink of falsehood. There must be something big they want to pick up at Post 14, something so heavy that an ice-buggy can’t carry it. That’s why the need the Proteo. They have also put a strange rack on its roof.” She caught her breath. “Do you think they’ll shoot us when he doesn’t need our arms and legs any longer?”
“Yes, they will,” I said. “So we must make ourselves indispensable until we get a chance to run away.”
Chapter 12
The following morning more than a hundred ursines swarmed into the huge cavern and manned two dozen ice-buggies. After ten minutes, the raid force departed from the promontory.
We humans shared the Proteo and took turns behind the wheel to drive around the clock. Peter Lee managed his driving duties by eating painkillers, but was too weak to do much else. Our speed was limited to fifteen knots so soon the ice-buggies disappeared ahead of us. However, we would follow a straight course to the assembly point, whereas they would disperse and approach it by roundabout routes. An ursine squadron moving in force across the ice might attract undesirable attention and even though the Russians had few aircraft in the region, it was important to reduce that risk.
Maxidin, monotony, noise: these three words summarize 36 hours’ journey. The glare from sunlight on ice wore out the eyes, despite our sunglasses. We handled calls of nature in the cargo compartment behind the fuel barrels and we cooked food on a camping stove in the crew compartment. Every now and then I topped the fuel tank by pumping oil by hand from a barrel. We slept in shifts on a passenger couch behind the driver’s seat.
At sunset the day after our departure we reached our destination, an anonymous spot on the ice sheet. Several ice-buggies had preceded us and more arrived from all corners of the compass during the next hour. When darkness had fallen, we had to exit our warm cabin to take Peter Lee to a staff meeting. A kicksled served as an improvised wheelchair and we pushed it to a huge white tent in the middle of the pack of ice vehicles.
Linda and I suffered from Maxidin hangovers and huddled at the rear of the tent while waiting for a chance to retire. The ursines did not stand still and their restless shuffling pressed us against the cold tent cover. The air was as thick with ursine odours as in Gishtir’s thermae. Peter Lee made an apparently coherent review of the battle plan in an ursine language and Linda translated important bits into English. The braves saluted Lee by bellowing cheers when he had finished. Terakh was the next speaker and his words incited the braves to clamouring war dances where waving blades reflected the gleam of kerosene lanterns. Linda and I quickly retreated out into the cold to avoid being trampled.
A huge fan contraption rumbled beyond the ice-buggies, but I did not understand its purpose. After ten minutes we returned inside, where Terakh still spoke though the dancing had abated. Peter Lee slept sitting on the kicksled, so we took him back to the Proteo without anyone objecting. There we, too, went to sleep.
The sharp light of the rising sun penetrated my eyelids and jabbed a jolt of pain through my head. I sat up and realized that my eyes did not function properly. The hangover persisted – I was getting hooked on Maxidin. If I get out of this mess alive, I mustn’t touch that drug ever again, I thought.
Outside the Proteo colossi had grown out of the ice. I struggled to make my eyes regain focus and got tossed into a living nightmare: a dozen off-white hulks cast long shadows across our site. Their pulsating bodies shifted slightly back and forth. I recognized the Alban leviathans from book illustrations and now I understood their true size: living hills surrounded our camp.
Linda was still asleep whereas Peter Lee sat on the floor and gulped whisky straight out of a bottle. “I succeeded,” he cried. “I managed to synthesize the right pheromones. Now I can send them wherever I want. Do you want a swig?” He waved the bottle in my direction.
“Hell no,” I said. “I feel rotten. I need food.” I rummaged through a carton of food before lighting the camping stove. I did not want to see that man, but there was no escaping him right now.
The greasy smells of cooking filled the compartment and woke Linda. She merely grunted while eating boiled sausages with stale bread and washing them down with fruit juice.
Food in the belly made life more bearable and lessened my headache. Peter Lee seemed to have gone off the tracks completely, his mind addled by a mix of alcohol, painkillers and Maxidin. Well, hardly our problem, I thought.
Linda and I ran a detailed checklist for the Proteo to ensure that it was ready for today’s battle. While we were working, two ursines knocked on the door and called for something.
“They want Mr Lee,” said Linda.
“Let’s give them what they ask for,” I said. We dressed him for the Arctic cold and handed him over for transportation to the staff tent. I kept the whisky bottle because I wanted him to be able to speak.
A few minutes later, an ursine returned and called for us. “He wants us to join the staff meeting,” translated Linda.
In the big tent we found that the partially coherent Peter Lee reclined on a pile of skin rugs. An ursine stood behind him and made sure he did not fall over. A dozen others milled around the blackboard, on which Terakh had drawn a sketch map. He addressed Linda. “He wants to explain the battle plan for us so that we will ensure that Peter Lee’s parts are executed properly,” she explained.
I nodded and she started doing a simultaneous translation. Peter Lee looked at us every now and then during the briefing and towards the end he vomited on the ice. He’s going to hell quickly. If he dies before we’re able to escape, we’ll die, too, I thought.
We returned to the Proteo ten-fifteen minutes later and discovered that ursine mechanics were putting rockets in the rack on the roof. When ready, they proceeded to bolt an unwieldy fan behind that rack. Linda and I got busy checking the new installations and making sure that the wiring was properly connected all the way to the driver’s dashboard. The success of the operation, and our survival, depended on the equipment’s flawless performance. Peter Lee would hardly be sober until late in the evening, so Linda and I had to manage everything.
When the mechanics had completed their assignments, Linda and I sat down in the drivers’ seats and rehearsed dry runs of our tasks during the attack. That proved to be easier than we had expected. We even had got
orders not to risk our lives, because Terakh wanted us to be alive and healthy for the post-assault investigation of Post 14.
One hour after dawn Linda started the Proteo and I activated the roof fans that spread pheromones all around us. The off-white hills started moving and the ursines scattered to avoid getting crushed.
The leviathan herd surrounded us in all directions and I could barely make out the horizon beyond the pulsating bodies. Linda increased the speed to 15 knots and the monsters had no problem keeping up with us. According to plan, the ursines’ ice-buggies followed closely behind the herd.
If any leviathan decided to check our vehicle closely we would be crushed. Peter Lee had promised Terakh that the pheromones we were spreading would make the animals believe that the Proteo was a top-rank herd leader, but we had only the words of an addled megalomaniac for it. Maybe that was the reason he had drunk himself into a stupor at breakfast.
However, events proved Lee to be right. After one hour we reached the attack position without having experienced any problems.
When I glimpsed the coastal cliffs ahead, beyond a shambling hulk, I said: “Now,” and shut down the pheromone fan. Linda cut the speed and let the monsters slither past us. Soon the whole herd has overtaken us, and we had unobstructed view to the sides. When the ice-buggies roared past us, I flipped another switch, launching our rockets with a loud whoosh. Peter Lee revived for a moment and shouted a slurred “Hurrah!”
A dozen rockets flew in an arc above the leviathans and struck the cliffs several hundred yards ahead of them. The well-composed scents of their smoke trails lured the monsters forward into the Russians’ tents and vehicles.
A fight in a French adventure film looks dramatic and comprehensible. The heroes do exactly the right things to prevail, preferably elegantly, too, while their enemies fall for their bullets, all actions displayed in nice camera angles. In reality a battle is a matter of horror, explosions, smoke, and confusion.
The Proteo lingered in the rear while a couple of hundred intelligent beings did their best to kill one another inside and outside those cliffs. I did not bother to use the binocular, because I did not want to see the carnage close up. Occasional smoke puffs fluttered out of holes in the cliffs and we heard distant detonations. The leviathans got dispersed in the raucous chaos and fled the area – a small-calibre bullet will only nick them but that still hurts – and Linda had to move the Proteo out of harm’s way at several occasions.
Linda and I crossed the battleground on foot with our faces behind protective masks and our backpacks crammed with equipment. Peter Lee remained in the Proteo. I would report to him whenever he got sober. Two ursine braves escorted us through a mess of crushed vehicles to the edge of the ice sheet and across a small rocky beach cluttered with corpses to a wide opening in the cliff face. Linda looked ahead with a stiff neck and squeezed my hand through thick mittens. I focused on taking one step at a time without stepping on a body or slipping on the ice.
Will this be our fate, too? That’s the only thought that stuck in my mind during that walk. The ursines seemed unaffected, but what did I know of their mentality? Veteran soldiers have their emotions dulled by combat, though sometimes they crack under the pressure of war and turn into shivering mental cases or raging beasts. Does that happen to other intelligent species, too? Well, I leave that issue to the anthropologists.
Standing at the opening, I said: “This is an artificial cave mouth.” The technical words camouflaged my fear. “Look, the walls and the ceilings are too even. I think this is or has been a mine.”
I gazed up along the steep cliff side. Some openings far above us were easy to spot while other looked like patches of shadow on the granite. A Russian diesel generator chuffed next to the opening, its exhaust pipe spewing wisps of stinking smoke. Bullets had dented its metal housing. A bundle of thick cables carried electricity into the mountain.
The daylight reached some distance into the tunnel, but soon we entered chthonian darkness. Most of the light bulbs strung on cables along the ceiling had been destroyed in the fighting. Our electric torches and a chain of ursine oil lanterns attempted to dispel the dark, though with little success. Far ahead a cluster of spotlights illuminated a big bulky object. Occasional gunshots echoed in the distance. Maybe some Russians kept on fighting down in the pits or, more likely, trigger-happy ursines fired at fluttering shadows.
A restless Terakh waited for us at the spotlights about three hundred feet into the mountain. They formed a circle around an elevator. Gunshots had shattered a few, but enough were shining to provide decent illumination. Five humans in stained winter uniforms and two ursines lay dead around it. Ten yards beyond them I saw in a sturdy rack of steel rods holding a metal cylinder, six foot tall and two foot in diameter.
The tunnel continued into the mountain, a route marked with more oil lanterns. I pointed my torchlight at the cylinder: its shell had the same red shade as the strange stove in major Akhmatov’s hideout. The words Мольния Царя were stencilled on its lateral surface in the same font and colour as the text on that stove.
“Linda, what does that say?” I whispered.
“I can only make out the words mol’níya tsárya. It means ‘the tsar’s thunderbolt’. But there seem to be words in small print below it.”
Shit! Another sign of the Russians’ advanced technology, I thought. I made an effort to keep my voice calm. “We’ll check it in a moment.” I turned to Terakh and made a slight bow.
He addressed us and Linda translated: “This facility is secured. I want you to go down with the elevator. You will find one of my braves three drifts down and he will direct you to something important.”
“Certainly. I’d just like to take a look at that cylinder first,” I said. Will he sense my nervousness?
“Why? It’s just some sort of barrel,” Terakh said.
“I’d like to confirm that,” I said.
Terakh remained in place without speaking, so I walked around him and motioned Linda to come along. His eyes followed us, but I could not read his inhuman face.
“Does it say the same things as on the red stove? Speak quietly,” I whispered.
“In parts, yes. It says: ‘Hazard. The unit contains explosives. The unit contains substances that emit ionizing radiation. The unit contains toxic substances. The unit may only be handled by authorized specialists.’ What do you think this is?” mumbled Linda.
“Djävlar!” The insight made me lose my composure. For the first since my arrival in Alba, I spoke in Swedish. Linda grunted something and I switched to English. “Apologies for that curse. It is an infernal device. I’ll explain later.”
Linda nodded.
I forced myself to remain calm while scrutinizing the cylinder. Its top could be unbolted and detached with proper tools. A mechanism was attached to its centre, a square, six by six inches, with sixteen black buttons arranged four by four. When the beam of my torchlight rested on them, I saw that each was labelled with a yellow Cyrillic letter.
“That’s the sixteen initial letters in the Russian alphabet,” said Linda.
“Ask Terakh if he knows who the dead Russians are?” I said.
Linda translated and I understood the answer without interpretation: “No.”
Two Russians had officers’ rank insignia. I checked their pockets. Most items were of little interest, but I found a piece of paper with ten block letters written by hand. They were all on that set of buttons. The note disappeared discreetly into one of my pockets.
“Have you taken any prisoners?” I asked.
“Only a few civilians. All enemy soldiers are dead. We usually don’t take prisoners. It’s too cumbersome to keep them alive,” answered Terakh through Linda.
I shivered. What calm cruelty. “How did those Russians die?”
“They came up in the elevator when we stormed the entry tunnel and they were killed here in a melee.” Terakh moved his feet in that restless “gesture” I had seen before. “Never mi
nd them. Go down at once.”
Linda and I entered the elevator cage, which was attached to three vertical iron bars going down in the dark. Its steel mesh railing ended just above my waist. It could carry four humans but an ursine would probably consider it unpleasantly cramped even if he used it alone. The bright roundel from Linda’s electric torch moved across the control panel, neatly labelled in Russian, and she pressed a button.
The cage shook and started to descend slowly. I pointed the torchlight’s beam straight down but did not see the bottom. The cage quivered when the electrical engine unrolled the elevator cable, but I felt secure because this was a sturdy construction.
“The elevator is a later installation,” said Linda. “It does not match the tunnel or the shaft. Wrong proportions.” Her voice was devoid of emotions.
“Is this a Russian mine?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. It is too wide and too well excavated. Look at the bedrock.” Her electric torch made tiny quartz crystals glitter one foot from my face. The cage descended so slowly that I could touch that rock easily. The surface was surprisingly smooth. Its dull sheen spoke of old age.
“I don’t know of any machine that can drill a polished pit like this,” I said.
“The dinosaurs,” said Linda.
“What?!”
“Don’t take me literally. But this mine seems to be older than mankind’s arrival in Alba. The ursines must have had a golden age a long time ago,” said Linda.
“God alone knows,” I said. “Regardless what the Russians have found, they’ve kept it well hidden. The Institute knows nothing of this.”
“If the ursines once upon a time drilled this pit, they must have been very advanced,” said Linda.