by Brian Lumley
“Sirens?” Jazz had been especially interested. “From the Projekt?”
“Of course, where else?” Kazimir had answered. “Their alert sirens, their alarms! There’d been an accident, a big one. Oh, we heard rumours. And during the next two or three weeks … helicopters flying in and out, ambulances on the new road, men in radiation suits decontaminating the walls of the ravine. And the word was this: blow-back! The weapon had discharged itself into the sky, all right—but it had also backfired into the cavern that housed it. It was like an incinerator; it melted rock, brought the roof down, nearly took the lid off the whole place! They took a lot of dead out of there over the next week or so. Since then it hasn’t been tried again.”
“Now?” Yuri had had to have the last word. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “They run the turbines now and then, if only to keep ’em in trim; but as my father says, the weapon’s been quiet. No more testing. Maybe they learned something from that first trial, and maybe it was something they’d rather not know. Myself, I reckon they know they can’t control it. I reckon they’re finished with it. Except that doesn’t explain why they’re still there, why they haven’t dismantled everything and cleared off.”
At which Jazz had nodded, saying: “Well, that’s one of the things I’m here to find out. See, a lot of very important, very intelligent men in the West are worried about the Perchorsk Projekt. And the more I learn about it, the more I believe they have good reason to be …”
One night when they gave Jazz his pills, he didn’t take them. He pretended to, stuck them in a corner of his mouth, drank his water without washing them down. It was partly an act of rebellion—against what amounted to physical, even mental imprisonment, however well-intended—and partly something else. He needed time to think. That was the one thing he never seemed to have enough of: time to think. He was always either asleep or taking pills to put him to sleep, in pain or dopey from the needle that killed the pain and helped him talk to the Debriefing Officer, but never left alone to just lie there and think.
Maybe they didn’t want him to think. Which made him wonder: why didn’t they want him to think? His body might be a bit banged-up, but there didn’t seem a deal wrong with his brain.
When he was alone (after he’d heard them go out of his room and close the door) he turned his head a little on one side and spat the pills out. They left a bad taste, but nothing he couldn’t live with. If the pain came he could always ring his bell; the button was right there beside his free right hand, requiring only a touch from his index finger.
But the pain didn’t come, and neither did sleep, and at last Jazz was able to just lie there and think. Better still, in a little while his thinking grew far less fuzzy; indeed, in comparison to the mental slurry he’d recently been accustomed to, it became like crystal. And he began to ask himself all over again those questions he had been asking, but which he’d never found the time to answer. Like:
Where the hell were his friends?
He’d been out of Russia … what, two weeks now? And the only people he’d seen (or rather, the only ones who’d seen him) were a doctor, a DO, and a nurse who grunted a little but never spoke. But he did have friends in the Service. Surely they would know he was back. Why hadn’t they been to see him? Was he that banged-up? Did he look that bad?
“I don’t feel that bad,” Jazz whispered to himself.
He moved his right arm, clenched his right fist. The hole through his wrist had healed and new skin had knitted over the punctures front and back. It was pure luck that the point of the ice axe had slipped between the bones and managed to miss the arteries. The hand was a little stiff and out of practice, that was all. There was some pain, but nothing he couldn’t survive. Come to think of it, there wasn’t much of pain in anything right now. But of course he couldn’t move everything—could he? Jazz decided he’d better not try.
What about sight? Would his room be in light or darkness? The “snow” of his bandages was thick and dark. They said they’d saved his sight. From what? Had his eyes been hanging out or something? “Saved his sight” could mean anything. That he’d be able to see for instance—but how well?”
Suddenly, for the first time since he’d been here, he knew real panic. They might have kept something back until he’d been fully debriefed, so as not to discourage or distract him: where there’s life there’s hope, sort of thing. How about that? What if they hadn’t told him everything?
Jazz got a grip on himself, gave a derisive snort. Huh! Told him everything? Christ, they hadn’t told him anything! He was the one who’d been doing all the—
Talking …
His new clarity of mind was leading him in a frightening new direction, and it was all downhill going; the more he considered the possibilities, the faster he went and the more frightening it got; bits of a puzzle he hadn’t known existed until now were starting to fall into place. And the picture they made was one of a clown, a puppet, with his name on it. Michael J. Simmons dupe!
He bent his right elbow, lifted his hand to his band aged head, began picking at the bandages where they covered his eyes. But carefully; he only needed a peep hole, nothing more than that. A narrow gap between strips of bandage. He wanted to see without being seen.
In a little while he believed he’d succeeded. It was hard to tell with any degree of certainty. The snow was still there, but if he narrowed his eyes to slits the light (there wasn’t a lot of it) became more nearly natural. in was like when he was a child: he’d used to lie in bed with his eyes slitted, simulating the slow, regular breathing of sleep. His mother would come in and put the light on, stand there looking at him, and she was never quite sure if he was asleep or awake. But now, with these bandages swathing his face, it should be so much easier.
He straightened his arm again, found his button and pressed it. Now his nurse would know he was still awake, but the principle would be the same: when she came in he’d be able to look at her and she wouldn’t know it. He hoped!
In a little while soft, unhurried footsteps sounded. Jazz pressed his head back into his pillows, waited in the near-darkness of his room. Around him the air-conditioning hummed faintly; the air had a mildly antiseptic smell; his sheets felt somehow coarse to those parts of his body which were exposed. And he thought:
It doesn’t feel like a room in a hospital. Hospitals feel artificial, unreal, at best. But this one feels like fake artificial …
Then the door opened and the light came on.
Jazz squinted straight up; only the fact that his eyes were shuttered saved them from dazzle from the naked light bulb where it hung on its flex from the ceiling. As for that ceiling itself: that was of dark grey stone, pocked from blasting and patterned with folded, tightly packed strata. Jazz’s hospital room was a man-made cave, or at least it was part of one!
Too stunned to move, he lay there frozen as his nurse came to the side of his bed. Then, fighting the anger and revulsion he felt welling inside, he slowly turned his head to look at her. She scarcely glanced at him, merely reached down to feel his pulse. She was short and fat, wore her hair straight and short-cropped, like a medieval knight, also wore the uniform and starched cap of a nurse. But not a British nurse. A Soviet nurse. And all of Jazz’s worst fears were realized.
He felt her fingers on his wrist, at once snatched his hand away. She gasped, took a pace to the rear, and the heel of one of her square black shoes came down hard on something that crunched. She stood still, glanced at the floor, looked hard at Jazz and frowned. Her green eyes narrowed where they tried to penetrate the slit in his bandages. Maybe she saw the steely glint of his grey eyes in there; anyway, she gasped a second time and her hand flew to her mouth.
Then she went down on her knees, gathered up fragments of tablet, came upright with fury written right across her pudgy face. She glared at Jazz, turned on her heel and headed for the door. He let her get there, then called out: “Comrade?”
She paused instinctively, whirled and thrust out her j
aw, glowered her hatred of the spy, then rushed out and slammed the door behind her. She had left the light on in her hurry to go and report all of this.
I have about two minutes before things start to warm up, Jazz thought. I suppose I’d better put them to some use.
He looked to his left, his alleged “dead” side, and saw a deep saucer of pale yellow fluid standing on a bedside table. Inclining his head and stretching his neck as far as he could in that direction, he inhaled deeply, smelled a strong antiseptic odour. How easy it was to create a hospital atmosphere: rubber tiles on the floor to deaden footfalls, a saucer of TCP for the too-clean smell, and a constant flow of sterile, temperate air. Simple as that.
The walls of Jazz’s room (his cell?) were of corrugated metal sheets bolted to vertical steel stanchions. There’d be laminated padding, too, Jazz supposed, to keep the room soundproofed and isolated. Or it could be the case that in fact this entire area was a hospital, built to serve the staff of the Projekt. After the Perchorsk Incident, they’d probably decided it was advisable. A hospital area would be handy for periodic check-ups and would probably be situated alongside a decontamination facility—assuming, that is, that there was still an atomic pile down here. Back in the West they were pretty sure that there had been one. Anyway, Jazz had already spotted an excess-radiation warning device on the wall; at present it was green, with just a tinge of pink showing in the aperture.
The uneven rock ceiling was maybe nine feet high on average; it looked very hard stuff and there were no fractures, not even small ones, that Jazz could see. Still (and even taking into account the massive steel stanchions) he felt just a touch of claustrophobia, something of the enormous weight of a mountain pressing down on him. For by now there was no doubt at all in his mind but that that was where he was: under the Urals.
Running footsteps sounded and the door was thrown open. Jazz lifted his head as far as restrictions would allow and stared at the people who came panting into the room. Two men, and behind them the fat nurse. Hot on their heels came a third man; his white smock and the hypodermic in his hand gave him away at once: Jazz’s favourite pulse-feeler, the clucking doctor. Well, and maybe now he’d have something worth clucking about.
“Mike, my boy!” the man in front, dressed in casual civilian clothes, motioned the others back. He approached the bed alone, said: “And what’s all this that Nursie’s been telling us? What? You didn’t take your pills? Why ever not? Wouldn’t they go down?” The ingratiating voice was that of Jazz’s DO.
Jazz nodded stiffly. “That’s right, ‘old boy,’” he answered harshly, “they sort of stuck in my craw.” He lifted his right hand and tugged at his fake bandages, tore them from his eyes. He stared at the four where they stood frozen as if they were insects trapped in amber.
After a moment the doctor muttered something in Russian, took an impatient pace forward and gave his needle a brief squirt. The second man into the room, also dressed casually, caught his arm and dragged him to a halt. “No,” Chingiz Khuv told the doctor curtly, in Russian. “Can’t the two of you see that he knows? Since he’s awake, aware and with all his wits about him, let’s keep him that way. Anyway, I want to talk to him. He’s all mine now.”
“No,” Jazz told him, staring straight at him. “I’m all mine—now! If you want to speak to me you’d better let him dope me up. It’s the only way I’m going to do any talking.”
Khuv smiled, stepped right up to the bed and looked down on Jazz. “Oh, you’ve already talked enough, Mr. Simmons,” he said, without a trace of malice. “Quite enough, I assure you. Anyway, I don’t intend to ask you anything. I intend to tell you a few things, and maybe show you a few things. And that’s all.”
“Oh?” said Jazz.
“Oh, yes, really. In fact I’m going to tell you the things you most want to know: all about the Perchorsk Projekt. What we were attempting to do here, and what we actually did. Would you like that?”
“Very much,” said Jazz. “And what is it you’re going to show me? The place where you make your bloody monsters?”
Khuv’s eyes narrowed, but then he smiled again. And he nodded. “Something like that,” he said. “Except there’s one thing you should know right from the start: we don’t make them.”
“Oh, but you do!” Jazz also nodded. “That’s one thing we’re pretty sure about. This is the source. This is where it was born—or spawned.”
Khuv’s expression didn’t change. “You’re wrong,” he said. “But that’s only to be expected, for you only know half the story—so far. It came from here, yes, but it wasn’t born here. No, it was born in a different world entirely.” He sat down on Jazz’s bed, stared at him intently. “It strikes me you’re a survivor, Mr. Simmons.”
Jazz couldn’t resist a snort of derision. “Am I going to survive this one?”
“Maybe you will at that.” Khuv’s smile was very genuine now, as if in anticipation of something quite delicious. “First we must get you up on your feet again and show you round the place, and then—”
Jazz moved his head enquiringly.
“And then … then we’ll see just what sort of a survivor you really are.”
Chapter Three
The Perchorsk Projekt
THE COMPLEX BUILT INTO THE BASE OF THE RIVEN MOUNTAIN at the bottom of the Perchorsk ravine was vast, and it wasn’t without a degree of Russian pride in achievement that Chingiz Khuv took Michael J. Simmons on a tour of inspection—but neither did Khuv lack respect for Jazz’s considerable talent for destruction. On their walkabouts, the British agent was literally strait-jacketed in a garment which effectively disabled him from the waist up, and as if that weren’t enough Karl Vyotsky was invariably present, surly bodyguard to his KGB boss.
“Blame all of this on the technology-gap, if you must have any sort of scapegoat at all,” Khuv told the British agent. “The Americans with their microchips, spy-satellites, complicated and oh-so-clever electronic listening systems. I mean, where’s the security if they can tap-in on any phone call anywhere in the whole wide world, eh? And these are only a handful of the ways in which sensitive information may be obtained. The art of spying,” (a sideways glance at Jazz, but without enmity) “takes a great many forms and encompasses some formidable, one might even say terrifying talents. On both sides, I mean, East and West alike. High-tech on the one hand, and the supernatural on the other.”
“The supernatural?” Jazz raised an enquiring eyebrow. “The Perchorsk Projekt looks solid enough to me. And anyway, I’m afraid I don’t much believe in ghosts.”
Khuv smiled and nodded. “I know,” he said, “I know. We’ve checked on that—or perhaps you don’t remember?”
Jazz looked blank for a moment, then frowned. Come to think of it, he did remember. It had been part of his “debriefing,” but at the time he hadn’t paid it a lot of attention. Actually, he’d thought his “DO” was pulling his leg: to ask what he knew about INTESP, or E-Branch, which used Extra Sensory Perception as a tool for espionage. Indeed ESPionage! As it happened, Jazz had quite genuinely known nothing at all about it, and he probably wouldn’t have believed it even if he had.
“If telepathy was feasible,” he told Khuv, “they wouldn’t have needed to send me, would they? There wouldn’t be any more secrets!”
“Quite right, quite right,” Khuv answered after a moment’s pause. “Those were my feelings exactly—once upon a time. And as you rightly point out, all of this,” he waved an arm expansively about, “is obviously solid enough.”
“All of this” was the gymnasium area, where for the past week Jazz had been getting himself back in shape following the fortnight he’d spent on his back. The fact that they’d so easily emptied him of all he had known still didn’t sit too well with him. Here, as they paused a while to let Karl Vyotsky strip off his pullover and work out for a few minutes with the weights, Jazz thought he’d try a little pumping of his own.
He had no doubt that whatever questions he put to Khuv, they’d
be answered in a truthful, straightforward manner. In this respect the KGB Major was entirely disarming. But on the other hand, why shouldn’t he be open? He had nothing to lose. He knew that Jazz wasn’t going anywhere outside of this place, ever. He’d known that right from square one. That’s the way they had it figured out, anyway.
“You surprise me,” he said, “complaining about American know-how. I was supposed to be about 75 per cent proof against brainwashing, but you pulled my plug and I just gurgled away. No torture, not even a threat, and I’m pentathol-resistant—but I couldn’t hold a thing back! How the hell did you do that?”
Khuv glanced at him, went back to watching Vyotsky handling weights as if they were made of papier-maché. Jazz looked at Vyotsky, too.
Khuv’s underling was huge: seventy-five inches and a little over two hundred pounds, and all of it muscle. He hardly seemed to have any neck at all, and his chest was like a barrel expanding out of his narrow waist. His thighs were round and tight inside light-blue trousers. He felt Jazz’s eyes on him, grinned through his black beard and flexed biceps that would shame a bear. “You’d like to work out with me, British?” He finished his exercises and dropped the weights clanging to the floor. “Bare-fisted, maybe, in the ring?”
“Just say the word, Ivan,” Jazz answered, half-smiling, his voice low. “I still owe you for a couple of teeth, remember?”
Vyotsky showed his own teeth again, but not in a grin, and put on his pullover. Khuv turned to Jazz, said: “Don’t push your luck with Karl, my friend. He can give you twenty pounds and ten years of experience. On top of which he has some ugly little habits. When we caught you on that mountain he knocked your teeth out, yes, but believe me you were lucky. He wanted to pull your head off. And it’s possible he could do it, with a little effort. I might even have let him try, except that would have been a terrible waste, and we’ve already had enough of that around here.”