He climbed inside the tent, which was barely large enough for two people, let alone three. Rook and Queen were already huddled together beneath an unzipped sleeping bag, and after stripping down to his polypro long johns, Knight slid in with them. The change in temperature was neither immediate nor dramatic, but the combination of three living heat generators, all set to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, gradually took away the chill.
When his teeth finally stopped chattering, he made sure that Deep Blue’s micro-drones were keeping an eye on them. Not that he had the slightest idea of what they would do if another wave of yetis or some other unknown threat materialized. Their weapons—except for his little SIG pistol—were buried under a mountain of snow. It would take hours to dig them and the rest of the gear out and render them fully functional, and even if they did that, there was little hope of fighting off another yeti attack.
He thought about Rook’s ghost story about the Russian trekkers, and the missing Spec Ops team. Had they both suffered a similar fate, attacked by monsters and left to freeze to death? Then he recalled that the tent used by the Dyatlov expedition had been torn open from inside, as if the hikers had been trying to escape from something inside with them.
What if there were worse things than yetis in the snowbound wilderness?
He lay there for what seemed like hours, unable to sleep, unwilling to completely wake up, until Deep Blue’s frantic voice sounded in his ear. “Guys, you need to wake up. Company’s coming!”
24
After the Russian President’s departure, King and Lynn were hooded again and taken from the interrogation cell. They walked a short distance and then stood still for a few seconds, during which time King thought he felt movement beneath him.
An elevator.
A sudden change in air temperature, which he could feel on his exposed hands, indicated that they were outside. The roar of a jet turbine engine and the distinctive rhythm of rotor blades beating the air finally brought his mental image into focus. Wherever or whatever Volosgrad was, they would be going there by helicopter.
The noise inside the aircraft, combined with the heavy shroud covering his entire head, made it impossible for him to hear anything that might have offered a clue as to where they were actually going. He didn’t even know for certain that Lynn was still with him.
‘Take him to Volosgrad,’ the Russian had said. ‘He should be able to provide what Alexei needs.’
He, King thought, means me. They think I’ve got something that this Alexei wants. What? And why?
The Russian had said something else, too.
‘We must have the Firebird.’
King doubted whatever scheme they were cooking up involved an American muscle car. The only other thing that came immediately to mind was a Stravinsky ballet suite, composed in 1910 and based on a Russian folk tale about a magical creature. That made only a little more sense though. Likely, it was merely a randomly selected code-name, but whatever it meant, King evidently had something they needed to make the Firebird a reality.
It was one more maddeningly irregular piece of the puzzle. Julie…or rather Catherine, had recognized him as King. Why was that important? He felt certain that if he could just get an answer to that question, the full picture would emerge.
I need to talk to her again.
But as the minutes dragged into hours, those jumbled pieces kept coming to the surface of his consciousness. Was the woman that called herself Catherine Alexander actually Julie Sigler? Was his sister alive or not? Were the Russians preparing for all-out war with the United States? Were Peter and Bishop safe? Did his father know that the President of Russia had taken a personal interest in finding him?
He felt the helicopter banking, changing both direction and elevation, as if in preparation for landing. The maneuvers continued for several minutes, and then he felt a bump as the aircraft came to rest.
While the turbines were still powering down, his hood was removed again. He blinked to bring the world into focus, immediately noting the interior of the aircraft. From the large passenger compartment and utilitarian design, he guessed it to be a military transport. The small contingent of soldiers occupying some of the seats supported that assumption, but there were also two other people with him. They were not wearing dark green camouflage uniforms. His mother, at least he assumed it was Lynn under the sack hood, and—
Julie!
—Catherine Alexander, who was standing right in front of him.
He forced a smile. “Hey. We didn’t get a chance to talk. I was going to tell you all about how I found your operation in Virginia. It’s a good story. I think you’ll like it.”
Her stare was unnerving. No matter how hard he tried, he could not see her as anyone but his lost sister. Even her expression, a mixture of confidence and curiosity, was pure Julie. “I’d like to hear it if there’s time.”
“Make the time. You’re the boss, aren’t you?”
A wry smile. “What makes you say that?”
He ignored the question and nodded toward Lynn. “Can you take that off her?”
Catherine glanced over and then did as asked, removing Lynn’s shroud more gently than she had his. As Lynn’s eyes adjusted to the light, Catherine turned back to King. “Why did you bring your mother along?”
It was an odd question, and he considered his answer carefully. “How do you know she’s my mother?”
“Please. Even if I didn’t have files on both of you, the family resemblance is obvious. I can understand why you might want someone with her background along, but putting your mother in harm’s way? That’s…cold.”
Her background? Files? King was certain that he was missing something very important. “Maybe she’s the one who brought me.”
Catherine registered mild surprise at the statement, and then something like comprehension. “Interesting. I hadn’t considered that.” She turned to one of the soldiers and spoke in Russian that was precise but slow and labored, a sure indication that it was not her first or preferred language. “Take them to the research laboratory.”
King sensed the window of opportunity closing. “I saw you on television,” he blurted.
She turned back to him, the curious look back again. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s how I found your supply depot. I saw you on television with President Chambers.”
“And because I resembled your sister, you tried to track me down.”
King nodded. “We linked you to TSAR Data Solutions, and that led us to the warehouse in Virginia. But it’s more than just a resemblance. I keep trying to find something about you that’s off, but the harder I look, the more certain I am. You are her. That’s why I brought my mother. We had to know the truth.”
Catherine shook her head sadly. “All that work, undone because of a case of mistaken identity.”
“Is that all it is?”
“How could it be anything else?”
“We’re still talking about it. I think you’re wondering if it might be true. If you might actually be Julie Sigler.”
“Preposterous.”
“The lady doth protest too much,” King said. “Can you prove that you aren’t Julie?”
Her silence told him more than her expression. At length, she turned and opened the helicopter’s sliding door. “Alexei is waiting,” she said, to no one in particular.
King was mildly surprised to see that the helicopter was inside a closed hangar with no obvious opening to the outside world. The air was chilly and there were clumps of snow scattered randomly about the tarmac.
Probably a retractable roof door, King thought.
The soldiers marched him and Lynn across the landing area, through a door and into a hallway that wouldn’t have been out of place in a school or hospital from the 1950s. They continued into a windowless room with an examination table and other medical apparatus, which strongly suggested the latter. Catherine entered first and stood next to a young man wearing a white lab coat. He was
almost painfully thin, with lank brown hair and a short beard that could not quite hide his delicate, somewhat effeminate features. There was something vaguely familiar about his appearance, but King’s attention was immediately drawn to the man’s blue eyes. The orbs darted about the room, never settling on any one thing for longer than a few seconds.
“You must be Alexei,” King said in English. “I’d offer to shake, but…” He held up his hands, which were still shackled together.
The man in the lab coat shot him a hateful look, then turned to Catherine and addressed her in Russian. “Why isn’t he sedated? Are you trying to kill me?”
There was no trace of humor or even sarcasm in the man’s tone. King could almost smell paranoia on the man’s skin. Catherine was not the least bit apologetic. “I do not work for you, Alexei. He’s awake because I needed to question him. If you want to sedate him, do it yourself.”
His dancing eyes could not meet her cool stare, so the man looked at King. “Well, we mustn’t interfere with your interrogation.” He turned to the soldiers. “Strap him down.”
King’s reaction was a moment too slow, not that he could have done much to prevent what happened next. One of the soldiers grabbed his shoulders, while another kicked his legs out from under him. An instant later, he was slammed, face down, onto the examination table. A heavy leather belt was cinched down across the small of his back. He struggled, instinctively, but with his waist already secured, he was easily overpowered. His legs were restrained, then his hands were unshackled and similarly bound to the table, leaving him spread-eagled, facing down.
“Alexei,” Catherine said, her tone more irritated than pleading. “You don’t need to do this. Just give him a general anesthetic.”
From the corner of his eye, King could see the defiant look on the young Russian’s face. “You think I’m afraid, don’t you?”
Alexei bared his teeth in a feral grin. He pulled a small cart from the corner of the room, positioning it beside the exam table. On it were a variety of medical instruments. Alexei’s hand trembled with anticipation as he picked up a scalpel, holding it up so King could see the glint of light reflecting off the blade.
“I’m not afraid,” he whispered.
King couldn’t see what happened next. He ground his teeth, but the only sensation he felt was of cool air on the skin of his lower back and buttocks. Alexei had sliced through his belt and the waistband of his trousers, exposing his right hip. He returned the scalpel to its place on the cart. Then, with fastidious care, the man picked up a trocar. The hollow needle looked almost as big as a drinking straw. He showed it to King, just as he had the scalpel, but this time he leaned close to King’s face and whispered in heavily accented English.
“This is going to hurt.”
He was not wrong.
25
They watched the trees for a full thirty minutes, waiting to see if the arrival of the helicopter was the harbinger of some new threat—for which they were completely unprepared. But the activity that had prompted them to venture out into the blisteringly cold night seemed to have run its course. Darkness had returned, and the only sound was the rasp of ice crystals being blown about by the wind.
The aircraft had come from the northwest, moving fast. It had been too fast to be searching for them or anything else in the frozen wilderness. There had barely been enough time for them to pull on their ski clothes and make the short hike across the slide zone to where they had been earlier in the day. They arrived just as the helicopter dropped below the treetops, disappearing completely, as if the woods had swallowed it whole. Queen half-expected another swarm of yetis to burst from the forest, fleeing before the hovering noise machine, but if there were more creatures lurking there, they remained in hiding.
After that, there had been a whole lot of nothing.
“Is that it?” Rook said, breaking the silence.
“Looks that way,” Queen agreed, hugging her arms around her body in a futile effort to stay warm. She wasn’t sure if it was the actual air temperature, or the memory of being buried alive in the avalanche that now chilled her to the bone.
“If there’s an LZ in there,” Deep Blue said, “then there’s probably a whole lot more we’re not seeing. I’d say we found our secret research base.”
Queen grimaced. They were in no condition to infiltrate a nursing home, much less a secret Russian research facility. Especially one they knew nothing about, beyond the fact that it had evidently been guarded by yetis. Ready or not, though, this was the mission.
As if sensing her anxiety, Deep Blue said, “I meant, once Bishop gets there.”
At last report, Bishop had caught a late flight to Yekaterinburg, where she had picked up a small arsenal of Soviet-era weaponry from an old former comrade turned black market arms dealer. Her plan was to hire a bush pilot to fly her north. The flight had been on hold due to the presence of the unidentified helicopter in the area. If there was a secret base in the woods, the airspace would almost certainly be monitored with radar and possibly even anti-aircraft weapons.
“Still no word from King?”
“No.”
Their last standing order from King had been to recon the site and await his arrival, but if he did not make contact soon, it would be Queen’s job to decide how and when to carry out the mission.
Wonderful, she thought. Another FRAGO.
Deep Blue was silent for several seconds. “I’m going to take another look at the drone’s surveillance feed. Maybe it saw something that I missed. Like another entrance.”
“Or a fucking Ewok treehouse city,” Rook grumbled.
Queen glanced over at him. “Yeah, about those…things… It feels weird calling them yeti.”
“Been looking into that,” Deep Blue said. “The locals call them ‘almas.’ Plural is ‘almases.’”
“Seriously? They’re actually a thing?”
“There have been a lot of sightings over the years, though they’re usually described as being a bit smaller than the creatures you encountered. Five or six feet tall, with reddish-brown hair. A leading theory for the fate of the Dyatlov expedition is that they were attacked by an almas.”
Rook shook his head. “Just this once, I hate being right.”
“Whatever you want to call them,” Knight said, “it’s a hell of a coincidence, them living in the same woods as a secret Russian base.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Queen added. “Those weren’t just wild animals. Could that be what the Russians are doing in there? Creating an army of monsters to fight for them?”
“If so,” Rook put in, “they’ve been at it for a while. The Dyatlov incident was over fifty years ago.”
“It’s a distinct possibility,” Deep Blue said. “A hundred years ago, a Russian scientist named Ivanov believed he could create human-ape hybrids. Orangutans and chimpanzees bred with humans. Stronger than a man but smarter than an ape. Easier to train for absolute loyalty. Stalin loved the idea of a humanzee army. Ivanov failed though. Stalin exiled him to a gulag, and he died in 1932.”
“Humanzee,” Rook rolled the name around in his mouth. “I don’t know if that’s better than ‘almas’ but it fits those monkey-faced fuckers.”
“Maybe he succeeded,” Queen suggested. “And Stalin exiled him to cover it up?”
“Ivanov’s experiments would never have worked. Not with the methods he was using.”
Rook’s eyes went wide. “Uh, methods?”
“Artificial insemination. With modern gene-splicing technology, I suppose it’s feasible, but not then. And not in 1959, when the Dyatlov incident occurred.”
“Maybe we’re not dealing with humanzees after all,” Knight said. “Maybe this is a different experiment. One that worked.”
Queen shook her head. “This has to be about more than just humanzees. I think they were just the guard dogs. We need to get a closer look at that place.”
“The only way to keep something like this a secret is to limit
the number of people who know about it,” Deep Blue said, trying to sound upbeat. “If they were relying on humanzees to guard the perimeter, then there probably won’t be a strong security presence inside. Maybe none at all.”
“Which is wonderful news,” Rook said, “if we got them all in the avalanche.”
Queen sighed. “Give Bishop the greenlight. Humanzees or not, we need to get in there and get this done. I don’t know if the cover of darkness will give us any sort of advantage, but out here we’ll stick out like a sore thumb, come daybreak.”
“While we wait, I’ll see if I can dig out our weapons,” Knight said.
“We’ll help,” Queen said.
“Our shit’s buried under a ton of snow,” Rook said, giving Knight a skeptical look. “How are you going to find them?”
Knight tapped a finger beside his left eye. “X-ray vision.”
Rook snorted derisively. “No. Seriously.”
Queen didn’t need X-ray vision to know that, under his thermal face mask, Knight was grinning.
26
Moscow, Russia
The phone trilled once in Peter’s ear. Then a second time. He expected Vladimir to pick up then. In their past dealings, which were admittedly few and far between, the Russian mole had always picked up before the second ring.
Two was unprecedented.
Three would be cause for alarm.
Peter had spent hours creating an elaborate network of mobile relays, distributing linked burner phones all over Moscow to confound any efforts to trace the call and learn his location. It was possible that, even now, the trace had begun and FSB officers were triangulating the signal. When they found the phone, in a garbage can in Gorky Park, they would know what he had done. It was a trick he would not attempt to duplicate. If Vladimir did not pick up, it would all be in vain.
Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8) Page 18