Kolymsky Heights

by Lionel Davidson

  Hendricks hesitated only briefly, then he closed the inquiry down: papers to be kept current for six months in case by chance something new did come up, although he didn’t expect anything to come up.

  But something did then come up. By chance something quite new came up.

  7

  The satellite came up, over the Indian Ocean. And twenty minutes later it was over Siberia.

  The satellite was one of a group of three delivered to the US military by Boeing, a development of the company’s Big Bird series. Each of the three had a telemetry package that allowed instantaneous relay, and each was in a slightly different orbit.

  This one was in a polar orbit. Travelling north-south, it made a complete circuit of the earth once every ninety-four minutes. Its intelligence-gathering equipment was turned on only over the territory of the old Soviet Union, however. There it had to monitor upwards of 500 land objectives.

  An hour before another satellite had overflown the site, and there had been no recordable activity. But when this one came round, 300 miles to the west of it, the fires were already burning.

  At first the fact went unnoticed for the satellite’s current objective was a missile base. Of this it had to take four still photographs and ten seconds of video. All the stills were good, despite freckling along the right-hand edges, but the results showed no change and were merely saved for reference.

  The video was different. Something was spotted moving in it. A loaded flatbed truck was moving. This was unusual at three o’clock in the morning, and attention was diverted to it to find out what it might be carrying through deep snow at that hour. For this reason some time passed before it was noticed that the right-hand edge of the video was also freckled.

  Optical enhancement brought up the freckles as flames and interest rapidly switched to the new development.

  The location of the distant fire was soon established, as was its probable origin in an explosion: the flames were still shooting one hundred feet high. This was surprising, for the low-rated objective had not been known to house explosives. In earlier listings it had been marked as a weather station. Later analysis had shown the ground to be covered over a wide area with ventilators, indicating that work went on below ground, and too extensively for simple meteorology. The radio traffic and transport pattern showed no military significance, however, so the low rating was retained, but all visible structures were marked and thereafter updated. They consisted of a few concrete buildings, telegraph poles, generator housings, power pylons, and a fenced area of sheds, evidently used for storage, just off the landing strip.

  The enhanced freckles were compared with earlier photographs, and some differences emerged. The largest concrete structure, apparently the dome of something below, had vanished, and so had the generator housings. Pylons and poles had been toppled, sheds blown down, and burning debris scattered over a wide area.

  More optical work brought other images into definition. A thin thread-like line of beads, at first glance glowing debris, was detached from its background of flame and translated into a formation of men. They were standing in line, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front. They were bandaged about the eyes, and dressed only in underpants – their clothing evidently abandoned in flight from the burning buildings.

  Slightly apart from this line was another man, also in underpants, but with no discernible bandage. This individual had something in his hands. It was not possible to see what it was, but a study of the video showed his head going up and down while those of the men in line turned towards him and away.

  An anthropometrist was called in.

  This expert’s field was body movement and measurement and he concluded that what was in the man’s hand was a list, and that a rollcall was going on; and from the ten seconds of action that it was a rapid one, not surprising for almost naked men in fifty degrees of frost. But some aspects of it puzzled him, and he asked for further imaging work to clarify the effects of flame and heat distortion. The imaging work was done but it did not solve the problem. He ran a few tests to prove that what he was beginning to suspect could not be true. But it seemed that it was true.

  the men who stood in their underpants in the Siberian ice had arms that were too long. There was something not right about their femurs, too, and the whole shape of their legs. The man reading the list and calling out the names was built the same way. And however the anthropometrist juggled the results, the way did not turn out to be human.

  April was the month of this observation.

  8

  In April Lazenby was into a fish, and it was a magnificent one.

  The salmon had actually looked at him as it leapt. It was as big as a big dog and all the way through its long arc it had looked at him. Then it hit the water and went deep, into the Long Pool, taking Lazenby’s enormous Bloody Butcher with it.

  Last year he had caught nothing at all, but already this season he had had several splendid touches. The river was in spate, red-brown with peat, and roaring like an engine. It was full of fish. The water boiled over the rocks, spray dashing high, and wherever he looked there were fish. The very air was full of them. He’d seen nothing like it! An incredible spring run!

  He had tried all his normal flies, big sunk ones for the coloured water, Thunder and Lightning, Childers, Ackroyd. And they’d gone for them, oh yes; some heart-stopping tugs. Tugs only, but they couldn’t make out the flies in all the peat. For the fish to take it needed something flashier, a big old-fashioned Butcher, so he had tied one on, and right away had the rod nearly snatched out of his hands. He backed up the bank now and scrambled along it, letting out line. He could feel the fish on the end, very strong, twisting and turning.

  It was snowing slightly and already getting dark. But what a wonderful brute – thirty pounds if it was an ounce, maybe even forty! He couldn’t leave it sulking in the pool, had to get it out of there and into fast water. But careful now. Getting dark. Beyond the deep pool he would have to clamber back into the river again. Racing water, slimy rocks. Careful. For now just keep pressure on him. Let him know he couldn’t stay there in the pool. Out now, come on, out. Yes, he was out! Coming over the lip into white water – a gorgeous brute, silver, tail flipping, very strong, not long in from the sea.

  Lazenby let him take line, keeping on pressure, slithering down the bank. He entered the water carefully, feeling his way between the rocks, the current dizzying. The salmon had commenced a long dash upriver and the reel was whirring. Good, let him run, just a little pressure. He steadied himself against a rock, got both feet planted firmly, and started playing him, real pressure, the rod bending.

  The fish zigged and zagged, trying to get free of the line. It leapt again, miles off, but he saw it through the spray, the line coming up with it, dripping. He pulled in line fast as it turned, and played it all the way back, too. And by God, he was a fast fellow, and lively, and educated, trying to snap the line on the rocks. Keep him under pressure, tire him.

  Minute by minute he tired the salmon. For forty minutes.

  He was as exhausted as the fish when he guided him gently into the shallows at last. He had the net there under water, the long rod crooked under his arm so he could get both hands to it He was so tired he nearly fell over the fish in the water, trembling as he awaited the final leap when the fish felt the mesh.

  But there was no leap, just some threshing in the net and then he had hauled it out and up on to the bank and he collapsed himself. He pulled the Priest out of his pocket and despatched the salmon and sat a while longer, panting. His gear was some way back, and when he reached it the light was too bad for him to see the gauge on his weighing hook. He got the fish, and his gear, back up to the car and drove to the hotel, and went right to the fish room through the garage block at the rear.

  There, to his slight disappointment, it went nineteen pounds.

  ‘But yon’s a beauty, Professor – fresh in! This here you can call a fash!’

  ‘Yes, not a
bad chap, is he?’ Lazenby said modestly, and waited to see his prize sacked and labelled for the smoker’s at Aberdeen before going through to clean up and change. The passage led into the reception lounge and there, to his astonishment, he saw waiting for him Philpott and a grave fellow in a three-piece suit.

  ‘Hello, Prof. I don’t think you’ve met Mr Hendricks – Mr W. Murray Hendricks. He’s got something very interesting for you.’

  9

  Up in Lazenby’s room, after dinner, Hendricks opened his briefcase.

  Twenty hours after the first satellite, another one had overflown the site, its cameras specially switched on. The first Bird had captured its images from 300 miles away at three o’clock in the morning; the second was directly overhead at eleven the same night. The fires were out, a gale was blowing, and masked figures in protective clothing were working under floodlights. They were working on the structure with the blown-off roof.

  Military biology of some kind had been going on in the place, that was certain; despite the wind, a number of elements had been identified still escaping into the air. What had produced the explosion it was not possible to say, but the nature of the work in the establishment had certainly been very varied.

  Lazenby was shown some shadowy prints: a jumble of wrecked equipment photographed through the hole in the dome. Transparent overlays with sketched-in lines helped to clarify the mess, but Lazenby still couldn’t make it out.

  A ducting system, Hendricks explained. It had been identified as part of a layout internationally designated ‘P4’.

  ‘Ah, P4. Not my field,’ Lazenby said. ‘That’s rather a high security label, the highest actually. It’s a system for the containment of tricky bacteria – E-coli, I believe, normally. They use it to replicate cells, for gene-splicing.’

  ‘Yes, E-coli is what they were using, and it was for gene-splicing,’ Hendricks said. ‘This is the remains of a genetics lab – quite a large one.’

  ‘Is it, now? What would they want with that?’

  Hendricks probed in his briefcase again and showed him the photographs of the individuals in line. There were over a dozen prints now, some sections having been detached and enlarged. These images were also muzzy but again overlays had been provided to outline the limbs.

  Lazenby examined them. ‘Apes,’ he concluded.

  ‘No, they aren’t apes. Not now.’

  Lazenby peered again. ‘Improved apes?’

  ‘Yes, these can talk and read. This one can, anyway. He is reading a list and calling out names, and the others are answering him. It’s clearer on the movie.’

  Lazenby looked at him over his glasses for some moments.

  ‘You’re not supposing this is Rogachev’s work?’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s his place. There’s no doubt about that. I can show you.’

  He showed him a map. It was a section of a large-scale sheet of the Kolyma region – some thousands of miles, he said, from where they had previously been looking. Ringed on it was the spidery symbol for a weather station, and close by the weather station a lake. Blackpool had been handwritten over the lake.

  He explained this, too. The name came from a book, one of a collection gathering dust in the department’s library; the cross-referencing system, though improved, had not caught it.

  Lazenby looked at the sheet of paper handed to him.

  ON FOOT THROUGH SIBERIA

  Captain Willoughby Devereaux

  London 1862 [Extract, p.194]

  The water, enclosed in a basin of black basalt, has from a distance the appearance of ink, but is perfectly clear and in fact the purest in the area. It is known locally as Tcherny Vodi (dark waters) but I preferred the homelier appellation of Blackpool; and at Blackpool I camped for some days before returning the thirty miles to Zelyony Mys (Green Cape).

  ‘Here’s Green Cape,’ Hendricks said, unfolding a further section of map. ‘It’s a port, on the Kolyma river, exactly thirty miles from the lake. That’s how Rogachev’s cigarettes came out.’

  Lazenby looked from the map back to the prints.

  ‘You think this is what he’s trying to get out?’ he said.

  ‘No. I don’t. What would be so secret about it?’

  ‘This isn’t startling enough for you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s startling. But more startling is why they’ve kept quiet about it for so many years. Also where it’s going on. Would you experiment with apes in a place like this?’

  ‘Well, the Arctic isn’t their environment,’ Lazenby said.

  ‘Right. It isn’t. And this isn’t just the Arctic. It’s the most secret place they have – the remotest, the least accessible. There’s hardly any information on it. On this place itself there’s none. We knew nothing about it. Now that’s startling. It’s disturbing. We’re pretty well up on Russian science. People change jobs, news gets around. But nobody has changed jobs here. That is, if you get a job here you evidently don’t leave. And work has been going on in it for a long, long time, we can see that. Which raises another long-time question. What do you know of a fellow called Zhelikov?’

  Lazenby looked at him. ‘Zhelikov the geneticist?’

  ‘That’s right. L. V. Zhelikov.’

  ‘Well, I knew of him. Who didn’t? He was the favoured student of Pavlov, the dog man. He’ll have been dead, what – thirty, forty years?’

  ‘Nobody knows when he did die. They didn’t tell anybody. We think because he died here. We think this was his place, and Rogachev took over from him. Which would make it about seventeen years ago. You’re right that Zhelikov went out of circulation some forty years ago. He was in a camp then, in the fifties. We think they let him out and offered him this, and he took it. Rogachev was in the same camp with him. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, he was. They knew each other. Anyway, this place was here when Zhelikov arrived. At least forty years ago, and probably established a lot longer. After all, they wouldn’t have sent a guy of his class up to Siberia to start something going there. Something must already have been going, probably involving animals, since that was his field. But not just animals. Animal work isn’t secret. This is secret. It’s very secret – they’ve put it in their most secret place. So yes, the pictures are startling. But more startling is what else is going on there. And why he’s trying so hard to tell us about it.’

  They looked at each other for some moments.

  Philpott discreetly collected the papers and returned them to the briefcase. He took another one out.

  ‘We need your help,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Well, anything I can do, of course – although exactly what −’

  ‘Would you go on a trip for us?’

  Lazenby stared at him, and his mouth dropped open.

  ‘No, not Siberia.’ Hendricks’s own small mouth curved wryly. ‘Somewhere else. We think we’ve traced the young man you mention.’ He held a hand out and Philpott placed an enlarged photo in it. ‘Would he look anything like this?’

  Lazenby gazed at the photo. The young Asiatic of his nightmare evening stared sullenly back. Broad, high cheekbones, eyes glowering from under a heavy fringe of hair.

  ‘Well – that is him!’

  ‘Could you put a name to him now?’

  ‘Raven!’ Lazenby said. The name had swum suddenly into his mind. A number of other things had also swum there. Whisky after whisky. Staggering down a road, the whole bunch of them. Red-haired Rogachev joking away. Then round a corner, up against a wall – a familiar corner, a familiar wall … It was Oxford, damn it! It had been in Oxford.

  He looked up to find Hendricks and Philpott gazing at each other.

  ‘Raven?’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Almost sure. Also a Goldilocks. There were several people … it was all very – confusing.’

  ‘Goldilocks?’ Hendricks and Philpott were again exchanging glances. ‘Look, Professor, if you were maybe into – nicknames – could Goldilo
cks have been Rogachev –a red-haired sort of fellow?’

  ‘Nicknames, ah. Yes, I suppose it could be.’

  ‘With the other fellow as Raven because he was dark, very dark, in fact black – his hair?’

  ‘Possible. Raven doesn’t sound too Russian, does it?’

  ‘No. This fellow isn’t Russian. He’s an Indian.’

  ‘An Indian?’

  ‘A Red Indian. Canadian. His name’s on the back there.’

  Lazenby looked at the back. The caption read: J. B. Porter (Dr Johnny Porter).

  ‘Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?’

  ‘I can’t say it does, no.’

  ‘Riots in Quebec?’

  ‘Oh, him. Well, I Well, wouldn’t have connected –’

  ‘No. He doesn’t look like that now. That’s the way he looked at Oxford. We think that’s where you met him.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too.’

  ‘Can you remember how you met him?’

  ‘Well, during a conference. At a reception, I think. For the delegates.’

  ‘He wasn’t a delegate. What was he doing there?’

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he seem to know Rogachev already?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either. They were just talking away about Siberia.’

  ‘About what aspects of it – do you remember?’

  ‘Well.’ Lazenby thought. ‘Languages, people, physical impairment of some kind – blindness? Snow blindness, perhaps. Something of the sort. About Siberia, anyway. Rogachev had worked there, of course, and I thought this fellow some kind of native. They were talking Russian rather a lot, and he certainly seemed to know the place so I assumed –’

  ‘Yes, he knows Siberia. He’s been there. There isn’t any doubt this is who Rogachev wants. He won’t talk to us. We think he might talk to you. Will you talk to him now?’

  Lazenby stared at him. ‘You don’t mean now, of course,’ he said.