by Joe Buff
He’d already heard rumors of wonderful things, such as genetically engineered pumpkins and thistles that grew in harsh climates, absorbed and retained uranium and plutonium, and were unpalatable to animals. Harvesting these plants, and disposing of them properly, cleaned the soil and made it fertile again.
Nyurba would continue his data collection, in different ways and for different reasons, throughout the squadron’s march to the missile field, their assault, the unauthorized launch of Russian ICBMs, and their attempted escape back to the water many miles away from here. As second-in-command under Kurzin, it was standard for him to be the unit’s decontamination specialist. As a Seabee Engineer Recon Team veteran, he had the expertise to assess this pollution meaningfully in the context of coastal and inland topography, soil drainage, and other factors.
I’m thinking too far ahead. First we need to launch the missiles and get ourselves home alive. As a Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer with an advanced degree in structural design, he understood how hardened bunkers and silos were built — and how they could be penetrated without destroying their contents.
He noticed a sign posted near the beach, with its back to him. Using the mine detector as a precaution, he went up the gravel toward the sign. As he got closer he saw it was made of corroded sheet metal, nailed to a weathered gray wood post. Rust from the nail heads streaked down the front of the sign. The post stood at a cockeyed angle.
He laughed out loud, almost madly, when he realized what the sign said. It was ridiculous, but it had been placed here by a government, a system that subsequent history showed was transcendentally hypocritical and outrageously absurd.
The sign, so faded and stained it was barely legible, warned labor camp escapees that the swim from here to Alaska was two thousand kilometers. It said that their labor belonged to the Soviet State. They should go back to camp and turn themselves in and they wouldn’t be punished.
He wondered what incredible idiot had ever thought to put such a notice here. He wondered if anyone it was meant for had ever, once, been by to see it. It was an emblem of personal tragedies, tens of millions of them, most of which would go forever untold.
Shaking his head in a mix of regret and disgust, he returned to his men.
Four hours after he’d first emerged by this beach in northern Siberia, the last of the eighty commandos came into sight. Nyurba knew instantly, just from the arrogant way in which the suit hood moved, and the bullish manner in which he walked through the surf, that his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Kurzin, had arrived. Kurzin immediately barked orders, muffled through his suit but clear enough.
Nyurba also issued orders. The squadron formed up into four infantry platoons, each of two squads. They moved out, crossing the beach at an angle, aiming for the nearest branch of the Alazeja’s mouth. Nyurba stayed with the lead platoon, acting as Kurzin’s deputy and monitoring for toxins from in front. Other platoons deployed to cover both flanks. Kurzin, with the headquarters platoon, brought up the rear as he had in the water.
The beach petered out. They stepped onto the Arctic tundra proper. Beneath their feet the permafrost was spongy; six feet down it became as hard as concrete, and stayed that way year-round. A mixture of compacted snow, sand, gravel, and larger stones, it was a leftover from the last ice age — excavations sometimes unearthed the remains of woolly mammoths. Permafrost’s remarkable seasonal properties dominated, even defined, the whole look and feel of the different environmental belts of Siberia, before man’s interference. In some places it reached two thousand feet deep. Elsewhere it was shallower, often overlying coal and gold seams, oil and natural gas deposits, or diamond chimneys and valuable ores. Tundra topsoil was arid and thin.
Nyurba and Kurzin set a grueling pace. It would be miles, and hours, before they advanced alongside the river far enough to get safely away from the offshore nuclear dumping ground. Then they hoped to find fresh water clean enough to wash the lethal sludge of radioactive isotopes off their outer suits and equipment bags, so they could remove the suits to bury them and their scuba gear in the appallingly polluted Alazeja’s never-visited banks. If the water isn’t clean enough, we’ll have to wash in it anyway. Otherwise we’ll all suffocate when our respirators run out of breathable air. The choice between severe radiation, and exposure to chemicals including arsenic, lead, dioxin, mercury, PCBs, and DDT, was unpleasant to have to make. But the clock was ticking in more ways than one, and not just on their air supply and the dosimeters under their suits.
They didn’t expect to need their burdensome suits and scuba gear later. If the raid’s plan came to fruition, the men not killed or severely wounded would make their escape at a much cleaner place, down the mighty Kolyma riding a commandeered high-speed boat, still acting as legitimate Russian Spetsnaz.
Chapter 20
The village of Logaskino near the Alazeja’s mouth was a ghost town. Decades-old shacks and rotting log cabins tilted crazily, half-sunk as if being swallowed by the earth. Dreary Krushchev-era cinderblock apartment buildings, each a standard five stories tall, stood crumbling and cracking on concrete stilts dug into the permafrost. Without these stilts, which Nyurba knew were common in much of Siberia, structures heated in wintertime would melt into the ground; even sewer lines had to be laid on stilts above the permafrost or they’d twist and rupture.
With mineral wealth and fishing near here tapped out or killed off years ago, the occupants had abandoned Logaskino and moved on. The commando team gave the place, with its mountainous slag heaps and forlorn piles of rusting machinery, a very wide berth. Siberia was full of ghost towns, each a monument to broken dreams and once-close, now scattered and lost communities.
They intended to use the Alazeja’s bed to navigate. For a three-day forced march, the river would lead them southeast. At the spot where it suddenly turned sharply west, the men intended to aim in the opposite direction, east. Another day’s cross-country slog should bring them to the foothills of the Oloy Range — and the densely forested taiga where the missile silos hid. Because the silo crew-change timing was tighter by twenty-four hours compared to what they’d been led to expect, they hadn’t a moment to waste.
Out of their radiation suits and dry suits and respirators, the men would, of necessity, cover more than fifty miles a day. Now they wore Army Spetsnaz camouflage fatigues and ceramic battle helmets, waterproof boots, and backpacks weighing nearly one hundred pounds; the mild weather and steady exertion ruled out parkas or thick pants. The fatigues were specially treated to be impervious to chemical weapons and also repellent to insects; the trouser bottoms were tucked into their boots.
Other equipment festooned their belts, bulged in their cargo pockets, or hung from load-bearing vests on the front of their torsos. Most carried their AN-94 Abakan assault rifles by the sling, over a shoulder. A hand at any one time gripped their Abakans, ready for instant use. The bayonets were in scabbards attached to their belts. Fighting knives — each man chose his favorite — were slipped in the top of their boots. Spetsnaz PRI pistols in holsters were strapped to their upper thighs. Across their bellies, in slots of the load-bearing vests, each man bore a dozen sixty-round box magazines for the AN-94s. Under these vests they wore state-of-the-art, nonconstricting lightweight body armor. In each squad two men had grenade launchers clipped under the barrels of their Abakans. The squadron was well supplied with shoulder-fired antitank and antiaircraft missile launchers too. Several men carried SVD sniper rifles instead of Abakans — long-barreled, futuristic, and deadly accurate out to almost three thousand yards.
Before long everyone was sweating, their lower backs were sore, and their legs burned from the steady exertion. Since it never got totally dark, they would march sixteen to eighteen hours a day, with short stops to eat from their rations and drink, or rest and drink, then pause to make camp and get four or five hours sleep before starting the next day’s trek.
As they moved away from the sea the first day, it grew warmer and warmer. Perspiration dripped
off Nyurba’s chin and soaked his fatigues. Unlike its wintertime moonscape of white, of snow drifts and blinding blizzards, in summer the tundra got hot. The permafrost was covered with moss and lichen in rich shades of green. Trees were uncommon, and stunted, just now budding halfheartedly, because their shallow roots gained little nourishment. Bushes and scrub, bearing red berries, gave the only variety to an open and endless plain in which each mile seemed the same as the last. Wolves, lemmings, and Arctic foxes populated the tundra in summer, but Nyurba never caught sight of one, or their burrows or droppings or tracks.
The team, following the river, saw a band of native tribespeople on the horizon, going northeast toward a healthier section of coast. His binoculars showed some were armed with shotguns or hunting rifles.
“Yakut,” Nyurba said, “from the looks of them.” They wore furs despite the warmth, driving a herd of reindeer. The men rode sturdy horses. So did some of the women and older kids, while others sat on sledges drawn by pairs of reindeer. The creatures were big, almost the size of moose, but their antlers were different, much thinner than moose antlers, and very long. “Heading for the seaside summer grazing grounds.”
Reindeer did well on a diet of moss, lichen, and berries. The cold ocean breezes there would hold down mosquitoes and horseflies, which were starting to swarm voraciously and would only get worse to the south, and which drove the animals crazy — sometimes even killing them by sucking too much blood. The reindeer were bred for meat, which Nyurba had heard was low-fat and was said to be delicious. He knew the Yakuts liked to eat horsemeat too. They ignored Kurzin and Nyurba and their men, not a glance or a wave. Relations between native tribespeople and Russia’s military were strained. These Yakuts clung to an old way of life, but the army still drafted their sons, who’d come back two years later sick or wounded, if they came back at all.
Nyurba guessed that the reindeer herd totaled about a thousand. It took an hour for the two groups to pass, the Yakut families with their livestock and the phony Spetsnaz company.
The contrast appealed to Nyurba’s sense of cynicism. This part of Siberia was in the governmental oblast — region — called Yakutia, one of eighty-nine that made up the Russian Federation. When the USSR folded, Yakutia was renamed the Autonomous Republic of Sakha, but there was nothing autonomous about it; the new name fell from use during the strongman crackdown after the 1990s experiment with democracy failed. The regional governor, in the oblast capital of Yakutsk — a real city a thousand miles southwest — was appointed by the Kremlin. Representatives from Yakutia to Russia’s parliament in Moscow, the Federation Council upper house and the Duma lower house, were hand-picked for their loyalty to centralized control. Local legislative elections were also corrupted, rigged, the majority of the winners always compliant to Moscow’s will.
Sometimes, alas, democracy is only a phase on a pendulum that swings.
Nyurba woke up on the morning of the third day feeling stiff and drained and thirsty. The air buzzed steadily with clouds of insects. Despite his gloves, and the face net draped over his helmet, while he slept he’d been bitten. The mosquito bites itched and bled, and the horsefly bites stung annoyingly. He got up off his ground cloth — used more as protection from ticks than for comfort. He carefully reached into his pack for cream to prevent infection and reduce discomfort from the bites. His hand brushed past safed grenades and blocks of explosive.
Around him dozens of other men stirred, on their own or when their squad leaders prodded them. They made their morning preparations; an expedient field latrine had been laid out the evening before. The biggest problem was potable water, but the team had come ready for this with reverse-osmosis filtration systems in their packs. Powered by compressed air replenished by a foot pump, the modularized units slowly forced water through a molecular sieve. The water itself, obtained from rivers, rain puddles, swamps, or even permafrost melted by body heat, passed through the sieve, but everything from bacteria and viruses to dissolved chemicals was caught and held behind. Each individual system could make a few gallons a day, in smaller batches ready every few hours. A concentrated sludge, by-product of the filtration, was discarded. The filters would eventually get saturated and clogged, but they’d last long enough for the mission. Drinking water from these filters isn’t exactly what I’d call healthy, but it’s much better than what went in. And it sure beats death by dehydration.
In warm weather, special ops forces never made cooking fires, an unnecessary luxury whose smoke and odor could compromise stealth. All around Nyurba, men ate cold high-calorie breakfasts out of their Russian field-ration pouches. With medics supervising, they gulped down pills to prevent diseases common in Siberia, strains of which were vaccine-resistant: hepatitis, dysentery, cholera, malaria, and a long list of dreadful parasites. As Kurzin watched, they also swallowed tablets picked from a menu that Nyurba prepared, after he’d taken updated measurements of the environment. These German-made drugs included chelation agents to reduce heavy-metal poisoning, and other pharmaceuticals that suppressed the neurological and genetic damage caused by some components in the pollution.
Nyurba made a face as he drank — the filtered water tasted awful. It wasn’t any better when he added a packet of instant coffee, stirring it with a spoon from his mess kit. Like the others, he had to lift his face net, resembling ones that beekeepers wore, each time he ingested something. Aside from being bitten again, it was hard to keep from swallowing bugs, or inhaling them.
“I’d almost rather just go without,” he said to Kurzin as he stared at the bottom of his empty drinking cup.
“Nonsense. We all need to keep up our strength. There’s nothing like a rousing jolt of caffeine when you’ve slept in the field.” Kurzin smacked his lips pointedly, but Nyurba knew this was more from the need to try to clear the persisting, bitter aftertaste of the water than it was from any sincere delectation.
Done with his morning chores, Nyurba surveyed their encampment and its surroundings. Sentries had been posted while their teammates slept, and they were relieved by others to maintain perimeter security. Up to now this was mostly a precaution — while they’d walked all day and most of the night they’d met no one but the Yakut herdsmen, and no aircraft had come within miles. But each day brought them closer to their target, which they knew would be heavily guarded, the area around it patrolled. Squadron discipline could not be relaxed.
Their camp was on a type of terrain feature peculiar to this part of the tundra, called a pingo by native Siberians. It was a sort of blister in the permafrost, a conical hill rising a hundred feet about their surroundings. Pingos at this time of year were covered with coarse yellow sedge grass. Their slopes provided good drainage, so their footing was firm and dry. They also made excellent lookout points.
It was 3 A.M. local time, and the sun shone, dull red, above another pingo to the northeast. Aside from the whine of insects and the occasional chirp of a bird, the loudest natural sound came from the river, a steady rushing and gurgling; the commandos themselves were virtually silent. Patches of morning mist, on lower ground, drifted in the slight breeze. Rising much higher above the tundra was a layer of smoggy haze. Wispy clouds floated slowly in the sky way overhead, but it was too light and too hazy to see any stars between the clouds. Nyurba took a deep breath. The smell of damp earth combined with something else that irritated and clung to the back of his throat. There was a smell in the air like burning wood and burning rubber combined with chlorine and ammonia. His instruments had confirmed what his nose was telling him, and had also picked up traces of formaldehyde, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, and phenol — an industrial solvent — and coal-tar aerosol — yet one more toxic pollutant. The smog came from factory complexes many miles off.
The team geared up and set out on their route march once again. Now they wore pressure spreaders attached to their boots, based on a traditional local design of short and wide work ski, but plastic with upturned edges — like a pair of small snowboards-cum-water-skis
. They were needed to cross the tundra, which was becoming increasingly soggy. The Alazeja’s banks often gave way to stagnant marshes, which the men had to skirt. This area on their maps was marked “Mnogo ozyor.” Many lakes.
“Many” doesn’t begin to describe it. There are tens of thousands of bodies of open water in this part of Siberia alone.
Nyurba trudged with the point squad, as they tried to pick their way between the mushiest patches of ground, to find spots where the footing was better. It was wearying, monotonous work, conducted always under harassment by relentless, bloodthirsty, giant mosquitoes and big horseflies. The work, the perspiration, and the insistent buzz of the insects went on all day.
Some of the puddles they passed gave off a rainbow sheen, tainted by raw petroleum or refinery spills. Other puddles, miles later, were colored bright red from iron oxide runoff.
They began to encounter another type of terrain feature unique to the tundra and taiga. Year after year of wintertime frost heave created oval-shaped ponds and bogs, each surrounded by a ring of stones and boulders. Fungi grew on these rocks, giving them a silvery or orange tint. Mushrooms sprouted around the ovals’ edges. The commandos wove between the ponds and bogs.
At some points the best route took them toward and then right along the Alazeja. Nyurba saw big logs, one after another after another, caught in pockets worn into the banks, or washed up in hordes on gravel beds at riverbends, or stranded midstream on rocks that formed small rapids. The logs obviously resulted from lumbering somewhere upriver — their ends were sliced by chainsaws and their branches had been lopped off. As the third day wore on, he must have seen thousands of these pieces of felled trees, from further south in the taiga belt. It was a sign of the chronic wastefulness of Russian fast resource extraction that they’d lose such quantities of valuable timber to begin with, and then not care.