by Joe Buff
Samples of the river showed it heavily laced with coliform germs — a marker of raw sewage — plus fertilizers, pesticides, and defoliants, even cyanide. The silt content was very high. Agricultural mismanagement on a monumental scale had putrefied millions of acres of once-fertile farm fields, turning them into poisonous dust to be washed away by thaw and rain, or blown away by the wind. Out-of-control clear-cutting made the erosion problem much worse. Nyurba detected traces of radioactive waste. He knew that underground tests had been conducted in Siberia, some military and some civilian, and fission by-products were leaching into the groundwater. The civilian tests had been for such mad purposes as mining natural gas cheaply, or digging canals. Only in the Soviet Union. Then there were the secret nuclear weapons plants, some still in operation, including underground nuclear reactors to make plutonium for warheads.
At the end of the third day, extremely thirsty and tired but on schedule, they reached their next waypoint, where the Alazeja turned west. Here they made camp on the slopes of another pingo.
Nyurba took more air measurements, and soil and water samples; coal dust and kerosene were problems. He chose a pond where the water was least bad, though acidity readings shocked him. The men drank from their filtered supplies, ate, and took more drugs. They reloaded the reverse-osmosis modules from the pond, working the foot pumps to raise the air pressure that made the things go, so they’d have more drinking water in the morning.
After he and Kurzin checked that the field latrine was properly established, that the first sentry watch was posted, and that the men were settling in with no problems that platoon leaders or medics had to report, Nyurba unrolled his ground cloth. He laid out the thin sleeping bag that provided him modest shielding from the ever-present flying, hopping, and crawling insects. He got into the bag, with his AN-94 outside on the ground cloth — keeping it clean and dry but within easy reach. He smeared his face and neck, even his hair, with insect repellent, arranging the insect net to protect his head.
He fell asleep immediately.
In the morning, everyone attached the low-power optical scopes that were a standard part of the AN-94, clipping them onto brackets to the left of the iron sights. By squad, they took turns zeroing in on the sights, firing at targets improvised from tied tufts of sedge grass. The tufts would shiver and dance when they got hit. The rifle reports were loud, but the noise here was acceptable because they were still in the middle of nowhere.
The stench of bullet propellant mingled with the natural odors and the smog. The smog was thicker than the day before, and had a different mix of chemicals; the particulate content was higher — soot from coal and fuel oil smoke from furnaces and boilers, and diesel exhaust. The men were stingy in their use of ammunition, as disciplined troops always were.
They collected all the spent brass. Then, squatting on their ground cloths, wearing gloves from now on so as not to leave fingerprints, they field-stripped and cleaned the firearms, including their pistols. The gloves were tight-fitting, flame-retardant and puncture-proof. Morale improved despite the increase in tension. Nyurba thought that using their weapons had helped to liven things up. The gunsmoke in his nostrils certainly gave him a surge of adrenaline, and of anticipation.
Kurzin addressed the squadron, in his usual curt and taciturn way. “One more day, men, fifty more miles. Then a few hours sleep, and we put in action what we’ve practiced for a year. So let’s get moving!”
The team set out, heading east. The land began to rise. The ground was drier; the men could remove their snowboard boot attachments. The swarming insects never let up. If anything, they were thicker than ever as the men neared the tree line, where the bleak tundra yielded to the heavily forested taiga.
They began to see the first tangible indications of settlement. Cloth streamers were fastened to bushes, flapping in the breeze. Wooden and metal wind chimes hung from dwarfish spruces, making tinging and clunking sounds.
Tokens of worship… Animism, and Buddhism.
By noon the land in front of them rose out of the haze, as blue-gray hills. They worked harder, gaining altitude with their weighty loads. The topsoil now was richer. They walked by jagged, crumbling outcrops of weathered slate and shale. Hummocks weren’t permafrost pingos anymore — they were granite.
At 4 P.M. the squadron climbed a last slope into the pine forest. The trees blocked the light and the sky. Their trunks interrupted lines of sight, which previously, on the tundra, had been wide open. The shadiest spots even sheltered clumps of snow. The men acclimatized to these new conditions, spreading out into a tactical formation, more alert.
Some of the tall trees leaned against their neighbors, as if they were drunk. The men were still walking on permafrost, just a few feet down. Tree roots couldn’t get much purchase before they hit the frozen-solid layer beneath the soil. Storms, or the tree’s own weight, would make the weaker root systems fail.
They came to a clearing of dozens of acres, and passed what at first appeared to be a meadow covered by wildflowers. Butterflies and bees enjoyed the nectar. But then Nyurba began to notice clues to something else. Among the wildflowers were ramshackle lines of fenceposts, half rotted. Attached to the posts were rusted, broken strands of thick barbed wire. He explored more and came to a disorderly pile of weatherbeaten planks, with what looked like old telephone poles, lying on their side by the planks. Most of the planks were splintered and loose, but some, he realized, were still nailed to a frame, like a platform or a flat roof. Finally it dawned on him. He was looking at the remains of a collapsed guard tower. This field had once been a forced-labor camp.
There were no signs of any buildings. The inmates and guards alike had to have lived in tents year-round.
A death camp, pure and simple. Winters here, with the windchill, can reach eighty below…. Gulag executioners were often executed themselves. Dead guards meant no witnesses.
Kurzin walked up to him. “The corpses would’ve been buried, or dumped, or left where they fell, right around here someplace. We’re standing on a cemetery.”
“Siberia is one giant cemetery,” Nyurba said.
“The direction the Kremlin’s been going in lately, things like this could recur.”
Nyurba just nodded, knowing Kurzin was right, and feeling angry.
“Take strength from this,” Kurzin told him. “It embodies the reason we came. Tyranny, pure evil, the forces of darkness, they aren’t a myth.”
Nyurba gazed at the meadow. “I keep telling myself our job is to help stop things like this from spreading, from happening again.”
“That is our job. A job, a cause, worth dying for.”
Chapter 21
Too exhausted to be kept awake by last-minute fear or excitement, that night the commandos slept as soundly as hibernating bears. Very early the next morning, they prepared to advance from their clandestine bivouac to the final recon position.
“A good day for a firefight,” Kurzin told Nyurba after gulping down his pills with cold instant coffee. He gave orders to safe and charge their rifles and move out. Metallic clicks and snaps and snicks sounded everywhere.
Nyurba flipped the plastic covers off of his optical sight. He checked the end of his AN-94’s barrel for dirt — Abakans were made with an unusual figure-eight-shape combined recoil brake and flash suppressor, which was very effective. A bulky sixty-round box magazine was already inserted, from the night before. The safety, on safe now, was inside the trigger guard. Nyurba pulled back the right-handed charging handle and released it to chamber a round. The separate firing mode selector was on the weapon’s left side; he chose the special two-round-burst time-shifted option, instead of single shot or full auto.
The air at higher altitude was cooler, enough to keep down mosquitoes. The sky that Nyurba could see between the leafy crowns overhead was cloudless. Worming between the tree trunks, scouts preceded the main formation with mine detectors, but found no mines, tripwires, or motion sensors. They saw no sign of Russian foot p
atrols — neither humans nor guard dogs — as they eased closer and closer to their target, but they did see scat left by wolves. Then, on Kurzin’s command, everyone went to ground and formed a defensive perimeter where the trees began to give way to a big man-made clearing. Four snipers inched forward with their weapons to pre-chosen vantage points, now wearing billowy burlap camouflage suits they’d custom-made for the terrain and foliage colors they’d been briefed that they would encounter. The snipers were far more than superb sharpshooters, Nyurba knew. They were men of infinite patience, masters of self-concealment under the eyes of alerted foes, and with observation skills honed to an astonishing degree.
According to the signals intercept by the NSA experts on Carter, the supply shipment and the missile silo crew rotations were scheduled to occur at 8 A.M. local time. Nyurba expected that, unlike many things in Russia, these events would be very prompt. Hiding among the firs and larches, he surveyed the silo complex through binoculars. It was surrounded by a swath of open taiga a full kilometer wide; every tree had been cut down and the stumps removed. This no-man’s-land was empty except for dead short grass and plant shoots, all a telltale orange-brown — sprayed by military defoliants. Then, within the huge rectangle of triple twelve-foot-high electrified fences — posted with warnings that the area between them was mined — there wasn’t much to see unless you understood what to look for.
A concrete guard tower in each corner, plus pylons for high-voltage wire, many poles for floodlights — turned off now — and various radio antennas rose from what might almost have been an empty parking lot; the area surrounded by the fencing was flat. A metal guard shack inside the gate through the fence barrier was surrounded by sandbags as if to stop bullets or shell fragments. A chimney and an air vent in the roof of the shack suggested it was heated in winter, and contained a bathroom for the guards. Several guards stood in a circle, talking and smoking outside the shack, their AK-74s slung casually over their shoulders. Near the shack was a small sandbag emplacement, which Nyurba assumed was protection for a tripod-mounted heavy machine gun. Aside from two worn khaki-colored UAZik Russian jeeps near the guard shack, the enclosure held no vehicles. The guts of this installation, Nyurba reminded himself, were underground, dug into the living granite bedrock.
It looked new — it was new.
Within the triple fence, a scattering of squat gray concrete structures, with sloping sides to deflect airborne nuclear shock waves, rose only a couple of feet above the surfacing of black asphalt. These structures were the tops of the entryways to the silo control bunkers, protected inside by interlocking double blast doors. Nyurba also saw concrete roads, branching from the main gate like veins, ending in hard-stand areas for parking heavily laden flatbed trucks and mobile cranes. Most of the hard-stands were next to what looked like gigantic round pot lids, painted glossy white to reflect heat. Each of these was the top of an SS-27 missile silo. The hinged lids made of alloy steel — three meters thick and seven meters in diameter — could be raised hydraulically in seconds, just before a missile was fired. Each lid weighed eight hundred tons. There were nine domed lids altogether, as he’d expected from high-resolution satellite photos. Each was flanked by two openings, missile engine exhaust ducts — somewhere for the flames and gas to go when the first-stage booster fired. These were sealed by reinforced-concrete slabs designed to slide open sideways on rollers when the time came. Other, smaller projections were hardened inlets and outlets for primary air supplies for the missile crews and for the diesel generators that drove backup electric and hydraulic systems; some bumps were TV surveillance camera pods, or armored shutters for spare antennas. Nyurba could see the bulk of EMP shielding where every high-tension wire or antenna or camera feed entered the ground.
Three separate control bunkers were spaced hundreds of yards apart, each responsible for three missiles in their silos. Together this constituted an independent regiment of SS-27 ICBMs.
A wide concrete access road, raised well above the surrounding terrain for good drainage and less snow buildup, led to Nyurba’s left from the gates and disappeared into the forest. The power lines followed a cutting through the pines, paralleling this road. Both led toward the regimental support base, ten miles away near the town of Srednekolymsk, on the Kolyma River. The support base, in a secure cantonment of its own, had staff offices and barracks, maintenance and storage facilities, and an underground command bunker. Srednekolymsk boasted all the creature comforts and vices — including sordid fleshpots — that a Siberian river harbor town typically offered.
Kurzin crawled up next to Nyurba. “The sniper-observers have seen no signs of life in any guard towers. They think they’re unoccupied.”
“Not surprising,” Nyurba said, “considering the attitude of the guards at the gate.”
“I expect they’ll act more conscientious when the relief crews and supply trucks get here.”
Nyurba glanced at his wristwatch, wiped of fingerprints and worn over his left glove. It was almost 6 A.M. “Pull back and establish our phony roadblock?”
At this roadblock, posing as beefed-up security, we intercept at least one silo relief crew. The team would learn from these Russians correct crew changeover procedures, and get whatever essential items and knowledge they carried in with them, such as one-time-use launch-order validation codes, new launch-key safe combinations, updated passwords, and valid IDs. Some of Kurzin’s men would either impersonate a relief crew or force a real one to help specialists from the teams get into a control bunker. Their interrogation and manipulation would be greatly aided by fast-acting intravenous drugs the team had brought, made in Germany, the modern equivalent of truth serums and hypnotics.
It was the Nazis, after all, who invented sodium pentathol.
“Tell the snipers to stay in place,” Kurzin said. “Have everyone else assemble on my HQ.” Kurzin’s headquarters was a hollow in an especially thick stand of trees.
Over his miniaturized tactical radio, Nyurba issued orders to the platoon leaders. He wore the radio’s lightweight headset under his helmet. The radio was Russian special forces equipment, copied from American technology. The squadron’s radios used a method to avoid detection or jamming that was similar to the undersea acoustic links of the subs they’d ridden to get here. Voice messages were encrypted and turned into digital pulses. These were transmitted on frequencies that jumped around thousands of times per second. The frequency band they used was normally meant for radar. As a result, the transmissions penetrated undergrowth and bounced around structures, to give better reception than regular radios could.
Except the team’s Russian equipment had been changed. The battlefield encryption-decryption routine was German, one recently broken by the NSA. The frequency-agile specifications programmed into the radios were also German. Even real Russian Spetsnaz, with the same type of radio sets, wouldn’t be able to monitor the team — which was vital to mission security.
And when some of the radios were left behind during the raid, their altered software would be one more piece of evidence incriminating Germany.
An hour later, Kurzin’s squadron was set up in the trees that lined the access road, three miles away from the gate into the silo complex. The road curved slightly to avoid granite outcroppings, and took a steep grade down toward the support base near the town by the river, so this spot didn’t have a view of either the base or the missile site — and vice versa.
Nyurba switched his lip mike to voice-activated mode. “Snipers, Nyurba, radio check, over.”
One by one the four men confirmed that they could hear him. He responded that he could hear them, too. He requested a status report from the missile complex. The sniper-observers, hiding in the dead undergrowth in the defoliated zone around the fences, each reported that nothing significant had occurred since the main body of the squadron had maneuvered off through the woods. Nyurba acknowledged, and left his mike open so they and the rest of the team could get from him a running commentary on any deve
lopments.
Eight A.M. came and went, but nothing happened on the road.
Nyurba began to worry. “Sir, you think they did the shift change all by helicopter?” If so, leapfrogging any roadblocks by air, the squadron’s task had just become infinitely more difficult.
Kurzin shook his head. “It’s not that far. We’d’ve heard.”
The team continued to wait, and wait.
By 2 P.M., Nyurba grew very concerned. “Sir, what if our NSA guys made a mistake? Or the Russians changed the schedule?”
“What if?” Kurzin asked sarcastically. By now he’d also set his radio to open-microphone mode. “We could be here for days.”
Around him, Nyurba sensed the other commandos reacting to having heard this, and he could feel their morale start to drop like an almost physical thing.
“Adopt the contingency plan?”
Kurzin turned to look at Nyurba. He opened his mouth to say something when they both heard a sound in the distance, from Srednekolymsk or the support base.
All four snipers called in at once, pandemonium in Nyurba’s headset.
“Radio discipline!” Kurzin snapped.
The confusion on the circuit stopped. The seniormost sniper-observer reported, more calmly. “A guard in the shack got a phone call. Then he ran out and yelled to the others. They took off in every direction…. The guard towers and machine gun nest are manned. Tripod-mounted machine guns are now visible in each of the towers. Estimate them as seven point six two millimeter.” Thirty-caliber antipersonnel weapons.
“Acknowledged. Report any changes. Kurzin out.”
That sound Nyurba had heard was getting much louder.
Suddenly two Mi-24 Hind-F attack helicopters came around a bend in the road and zoomed by, almost brushing the treetops. Nyurba was lashed by the downdraft from their five main rotor blades; he saw tree branches sway. Each Mi-24’s sides had stub wings bristling with rocket pods and missiles. There was a thirty-millimeter tank-buster gun on a turret under their chins, a Gatling cannon that distinguished Hind-Fs from earlier versions. F-models carried no passengers, just the gunner plus a pilot seated above and behind him. Both Mi-24s were colored a mottled matte green-brown, which made them seem businesslike and merciless.