that the truth was that no one else wanted Sobchak. The little man with the thick glasses and ugly mustache was sloppy, pompous, vain, and aggravating, and Ligacheva wasn’t especially convinced that he had any great abilities as a scientist, either.
She opened the door to the geological monitoring station, and warm air rushed out at her Sobchak kept his tiny kingdom as warm as he could, and old orders giving the scientists priority on the steam output from the boiler plant had never been rescinded, so that was quite warm indeed.
The geologist’s workroom was good-sized, but so jammed with machinery that there was almost no space to move about. Exactly in the center sat little Sobchak, perched on his swivel chair, surrounded by his equipment- meters and displays, switches and dials on every side. He looked up at her; the fear on his face was so exaggerated that Ligacheva almost laughed. His beady little eyes, wide with terror, were magnified by his glasses; his scraggly attempt at a mustache accentuated the trembling of his upper lip. His narrow jaw and weak chin had never looked any worse.
”Lieutenant Ligacheva!” he called. “I’m glad you’re here. Come look at this!”
Ligacheva stepped down the narrow space between a file cabinet and an equipment console to see where Sobchak was pointing. It was a paper chart, unscrolling from one drum and winding onto another. A pen had drawn a graph across it, a graph that had suddenly spiked upward not long ago, and was now hovering well above where it had begun.
”This is your record of seismic activity?” Ligacheva asked, unimpressed.
Sobchak looked up at her, startled. “Seismic activity? Oh, no, no,” he said. “That’s over there.” He pointed to a large bank of machinery on the other side of the room, then turned back to the first chart and tapped it. “This chart shows radiation levels.”
Ligacheva blinked at him. “What?”
”Radiation,” Sobchak said. “Radioactivity.”
Ligacheva stared. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.
”This,” Sobchak said, pointing. “This, Lieutenant. I don’t know what it is. What I do know is that something happened that made the ground shake about twenty kilometers northeast of here, and that when it did there came this burst of radioactivity. Ever since then the background radiation has been four times what it should be.”
”Four times, you say,” Ligacheva said, fingering the paper chart.
”Yes,” Sobchak said. “Four times.”
”And you want me and my men to go find out what this thing is, that’s radiating like this.”
”Yes,” Sobchak repeated.
Ligacheva stared at the chart.
It might be dangerous, whatever was out there. She didn’t know what it was, and all her guesses seemed wild-an American attack? A fallen satellite?
Whatever it was, it was not any part of the established routine.
Perhaps she should report it to Moscow and await orders, but to report it when it was still just readings from old equipment that the authorities would say could not be trusted would be asking to be ignored. Sobchak’s pay still came through, but Ligacheva knew that no one in power thought much of the little geologist, and as for Moscow’s opinion of herself-well, if you were a general in Moscow, you didn’t send a young officer out to the middle of the Yamal Peninsula because you wanted to pay close attention to her and encourage her career. General Ponomarenko, who had assigned her here, had never done anything to make her believe he respected her opinions.
If she took her men out there and they saw whatever it was with their own eyes, though, that would be harder to ignore. No one could say that the phenomenon was the result of Sobchak’s imagination or of poorly maintained monitoring equipment if she had half a dozen eyewitnesses confirming… whatever it was out there.
She knew that no one advanced quickly in any army, let alone in the new, post-Soviet Russian Army, by staying timidly in the barracks waiting for her superiors to tell her what to do.
”Right,” she said. “Where is this mysterious radioactive disturbance, exactly?”
Chapter 3
“The temperature out there is thirty-four degrees below zero, and it’s snowing again,” Salnikov said as he straightened his gunbelt and reached for his hat. “That weather is just right for a pleasant little twenty-kilometer stroll, don’t you think so, Dmitri?”
Dolzhikov snorted. “Oh, yes, Pyotr, just delightful,” he said as he yanked on his second boot. “I’m so pleased we’re all being sent out on this little errand!” He stamped the boot into place. “I wonder, though, Pyotr, if perhaps our beloved Sobchak’s instruments would be just ever so slightly less sensitive if he were the one sent to investigate every little knock and tumble.”
”That’s not fair, Dmitri,” Utkin said mildly, looking up from checking the action on his AK-47. “How many times before has Sobchak sent us out now? Two, maybe three, in the past year?”
”And how many times have we found anything?” Dolzhikov retorted as he rose from his bunk and reached for his overcoat. “Last time, as I recall, a reindeer had tripped over one of Sobchak’s seismographs. How very important it must have been to investigate that and report every detail to Moscow at once!”
”Now, Dmitri,” Salnikov said, grinning. “That might have been an American reindeer, spying on us!” He clapped his gloved hands together. “Besides, is it Sobchak who sends us out, or is it the bold Lieutenant Ligacheva?”
”At least the lieutenant comes with us,” Dolzhikov muttered, fumbling with his buttons, “while Sobchak stays huddled in his little laboratory, watching all the gauges on his precious machines.”
”Watching the gauges is Sobchak’s job,” Lieutenant Ligacheva barked from the doorway. “Sometimes finding out what the readings mean is yours. Now stop your griping and move! Get out to the truck! “
Utkin and Salnikov charged out the door to the waiting snow truck while the other men hurried to get the last few straps and buttons fastened; Ligacheva watched them from the doorway, settling her snow goggles into place so the others could not read her eyes.
The men had no idea why they were going out on the ice, what made this particular tremor any more worthy of investigation than any other. They could hardly be expected not to grumble, under the circumstances.
Ligacheva knew that, and saw no reason to change the circumstances. She could live with grumbling. She hadn’t told the men anything about the radioactivity because she saw no need to frighten them. These were not experienced warriors who could put fear aside or who would be hardened by it; they were mostly children, boys of eighteen or nineteen with only a few weeks of arctic weather training among them all and with no knowledge of science at all. Better, she thought, to let them grumble than to panic them.
Just children-with the bold Lieutenant Ligacheva to lead them across the ice, she thought bitterly. She was no child, yet she was out here, too, her career as frozen as the ground around her.
She could still remember what General Ponomarenko had said the day he assigned her to the Assyma oil field. “This is an important duty, Ligacheva,” he said. “Do well and there may be a place for you on my staff.”
She could still remember his condescending smirk as he said it. A place on his staff, indeed. And perhaps she could grow oranges in her spare time here.
Ponomarenko had known where he was sending her-out of the way, where failure could be hidden or ignored. Such faith he had in her, sending her somewhere no one would blame him if she fouled up! And all the while he was undoubtedly patting himself on the back for his enlightened policies, for not openly trying to ruin her just because she was a woman and an outspoken democrat.
”Come on,” she called to the men. “The snow won’t let up for hours, and the temperature’s still dropping. The longer you wait the worse it’ll be, and the sooner we get this over with the sooner you’ll get back to your cards and liquor.”
The men came and clambered onto the “truck”-an oversized tractor on snow treads, hauling a personnel carrier. Salnikov was in the driver’s seat, with the engine running; as soon as the last boot left the ice he put the tractor in gear, and the ungainly vehicle lurched forward.
