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.
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
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.
