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.
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.
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
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 patrols — 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
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
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.
