“Then in three nights, we’ll be back to stop it,” I said firmly.
WE decided to drive straight through to Zlatoust without stopping for lunch. I still felt weird after my stint at the bottom of the lake as the bog monster, and Theo was obviously uncomfortable reliving the slaughter he’d witnessed.
It took an hour to get to Zlatoust and as Theo drove, I searched for news articles on my phone mentioning the location of the third meteor impact. I finally found the coordinates, but it was a few miles inside of Taganay National Park and not near any road. We would need to rent snow machines, or maybe horses? It seemed like the authorities were doing a better job keeping tourists away from this site. We would probably have to sneak our way to it.
I told Theo what I’d found and he voted we text Zasha to see if she’d heard from her missing doctor yet. If not, she might be at loose ends and be willing to guide us.
I texted her and got an immediate, excited reply. She was in Zlatoust with other members of her team searching for meteorite fragments near the impact site. She was resting and would meet us in an hour for coffee.
Zlatoust was a small city on the banks of the Ay River. It was much smaller than Chelyabinsk and at a much higher elevation. The snow-covered southern Urals surrounded us as we drove up into the city.
We met Zasha at a coffee shop near a tramway stop. Theo and I just sat down when she bustled in, wrapped in a thick coat, her pink cheeks glowing from the cold. I heard Theo mutter something beside me. She hurried to our table and shook off her gloves.
“I am so happy to see you,” she said. “I have been busy, busy all morning digging in the snow for meteorite pieces and my hands are still frozen!” She laughed and showed us her red fingers.
“That’s so cool,” I answered. “Have you found a lot? Is the site hard to get to?”
“It is a little far, yes. It takes about an hour to get there on a snowmobile. But soon we will be done at the site and will take the meteorite fragments to the lab. Then I will not be so cold all day.”
“What about your boss?” Theo asked. “Did you find him?”
Zasha’s face fell. “No. The last he was seen, he rented a snowmobile and was searching for the crater. That was four days ago. He is a missing person.” Zasha looked very somber. “The police think he got lost in the woods. If that is so, we may never find his body. The snow is deep in these mountains and it is many months until it melts.”
“Where did he rent the snowmobile? Have the police tried following his trail?” Theo suggested.
“Alas, we have had a big snow two days ago. The trail is gone, if he made one. He left from the Taganay Hotel a little bit outside of town and the hotel clerk thinks he went straight into the park following the cross-country ski trail. The police and park rangers found the snowmobile on the trail, but there is no sign of the doctor.” Zasha shook her head sadly. “His poor wife,” she added. “She has been calling and calling us but we have no answers.”
We finished our coffees and talked a little about Zasha’s meteorite fragments. Apparently, they were very heavy and full of iron. It was a race to collect them before they vanished under the snow, or were picked up by treasure hunters hoping to sell them online
Zasha’s team would stay in Zlatoust until the weekend, studying the crater, taking radiation readings, and picking up fragments. Then they would use the astronomy lab at the university in Chelyabinsk to run some tests on the fragments and the soil in the crater. The scientists would be able to tell where in space the meteors arrived from based on the elements and mineral compositions in the meteorite fragments.
When Zasha got up from the table to head back to work, Theo hopped up too and walked with her out the door. I lost sight of them so while I waited for Theo to return, I called the Taganay Hotel and booked us rooms for the night. I asked the clerk if he had any snow machines still available for the day and then reserved one for the afternoon.
When Theo came back inside to get me, I teased him about Zasha the whole way to the hotel.
AN hour later, we were on our way into the national park. We followed the same cross-country trail that Dr. Kuznetsov took just days earlier, with me driving the snow machine and Theo holding on loosely. I had the compass direction and coordinates for the crater but for now, we would follow the ski trail and look for any signs of the missing doctor.
The snow blanketed the forest around us. The trees were tall and bowed over the ski trail in places, forming tunnels. The trail steadily climbed and we caught occasional glimpses of the sweeping valley below, dotted with frozen lakes. We planned to follow the trail for about an hour and then turn the sled toward the crater and try and cut across the forest, hopefully bypassing any authorities guarding the site access.
I saw a small herd of elk picking its way through the trees and pointed them out to Theo. Their hooves moved daintily through the snow and left a winding trail behind them.
We were approaching the turn off point when Theo patted my shoulder and I stopped the snow machine.
“My intuition is telling me to turn off the trail here,” he said.
I
