I shook my head and tapped the map again.
“Iskitim?” He shook his head. “Bad place for tourists.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head again. I double-checked my notes—as if I didn’t have the exact location memorized—grabbed a pencil, and made a small X on the map. “There,” I told him. “I want to go right there.”
He frowned at the mark on his map, then peered at it. “Sixty kilometers away,” he said. “Nothing out there but a few poselok—little villages.”
“I just need to be there in two and a half hours,” I told him. “Me and my equipment.” I gestured at the bags and pulled a few bills from my wallet. This trip was costing me three months’ pay, but if I pulled this off, it’d be worth it.
Granted, if I messed it up, there was a solid chance I was going to be very dead. Along with everyone in a forty-mile radius or so. Give or take a mile.
He shrugged, took the money, and picked up the phone. After a quick conversation in Russian he told me my driver would be here in twenty minutes. He explained Nikita’s name as we killed time.
I expected to get two or three people and a truck. Instead I got Nikita. The man was an ox. He threw one bag onto his back and picked up one under each arm. He and the manager tossed a few quick words back and forth and then he marched over to a battered BMW sedan. He fit all three bags in the big trunk—you can’t help but think of the Russian Mafia when you see a trunk that big—and waved me to the passenger side of the car.
For almost an hour now we’d been driving along a paved road that could’ve been in Kansas or Oklahoma or some flyover, grain-belt state. You hear Siberia and you picture some nightmare arctic wasteland, but it’s kind of beautiful. If you’re into that sort of thing.
The arrow on the GPS began to swing again, but this time the road didn’t swing with it. I looked ahead but didn’t see any turnoffs. Nikita drove along at a steady fifty miles an hour or so. The arrow was pointing at the steering wheel, then him, and then it was aimed at the backseat.
“Stop,” I told him. “We missed it.”
He grunted, shook his head, and gestured at the road ahead of us.
“No,” I said, shaking my own head. “Back there.” I held up the GPS.
Nikita slowed the car to look at the little digital arrow, then glanced back over his shoulder. He sighed and turned the car around in a wide three-point turn.
We backtracked three-quarters of a mile until the arrow was perpendicular to the road. He watched it with me and brought the car to a smooth stop. I hopped out.
It looked like we were on the edge of someone’s field, one that’d grown wild for a season or two. Just flat land for miles, broken by a couple small clumps of trees. For some reason I’d imagined this spot would be in some remote forest or something. Maybe a mountain plateau.
We were still half a mile away. I looked back at Nikita. He’d opened his door and looked over the car at me. “Come on,” I told him. I pointed at the trunk. “Bring the bags.”
He threw his hands up and looked around with a bewildered expression. He threw a few words at me and gestured at the road again.
I pointed out at the field with the GPS and tapped my watch. “The bags,” I said again.
He sighed, slammed his door shut, and stomped over to the trunk.
I stumbled out into the field. The grass was just high and thick enough that I couldn’t see the ground, so it was awkward. I made myself go slow. It would suck to get this close, after all this time, and break my ankle a few hundred yards from the site.
Nikita cleared his throat behind me. “We drive out here to see field?”
I stopped and looked back at him. “You can speak English?”
He snorted. “Of course I speak English. You think this is United States where people speak only one language? Russians much smarter.”
“We were in the car for an hour.”
“You very boring,” he told me. “Talk of trees and weather. Is women-talk.” He shook his head.
The GPS led us past the first cluster of trees, across a muddy line that might be a stream at a different part of the year, and over a small stretch of rock. Eleven minutes after we left the car, it beeped three times. A small target flashed on its screen. I walked in a circle, checking every direction. The GPS beeped again. The target kept flashing.
This was it.
I gestured for Nikita to set the bags down and kept circling, stomping the grass down. I needed room to work. Forty-six minutes till showtime. A little tighter than I’d hoped, but still more than I needed.
I pulled open the first bag. It had the three bracket sections, each one wrapped in a padded blanket to keep them safe. I double-checked the GPS one last time and started setting them up.
The first bracket popped open and I spread the legs. They were made out of iron. Weaker and heavier than steel, but they weren’t conductive. At least, not conductive for what I was dealing with. I set the GPS down on the ground, shuffled it a few inches to the left, and then centered the bracket’s arms over it. Once I felt comfortable with it I unwrapped the second blanket and started to unfold its legs.
Nikolai stood by the bags and cleared his throat again. “This is … how you say …” He dug around in his head for words. “This is science equipments?”
I locked the last leg into place. “Well,” I told him, “it’s a kind of science.”
“You could not do this in Novosibirsk?”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s not just about the path of the
