right, they discovered a man sitting there, looking somewhat uncomfortable on a chair that must have been at least a hundred years old.
He immediately rose and came toward Natalya, saying 'Natalya Nikolayevna!' They embraced warmly. Then he stepped back, surveyed her brunette hair, looked surprised.
After they'd spoken a few more words in Russian, he turned to Benjamin and extended his hand.
'Nikolai Orlov,' he said in only slightly accented English. 'I am pleased to greet you.'
Nikolai was slightly taller than Benjamin, slightly thinner. Benjamin guessed he was in his late sixties. He had a long, narrow face, with extraordinarily bright blue eyes-he could see where Natalya had got the blue in her blue- green eyes-and close-cropped gray hair. His handshake was firm, and he placed his other hand on Benjamin's as they shook. Benjamin felt instant respect and trust for the man.
'Benjamin Wainwright,' he said, and then added, almost instinctively, 'sir. And I am pleased to meet you, as well.'
Nikolai turned to Natalya again and spoke to her again in Russian. Then he motioned them to extract chairs from the stacks against the wall and sit down next to him.
Once they were seated, Natalya close to Nikolai and holding his hand, she looked at Benjamin.
'The first thing my father wants to know,' she said, smiling, 'is what the hell you are doing here.'
Benjamin looked surprised, started to say something.
'Is joke,' Nikolai said, patting Benjamin on the shoulder. 'Sort of. I ask Natashka what brings you together. For your story, I mean. How do you come here in all this… khren, this mess?'
'Well,' Benjamin said. 'That's quite a story.'
And then, as he had with Natalya, he started at the beginning, with the call from Fletcher to the Library of Congress, his arrival and meeting with Samuel Wolfe, and their subsequent investigation into Fletcher's death. But this time he tried to leave no detail unmentioned, thinking it was important that Nikolai understood the implications of passwords and poisons and sudden, inexplicable deaths. He wanted to make certain Nikolai grasped the full sinister background of everything that had happened to him, to know exactly what his daughter had become involved with.
With Natalya translating from time to time, Benjamin tried to include everything that had happened to him: Fletcher's death, Edith's 'accident' with her bees, Wolfe's veiled warnings, his suspicions of a wider conspiracy (though even now he stopped short of including what he thought he'd seen in the Foundation mural)-everything to impress on Nikolai the danger his daughter faced.
Yet oddly enough, it wasn't until Benjamin came to the part about his discussions with Anton Sikorsky that Nikolai showed signs of anxiety, and finally anger, until he and Natalya were engaged in what sounded like a fierce argument, not a word of which Benjamin understood.
'I'm afraid,' Natalya said with exasperation, 'my father does not trust Anton's role in all this. Especially as he once worked for the Soviet Ministry of Defense. How do you know you can trust him, he wonders, especially after he disappeared.'
Benjamin started to answer, but Nikolai stopped him.
'Now it is my turn to tell a story,' Nikolai said. 'Then you will understand my suspicion.
'Imagine,' he began, 'it is August 1968, at the heart of the Cold War.'
CHAPTER 43
From the air, Uzhur looked no different than so many other Siberian villages: ancient houses of blackish brown logs nestled in low, rounded hills and connected to the nearest villages by a solitary, narrow road, a road that wound through the hills and occasional thick pine forests, appearing lonely and alien in this vast landscape.
'Uzhur,' in the area's ancient Khakas language, meant 'hole in the ground.' None of the long-dead tribesmen who named it, and none of its living inhabitants, could know just how ironic that name would prove to be.
But if one could somehow see through solid rock, they would discover what made Uzhur different than the other villages around it. They would see what appeared to be a submarine, or parts of a submarine, buried five hundred meters underground. They would see the secret underground village designated Uzhur-4.
The rooms of this secret village had rounded ceilings and walls, the doors were oval-shaped rather than rectangular and set with large metal wheels in their centers, and everywhere there wound parallel rows of pipes and conduits. But, unlike in a submarine, the hallways bent and twisted at sharp angles, and were constructed of three-meter-thick concrete; beneath the rooms and hallways were dozens of oversized shock absorbers, each a meter wide and driven ten meters into solid granite. The curved, angled hallways, massive walls, and giant springs were all designed to allow the structure to withstand seismic shock waves of up to 500 psi-say, for instance, from the nearby impact of a one-megaton nuclear warhead.
The buried village's inhabitants didn't call it Uzhur-4; they called it, with fierce Russian irony, Solnechnyy Uzhur-Sunny Uzhur. There were only thirty such inhabitants, each of whom visited for a two-week duty shift, after which he returned for ten days to his surface home and wife and children, but as silent and pale as the sterile crypt in which he kept vigil.
And what they kept vigil over were the thirty-three SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles of the 39th Missile Division, 33rd Guards Missile Army, Omsk. Each missile was topped by the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created, the R-36M, twenty-five megatons of instantaneous hell. The official manual of the Strategic Rocket Forces labeled the missiles 'Voyevoda,' a word from the old Russian that meant something like Chieftain, or simply Boss. The name the Americans gave the missile was even simpler, and perhaps more accurate: Satan.
Uzhur-4 was a village of uniformly light gray and green rooms, harshly echoing hallways, shadowless fluorescent lights, unpalatable recycled air, and absolutely inviolate routines. A village whose sole purpose was to destroy a significant portion of the world. A village that didn't exist.
In this village that didn't exist, a group of men in pale blue overalls were sitting in a room with couches, chairs, a Ping-Pong table, a television set-everything that might have made the room a den in someone's home. But the walls were of concrete painted gray, the floor was also concrete but painted pale green, the lights were harsh fluorescents, and the men acted with the controlled ease of soldiers who might at any moment be required to resume rigid discipline. And, even though the room was on the surface, there were no windows, for the room, and the small building in which it was contained, were buried under ten feet of earth, earth that was planted with pine trees and shrubs and therefore, from the air, indistinguishable from the other dozens of small hills around it.
The men were watching television: a news report from Moscow about the growing Czechoslovakian crisis. The stolid reporter was saying that anti-Soviet leaflets were being distributed in Prague, that a radio station had been seized by rebels and renamed 'Free Bratislava,' and that it was broadcasting calls to the Czech people to resist by all means necessary the 'invasion' by tanks and soldiers of the Warsaw Pact. One troop train had already been derailed, and many Red Army soldiers had been killed, some by weapons clearly marked 'Made in the U.S.A.' Finally the broadcast changed to other news.
'Counterrevolutionary bastards!' said one of the men sitting around the television.
'To think, one hundred and forty thousand brave Red Army men died ridding them of Hitler-and this is how they thank us!'
Another of the men-the name tag on his overalls read ORLOV, N.-turned to a man on the couch next to him, whose tag read LEVEROTOV, V.
'What do you think?' he said. 'Will NATO come to the rebels' aid?'
'I think,' Leverotov said, putting out a cigarette, 'our 'sausages' are a cold compress on the hotheads in the Pentagon. But they are wild Americans.' He smiled. 'Who knows that they will dare.' He looked up at a clock. 'Come on, it's time for our watch. And remember, we have a very important drill today.'
Saying 'pakah,' giving a few mock salutes to the other men in the room, they walked out of the room, down a short hallway to a small medical clinic.
After a thorough medical examination, they reentered the hallway and walked to an elevator. There was a keypad next to the elevator, and Leverotov punched in a numbered code. The doors opened and they entered, typed another numbered code on another pad inside the elevator. Its doors closed and it began to descend.
