Pandemonium (25 page)

Ferrell continued with mechanical efficiency. “The government of Kaziristan has buckled under considerable pressure by both the U.S. and Russian governments to let us send in this team. The Kaziristanis claim they have no knowledge of this facility, at all. They also claim they have sealed off all known ventilation shafts and entrances to it, so you do the math. The Russians have provided us with a map of the city in exchange for letting these three comrades join our team. Let me introduce them to everybody. This here is Spetsnaz
stariki
Commander, Dima Volkov, Russian special forces.”

A light-haired, green-eyed man with a sharp, devilish grin, Dima waved at the others cheerfully. “The only reason we decided to let you Yanks come along was because you brought hendros.
Zdras-tvooy-tyeh!
” he laughed.

“Spasiba,”
Hender replied.

Dima’s tanned face blanched. “You speak Russian?”

Hender smiled. “Russian is fun to speak,
da
?”

Dima looked at his Russian comrade in shock.

Ferrell pointed at the huge commando who was relacing his boots beside Dima. “Spetsnaz Alfa team leader, Tusya Kovalovich.”

“A small hand for the big man.” Jackson nodded.

Andy clapped, then stopped, cringing in embarrassment. Jackson winked at him. “Did you say his name was Sonuvabitch?” Jackson said. The big American cupped his ear with his broad right hand as he set up the last couple of chess pieces on his magnetic board with his left hand.

Ferrel cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, former Army Ranger, Delta weapons specialist and all-around asshole, Jackson Pierce.”

“Did you say Jackoff?” Tusya cupped one hand behind his ear and gripped Jackson’s hand with the other in a crushing handshake. “Pleased to meet you!”

“OK,” Jackson chuckled. “Let go now, Sonuvabitch!”

Tusya let the big man’s bloodless hand go. “
Da,
Jackoff!”

Dima snickered.

Ferrell’s jet-blue eyes burned under charcoal eyebrows as he pointed at a large man sitting across from Kuzu. “That California redwood sitting in the corner is Teddy ‘Bear’ Jenkins.”

The big man with cropped black and silver hair nodded his scarred head, irritated.

“Bear’s a former Army Ranger who’s now a Delta force sniper and sapper,” Ferrell said, referring to a clipboard. “And one-half Blackfoot Indian.”

“Even though he was one of the ones who screwed up at Tora Bora, we brought him along, anyway, mostly for his charming personality. Right, Bear?” Jackson laughed.

“Fuck your mother’s ear,” Bear growled. The mountain-faced man, who had been tuning a crossbow on his lap, extended a hand to Tusya, who immediately regretted taking it as Bear vised his grip. “Nice to meet you.” Tusya felt the bones in his hand grind together as Bear grinned.

“OK!” Tusya yelled, conceding.

Kuzu watched as Bear finally let Tusya’s hand go.

“Thank you, Bear.” Jackson winked at the wounded Russian.

Kuzu admired Bear’s weapon, stretching his neck as he peered at it with both eyes.

“OK, General Ferrell,” Jackson sneered, “since you seem to be Mr. Voice and have a pipeline to SOCOM, why don’t you narrate exactly what’s going on in this movie?” Jackson looked down at Kuzu’s latest rapid-fire move, perturbed. He enjoyed chess, but he did not enjoy getting his ass beaten like an omelet in less than four minutes by this genius spider crab.

“Let’s look at the map of the city,” Andy said.

“Let me introduce you to our expert in Russian excavations.” Ferrell held out a hand to a slender black-clad woman who had blended like a shadow into the fuselage. “Anastasia Kurolesova from the Moscow Geological Institute—or should we call you Doctor?”

The rather beautiful woman with short black hair smiled sardonically. “Call me Nastia.” She leaned forward as she pulled a large blueprint out of a leather tube at her feet.

“Nastia is an honorary member of the Diggers Russian Underground club, I believe,” Ferrell said. “She’s helped map hundreds of miles of passageways in Metro-Two under Moscow—isn’t that right, Doctor?”

“Of course not,” she smirked. “Metro-Two does not exist. In any event, mapping it would be illegal. But, I am an expert on Soviet-era engineering projects, especially underground projects. And I’m also a musophobiac.”

“What’s that?” Jackson said.

“I am terrified of rats,” she said.

“Then why would you devote your life to studying sewers?” Bear asked.

“Exactly.” Nastia gave a faintly ironic smile as she whipped a rolled sheet of paper open on the floor of the plane between them. Her caviar-black eyes glittered with excitement as she admired the faded blueprint. “I obtained this plan of the city from Kremlin archives two days ago and was only allowed to bring a copy because of the dire circumstances. The Diggers have been requesting maps such as this for over twenty-five years, and we were always told they don’t exist because, of course, none of these places exist. So, I suppose that means this is the only underground city that exists, since this is the only map that exists.” She deadpanned them with 90-proof Russian sarcasm. “Stalin called it Pobedograd—‘Victory City.’ Construction went on from 1950 to 1959 before it was abandoned, shortly after Stalin’s death.”

They gathered around the blueprint. Kuzu and Hender immediately began memorizing it like a gameboard or like a jungle, tracing walls, passages, and escape routes.

Nastia waved her hand over the large circular cavern at the center. “Sector Six is the main chamber of Pobedograd. It has a central tower thirty-five stories tall that was built for party officials. The streets radiating from the tower were to be lined with workshops, supply depots, factories, fire stations, and even restaurants and taverns. Along the river at the south end of the city are apartments and a bridge crossing the river to a train station at the southeast corner. In the northwest corner is Sector One, Stalin’s palace.” Her hand motioned over the blueprint as she continued. “South of the palace is Sector Five, a farm, and to the east of the palace, in Sector Two, was a garrison for Stalin’s guards. Further east is Sector Three, a hospital and medical laboratory, and east of this—” Nastia pointed her red-nailed index finger at the upper right corner of the map. “—warehouses and a self-sustaining power plant.”

“A power plant?” Jackson whistled.

“What kind?” Ferrell said. “Nuclear?”

“No,” Nastia said. “It’s quite funny. In the 1960s, the Soviets built over one hundred thirty-five robot lighthouses along the Arctic coast of Russia. The long polar night makes navigating those waters extremely dangerous. No one today knows how many or exactly where all of those lighthouses are, but since it was impossible for crews to maintain them in such remote locations, it was decided to power them with nuclear reactors that produce strontium-90. Once they were built, the Soviet work crews just threw the switch and left. They were supposed to be fully autonomous, turning on when the Arctic night arrived and turning off when day returned months later, all while radioing signals to passing ships.”

“The Russian authorities might not know where all of them are, but scavengers have been dismantling those things and hauling off scrap for years,” interjected a small, wiry American with brown hair and wide-set gray eyes around a hawkish nose. He had not spoken until now, and he flung a crumpled juice box between them, dropping it neatly into Dima’s duffel bag just as he was zipping it open. He winked at the surprised Russian.

Captain Ferrell looked at a clipboard. “Let me introduce you to Specialist Steve Abrams, formerly with military intelligence. I hope you’re as good with a grenade, Specialist.”

“I’m better with grenades,” Abrams answered. “If I were two inches taller, I’d be at Disney World right now with a shiny new Super Bowl ring. Instead I’m here with you assholes. Lucky for you. Hey, Bear, bet you twenty dollars I can toss this one-dollar bill in your upper pocket.”

“You’re on, jerk-off.”

“You can’t move.”

“Go ahead, try it, asshole.”

Abrams wadded up a dollar bill and tossed it with a perfect parabola, lobbing the balled-up note into the soldier’s shirt pocket.

“Damn, dude,” Bear said.

Hender and Kuzu were impressed.

“You owe me a double-sawbuck,” Abrams said, turning to Nastia. “Terrorists have been trying to plunder those lighthouses for years now, darlin’, as well as hundreds of other former Soviet sites powered by those nifty little portable nuclear reactors. You see, the Soviets made over five hundred of those damn things. Over a hundred have never been accounted for.”

“Shit.” Dima scowled.

“Yes, but finding them and taking them anywhere would probably kill you,” said Nastia.

“Yeah, sure. Like that’s a deterrent,” Abrams said.

“Death is always a deterrent,” Nastia said. “Since 1991, with help from America, Russian authorities have been trying to locate all the lighthouses so they can replace their reactors with solar-power sources. It is true that some of the reactors were already missing by the time inspectors got there. In 2001, salvagers apparently tried to strip parts from one of the lighthouses. But the men who took them were never found.”

“I rest my case.”

Nastia shrugged, unfazed. “You would know better than I, perhaps. But Siberia is not a pleasant place, especially along the Arctic Coast. And carrying a radioactive cargo would not make the journey any easier.”

“But even the Soviets wouldn’t put a nuclear power plant in an underground city,” Andy said. “Would they?”

“Why not?” Abrams said. “Maybe Maxim Dragolovich has been selling strontium-90 on the black market.”

“Maybe this Henders Island horror story is just a cover,” Jackson concurred. “Maybe they were making a dirty bomb and had an accident down there.”

“But why would they bring in scientists who had visited Henders Island?” Ferrell asked.

“It completes the illusion,” Abrams said.

“Supposedly, the power plant of Pobedograd is geothermal,” Nastia said. “A dry-steam generator.”

Kuzu pinned Jackson’s king.

“Aw!” Jackson groaned.

“Checkmate, Jackson,” Kuzu said.

“Let’s play,” Abrams said, taking the board off Jackson’s knee and setting it up on a crate in front of Kuzu. “OK?”

“OK, Abrams. Play,” Kuzu said.

Abrams winked. “You go first.”

Hender pointed at the map on the floor with a long arm. “Where are Nell and Geoffrey?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Ferrell answered, irked by the well-spoken creature. “We don’t even know if they are still alive. The odds aren’t good. But according to our source, they might be in the palace.” Ferrell pointed at Sector One.

“Where is Maxim?” Kuzu asked.

“Just what I want to know,” said Dima.

“He may be trapped here in Sector Three,” said Ferrell. “This was the last place Galia Sokolof reported him going. Which brings us to our special guests, Dr. Andrew Beasley, Hender, and Kuzu.” Ferrell nodded at each of them in turn. “The hendros are the only ones with any experience in this theater. They survived for thousands of years among these critters. They’re here to tell us what we’re up against. And what they tell us may well be the difference between life and death down there, so let’s all pay attention.”

“Don’t leave anything out,” Bear said.

Kuzu looked back at him, leaning forward with one iridescent eye that had three stacked pupils. “You survive, maybe,” he said, and his lips spread into a foot-wide smile over three wide upper and lower teeth.

Andy fished his cell phone out of his vest pocket. “Can you take a picture of that map, Hender?”

“OK, Andy.” Hender took the camera and unfolded his two-elbowed arm six feet as he took a picture of the map from directly above it. He handed the camera back to Andy.

“Wow,” Jackson approved.

“Send that image to me, too,” Abrams said, echoed by the rest.

“Sneakernet, not wireless,” Ferrell said.

“Yeah, let’s not bounce that image off a satellite,” Abrams agreed.

“I’ll pass around a memory card,” Andy said, setting his phone on a crate in the middle of the floor. Then he clicked on the projector function and beamed an image from a slideshow he had prepared on a canvas tarp blocking the forward cargo in the C-130.

“What are we looking at here?” Abrams asked.

“Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Jackson snickered.

“Pay attention, Jackson,” Hender admonished.

The ranger’s gum fell out of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Andy said. “Pay attention.”

The first image Andy projected was a still photo of rolling wheel-like bugs. “Disk-ants are small, but they might be the deadliest life we found on the island,” said the biologist. “Their backs are covered with spirals of babies whose backs are covered with spirals of babies, and so on, down to the size of nano-ants, or ‘nants,’ as we call them. They roll on their edge, moving much faster than normal ants, and when they strike, the nants unload from their backs and melt flesh right off their prey’s bones. They can crawl on either side, as well, and hurl themselves through the air like Frisbees.”

“Frisbees?” Dima asked.

“Like Chinese throwing stars,” Andy said.

Hender nodded at the blond-haired Russian soldier. “They’re very bad.”

Dima nodded, chilled.
“Da.”

“Each disk-ant is really a whole colony,” Andy continued. “But they travel in packs.” Andy clicked to a shot of three many-legged creatures in midleap, their spiked arms splayed and their round heads gashed with fang-filled smiles. “These are Henders rats: fast-breeding opportunists that eat anything alive. The average Henders rat can leap twenty feet.”

“They don’t look like rats,” Ferrell muttered.

“They’re not,” Andy said. “They’re bioluminescent, nocturnal, and diurnal mammal-like descendants of crustaceans with stripes that flash colors on their heads to confuse prey and predators.”

“It wouldn’t confuse me,” Abrams said. “Or my machine gun.”

Bear laughed. “I hear that, brother.”

“Don’t run straight,” Kuzu said as he moved his knight to counter Abrams’s bishop.

“Ah,” Ferrell noted. “Good tip from Kuzu, everybody.”