MARCH 28
6:42 P.M. CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME
The phone shattered Standish Harrington’s tranquillity as he sat on the balcony of his Swiss chalet, watching the sunset purpling the waters of Lake Geneva. He watched a Jet Skier draw a chalk-line across the mirrored surface, sipping sherry and smelling the bratwursts his girlfriend was grilling.
Standish was a happily retired investment banker at the ripe old age of forty-seven. He was indebted to several politicians, who had provided him with a platinum parachute to bail out of his own financial Hindenburg. But the parachute had come with a lot of strings attached. One of them was attached to the phone, whenever it might ring, for the rest of his life. He noted the number of the incoming call and picked it up, waving off his girlfriend, who walked away, annoyed. “Yes?” he answered.
Someone proceeded to give him the names and numbers of two men who might be susceptible to a financial incentive for accepting a certain assignment. The task was to make sure that neither of the hendros joining a certain dangerous expedition survived.
Standish poured himself another drink and gazed across the darkening lake.
MARCH 30
10:27 A.M. CENTRAL EUROPE TIME
Hender, Kuzu, and Andy were belted into seats against the wall of the C-130 Hercules transport plane as it took off from the Zürich–Dübendorf military airfield. Around them sat ten others comprising the rescue team that had been assembled.
Much to the humans’ surprise, Kuzu turned “invisible,” his fur projecting the wall behind him, as the aircraft raced down the runway and took off. When the plane was airborne, and they were all finally allowed to unbuckle and move about inside the transport plane, Kuzu finally reappeared, freaking them all out.
“Nice trick,” said a large man seated next to Kuzu who had fine blond stubble on his head.
Captain Craigon Ferrell, a former American Army Ranger and now a Delta Force operator, gave a sudden two-fingered whistle beside Kuzu. The soldier’s angular face was all business. His crew-cut hair was jet-black. “Listen up!”
The black T-shirt over Ferrell’s chiseled chest sported a dragon brandishing samurai swords. A black and red tattoo on one of his biceps showed an eagle gripping two bloody daggers, and there was a skull-and-crossed-machine-guns patch on his cap. “As you know, we are entering an underground facility that has been identified as a WMD lab. An outbreak of dangerous biologicals has occurred inside the facility. Our first objective is to set explosives in a railway tunnel to stop the outbreak from spreading to points unknown. These exceptional units have joined us for the mission.” He extended a hand presenting the hendros.
“Mmm,” Kuzu buzzed like a subwoofer.
Ferrell flashed a nervous smile at the sel and looked at Andy. “Do you need to translate for them, Dr. Beasley?”
“Understand,” Kuzu said.
“Me, too,” Hender said.
“They understand.” Andy nodded. “If Kuzu can’t, Hender can translate. Please continue.”
Ferrell had seen a lot of things during his life in the service, but it took all his focus and training to overcome the shock and awe of being in the presence of alien beings that appeared to have something like human intelligence. And yet they were said to have evolved on Earth; indeed, they were said to have lived longer on Earth than humans. “Our secondary goal,” he said, “is to locate and rescue Nell and Geoffrey Binswanger and capture or kill Maxim Dragolovich, the terrorist who funded the construction of this place and who might still be trapped inside this city.”
“Whoa, wait—city?” exclaimed the large man sitting next to Kuzu as he set up a miniature chessboard on his cannon-sized thigh. Jackson Conway Pierce was a six-foot-five Alabama farm boy with a 171 IQ, a black-ops officer for the United States military with a very dry sense of humor. “Nobody said anything about a city.” He gestured to Kuzu. “Chess?”
Kuzu looked at the big man. “Yes.”
“Well,” Ferrell said. “It’s a city. Is that clarified enough for you?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Go on.”
“The city was called Pobedograd in Stalin’s time. It was built in the years before his death and purchased by Russian bazillionaire Maxim Dragolovich about ten years ago. It would be a lot easier, of course, to just place a tactical nuke down there and call it a day. But we have targets to rescue and targets to kill or capture, if possible.”
Andy’s heart plunged. Finding Nell and Geoffrey alive seemed to be a conflicting and secondary objective of the mission.
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 a*shole, 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.
“F*ck 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 a*sholes. 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, a*shole.”
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.”
“Zigzag.” Hender nodded.
Andy clicked to the next image of a strange growth covering what looked like a log. With oddly geometric edges, the lichenlike growth was colored green, orange, yellow, red, purple, and white. “This is Henders clover. It’s not dangerous, but everything eats it and it eats everything. Plus it photosynthesizes and makes oxygen. It uses sulfuric acid to eat through just about anything.”
“Run on green,” Kuzu said. “Better.”
“Huh?” Abrams said.
“It’s better to run on green clover,” Hender agreed. “Purple will melt your feet.”
“Gotcha! Thank you.” Jackson looked at the others.
“Go on,” Bear said grimly.
Andy clicked to the next image: a six-legged beast launching off a thick tail with vertical jaws and giant spiked arms.
“Chërt!” Dima cursed.
“What the hell is that thing?” Jackson said.
“A spiger,” Tusya chided. “Where have you been, in a cave?”
The others laughed.
“Yes, that’s a spiger,” Andy said. “They grow as big as a pickup truck and can jump thirty-five feet or more and swallow a man whole. I don’t see how they could have gotten live spigers here, but you should see it, just in case. This snapshot was taken by a National Geographic photographer on the machine gun turret of a Humvee in which the famous naturalist Sir Nigel Holscomb rode across Henders Island. The spiger chasing them was roughly the size of the vehicle it’s chasing in the photo.”
“OK, so spigers just kill you,” observed Jackson.
“Yeah,” said Andy. “Pretty much.”
“Looks like a big damn target for an incendiary grenade to me,” Abrams said, throwing a wadded-up Nicorette package at the projected image and hitting the spiger’s mouth dead center.
Kuzu leaned down and whispered into Abrams’s ear chillingly: “You might live, too.”
“OK,” Ferrell said. “What else?”
Andy put the next image up. Curving “tree” trunks bent together like whale ribs along a twisting jungle corridor. “They look like trees,” the biologist said, “but they’re animals. Some of them shoot poisonous bloodsucking darts, others have jaws for bark, and most hang sticky eggs like bait for passing predators.”
“Welcome to the jungle,” Jackson grunted, popping his last square of Nicorette gum.
“What else?” Bear said.
Andy clicked to an image of two flying bugs, one with five wings over ten opposing praying mantis-like claws and a fanged abdomen. “That’s a Henders wasp. They have a brain at both ends, eat with their butts, and inject larvae through a needlelike ovipositor at the same time. Their larvae bore through flesh, seeking out the electrical signals of nerves in order to immobilize their prey with pain.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bear said.
Andy showed a picture of another buglike species, this one with three wings, three long legs and a drill-bit abdomen. “The drill-worm. Its butt can drill through wood, human flesh, bone, and just about anything else but glass, rock, or steel. Both of these bugs are bioluminescent and highly active, day or night. You don’t want to see either of them without something between you and it.”
“Shit. I’m starting to think we should just set off a dirty bomb down there and call it a day,” said Jackson.
“Me, too,” Dima agreed.
“What is your plan?” Andy asked. “Because this stuff is worse than any WMD. These are weapons of global destruction. They’re self-replicating and absolutely lethal to all life on land. If this stuff gets anywhere near us, we’re as good as dead. And if it gets out, it’s the end of the world. Everything on Henders Island evolved to kill in an all-predator ecosystem over hundreds of millions of years. It fights everything that doesn’t kill it first. It never backs down. It always escalates. Not even a mongoose lasted more than a few minutes on Henders Island.”
“Well, we’ve got a few killing machines of our own,” Jackson said, rising.
“Like what?” Nastia said. She looked pale and terrified by Andy’s slideshow.
“Let’s take a look,” Jackson said. “Ferrell, why don’t you give me a hand?”
Ferrell and Jackson pulled up the tarp on which Andy had projected his images and revealed a number of large flats stacked with high-tech equipment.
Jackson tapped each item with reverence through plastic wrapping as he ran down their inventory: “AA-12 fully automatic combat shotguns with detachable thirty-two-round polymer drum magazines, each with a forty-meter range. Based on what we’re hearing, I’m definitely packing one of these puppies. Right here we have a crate of M84 flashbangs, which produce a one-million-candlelight flash and a 180-decibel bang. Yell ‘fire in the hole’ when you throw one and make sure to cover your ears and eyes. Right here we have M7A2 riot-control tear gas grenades and AN-M14 thermite incendiaries that burn at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature on the surface of the sun. They burn underwater, too. And these right here are some good old-fashioned M67 fragmentation grenades. Plus an assortment of even nastier stink bombs with assorted internationally banned contents.”
Andy pointed to a humanoid erector set that looked like a collapsed Transformer in the center of the flat. “What’s that?”
“That, my friend, is the latest Sarcos Raytheon XOS Exoskeleton,” Jackson said.
“No shit?” Bear grunted.
Kuzu was distracted by Abrams’s sacrificing his queen as the small, wiry human stood up to get a closer look at the battle gear.
“Who’s going to be the Terminator?” Tusya said.
“I am,” Abrams said. “I’m the reason it’s here, actually. And I’m the only one trained to use it.”
“Well, then, Iron Man, tell us what it can do,” Ferrell said.
“It comes with full body-armor like something out of Star Wars, too.” Abrams winked at Kuzu, leaving his queen in danger as he approached the mountain of equipment. “When suited up in this thing, a man can lift two hundred pounds with each arm, punch through brick walls, and run at twelve miles per hour for ninety minutes before changing batteries. Heh, heh. It’s more fun than a new Rush album.”
Kuzu took Abrams’s queen.
“Well, well,” Abrams said, bending down to take Kuzu’s knight with a pawn that was now one move from queening.
Kuzu’s fur flushed violet. Abrams had disguised offense inside a seemingly reckless defense, Kuzu noted, learning from him.
“Well, you won’t be the only robot down there,” Jackson said, resting his hand on some cylindrical shapes under the shrink-wrap. “These babies right here are Dalek combat robots, flying Crock-Pots with four landing legs. They can hover or cruise at twenty miles an hour, automatically turn around corners, and feed back reconnaissance. And we’ve got the latest crawling bugs, too. These little knights in shining armor are Talon SWORDS, robot rovers with M249 SAW machine guns, which fire a thousand rounds per minute. They can climb stairs, travel over sand, snow, water, and debris while transmitting video back in color, black-and-white, infrared, or night vision. Best of all, we’ve trained these hounds to heel and follow us wherever we go.” Jackson walked around to the other side of the swaddled flat of equipment. He raised his arm in a flourish. “Last, but not least, we brought the Big Dog.” He patted the plastic-covered shape. “The latest quadrupedal all-terrain cargo robot. Wait’ll you see her.” Jackson lifted what looked like a video game controller hanging from a cord around his neck. “All these bots follow this dog whistle, which also signals commands.”
“I want a dog whistle,” Abrams said.
Dima nodded. “Me, too.”
“All right, that can be arranged,” Jackson said. “But I’m the alpha dog.”
“There’s an alpha dog override function I’ll show you how to use on your own dog whistles,” Ferrell said.
“But only if the alpha dog says it’s OK,” Jackson said.
“Or dies,” Ferrell said.
“That’s good,” Tusya said.
“That brings us to body armor,” Jackson said. “We’ve got the best in the world, Dragon Skin. It’s made of laminated silicon-carbide ceramic and titanium matrices overlapping like dragon scales covered with Kevlar. We all have full suits that cover wrists and necks, with helmets whose exterior microphones transmit sound to the ears and whose radios transmit our voices to each other. Our helmets also have rearview visor display. Since we’ll mostly be communicating with our helmet radios, we have to remember to keep them switched on, folks. We have a large supply of oxygen canisters on hand in case the gas in the cave becomes unbreathable. These species may be more evolved for battle than we are, but we’ve got technology, folks. I guarantee they’ve never come up against what we’re bringing to the fight.”
“We want Russian body armor,” Dima said.
“Kirasa!” Tusya insisted.
“Boys, I know you’re proud of your country,” said Jackson. “And I’ll give you a lot of credit for that. But compared to what we’ve got here, Kirasa armor is crap. No offense.”
Dima spit.
“We’ll do it your way this time,” Tusya said.
Kuzu marveled at the amazing devices the humans had made to compensate for their physical frailty.
“Checkmate, my friend,” said Abrams.
Kuzu looked down. The human had trapped his king with a second queened pawn. The hendro nodded, impressed. “Thank you, Abrams.”
Abrams marked the creature’s dignified defeat warily.
Nastia sat beside Andy. “What are you doing here?” she asked the skinny biologist whose shaggy blond hair and thick glasses marked him as a civilian.
Andy frowned, already asking himself the same thing. “I’m here with the hendros. I’m the first human they ever met. And my friends, Nell and Geoffrey, are trapped inside.”
“I think you’re crazy,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
She laughed. “I’m an expert in underground Soviet installations. And, also … Well, my grandfather died in this city. Trofim Lysenko sent a letter to my grandmother. He told her he had met my grandfather, who was a mining engineer, inside a great city under a mountain. I think this is the place he was talking about.”
“You’re crazier than I am.”
“You’re probably right.”
“The Trofim Lysenko?” Andy asked.
“Yes. He also said that there were monsters inside the city,” Nastia said.
“Like what?”
“Well … he said that my grandfather was attacked by a ghost.”
“Oh,” Andy shrugged. “Ghosts I can handle.”
Kuzu retrieved his bow from below his seat as he examined his weapon.
Bear noticed him and brought his bow over to compare with Kuzu’s, which was a three-armed bow, made to be loaded with a fourth arm. With all his might, Bear could only half bend it. Kuzu was pleased to find that Bear’s arrows could equally work with his bow, and especially pleased when Bear offered him a dozen of the aluminum shafts.
Hender approached Kuzu and spoke to him in his own language. “Do you still think humans mean us harm?”
Kuzu replied, “They want to kill off everything else from our world.”
“They? There is no ‘they,’ Kuzu,” Hender said in a buzzing rebuke. “Remember? There is only one. And one. And one. No ‘they!’”
Kuzu let loose a long, rumbling laugh, his chest compressing like bagpipes. “That is how you win, Shenuday,” he said. “I learn from you.”
“This is not chess, Kuzu,” Hender said.
“Oh, yes, it is.”
9:11 P.M.
They arrived in the town of Gursk by helicopter, landing on a children’s football field in the pouring rain.
Three waiting cars conveyed them to a small hotel, where they had twenty minutes to deposit their luggage and freshen up. The sels occupied the room adjoining Nastia and Andy’s room. Andy overheard them arguing, in Kuzu’s language mixed with English. They had been given a room together, which was a mistake and one that the small hotel seemed unable to rectify despite Andy’s efforts.
Twenty minutes later, the sels and humans met downstairs in a private dining room, where they were joined by Kaziristani officials and a man who introduced himself as Galia Sokolof. He was the man who would be their guide into the city.
“How could your government allow terrorists to take over this facility?” Andy asked the officials tactlessly.
Galia answered, to the consternation of the Kaziristanis. “The government of Kaziristan sold the city of Pobedograd to Maxim Dragolovich for 380,000 American dollars in the year 2001 in a perfectly legal transaction. He is not a terrorist.”
“We sold salvaging license to company whose stated intent was to scrap city for steel,” snapped one of the officials, butting out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table and shooting a look at Galia.
“I won’t argue,” Galia said, closing his eyes and waving a hand.
“Well, it sounds like a bargain for a whole city,” Andy said.
“It’s not unusual,” Nastia said. “Many of these underground facilities from the Cold War have been sold for bargain basement prices by local authorities. Nobody has much use for them. In Moscow, the underground is so extensive and secret that some people even live there, in places the government does not even know about. An entire subculture of people are devoted to exploring and mapping these places,” she said. “Of course, I am not involved with such individuals.”
“Of course,” said Dima. “That would be illegal.”
The Kaziristani official continued. “There is only one way left into the mine. We have already sealed all other entrances with explosives and concrete, including all the city’s ventilation shafts on Mount Kazar.”
“Are you sure?” Andy asked.
“We are sure. And we were going to seal off the last entrance, too, before we got word that we must let your team in. We will do so, but with these conditions: You are to set timed explosives in the train tunnel heading west from the city. No one seems to know how far that tunnel goes. And you will have eight hours from the time you enter to complete your mission before we seal the entrance. Is that understood?”
The Russians looked at one another across the table and the Americans looked at one another, as well.
“All right,” Jackson said, raising his warm beer and taking a swig. “So I guess we’re done?”
“All right,” Ferrell agreed. “Thank you for the hospitality, and I guess we should all get some sleep. We’ll meet here at 0500. Sweet dreams.”
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Bear grinned at Kuzu.