NECROSCOPE III: THE SOURCE

BRIAN LUMLEY

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1

Simonov

The agent lay on a patch of snow in a jumble of white boulders on the eastern crest of what had once been the Perchorsk Pass in the mid-Ural’skiy Khrebet. He gazed down through nite-lite binoculars on almost two acres of curved, silvery-grey surface covering the floor of the ravine. By the light of the moon that surface might easily be mistaken for ice, but Mikhail Simonov knew that it was no glacier or frozen river; it was a mass of metal some four hundred feet long by something less than two hundred wide. Along the irregular edges of its length, where its gently curving dome met the rocky walls of the gorge, and at both ends, where the arcing metal came up flush against massive concrete barriers or dams, the stuff was ‘only’ six inches thick, but at its centre the moulded mass was all of twenty-four inches through. That was what had registered on the instruments of the American spy-satellites, anyway, and also the fact that this was the biggest man-made accumulation of lead anywhere in the world.

It was like looking down on the three-quarters-buried, lead-wrapped neck of some giant bottle, thought Mikhail Simonov. A magic bottle – except that in this case the cork had already been pulled and the genie flown, and Simonov was here to discover the nature of that very dubious fugitive. He gave a quiet snort, pushed his flight of fancy to the back of his mind, focused his eyes and concentrated his attention on the scene below.

The bottom of the ravine had been a watercourse subject to severe seasonal flooding. Up-river, above the ‘wet’ dam wall, an artificial lake was now full, its surface flat and likewise leaden – but only its surface. Channelled under the great roof of lead through unseen sluices, the water reappeared in four great shining spouts issuing from conduits in the lower wall. Spray rose up from that deluge, froze, fell or drifted back to coat the lower ravine in snow and ice, where for all the apparent volume of water only a stream now followed the ancient course. Under the shield of lead, four great turbines lay idle, bypassed by the hurtling waters bled off from the lake. They’d been at rest like that for two years now, since the day the Russians had tested their weapon for the first – and the last – time.

Despite all the USSR’s technological camouflaging countermeasures, that test, too, had been ‘seen’ by the American spy-satellites. What exactly they saw had never been made public or even hinted at outside of higher-echelon and correspondingly low-profile government departments, but it had been sufficient to jolt America’s SDI or ‘Star Wars’ concept into real being. In very small, very powerful and highly secretive defence circles throughout the Western World there had been worried discussions about APB (Accelerated Particle Beam) ‘shields’, about nuclear- or something called a ‘Magma Motor’ which might theoretically tap the energy of the small black hole believed by some scientists to lie at Earth’s core, simultaneously feeding upon and fuelling the planet; but all such discussions had been purely conjectural. Certainly nothing substantial – other than the evidence provided by the satellites – had leaked out of Russia herself; nothing, that is, in the way of normal intelligence reporting. No, for the Ural Mountains in the region of Perchorsk had been for some time far more security-sensitive than even the Baikonur Space Centre in the days of the Sputniks. And it was a sensitivity which, in the aftermath of that single, frightful test, had suddenly increased fourfold.

Simonov shivered in his white, fur-lined anorak, carefully demisted his binoculars, flattened himself more rigidly to the frozen ground between the boulders as scudding clouds parted and a nearly full moon blazed treacherously down on him. It was cold in the so-called ‘summer’ up here, but in the late autumn it was a kind of frozen hell. It was autumn now; with a bit of luck Simonov would escape suffering through another winter. No, he mentally corrected himself, that would take a lot of luck. A hell of a lot!

The scene below turned silver in the flooding moonlight, but the special lenses of Simonov’s binoculars made automatic adjustment. Now he turned those lenses on the pass proper, or what had been the pass until the Perchorsk Projekt had got underway some five years ago.

Here on the eastern side of the ravine, the pass had been eroded through the mountain’s flank by one of the sources of the Sosva River on its way down to Berezov; on the western side, it had been dynamited through a deep saddle. Falling steeply from the mountains, its road roughly paralleled the course of the Kama River for two hundred and fifty miles to Berezniki and Perm on the Kirov–Sverdlovsk rail link.

In the forty years prior to the Projekt, the pass had been used chiefly by loggers, trappers and prospectors, and for the transportation of agricultural implements and produce both ways across the range. In those days its narrow road had been literally carved and blasted from the solid rock, and so it had remained until recently: a rough and ready route through the mountains. But the Perchorsk Projekt had brought about drastic changes.

With the construction of the Zapadno rail link to Serinskaja in the east, and the extension of the railway from Ukhta to Vorkuta in the north, the high pass had long since fallen out of favour as a route through the mountains; it had only remained important to a handful of local farmers and the like, whose livelihoods hardly mattered in the greater scheme of things. They had simply been ‘relocated’. That had taken place four and a half years ago; then, with all the speed, ingenuity and muscle that a superpower can muster the pass had been reopened, widened, improved and given a two-lane system of good metalled roads. But not as a public highway, and certainly not for the use of the far-scattered ‘local’ communities. Indeed, their use of the pass had been strictly forbidden.

In all the project had taken almost three years to complete, during which time the Soviet intelligence services had leaked innocuous details of ‘a pass in the Urals which is undergoing repair and improvement’. That had been the official line, to forestall or confuse the piecing together of the true picture as seen by the USA from space. And if additional proofs of the innocence of the Perchorsk Projekt were required, it could also be seen that gas and oil pipelines had been laid in the pass between Ukhta and the Ob gasfields. What the Russians couldn’t conceal or misrepresent was the construction of dams and the movement of heavy machinery, the incredibly massive lead shield built up in layers over the erstwhile bed of a powerful ravine torrent, and perhaps most important, the gradual build-up of troop movement into the area to a permanent military presence. There had been a deal of blasting, excavation and tunnelling, too, with many thousands of tons of rock moved out by truck or simply dumped into local ravines, plus the installation of large quantities of sophisticated electrical equipment and other apparatus. Most of which had been seen from space, and all of which had intrigued and irritated the West’s intelligence and security services almost unendurably. As usual, the Soviets were making life very difficult. Whatever they were up to, they were doing it in an almost inaccessible, steep-sided ravine nine hundred feet deep, which meant that a satellite had to be almost directly overhead to get anything at all.

Conjecture in the West had gone on unabated. The alternatives were many. Perhaps the Russians were attempting to carry out a covert mining operation? It could be that they’d discovered large deposits of high-grade uranium ore in the Urals. On the other hand, maybe they were concerned with the construction of experimental nuclear installations under the very mountains themselves. Or could it be that they were building and making ready to test something quite new and radically different? As it happened – when it happened, at that time just two years ago – advocates of the third alternative were seen to have guessed correctly.

Once again Mikhail Simonov was drawn back to the present, this time by the low rumble of diesel-engined transports that echoed up hollowly from the gorge to drown out the wind’s thin keening. Just as the moon slipped back behind the clouds, so the headlight beams of a convoy of lumbering trucks cut a swath of white light in the darkness where they stabbed out from the gash of the pass in the deep ‘V’ of the western saddle. The huge, square-looking trucks were just under a mile away across the ravine and some five hundred feet below the level of Simonov’s vantage point, but still he flattened himself more yet and squirmed back a little into his nest of gaunt boulders. It was a controlled, automatic, almost instinctive reaction to possible danger, in no way a panicked retreat. Simonov had been very well trained, with no expense spared.

As the convoy came through the pass and turned its nose down the steeply descending ramp of a road cut from the face of the ravine, so a battery of spotlights burst into brilliant life, shining down from the sheer wall and lending the well-gritted road excellent illumination. Fascinated, Simonov listened to the great diesels snarling into low gear, watched the routine of a well-organized reception.

Without taking the nite-lites from his eyes, he reached into a pocket and drew out a tiny camera, snapping it into position in the lower casing of the binoculars. Then he pressed a button on the camera and continued watching. Whatever he saw would now be recorded automatically, one frame every six seconds for a total of four and a half minutes, forty-five tiny stills of near-crystal clarity. Not that he expected to see anything of any real importance: he already knew what the trucks contained and the camera shots were simply to certify that this was indeed their destination – for the satisfaction of others back in the West.

Four trucks: one of them containing all the makings of a ten-foot electrified fence, two more carrying the component parts and ammo for three twin-mounted, armour-piercing, 13mm Katushev cannons, and the fourth and last loaded with a battery of diesel-powered generators. No, what was being hauled wasn’t the question. The question was this: if the Russians were going to defend the Perchorsk Projekt, who were they defending it against?

Who … or what?

Simonov’s camera clicked away almost inaudibly; his eyes took in all that was happening below; he was aware that he mustn’t stay here more than another ten or fifteen minutes at the most, because of the high radiation count, but part of his mind was already somewhere else. It was back in London just two months short of two years ago. Shooting the arrival of the trucks had done it, set Simonov’s mind working on that other film he’d been shown by MI6 and the Americans in London. A real film, however short, and not just stills. He relaxed just a fraction. He was doing all that was expected of him, could afford a little mental meandering. And actually, once you’d seen that film, it was difficult not to keep going back to it.

The film was of something that had happened just seven weeks after the Perchorsk Incident (called ‘pi’) and had earned itself the acronym ‘pi II’ or ‘Pill’. But it had been one hell of a pill to swallow. It had come about like this.

… Early morning of a bright mid-October day along the eastern seaboard of the USA; but along the ‘obsolete’ Canadian DEW-line things have been stirring for some three hours, since a pair of spysats with overlapping windows on the Barents and Kara seas, and from Arkhangel’sk across the Urals to Igarka, flashed intruder reports down across the Pole to listeners in Canada and the USAF bases in Maine and New Hampshire. Washington has been informed, and low-key alert status has already been notified to the missile bases in Greenland and the Foxe Peninsula base on Baffin Island. Other DEW-line subscribers have been notified; Great Britain has shown mild interest and asked for updates, Denmark is typically nervous (because of Greenland), Iceland has shrugged and France has failed to acknowledge.

But now things begin to speed up a little. The original spies-in-the-sky have lost the intruder (an ‘intruder’ being any aerial object passing east to west across the Arctic Ocean) out of their windows, but at the same time it’s been picked up by DEW-line proper crossing the Arctic Circle on a somewhat irregular course but generally in the direction of Queen Elizabeth Island. What’s more, the Russians have scrambled a pair of Mig interceptors from their military airfield in Kirovsk south of Murmansk. Norway and Sweden join Denmark in an attack of the jitters. The USA is hugely curious but not yet narrow-eyed (the object is too slow to be a serious threat) but nevertheless an AWACS reconnaissance aircraft has been diverted from routine duties to a line of interception and two fighters are scrambled up from a strip near Fort Fairfield, Maine.

It is now four hours since the – UFO? – was first sighted over Novaya Zemlya, and so far it has covered a little more than nine hundred miles, having passed west of Franz Josef Land on what now seems a beeline for Ellesmere Island. Which is where the Migs draw level with it, except that doesn’t quite show the whole picture. Geographically they’ve caught up with it, but they’re at max. headroom and the UFO is two miles higher! Then … apparently they see it – and at the same time it sees them.

What happens then isn’t known for a certainty, for the Kirovsk base has ordered radio silence, but on the basis of what will be seen to happen later we can take a broad stab at it. The object descends, puts on speed, attacks! The Migs probably open fire on it in the seconds before they are reduced to so much confetti. Their debris is lost in snow and ice some six hundred miles from the Pole and a like distance short of Ellesmere …

And now the intruder really is intruding! Its speed has accelerated to around three hundred and fifty miles per hour and its course is straight as an arrow. The AWACS has reported the Migs lost from its screens, presumed down, but a hotline call from Washington to Moscow fails to produce anything but the usual ambiguities: ‘What Migs? What intruder?’

The USA is a little peeved: ‘This aircraft came out of your airspace into ours. It has no right being there. If it sticks to its present course it will be intercepted, forced to land. If it fails to comply or acts in any way hostile, there’s a chance it will be shot down, destroyed …’

And unexpectedly: ‘Good!’ from the Russians. ‘Whatever it is you have on your screens, it is nothing of ours. We renounce it utterly. Do with it as you see fit!’

Far more detailed Norwegian reports are now in from the Hammerfest listening station: the object is believed to originate from a region in the Urals near Labytnangi right on the Arctic Circle, give or take a hundred miles or so. If they had given or taken three hundred miles south, then the reports would have been more nearly correct; for the Perchorsk Pass was just that far away from the source they’d quoted. Alas, in the other direction, north of Labytnangi, lay Vorkuta, the USSR’s most northerly missile site, supplied by rail from Ukhta. And now the Americans go from mildly irritated to extremely narrow-eyed. Just what in hell are the Reds up to? Have they loosed some sort of experimental missile from Vorkuta and lost it? If so, does it have a warhead?

How many warheads?

Alert classifications go up two notches and Moscow comes under fire in some very heated hotline exchanges. Still the Soviets deny all knowledge, however nervously.

Better, clearer reports are coming in. We now have the thing on satellite, on ground radar, on AWACS. No physical, human sightings as yet but everything else. The spysats say it could be a dense flock of birds – but what sort of birds fly in excess of three hundred mph five miles high across the Arctic Circle? Collision with birds could have taken out the Migs, of course, but … The top-secret high-tech radar sites along the older DEW-line say it’s either a large airplane or … a space-platform fallen out of orbit? Also that it’s impossibly low on metal content – namely, it doesn’t have any! But intelligence won’t admit of any aircraft (not to mention space-stations) two hundred and some feet long and constructed of canvas. AWACS says that the thing is flying in a series of spurts or jets, like some vast aerial octopus. And AWACS is more or less right.

It is now one hour since the American interceptors scrambled. Flying at close to Mach II, they have crossed the Hudson Bay from the Belcher Islands to a point about two hundred miles north of Churchill. In so doing they’ve just overtaken the AWACS and left it a few minutes behind. The AWACS has told them that their target is dead ahead, and that he’s come down to 10,000 feet. And now, finally, just like the Migs before them, they spot the intruder.

That had been the narrative, the scenario that the CIA and MI6 had set for Simonov before showing him the AWACS film; and as the Briefing Officer had spoken those last three words, ‘spot the intruder’, so the film had started to roll. All very dramatic, and deservedly so …

‘Spot the intruder,’ thought Simonov now, the words bitter on his tongue so that he almost spat them out loud. By God, yes! For that was the name of the game, wasn’t it? In security, intelligence, spying: Spot the Intruder. And all sides playing it expertly, some a little better than others. Right here and now he was the intruder: Michael J. Simmons, alias Mikhail Simonov. Except he hadn’t been spotted yet.

Then, as he re-directed all of his concentration back down onto the scene in the ravine, he sensed or heard something that didn’t belong. From somewhere behind and below him had come the chink of a dislodged pebble, then lesser clatterings as the tumbling stone picked up smaller cousins on its way down the side of the mountain. The last leg of the climb had been along a steep, terraced ridge of rock, more a scramble than a real climb, and there had been plenty of loose scree and stony debris littered about. It could be that in his passing he’d left a pebble precariously balanced on some ledge, and that a strong gust had dislodged it. Simonov fancied that was all there was to it, but –

What if it was something else? He’d had this feeling recently – a sort of uneasy, half-formed suspicion – that someone, somehow, was aware of him. Someone he’d rather was not aware of him. He supposed this was a feeling spies learned to live with. Maybe it was just that everything had seemed to be going so smoothly, so that now he’d started to invent difficulties. He hoped that was all it was. But just to be sure …

Without looking back or changing his position, he unzipped his anorak, reached inside and came out with a blocky, wicked-looking short-barrelled automatic, its stubby silencer already attached. He checked the magazine, and silently eased it up again into the grip. And all of this done one-handed, with practiced ease, without pausing in the filming of the trucks in the ravine. Maybe the last couple of frames would be a bit off-centre. No big deal. Simonov was satisfied with what he’d got.

The tiny camera attached to Simonov’s nite-lites clicked one last time and gave a warning whir, signalling that the sequence was complete. He unclipped the camera and put it away. Then he wedged his binoculars securely in the base of a boulder, carefully cocked his pistol, squirmed about-face and got to his knees. Still concealed, he peered cautiously through the ‘V’ formed where the tops of two rounded boulders leaned together. Nothing back there. Nothing he could see, anyway. Steep cliffs falling away for a thousand feet, with spurs extending here and there, and thinly-drifted snow lying white and gleaming on all flat surfaces. And way down there, obscured by the night, the tree-line and gentling lower slopes. Everything motionless and monochrome in dim starshine and occasional moonlight, where only the thin wind scattered little flurries of snow from the spurs and high ledges. There were plenty of places where men could hide themselves, of course – no one knew that better than Simonov, himself an expert in concealment – but on the other hand, if he’d been followed, why would they want to come up here? Easier to wait for him below, surely? Yet still the feeling persisted that he was not alone, that feeling which had grown in him increasingly over his last two or three visits to this place.

This place, this spawning ground for utterly alien monsters …

He got back down into his original position, recovered the nite-lites and brought them to his eyes. In the ravine, where the steep road hugged the face of the defile down to the towering twin walls of the dam and the curved lead surface between them, a cavernous opening in the cliff blazed with light. The last truck turned left off the road onto a level staging area, then passed in through huge, wheeled, steel-framed lead doors. A gang of yellow-clad traffic controllers flagged the truck rumblingly inside and out of sight, then followed it into the blaze of illumination under the cliff. Other men came hurrying down the road, gathering up flashing beacons. The great doors had clanged shut by the time they reached them, but a wicketgate thick as the door of a vault had been left open, issuing a square beam of yellow light. It swallowed up the men with the traffic beacons, then was closed. The floodlights over the pass snapped out and left stark blackness in their wake. Only the dammed watercourse and the great lead shield were left to reflect the starshine.

But all of that lead down there. And these poisoned heights, a little more than mildly radioactive. And that Thing filmed by the AWACS as it did battle with the USAF jet fighters. Simonov couldn’t suppress a small shudder, which this time wasn’t due to the intense cold. He folded his nite-lites into a flat, leather-cased shape which he slipped inside his anorak with the strap still round his neck. Then for a moment longer he just lay there, his eyes staring into the enigmatic gulf below, his mind superimposing on the darkness the sequence of events he’d witnessed in London, recorded on that flickering AWACS film …

But even remembering it, he cringed away from it. Bad enough that he still occasionally saw it in his dreams! But could that … that … whatever it had been, could it really have come from here? A monstrous mutation? A gigantic, hideous warrior clone conjured in some crazed geneticist’s incredible experiment? A ‘biological’ weapon outside all of man’s previous experience and understanding? That was what he was here to find out. Or rather, it was what he was here to prove conclusively: that indeed this was where that Thing had been born – or made. That seething, pulsing, writhing –

Snow crunched softly, compacted by a stealthy footfall!

Simonov thrust himself to his feet, turning as he rose, and saw a head and staring eyes outlined briefly above the low jumble of rocks. His automatic was in his hand as he launched himself into a dive to the left of the boulders, his right arm outstretched, ready to target his weapon. A man in a pure white parka was crouched behind the boulders, with a gun in his hand which he even now lifted to point at Simonov. In the instant before Simonov came down on his side in the snow he snapped off two shots; the first one struck the man in the shoulder, snatching him upright, and the second slammed into his chest, flinging him backwards and down onto the patchy snow.

The dull phut, phut, of Simonov’s silenced weapon had caused no echoes, but he’d scarcely caught his breath when there came a hoarse, gasping grunt from close at hand and silver glinted in a sudden flood of moonlight. The snow on Simonov’s left-hand side, not eighteen inches away, erupted in a spray of frantic activity. ‘Bastard!’ a voice snarled in Russian as a massive hand reached out to grasp Simonov’s hair and an ice-axe came arcing down, its spike impaling his gun-hand through the wrist and almost nailing it to the stony ground.

The Russian had been lying in a snow-filled depression, waiting. Now he sprawled forward, trying to hurl his bulk on top of Simonov. The agent saw a dark face, a white bar of snarling teeth framed in a beard and a ruff of white fur, and drove his left elbow into it with as much force as he could muster. Teeth and bone crunched and the Russian gave a gurgling shriek, but he didn’t release his grip on Simonov’s hair. Then, cursing through blood and snot, the massive Soviet drew back his ice-axe for a second swipe.

Simonov tried to bring his gun to bear. Useless – there was no feeling in his hand, which flopped like a speared fish. The Russian hunched over him, dripped blood on him, changed his grip to Simonov’s throat and drew back his axe menacingly.

‘Karl!’ came a voice from the shadows of other boulders. ‘We want him alive!’

‘How much alive?’ Karl choked the words out, spitting blood. But in the next moment he dropped the axe and instead drove a fist hard as iron to Simonov’s forehead. The spy went out like a light, almost gladly.

A third Russian figure came out of the night, went to his knees beside Simonov’s prone form. He felt the unconscious man’s pulse, said: ‘Are you all right, Karl? If so, please see to Boris. I think this one put a couple of bullets into him!’

‘Think? Well, I was closer than you and I can assure you he did!’ Karl growled. Gingerly touching his broken face with trembling fingertips, he went to where Boris lay spread-eagled.

‘Dead?’ the man on his knees beside Simonov enquired, his voice low.

‘As a side of beef,’ Karl grunted. ‘Dead as that one should be,’ he pointed an accusing finger at Simonov. ‘He’s killed Boris, messed up my face – you should let me twist his fucking head off!’

‘Hardly original, Karl,’ the other tut-tutted. He stood up.

He was tall, this leader, but slender as a rod even in his bulky parka. His face was pale and thin-lipped, sardonic in the moonlight, but his sunken eyes were bright as dark jewels. His name was Chingiz Khuv and he was a Major – but in his specialized branch of the KGB the wearing of uniforms and the use of titles and rank were to be avoided. Anonymity increased productivity, ensured longevity. Khuv forgot who’d said that, but he agreed wholeheartedly: anonymity did both of those things. But at the same time one must make sure it did not detract from authority.

‘He’s an enemy, isn’t he?’ Karl growled.

‘Oh, yes, he’s that all right – but he’s only one and our enemies are many. I agree it would be very satisfying to squeeze his throat, and who knows but that you’ll get your chance – but not until I’ve squeezed his brain.’

‘I need attention.’ Karl held snow tenderly to his face.

‘So does he,’ Khuv nodded at Simonov. ‘And so does poor Boris.’ He went back to his hiding place in the rocks and brought out a pocket radio. Extending its aerial, he spoke into the mouthpiece, saying: ‘Zero, this is Khuv. Get the rescue chopper up here at once. We’re a kilometer up-river from the Projekt, on top of the eastern ridge. The pilot will see my torch … Over.’

‘Zero: at once, Comrade – out,’ came back the answer, tinny and with a touch of static. Khuv took out a heavy-duty torch and switched it on, stood it upright on the ground and packed snow around its base. Then he unzipped Simonov’s anorak and began to turn out his pockets. There wasn’t much: the nite-lites, spare clips for the automatic, Russian cigarettes, the slightly crumpled photograph of a slim peasant girl sitting in a field of daisies, a pencil and tiny pad of paper, half a dozen loose matches, an ‘official’ Soviet Citizen’s ID, and a curved strip of rubber half an inch thick by two inches long. Khuv stared at the block of black rubber for long moments. It had indentations that looked like –

‘Teeth marks!’ Khuv nodded.

‘Eh?’ Karl mumbled. He had come to see what Khuv was doing. He spoke through a handful of bloody snow with which he staunched the wounds to his nose and lips. ‘What? Did you say teeth marks?’

Khuv showed him the rubber. ‘It’s a makeshift gum-shield,’ he informed. ‘I’d guess he puts it in at night – to keep from grinding his teeth!’

They got down on their knees beside Simonov where Karl could work on his jaws. The unconscious man groaned and twitched a little but finally succumbed to the pressure of the Russian’s huge hands. Karl forced his mouth wide open, said: ‘There’s a pencil torch in my top pocket.’ Khuv fumbled the torch out of the other’s pocket, shone it into Simonov’s mouth. Lower left, at the back, second forward from the wisdom tooth – there it was. A capped tooth at first glance, but on closer inspection a hollow tooth containing a tiny cylinder. Part of the enamel had worn away, showing bright metal underneath.

‘Cyanide?’ Karl wondered.

‘No, they’ve got a lot better stuff than that these days,’ Khuv answered. ‘Instantaneous, totally painless. We’d better get it out before he wakes up. You never know, he might just want to be a hero!’

‘Turn his face left-side down on the ground,’ Karl grunted. He had put both Simonov’s and Boris’s guns in a huge pocket; now he took them out and used the butt of Simonov’s weapon as a wedge between his jaws. His dead comrade’s gun had a barrel that was long and slender. ‘This is not going to hurt me more than it hurts him!’ Karl grunted. ‘I think Boris would like it that I’m using his gun.’

‘What?’ Khuv almost shouted. ‘You’d shoot it out? You’ll ruin his face and the shock might kill him!’

‘I would love to shoot it out,’ Karl answered, ‘but that isn’t my intention.’ He poised the heel of his free hand over the weapon’s butt.

Khuv looked away. This part of it was for such as Karl. Khuv liked to think he stood a little above sheer animal brutality. He looked out over the rim of the ridge, gritted his own teeth in a sort of morbid empathy as he heard Karl’s hammer hand come down with a smack on the butt of the gun. And:

‘There!’ said Karl with some satisfaction. ‘Done!’ In fact he’d got two teeth, whole, the one with the cylinder and its neighbour. Now he used a grimy finger to hook them out of Simonov’s bloody mouth. ‘All done,’ Karl said again, ‘and I didn’t break the cylinder. See, the cap’s still secure on the top. He was just about to wake up, I think, but that bit of additional pain should keep him under.’

‘Well done,’ said Khuv with a small shudder. ‘Pack some snow in his mouth – but not too much!’ He inclined his head, added, ‘Here they come.’

Dim, artificial light washed up from the gorge like the pulse of a far false dawn. It brightened rapidly. With it came the slicing whup, whup, whup, of a helicopter’s rotors …

Jazz Simmons was falling, falling, falling. He’d been on top of a mountain and had somehow fallen off. It was a very high mountain and it was taking him a long time to hit the bottom. Indeed, he’d been falling for so long that the motion now seemed like floating. Floating in air, frog-shaped, free-falling like an expert parachutist waiting for the right moment to open his chute. Except Jazz had no chute: Also, he must have hit his face on something as he fell, for his mouth was full of blood.

Nausea and vomiting woke him up from nightmare to nightmarish reality. He was falling! In the next moment, remembering everything, the thought flashed through his mind:

God! They’ve tossed me into the ravine!

But he wasn’t falling, only floating. At least that part of his dream was real. And now as his brain got in gear and shock receded a little, so he felt the tight grip of his harness and the down-draft of the helicopter’s great fan overhead. He craned his neck and twisted his body, and somehow managed to look up. Way up there a chopper, its spotlights probing the depths of the ravine, but directly overhead …

Directly overhead a dead man twirled slowly on a second line, a hook through his belt, his arms and legs loosely dangling. His dead eyes were open and each time he came round they stared into Jazz’s eyes. From the splashes of crimson on his white parka Jazz supposed it was the man he’d shot.

Then –

Shock returned with a vengeance, weightlessness and vertigo and cold, blasting air and noise combining to put him down a second time. The last thing he remembered as he fell into another ravine, the night-black pit of merciful oblivion, was to wonder why his mouth was full of blood and what had happened to his teeth.

Mere moments after he’d passed out the helicopter lowered him to the flat top of the upper dam wall and yellow-jacketed men removed him and his harness complete from his hook. They took Boris Dudko down, too, a heroic son of Mother Russia. After that … their handling of Jazz Simmons wasn’t too gentle, but he neither knew nor cared.

Nor did he know that he was about to experience the dream of every intelligence boss in the Western World: he was about to be taken inside the Perchorsk Projekt.

Getting out again would be a different thing entirely …

2

Debrief

Though lengthy, the debriefing was the very gentlest affair, nothing nearly so cold and clinical as Simmons had imagined this sort of interrogation would be. Of course, in his case it had to be gentle, for he’d been close to death when his friends had smuggled him out of the USSR. That had been several weeks ago – or so they told him – and it seemed he was a bit of a mess even now.

Gentle, yes, but on occasion irritating, too. Especially the way his Debriefing Officer had insisted on calling him ‘Mike’, when he must surely have known that Simmons had only ever answered to Michael or Jazz – and in Russia, of course, to Mikhail. But that was a very small grievance compared to his freedom and the fact that he was still alive.

Of his time as a prisoner he’d remembered very little, virtually nothing. Security suspected he’d been brainwashed, told to forget, but in any case they hadn’t wasted too much time on that side of it; the important thing had been his work, what he’d achieved. Perhaps at one time the Reds had intended to keep him, maybe even try to reprogramme him as a double agent. But then they’d changed their minds, ditched him, tossed his drugged, battered body into the outlet basin under the dam. He’d been picked up five miles down-river from Perchorsk, floating on his back in calm waters but gradually drifting toward falls which must surely have killed him. If that had happened … nothing remarkable about it: a logger and spare-time prospector, one Mikhail Simonov, falls in a river, is exhausted by the cold and drowns. An accident which could happen to anyone; he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. The West could make up its own mind about the truth of it, if they ever found out about it at all.

But Simmons hadn’t drowned; ‘sympathetic’ people had been out looking for him ever since his failure to return to the logging camp; they’d found him, cared for him, given him into the hands of agents who’d got him out through an escape route tried and true. And Jazz himself remembering only the scantiest details of it, brief, blurry snatches from the few occasions when he’d been conscious. A lucky man. Indeed, a very lucky man …

His days were uncomplicated during that long period of recuperation. Uncomfortable but uncomplicated. He would wake up to slowly increasing pain, a pain which seemed to stem from his very veins as much as from any identifiable limb or organ. Immobile, his lower half encased and (he suspected) in some sort of traction, his left arm splinted and swathed and his head similarly wrapped, waking up was like moving from some darkly surreal land to an equally weird world of grey shadows and soft external movements.

Light came in through his bandages, but it was like trying to see through inches of snow or a heavily frosted window. His entire face had been very badly bruised, apparently, but the doctors had managed to save his eyes. Now he must rest them, and the rest of his body, too. Simmons had never been vain; he didn’t ask about his face. But he did wonder about it. That was only natural.

His dreams disturbed him most, those dreams he could never quite remember, except that they were deeply troubled and full of anxiety and accusation. He would worry about them and puzzle over them in the period between waking and the pain starting, but after that his only concern would be the pain. At least they’d given him a button he could press to let them know he was awake. ‘Them’: the angels of this peculiar hell on earth, his doctor and his Debriefing Officer.

They would come, shadows through the snow of his bandages; the doctor would feel his pulse (never more than that) and cluck like a worried hen; the Debriefing Officer would say: ‘Easy now, Mike, easy!’ And in would go the needle. It didn’t put him out, just took away the pain and made it easy to talk. He talked not only because the DO wanted him to and because he knew he must, but also out of sheer gratitude. That’s how bad the pain could get.

He’d been told this much: that while he was badly banged about he wasn’t beyond repair: There’d been some surgery and more to come, but the worst of it was over. The pain-killer they’d used had been highly addictive and now they had to wean him off it, but his dosage was coming down and soon he’d be on pills alone, by which time the pain wouldn’t be nearly so bad. Meanwhile the DO had to get everything he knew – every last iota of information – out of him, and he had to be sure he was getting the truth. The ‘damned Johnnie-Red’ might have inserted stuff in there that wasn’t real, ‘don’tcha know.’ With the methods they used these days they could alter a man’s memory, his entire perception of things, ‘the damned boundahs!’ Jazz hadn’t known there were people who still talked like that.

And so, to ensure they were digging out the ‘gen stuff’, they’d started right back at the beginning before Simmons had ever been recruited by the Secret Service, indeed before he’d been born …

Simonov hadn’t been such a hard name to adopt, for it was his father’s name. Back in the mid-1950s Sergei Simonov had defected to the West in Canada. He had been a trainer with a team of up-and-coming young Soviet skaters. A disciplinarian and cool head on the ice, off it he’d been quick-tempered and given to hasty and ill-considered decisions. Afterwards, in calmer mood, he’d often enough change his mind, but there are some things you can’t easily undo. Defection is one of them.

Sergei’s love affair with a Canadian ice-star fizzled out and he found himself stranded. There had been offers of work in America, however, and total freedom was still something of a heady experience. Coaching an ice-troupe in New York, he met Elizabeth Fallon, a British journalist in the USA on assignment, and they fell in love. They had a whirlwind engagement and got married; she arranged work for him in London; Michael J. Simmons had been born in Hampstead nine months to the day after the first meeting of his parents in a wild Serbian restaurant in Greenwich Village.

Seven years later on the 29th October 1962, a day or so after Khruschev had backed out of Cuba, Sergei walked into the Russian embassy and didn’t come back out. At least, not when anyone was watching. His elderly parents had been writing to him from a village just outside Moscow, where they’d been having less than a grand time of it; Sergei had been in a mood of depression over his marriage, which had been coming apart for some time; his belated double-defection was another typically hasty decision to go home and see what could be recovered from the wreckage. Elizabeth Simmons (she had always insisted on the English version of the name) said, ‘Good riddance, and I hope they send him where there’s plenty of ice!’ And it later turned out that ‘they’ did just that. In the autumn of 1964, the week before Jazz’s ninth birthday, his mother got word from the governmental department responsible that Sergei Simonov had been shot dead after killing a guard during an attempted escape from a prison labour camp near Tura on the Siberian Tunguska.

She cried a few tears, for the good times, and then got on with it. Jazz, on the other hand …

Jazz had loved his father very much. That dark, handsome man who used to speak to him alternately in two languages, who taught him to skate and ski even as a small child, and spoke so vividly of his vast homeland as to seed in him a deep-rooted and abiding interest in all things Russian – an interest which had lasted even to this day. He had spoken bitterly of the injustices of the system, too, but that had been in the main beyond Jazz’s youthful understanding. Now, however, at the age of only nine years, his father’s words had come back to him, had assumed real importance and significance in his mind, conflicting with his thirst for knowledge. The father Jazz had loved and always known would return was dead, and the Russia Sergei Simonov had loved was his murderer. From that time forward Jazz’s interest became centered not so much in the sweeping grandeur and the peoples of his father’s homeland as in its oppressions.

Jazz had attended a private school since before he was five and his special subject, requiring private tuition as well as his father’s constant guidance, was of course Russian. By the time he was twelve it was obvious that he had a linguist’s grasp of the language, which proved to be the case when he obtained almost 100 per cent marks in a specially set examination. He attended university and at seventeen held a first in Russian; by the time he was twenty he’d added to this a second in Mathematics, a subject towards which his brilliantly clear mind had always leaned. Only a year later his mother died from leukaemia; uninterested in an academic career, he took a job as an industrial interpreter/translator. After that all of his spare time was spent in winter sports, which he would pursue world-wide wherever the climate and whenever the financial situation permitted. There were several girlfriends, none of them serious affairs.

Then, holidaying in the Harz when he was twenty-three, Jazz had met a British Army Major on a Winter Warfare course. This new friend was a member of the Intelligence Corps serving in BAOR and the meeting proved to be a big turning point. A year later Jazz was in Berlin as an NCO of that same low-profile corps. But Berlin and BRIXMIS hadn’t suited him, and by then the Secret Service had its eye on him anyway and didn’t want him over-exposed; he was field agent material and should now start to learn the real tricks of the trade. His demobilization was arranged, as would be the next six years of his life, all greatly to Michael J. Simmons’s satisfaction.

From then on it had been training, and training, and more training. He trained in surveillance, close protection, escape and evasion, winter warfare, survival, weapons handling (up to marksman), demolition and unarmed combat. The only thing they couldn’t give him was experience …

Jazz had been all set to fly to Moscow as a ‘diplomatic interpreter’ when Pill came up, or ‘went down’ as the CIA had it. His original task was reassigned (it had in any case been little more than a training exercise) and he was given Operation Pill. The Service had been setting it up ever since the Soviets got the Perchorsk Projekt underway, and ‘local services’ were all well established and in full working order. Jazz was briefed from head to heels, went out to Moscow 2nd Class as Henry Parsons, an ordinary tourist, got issued with his Russian ID within an hour of de-planing. An intelligence agent already in the USSR would assume his Parsons identity (along with his passport, etc.) and use his return flight back to London. ‘One in, one out, and shake it all about!’ as Jazz’s Chief Briefing Officer had explained. ‘Like the hokey-cokey except there are no left feet, only right ones.’

Jazz hadn’t known much about the Moscow end of the network; he’d been deliberately kept in the dark on that, just in case. Ditto for the Magnitogorsk set-up, which had a line on shipments by rail destined for the Perchorsk Projekt. He hadn’t quite been able to figure out why his DO should feel peeved that he didn’t know more about these things. That was definitely the impression that came over: that even though he’d given as much detail as he could, still the DO would have liked him to have known more. But the simple fact was that all of that stuff had been on a need-to-know basis, and Jazz hadn’t needed to know.

As for ‘local services’: he’d known all about them! And during the many debriefing sessions, Jazz had told everything.

Back in the 1950s Khrushchev had broken up a politically suspect pocket of Ukrainian Jewish peasants and ‘resettled’ them from an area near Kiev to the eastern slopes and valleys of the upper Urals. Maybe he’d hoped the cold would kill them off. There they’d been allocated land and a work quota. The business: logging, and in winter trapping, all generally to be carried out under the supervision and guidance of old-guard ‘Komsomol’ officials from the West Siberian oil and natural gas fields. It wasn’t quite a forced labour camp, but in the beginning it wasn’t a hell of a lot better.

But the Ukrainian dissidents were a funny lot; they stuck it out, filled their quotas, made a going concern of it and actually settled the district. Their success, coupled with the rapid expansion of the far more important oil and natural gas industries in the east, made strict control of the Jewish settlements unwieldy, even unnecessary. Their overseers had better things to do. It could plainly be seen how a previously untamed region was now productive of timber and skins, making good use of natural assets and giving work to the people; Khrushchev’s ploy had apparently worked, making good conscientious Russian citizens from what had been an idle pack of troublesome political pariahs. He should have been so lucky in other fields! Anyway, visits from controlling officialdom fell off in direct proportion to the scheme’s success.

In fact, all the Jews had wanted was a little peace to follow their own whims and ways of life. The climate might change but they never would. There in their logging camps at the foot of the mountains they were now more or less content. At least they were not pestered and there was always more than enough left over to make the living good. Hard but good. They had all the timber they needed to build with in the summers and burn through the winters, meat aplenty, all the Vegetables they could grow for themselves, even a growing fund of roubles from forbidden trading in furs. There was a little gold in the streams, for which they prospected and panned, occasionally with some success; the hunting and fishing were good, flexible work rosters ensured a fair distribution of labour, and everyone had a share in what was available of ‘prosperity’ and the good things of life. Even the cold worked in their favour: it kept busybodies out and interference to a minimum.

Several of the settlers were of Romanian stock with strong family ties in the Old Country. Their political views were not in accord with Mother Russia’s. Nor would they ever be – not until all oppression was removed and people could work and worship in their own way, and restrictions lifted so that they might emigrate at will. They were Jews and they were Ukrainians who thought of themselves as Romanians, and given freedom of choice they might also have been Russians. But mainly they were people of the world and belonged to no one but themselves. Their children were brought up with the same beliefs and aspirations.

In short, while many of the resettled families were simple peasants of no distinct political persuasion, there were a good many in the new villages and camps who were anti-Communist and budding, even active fifth-columnists. They clung to their Romanian links and contacts, and similar groups in Romania had well-established links with the West.

Mikhail Simonov – fully documented as a city-bred hothead and troublemaker, who’d been given the choice of becoming a pioneering Komsomol, or else – had gone to just such a family, the Kirescus of Yelizinka village, for employment as a lumberjack. Only old man Kazimir Kirescu himself, and his oldest son, Yuri, knew Jazz’s real purpose there at the foot of the Urals, and they covered for him to give him as much free time as possible. He was ‘prospecting’ or ‘hunting’ or ‘fishing’ – but Kazimir and Yuri had known that in actual fact he was spying. And they’d also known what he was after, his mission: to discover the secret of the experimental military base down in the heart of the Perchorsk ravine.

‘You’re not only risking your neck, you’re wasting your time,’ the old man had told Jazz gruffly one night shortly after he took up lodgings with the Kirescus. Jazz remembered that night well; Anna Kirescu and her daughter Tassi had gone off to a women’s meeting in the village, and Yuri’s younger brother Kaspar was in bed asleep. It had been a good time for their first important talk.

‘You don’t have to go there to know what’s going on in that place,’ Kazimir had continued. ‘Yuri and I can tell you that, all right, as could most of the people in these parts if they’d a mind to.’

‘A weapon!’ his great, lumbering, giant-hearted son, Yuri, had put in, winking and nodding his massive shaggy head. ‘A weapon like no one ever saw before, or ever could imagine, to make the Soviets strong over all other people. They built it down there in the ravine, and they tested it – and it went wrong!’

Old Kazimir had grunted his agreement, spitting in the fire for good measure and for emphasis. ‘Just a little over two years ago –’ he said, gazing into the heart of the flames where they roared up the sprawling cabin’s stone chimney, ‘– but we’d known something was in the offing for weeks before that. We’d heard the machinery running, do you see? The big engines that power the thing.’

‘That’s right,’ Yuri had taken up the story again. ‘The big turbines under the dam. I remember them being installed more than four years ago, before they put that lead roof on the thing. Even then they’d restricted all hunting and fishing in the area of the old pass, but I used to go there anyway. When they built that dam – why, the fish swarmed in that artificial lake! It was worth a clout and a telling-off if you got caught there. But about the turbines: hah! I was stupid enough then to think maybe they were going to give us the electricity. We still don’t have it … but what did they need all that power for, eh?’ And he’d tapped the side of his nose.

‘Anyway,’ his father continued, ‘it’s so still on certain nights in these parts that a shout or the bark of a dog will carry for miles. So did the sound of those turbines when they first started to use them. Despite the fact that they were down in the ravine, you could hear their whining and droning right here in the village. As for the power they produced, that’s easy: they used it for all of their mining and tunnelling, for their electric drills and rock-cutting tools, their lights and their blasting devices. Oh, and for their heating and their comfort, too, no doubt, while here in Yelizinka we burned logs. But they must have taken thousands of tons of rock out of that ravine, so that God only knows – you’ll forgive me – what sort of warrens they’ve burrowed under the mountain!’

Then it had been Yuri’s turn again: ‘And that’s where they built the weapon – under the mountain! Then came the time when they tested it. My father and me, we’d been setting a few traps and were late getting home that night. I remember it clearly: it was a night much like tonight, bright and clear. Where it was darkest in the woods, we could look through the treetops and see aurora borealis shimmering like a strange pale curtain in the northern sky …

‘The humming of the turbines was the loudest it had ever been, so that the air seemed to throb with it. But it was a distant throbbing, you understand, for of course the Projekt is about ten kilometres from here. My father and me, we were somewhere in the middle, maybe four or five kilometres from the source. Anyway, that should give you some sort of idea of the raw power they were drawing from the river.’

‘At the top of Grigor’s Crest,’ Kazimir took up the thread, ‘we stopped and looked back. A wash of light, like the aurora, was playing all along the rim of the Perchorsk ravine. Now, I was one of the first men to settle this place – one of the first victims of Khrushchev’s scheme, you might say – and in all those years I’d seen nothing like this. It wasn’t nature, no, it was the machine, the weapon! Then –’ he shook his head, momentarily lost for words, ‘– what happened next was awesome!’

At this point Yuri had grown excited and once again took over. ‘The turbines had wound themselves up to a high pitch of whining,’ he said. ‘Suddenly … it seemed there was a great gasp or a sigh! A beam of light – no, a tube of light, like a great brilliant cylinder – shot up from the ravine, lit up the peaks bright as day, went bounding into the sky. But fast? – lightning is slow by comparison!

That’s how it seemed, anyway. It was a pulse of light; you didn’t actually see it, just its after-image burning on your eyeballs. And in the next moment it was gone, fired like a rocket into space. Lightning in reverse. A laser? A giant searchlight? No, nothing like that – it had been more nearly solid.’

At that Jazz had smiled, but not old Kazimir. ‘Yuri is right!’ he’d declared. ‘It was a clear night when this happened, but within the hour clouds boiled up out of nowhere and it rained warm rain. Then there blew a hot wind, like the breath of some beast, outwards from the mountains. And in the morning birds came down out of the peaks and high passes to die. Thousands of them! Animals, too! No beam of simple light, no matter how powerful, can do all that. And that’s not all, for right after they’d tested it – after the bar of light shot up into the sky – then there came that smell of burning. Of electrical burning, you know? Ozone, maybe? And after that we heard their sirens.’

‘Sirens?’ Jazz had been especially interested. ‘From the Projekt?’

‘Of course, where else?’ Kazimir had answered. ‘Their alert sirens, their alarms! There’d been an accident, a big one. Oh, we heard rumours. And during the next two or three weeks … helicopters flying in and out, ambulances on the new road, men in radiation suits decontaminating the walls of the ravine. And the word was this: blow-back! The weapon had discharged itself into the sky, all right – but it had also backfired into the cavern that housed it. It was like an incinerator; it melted rock, brought the roof down, nearly took the lid off the whole place! They took a lot of dead out of there over the next week or so, since when it hasn’t been tried again.’

‘Now?’ Yuri had had to have the last word. He shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘They run the turbines now and then, if only to keep ’em in trim; but as my father says, the weapon’s been quiet. No more testing. Maybe they learned something from that first trial, and maybe it was something they’d rather not know. Myself, I reckon they know they can’t control it. I reckon they’re finished with it. Except that doesn’t explain why they’re still there, why they haven’t dismantled everything and cleared off.’

At which Jazz had nodded, saying: ‘Well, that’s one of the things I’m here to find out. See, a lot of very important, very intelligent men in the West are worried about the Perchorsk Projekt. And the more I learn about it, the more I believe they have good reason to be …’

One night when they gave Jazz his pills, he didn’t take them. He pretended to, stuck them in a corner of his mouth, drank his water without washing them down. It was partly an act of rebellion – against what amounted to physical, even mental imprisonment, however well-intended – and partly something else. He needed time to think. That was the one thing he never seemed to have enough of: time to think. He was always either asleep or taking pills to put him to sleep, in pain or dopey from the needle that killed the pain and helped him talk to the Debriefing Officer, but never left alone to just lie there and think.

Maybe they didn’t want him to think. Which made him wonder: why didn’t they want him to think? His body might be a bit banged-up, but there didn’t seem a deal wrong with his brain.

When he was alone (after he’d heard them go out of his room and close the door) he turned his head a little on one side and spat the pills out. They left a bad taste, but nothing he couldn’t live with. If the pain came he could always ring his bell; the button was right there beside his free right hand, requiring only a touch from his index finger.

But the pain didn’t come, and neither did sleep, and at last Jazz was able to just lie there and think. Better still, in a little while his thinking grew far less fuzzy; indeed, in comparison to the mental slurry he’d recently been accustomed to, it became like crystal. And he began to ask himself all over again those questions he had been asking, but which he’d never found the time to answer. Like:

Where the hell were his friends?

He’d been out of Russia … what, two weeks now? And the only people he’d seen (or rather, the only ones who’d seen him) were a doctor, a DO, and a nurse who grunted a little but never spoke. But he did have friends in the Service. Surely they would know he was back. Why hadn’t they been to see him? Was he that banged-up? Did he look that bad?

‘I don’t feel that bad,’ Jazz whispered to himself.

He moved his right arm, clenched his right fist. The hole through his wrist had healed and new skin had knitted over the punctures front and back. It was pure luck that the point of the ice-axe had slipped between the bones and managed to miss the arteries. The hand was a little stiff and out of practice, that was all. There was some pain, but nothing he couldn’t survive. Come to think of it, there wasn’t much of pain in anything right now. But of course he couldn’t move everything – could he? Jazz decided he’d better not try.

What about sight? Would his room be in light or darkness? The ‘snow’ of his bandages was thick and dark. They said they’d saved his sight. From what? Had his eyes been hanging out or something? ‘Saved his sight’ could mean anything. That he’d be able to see, for instance – but how well?

Suddenly, for the first time since he’d been there, he knew real panic. They might have kept something back until he’d been fully debriefed, so as not to discourage or distract him: where there’s life there’s hope, sort of thing. How about that? What if they hadn’t told him everything?

Jazz got a grip of himself, gave a derisive snort. Huh! Told him everything? Christ, they hadn’t told him anything! He was the one who’d been doing all the –

Talking …

His new clarity of mind was leading him in a frightening new direction, and it was all downhill going; the more he considered the possibilities, the faster he went and the more frightening it got; bits of a puzzle he hadn’t known existed until now were starting to fall into place. And the picture they made was one of a clown, a puppet, with his name on it. Michael J. Simmons: dupe!

He bent his right elbow, lifted his hand to his bandaged head, began picking at the bandages where they covered his eyes. But carefully; he only needed a peephole, nothing more than that. A narrow gap between strips of bandage. He wanted to see without being seen.

In a little while he believed he’d succeeded. It was hard to tell with any degree of certainty. The snow was still there, but if he narrowed his eyes to slits the light (there wasn’t a lot of it) became more nearly natural. It was like when he was a child: he’d used to lie in bed with his eyes slitted, simulating the slow, regular breathing of sleep. His mother would come in and put the light on, stand there looking at him, and she was never quite sure if he was asleep or awake. But now, with these bandages swathing his face, it should be so much easier.

He straightened his arm again, found his button and pressed it. Now his nurse would know he was still awake, but the principle would be the same: when she came in he’d be able to look at her and she wouldn’t know it. He hoped!

In a little while soft, unhurried footsteps sounded. Jazz pressed his head back into his pillows, waited in the near-darkness of his room. Around him the air-conditioning hummed faintly; the air had a mildly antiseptic smell; his sheets felt somehow coarse to those parts of his body which were exposed. And he thought:

It doesn’t feel like a room in a hospital. Hospitals feel artificial, unreal, at best. But this one feels like fake artificial …

Then the door opened and the light came on.

Jazz squinted straight up; only the fact that his eyes were shuttered saved them from dazzle from the naked light-bulb where it hung on its flex from the ceiling. As for that ceiling itself: that was of dark grey stone, pocked from blasting and patterned with folded, tightly-packed strata. Jazz’s hospital room was a man-made cave, or at least it was part of one!

Too stunned to move, he lay there frozen as his nurse came to the side of his bed. Then, fighting the anger and revulsion he felt welling inside, he slowly turned his head to look at her. She scarcely glanced at him, merely reached down to feel his pulse. She was short and fat, wore her hair straight and short-cropped, like a medieval knight, also wore the uniform and starched cap of a nurse. But not a British nurse. A Soviet nurse. And all of Jazz’s worst fears were realized.

He felt her fingers on his wrist, at once snatched his hand away. She gasped, took a pace to the rear, and the heel of one of her square black shoes came down hard on something that crunched. She stood still, glanced at the floor, looked hard at Jazz and frowned. Her green eyes narrowed where they tried to penetrate the slit in his bandages. Maybe she saw the steely glint of his grey eyes in there; anyway, she gasped a second time and her hand flew to her mouth.

Then she went down on her knees, gathered up fragments of tablet, came upright with fury written right across her pudgy face. She glared at Jazz, turned on her heel and headed for the door. He let her get there, then called out: ‘Comrade?’

She paused instinctively, whirled and thrust out her jaw, glowered her hatred of the spy, then rushed out and slammed the door behind her. She had left the light on in her hurry to go and report all of this.

I have about two minutes before things start to warm up, Jazz thought. I suppose I’d better put them to some use.

He looked to his left, his alleged ‘dead’ side, and saw a deep saucer of pale yellow fluid standing on a bedside table. Inclining his head and stretching his neck as far as he could in that direction, he inhaled deeply, smelled a strong antiseptic odour. How easy it was to create a hospital atmosphere: rubber tiles on the floor to deaden footfalls, a saucer of TCP for the too-clean smell, and a constant flow of sterile, temperate air. Simple as that.

The walls of Jazz’s room (his cell?) were of corrugated metal sheets bolted to vertical steel stanchions. There’d be laminated padding, too, Jazz supposed, to keep the room soundproofed and isolated. Or it could be the case that in fact this entire area was a hospital, built to serve the staff of the Projekt. After the Perchorsk Incident, they’d probably decided it was advisable. A hospital area would be handy for periodic check-ups and would probably be situated alongside a decontamination facility – assuming, that is, that there was still an atomic pile down here. Back in the West they were pretty sure that there had been one. Anyway, Jazz had already spotted an excess-radiation warning device on the wall; at present it was green, with just a tinge of pink showing in the aperture.

The uneven rock ceiling was maybe nine feet high on average; it looked very hard stuff and there were no fractures, not even small ones, that Jazz could see. Still (and even taking into account the massive steel stanchions) he felt just a touch of claustrophobia, something of the enormous weight of a mountain pressing down on him. For by now there was no doubt at all in his mind but that that was where he was: under the Urals.

Running footsteps sounded and the door was thrown open. Jazz lifted his head as far as restrictions would allow and stared at the people who came panting into the room. Two men, and behind them the fat nurse. Hot on their heels came a third man; his white smock and the hypodermic in his hand gave him away at once: Jazz’s favourite pulse-feeler, the clucking doctor. Well, and maybe now he’d have something worth clucking about.

‘Mike, my boy!’ the man in front, dressed in casual civilian clothes, motioned the others back. He approached the bed alone, said: ‘And what’s all this that Nursie’s been telling us? What? You didn’t take your pills? Why ever not? Wouldn’t they go down?’ The ingratiating voice was that of Jazz’s DO.

Jazz nodded stiffly. ‘That’s right, “old boy”,’ he answered harshly, ‘they sort of stuck in my craw.’ He lifted his right hand and tugged at his fake bandages, tore them from his eyes. He stared at the four where they stood frozen as if they were insects trapped in amber.

After a moment the doctor muttered something in Russian, took an impatient pace forward and gave his needle a brief squirt. The second man into the room, also dressed casually, caught his arm and dragged him to a halt. ‘No,’ Chingiz Khuv told the doctor curtly, in Russian. ‘Can’t the two of you see that he knows? Since he’s awake, aware and with all his wits about him, let’s keep him that way. Anyway, I want to talk to him. He’s all mine now.’

‘No,’ Jazz told him, staring straight at him. ‘I’m all mine – now! If you want to speak to me you’d better let him dope me up. It’s the only way I’m going to do any talking.’

Khuv smiled, stepped right up to the bed and looked down on Jazz. ‘Oh, you’ve already talked enough, Mr Simmons,’ he said, without a trace of malice. ‘Quite enough, I assure you. Anyway, I don’t intend to ask you anything. I intend to tell you a few things, and maybe show you a few things. And that’s all.’

‘Oh?’ said Jazz.

‘Oh, yes, really. In fact I’m going to tell you the things you most want to know: all about the Perchorsk Projekt. What we were attempting to do here, and what we actually did. Would you like that?’

‘Very much,’ said Jazz. ‘And what is it you’re going to show me? The place where you make your bloody monsters?’

Khuv’s eyes narrowed, but then he smiled again. And he nodded. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Except there’s one thing you should know right from the start: we don’t make them.’

‘Oh, but you do!’ Jazz also nodded. ‘That’s one thing we’re pretty sure about. This is the source. This is where it was born – or spawned.’

Khuv’s expression didn’t change. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘But that’s only to be expected, for you only know half the story – so far. It came from here, yes, but it wasn’t born here. No, it was born in a different world entirely.’ He sat down on Jazz’s bed, stared at him intently. ‘It strikes me you’re a survivor, Mr Simmons.’

Jazz couldn’t resist a snort of derision. ‘Am I going to survive this one?’

‘Maybe you will at that.’ Khuv’s smile was very genuine now, as if in anticipation of something quite delicious.

‘First we must get you up on your feet again and show you round the place, and then –’

Jazz moved his head enquiringly.

‘And then … then we’ll see just what sort of a survivor you really are.’