It was snowing slightly and already getting dark. But what a wonderful brute — thirty pounds if it was an ounce, maybe even forty! He couldn’t leave it sulking in the pool, had to get it out of there and into fast water. But careful now. Getting dark. Beyond the deep pool he would have to clamber back into the river again. Racing water, slimy rocks. Careful. For now just keep pressure on him. Let him know he couldn’t stay there in the pool. Out now, come on, out. Yes, he was out! Coming over the lip into white water — a gorgeous brute, silver, tail flipping, very strong, not long in from the sea.
Lazenby let him take line, keeping on pressure, slithering down the bank. He entered the water carefully, feeling his way between the rocks, the current dizzying. The salmon had commenced a long dash upriver and the reel was whirring. Good, let him run, just a little pressure. He steadied himself against a rock, got both feet planted firmly, and started playing him, real pressure, the rod bending.
The fish zigged and zagged, trying to get free of the line. It leapt again, miles off, but he saw it through the spray, the line coming up with it, dripping. He pulled in line fast as it turned, and played it all the way back, too. And by God, he was a fast fellow, and lively, and educated, trying to snap the line on the rocks. Keep him under pressure, tire him.
Minute by minute he tired the salmon. For forty minutes.
He was as exhausted as the fish when he guided him gently into the shallows at last. He had the net there under water, the long rod crooked under his arm so he could get both hands to it He was so tired he nearly fell over the fish in the water, trembling as he awaited the final leap when the fish felt the mesh.
But there was no leap, just some threshing in the net and then he had hauled it out and up on to the bank and he collapsed himself. He pulled the Priest out of his pocket and despatched the salmon and sat a while longer, panting. His gear was some way back, and when he reached it the light was too bad for him to see the gauge on his weighing hook. He got the fish, and his gear, back up to the car and drove to the hotel, and went right to the fish room through the garage block at the rear.
There, to his slight disappointment, it went nineteen pounds.
‘But yon’s a beauty, Professor — fresh in! This here you can call a fash!’
‘Yes, not a bad chap, is he?’ Lazenby said modestly, and waited to see his prize sacked and labelled for the smoker’s at Aberdeen before going through to clean up and change. The passage led into the reception lounge and there, to his astonishment, he saw waiting for him Philpott and a grave fellow in a three-piece suit.
‘Hello, Prof. I don’t think you’ve met Mr Hendricks — Mr W. Murray Hendricks. He’s got something very interesting for you.’
9
Up in Lazenby’s room, after dinner, Hendricks opened his briefcase.
Twenty hours after the first satellite, another one had overflown the site, its cameras specially switched on. The first Bird had captured its images from 300 miles away at three o’clock in the morning; the second was directly overhead at eleven the same night. The fires were out, a gale was blowing, and masked figures in protective clothing were working under floodlights. They were working on the structure with the blown-off roof.
Military biology of some kind had been going on in the place, that was certain; despite the wind, a number of elements had been identified still escaping into the air. What had produced the explosion it was not possible to say, but the nature of the work in the establishment had certainly been very varied.
Lazenby was shown some shadowy prints: a jumble of wrecked equipment photographed through the hole in the dome. Transparent overlays with sketched-in lines helped to clarify the mess, but Lazenby still couldn’t make it out.
A ducting system, Hendricks explained. It had been identified as part of a layout internationally designated ‘P4’.
‘Ah, P4. Not my field,’ Lazenby said. ‘That’s rather a high security label, the highest actually. It’s a system for the containment of tricky bacteria — E-coli, I believe, normally. They use it to replicate cells, for gene-splicing.’
‘Yes, E-coli is what they were using, and it was for gene-splicing,’ Hendricks said. ‘This is the remains of a genetics lab — quite a large one.’
‘Is it, now? What would they want with that?’
Hendricks probed in his briefcase again and showed him the photographs of the individuals in line. There were over a dozen prints now, some sections having been detached and enlarged. These images were also muzzy but again overlays had been provided to outline the limbs.
Lazenby examined them. ‘Apes,’ he concluded.
‘No, they aren’t apes. Not now.’
Lazenby peered again. ‘Improved apes?’
‘Yes, these can talk and read. This one can, anyway. He is reading a list and calling out names, and the others are answering him. It’s clearer on the movie.’
Lazenby looked at him over his glasses for some moments.
‘You’re not supposing this is Rogachev’s work?’ he said.
‘Well, it’s his place. There’s no doubt about that. I can show you.’
He showed him a map. It was a section of a large-scale sheet of the Kolyma region — some thousands of miles, he said, from where they had previously been looking. Ringed on it was the spidery symbol for a weather station, and close by the weather station a lake. Blackpool had been handwritten over the lake.
He explained this, too. The name came from a book, one of a collection gathering dust in the department’s library; the cross-referencing system, though improved, had not caught it.
Lazenby looked at the sheet of paper handed to him.
ON FOOT THROUGH SIBERIA
Captain Willoughby Devereaux
London 1862 [Extract, p.194]
The water, enclosed in a basin of black basalt, has from a distance the appearance of ink, but is perfectly clear and in fact the purest in the area. It is known locally as Tcherny Vodi (dark waters) but I preferred the homelier appellation of Blackpool; and at Blackpool I camped for some days before returning the thirty miles to Zelyony Mys (Green Cape).
‘Here’s Green Cape,’ Hendricks said, unfolding a further section of map. ‘It’s a port, on the Kolyma river, exactly thirty miles from the lake. That’s how Rogachev’s cigarettes came out.’
Lazenby looked from the map back to the prints.
‘You think this is what he’s trying to get out?’ he said.
‘No. I don’t. What would be so secret about it?’
‘This isn’t startling enough for you?’
‘Yes, it’s startling. But more startling is why they’ve kept quiet about it for so many years. Also where it’s going on. Would you experiment with apes in a place like this?’
‘Well, the Arctic isn’t their environment,’ Lazenby said.
‘Right. It isn’t. And this isn’t just the Arctic. It’s the most secret place they have — the remotest, the least accessible. There’s hardly any information on it. On this place itself there’s none. We knew nothing about it. Now that’s startling. It’s disturbing. We’re pretty well up on Russian science. People change jobs, news gets around. But nobody has changed jobs here. That is, if you get a job here you evidently don’t leave. And work has been going on in it for a long, long time, we can see that. Which raises another long-time question. What do you know of a fellow called Zhelikov?’