I’m thinking too far ahead. First we need to launch the missiles and get ourselves home alive. As a Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer with an advanced degree in structural design, he understood how hardened bunkers and silos were built — and how they could be penetrated without destroying their contents.
He noticed a sign posted near the beach, with its back to him. Using the mine detector as a precaution, he went up the gravel toward the sign. As he got closer he saw it was made of corroded sheet metal, nailed to a weathered gray wood post. Rust from the nail heads streaked down the front of the sign. The post stood at a cockeyed angle.
He laughed out loud, almost madly, when he realized what the sign said. It was ridiculous, but it had been placed here by a government, a system that subsequent history showed was transcendentally hypocritical and outrageously absurd.
The sign, so faded and stained it was barely legible, warned labor camp escapees that the swim from here to Alaska was two thousand kilometers. It said that their labor belonged to the Soviet State. They should go back to camp and turn themselves in and they wouldn’t be punished.
He wondered what incredible idiot had ever thought to put such a notice here. He wondered if anyone it was meant for had ever, once, been by to see it. It was an emblem of personal tragedies, tens of millions of them, most of which would go forever untold.
Shaking his head in a mix of regret and disgust, he returned to his men.
Four hours after he’d first emerged by this beach in northern Siberia, the last of the eighty commandos came into sight. Nyurba knew instantly, just from the arrogant way in which the suit hood moved, and the bullish manner in which he walked through the surf, that his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Kurzin, had arrived. Kurzin immediately barked orders, muffled through his suit but clear enough.
Nyurba also issued orders. The squadron formed up into four infantry platoons, each of two squads. They moved out, crossing the beach at an angle, aiming for the nearest branch of the Alazeja’s mouth. Nyurba stayed with the lead platoon, acting as Kurzin’s deputy and monitoring for toxins from in front. Other platoons deployed to cover both flanks. Kurzin, with the headquarters platoon, brought up the rear as he had in the water.
The beach petered out. They stepped onto the Arctic tundra proper. Beneath their feet the permafrost was spongy; six feet down it became as hard as concrete, and stayed that way year-round. A mixture of compacted snow, sand, gravel, and larger stones, it was a leftover from the last ice age — excavations sometimes unearthed the remains of woolly mammoths. Permafrost’s remarkable seasonal properties dominated, even defined, the whole look and feel of the different environmental belts of Siberia, before man’s interference. In some places it reached two thousand feet deep. Elsewhere it was shallower, often overlying coal and gold seams, oil and natural gas deposits, or diamond chimneys and valuable ores. Tundra topsoil was arid and thin.
Nyurba and Kurzin set a grueling pace. It would be miles, and hours, before they advanced alongside the river far enough to get safely away from the offshore nuclear dumping ground. Then they hoped to find fresh water clean enough to wash the lethal sludge of radioactive isotopes off their outer suits and equipment bags, so they could remove the suits to bury them and their scuba gear in the appallingly polluted Alazeja’s never-visited banks. If the water isn’t clean enough, we’ll have to wash in it anyway. Otherwise we’ll all suffocate when our respirators run out of breathable air. The choice between severe radiation, and exposure to chemicals including arsenic, lead, dioxin, mercury, PCBs, and DDT, was unpleasant to have to make. But the clock was ticking in more ways than one, and not just on their air supply and the dosimeters under their suits.
They didn’t expect to need their burdensome suits and scuba gear later. If the raid’s plan came to fruition, the men not killed or severely wounded would make their escape at a much cleaner place, down the mighty Kolyma riding a commandeered high-speed boat, still acting as legitimate Russian Spetsnaz.
Chapter 20
The village of Logaskino near the Alazeja’s mouth was a ghost town. Decades-old shacks and rotting log cabins tilted crazily, half-sunk as if being swallowed by the earth. Dreary Krushchev-era cinderblock apartment buildings, each a standard five stories tall, stood crumbling and cracking on concrete stilts dug into the permafrost. Without these stilts, which Nyurba knew were common in much of Siberia, structures heated in wintertime would melt into the ground; even sewer lines had to be laid on stilts above the permafrost or they’d twist and rupture.
With mineral wealth and fishing near here tapped out or killed off years ago, the occupants had abandoned Logaskino and moved on. The commando team gave the place, with its mountainous slag heaps and forlorn piles of rusting machinery, a very wide berth. Siberia was full of ghost towns, each a monument to broken dreams and once-close, now scattered and lost communities.
They intended to use the Alazeja’s bed to navigate. For a three-day forced march, the river would lead them southeast. At the spot where it suddenly turned sharply west, the men intended to aim in the opposite direction, east. Another day’s cross-country slog should bring them to the foothills of the Oloy Range — and the densely forested taiga where the missile silos hid. Because the silo crew-change timing was tighter by twenty-four hours compared to what they’d been led to expect, they hadn’t a moment to waste.
Out of their radiation suits and dry suits and respirators, the men would, of necessity, cover more than fifty miles a day. Now they wore Army Spetsnaz camouflage fatigues and ceramic battle helmets, waterproof boots, and backpacks weighing nearly one hundred pounds; the mild weather and steady exertion ruled out parkas or thick pants. The fatigues were specially treated to be impervious to chemical weapons and also repellent to insects; the trouser bottoms were tucked into their boots.
Other equipment festooned their belts, bulged in their cargo pockets, or hung from load-bearing vests on the front of their torsos. Most carried their AN-94 Abakan assault rifles by the sling, over a shoulder. A hand at any one time gripped their Abakans, ready for instant use. The bayonets were in scabbards attached to their belts. Fighting knives — each man chose his favorite — were slipped in the top of their boots. Spetsnaz PRI pistols in holsters were strapped to their upper thighs. Across their bellies, in slots of the load-bearing vests, each man bore a dozen sixty-round box magazines for the AN-94s. Under these vests they wore state-of-the-art, nonconstricting lightweight body armor. In each squad two men had grenade launchers clipped under the barrels of their Abakans. The squadron was well supplied with shoulder-fired antitank and antiaircraft missile launchers too. Several men carried SVD sniper rifles instead of Abakans — long-barreled, futuristic, and deadly accurate out to almost three thousand yards.
Before long everyone was sweating, their lower backs were sore, and their legs burned from the steady exertion. Since it never got totally dark, they would march sixteen to eighteen hours a day, with short stops to eat from their rations and drink, or rest and drink, then pause to make camp and get four or five hours sleep before starting the next day’s trek.
As they moved away from the sea the first day, it grew warmer and warmer. Perspiration dripped off Nyurba’s chin and soaked his fatigues. Unlike its wintertime moonscape of white, of snow drifts and blinding blizzards, in summer the tundra got hot. The permafrost was covered with moss and lichen in rich shades of green. Trees were uncommon, and stunted, just now budding halfheartedly, because their shallow roots gained little nourishment. Bushes and scrub, bearing red berries, gave the only variety to an open and endless plain in which each mile seemed the same as the last. Wolves, lemmings, and Arctic foxes populated the tundra in summer, but Nyurba never caught sight of one, or their burrows or droppings or tracks.