The team, following the river, saw a band of native tribespeople on the horizon, going northeast toward a healthier section of coast. His binoculars showed some were armed with shotguns or hunting rifles.
“Yakut,” Nyurba said, “from the looks of them.” They wore furs despite the warmth, driving a herd of reindeer. The men rode sturdy horses. So did some of the women and older kids, while others sat on sledges drawn by pairs of reindeer. The creatures were big, almost the size of moose, but their antlers were different, much thinner than moose antlers, and very long. “Heading for the seaside summer grazing grounds.”
Reindeer did well on a diet of moss, lichen, and berries. The cold ocean breezes there would hold down mosquitoes and horseflies, which were starting to swarm voraciously and would only get worse to the south, and which drove the animals crazy — sometimes even killing them by sucking too much blood. The reindeer were bred for meat, which Nyurba had heard was low-fat and was said to be delicious. He knew the Yakuts liked to eat horsemeat too. They ignored Kurzin and Nyurba and their men, not a glance or a wave. Relations between native tribespeople and Russia’s military were strained. These Yakuts clung to an old way of life, but the army still drafted their sons, who’d come back two years later sick or wounded, if they came back at all.
Nyurba guessed that the reindeer herd totaled about a thousand. It took an hour for the two groups to pass, the Yakut families with their livestock and the phony Spetsnaz company.
The contrast appealed to Nyurba’s sense of cynicism. This part of Siberia was in the governmental oblast — region — called Yakutia, one of eighty-nine that made up the Russian Federation. When the USSR folded, Yakutia was renamed the Autonomous Republic of Sakha, but there was nothing autonomous about it; the new name fell from use during the strongman crackdown after the 1990s experiment with democracy failed. The regional governor, in the oblast capital of Yakutsk — a real city a thousand miles southwest — was appointed by the Kremlin. Representatives from Yakutia to Russia’s parliament in Moscow, the Federation Council upper house and the Duma lower house, were hand-picked for their loyalty to centralized control. Local legislative elections were also corrupted, rigged, the majority of the winners always compliant to Moscow’s will.
Sometimes, alas, democracy is only a phase on a pendulum that swings.
Nyurba woke up on the morning of the third day feeling stiff and drained and thirsty. The air buzzed steadily with clouds of insects. Despite his gloves, and the face net draped over his helmet, while he slept he’d been bitten. The mosquito bites itched and bled, and the horsefly bites stung annoyingly. He got up off his ground cloth — used more as protection from ticks than for comfort. He carefully reached into his pack for cream to prevent infection and reduce discomfort from the bites. His hand brushed past safed grenades and blocks of explosive.
Around him dozens of other men stirred, on their own or when their squad leaders prodded them. They made their morning preparations; an expedient field latrine had been laid out the evening before. The biggest problem was potable water, but the team had come ready for this with reverse-osmosis filtration systems in their packs. Powered by compressed air replenished by a foot pump, the modularized units slowly forced water through a molecular sieve. The water itself, obtained from rivers, rain puddles, swamps, or even permafrost melted by body heat, passed through the sieve, but everything from bacteria and viruses to dissolved chemicals was caught and held behind. Each individual system could make a few gallons a day, in smaller batches ready every few hours. A concentrated sludge, by-product of the filtration, was discarded. The filters would eventually get saturated and clogged, but they’d last long enough for the mission. Drinking water from these filters isn’t exactly what I’d call healthy, but it’s much better than what went in. And it sure beats death by dehydration.
In warm weather, special ops forces never made cooking fires, an unnecessary luxury whose smoke and odor could compromise stealth. All around Nyurba, men ate cold high-calorie breakfasts out of their Russian field-ration pouches. With medics supervising, they gulped down pills to prevent diseases common in Siberia, strains of which were vaccine-resistant: hepatitis, dysentery, cholera, malaria, and a long list of dreadful parasites. As Kurzin watched, they also swallowed tablets picked from a menu that Nyurba prepared, after he’d taken updated measurements of the environment. These German-made drugs included chelation agents to reduce heavy-metal poisoning, and other pharmaceuticals that suppressed the neurological and genetic damage caused by some components in the pollution.
Nyurba made a face as he drank — the filtered water tasted awful. It wasn’t any better when he added a packet of instant coffee, stirring it with a spoon from his mess kit. Like the others, he had to lift his face net, resembling ones that beekeepers wore, each time he ingested something. Aside from being bitten again, it was hard to keep from swallowing bugs, or inhaling them.
“I’d almost rather just go without,” he said to Kurzin as he stared at the bottom of his empty drinking cup.
“Nonsense. We all need to keep up our strength. There’s nothing like a rousing jolt of caffeine when you’ve slept in the field.” Kurzin smacked his lips pointedly, but Nyurba knew this was more from the need to try to clear the persisting, bitter aftertaste of the water than it was from any sincere delectation.
Done with his morning chores, Nyurba surveyed their encampment and its surroundings. Sentries had been posted while their teammates slept, and they were relieved by others to maintain perimeter security. Up to now this was mostly a precaution — while they’d walked all day and most of the night they’d met no one but the Yakut herdsmen, and no aircraft had come within miles. But each day brought them closer to their target, which they knew would be heavily guarded, the area around it patrolled. Squadron discipline could not be relaxed.
Their camp was on a type of terrain feature peculiar to this part of the tundra, called a pingo by native Siberians. It was a sort of blister in the permafrost, a conical hill rising a hundred feet about their surroundings. Pingos at this time of year were covered with coarse yellow sedge grass. Their slopes provided good drainage, so their footing was firm and dry. They also made excellent lookout points.
It was 3 A.M. local time, and the sun shone, dull red, above another pingo to the northeast. Aside from the whine of insects and the occasional chirp of a bird, the loudest natural sound came from the river, a steady rushing and gurgling; the commandos themselves were virtually silent. Patches of morning mist, on lower ground, drifted in the slight breeze. Rising much higher above the tundra was a layer of smoggy haze. Wispy clouds floated slowly in the sky way overhead, but it was too light and too hazy to see any stars between the clouds. Nyurba took a deep breath. The smell of damp earth combined with something else that irritated and clung to the back of his throat. There was a smell in the air like burning wood and burning rubber combined with chlorine and ammonia. His instruments had confirmed what his nose was telling him, and had also picked up traces of formaldehyde, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, and phenol — an industrial solvent — and coal-tar aerosol — yet one more toxic pollutant. The smog came from factory complexes many miles off.
The team geared up and set out on their route march once again. Now they wore pressure spreaders attached to their boots, based on a traditional local design of short and wide work ski, but plastic with upturned edges — like a pair of small snowboards-cum-water-skis. They were needed to cross the tundra, which was becoming increasingly soggy. The Alazeja’s banks often gave way to stagnant marshes, which the men had to skirt. This area on their maps was marked “Mnogo ozyor.” Many lakes.