They slid and climbed and scrambled their way down into the valley. Demidov checked her radio. “Wolf to Eagle. You still reading me?”
A crackle of static on her comms, but then she heard the pilot’s voice. “Eagle here. Still tracking.”
“You might need to make a pick up in the valley later.”
“At this point, why not?” the pilot said. Just as she’d expected. He might have called in their diversion from the mission already, but until someone came to shut them down, Eagle wasn’t going to abandon Wolf. Not a chance.
They started across the hard-packed snow toward the hole. Even from a distance, the darkness of it yawned, as if it had a gravity all its own, drawing them in.
“I’m going to be moaning along with Vasnev in a moment,” Yelagin said. “I don’t know I’ve ever been this cold.” Her teeth chattered.
“Kristina, you’re Spetsnaz,” Demidov said curtly. But they both knew she meant something else. It wasn’t about their training, their elite status, their special operations. It was about being a woman in a field dominated by testosterone-fueled men who waved their guns around like they were showing off their cocks. They had to be tougher, she and Yelagin did. Especially Demidov, the woman running the show.
“I’ll bear your disappointment,” Yelagin said. “My nipples are going to snap off like icicles.”
That got a laugh, breaking the tension, and suddenly Demidov felt grateful to her. Their closeness had started to fray a little, but now they were a team again.
“Captain,” Vasnev said cautiously, lagging behind.
“I swear I will fucking shoot you,” Budanov reminded him.
Then Corporal Zhukov echoed Vasnev. “Captain.”
His voice gave her pause and made her turn. Vasnev had knelt in the snow. Zhukov stood over him, face as gray as the Siberian sky.
Vasnev looked up. “We’ve been moving parallel to some markings I couldn’t make out, like someone dragged branches through here to obscure animal tracks.”
“You didn’t mention the tracks themselves,” Zhukov said.
“Bear,” Vasnev said. “And I saw some wolf tracks, too, up on the ridge. Same weird markings there, brushing the snow. But something happened right here, on this spot.”
Demidov didn’t like the hesitation in his voice. It sounded a bit like fear. Vasnev might have been a malingerer and a moaner, but he’d never been a coward.
“What ‘something?’”
Zhukov answered for him. “The bear tracks stop. Whatever made those brush marks, it picked up the bear. Carried it off.”
Vasnev stood, pointed at the hole. “It goes that way.”
Demidov stood at the edge of the hole, a few feet back, not trusting the rim to hold her up. Sinkholes had appeared in many places in the area but she didn’t think any of those on record had ever been this big. The hole seemed carved down into the permafrost and the rock and earth below. No telling how deep it went without doing a sounding. They had nothing to gauge the depth except two long coils of rope they’d found in the science team’s base. That seemed unlikely to help them.
“Do you not just want to shout down, see if you get a response?” Kristina Yelagin said, standing at her shoulder.
Budanov snickered. “Yes, let’s do that.”
Yelagin shot him a death stare, but he ignored her, wrapped up in his own efforts. He had taken out the comm unit attached to his belt and begun searching through channels for any kind of beacon or signal. On each frequency, he’d broadcast the same message. “Research Unit one-one-three, please come in. Research Unit one-one-three, do you read me?” A few seconds, then again. With no answer, he’d move on.
They were getting nowhere. Vasnev had stopped whinging, but the cold had gotten down into Demidov’s bones. Come here, Anna, I’ll warm you, Vasily would have said. And she’d have let him. As she had so many times before. Where are you, my darling? The loving part of her felt lost, but Demidov had spent a lifetime training to charge forward when anyone else would flee.
Zhukov glanced around, nervous and on guard. He’d been more unsettled than any of them, and that concerned Demidov. If the Mountain worried, they all should.
“I don’t hear a thing but the wind.” Zhukov shifted, boots crunching snow. “Don’t see a thing. Not so much as a bird.”
“Enough,” Demidov said. “Private Yelagin, get those ropes out. There were a few pitons with them.”
“We don’t have enough climbing gear for all of us,” Yelagin said. “Shall I radio Eagle, have them bring more equipment from the base?”
Demidov wanted to tell her to follow orders. Do what she was fucking told. The woman made sense, but the problem was that it would delay their descent, and a delay would be costly if Eagle had really radioed the situation back to command.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Meanwhile, get those ropes out and—“
“Captain,” Zhukov said.
“Fuck me, what the hell is that?” Vasnev whispered.
Demidov narrowed her eyes. Her balaclava had slipped a bit and she tugged it away from her eyes. The others had begun swearing, lifting their weapons, taking aim. Demidov blinked to clear her vision, thinking somehow in spite of her team’s reactions she must just be seeing something. Spots in her eyes. The things moving across the valley toward them couldn’t possibly be real.
But they were moving nearer, coming into focus, and in moments she could no longer doubt. They weren’t spots in her eyes or her imagination. They moved like some strange combination of tumbleweed and sea anemone, their flesh such a pale nothing hue that they blended almost too well against the snowy ground. Had they only stopped and kept still, they’d have been almost invisible at a distance. But they weren’t stopping.
“Holy shit,” someone said. Demidov thought she recognized her own voice. Maybe she’d said it.
They weren’t stopping at all. They came from all directions, perhaps ten or twelve in all, rolling or slithering or some combination thereof, and they did not come without burden. They seemed nothing but a mass of tendrils, but each of them dragged something else behind them – something more familiar. Animals, some struggling and some limp, some broken, some bleeding. A musk deer, some squirrels, a leopard. One of the things had wrapped itself around a wolf. The beast could not extricate itself but it continued to fight, clawing, attempting to escape. It snarled and howled, as if trapped between the sister urges to fight and to scream in sorrow.
“Captain,” Zhukov said, his voice gone cold. That was when the Mountain turned most dangerous. The deader his voice, the more she knew he must be feeling. The Mountain didn’t like to be made to feel. “Give me an order please, Captain.”
In the distance, Demidov saw something big and brown in the midst of a squalling twist of those white tendrils. Three or four of the things had surrounded a moose – a fucking moose – and were dragging it back toward the hole. A knot of dread twisted in her gut as it finally hit Demidov. Stupid, she thought. So goddamn stupid. Should have seen it instantly, should have understood. If they could drag down a moose, a trio of curious, unarmed scientists would be no problem at all.
Feeling sick and jittery and wanting to roar out her fear for her mate, Demidov clicked off the safety on her Kalashnikov AK-12.
“Weapons free. Don’t let these things get anywhere near us.”