The dark mass on the horizon, the mountains Chapel had been watching for hours, started to gain a little definition. Dead ahead stood a long massif of rock that lifted above the sand dunes like the curtain wall of a castle. As they drew closer still, Chapel could see the rocky barrier was broken in some places, cracked open by ravines and even winding box canyons. One of those canyons seemed darker than the others.
“Perimeter will be there,” Nadia said, consulting the GPS on the tablet. “Those shadows — I hope it is not overgrown with brush that we will have to clear away.”
A few seconds later Chapel said, “I don’t think that will be a problem.” The shadows were too regular, too blocky in shape. That wasn’t brush. It was a collection of structures definitely built by human hands. Nature didn’t build that straight or that repetitively.
Bogdan stepped on the brake, and the truck rocked to a stop a few hundred meters from the entrance to the canyon. From there it was quite easy to see that the defile was full of buildings. It looked like there was a whole town sheltered between the walls of the canyon.
For a while the three of them stared at the canyon in hushed silence, trying to make out features in the shadowy place. Moonlight lit up the sand and rocks on either side of them, but the canyon hid its secrets well, casting a pall of darkness over the sleeping buildings.
“You weren’t expecting this,” Chapel said.
“No,” Nadia said. She unlatched her door and jumped down into the sand.
“Wait,” Chapel called, and jumped down after her. No lights showed in the town, but that didn’t mean it was uninhabited — or for that matter, that it wasn’t surrounded by a minefield. He hurried after Nadia as she staggered forward, across the desert floor, toward the dark interior of the canyon. Toward the town there. As Chapel raced after her he saw a sign hung in front of the closest building. He struggled to make out the words, then to transliterate the Cyrillic characters. “Aralsk-30,” he whispered.
Nadia turned and faced him. Her hair blew across her eyes in the breeze that came down the canyon. She hugged herself, perhaps against the night’s chill, perhaps to contain some of her excitement. “A secret city,” she said. “Of course!”
Chapel knew something about the secret cities.
They had been built by Stalin, mostly back before the Space Race. Back before reconnaissance satellites, when the Soviets still believed they could keep big secrets hidden inside their borders. People had lived and worked in the secret cities, just like normal cities, but they were also secret installations — weapons laboratories, factories constructing biological weapons or atomic bombs, even farms where experimental livestock could be raised. They were constructed by slave labor, dissidents and criminals and sometimes just people who belonged to ethnic groups the politburo didn’t like. When the building was complete, the slaves would be shipped off to the next project and the city’s actual residents would move in — scientists and workers who could be trusted to tell no one, not even their families, where they lived. The cities were built far from civilization, in places where people weren’t likely to stumble on them, and they were never, ever mentioned in official documents. They didn’t appear on any maps, and they didn’t even get their own names — they just took the name of the nearest town and a number to describe how far away they were, so they had names like Arzamas-16 or Chelyabinsk-65—or Aralsk-30.
The most advanced science that the Soviets did happened in the secret cities. So did some of their worst atrocities. The NSA had compiled a list of all the cities and what was known about them, but it was believed it was incomplete — some of them had been hidden so carefully that they still hadn’t been found, decades after spy satellites had mapped every inch of the former Soviet Union. Some of the secret cities hid in deep forests or on the tops of mountains. Some were believed to be housed in enormous underground bunkers, though that might just be an urban legend.
Whatever reason the Soviets had had for building Aralsk-30, they’d hidden it very well. The walls of the box canyon would shield it from view from all but one side, the direction from which they’d approached it, and the shadows of the canyon walls might hide it even from eyes in the sky.
“Have you ever heard of this place?” Chapel asked.
Nadia shook her head. She seemed too overwhelmed to speak. Years of her life to find this place and it had still surprised her. Without a glance backward she raced down the main street of the town, deep into the canyon.
“Wait!” Chapel called after her, but she was already gone.
In the dark of night she was likely to get lost, or trip over something and break a leg. Chapel called back to Bogdan, telling him to turn on the truck’s lights. The sudden blast of illumination blinded Chapel for a second, so he had to put one hand over his eyes and look away. He hadn’t realized just how dark it was out here and how much his eyes had adapted.
He jogged back to the truck and climbed up the ladder on the driver’s side, so he could look in the window and tell Bogdan to start moving forward, slowly, into the town.
Jesus, Chapel thought. Secret cities tended to be guarded with fences and watchtowers and sentry patrols. What if Nadia ran in there and stumbled right into an ambush?
The truck rumbled forward, off the sand and onto the first paved road it had touched since they passed Baikonur. The lights swept across a row of squat, square buildings with broken windows and boarded-up doors. There was a searchlight on the roof of the cab. Chapel scrambled up on top of the truck so he could move its beam around manually. He shone it through empty, open windows and saw nothing but broken furniture and old dust.
The noise and the light seemed perverse in that dead place. It made him jumpy and anxious. He felt like at any second people should come pouring out of these old buildings, maybe the descendants of the old inhabitants, devolved into savagery after being left behind for so long. Or maybe they had all left because the place was contaminated, maybe some old experiment had gone wrong and flooded this place with radioactivity or plague germs—
He shook his head. He was letting his imagination spin out of control. This was just an old ghost town, nothing to be afraid of. He shone his light down into a guard post at the corner of two intersecting streets. Nobody there. The booth was empty.
“Nadia!” he called out. There was no answer.
Aralsk-30 wasn’t very large. There were only the two main streets, which met at the center of the town. The squat buildings near the canyon entrance must be dormitories, he decided, living quarters for the people who had worked here. Past the intersection lay big buildings that must be factories, judging by the forest of smokestacks that stuck up from their rooftops. Maybe there had been other things here once, shops and bars and places for the workers to blow off steam, but now it all just looked like decaying concrete and broken glass. Sand was everywhere, in a thin film over the streets, in great drifts up against the lee sides of the buildings. It had blown in through any open doorway and clogged some of the buildings until it poured out through second-story windows. Falling rocks from the canyon walls had crushed in some of the smaller structures. At least there was no sign of barbed wire or mass graves, and if there were mines, the truck hadn’t rolled over any of them so far.
Bogdan drove up to the intersection and stopped. “Which way?” he called out, over the noise of the truck’s engine.
“Just park it here,” Chapel shouted back. He tilted the searchlight back to illuminate the intersection. It was just wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, but a little space in its exact center had been cleared for a bronze statue that stood twenty feet high. The light washed over the face of Vladimir Lenin, then down his chest to show that he held an oversize hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other.