Death Cry, page 8
One room toward the lower end of the complex was jammed to the ceiling with an old gas-burning generator. Once upon a time, this had provided all the heat and power that the little underground facility required, but when Kane searched around the room with his microlight he found that there was no fuel left to run the generator. They would have to continue working in darkness, relying on the electrochemical polymer lenses and whatever lights they carried with them.
The long corridor included several breaks where a small flight of three or four stairs led down, and Kane had the feeling that the whole complex was built at a subtle incline. The larger rooms of the canteen and sleeping quarters were at the lowest part of the small bunker complex; hence they were deeper into the mountain.
Grant examined the rooms flaring off at the opposite end of the corridor, reasoning that higher ground was the most likely location for the entry door. He found the door, but it had been bricked up as though someone inside was scared of someone or something getting through. He showed it to Kane and they concluded that it was too impractical to remove the bricks and that they would continue to use the large ventilation shaft to enter and exit the redoubt.
“Besides which,” Grant added, “this is about as damn secure as we could make it short of planting mines.” The bricked-up door itself was wide and the room had an especially high ceiling, just big enough to house a single army transport truck.
The large ventilation shaft that they had used to enter the bunker ran parallel to and slightly above the main corridor. Kane realized that the floor of the ventilation shaft had been built at an angle, allowing a steady flow of air into the complex but guiding rainwater away. It was a simple and elegant solution to the problem of continuously providing air to an underground facility, requiring no moving parts or any great complexity of construction.
The remainder of the cramped, low-ceilinged rooms appeared to have been dedicated to research in various forms. There were several testing areas, including a small rifle range and a modest armory, but nothing to suggest the mysterious Death Cry weapon.
“Nothing of value,” Kane concluded when they finished checking the bunks for a third time. “No hidden doors, no false walls, no trapdoors.”
“You think it’s a bust?” Grant rumbled sourly.
Kane shook his head, absently running a dirt-smeared hand through his hair. “Baptiste has had three hours with the files,” he said. “She should have stumbled on something by now.”
When they returned to the office with the Cheka-KGB shield on the wall, they found Brigid sitting at the desk amid stacks of card-covered files. She had tied Grant’s high-power xenon beam to the light fixture in the center of the ceiling where its incandescence served to illuminate the whole of the small office. There was no computer in the room, Kane realized when he reentered, and he hadn’t seen one in the whole complex, which implied that the Soviets there were used to doing things the old-fashioned way. Having been party to more than one computer-hacking project in his time, Kane could readily appreciate the higher level of security protocol that would be observed by this seemingly laborious way of storing information. If you wanted a copy of a file, you sat down and made one.
“Sit down, make yourselves at home,” Brigid said, briefly peering at them over the rims of her reading glasses.
Grant and Kane both looked at the two free chairs that faced the desk, now piled high with brown envelopes and cardboard folders, before turning back to Brigid. “Can we touch anything?” Grant asked tentatively.
Brigid looked up again from the paperwork that she had buried her nose in. “No, don’t touch any of the files. There’s an order to this stuff, and I need to keep it just so.”
Kane looked down at the faded Persian rug, a mandala pattern, blue-and-gold thread interweaved with specks of green and red, and lowered himself down to sit cross-legged. Grant picked up his Copperhead close-assault subgun and took up a post by the door, leaning on the frame and examining the Copperhead’s breech to make sure it was free of debris.
“So,” Kane began after a moment, “what have you found so far?”
Brigid didn’t bother looking up from her reading, and Kane saw the familiar hammer and sickle along with another representation of the Cheka shield stamped across the front of document she was immersed in. “You first,” she said.
“Skeletons and dust,” Kane told her. “That about sums it up. And the original exit’s been sealed with bricks. Short of using explosives, we couldn’t shift them if we wanted to.”
“Handy,” Brigid offered with a sarcastic edge to her voice. She put the file she was reading to one side, flattening out the page she was on with the heel of her hand before addressing Kane and Grant. “There’s a lot of information here alluding to the Chernobog Project, but nothing very concrete about what they were actually developing.”
“No Death Cry?” Grant asked.
“Not even a whimper.” Brigid shrugged. “That doesn’t mean it’s not here, though. The Chekists were obsessive bureaucrats. Sure, they’d make you parade around your village naked in subzero temperatures if they thought you were a counterrevolutionary, but they made sure that they had a form filled in and filed in triplicate regarding the whole incident, including your time of death.”
“That must have been very reassuring,” Kane grunted.
“My point is,” Brigid continued, “there’s a lot of information here about how many staples and rubber-tipped pencils the Cheka required for this facility. And I mean a lot. I’m wading through that as quickly as I can, but without a computer version of these files I’ve got to do it manually and that means at least skimming every file here.”
“Sucks to speak Russian.” Kane grinned, rising from the floor. “We’ll leave you to it.”
“Not so fast,” Brigid called as Kane stepped toward the door. She quickly wrote down two words on a piece of paper and copied it a second time, handing one sheet to Grant and the other to Kane. “These are the Russian words for ‘weapon’ and the word I translated as ‘Death Cry.’ You big, strong men of action are going to grab a pile of folders each and start scanning every single document for these words. If you see them mentioned in a file, I want you to put it to one side—” she gestured to an empty space on the floor by the wall “—where I can then go through them more fully to see what you’ve found.”
Kane made a telephone sign with his outstretched thumb and pinkie finger and smiled. “I need to check in with Lakesh first, but I’m sure Grant will be only too pleased to brush up on his Russian. Isn’t that right, tovarishch?”
Grant growled something under his breath as Kane stepped past him through the open door. Looking behind him as he left the little office, Kane saw that, despite his protest, Grant was already taking instructions from Brigid about which stack of files to start work on.
Ambling along the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, Kane called the Cerberus ops center over the Commtact but received no response. “Kane to Cerberus,” he called again, running a finger lightly across the Commtact to make sure that the pintels were connected.
After an excruciatingly long ten seconds, Donald Bry’s voice came through Kane’s skull. “…just barely,” it began before fading out.
Kane immediately realized that there was a problem with reception there in the underground redoubt. He began to jog along the corridor, repeating his hail and waiting a few seconds for any sign of response. He reached the room with the large ventilation shaft that had given the field team access to the complex.
“Grant, Baptiste, can you hear me?” he asked as he clambered into the shaft.
“…ceiving you,” Grant’s voice replied over the Commtact.
“Communications problem,” Kane explained. “I repeat—communications problem,” he said slowly while he made his way along the slippery air shaft. “I’m heading to the surface to speak to Cerberus.”
Grant’s voice came over the Commtact a moment later, and Kane noticed that the rich bass of his friend’s voice sounded distorted, as though it was being electronically filtered. “You’re breaking up a little, but nothing we can’t cope with. Take it easy, over.”
“You, too,” Kane said, jogging back to stand beneath the overhead, circular gap where they had cut through the grate. They had left a rappel cord hanging from the gap, anchored above with a climber’s pick pushed into the soil. Kane tested its strength before weaving the thin rope through his hands. “I’m heading to the surface now, Cerberus. Are you receiving me?”
Donald Bry’s voice came back to Kane once more, still broken and patchy.
Kane scrambled up the rope the fifteen feet to the surface.
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Cerberus redoubt. Lakesh tried to look reassuring as Donald Bry, along with several others in the ops room, turned to him, concerned expressions on their faces. They had all heard Kane’s first message, breaking apart as it came over the speakers almost six minutes ago, and the level of anxiety was growing as further messages continued to be of erratic quality.
“Do you think they’re okay?” Domi piped up from where she was sitting beside a stripped-down computer hard drive that Brewster Philboyd kept assuring Lakesh he was working at.
Lakesh held up a placating hand as a number of other voices began asking the same thing. “Now, now, everyone,” he said loudly, “let’s not worry ourselves over nothing.” He pointed to a computer screen that displayed a map of Georgia, along with a delayed-image satellite feed showing the Caucasus Mountains. Three green blips regularly blinked on the map and on a separate overlay on the delayed feed, showing precisely where the members of the field team were. The subcutaneous transponders could also provide the Cerberus nerve center with a constant stream of information about an individual’s health and well-being, including heart rate, blood pressure and brain-wave activity.
“Something in the mountain range or within the bunker that they are exploring is interfering with the communications, nothing more,” Lakesh firmly assured everyone, his voice calm. “Let’s everyone just sit down and wait for Kane to contact us properly.”
Kane’s familiar voice came over the communications array again. “Kane to Cerberus, do you read? Over.”
“Loud and clear,” Donald Bry said, relief in his voice. “What’s the situation, Kane?”
“Everything normal,” Kane explained after a short delay for the satellite to relay the message halfway around the world. “Looks like the bunker’s screwing with our comms but I’m hearing you fine out here, so I think we’re just going to have to maintain an involuntary radio silence for a little while and I’ll check in every two hours.”
Lakesh gave Bry the thumbs-up and Bry relayed the message to Kane. “What’s the current state of play?” Bry added.
There was another pause while the signal caught up with Kane and relayed his response. “We’ve found an old Cheka base but no weapons as yet. Baptiste is sifting through the evidence we’ve found here—a load of old typed files, not computer. She seems to think this could be the place. Over.”
“The location is certainly correct,” Lakesh stated clearly in his mellifluous voice. “I suppose it’s a question of whether any weapon was ever built.” He looked at the computer screen showing the signals from the transponders and idly brought up Kane’s biometric feed as he spoke to his friend. “Over,” he added after a moment, realizing that he had left the communication—and Kane—hanging. The Cerberus personnel did not always adhere to the old protocol of radio communications, but in a situation such as this one, which involved extended satellite delays to the feed, it became necessary simply because of the impossibility of reacting to the other party’s statements in real time.
“Fingers crossed, Lakesh,” Kane replied cheerily. “I’m going back down below. One of us will speak to you again in a couple of hours. I’m still receiving bits of your messages while I’m down there so, if anything urgent comes up, keep trying until one of us responds. Might not be able to make a lot of sense of what you’re saying, but at least we’ll know you’re saying it. Over and out.”
“Good hunting,” Bry responded automatically. “Over and out.”
WHEN KANE RETURNED to the office with the Cheka shield on the wall, he found Brigid poring studiously over the pages of a thick report while Grant sat at her elbow, watching.
Grant looked up at Kane’s approach and a wide smile crossed his features. “Brigid thinks she’s found something,” he told Kane.
“That’s great,” he replied. “Something in this rabbit warren is messing with our communications. We’re going to have to go topside every time we need to contact Cerberus.
“Good news, however, is very welcome,” Kane added after a moment, giving Brigid the floor.
Brigid peered at him, showing him the report. Kane could see the now familiar Cheka shield printed in black on the top of the title page. The rest seemed to be a page of writing, but on closer inspection it contained a lot of letters that Kane was not familiar with; unsurprisingly, it was written in Russian.
“This here,” Brigid explained, “purports to be the case notes of one Dr. Anastas Djugashvili on research into something that is referred to simply as Device One at this stage. These date from 1922, which means that the KGB would likely have taken over Project Chernobog that same year. I guess from the stamp on the front and from the old-style shield on the wall here, the Chernobog people were pretty attached to the old Cheka setup, though, almost like time stood still for them.”
Grant and Kane both looked at each other and shook their heads. “Let’s not have any more Operation Chronos–type stuff,” Grant grumbled, referring to the prenukecaust U.S. government investigation of time travel, something that had plagued the Outlanders before now.
“I don’t think it’s anything like that,” Brigid reassured them, “more that these people got very involved in their research. Of course, that was probably the sensible thing to do with these brutal government spooks watching your every move.”
She paused and flicked through a few pages of the report. It seemed to be endless reams of tightly spaced type with only the occasional line break or underlined section to break the monotony. “According to Djugashvili,” Brigid continued, “Device One was a proposed weapon to use in combat against ‘supraterrestrial elements considered disruptive to the Soviet way of life.’”
“Space aliens,” Kane translated, and Brigid nodded.
“I’ve read only a little way into this report,” Brigid explained, “and it’s not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?” Grant asked Brigid, and Kane encouraged her to continue.
“The same thing you were,” Brigid told him. “The same thing we all were, even Lakesh. A nuclear device. Or a gene bomb. Or, I dunno, some kind of big—” She stopped, trying to think of the right words.
“A death ray?” Kane suggested.
“Yeah,” Brigid agreed. “But this isn’t about that. Dr. Djugashvili and his team weren’t concerned so much with what the weapon was, only how they would store it.”
“What if the weapon was developed somewhere else?” Kane pondered.
“That’s possible,” Brigid agreed, but she didn’t sound convinced. “But that’s not really what I’m getting at. Let me find the part I was reading a moment ago,” she told them, flicking through pages of the report before stopping about a quarter of the way through the file and running her finger over the words she found there. “It says, translating quickly here, that the problem with the supraterrestrial threat is that these creatures have displayed increased mental capacities. To create Device One in any established locale would potentially be to give the item directly over to their top thinkers…top brains. I don’t quite know what this means here. What Djugashvili seems to be saying is that there’s no location within Russia that would be safe to hide such a weapon.”
“So we’ve come a long way to pick up a report?” Kane asked.
“No,” Brigid insisted, “there’s more to it than that. This is an examination of where you hide something from someone with ESP. How do you hide a weapon from someone who can read your mind?”
Chapter 8
It was early morning in Montana, just after dawn, and Mohandas Lakesh Singh sat by himself in the cafeteria, idly tapping a pen against the notebook before him, upon which was written a single problem in his own hand. Eight or nine other people were scattered about the cafeteria, sitting in groups or alone, readying themselves for the day or just coming off a long night shift. Lakesh himself had been up the whole night, presiding over operations in the ops center and absorbing the reports that were coming in from Georgia.
Kane’s third report, received almost an hour ago, continued to address the dilemma of how to hide an item from a mind reader. The top sheet of Lakesh’s pad showed a simple diagram of two stick figures along with a box. One stick man stood beside the box, upon which was written “Device One.” Though drawn simply, the other stick man was clearly shorter and had a bulbous head with large, beadlike eyes—Lakesh had automatically drawn the classic “gray” alien design to represent a mind reader. Several arrows had been sketched and crossed through on the illustration, and a number of notes had been written along the side in Lakesh’s precise hand, several of which had also been scored through. Across the top of the single sheet of paper Lakesh had written the following: “Q: How do you hide Device One from mind reader?”
He continued to tap the top of his pen against the notepad as he reread the question and took a sip of the cooling mug of tea that sat before him beside a plate of toast and fruit preserves.
