Tundra (21 page)

Lenilko’s request to the General had been unambiguous. The personnel at Yarkovsky Station had to be neutralised. Every one of them. The stakes were too high for it to be otherwise. There was no time for niceties, no time to identify who the terrorist saboteur was, to separate out the innocent from the guilty.

Lenilko hadn’t mentioned the presence of a British agent to General Tsarev, either. As with the President, if Tsarev knew he would be sending his men to kill a foreign intelligence operative, he would have refused the request. The potential ramifications would have been too serious to ignore.

High above the square, its shape made indistinct by the white sky, a helicopter clattered past. Lenilko thought of the other helicopter, six thousand miles away, that had by now been airborne for a quarter of an hour. General Tsarev had given Lenilko the details. At such short notice, it wouldn’t be possible to deploy a fully functional team with the ideal hardware, for example gunships. However, there was a small company of special operations soldiers currently engaged in training manoeuvres at a base two hundred kilometres south of Yakutsk. They had at their disposal a Mil Mi-26 heavy cargo transporter, designed for carrying almost one hundred troops. Tsarev could spare twelve men.

‘It’ll be enough,’ he said.

The helicopter had a range of almost two thousand kilometres, and a cruising speed capability of 250 kilometres per hour. The distance to Yarkovsky Station was 480 kilometres. Assuming acceptable weather conditions, the troops would reach the station in just under two hours.

Lenilko turned from the window. He thought about the Englishman, Purkiss.

It was possible that Purkiss had told him the truth. That somebody else had killed Wyatt. Lenilko didn’t think Purkiss was part of the terrorist cell; he’d sounded genuinely unaware of the disappearance of the Tupolev aircraft with its missile load. Which meant Purkiss was at the station in a different capacity, perhaps even with the same goal in mind as Lenilko and Wyatt themselves: to detect and prevent a terrorist threat.

But Lenilko thought it highly likely that Purkiss had killed Wyatt in his pursuit of the investigation. And that made what was going to happen to him marginally easier for Lenilko to come to terms with.

Assuming of course that Purkiss himself was still alive. Lenilko had heard the barked orders in the background during his brief conversation with Purkiss, listened to the muffling of the sound as the phone handset was laid down. Shortly afterwards there’d been a click as the call was terminated. Had Purkiss been shot subsequently? Lenilko suspected he’d never know.

He’d turned his own satellite handset off immediately. There was no more use for it.

He thought of Purkiss’s final question:
when and where did it crash?
Lenilko had told him the date, but they’d been interrupted before he could finish the second part of the question. The truth was that Lenilko didn’t know the location of the wreck. He’d asked Rokva, during their meeting that morning at the restaurant, but the Director had said he himself was unaware of the precise coordinates of the Tupolev, that it was considered information too classified to be shared even with the heads of the FSB directorates. Lenilko supposed Rokva was telling the truth. On the other hand, it was perfectly feasible that he was withholding the information because he didn’t trust Lenilko with it.

Deceptions within uncertainties within suspicions... It was a life Lenilko had entered voluntarily and without illusions, one he’d come to accept as his home. But he felt weariness settle on him like a shroud. He longed suddenly for simplicity, for the straightforward innocence of the world his twins still knew.

For perhaps the tenth time, Lenilko caught himself glancing at the clock on the wall. It was now six thirty-five p.m. in Yakutsk and at Yarkovsky Station. By eight, the Mi-26 transporter would have arrived. The troops would do their work, and the Tupolev and its deadly cargo would remain in the tundra, undisturbed for now.

If, of course, eight o’clock wasn’t too late. If the terrorist cell hadn’t already broken out of the station and reached the aircraft.

Anna came in then, with a preliminary draft of the report he would furnish, and Lenilko set to work with his editing pen.

M
ontrose tossed the handset back to Purkiss, who caught it one-handed.

‘Damn it.’

He’d snatched it from Purkiss and stared at it and hit the dial key, listened.

Avner began to pace, his hands thrust into his pockets. ‘So what now? What do we do?’

Purkiss said, mostly to Medievsky, ‘They’ve severed contact, which means they assume I’ve been compromised. Either killed or otherwise incapacitated. The time for subterfuge is past. They’ll be sending a force here.’

‘To rescue us,’ said Budian from the sofa. It was half a question, and her tone held little hope.

‘Maybe.’ Purkiss was thinking quickly. ‘Oleg, I need a word in private.’

‘Hey.’ Montrose stepped forward. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

Medievsky held up a hand. ‘Over there.’ He nodded at the far end of the room.

Montrose got between Medievsky and Purkiss. ‘You can’t do this. We’re all part of this now.
He
can’t be allowed to just –’

‘Back, Ryan.’ Medievsky laid a hand on the Ruger slung across his chest. Montrose clenched his teeth behind compressed lips.

In the corner, aware of the others staring across at them, Purkiss murmured close to Medievsky’s ear, ‘I can’t be sure, but there’s a strong chance Moscow will take extreme measures to deal with this.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The situation’s out of control. They have no idea who it is here at the station they’re looking for. All they know is there’s nuclear material in the area, under threat of being stolen, and a terrorist cell of unknown numbers and unknown firepower operating here. They won’t be cautious. They’ll be looking to shoot first and salvage whatever’s left afterwards.’

Medievsky stared at him, his eyes at once haunted and disbelieving.

‘Don’t think they wouldn’t dare it, Oleg. Just because this is an internationally owned facility, with foreign nationals working here. It’ll be simple to cover up. They’ll concoct some story about a freak storm, a faulty exploding generator.’

Medievsky glanced away at the others, crowded on the either side of the mess. ‘What do you suggest?’ he muttered.

‘If they’ve scrambled jets, which would be the quickest way to reach us, they could bomb us at any second. There’s no point planning for something like that because we wouldn’t have a prayer. But I don’t think they’ll do that. The US monitors flight patterns over Russia with satellite technology. Any unusual activity would alert suspicions, and if Yarkovsky Station suddenly got obliterated the Americans would put two and two together. My guess is they’ll be sending in ground troops, probably
Spetsnaz
, by helicopter. It buys us time. Not much, but perhaps an hour, two at the most.’

‘Time... to do what?’ Medievsky said, not fatalistically but with genuine curiosity.

‘To pack up and move out of here.’

‘Move out?’

‘We can’t stay. We’d be no match for a detail of
Spetsnaz
troops, however good Haglund is with a rifle or whatever. We have to get away from here, find sanctuary.’

Medievsky appeared to consider it. ‘The nearest human habitation -’

‘Is Saburov-Kennedy Station to the north. Yes.’

Medievsky shook his head, once. ‘Impossible.’

‘It’s not impossible.’

‘One hundred and forty kilometres –’

‘Of hostile, impassable terrain. Yes, I know.’ Purkiss spoke more urgently, aware of the growing hum of mutters emanating from the other end of the mess. ‘But we don’t have a lot of choice, Oleg. Either we strike out, and pool our talents and our intellectual powers, and find a way to make it there. Or we sit here and wait to be butchered like livestock.’

Medievsky’s jaw worked, his eyes flicking, calculating.

Purkiss said, ‘How many people can your truck carry?’

‘The Ural? All of us. Three up front in the cab, the rest in the back.’

‘Okay. You need to get it ready. Load it up with whatever’s essential. Your research equipment, stuff you can’t save electronically. As little in the way of hardware as you can manage. And the rifles have to come with us. All of them.’

Medievsky said, ‘There’s a problem with your plan.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The killer, the saboteur, the terrorist, will be coming with us.’

‘No, he won’t,’ said Purkiss. ‘Or she.’

Medievsky frowned.

Purkiss said: ‘Because I’m going to identify, and neutralise, whoever it is. Before we leave.’

‘How?’

On the periphery of his vision, Purkiss saw Haglund and Montrose break away from the group and come striding across the room towards them.

‘Give me access to your database,’ he whispered. ‘You said you keep logs of when each team member leaves and returns to the station. I think I know what I’m looking for.’

With only a moment’s hesitation, Medievsky muttered two sequences of letters and numerics. ‘Username and password. The file’s named
passages
.’

Purkiss hooked each of the sequences on the mental grid he used to memorise new strings of data. ‘Got it.’

Before either Haglund or Montrose could speak, Medievsky turned to them. ‘We’re moving out. Get everything you consider absolutely essential, possessions and research material and the like, and bring it to the hangar as quickly as possible. I’ll sort through it and cull anything I don’t agree with.’ He tipped his chin at Purkiss. ‘You too, Farmer.’

It was Purkiss’s cue.

As he strode towards the door, the eyes of Avner and Budian and Clement following him, he heard the argument behind him:
Heading out?
from Montrose, and Medievsky’s clipped reply, and a grunt of disbelief from Haglund.

He had access. It was of a kind he could have done with two days earlier, but there was no point in looking back.

Purkiss headed down the corridor towards the west wing, hurrying before the door of the mess opened behind him and someone noticed where he was going.

*

H
e used Medievsky’s office, finding it locked but cracking the mechanism within thirty seconds. The computer took frustratingly long to boot up. Purkiss tried to ignore the distant whine of the wind outside, and the way it suggested the scream of approaching jet engines.

The file was a spreadsheet, organised by date and time and logging each excursion over twenty-four hours by the individual team members, as well as their destinations. Purkiss took a minute to familiarise himself with the system.

He selected December of the previous year. Beginning at the start of the month, he scanned through the records, day by day. He noted the clustering on two or three days of every week, while on others there appeared to be no recorded trips outside the station.

Most of the excursions had been undertaken by five members of the team in particular: Avner, Budian, Montrose, Wyatt, and Nisselovich. Clement or Medievsky appeared on about one third of the trips. Haglund had gone out a handful of times, and there was only a single recorded instance of Keys leaving the station, presumably to attend to some kind of medical problem or injury. As Medievsky had said, the team members always went out in groups of two or more, never singly.

The last inclusion of Nisselovich’s name was on the twenty-eighth of December, the day before his disappearance. He’d gone out with Wyatt, Avner and Clement to a location with an unfamiliar code number. On the night Nisselovich disappeared, Medievsky and Montrose and Haglund and Wyatt were recorded as having left the station at ten thirty and returned at eleven fifty. For once, no destination was specified for their journey. Purkiss assumed this had been the search party looking for Nisselovich.

Purkiss glanced around Medievsky’s office, saw a laminated map pinned to one wall. It was a smaller-scale reproduction of the large map of the surrounding region he’d studied in the main laboratory. He peered at it, scanning it systematically until he found the code number of the last recorded location Nisselovich had visited. It was a spot some twenty kilometres west of the station, and meant nothing to Purkiss.

His eyes were drawn to the area near the upper left-hand corner of the map, and the site marked
Nekropolis
. By his estimation it was eighty or ninety kilometres away. Between it and Yarkovsky Station, three coded locales were marked on the map.

Purkiss memorised the codes, and turned his attention back to the spreadsheet on the screen before him. He used one of the program’s drop-down menus to sort the information from the entire spreadsheet, not only for December but for the two months since and the six months preceding, filtering the data by the team members’ names and the three location codes from the map.

There’d been thirty-one recorded field trips to the three locations over the last eight months, over half of them in the previous four. Wyatt’s name came up most often in connection with the visits, followed closely by Nisselovich and then Budian and Medievsky, despite his overall record of fewer excursions than the others. Montrose had taken the trip a handful of times, the rest not at all.

Frustration knotted Purkiss’s stomach. What did it mean, if anything? His idea had been that whoever was taking an interest in the crashed Tupolev might have suspected it was somewhere in the vicinity of the
Nekropolis
, and might therefore have visited the sites nearby in order to investigate further. But none of the names stood out as obvious suspects.

Time was running out. Perhaps, Purkiss thought, he’d have to abandon the notion of identifying the enemy before they fled the station, would have to accept that he’d be journeying with a group of people one of whom could potentially turn on the rest of them at a crucial moment.

He stared at the monitor, willing a clue to present itself, when the door opposite him opened and he tensed and Patricia Clement stepped into the room.