Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

The boys glanced at him nervously, still crouched as low as they could get. He could see fear in their eyes. Before he could reassure them, a new sound reached out across the tundra: a helicopter coming toward them.

Gregorovich turned and saw one of the monstrous Mi-24 models, lumbering beneath the overcast sky. A phalanx of missile pods and multibarreled cannon were displayed on pods beneath its stubby wings. Its six-bladed rotor churned overhead in a great and constant whirl.

The helicopter dropped lower and lower, slowing as it approached and then hovering. Finally, it touched down on the grass fifty yards away. Before the engines even reached idle, a side door had been thrown open and a man in a heavy overcoat had climbed out and begun hiking toward Gregorovich.

Even from this distance, Gregorovich recognized him: Dmitry Yevchenko, one of Russia’s oil billionaires.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Yevchenko had joined the scramble for wealth, transforming a dying Siberian oil field into a Eurasian empire of sorts. Like many of the new billionaires, Yevchenko had been ruthless on his way to the top. But, unlike most, he’d seen the need to change when the writing appeared on the wall.

His corporation now filled the coffers of Communist Party stalwarts. He hired their friends and family members. He ignored the graft and theft he had to deal with, considering these things another form of taxation and calculating them into his business plan as a separate line item.

But the past was hard to hide, it did not vanish just because Yevchenko wanted it to. A few months back, a reporter had begun probing for the truth, getting fairly close to some answers, before dying suddenly in a plane crash. An overzealous politician who’d asked for too much met a different fate: drowning in the Black Sea.

It wasn’t by chance that Yevchenko was called the Siberian Butcher, the bodies of his enemies lay everywhere. But the name itself was a misnomer. Yevchenko had never killed anyone. Gregorovich had always done it for him.

“Take the horses,” Gregorovich said to the boys. “I’ll meet you back in the village.”

The boys did as they were ordered, disappearing as Yevchenko approached.

“Playing with children these days, Gregorovich?”

Yevchenko had always been portly, now he looked rotund, even beneath the heavy coat. Apparently, he’d been eating well in Moscow.

“Boys from the village,” Gregorovich replied. “Their mother is appealing to me, and they have nothing better to do.”

“I see,” Yevchenko said. “And do you?”

Gregorovich pulled a gray shirt over his head. “What are you bothering me for?”

“I’ve been at an emergency meeting with members of the party,” Yevchenko explained.

“Are they trying to take control?”

“No, nothing like that. They have learned that what’s good for us is good for Russia.”

“Then why do you look as if you’ve seen a ghost?”

“Because I have.”

Yevchenko’s hands were stuffed deep into his pockets, the collar of his coat was pulled up high. It was mid-March, and he was freezing. The Siberian Butcher had gone soft. “Why don’t you come to it, my friend?” Gregorovich said to him.

“What do we fear?” Yevchenko asked rhetorically. “Either the failure to get what we desire or the loss of that which we have. Our business, our economy, our nation’s very existence, is linked primarily to one thing and one thing only: energy. Coal, oil, natural gas. We’re now the world’s largest producer of crude, outstripping the Saudis for the past two years. For a decade, we’ve been the largest producer of natural gas, and we possess the most extensive reserves of coal on the planet. These are the resources that will sustain us. We will sell them to power-hungry China, India, Europe for ever-increasing prices. It is nothing less than our life’s blood. But now we face a threat that could take it away in the blink of an eye.”

Gregorovich picked up the shotgun and began walking, more interested in finding the wounded bird than continuing this conversation. Unfortunately, Yevchenko followed him.

“Five years ago, I sent you on a mission,” Yevchenko explained. “The Japanese were developing a way to extract energy from the air around us. They were planning a fleet of purely electric cars, a national grid that did not require power plants of oil, coal, or natural gas. And they were greedily looking forward to exporting the technology to the rest of the world, gaining more wealth for themselves and slamming the door of poverty in our faces yet again.”

“The Yagishiri experiments.”

“So you remember.”

“Of course I remember,” Gregorovich snapped. “I destroyed the laboratory and killed the scientists.”

Yevchenko raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

Gregorovich was looking in the grass for the pigeon. He found feathers and a trail of blood. “What are you suggesting?”

“Much like this wounded pigeon,” Yevchenko said, “it seems you did not obliterate the threat as completely as you claimed.”