The Last Oracle (Sigma Force 5)

“Yes, General-Major.”

“Then do not disappoint me again.”

“No, General-Major.”

She clicked off the line. She may have been harsher than she intended, but she’d already heard disturbing news in the past hour.

A maintenance worker from the neighboring town of Ozyorsk had discovered one of the Warren’s decommissioned trucks, one once used to transport waste from a uranium enrichment plant near the shore of Lake Karachay. Inside, the worker had found a fake badge with Dr. Archibald Polk’s face.

It answered the mystery of the professor’s escape.

He’d had help.

And it didn’t take much contemplation to figure out who had assisted in his escape. It had to be Dr. Trent McBride. What game were the Americans playing? With Yuri’s continuing silence, she could only imagine that he and the girl had been captured. In fact, the escape might have been staged to accomplish just that end.

If so, Savina had to respect McBride for such an effort.

Like her, he understood necessity.

In retrospect, she should have never engaged in a partnership with the United States. But she’d had little choice at the time. In the turmoil following the breakup of the Soviet Union, her project had lost all funding. It was only through such a union that her work was allowed to continue.

The United States supplied the interim cash, seeking new ways to expand their ability to gather intelligence. Her project offered such a promise. But her project also offered one thing more. She supplied the American government with plausible deniability, similar to the secret CIA-financed torture camps in Europe. In this new world, the lines of acceptable conduct—whether military or scientific—had become blurred.

Not on our soil was the new American credo.

And she’d been happy at the time to exploit that.

Still, the loss of Yuri and the child was not insurmountable. It only required accelerating her timetable. Her operation—titled Saturn—was supposed to follow Nicolas’s actions in Chernobyl by a week. Now the two would commence on the same day.

Tomorrow.

The two operations—Uranus and Saturn—were named after two strategic offenses during World War II, when Soviet forces defeated the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in human history. Close to two million were killed in that battle, including vast numbers of civilian casualties. Still, the Germans’ defeat was considered the turning point of the war.

A glorious victory for the Motherland.

And as in the past, Operation Uranus and Saturn would once again free Russia and change the course of world history.

And likewise, not without casualties.

Necessity was a cruel master.

Savina reached the far wall of the cavern. A tunnel opened, framed by thick lead blast doors, miniature versions of the same doors that closed the main tunnel into Chelyabinsk 88.

Just inside the mouth of the tunnel rested a train and bumper stops. The electrified tracks carried a single train back and forth between the Warren and the heart of Operation Saturn, on the far side of Lake Karachay. The old tunnel went under the toxic lake, allowing for fast transport between the two sites without risk of exposure to the lake’s hot radiological soup of strontium 90 and cesium 137.

The train was already waiting for her.

Savina climbed into one of the lead-lined cabs. There were only two enclosed cars, one on either end of the train. The remaining four sections were open ore cars for hauling supplies, mining gear, and rocks.

As the train sidled out with a clack of wheels and sizzle of electricity, the blast doors sealed behind her. The tunnel went dark. She stared up as the train began the five-minute journey. As it accelerated, Savina pictured the weight of water overhead, insulated by a quarter mile of rock.

The region above was the heart of the Soviet Union’s uranium and plutonium production. Mostly now defunct, the facility had once had seven active plutonium production reactors and three plutonium separation plants. It was all sloppily run. Since 1948, the production facilities had leaked five times more radiation than Chernobyl and all of the world’s atmospheric nuclear tests combined.

And half that radiation was still stored in Lake Karachay.

The radiation level on the lake’s shore measured six hundred roentgens per hour. Sufficient to deliver a lethal dose in one hour.

Savina remembered where the maintenance worker from Ozyorsk had found Dr. Archibald Polk’s abandoned truck.

On the shore of that lake.

She shook her head. There had been no need to hunt down Dr. Polk. He’d been dead already.

Lights appeared ahead.

It glowed with the hope for a brighter future.

The heart of Operation Saturn.

3:15 P.M.

“They’re planning on doing what?” Monk said, a bit too loudly as he walked alongside the riverbank.

He and the kids had been walking alongside the churning river for the past hour. It was not the same waterway as where they’d encountered the bear. Monk had forded that turbulent stream by using a series of boulders and followed it down to this larger river, buried in a dense fir forest. Monk had studied the topographic map several times. It seemed they were following along the watershed that drained the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains. On the western side, the Urals shed their rainwater and snowmelt into the Caspian Sea; on this side, it all flowed into a region of massive rivers and hundreds of lakes, all of which eventually emptied into the Arctic Ocean.

What the Russians were planning…

Shock had rung in his voice.

Konstantin winced at his sharpness.

“I’m sorry,” Monk said more quietly, knowing voices traveled far in the mountains. He had been the one to warn the children to speak only in whispers. He obeyed his own rule now, though his voice was still strained. “Even with the hole in my memory, I know what they’re planning is madness.”

“They will succeed,” Konstantin countered matter-of-factly. “It is not difficult. A simple strategy. We”—he waved to Pyotr and Kiska, then in a general motion behind him, indicating the other children like him at the underground compound—“have run scenarios and models, judged probable outcomes, analyzed statistical global data, studied environmental impact, and extrapolated end results. It is far from madness.”

Monk listened to the boy. He sounded more like a computer than a teenager. Then again, Monk remembered the cold steel behind Konstantin’s ear. They all had them. Even Marta bore a thumb-size block of surgical steel buried in the fur behind her ear. During the past hour, Konstantin had also used the time to demonstrate his skill at calculations. The mental exercise had seemed to calm him. Kiska showed him how she could identify a bird’s song and mimic it in perfect pitch.