The Last Oracle (Sigma Force 5)

“Very good.”

Savina followed the man under the arch of scaffolding. The vehicle-mounted drill rig was already being driven out of the way. Men worked around the tight space: in the rigging, on the floor, and amid the equipment. She looked to the upper wall of the cavern. A two-meter-wide shaft sloped upward at a steep angle, lined by an idle conveyor belt, dripping with water from the hoses. Lights glowed at the far end of the shaft, almost half a kilometer away. Tiny shadows moved within the glow, motes in the brightness. The demolition team was doing one final inspection.

Savina appreciated their thoroughness.

Over fifty bore holes—as thick around as her thumb and a meter deep—had been drilled into the end of the shaft and packed with ANFO supercharges. The bores needled through a fault that lay beneath Lake Karachay. Wired to detonate in sequence, the charges would crack a gaping hole in the bottom of the poisonous lake, dumping its slurry of radioactive strontium and cesium straight down the shaft.

“Over here, General-Major.” The technician waved her away from the center of the cavern.

Set into the floor was a three-meter-wide circular hatch. She had obtained it from the Sevmorput Naval Shipyard in Murmansk. It was the latest missile silo door, composed of six flakes of half-meter-thick steel in the shape of an iris.

She stepped off of it and over to where a diagnostic laptop rested on a worktable. The technician had the engineering schematics open on the screen. Other men had stopped to watch.

He spoke into a radio, listened, then nodded to Savina. “We’re set in the control room. Ten seconds until firing.”

Savina crossed her arms. The control room was back in Chelyabinsk 88, in one of the old abandoned Soviet-era apartment buildings. Technicians manned the small room of monitors and computers. Once the site was evacuated, thirty different cameras would provide coverage of the area.

The engineer counted down the seconds. “Three…two…one…zero.”

A snap of an electrical circuit sounded from the silo door, and its steel petals opened like the iris on a camera. As they peeled wider, a low roar of water echoed up to her. She stepped to the iris and stared over the edge. A vertical shaft dropped two hundred meters through the rock.

The engineer joined her and pointed a heavy flashlight down the throat of the mine shaft. Far below, she spotted a silvery rush, reflecting the light. An underground river. There were several such waterways draining the Urals, massive aquifers flowing down from the highlands. On the far side of the mountains, the waters flooded into the Caspian Sea, but here the aquifers drained through a series of rivers, specifically the Techa and Ob, all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

Savina turned and looked up the sloped shaft that led to the fault line under Lake Karachay. It contained over one hundred times more strontium and cesium than was released in Chernobyl. And Chernobyl’s toxic plume had circled the globe. She stared back down the vertical shaft to the flowing aquifer.

It had been an ongoing threat. Geologists were well aware of the faults that underlay Lake Karachay. It was only a matter of time until an earthquake burst one of those fissures and dumped all that radioactivity into the drainage basin of the Ural Mountains. Studies done by geophysicists from Norway estimated that such a catastrophe would sterilize a good portion of the Arctic Ocean, one of the planet’s last great wildernesses. From there, its poisonous pall would sweep halfway around the planet, concentrating its worst effects across northern Europe. Conservative estimates put the death toll from primary radiation and secondary cancers at one hundred million. And that could easily double or triple from the resulting economic and environmental damage.

She stared from the sloped shaft above to the river below. Such a disaster had always been a constant but barely acknowledged threat. All nature needed was a little shove.

Then the world would burn.

Her breathing grew harder at the enormity of what was about to unfold. Out of that radiological fire, a new Russian Empire would rise, like a phoenix out of the ashes of their own nuclear legacy.

She would let nothing stop her.

She had spent her life and soul here in the Warren, all to serve the Motherland. And after so many sacrifices, so much bloodshed, what was left of Russia? Over the past decades, Savina had watched the Motherland devolve into this corrupt, pitiful shadow of itself. Here at the end of her life, she would offer it hope again. That would be her legacy, brought about by her own son.

She would burn away the corruption and create a new world.

“General-Major? Is there anything more?”

She shook her head and controlled her words. “I’ve seen enough.”

The engineer nodded and crossed to a steel lever beside his workstation. It looked like a giant handbrake on a car. He pinched the release on the lever, cranked the bar up, and shouldered it in the opposite direction. The iris swept closed at her toes and sealed the shaft. There was still work to be done. Miners, who had stopped to see the silo doors open, went back to work, crossing over the top of the iris, as they had for the past two years since dropping that first shaft.

Operation Saturn was ready to commence.

Savina turned away and headed toward the waiting train. She also had final preparations back at Chelyabinsk 88 to complete. She checked her watch. Nicolas should be heading to the ceremony at Chernobyl in another hour. Despite his rash actions of late, he did have everything under control. With or without him, systems were in place and would run their course. All was in order. Nothing could stop it from happening.

As she stepped into the train car and the doors sealed, she glanced back to the heart of Operation Saturn. She tried to picture the millions that would die, but they were an abstraction, a number too large to contemplate beyond cold statistics. She faced forward as the train lurched into motion and headed back toward the Warren at Chelyabinsk 88. The teachers and researchers should be readying for their own evacuation. Computers were being wiped, records incinerated. The children were also being prepared—but not for evacuation. They would be taking one last train ride themselves.

All of them, except the ten who would be with her.

Savina pictured the faces of the other children. Sixty-four, including the infants. It was a number too small to view as only an abstraction. She knew a majority of the children by name. As the train trundled toward the Warren in the dark, Savina leaned a hand against the wall. Her knees trembled, and a wave of emotion swept through her. She did not fight it. It welled up out of her chest and choked her throat. A few hot tears streamed down her cheeks. In this private moment, she let her emotions run their course. She recognized her humanity and allowed herself a moment to grieve.