Siberius (45 page)

Talia.

Her name came like a punch in the gut, and he broke out in nervous sweat as her face materialized out of the blackness. Images of the woman he loved stuck up in a tree. Images of a horde of vicious fanged nightmares trying to get at her. Images of her terrified, tear-streaked face.
“Nick, where are you?”
she was saying between sobs.
“WHERE ARE YOU?”

             
He struggled against the bindings, trying to free himself. “Let me go,” he cried out. “I have to help her.” Now his head was pounding.

             
Mishka stood up, interested. “Help who?” he said.

Nick looked at him for a long time and didn’t say anything.

“You spoke of a woman while you were asleep. Who is Talia, Mr. Somerset?”

Though he looked calm, Nick could hear intensity in Mishka’s voice.

“Everyone from the train has been accounted for,” said the Russian. “There is no Talia. Is she one of your operatives?”

             
Nick shook his head, ignored the Russian’s question. “How long have I been here?”

Mishka sat back down, glanced over at the two soldiers and nodded for them to go. They left without a word. “You were brought here three weeks ago.”

              Nick closed his eyes again in hopes of hiding his sudden despair. He quashed tears, swallowed down an upwelling of emotion.

Three
weeks
?

The train crashed three
weeks
ago?

He escaped the gulag three
weeks
ago?

He left Talia in the tree three weeks ago?

It all seemed impossible. Helpless, he imagined her fate and wondered if she had escaped the Smilodons. He imagined her climbing down after they had gone, following the gully to the railroad tracks and then hiking to the wrecked train. She would have deduced that he had been captured. She was smart; she would have done just that. He was sure that at that very moment, Talia was sipping tea by a fireplace in a little Bratsk inn, wondering where he was. There was no place he’d rather be than sitting right next to her.

Before that could happen, though, he’d have to escape from the hospital. He tested the bindings again, but they wouldn’t budge. It was a fantasy and he knew it, but it was keeping him from breaking down. He understood what the new reality was: he was a prisoner of the MGB, the Red Army, Stalin, and the Soviet state. The whole of the U.S.S.R had him, and it was probable Nick was going to die there.

“If it had been my decision,” said Mishka. “You’d be in front of a firing squad, Mr. Somerset, instead of lying in a hospital bed.”

Nick looked at the MGB agent again. The tactics of the Soviet secret police were not well known, but he was sure their mandate wasn’t
be kind to strangers
.

“
How do you know my name?”

“
You talk in your sleep,” continued the Russian. “Unfortunately, you didn’t say much beyond your own name. There was some mention of this ‘Talia’ and-” His voice lowered to accentuate the point. “You spoke of an Alpha.”

Nick’s stomach fluttered. Now Mishka got down into his face.

“I could make you talk,” he said with breath that smelled like a stable. “I’m quite good at it, believe me.”

             
Nick had no doubt. But he didn’t care. He wanted to cry, for the one thing, the
one person
that mattered to him most was Talia. He hoped she was okay, but how could he be sure? He couldn’t come right out and ask them. He remembered her words:

Nick, you have to make a promise to me, the most important promise that I have ever asked anyone. Take my hands and look into my eyes, and promise me that no matter what happens, you will never reveal to anyone the existence of these animals. Not to your friends, not to your family. Not anyone.

‘No matter what happens’ was now staring him in the face, and he wasn’t sure if he could pass the test. If he told them about Talia, they’d search for her, and if they found her, they found her Smilodons
.
And that would mean the end of the species and the end of him and Talia.

“
Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Mishka said.

Nick thought about. He even started to say something, then decided against it. He simply couldn’t break his promise.

              “Very well then.” Mishka stood up and paced the aisle between the beds. “We will be leaving tomorrow.”

Watching him wring the gloves in his hands, Nick thought Mishka was suppressing the need to instead wring his neck.

“The exchange is to take place at 11 o’clock.”

             
“Exchange for what?” said Nick, uninterested.

             
“There’s a village on the border with Mongolia. Altanbulag, I believe it’s called. At 11 o’clock Thursday night, you will walk through the border checkpoint there. At the same time, three Russian agents will pass you on their way home.”

             
He sorted through it, but Nick soon got it.
A prisoner exchange?
England and the U.S. must have wanted him back pretty bad if they were willing to give up three captured Soviet spies for him. If the exchange went through, it would be impossible for him to get back into the U.S.S.R.

             
“Tell me,” began Mishka, a touch of inquisitiveness in his voice. “Why were you on the train?”

             
Nick found the question strange. If they wanted to know that, why didn’t they interrogate him? He wasn’t complaining, and this Mishka was right. He
was
being treated very well.
Too
well, in fact. Strapped to a hospital bed somewhere in southern Siberia wasn’t the way to get information, that was for sure. There were ways to make a man talk.

             
His head felt as if someone was driving a railroad spike through it. His mouth was dry and salty, too, and his throat stuck to itself. If he hadn’t been unconscious for three weeks, he’d have guessed he was hung over.

And then, it suddenly came to him.

              Unconscious. For
three weeks.

             
They
had
interrogated him. Nick was suffering from a hangover all right, but not an alcoholic one. He knew of the side affects of sodium pentothal, and he figured he was now suffering from the side affects of what must have been a special Soviet mix. Administering it to someone who was in and out of consciousness, as he must have been after the wreck, would have made the so-called ‘truth serum’ very effective. But if they had injected him with it, why was stone-faced Mishka asking him such basic questions? Unless, of course, the serum hadn’t worked. What did Mishka say? ‘You talk in your sleep’? It would be ironic if Nick, under the influence of the pentothal, hadn’t offered up any information, and provided only his name, rank and serial number when he talked during normal sleep.

             
“I was on a camping trip,” Nick said.

Mishka nodded. “It’s a shame decisions were made in such haste. I think you and I could have had a nice long chat about your camping trip.” He turned and left Nick’s bedside. “I will be back in the morning, Mr. Somerset,” Mishka said without looking back. As Nick watched him stride down the corridor between beds, he realized that he had the entire wing to himself.

A prisoner exchange. He was going home. For the first time in weeks, it was the one place he didn’t want to go. Not yet, anyway. Not without Talia. He closed his eyes and wished the pounding in his head would go away. He thought about her, the Smilodons, the gulag, the plane crash. This was now the third time he had been tied down. Nick sobbed quietly, then drifted off to sleep with Talia’s picture etched into his mind.

Vladamir Mishka left the hospital a frustrated man. By trying to be affable to the American- affable for the MGB, at least- he had nevertheless failed to gather any more information from him. He was angry that he wasn’t allowed to do more, but the urgent order to affect the exchange came from General Tomkin himself. Which left Mishka no other option. He had a thousand questions, and without the American’s cooperation, forced or voluntary, he doubted he’d ever know the truth about what happened to the eastbound.

Regardless, there were even more pressing concerns than a wrecked freight train. The radar installation at Yenisey had been abandoned. They had found some blood in the barracks, but that was it. No soldiers, no bodies, nothing. Worse, outside doors were left wide open, exposing the brand-new facility and equipment to the elements for nearly a month. If it were sabotage, it was a strange way to disable the radar.

Equally puzzling was Colonel Aleksei Barkov’s trek from Yenisey to Angara labor camp. Why had he taken a convoy of trucks and, presumably, the installation’s soldiers to the camp? Why would a contingent of soldiers assigned to guard the Soviet Union’s newest radar station abandon it? Where were they now? In wrecked Jimmies at the bottom of a ravine? Were they chasing the American? If they were, why did Barkov not report it? In the end, the reasons for the colonel’s actions would never be known. He had been found frozen solid at the top of a light pole at the labor camp. Soviet high command assumed it was a suicide, the final act of a man suffering from mental illness.

Outside the hospital, Mishka stopped as a soldier opened the door of his waiting car. Before entering, he looked around the streets of downtown Novosibirsk. Six feet of snow had fallen in the past 72 hours. This city, a frozen oasis in the cold desert of Siberia, was 800 miles southwest of the site of the train crash. How much more snow had fallen up there? And would the spring thaw reveal any secrets? The Office of Transportation had opted to leave the wreck alone until then, for winter was now at full force and wouldn’t let up for another five months. It was a long time to wait before resuming an investigation, and Mishka knew there would be little interest in it by then. And already, there were many in the military’s upper echelons that knew of Aleksei Barkov’s past, and accepted the entire mess as his own misguided, single-handed attempt to capture an American spy.

He climbed into the back seat and the driver pulled away. Vladamir Mishka decided that in the end, if his MGB superiors were satisfied, he was satisfied. They had found a camera inside the pocket of frozen Barkov’s greatcoat. The American was gathering intelligence on their radar facilities. The only real question now was, who had helped him? In order to function in such an inhospitable environment as the Central Plateau, a spy would need a whole network just to survive. At least, that was the conventional wisdom.

He smiled, and contrary to Nick’s prediction, Mishka’s face did not break. They were going to get three of their operatives back in a few days, and that was reason enough to celebrate. Stalin had relaxed a little bit since the end of the war, and Mishka believed that the Soviet Union was on the cusp of greatness, a sort of ‘golden age’ of prosperity that could last well into the next millennium.

But if there was one nagging question, it was the whereabouts of this Talia. Mishka was sure she was an important piece of the puzzle and likely intrumental in Nick Somerset’s survival in the Siberian wilds. Who was she? Where was she? And what, if anything, did she have to do with an American spy?

47

CENTRAL SIBERIAN PLATEAU, AUGUST 1992

Sixty-nine year old Nick Somerset sat on the grass of a little hill. The lump in his throat would not go away, the constant butterflies fluttering in his gut would not cease, and the flashes of heat coursing through his body would not cool. When last he saw the valley below him, it was a stark, snowy land of barren trees and freezing wind. It was different now. The mid-afternoon temperature hovered around 65 degrees, and this time the breeze didn’t freeze his eyelids shut. Nick popped open a water bottle and sipped from it, his eyes transfixed on a cluster of trees at the bottom of the valley a mile away.

             
Four months ago, Nick had purchased an airline ticket that took him from New York to Moscow. From there he booked a tourist-class ticket on the eastbound line of the Baikal-Amur railway, a line of the trans Siberian railroad that hadn’t existed 44 years ago. After a week on the train he arrived in Bratsk, and began the long, three-week hike across the taiga. A hike that would take him to a place he had not allowed himself to think about for years.

             
The Soviet Union had finally collapsed in 1991. Nick had been retired from his career as a forest ranger with the National Parks Service in Colorado for four years when he watched on television the fall of the Berlin Wall. He paid close attention to the events that followed, and finally in the spring of 1992, decided that the political climate was stable enough to make the long-in-coming trek back to Siberia.

             
Back to his secret past.

             
His heart pounding in his chest, Nick stood up and slipped his backpack over his shoulders. He was in good shape for his age, and was lean, strong and energetic. Nick had long ago chosen a career that would keep him outdoors and moving. Years of backpacking the American and Canadian Rockies, of guiding adventure groups, of instructing park rangers, provided constant training for his body and mind. In a way, he felt he had always been preparing for a return to one of the last great unexplored regions of the world.