The Man of Bronze (12 page)

Which is how he reached Tunguska first. Even so, he didn’t have much of a head start. A few hours at most.

“Our enemies have to be close,” I said. “Wherever the bronze thigh is, Urdmann camped here because it’s ground zero. Then he coptered to the actual site. We can use the Havoc to search—no, wait, that’s a bad idea.”

“What’s the problem?” Ilya asked.

“Urdmann used to be an arms dealer,” I said. “Guns mostly but also weapons with more kick.”

“You mean surface-to-air missiles?”

I nodded. “Urdmann might have brought shoulder-mounted heat seekers to shoot down unwanted visitors. He enjoys blowing things up. Can the Havoc withstand rocket fire?”

Ilya shook his head. “I get nervous around children with peashooters.”

“So we’d best stay on solid ground.” I took a breath and scanned the surrounding area: frozen bog, trees, stone. “It shouldn’t be hard to spot Urdmann’s chopper. It can only set down on clear terrain, and I doubt if Urdmann would bother with camouflage nets.” I looked around again. “We’ll head up there,” I said, pointing to a nearby hill. “It’s high enough to give a good lookout point . . . especially if I climb a tree for a bird’s-eye view.”

“Always so energetic,” Ilya muttered. “Why not just wait till this fellow comes back to camp?”

“If he gets the bronze thigh, he might fly straight home—Urdmann’s too rich to care about losing a few tents. And he probably heard his booby-trap bombs go off. Sound carries a long way in this wilderness. If he knows someone else is nearby, flying home fast makes sense. Then we’ll have to pursue in the Havoc . . . and what if Urdmann’s copter is faster than ours?”

“It probably is,” Ilya said. “Rich men can afford all the maintenance needed to keep a chopper running well. Me, I can barely pay to keep my ship in the air.”

Now he tells me,
I thought. Aloud, I said, “So let’s avoid flying chases. We have to find Urdmann before he gets off the ground.”

With purposeful stride, I headed back to the Havoc. Ilya followed, his expression turning gloomy. “Larochka,” he said, “you’re sure this isn’t just an excuse to try your new toys?”

“What do you have against toys?”

He didn’t answer. Broody Siberian mystics shy away from frivolities . . . which is why Ilya disapproved of my lovely new snowmobiles.

We’d attached the two sleds to the Havoc’s external landing rails. The copter’s interior might have been big enough to hold them, but hauling them out would have been a nightmare. Snowmobiles may look lightweight when they’re roaring over jumps and moguls, but they’re brutishly heavy devils . . . especially the high-performance models. And I
always
choose high performance.

I’d named my new darlings
Powder
and
Puff
: both white, both beautiful, both gifted with the horsepower of a cavalry brigade. They had no make or model number—I’d sweet-talked the manufacturers into giving me experimental prototypes after I drove for their company in the Transalaskan marathon. (I won but missed setting a new record by 3.8 seconds. Tsk.) This was the first time I’d taken my sweethearts out in untamed conditions, and I was looking forward to it immensely.

“So which do you want?” I asked Ilya. “
Powder
or
Puff
?”

He looked dubiously at both machines. “What’s the difference?”

“
Powder
’s guns are 45s;
Puff
’s are 9 millimeters. Do you like imperial or metric?”

“They have guns?”

“Of course, they have guns. What’s the point of snowmobiling without guns?”

I pressed a button on
Puff
’s dash. Metal covers slid back on the snowmobile’s bonnet, and a pair of Ingram MAC-10s leapt into ready position. “You aim with trackballs near your thumbs on each handlebar.” I demonstrated; the guns responded smoothly, stabilized by an advanced gimbal system with internal gyroscopes. “Not perfect for targeting,” I admitted, “but if you’ve played enough video games, you’ll soon get the hang of it. Each gun has thirty-two rounds in the clip . . . and you can’t reload while driving, so don’t squander shots. Only bring out the guns when you need them,” I added, pressing the button again so the SMGs retracted into their housings. “Otherwise, they’ll clog with snow, and that would be bad.”

“The kind of bad where the gun barrels get plugged and explode in your face when you fire?”

“Yes, that kind of bad. Avoid it.”

Ilya shuddered. He looked like he’d rather remain with his beloved Havoc than bounce about the countryside on
Powder
or
Puff
. Like many pilots, Ilya felt no qualms riding miles aboveground in shaky aircraft, but he deeply distrusted land vehicles. Still, he wasn’t a man who’d let a woman go off on her own . . . so he slouched over to
Powder
and gazed gloomily at her controls.

“They’re easy to drive,” I said, tossing him a safety helmet. “Just like motorcycles, except they’re
supposed
to skid.”

For some reason, he didn’t find that reassuring.

We drove up the hill at a restrained pace, Ilya on
Powder,
me on
Puff
. Both of us had good reason to take it easy. Ilya knew nothing about snowmobiles; as a topnotch pilot he soon grasped the basics but wasn’t satisfied with simple competence—he wanted to be
good
. I could see him experimenting with the sled: first trying modest little maneuvers, then gradually adding more challenge as he got the feel of the controls. I, too, had to take my time . . . not to get used to driving but to learn the tricks of the terrain. Ilya’s years in Siberia let him instantly discern fallen trees beneath the snow, but I had a dozen close calls nearly smashing
Puff
’s front runners before I could distinguish harmless snowdrifts from lurking deadfalls.

Five minutes later, we topped the rise and halted to survey the land. The sun still hadn’t cleared the horizon—it moved like a sleepy old woman reluctant to get out of bed—but there was light enough to see untold miles of trees, ice, and long shadows. Ilya got out binoculars—the snowmobiles had small storage trunks which we’d filled with useful equipment—and he searched for signs of Urdmann’s copter. I crossed to the other side of the hill and did the same.

After a preliminary visual sweep, I lowered my binocs and let my ears take over from my eyes. The world was coldly silent: no leaves to rustle on the winter-stripped birches, no birds cheeping, no insects buzzing, not even a whisper of wind. Just my own heartbeat . . . the crinkle of my clothes as I shifted my weight . . .

Then a distant scream, an animal’s roar, and the
trrrrrrr
of Uzis firing. At this distance, the guns sounded like the purring of contented cats.

Ilya came charging through the bush, manfully keen to protect me though the guns were a mile away. The noise of his approach made it hard for me to pinpoint the noises of battle. I waved him to silence, but it was too late; the fight lasted only a few seconds. Still, I had a general bearing on the commotion. “There,” I said pointing northwest. “Somewhere over there.”

Ilya squinted in the indicated direction, but trees hid whatever we might see. “What do you think it was?” he whispered.

“Something attacked Urdmann’s party. Maybe a wolf or a bear.”

Ilya shook his head. “I know every noise local wildlife makes. That roar wasn’t a wolf or a bear.”

“Maybe a Siberian tiger?”

“None within a thousand kilometers. Their range is far to the east.”

“Well, whatever the animal was, it’s dead. Otherwise, Urdmann’s men would still be shooting.”

“Unless the creature got them all.”

“Such a cheerful man you are.” I patted him fondly on the arm. “Let’s go see what type of carcasses are bleeding on the snow.”

I’d been close when I suggested the roar came from a tiger . . . but it wasn’t Siberian, it was saber-toothed: a massively muscled beast with tawny fur, a huge feral head, and incisors like eight-inch bayonets. Conventional science claimed the last such cat died ten thousand years ago . . . but this one had been killed within the past ten minutes, shot dozens of times from several different directions.

Despite voluminous gunfire, the saber tooth had taken out two men before it fell. Their bodies lay nearby: one with his throat obliterated, the other with his chest raked to ribbons by lethal claws. Both men were dressed like the mercenaries in Warsaw but with thick padded parkas over their black-on-black outfits. The dead men’s parkas were in tatters—shredded by the saber tooth’s attack and spilling blood-spattered goose down into the drifting air.

Ilya barely glanced at the human corpses. His eyes were on the cat, as if he feared it might spring back to life. I felt the same apprehension—I wasn’t sure the beast was dead until I’d given it several hearty shoves with my boot. Once we’d both accepted that the tiger had shuffled off its mortal coil, Ilya let himself relax . . . slightly. “I thought these things were extinct.”

“So did I,” I replied. “I thought the same about T. rexes till I met one in the Himalayas.” I gave the saber tooth one last nudge. “Odd that Urdmann didn’t take the head as a souvenir. He’s the sort of man to hang big game on his wall.”

“Maybe he couldn’t afford the time. Urdmann must know we’re nearby—with the helicopter, the exploding tents, and the snowmobiles, we’ve made enough noise to be heard halfway to Irkutsk. So the man decided to move on quickly before we caught up with him.”

“No,” I said. “Urdmann wouldn’t let our presence cheat him of a trophy. If he ran off, he had some urgent reason to get away.”

“Like what?”

Very, very close to us, something trumpeted like an elephant. I was certain Siberia didn’t have elephants . . . but once upon a time, it had something similar.

“Quick,” I said. “Back to the snowmobiles.”

I’d just got my engine started when the mammoth crashed out of the forest.

I know modern elephants quite well. I’ve ridden domesticated ones, and I’ve—carefully—befriended a few in the wild. I’ve also examined specimens of ancient elephant ancestors: prehistoric mammoths and mastodons, some just skeletons, others with their woolly hides intact and their tusks lovingly polished by museum conservators. Well lit and well posed in well-researched displays, mammoths seem noble, dignified beasts . . . dangerous if angered but with an air of tragedy that overwhelms any imminent threat.

Such romanticized notions get hastily revised when a great hairy monster gallops at you like a hirsute city bus. The mammoth in front of me was big—bigger than anything I remembered from museum dioramas. The beast was fast too, storming across the snow at a ground-shaking sprint. Most of all, it was utterly crazed with rage: its black eyes wild, its mouth spilling froth, its voice a maddened bellow. Few creatures ever plunge to such bottomless fury; animal anger is brief—a moment’s lashing out after which the beast flees or reverts to a formalized show of ferocity that intimidates without drawing blood. Predators pouncing on prey are seldom angry at all. Their kills are dispassionate . . . or if there
is
an emotion, it’s the straightforward pleasure of catching a meal. Lions aren’t mad at gazelles, they’re just hungry.

But the mammoth hurtling down on us wasn’t after food. It wasn’t protecting its young, defending its territory, or venting any other natural instinct. One look at its frenzied expression convinced me the creature was driven by pure burning hate. It wanted to kill Ilya and me simply for the satisfaction of snuffing out lives.

Beneath me,
Puff
’s engine roared on all cylinders. I cranked the throttle and jolted away, checking over my shoulder to make sure Ilya had gotten
Powder
started too. If we could outrun the beast, there was no point in killing it . . . and surely my supercharged snowmobiles had more speed than an antique elephant in need of a currycomb. Besides, friends give me grief for the number of endangered creatures I’ve killed—though I swear I do so only when I have no other choice—and I didn’t want to gun down the sole mammoth seen by human eyes since the Pleistocene epoch. That might be sufficient grounds to get me tossed out of the Royal Society. Again.

So I chose flight over fight: accelerating away with snow spewing wetly behind me. Ilya cursed as he got half my plume in his face. He steered quickly out of the spray just as the mammoth loosed an ear-piercing blare that sounded more like a mechanical air horn than noise produced by a flesh-and-blood throat. I looked around, thinking I’d see the mammoth trumpeting in frustration because it couldn’t keep pace with
Powder
and
Puff.
Instead, the mammoth kept thundering forward, deliberately altering course a step so it could trample one of the dead bodies lying in the snow, then putting on a burst of speed to get back on track, only a stone’s throw behind Ilya’s sled.

As the beast ran, it
changed.
The crude coarse hair on its lower body withered like grass in a bonfire. Its burdensome trunk shortened, no longer low to the ground but ending at knee height, where it interfered less with galloping. Worst of all, the animal’s heavy tree stump legs grew sleek . . . brown . . . metallic . . .
bronze
.

“Dear, oh dear, oh dear,” I muttered. What had Father Emil said about Bronze’s scattered body parts? That they had arcane powers, including the ability to twist humble animals into mutants. Long, long ago, this beast might have been a genuine mammoth . . . but after millennia of living too close to the bronze thigh, the creature was a warped monstrosity—no more a mammoth than I was. How on earth could Father Emil be sure Bronze was a force for good when the detached bronze bits produced such abominations?

On the bright side, however, if this was no longer a real mammoth, the Royal Society wouldn’t mind me shooting it.

We’d first met the mammoth in a clearing beside one of the region’s small lakes. Ilya and I raced along the edge of the lake, where the ground was clear of fallen trees. I’d purposely stayed off the lake itself—its surface was frozen and dusted with snow, but I had no clue if the ice was thick enough to hold the combined weight of me and half a ton of turbopowered
Puff
. Now, however, I mentally crossed my fingers and veered hard left. One fierce bounce at the edge of the beach, and I was skittering across the lake. Ice cracked beneath the sled like the back stairs at Croft Manor, which have creaked up a storm since 1532 . . . but those stairs are perfectly solid and so was the ice, groaning in protest but holding firm.