Final impact

He turned and smiled at his small band. Kicji, ageless, bitter, looking like a totem carved from the root of a poisoned tree. Vendulka, her beauty marred by a line of scar tissue that ran from just below her left ear and across her face, before tapering off at the corner of her mouth. Sergo the Cossack, who stood six and a half feet tall and seemed to measure a couple of ax handles across the shoulders. And the smooth, dangerous Chechen jihadi Ahmed Khan, emissary of his Caliph, who laid claim to all the lands Ivanov had so recently fought to preserve from the likes of nutters just like them.

“So we won’t be kicking in the door,” Ivanov said.

Kicji leaned up against an outcropping of smooth black rock. “No need to get in,” he said. “There is only one road out to the coast. Every day convoys travel it. Some small, some large. But some with many more guards. These must be important, yes?”

Ivanov shrugged. “Probably.”

Kicji rustled around inside a stinking fur vest and pulled out a strip of dried meat, which he began to chew. “There are many places where it is possible to ambush these convoys.”

“Not with so few men,” Sergo said. “Not even with these.” He hefted his new and much-loved assault rifle, a genuine AK-47 with an underslung grenade launcher. Ivanov’s gift of more than two hundred Kalashnikovs to Sergo’s bandit tribe had secured their loyalty and the man’s services.

Kicji gnawed at the jerky, reminding Ivanov of a dog with a treat.

“We can get men from north. The Chukchi,” he said. “Many of them are buried in the Sharashka, too. They will fight.”

“They’re fishermen,” Vendulka said. “I served with some on the other side. They are good men, but they know nothing of fighting in the mountains.”

Kicji smiled, showing large gaps in his teeth. “Wrong Chukchi,” he said. “Those Chukchi are all gone. They lived in villages by the sea. Little buried huts. They couldn’t run when the Russians came. All dead now. The other Chukchi are reindeer people. They move. Many still died, those on big Russian farms. But some live. They have nothing now, just revenge. They will fight.”

Ivanov unwrapped a chocolate bar. He had never met a Chukchi, rein-deer man or fisherman. But he knew a little about them. He retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the federation’s many ethnic subgroups and their many, many blood feuds. The Chukchi were one of the smaller, more obscure, and infinitely less troublesome populations. As such, they tended to be overlooked. At best, he recalled, they were a shamanistic people, even after decades of Soviet rule and then democratic development. They believed that spirits inhabited the world, and they practiced animal sacrifice to appease those spirits. They had also been enemies of Kicji’s people.

“I thought the Chukchi attacked the Koryak,” he said. “Drove them from their homes.”

“Yes,” Kicji answered. “But no more Koryak now. Nobody to remember when I am gone.”

With a shake of his head and a minimal rise of the shoulders, he managed a gesture that captured the existential horror and despair of a man who thinks of himself as the last of his kind.

“If Chukchi die, I do not care,” he continued, “but they will kill Russians. And I care for killing Russians very much.”

Ivanov turned to peer questioningly at the others. The Cossack was sucking slowly at his beard. Ahmed Khan, more prince than guerrilla, regarded the guide like a bad penny. And Zamyatin was staring again at the shrouded prison, a frown digging deep fissures in her forehead.

The Spetsnaz officer finished his chocolate bar and balled up the wrapper, carefully placing it in a deep pocket. He would bury it later, with their other rubbish, when they reached softer ground, or burn it in a lava flow if they passed close to one. The morning was relatively warm, at least ten degrees Celsius. Down on the wide valley floor in the sun it might even get up to twenty or more. A pair of gyrfalcons rode a thermal a few hundred meters away, slate-gray plumage disappearing against the mountain background whenever their spiraling flight path carried them across the face of the range.

He wondered if any of the Uzbeks he’d seen taken away a year ago had ended up here. The Soviets were increasingly using mechanized equipment like tractors and bulldozers. The factories east of the Urals were immense, monstrously so, and they had been running twenty-four hours a day since they’d been built. But he’d heard rumors of this facility since his first days back on home soil, in 1942. It would have been built with slave labor. Hundreds of thousands of workers had probably been needed. Just clearing the forests around the site had to have been the work of an army.

“How long will it take us to reach the Chukchi?” he asked.

Kicji carefully placed the food he had been eating back in a pouch. He scratched at his thin beard. “Moving with care, it will be three days there. Four back-with more men it is slower.”

“And how many men can we expect?”

“How many can you arm?”

“Thirty.”