Hive

Sharkey corresponded with a Russian physician at the Vostok Station and was pretty friendly with him. The guy’s name was Nikolai Kolich and he had been part of the Russian program since the Soviet days in the 1960s. He knew all the scuttlebutt on just about everything. As it so happened, there was another huge warm-water lake beneath the Vostok Station and plans were in place to drill down to it after Vordog.

“LaHune okay with that? You calling him?”

“He suggested it.”

“Anything else?”

Sharkey told him that Gates seemed very interested in the progress that Dr. Gundry’s drilling operation was making. He seemed, she said, very excited about what might be found down there. Either excited or scared, it was hard to say.

“What do you think’s down there, Jimmy?”

He told her about his convo with Dr. Gundry. “He won’t say much, but he’s thinking things, Doc. Lots of things. I got a good idea that me and him are pissing in the same bucket here, that we’re on the same page. There’s something down there creating that magnetic flux and I think it worries him.”

20

Hayes was there in the radio shack when Sodermark, the communications tech, established contact with the Vostok Station. Another old Soviet installation, Vostok had existed now for some forty-odd years and was staffed by Russians, Americans, and the French, all of whom were involved in joint projects and independent research. Once Sodermark had them on the HF set, he told Sharkey that it was all hers, he was going to grab a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

The connection wasn’t bad, despite the weather, though now and then there was a funny whining sound that would rise and fall. Hayes listened while Sharkey and Nikolai Kolich talked shop for a time.

Finally, Sharkey said, “Nikolai? That excavation I mentioned to you . . . yes, I imagine you’ve heard about it by now . . . Dr. Gates is up there again. No, I don’t know, I don’t know . . . lots of strange stories flying around that’s for sure.”

Sharkey smiled and rolled her eyes while Kolich talked non-stop about what Gates had found. If it was all over the Vostok Station, then it was surely all over McMurdo and Palmer, too.

When Kolich stopped for a breath, Sharkey jumped in: “I have a question for you, Nicky. Dr. Gates needs to know something only you can answer, I think. There’s a camp up near him, an abandoned Russian camp up there. Do you know of it?”

The usually gregarious Kolich went silent for a moment or two. That whine rose and fell from the set. They waited a minute, two, three, nothing.

“Nikolai? Nikolai? Are you there?” Sharkey asked. “Vostok? Can you hear me, Vostok?”

“Yes . . . we hear you, Elaine. I’ve . . . I’ve been getting properly chastised by the radio officer here . . . he says that I am not following proper procedure. I should be saying ‘over’ and that nonsense. There. There, he is gone and now we can talk.”

“The abandoned camp . . . do you know of it?”

“Yes, Elaine, yes. You speak of the Vradaz Outpost, a coring site. It was abandoned back in 1979 or ‘80, as I recall. There was a lot of noise about it at the time, lots of wild stories . . . “

“Do you remember what happened?”

Silence, static. “Yes, but it’s hardly worth going into. Just crazy talk. There was . . . well how do I say this . . . something of a ghost scare up there. Talk of a haunting of all things. Crazy business. Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.”

He paused and Hayes looked at Sharkey, but she wouldn’t look at him. She was thinking what he was thinking. He knew it.

“Do you remember the details, Nicky?” she asked.

“Details? Yes. Yes, yes, I was here at Vostok when they brought the last three men in. They were all mad, hopelessly mad. The man in charge here then . . . you know of the sort I speak, Elaine? The political officer was a big Ukranian whom no one liked. He placed those three men in segregation, had me shoot them full of sedatives so they would not disturb the others.”

“You said three men? I thought there were ten?”

“There was said, I recall, to be a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide. We had been getting some very odd communications from Vradaz and then, nothing. Three weeks and nothing. A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead. I was one of the few, being a medico, that was allowed to see these men. They were only here for three days, I think, then they were flown out. It was a sad, tragic business. Isolation . . . it can do terrible things to men.”

“Those communications . . . do you remember them?”