Cold War

Chapter 2

Lieutenant Ligacheva was six months into her first command, and felt that she had settled in nicely. She was the lone officer in charge of the enlisted men of the little guard detachment at Pumping Station #12 on the Assyma Pipeline on the eastern fringe of the Yamal oil fields, and as such, she was responsible for making sure that the dozen pipeline workers at the station didn’t go on strike, that the local reindeer herders didn’t get into fights with anyone at the station, and that the Americans weren’t going to invade across the polar ice. If anyone tried to sabotage the pipeline, it was her duty to make sure the attempt failed.

The men weren’t interested in striking, though, nor were there any terrorists or invading Americans to be seen, and the villagers were more concerned with cadging liquor off the workers than in fighting with anyone.

Her job therefore was not particularly demanding-but then, she was a newly promoted lieutenant, and she couldn’t expect anything more. She hadn’t yet proven herself capable of handling duties beyond the drudgery of a routine guard post on the northern frontier.

The easy job didn’t mean that she hadn’t had any trouble at all, though. She was the only woman in the entire place, and when she first arrived, she had feared that that might cause problems-the old Soviet Union had paid lip service to equality of the sexes, but modern Russia didn’t even do that much. A woman alone among so many men, a woman in a position of authority, could expect to encounter a certain amount of unpleasantness.

Her sex had indeed made a few difficulties at first, but she had handled them, and they were past and done. She had avoided being raped, which she had seen as the most basic part of establishing herself; she had managed it by maintaining a fierce, asexual front. To do so she had had to give up any hint of romance and remain strictly celibate, of course, but that was a price she was willing to pay for her career.

The facade had worked. As they had before her arrival, the men took any opportunity they could get to visit the accommodating, if expensive, widows in the nearby village of aboriginal reindeer herders; they left Ligacheva alone-or at any rate, they left her alone sexually. She wasn’t socially isolated, thank heavens. Loneliness would be far worse than mere sexual abstinence.

She dealt with the men, both workers and soldiers, as if she were one of them-as much as they and her rank would allow her to. There had been a few incidents, but her refusal to be offended by coarse behavior, her calm flattening of the occasional rowdy drunk, and her prowess on the soccer field behind the motor pool had established her as deserving of respect.

She was fitting in, and was pleased by it. No one tried to go around her or subvert her authority; anytime a military matter came up, she was informed. When the station’s seismometers picked up a disturbance not far from the main pipe, she was summoned immediately.

She did not see at first why this disturbance concerned her-how was an earth tremor a military matter? When the messenger insisted that she had to come at once and talk to Dr. Sobchak in the little scientific station she was tempted to argue, but then she shrugged and came along; after all, now that winter had closed in and it was too cold even between storms to want to go outside, there wasn’t all that much to do at Station #12. Last summer’s soccer games were nothing but a fond and distant memory, and she had long since gone through everything of interest in the pumping station’s tiny library. Even though she didn’t like Dr. Sobchak, talking to him would at least be a break in the routine.

She did pull on her coat first, however, ignoring the messenger’s fuming at the delay, and she took a certain pleasure in keeping the annoying fellow waiting while she made sure she had everything straight, the red bars on her collar perfectly aligned.

When she was satisfied she turned and marched out immediately, almost trampling the messenger, who had been caught off guard by the sudden transition.

The coat was not merely for show. The maze of tunnels that connected the station’s buildings-the separate barracks for soldiers and workers, the pump room itself, the boiler plant, the extensive storerooms and equipment areas, the scientific station-was buried three meters below the snow, but was not heated; the corridors’ temperature, midway between buildings, could drop well below freezing.

The lieutenant walked briskly as she strode down the tunnel, partly to maintain the proper image, but partly just to keep warm.

The scientific station was at the northernmost point of the complex; Ligacheva had plenty of time, walking through the corridors, to wonder what had Sobchak so excited. “A seismic disturbance,” the messenger said-but what did that mean? Why call her? If there had been a quake, or an ice heave, or a subsidence, that might threaten the pipeline, but a threat to the pipeline didn’t call for the army; Sobchak would have called Galyshev, the crew superintendent, to send out an inspection squad or a repair team.

And if it didn’t threaten the pipeline, who cared about a seismic disturbance? Ligacheva had heard Sobchak explain that the instruments detected movement in the permafrost fairly often-usually during the summer thaw, of course, which was still an absolute minimum of two months away, but even in the dead of winter, so what made this one so special?

She stepped down a few centimeters from the tunnel entrance into the anteroom of the science center. The antechamber was a bare concrete box, empty save where small heaps of litter had accumulated in the corners, as cold and unwelcoming as the tunnels. Half a dozen steel doors opened off this room, but four of them, Ligacheva knew, were permanently locked those sections of the station were abandoned. The days when the Soviet state could afford to put a dozen scientists to work out in the middle of the Siberian wilderness were long gone; Mother Russia could not spare the resources, and only Sobchak was left. The other scientists had all, one by one, been called away-to homelands that were now independent nations, to better paid jobs in the wider world outside the old Soviet bloc, or to more important posts elsewhere in Russia, posts deserted by Ukrainians or Kazakhs or Lithuanians, or by mercenaries selling their talents abroad.

Only Sobchak was left.

The official story behind keeping Sobchak was that Russia’s oil company did need one scientist, one geologist, to remain here to monitor the equipment that watched over the pipeline, but the lieutenant suspected that the truth was that no one else wanted Sobchak. The little man with the thick glasses and ugly mustache was sloppy, pompous, vain, and aggravating, and Ligacheva wasn’t especially convinced that he had any great abilities as a scientist, either.

She opened the door to the geological monitoring station, and warm air rushed out at her Sobchak kept his tiny kingdom as warm as he could, and old orders giving the scientists priority on the steam output from the boiler plant had never been rescinded, so that was quite warm indeed.

The geologist’s workroom was good-sized, but so jammed with machinery that there was almost no space to move about. Exactly in the center sat little Sobchak, perched on his swivel chair, surrounded by his equipment-meters and displays, switches and dials on every side. He looked up at her; the fear on his face was so exaggerated that Ligacheva almost laughed. His beady little eyes, wide with terror, were magnified by his glasses; his scraggly attempt at a mustache accentuated the trembling of his upper lip. His narrow jaw and weak chin had never looked any worse.

”Lieutenant Ligacheva!” he called. “I’m glad you’re here. Come look at this!”

Ligacheva stepped down the narrow space between a file cabinet and an equipment console to see where Sobchak was pointing. It was a paper chart, unscrolling from one drum and winding onto another. A pen had drawn a graph across it, a graph that had suddenly spiked upward not long ago, and was now hovering well above where it had begun.

”This is your record of seismic activity?” Ligacheva asked, unimpressed.

Sobchak looked up at her, startled. “Seismic activity? Oh, no, no,” he said. “That’s over there.” He pointed to a large bank of machinery on the other side of the room, then turned back to the first chart and tapped it. “This chart shows radiation levels.”

Ligacheva blinked at him. “What?”

”Radiation,” Sobchak said. “Radioactivity.”

Ligacheva stared. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

”This,” Sobchak said, pointing. “This, Lieutenant. I don’t know what it is. What I do know is that something happened that made the ground shake about twenty kilometers northeast of here, and that when it did there came this burst of radioactivity. Ever since then the background radiation has been four times what it should be.”

”Four times, you say,” Ligacheva said, fingering the paper chart.

”Yes,” Sobchak said. “Four times.”

”And you want me and my men to go find out what this thing is, that’s radiating like this.”

”Yes,” Sobchak repeated.

Ligacheva stared at the chart.

It might be dangerous, whatever was out there. She didn’t know what it was, and all her guesses seemed wild-an American attack? A fallen satellite?

Whatever it was, it was not any part of the established routine.

Perhaps she should report it to Moscow and await orders, but to report it when it was still just readings from old equipment that the authorities would say could not be trusted would be asking to be ignored. Sobchak’s pay still came through, but Ligacheva knew that no one in power thought much of the little geologist, and as for Moscow’s opinion of herself-well, if you were a general in Moscow, you didn’t send a young officer out to the middle of the Yamal Peninsula because you wanted to pay close attention to her and encourage her career. General Ponomarenko, who had assigned her here, had never done anything to make her believe he respected her opinions.

If she took her men out there and they saw whatever it was with their own eyes, though, that would be harder to ignore. No one could say that the phenomenon was the result of Sobchak’s imagination or of poorly maintained monitoring equipment if she had half a dozen eyewitnesses confirming… whatever it was out there.

She knew that no one advanced quickly in any army, let alone in the new, post-Soviet Russian Army, by staying timidly in the barracks waiting for her superiors to tell her what to do.

”Right,” she said. “Where is this mysterious radioactive disturbance, exactly?”