Cold War

Chapter 4

They had Taro’s frozen body loaded halfway onto the truck when Lieutenant Ligacheva heard the scream. It was faint and distant, muffled by the wind, but there was no mistaking it for anything but the scream of pain it was.

”What in the…” She looked up in time to see something flare blue-white in the darkness beyond the ridge. “Pyotr!” she cried.

Then she remembered where she was, who she was, and who was with her.

”All of you,” she barked, “follow me! Now!”

Dolzhikov hesitated, holding Taro’s legs.

”Forget him!” Ligacheva shouted. “We can tend to him later!”

Dolzhikov obeyed and dropped his burden; the frozen corpse teetered, then rolled slowly out of the truck and onto the ice. Dolzhikov joined the others as they charged up the ridge, past the pole.

Ligacheva was shouting orders as she ran. “As soon as we reach Salnikov and the others, take up defensive positions! Use the ridge and the drifts for cover, if you can! No firing until I give the order!” That last was an afterthought; she didn’t want anyone accidentally shooting Salnikov or Utkin or Vetrov if they were still alive out there in the dark.

She tried to imagine what could have happened, what the three men could have found, what could have left those huge footprints and the strange scratchy marks. There had only been the single trail leading away from the pole, yet she had not heard any of her men fire their weapons, and no single lunatic could have defeated them all before they could shoot-did Taro’s murderer have companions? Was there an entire company of madmen waiting for them? Was this some insane invasion by Americans, or a terrorist attack by some extremist faction-Chechens, or Georgians, or Jews? Thoughts and images tumbled through her mind too quickly to make sense of any of them, to choose any as more likely.

And then Starostin’s head blew off.

Ligacheva staggered and stared.

One moment Private Anton Mikhailovich Starostin had been running up the ridge beside her, eyes bright with excitement, with anticipation of his first taste of battle, and the next moment there was a blue-white flash and Starostin’s head was gone, just-gone. The light had flashed through tissue and bone as if they weren’t there. Starostin’s body ran another half step and then collapsed in the snow, blood spattering across the white ground.

But there was no enemy, nothing to shoot at. The white flash had come out of nowhere.

”Where are they?” Dolzhikov cried.

”Fire if you see them!” Ligacheva shouted back.

Then the white light flashed again, and Dolzhikov was gone, his chest blown apart, one arm vanished, head flung back at a hideous, broken angle.

”We can’t fight this!” someone called-Ligacheva didn’t see whom and didn’t recognize the voice over the howling of the wind and the incoherent shouting of her panicking troops. She turned to see someone running for the truck. “We’ve got to get back to the…”

And then the light blazed again, but this time it did not shear through flesh; instead it struck the tractor’s engine compartment, and the vehicle exploded into flame.

Ligacheva knew then that she was going to die, they were all going to die-but she still didn’t know why or who was responsible.

She wanted to know-but more than that, she wanted to take some of them with her. She snatched up Dolzhikov’s AK-47 and released the safety-he hadn’t even had time to do that before dying.

Ligacheva couldn’t see the enemy, couldn’t see her own men, but she knew it didn’t matter anymore. Her men were as good as dead, with the enemy out there somewhere in the Siberian night; she opened fire, spraying steel jacketed lead into the darkness, in the general direction the bluewhite fire had come from.

Fire came again as her foot slipped on the ice and she began to tumble. White light and searing heat tore through her shoulder, and the AK-47 went flying in one direction as she fell in the other.

Snow gave beneath her, and she rolled down the ridge; the world wheeled madly about her, a chaos of snow and cold and darkness and light, the hot orange flashes of guns and the cold white flare of the enemy’s weapon, until she landed hard on wind-scoured ice, her own wind knocked out of her. Snow tumbled down upon her, almost burying her; one eye peered out through her goggles, while the lens protecting the other was covered by blank whiteness.

She was dazed, stunned by impact, by the shock of her shoulder wound, by the bitter cold that seeped through her heavy coat and down the back of her neck. She lay for a moment, unable to think or move, as the violence around her died away until the only screaming was the wind, until nothing flashed or blazed. The truck was burning, there before her-she could just see it at the edge of her field of vision but it had settled down to a slow, steady glow, no more explosions or flare-ups. The fire’s glow lit the icy landscape a hellish red-orange, giving her light to see.

Only one of her squad was in sight, lying motionless on his belly on the ice near the truck she couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Feigning death, perhaps, so as to take the enemy by surprise? Perhaps.

Most of the men were dead, she knew-but all of them? Could some have found cover? Might some be lying low, waiting for a chance?

They had no chance, not out here almost twenty kilometers from shelter in the middle of winter, obviously outgunned by an enemy they could not see. If the enemy did not kill them, the cold would.

She was still having trouble breathing, she realized; even now that she had had time to recover, she was having difficulty getting air into her lungs. Snow was blocking her nose and mouth. She was lying on one arm, while the other, the one that had been injured by the blue-white bolt, would not move; the weight of the snow held her down.

Then she heard the crunching of heavy footsteps on the slope just above her, and she stopped trying to move.

The enemy. The enemy was there, no more than a meter away, looking over his handiwork.

She held utterly still, waiting, staring out at the narrow area she could see through her one uncovered eye.

The man still lay there, and she tried to make out who it was-Mikhail Alexandrovich Barankin, was it? Yes, young Mikhail, almost certainly-a replacement, only arrived a fortnight before, the youngest boy in her command. Did he tremble at the sound of the approaching footsteps? Was he still alive, after all? She could see no mark on him, no blood anywhere.

The footsteps paused, no more than a meter or two from her head. Had she been spotted?

No, after only a second the footsteps proceeded; she watched intently, eager for a first clear look at their foe.

She didn’t get one; instead her vision seemed to distort, so that the image of Barankin and the burning truck wavered. She blinked, trying to clear her eyes, and sipped at the air, trying to force her lungs to draw.

The distortion did not vanish, but it seemed to contract, to shrink into a small, defined area that moved across the snowfield toward Barankin. She still could not see an enemy, but now she thought she saw footprints appearing from nowhere, as if the distortion were somehow causing them.

That could not be so, she told herself. She was imagining things. The fight, her wound, her fall, the cold, they were all affecting her, disorienting her, and now she was seeing things that weren’t there.

And then suddenly she saw something that she could not believe was a hallucination, that she could not accept as a trick of the cold or a smear on her goggles or anything but either reality or the onset of utter madness.

A creature appeared out of nowhere, a creature that stood upright like a man, but was clearly not human; arcs of electric fire crawled over its body for a moment as it appeared, and then vanished once it stood fully exposed. She could see its shape clearly in the firelight.

It was taller than a man, well over two meters in height. Its face was smooth, angular metal, and for a moment Ligacheva wondered whether the Americans had devised some sort of killer robot and sent it here for testing.

The thing did not move like a machine, though, and its body was proportioned and constructed almost like that of a living being.

Then she looked at the rest of it and saw that it was no machine; the metal face was a mask. It wore a belt and some sort of shoulder harness that held equipment; black cuffs covered its forearms.

But the rest of its body was almost bare, much of it hidden only by some sort of mesh. Its skin shone an unhealthy yellow in the firelight-and she could see plenty of skin through the mesh. She marveled at that; how could anything expose bare flesh to this burning cold?

This was obviously the creature that had left those tracks in the snow; she could not see its feet clearly, but she thought she saw not boots, but sandals, and curving black claws. That explained the claw marks-but how could it stand to expose its feet to the cold? Why wasn’t it dead of frostbite?

It wasn’t; she simply had to accept that.

It stood over Barankin, then suddenly stooped down. One hand gripped the boy’s head-his entire head fit neatly in the thing’s palm.

The other hand drew back. Two jagged blades slid out of the black wrist cuff and snapped into place, protruding past the creature’s closed fist, both blades glittering red in the glow of the burning tractor.

Up until then Ligacheva had hoped Barankin was still alive and unhurt; now she prayed that he was already dead, that he would not feel what was happening.

The thing lifted Barankin’s head, and the boy shouted, “No! No!” shattering Ligacheva’s hope that he would not feel anything. Then the twin blades swept down and sliced into Barankin’s back, and the shout turned into a wordless scream of agony.

It didn’t last long, though; a second later the creature lifted up Barankin’s head, the boy’s severed spine dangling, and let the headless body fall to the ground.

A pool of blood began to spread.

Then Ligacheva fainted, and that was all she saw until strong arms pulled her half-frozen from the snow-human arms, friendly arms.

The villagers, Taro’s people, had smelled the smoke from the burning truck and followed the orange glow. They saw the bodies, the blood, the tracks; pragmatically they made no attempt to follow the tracks back to the source. If something was out there that could wipe out an entire squad of the modern Russian Army, they weren’t interested in pursuing it armed only with knives and a couple of rifles.

They didn’t see any yellow-skinned creatures. They didn’t see anything that could explain the slaughter.

They did, however, recognize some of the marks in the snow on the ridge, marks where something had fallen and been buried, and they found Ligacheva and dug her out.

She was too far gone to talk, to tell them what had happened, so they took her back to her own people at the pumping station; this all took place in what seemed like a single feverish moment as the lieutenant slipped in and out of consciousness.

She saw the familiar corridors as she was hurried inside to the infirmary. She glimpsed Galyshev’s face, red with anger and fear, as he bent over her bed and tried to coax sense out of her. And then she woke up in a different bed, looking up at a different ceiling, a cleaner, whiter, more brightly lit one, but she never remembered the trip, and it wasn’t until the doctor told her, hours later, that she realized she was in Moscow, that they had flown her out at fantastic expense in a special emergency flight.

The massacre on the windswept Siberian ice seemed like some hideous fever dream, but one she could not shake from her thoughts; the image of that jagged double blade biting into Barankin’s back, the crunching sound as the blades cut through the boy’s ribs, the sight of that creature lifting its bloody trophy high so that it gleamed in the firelight, would not go away.

When at last they put her into a clean uniform and sent her to see General Ponomarenko the vision of Mikhail Barankin hung before her, like some unholy apparition, as she answered the general’s questions.

She stood at attention during questioning; in light of her condition they did allow her to hold on to a rail for support as she spoke. She thought she understood why she was not permitted to sit. When she had finished her description of the nightmare she had watched from beneath her blanket of snow, she did not stop, but went on to say, “An entire army squad has been wiped out. Someone has to answer for it. I know that. The circumstances of my promotion and transfer just make it that much easier to hold me responsible, and I accept that. You need make no pretenses.”

Ponomarenko smiled humorlessly and leaned back in his chair. He took a long drag on the imported cigar he held, then took a moment to carefully knock the ash into an ashtray before he looked back at Ligacheva.

”I make no secret of it, lieutenant,” he said. “I did think your promotion was a mistake. Your actions in the field, and the results, only confirm my belief.” He took another puff on his cigar, then leaned forward.

”You’re wrong, though, about one thing,” he continued. “We aren’t looking for a scapegoat this time. We don’t want simple retribution. We want more than that. We want to know what really happened, and what’s out there. And whether you have told us the truth or not, Lieutenant, you know more of what happened out there than we do.” He stubbed out the cigar and pointed at her. “So, my dear,” he said, “we don’t want your blood. It’s worse than that.” He smiled coldly.

”We want you to go back.”