Dolgonosov shrugged. “So what?”
“So they’re coming to check out the environment. How do you think it’ll look if they turn up to find the place already littered with chemical drums?”
“But this is a job for a civilian contractor.”
“Look, Dolgonosov, I don’t like this any better than you, but Major Rabinovich gets what Major Rabinovich wants. You have an issue with that, feel free to take it up with him. Otherwise, you’re next on watch.” Koikov pointed to a steep-sided moraine to the north-west of the compound, where Yudina had spent the last two hours scouting for polar bears. “Get up on top of that ridge. You know the drill, half-hour comms.”
“And keep your eyes peeled,” Yudina added, his deep voice echoing around the compound. “The last thing any of us needs is to be shit out of a bear.”
Dolgonosov spat on the floor, careful to direct the globule away from Koikov’s boots. “Bear watch,” he grumbled, slinging his hazchem gloves at Yudina. Then he shouldered his rifle and stomped off towards the moraine.
Koikov’s orders had been to pack the drums into the bunker and detonate them, burying what the official brief had termed evidence of AEPM ‘Anomalous Environmental Policy Mismanagement’. He shook his head at the conceit. There had been no environmental policy to mismanage, that much was obvious, and the only anomaly was that whoever built the place hadn’t fucked the environment up even worse.
It was a shame. For all its remoteness, he couldn’t deny that the island was a beautiful place. To the west of the compound was an expanse of icy, rock-strewn tundra, beyond which, if he raised himself up and peered across the bunker’s concrete roof, he could make out icebergs, distant islands and the ocean shimmering through fissures in the melting ice floes. To the east, further inland, the relief rose steeply towards the foot of a mountain range, half covered by an immense glacier. He followed the lie of the surrounding peaks as they jostled into the distance. The sight drew a whistle of contentment from him; the wind had blown him a hell of a long way from the grim tower-block estates of suburban Moscow.
He slotted the second of his explosive charges into place and made sure that it was firmly attached. Then he set to work on the wiring. As he began stripping back the plastic coating, something caught his attention. He stopped and listened. There it was again: a distant wailing. He pulled his head up out of the doorway and listened hard.
After a few moments, the noise gave out and he dropped back inside and refocussed on the charge. It was probably just a gull, that or one of the other poor creatures that called the island home—
It started up again, low but definite. The more he listened, the less animal it sounded, until he could no longer ignore it. He strode back out of the bunker and cast an eye towards the lookout post on top of the moraine.
His heart sank. Dolgonosov was nowhere to be seen.
He snatched at his radio. “Dolgonosov? Over.”
Silence.
“Private Dolgonosov. Answer me now, over!”
Silence.
“Junior Sergeant Sharova!”
“Starshyna?”
Koikov chased Sharova’s voice to the rear of the bunker. “Any word from Dolgonosov?”
Sharova shook his head. “Nothing, Starshyna.”
“Me either,” Yudina said.
“Either of you hear that noise?”
They looked blank.
“Just now. There was a noise like screaming, from beyond the ridge.”
“There’s a walrus colony further up the coast,” Yudina said.
Without responding, Koikov took off towards the hovercraft and leapt up behind the controls. Sharova and Yudina exchanged a glance. Then they dropped what they were doing and followed on.
“Junior Sergeant, man the gun turret.”
“Yes, Starshyna.”
Koikov keyed the ignition and within seconds the armoured vehicle was tearing around the moraine and on along the coast. He scanned the horizon. The landscape was as eerily still and calm as ever. There was no movement, nothing to suggest a human presence, until something shifted on the very periphery of his vision. It was faint, barely perceptible through the incessant glare of the midnight sun, but he could make out what appeared to be a thin trail of smoke leaking from behind a rock cluster north of the moraine.
He veered sharply towards it and slammed his foot onto the accelerator. “Hands on!”
A metallic crunch and slide rang out behind him as Sharova readied the mounted gun.
Rounding the side of the rock cluster, Koikov brought the hovercraft to an abrupt halt and cut the engine. He jumped down and shouldered his rifle. Yudina joined him and together they approached the smoke trail.
Koikov’s body went numb. “Jesus Christ!”
Obviously a dud, the standard-issue warning flare had not deployed properly. It dribbled out a thin trail of coloured smoke secure within the user’s hand. But the hand was no longer attached. It was severed a few inches above the wrist, and two splintered prongs of bone protruded from the pulp. The skin had been flayed from the palm and the ends of the fingers, as if somebody had gone at them with a grater, and the surrounding rocks were streaked with blood, still steaming into the cold.
As the men stared on in disbelief, there was a groan from behind a nearby rock.
Dolgonosov’s torso was twisted back against the outcrop. The rest of his arm had been removed at the shoulder and both of his legs had been reduced to shreds of flesh, which trailed like red tentacles from his groin. It was hard to believe that he could still be alive, but as Koikov dropped to his side he could see the young man’s chest staggering faintly up and down.
“Dolgonosov… what in God’s name?”
Dolgonosov’s head turned slowly. His lips and nose were bleeding and his eyes were bulging, grotesque with terror. He looked about ten years old. His mouth quivered as he attempted to force a word out, but all that emerged was a long exhalation that gurgled from the bottom of his throat before his head flopped forward into Koikov’s hands.
Instinctively, Koikov made to check his pulse. But before he could, a screech pierced the silence and a shadow dashed between the outcrops on the facing slope.
“Sharova!”
“Yes, Starshyna!” The hovercraft’s gun erupted into life and fire raked into the side of the opposing slope, sending clouds of residual ice and rock billowing up into the air. Back on his feet, Koikov trained his rifle in the direction of the barrage, and he and Yudina joined in, unloading magazine after magazine at the shadow as it darted up the incline.
Koikov’s heart pounded with adrenaline. Adrenaline, and something else. He could feel his hands shaking as he tried to aim, spraying rounds that he knew would normally have hit their mark, ineffectually across the barren slope.
At last the roar of the mounted machine gun, and the percussive thump and whine of high-calibre rounds on rock, ceased. Koikov looked down; his rifle magazine was empty, had been for some time. But his finger was still cramped back against the trigger, willing it to discharge.
He glanced across at Yudina. The private’s rifle was also poised but silent, quivering below his pale cheek.
Slowly, the two men lowered their weapons and watched in silence as the sediment thrown up by the barrage gradually resettled.
“What the hell was that?” Yudina half-whispered, his voice strained with fear.
Koikov said nothing but reached slowly for a papirosa.
Whatever it was, it was nowhere to be seen.
2
Loch Ness, Scottish Highlands
Callum Ross knelt down and selected a pebble from the shore. He looked it over, rubbing away the patina of ground-in silt and smoothing his thumb around the edge. It felt cold and granular. Instinctively he rolled it in his palms, warming it before handing it to Jamie. “That’s the sort you want, son.”
<
br /> Jamie took the pebble and gave it his own, much more rigorous, inspection. The little disc of water-worn stone looked suddenly very large as it flipped through the boy’s fingers. The day after his mother had been rushed into the maternity unit in Edinburgh, those fingers had barely folded around Callum’s thumb. He smiled at the memory. That tiny, insistent grip had changed his life forever.
Callum walked to the water’s edge and motioned for Jamie to join him. “You want to try and keep your body low,” he said. “Try and throw across the water.” He looked up to see that Jamie was beside him, knees bent into an exaggerated right angle, swinging his arm wildly back and forth towards the loch.
He was his father’s son alright, from his deep-set hazel eyes to his soft jawline and pale skin. His face bore the same intensity that Callum recognised in his own when he was concentrating, and it was already framed by the same mop of dark curls that enveloped his ears and licked at his brow.
“Do you want me to go first?”
Jamie nodded.
With an exaggerated sweep of his arm, Callum snatched up a stone and sent it skipping out across the silt-rich water.
“…nine, ten, eleven, twelve!” they counted together, watching as the stone tripped away, the trail of circular ripples feeding one into the other.
“My turn!” Jamie yelled. His face wrought with focus, he positioned the pebble precisely in his fingers, then crouched down and launched it out into the loch.
It sank without a single jump.
“No matter,” Callum said, watching as the disappointment spread across Jamie’s face. “You see all these pebbles?” He gestured along the sweeping shoreline. “That’s how many goes you’ve got.”
Disappointment morphed into a guarded smile, and Jamie dropped to his knees and gathered up a handful of new skimmers. He seemed to consider the multi-coloured stones carefully before selecting a thin, white one from amongst the greys and pushing it into Callum’s hand.
“Quartz,” Callum said, holding the pebble up to the light. “Ancient tribes used to make arrowheads out of this stuff, you know?”
Jamie’s brow wrinkled. “It’s just a stone, Dad.”
Callum laughed and closed his fingers around the gift. It was one of the things he loved most about his son. When they were together, he was no longer Doctor Callum Ross, Professor of Archaeology. He was just plain old ‘Dad’.
“Are they not scared of Nessie?”
Seated on a pebble-and-jacket throne later that afternoon, Callum followed Jamie’s gaze. His eyes were fixed on the water, where a group of young men were busy sculling around on their backs amongst the ranks of wooden piles. Beyond their shoulders, the loch stretched on into the distance like a vast pupil ringed by the iris of the Great Glen.
“I guess not,” he answered.
“He’s not real, though, anyway, is he?”
There was part of Callum that felt he ought to play it straight, just like his own father back when he and his brother had descended on the loch each year, determined to hunt the beast with nothing but wooden spears and a knackered-up old dingy. Chances are it’s nothing, son. You’re dreaming if you think it’s a dinosaur. Probably a freak sturgeon…
“Nessie? Of course he’s real,” he replied. “How can you not believe in Nessie?”
“But why don’t more people see him then?”
“Well, did you ever think that he doesn’t want to be seen?”
Jamie slurped up a mouthful of ice-cream. “Suppose,” he said. “Do you really think there’s a monster?”
“Of course I do.” Callum lowered his voice to a whisper, “Between me and you, I think there’s more than one.”
“More than one Nessie?”
“Well, there’d need to be for them to survive all this time, wouldn’t there?”
“Why?”
“Well, because…”
The boy’s brow was furrowed. The ice-cream cone hovered just below his chin and a tear of melted raspberry ripple was creeping for his knuckle.
The desire to come clean was there again: Because there’d need to be a viable breeding population, that’s why, son. Daddy Ness would need his and Mummy Ness would need hers and one thing would lead to another…
“Because he’d be too lonely to live on his own all this time, wouldn’t he? He’d need his family with him.”
“Why do you not want to live with me and Mum?”
The question struck Callum in the gut.
“Jimmy Bevan says it’s weird that you don’t live with us,” Jamie continued, “and so did Fraser.”
“Did they now?”
He nodded. “And Fraser called me a dicknose as well.”
Callum offered up the remains of his cone. “I wish I could live with you, Jamie, but you know it’s not that simple.”
“But why?”
“Well, for a start you and your ma live in Edinburgh, and I live in Aberdeen some of the time and in Norway some of the time and all over the place the rest.”
“You could take us with you. I want to see all over the place.”
“What about your school and your mother’s job?”
“But I want to dig up treasure like you.”
“Well, if that’s what you really want, then you’ve plenty of time.” Callum felt relieved that the conversation had moved on before he’d let slip the other reason why he no longer lived in Edinburgh: the simple fact that he and Moira would have ended up throttling each other. “It’s not all about finding treasure, you know. I spend much more time in the library reading dusty old books.”
Jamie looked as unconvinced as ever. But before Callum could say any more, his phone rang and he hurried to answer it.
“Jonas, hi…
“…I’m on Dores Beach with Jamie…
“…you’re where?”
He stared along the crowded beachfront. Sure enough, Doctor Jonas Olsen was standing in the garden of the Dores Inn, set just back from the shore. Phone pressed to his ear, he was waving his trademark straw boater methodically from side to side.
3
Callum reached out and shook his colleague’s hand. His grip felt weak and he seemed even thinner than usual, but Callum kept his thoughts to himself. “Jonas, to what do we owe the pleasure?”
In his thick Norwegian brogue Jonas replied, “You have told me so much about this monster of yours over the years that I just had to come out and meet him for myself.”
“But I thought you were supposed to be in Tromso for the summer?”
“I was supposed to be, yes. But things have changed.”
There was something about the word things that set the alarm bells ringing faster. It had been twelve years since Callum had first met Jonas Olsen. He had already established himself as a world authority on the archaeology of northern Eurasia and he had been one of the main reasons for Callum joining the department at Aberdeen. The result of over a decade of close collaboration was that he knew Jonas well and he was a specifics man, not a things man. He searched the pale blue of his friend’s eyes.
“Surely not again?”
Jonas nestled his boater back on top of his thinning grey hair. “Can we talk?”
Having settled Jamie back on the beach, Callum returned to Jonas, who motioned for them to sit at a nearby table. On it already were his favoured white jacket, lichen stains on the elbows where he had been leaning, and two glass tumblers, both containing generous measures of single malt. He slid one across the table to Callum.
“What’ve they said?”
“They think six months, a year at most.”
Callum slumped back in his seat. “Jonas, I don’t know what to say.”
“You can say whatever you like, my friend, but what you cannot do is feel sorry for me, please.” He assumed that same commanding gaze with which he fixed his students ye
ar on year. “You know, you should never feel pity for a dying sixty-year-old. He has enjoyed the things that are here to enjoy and now he gets to skip out on the bill. You should envy this man. You should refuse to drink the expensive whiskey he has bought for you and give it back to him on principle.” He grinned and held out his glass. Callum clinked it and they downed their measures.
“Is there really nothing they can do? Last time they said it was hopeless and then you came through.”
Jonas shook his head. “Three years ago it was a pussycat. This time it is a tiger. And besides, I’m afraid this time it has spread.”
“Where?”
He tapped the ends of his fingers against his hairline. “Straight to the old think tank.”
His words hung swollen and grotesque before them, as the shock passed from Callum’s stomach up into his chest and back again. They sat quietly together, the air cut with the familiar squabbling of gulls and the shrieking of children playing down on the shore.
“Is there anything you need me to do?” Callum said at last. “If there is then just name it, okay, anything at all.”
Jonas’s features hardened suddenly and his elbows forced a creak from the table-top as he leant forward. “As a matter of fact, there is something,” he said, “and it is the reason why I am here ruining your holiday like this.”
“You’re not ruining anything,” Callum replied. “I meant what I said. Do you need me to look out for Sarah? She knows, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, yes, she knows, and no thank you, she is far too headstrong, I mean stubborn, I mean independent an old girl to accept anybody’s help.”
Callum could feel a tear building in the corner of his eye. He turned his head and saw that Jamie was still sitting quietly down on the beach. Hand outstretched above his eyes, he was scouring the loch for movement.
“You have heard of a place called Franz Josef Land, of course?”
Callum nodded, still watching his son. “Off the north coast of Russia. Why? Are they developing a new treatment there?” No sooner were the words out than he knew they were absurd. There was no they in Franz Josef Land, let alone any advanced medical facilities capable of treating metastasised pancreatic cancer. For many years one of his major research foci had been the archaeology of northern Siberia, and he was familiar with the off-shore islands. Those that made up the Franz Josef Land archipelago were remote, uninhabited and glaciated. There was only a smattering of abandoned Cold War outposts, the odd meteorological research station and a handful of ramshackle nineteenth-century explorers’ hovels to show that man had ever given the place a second thought.