Chenko was soon at his side, eager to help him if only to get himself farther away from that god forsaken clearing. Only Troyak stood his ground, his eyes puckered as he scanned the distant tree line on the far side of the clearing, mindless so his mind could not unnerve him, his every movement no more than a well honed military reflex. A man who was afraid could not fight well, and Troyak was fearless. He knelt, shifting the pack on his back to off shoulder the equipment he had brought along. His shielded military field radio set had a mode that could detect electromagnetic interference and store the measurement level in memory. He also had a Geiger counter set that could see if there was any unseen radiation in the area. Both readings convinced him that this was no place to linger. He completed his survey, took a soil sample and sealed it off in a special container, and then turned to join the others.
He found them back in the main clearing, hastening towards the safety of the zeppelin basket.
“Orlov!” he called. “Don’t you want to have a look at that damn thing back there?” The Sergeant thumbed over his shoulder.
“Leave it!” Orlov was no longer curious. He had a chunk of something shiny enough in his pocket, and now all he wanted to do was to get back up to the zeppelin and get something hot to drink, followed by something much stronger.
Troyak looked back over his shoulder and stared at the object protruding from the matted duff of the tundra. He had heard so many tales of these hidden dens from his youth, and he knew what this must be. Kheldyu, he said to himself, a word from the Yakut Siberian dialect that meant “Iron House.” There was a vale nearby, between two rivers, that was known as Kheliugur, the “Place of the Iron People.” Others simply called them “Cauldrons” due to their concave, circular shape.
The regional lore was rich with tales of these strange dome like structures, overturned cauldrons, half buried in the marshy ground. Place names all throughout the region testified to their existence. He knew of a stream called Algy Timirbit, which meant “the large cauldron sank.” Another was called the Olguidakh, or “Cauldron Stream.” Some said they were orange in color, like copper, but made of a strange metal that no tool could cut, a metal that could not be chipped, scratched or hammered. They were thought to be the haunts of tall demons who roved the taiga looking for the souls of wayward hunters.
Usually covered by frost and snow in the winter, they seemed like nothing more than small hills to the unwary traveler. But some of the local peoples had stumbled upon them, and those that returned claimed there was a small opening in the top, and a winding stair that led down, where a series of metal rooms were arrayed about a central core, the home of Niurgun Bootur, a demon of the taiga called the “Fiery Champion.” Shamans warned the people to stay away from such things, or they would be stricken with incurable ailments. He had finally found one, and from the feeling in his gut now, the deep thrumming sensation of peril, he knew all the old legends and tales of the Valley of Death were true. He would do what any shaman of the taiga would advise-get away from this place, and as fast as possible.
When they were all secured aboard the Narva again, Corporal Zykov came in and brewed up a pot of good coffee, spiked with a brandy. “Trouble?” he asked of Troyak, who nodded, saying only one word: “Siberia.”
“Ah,” said Zykov. “Don’t tell me you ran across old Chuchuna, the hairy wild man of the taiga.” Legends held that there was a remnant of a strange Siberian hominoid, Siberia’s Bigfoot, still lingering in a region that was completely uninhabited by humans. Even into modern times there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of land where no human had ever ventured. The name was related to the Yakut Turkic word for “fugitive” or “outcast,” and in the Siberian Evenki language it meant “bandit.”
Described as a heavily built giant of a man that stood up to seven feet tall, Chuchuna was said to have long arms and an ape like aspect. Some thought they might have been remnants of the ancient Neanderthals, surviving to modern times. The creature had many other names, but in the West they came to be called “Yeti.”
“Who knows,” said Troyak. “Maybe a demon house, maybe a cauldron, maybe nothing at all.” He had seen what looked like a round metallic dome protruding from the mossy duff of the clearing.
Other legends spoke of unseen creatures that lurked in the depths of the bogs, dragging reindeer and other animals beneath the dark waters there in the summer. Another told of an alien creature that wandered into the cemetery of a small village near Chelyabinsk, less than a foot tall but with grey skin, blotched with small brown spots, claws on its hands, huge eyes, and only two tiny holes where the ears should be. The creature had been called the Siberian Chupacabra, but the woman who found it called it Aleshenka.
Yakut legends held that there were places in the wilderness where tall whirlwinds of fire would emerge from the ground, and massive circular structures would appear, described as “rotating metal islands” that would fly off into the sky. They had all heard them, some old stories, some new, none believed, all feared.
“Nothing at all?” Zykov shook his head. “Look at Orlov there! I haven’t seen him look so glum since we hauled him off that trawler in the Caspian Sea.”
“Yob tvoyu mat!” Orlov swore, telling Zykov what he could do with his mother, not wanting to be reminded of his ill-fated capture during Fedorov’s expedition. “Maybe we should stick you in that metal basket and send you down there, eh? Did you see all those bones, Chenko? That place was evil.”
Troyak shifted his equipment pack. “Whatever it was, it was radioactive,” he said quietly. “We got a low dosage in the time we were there, not enough to worry about anything, but better to be somewhere else.”
“Anywhere else,” said Orlov with a shrug. “That damn place is so thick a man can’t even walk. I fell right on my face.” He covered for the embarrassment of having turned to run for the tree line, but neither Troyak or Chenko held it against him. They knew what he had felt.
Then Orlov remembered the small shiny metal he had found by chance, wondering if it was silently burning him with a radioactive emission. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, holding it up to see that it glittered with an unnatural light. “Test this,” he said.
“Where did you get that?” Zykov leaned his way to get a better look at the fragment.
“It was right in front of my face when I tripped up. Is it radioactive, Troyak?”
The Sergeant grunted, pulling out his Geiger counter and doing a scan of the object, eventually shaking his head.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “Keep it as a little souvenir.”
Orlov pocketed the object returning to his coffee, the memory of that unheard sound still deeply troubling. They were cruising at 500 meters now, but he still felt uneasy, and he could sense the other men were equally discomfited.
They all lapsed into silence until Captain Selikov came back to the aft cargo gondola and saw them all huddled with their mugs of hot spiked coffee.
“Well?” He was understandably curious as to what the men had found, but Orlov just kept staring into his coffee mug. No one else said anything, and the Captain nodded, inwardly knowing that they had just had a taste of the reason he wanted to get the ship as far from this place as possible.
“We’re low enough to navigate beneath this cloud deck,” Selikov said at last. “I could follow this river northwest, and with any luck we may get back to the main branch of theYenisei River and find our way to the Angara. But that is 400 to 600 kilometers out of our way, and we might just as easily head south from this point. The Tunguska river bends that way here. If I follow it for a little while it will point us towards the Angara, which is where we were supposed to be all along, before that storm took us off course. In fact, the Tunguska River is pointing us right at our objective at the moment.”