“What are you people?” He pointed.
Miller turned to look at the faces of his crew, as if the question somehow changed what he knew. He chuckled.
“We are scientists,” he said, “biologists, ice experts and historians.”
Miller pointed at Olivia Newton. “And a journalist to help us organize our finds, for the books and conferences that would follow our discoveries.”
Miller prayed silently that he was convincing enough. Some of what he said was true. If the soldier believed him, his dark Spanish eyes didn’t show. He sized up the crew. His eyes landed on Olivia’s face and something in them seemed to make him mellow.
“What are those?” the soldier pointed at Nicolai’s boxes.
“Tools, for research,” the Russian answered promptly.
“Open them.”
The soldier gestured two of his men to search the boxes. They did with practiced and professional motions, with the muzzle of their guns. Satisfied, they nodded at their superior.
He tapped his gun, an M16. “Alright, you can stay for now, until my superiors say you can’t anymore. Anything you do will be under my supervision. My men will escort you around.”
Miller nodded. “That’s fair.”
Olivia watched Ted Cooper. He didn’t seem surprised by the armed intrusion.
They passed through the lighted way in the vault and found another room, a much bigger one. Four soldiers followed them, led by the major who ranked the detail.
The room was lighted too. In the middle of it, there was a raised platform and on it there were the remains of what looked like a rocket. It was about thirteen feet long and almost a meter in width. Time had done little to change much in the room.
On the walls there were various sorts of charts, diagrams, and schematics. An awed Anabia Nassif put on his reading glasses and gawked at the ones in the middle of the wall. There were molecular diagrams and charts on it.
“This is not…” he mumbled. “This is confusing.”
Miller went to him, quickly followed by a soldier. “What is?”
“These charts, the diagrams,” he stammered. “They are microbial and human genomes altered in their rawest state, except—”
Nassif turned around. He stumbled towards the platform where the rocket-like contraption was.
“What is this thing, Miller, is this a rocket?” He pointed.
A soldier grabbed him as he tried to get on the platform. Several other soldiers set up a barricade around the platform. The major said the platform, and the thing on it is “Out of bounds. You can look around elsewhere.”
Nassif insisted at Miller, “But do you know what that is?”
“An ICBM under construction,” Miller said. “Abandoned, unfinished.”
“Exactly what I thought too, I just needed to be sure.” Nassif rushed back to the wall of diagrams. He pointed to one of them. “This is a formula for a nerve-destroying chemical substance.”
This drew the attention of the whole crew. The soldiers observed the man’s tirade, unmoved.
“I think that thing there, on the platform, they were going to make it carry these chemicals in tubes and detonate in the air. Millions would die upon inhalation.”
Nassif snapped his finger. “Death in seconds.”
Everyone turned to the ICBM. The major shifted on his feet, perhaps being in the way, and feeling now that he shared the attention with the machine of death behind him. He dismissed the scientists. “Okay, okay, go on, there’s other rooms, other places to check. Go.”
Reluctantly, the expedition team moved through another doorway into a nearby laboratory. Anabia Nassif took the lead, followed by Miller and then Olivia who was on her Dictaphone again, dictating details concerning the rocket.
Behind them they heard the major talking on a talkie. And then he was giving his men more orders.
“Wow.” Nassif was standing before another chart. This one, like the charts in the rocket assembly room, was riddled with calculations and formulas.
“What now?” Peter asked him.
Olivia joined the small group clustering around Nassif now. After shrugging at each other, four of the soldiers, except one, moved closer to share in the amazing moment the crew was experiencing.
Nassif spread his hand and shook his head. “Alas, we see we were wrong all along,” he declared, with some emotion. “Given more time, they could have killed us all. See this guys…this right here was a formula — that I think — is one example of the 'super soldier’ compound. We have only heard about it, now I see it.”
With bright eyes, Frank Miller asked the biologist, “Would it have worked?”
“Nope,” Nassif said emphatically. He pointed at a spot in the intricate lines on the board, of compounds and components. “That compound with the ETH, is a polymer. It was wrongly believed that it could bond with the human genome. But it didn’t.”
Liam Murphy asked, “What did it do then?”
“It mutated it, it morphed it into whatever it wants at every exposure. There was no single track for its pathway. It was indeed super, but not the kind of super that we want.”
The crew stared in quiet respect for the biologist.
They heard a crash and when they turned around. A test tube had fallen off a rack on a nearby table. On the white linoleum floor was the broken glass, and a small puddle of smoking, clear liquid.
The soldier that had refused to join the discussion at the board was standing by the puddle, gazing at it dumbly. He looked up at his comrades and shrugged.
Nassif stammered, “Oh God, get away from there, you!”
He advanced on the soldier but Olivia pulled him back in time before the other soldiers used their gun butts on his face.
“You need to get away from that thing, it may not be safe for you,” Nassif shouted.
“Or us,” Olivia whispered.
Anabia Nassif suggested they left that laboratory, as there was no way of telling what the substance in the test tube had been.
Ted Cooper observed, “Well, he looks okay.”
The crew glanced back at the soldier who had mistakenly toppled the test tube with his gun. He was talking fast in Spanish with his companion. The major had ordered the expedition crew to bed down in a nearby sleeping quarters that they had found.
They in turn would stay in the room with the rocket.
The soldier was still laughing when he and his comrade sauntered away, babbling in Spanish, their boots making thick thumping sounds on the tile floor.
The room was of regular size. Four bunks, two on each side, and a table and chair. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. The wall was painted grey so that when the light was turned off, the room was plunged in darkness.
Miller gave Olivia the topmost bunk on the right, away from the door. Peter would sleep directly below her. The others took the rest. Ted Cooper pulled a blackened bed from under one of the bunks and put it on the floor.
“I don’t do bunks,” he said.
Olivia prepared some food — dried beans and frozen veggies — talking with Nicolai as she did. Miller instructed the Russian who loved singing while eating, that there would be no singing. The circumstances were different now.
After the small dinner the crew settled down to sleep. Olivia could not fall asleep. With the aid of a pen torch Nicolai had given her, she made notes and wrote. She looked over the bunk and saw a long bed on the floor. No Ted Cooper.
“It seemed that Ted Cooper could go and come as he wished…” she said.
She heard a clink and looked over her bunk again. Nicolai’s face was below. He stretched a metal flask at her. “Vodka,” he whispered. “To make you sleep.”
The suppressed urge awoke with a howl, like a wolf that was lost, far away from her pack. She looked at the flask with longing. She shook her head and smiled at the Russian.