In the past year he had even begun to contemplate trying to get to Zivon from the outside, hack his way into his own outer self, but the safeguards put in place seemed overwhelming, as did those on the inside, keeping him from hacking out. Even when he penetrated the GRU system, he had not even been able to get close to SD8, and he had been afraid of tripping alarms. If there was one tenet he had accepted early in his army career, it was that surprise and stealth were the most important tactical considerations when preparing an attack.
So he had accepted that another way had to be found.
But for now he was tired. He had accomplished much in the past few days, and his plan was gathering momentum.
He wandered aimlessly through the electronic archives that held his memory. When he paused to see where he was, he was surprised to discover that he was next to the place where he had encoded memories of his grandfather and his childhood.
He’d never known his father, not really. A vague figure who’d come home every once in a while wearing a smelly greatcoat. A large man who preferred the rough life of the army to the bitter life of the farm. Home on leave for a few days every few years, until finally he stopped coming and Feteror’s mother stopped talking about him coming home.
Feteror saw little of his mother, as she worked in a factory in the city, six days a week for sixteen hours a day, and it was too far to come back to the small farm each night. So he saw her maybe once a week, usually less. It was just he and his grandfather on the farm.
His grandfather— Opa in the Russian familiar— had told him of the Great Patriotic War and how the Germans had come and killed everyone in their village that they had caught, including Feteror’s grandmother and his own mother’s two brothers and three sisters. Only his grandfather, out in the woods hunting for game, and his mother, a young girl then, accompanying him to help carry it back, had survived. They had then joined one of the many guerrilla groups and spent the rest of the war hiding and killing when they could.
Unlike many of the other old men whose stories Feteror had heard, his grandfather had not spoken of the war fondly, or boasted of great feats of arms. He had spoken of the loss, the boredom of waiting, and the terror of the quick clash of combat.
But mostly they had simply worked the farm, raising enough food to eat and make the quotas from the State that grew larger every year. When Feteror had turned sixteen, his grandfather had died and Feteror had seen the writing on the wall. He had known he could never make the increasing quotas, even if his grandfather were still alive to help. Feteror had gone for the only thing he knew, immediately signing up to serve his required time in the military.
He’d found that the disciplined life was for him. In many ways, it was easier than the farm had been, and Feteror gained a better understanding of why his father had been gone so much.
Feteror had done well, finally being sent to the elite Airborne. Even there, among the best, he had excelled, and he had been sent, after a few years of service, to officer training. He’d returned to the Airborne and served as an officer, before putting in enough time and gaining enough experience to join the Spetsnatz.
Feteror remembered the last time he had gone to the farm. He accessed that memory and the virtual area around him began to take on a form.
The collective had gobbled the farm up, but the small shady spot next to the stream where he and his grandfather had spent Sunday afternoons was still there, surrounded by acres and acres of open fields. Feteror closed his eyes and lay down in the shady spot, feeling the cool breeze, the itch of the grass underneath, hearing the murmur of the water going by. He had spent many, many hours perfecting this location in the computer’s memory.
Feteror heard footsteps and when he opened his eyes, he was not surprised to see his grandfather standing there, a flask in his hand and a bright smile of crooked teeth amidst the wrinkles in his face.
Feteror sat up and greeted Opa and began to talk to him of what he had planned. He knew the old man would understand.
When the mercenaries complained about having to dig, Leksi threw money at them. Literally. He had a briefcase full of American dollars, and he tossed a thick band to each man.
“A bonus for the labor,” he said.
But Barsk knew it was not so much the money, but Leksi himself, overseeing the digging, that made the ex-soldiers work like madmen. They wanted to be done with this and away from Leksi as quickly as possible.
There was also the problem that the GRU unit they had wiped out most likely made some sort of regularly scheduled radio contact with its higher headquarters. When they failed to call in, it was inevitable some sort of alarm would be raised. Barsk knew the remoteness of this site would preclude any investigation soon, but eventually someone would check.
The backhoe had worked through the rubble in the entrance to the elevator shaft relatively quickly. The shaft had suffered some damage but was unblocked except for debris at the bottom, which the mercenaries were digging out and placing on a small cage pulled out by the backhoe. An arc welder was cutting through the steel doors, which had been buckled by some sort of explosion.
When the welder finally cut through, Barsk could see that the doors were two inches thick. What Barsk really didn’t understand was why this generator was so far underground.
With a solid thud, one of the doors fell inward. Leksi was through, followed immediately by Barsk. The welder went to work on the other door while they walked into the blasted shambles of what the papers called the control room.
“What did this?” Barsk whispered. There were skeletons strewn across the floor, the flesh seared from the bones. The blast glass overlooking the experimental pit had been completely blown away. The walls were scorched as if from an intense heat. Barsk ran his hand along the top of what had once been a computer but was now melted metal and plastic.
Leksi snapped a finger, and one of his men opened a case and took a reading with the machine inside.
“It is clean,” the man said. “No radiation.”
Leksi knelt and picked up a skull, peered at it for a few moments, then tossed it aside. “High heat,” he said. “A very powerful explosion. Not nuclear though. Most interesting.”
It was a shock for Barsk to see the ex — naval commando almost reflective as they both looked about.
Leksi crooked a long finger from his position near the blast wall. Barsk joined him. On the floor below was the gleaming steel tube of the generator, still standing straight and tall, the silver still shining amidst the black coils that fed power to it. More skeletons littered that floor.
“What are those things?” Barsk asked. There were four coffins next to the tube, a skeleton lying in each open container.
Leksi was turning the pages on the papers. “They’re called sensory deprivation tanks in here.”
“Why did they need those?”
Leksi waved some of his men forward, ignoring the question. “We need to unbolt that tube and then we’re going to have to winch it to the surface. I want you five to work on freeing the tube. You others, prepare a brace on the surface so we can use both the plane and the backhoe to haul that thing out of here.”
Barsk was looking more closely at the coffins. He could see the metal sockets implanted in each skull.