The airspeed indicator showed that the Tu-95 was now travelling at just over 510 knots, its four mighty engines straining. ‘Begin blast procedure!’ he ordered. Across the cockpit, his co-pilot pulled a pair of thick, almost opaque dark goggles down over his eyes. Durnovtsev waited until the insectile lenses were secure before donning his own. Day turned to night, the instruments barely visible through the tinted glass.
But he knew that the sky would become much brighter very soon.
Volkov stared up at the clouds again. Even over the sound of the dogs, he could now hear the bomber. The rumbling drone was subtly different, though. A Doppler shift; the aircraft was moving away from him.
He shook off a vague sense of unease. Whatever the plane was doing, it could have nothing to do with him — or the reason he was here. He touched the steel cylinder’s case, making sure it was secured in place. It was. Reassured, he looked back as the sled crested a rise. The blackened remains of the facility stood out against the snow, the entrance to the pit an ominous yawning mouth. The runestone was a single broken tooth at its edge.
There was no sentiment as Volkov regarded his former workplace for the last time. What mattered above all else was the work itself; what he had discovered, and where it could lead.
He turned his back on the scene, a small smile rising. With the sample in his possession and a new life awaiting in the United States, that work would continue.
‘Thirty seconds to detonation!’ Durnovtsev barked into the intercom. ‘All crew, brace for blast!’
He pulled his seat-belt straps as tight as they would go before clenching his hands back around the controls. The compass was an indiscernible shadow through the goggles, but holding the Tupolev on course was about to be the least of his concerns.
The ground controller continued the countdown. Twenty seconds. Ten. A last look around at the other crew in the cockpit. Dark shapes regarded him with impenetrable black eyes. One of the men in the seats behind him was holding a small cine camera, its lens pointed over Durnovtsev’s shoulder at the front windows. The pilot gave him a brief nod, trying to dismiss the thought that it might be the last time anyone ever saw his face, then looked ahead once more.
Five seconds. Four. Three—
Even through the heavily tinted goggles, the sky suddenly became as bright as the sun.
Volkov checked his watch again: 11.32. The dogs were making better time on the return trip to the boat, perhaps as eager as he was to get off the bleak island—
The leaden grey clouds turned pure white.
A flash lit the landscape from high above, its reflection from the snow blinding. Steam rose around the sled, the bitter cold dispelled by a searing heat…
Volkov’s last thought was one of horrified realisation — the bomber had been on a mission — before he and everything for miles around vanished in an unimaginable fire.
The Tsar Bomba detonated two and a half miles above the ground. Durnovtsev had done his job with great skill; even with the inherent inaccuracy of a parachute-dropped weapon, it was within half a mile of its target.
But a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb did not need to be precise.
The nuclear fireball, over two miles across, was as hot as the sun’s core. It never reached the ground, its own rapidly expanding shockwave bouncing back up off the surface to deflect it. But its flash alone, racing outwards at the speed of light, was enough to melt rock and vaporise anything lesser in a fraction of a second. Behind it came the blast, a wall of superheated air compressed so hard that it was practically solid. What little survived the flash was obliterated moments later.
The Tu-95 was almost thirty miles from Ground Zero when the bomb exploded. Even inside the plane, its crew felt a sudden heat as high-energy radiation, X-rays and gamma rays, passed through the aircraft — and their bodies. Sparks flashed around the cabin, the nuclear burst’s electromagnetic pulse surging through the bomber’s wiring. Durnovtsev heard an unearthly squeal in his headphones as their little loudspeaker converted the electrical overload into sound.
The brightness outside faded, but Durnovtsev knew the danger was far from over. The shockwave was on its way. Even with the Tupolev going flat out, it would catch up in seconds. He braced himself, hands on the controls ready to react…
It was as if the bomber had been rammed from behind by a speeding train.
For a moment Durnovtsev was stunned by the force of the impact, his restraints cutting tightly into his chest and crushing the breath from him. He struggled back to full awareness, gasping inside his oxygen mask as he pulled up the goggles. The sky was an angry orange-red, the fireball illuminating it like a miniature star. A colossal booming roar filled his ears: the sound of the atmosphere itself burning.
The artificial horizon was tumbling, the altimeter needle spinning rapidly down. A sickening feeling in his stomach told him he was in free fall. The Tupolev was dropping out of the sky, swatted like a wasp. It had already fallen a kilometre, and was still plunging…
The cloud layer below had been evaporated by the shockwave. The cold sea glinted through the windows — the Tu-95 was nose down. Durnovtsev pulled back hard on the controls to level out. The engines were still at full power; he eased them off to reduce the stress on the wings. The horizon slowly dropped back down through his view.
Nausea faded, the pressure on his chest easing. ‘Is everyone all right?’ he shouted over the crackling rumble. To his relief, all his crew replied in the positive. Next came a systems check. There had been some damage, but the aircraft was still in the sky with all four engines running. As far as Durnovtsev was concerned, that was a successful outcome.
He tried the radio. As he’d expected, nothing came through but a strange static screech. The explosion had ionised the atmosphere, making transmissions all but impossible. He had no idea how long it would take the effect to fade — all he could do was follow his orders and return to base.
The navigator provided him with the correct heading, but as he made the course change, Durnovtsev was stuck by a compulsion to see what he had wrought. He turned the bomber further so he could look back towards Novaya Zemlya through the cockpit’s side windows.
What he saw chilled his blood. The Tu-95 had climbed back to its original altitude, over six miles above sea level… but the mushroom cloud had already risen far higher, demonic fire still burning within as it roiled skywards. A ring of smoke and ash was expanding around its base.
Nothing on the ground could possibly have survived.
Durnovtsev stared at the fearsome sight for one last moment, then turned his plane for home.
The landscape around Ground Zero was now unrecognisable from what it had been just minutes before. Snow had flashed to steam, the frozen soil beneath turned instantly to cinders before being blown away by the immense force of the blast. Even the very rocks had melted into a glaze covering the bowl of the newly formed crater.
Nothing remained of the facility. It had been atomised, along with the two men. Even the runestone, which had withstood the harsh climate for over a thousand years, was gone.
As was the pit.
The blast had sealed it for ever, countless tons of molten and shattered rock filling it in. The dark secrets it contained would now remain hidden for eternity.
Except…
The runestone, and the words inscribed upon it, were no more. But they had been recorded, translated, and analysed. The men who had ordered Durnovtsev’s mission knew what it said.
And knew the danger it still represented. A danger they could not allow to be released.