Zero Hour

SIXTEEN

Mist fell on the grassy steppes of the Kamchatka Plain. The mottled gray sky obscured the mountain peaks and threatened rain.

“Pull!”

With that shout, the gates of several cages were opened. The flutter of wings burst forth.

Three shots rang out. Three birds, fleeing in different directions, fell in rapid succession, feathers exploding outward like dust.

Standing in the middle of the carnage, Anton Gregorovich pumped another shell into the shotgun’s breach. Three shots, three hits.

Grinning at his own prowess, he placed the weapon down and glanced at his two assistants, teenage boys who crouched by a circle of cages. “How many left?”

“Four,” one of the boys said.

“All of them, this time,” Gregorovich demanded.

The boys nodded and rigged the cages. Gray-winged birds jumped nervously in the traps.

Gregorovich stood calmly. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, listening for the sound of flight.

Six foot two, two hundred and forty-five pounds, Gregorovich wore fatigue pants in an Arctic-camouflage pattern and no shirt at all, despite temperatures barely out of the thirties. His muscular body was no more than one percent fat. He subsisted on a diet of almost pure protein, engineered supplements, and nutrient cocktails developed by the Russian Olympic Team. Standing motionless, he looked like a statue, like some sculptor’s version of the ideal man carved from a block of stone.

In many ways, he was more fit than any athlete since his regimen included steroids and human growth hormones and other factors banned by the athletic associations of the world.

It was only fair. In his world, the consequences of failure were not represented by second-place medals or dismissal from an event. If Gregorovich faltered, he died.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said quietly.

Silence for a moment. He could sense the boys creeping into position, moving the cages quietly, unwilling to give anything away. He appreciated that they wanted to test him. He kept his eyes closed, his heart rate steady, and his mind clear. Seconds ticked by, followed by the sudden bang of the cage doors opening.

Gregorovich snapped his head up and opened his eyes. In an instant, he’d fixed on the birds, once again flying in different directions. He yanked a pair of Makarov pistols from holsters on his hips like those of a gunslinger from the Old American West.

He spun to the right with a gun in each hand and pulled both triggers. The two pigeons on that side went down simultaneously.

He twisted to the left, spotted the third target, flying low. He took aim with his right hand and fired twice. The pigeon dropped into the long grass. The fourth was fifty yards off by now.

Gregorovich fired both guns at it, clipping a wing. The bird fell in a spiral, like a World War Two aircraft that had been shot down. It hit the ground before he could fire again and finish it for certain.

“Damn it!”

The boys glanced at him nervously, still crouched as low as they could get. He could see fear in their eyes. Before he could reassure them, a new sound reached out across the tundra: a helicopter coming toward them.

Gregorovich turned and saw one of the monstrous Mi-24 models, lumbering beneath the overcast sky. A phalanx of missile pods and multibarreled cannon were displayed on pods beneath its stubby wings. Its six-bladed rotor churned overhead in a great and constant whirl.

The helicopter dropped lower and lower, slowing as it approached and then hovering. Finally, it touched down on the grass fifty yards away. Before the engines even reached idle, a side door had been thrown open and a man in a heavy overcoat had climbed out and begun hiking toward Gregorovich.

Even from this distance, Gregorovich recognized him: Dmitry Yevchenko, one of Russia’s oil billionaires.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Yevchenko had joined the scramble for wealth, transforming a dying Siberian oil field into a Eurasian empire of sorts. Like many of the new billionaires, Yevchenko had been ruthless on his way to the top. But, unlike most, he’d seen the need to change when the writing appeared on the wall.

His corporation now filled the coffers of Communist Party stalwarts. He hired their friends and family members. He ignored the graft and theft he had to deal with, considering these things another form of taxation and calculating them into his business plan as a separate line item.

But the past was hard to hide, it did not vanish just because Yevchenko wanted it to. A few months back, a reporter had begun probing for the truth, getting fairly close to some answers, before dying suddenly in a plane crash. An overzealous politician who’d asked for too much met a different fate: drowning in the Black Sea.

It wasn’t by chance that Yevchenko was called the Siberian Butcher, the bodies of his enemies lay everywhere. But the name itself was a misnomer. Yevchenko had never killed anyone. Gregorovich had always done it for him.

“Take the horses,” Gregorovich said to the boys. “I’ll meet you back in the village.”

The boys did as they were ordered, disappearing as Yevchenko approached.

“Playing with children these days, Gregorovich?”

Yevchenko had always been portly, now he looked rotund, even beneath the heavy coat. Apparently, he’d been eating well in Moscow.

“Boys from the village,” Gregorovich replied. “Their mother is appealing to me, and they have nothing better to do.”

“I see,” Yevchenko said. “And do you?”

Gregorovich pulled a gray shirt over his head. “What are you bothering me for?”

“I’ve been at an emergency meeting with members of the party,” Yevchenko explained.

“Are they trying to take control?”

“No, nothing like that. They have learned that what’s good for us is good for Russia.”

“Then why do you look as if you’ve seen a ghost?”

“Because I have.”

Yevchenko’s hands were stuffed deep into his pockets, the collar of his coat was pulled up high. It was mid-March, and he was freezing. The Siberian Butcher had gone soft. “Why don’t you come to it, my friend?” Gregorovich said to him.

“What do we fear?” Yevchenko asked rhetorically. “Either the failure to get what we desire or the loss of that which we have. Our business, our economy, our nation’s very existence, is linked primarily to one thing and one thing only: energy. Coal, oil, natural gas. We’re now the world’s largest producer of crude, outstripping the Saudis for the past two years. For a decade, we’ve been the largest producer of natural gas, and we possess the most extensive reserves of coal on the planet. These are the resources that will sustain us. We will sell them to power-hungry China, India, Europe for ever-increasing prices. It is nothing less than our life’s blood. But now we face a threat that could take it away in the blink of an eye.”

Gregorovich picked up the shotgun and began walking, more interested in finding the wounded bird than continuing this conversation. Unfortunately, Yevchenko followed him.

“Five years ago, I sent you on a mission,” Yevchenko explained. “The Japanese were developing a way to extract energy from the air around us. They were planning a fleet of purely electric cars, a national grid that did not require power plants of oil, coal, or natural gas. And they were greedily looking forward to exporting the technology to the rest of the world, gaining more wealth for themselves and slamming the door of poverty in our faces yet again.”

“The Yagishiri experiments.”

“So you remember.”

“Of course I remember,” Gregorovich snapped. “I destroyed the laboratory and killed the scientists.”

Yevchenko raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

Gregorovich was looking in the grass for the pigeon. He found feathers and a trail of blood. “What are you suggesting?”

“Much like this wounded pigeon,” Yevchenko said, “it seems you did not obliterate the threat as completely as you claimed.”

Gregorovich stopped his search and turned toward Yevchenko. “The lab was annihilated. We used enough explosives to bring down a city block. The thermite burned everything to cinders. All record of what they were attempting was destroyed. And, before that, I shot every one of those poor bastards myself.”

“Someone survived.”

“Impossible.”

“The experiments have begun again,” Yevchenko explained, “in secret.”

Gregorovich looked away, taking a deep breath of the pure Siberian air. He figured there was a less sinister explanation.

“You knew we were merely delaying the inevitable,” he said. “If this scientific theory is valid, eventually someone else will stumble onto it and complete the work. Even if this theory proves false, change will come from another avenue. One day, there will be a solar panel that is one hundred percent efficient or a way to economically harvest energy from the tides or the waves or the wind. When that happens, there will be no more need for the Gazproms, Aramcos, or Exxons of this world.”

“Yes, of course!” Yevchenko shouted. “But let it happen a hundred years from now. We’ve spent a hundred billion dollars over the last three years, buying up new reserves of oil and natural gas. Huge portions of the government budget have gone into infrastructure for our industry. We cannot have those investments be wasted. Not now, not at this juncture.”

Gregorovich went back to his search, pressing down the long grass with his boots, following the trail of blood. “Even if the Japanese develop this system, it will take decades to build out the infrastructure,” he said. “Decades more to change the world.”

“No,” Yevchenko said. “When the change comes, it comes suddenly. Ten years ago, cell phones were the gadgets of the rich. Now they blanket the Earth. The trillion dollars spent on landlines for the world’s phone companies are fast approaching worthlessness.”

Gregorovich still hadn’t found the pigeon. He paused to focus on his old mentor once more. “Not like you to show fear, my friend. Perhaps you’ve lived in the comfort of Moscow’s bosom for too long.”

“No need for jealousy, you could have joined me.”

“And live in fear like you?” Gregorovich shook his head. “You’re screaming bloody murder over a pipe dream and a long-shot possibility. That doesn’t add up to me. What is it that really scares you?”

Yevchenko seemed to shiver a little more. He hesitated and then finally spoke. “I’ve received a threat. It claims we will suffer for what we did. It comes from Thero himself. It includes details only someone who was there would know. It promises that the martyrs of Yagishiri will be avenged, that their blood will be repaid a millionfold. What once was designed for peace will now be used for war.”

Gregorovich considered this. He couldn’t imagine anyone surviving the explosions and fire he’d caused. The lab had been turned into a smoking crater two hundred feet wide. The fire had burned so hot that Gregorovich and another commando had been singed from a long distance away. “Someone is using his name to scare you.”

“Perhaps,” Yevchenko agreed. “But, either way, they must be stopped. And the technology destroyed once and for all.”

Gregorovich paused, wondering who might be perpetrating this hoax. “As I recall, there was a woman, an Australian. She was a colleague of Thero’s, a friend of his son and daughter. She denounced the work as a waste of time, and remained in Australia when Thero and his team went to Japan.”

Yevchenko nodded. “We put tabs on her already, she’s not the cause. But she’s a danger to us nonetheless, especially now that she’s working with the Americans.”

“How did they get involved in your little mess?”

“There was an incident in Australia,” Yevchenko said. “The woman you spoke of was rescued by an American from their National Underwater and Marine Agency. We believe they’re also looking for Thero. Two of their ships have just been diverted toward Perth, a third toward Sydney.”

Gregorovich had heard of NUMA. Though their work was civilian in nature and their staff mostly scientists and environmental do-gooders, some in Russia were convinced that it was an offshoot of the NSA. Gregorovich doubted this. But even he had to admit they ended up in more scrapes than the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Why NUMA?”

Yevchenko shrugged. “No one knows. But, most likely, they intend to steal whatever they discover and develop it for America. As I’m sure you can understand, such an outcome is completely and categorically unacceptable.”

Perhaps this was what Yevchenko and the party leaders feared the most. “You should have listened to me the first time,” Gregorovich said. “I would have brought Thero and the other scientists to you. This would have been your prize to exploit.”

“All we want is the status quo,” Yevchenko explained. “It was your job to ensure that. As far as the party is concerned, it still is.”

Yevchenko’s gaze was harsh, his voice firm and bitter. Apparently, there was a little fire left in his soul after all, at least on this subject.

“What are you saying?”

“You must find Thero or this imposter and destroy him. You must erase from existence all record of their research, all evidence of their efforts. And you must not leave any loose strings to haunt us this time.”

He understood the context. This was not a request. “I did not fail.”

“Something slipped through your grasp.”

Gregorovich fumed at the insinuation. There had to be another explanation. It seemed he would have to find that explanation himself. “If you want to stop Thero, you’ll have to locate him first. The woman is the key. That’s undoubtedly why the Americans and Australians are using her.”

“What do you suggest?”

“You have men watching her?”

Yevchenko nodded.

“Have them capture her and bring her to whatever command post you’re setting up for me,” Gregorovich suggested.

“We have a ship awaiting your arrival. A team of commandos were flown to it yesterday. They have no knowledge of the situation but will follow your orders.”

“I’d rather hire my own,” Gregorovich said.

“No,” Yevchenko said.

Gregorovich turned away, noticing movement in the long grass ahead of him. The pigeon he’d wounded was there, trying desperately to drag its damaged body through the pasture. For a moment, he thought of blasting it with the shotgun. But it no longer mattered to him. He had a new quarry to hunt now.

Yevchenko saw it as well, stepping forward.

“Leave it,” Gregorovich said. “Let it suffer.”

Yevchenko stepped away. He seemed half pleased and half apprehensive. “You’re a very cold man, Anton Gregorovich. This is why we choose you. Do not fail us again or the suffering will be yours.”