with triple coils of razor wire. Probably when it was new, the zinc-coated razor wire could slice open a man like a sharp scalpel, even through the barest contact. Now, the dirty oxidized wire had the capability to infect wounds as well as inflict them.
The fence had another dangerous attribute. At random intervals, pulses of electricity energized the fence and stunned any living thing that happened to be touching it at the time. Ordinary bolt cutters could not chew into the hardened steel fence and its concrete foundation prevented tunneling under. Flood lights and television cameras were additional deterrents to trespassing, day or night.
He could trust Yuri to have checked every foot of the fence. Yuri was dependable, he was a friend, and they had meaningful history. That didn’t mean he could trust him completely, of course. Who could you trust completely? Sergey didn’t trust anyone completely, no one could. Sergey figured if you couldn’t anticipate what you yourself would do under any given circumstances, how could you possibly anticipate what a friend would do? You couldn’t, of course.
But over the last ten years, nothing Yuri had done belied Sergey’s trust – they needed each other to stay alive, and that is the best motive for trust. Once that is not there, or once a person’s life is better served by betraying another, trust was just unmapped territory full of surprises and often horror. This Sergey had learned very young and very well.
Sergey idled the Toyota just inside the gate to let the grader finish scraping the snow off the parking lot and entrance area. The snow had stopped falling, and the storm clouds were being pushed off by a cold north wind.
From checking his notes, he knew that inside the visible wire fence was a second, invisible, infrared fence composed of criss-crossing beams in the infrared spectrum that would instantly signal any interference with the fence by sounding alarms in the Security Control Centre. The beams were transmitted by compact senders mounted in the posts of the main fence and picked up by equally compact receivers, also mounted in the fence posts. Most of the time, this infrared fence was extremely effective for detecting the motion of warm bodies, whether they be men or large animals, and the threshold of sensitivity had been set to exclude nuisance penetrators like small rodents and birds and flying papers and leaves. Though it was relatively free of false alarms, it was not fully reliable in very dense fog or snowfall.
“Gori, gori, moya…” he hummed aloud as he glanced around the compound noting the fuel storage tank that lay far back in the compound near the fence. The small shed beside the tank was used to store cans of kerosene and gasoline. Rusty mining carts, some with a wheel missing or a side caved in, were strategically placed to give the impression that this was an under-producing and practically useless operation.
In the dim lighting of the outdoor flood lamps, the dingy main building looked like a huge steel shoebox. At one end, it sat solidly against the face of the mountain, and, at the other, was anchored by a stubby tower extending three floors above the flat roof. The robust steel roof trusses and steel supporting columns were covered on the interior with alloy steel mesh to limit the damaging effects of an explosion. The exterior was sheathed with galvanized corrugated iron that rusted quickly in the harsh Siberian climate. When it did rain, which was not often, the rust washed down in streaks like dirty reddish-brown tears that stained the outside walls in places where the galvanizing had thinned to nothing. A row of small windows, obscure from dust and dirt, lined up under the roofline facing the guarded perimeter gate. The only other visible openings in the building envelope was a massive steel vehicle door and beside it, a steel pedestrian door.
At such a remote outpost, the pace was unhurried as evidenced by the slow-moving grader. Sergey sat back with his cigarette and admired how the building that appeared to end at the face of the mountain, actually was connected by a tunnel and three sets of reinforced steel doors to the cave inside the mountain.
“Oh chee chorniya, oh chee strastnye, ochee zhguchie, predkrasnye..…” he bellowed, singing along with Rebroff and tapping a foot on the imagined drum.
This camouflaged operation deceived American spy satellites that orbited high above, circling the earth once every ninety minutes. Their orbits shifted over by a graduated amount on each pass so that eventually every square meter of Russian territory could be scanned if the Americans chose to do so. They did not, of course, because the cost in terms of money, resources, and manpower would be too heavy, even for them. The amount of data accumulated by constant scanning would be unmanageable. So they scanned the globe only sparsely and randomly. The data were analyzed even more randomly, then dumped if there was no apparent threat to their national security. They looked mainly for new construction and changes to previous installations. As with animals, it is movement or changes that alert the observer to possible danger.
Since the Americans only scanned Russian territory randomly, the Russians continually acquired American scanning schedules through agents and informers based in the United States. Armed with this intelligence, they merely scheduled their secret activities accordingly.
Early in the cold war, the Soviets leaked news to the West that prospectors looking for gold and diamond deposits in the Orlugen Mountains of Eastern Siberia had instead discovered a deposit of copper ore. Their objective was to conceal the real discovery of a new uranium deposit within the mountain.
But now, Sergey had a new assignment here in the land of a billion stars. Who knew how bad the project would be, but Sergey had learned to face what he didn’t like. By deliberately facing it, he found that whatever the misery was, it would lose it’s hold. If he just got on with the job he avoided hours and days of anguish dreading what he would have to end up doing anyway.
For this new mission, Sergey arrived in the rented J40 the week before, and Yuri and his family followed by bus the next morning. To put off any suspicion, they put out a simple but plausible cover story that they had recently been discharged from the army only to find that there was no housing and little chance of work for them in their new civilian life. Their former positions in the military police qualified them for security work, but not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, or any other main city. So, when they were finally offered jobs at this isolated location, they took them. A perfectly reasonable situation.
Yuri spent the week sussing out the people of the town, listening and looking and meeting the locals, and engaging in all the Russian activities; arm wrestling, drinking vodka, singing, gambling and helping with crosswords. The locals were more than happy to welcome a new character since they would have few opportunities to meet new people when winter set in.
Magda told him that she saw Katya, the visiting analyst, noting the license number of an old green and yellow Lada car parked near the shops.
“Elovach’s car. He’s the acting supervisor,” Yuri added.
This analyst, Katya, and the acting supervisor, Elovach had arrived a week apart. Coincidence? But if they knew each other before, surely, she would know the Lada was his car.
With Yuri looking after the personnel, Sergey spent the week inspecting the layout and condition of the inside of the plant, quickly learning the strengths and weaknesses of the operation. He located the uranium ore at the farthest corner of the natural cave that was much larger than Sergey had expected. At some time during the geological history of the region and the birth of the mountains, an underground river had carved out softer stone, leaving a huge granite-lined cave. Subsequently, when the mountain range was pushed further upward by movement between the Russian and North American tectonic plates, the river was cut off and the cave dried up. A small opening to the outside was the only clue to its existence.
Only a short distance away, a twenty-kilometer long lake remained as a marker to the source of the original underground river. Now, the lake was the head of a surface river, the Seytchan.
As soon as the cave had been discovered, the Soviets recognized the usefulness of constructing a special plutonium producing plant inside concealed from the satellite snooping eyes of the Americans. Weapons-grade plutonium was a very precious commodity and a vital element in building the Soviet Union's rapidly growing nuclear arsenal.