Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

Sam scrolled through the tyrant’s contact list, adamant to make his call quickly before having to discard the cell phone to prevent getting tracked. The name he was looking for appeared on the list and he could not help but throw an air fist pump for it. He dialed and waited anxiously, lighting up when the call was answered.

“Detlef! It’s Sam.”

Nina had not seen Purdue since she had struck him against the temple with her two-way radio the day before. However, she had no idea how much time had passed since, but by her exacerbated condition she knew it had to have been a while. Tiny blisters had formed on her skin, and her inflamed nerve endings had made it impossible to touch anything. Over the past day, she had attempted to contact Milla several times, but walloping Purdue had rattled the wiring out of place and left her with a device that could only produce white noise.

“Just one! Just give me one channel, you piece of shit,” she wailed softly in despair as she pushed the talk button incessantly. Only the hiss of white noise persisted. “I'm going to run out of batteries soon,” she muttered. “Milla, come in. Please. Anyone? Please, please come in!” Her throat was on fire and her tongue swollen, but she held on. “Christ, the only people I can contact with white noise are ghosts!” she shouted in frustration, aggravating her throat. But Nina did not care anymore.

The smell of ammonia and coal and death reminded her that hell was closer than her last breath. “Come on! Dead people! Dead…fucking Ukrai…dead people of Russia! The Red Dead, come in! Over!”

Hopelessly lost inside the bowels of Chernobyl, her hysterical cackle traveled through the underground system the world had forgotten decades ago. Inside her mind everything was nonsensical. Memories flashed and melted with plans for the future, becoming lucid nightmares. Nina was losing her mind faster than losing her life, so she just laughed and laughed.

“Didn’t I kill you yet?” she heard a familiar threat in the pitch darkness.

“Purdue?” she sniffed.

“Aye.”

She could hear him lunge, but she had lost all feeling in her legs. Moving or fleeing was not an option anymore, so Nina closed her eyes and welcomed the end of her pain. A steel pipe came down on her head, but her migraine had numbed her skull, so the warm blood only tickled her face. Another blow was due, but it never came. Nina's eyes grew heavy, but for a moment she saw a mad whirling of lights and heard the sound of violence.

She was lying there, waiting to die, but she heard Purdue scuttling away into the dark like a cockroach to get away from the man standing just outside the reach of his light. He bent over Nina, gently lifting her into his arms. His touch hurt her blistered skin but she did not care. Half awake, half lifeless, Nina felt him carry her toward a bright light overhead. It reminded her of the accounts of dying people seeing white lights from heaven, but in the sharp whiteness of daylight from outside the well mouth Nina recognized her rescuer.

“Widower,” she sighed.

“Hey sweetheart,” he smiled. Her tattered hand caressed his empty eye socket, where she had stabbed him, and she began to sob. “Don't worry,” he said. “I lost the love of my life. An eye is nothing compared to that.”

When he gave her fresh water outside, he explained that Sam had called him, having had no idea that he had no longer been with her and Purdue. Sam was safe, but he had asked Detlef to find her and Purdue. Detlef had used his security and surveillance training to triangulate radio signals coming from Nina's cell phone in the Volvo until he had been able to pin her location to Chernobyl.

“Milla broadcast again, and I used Kiril’s CB to tell them that Sam was safely away from Kemper and his compound,” he told her, while she was cradled in his arms. Nina smiled through cracked lips, her dusty face riddled with bruises, blisters and tears.

“Widower,” she dragged the word with her swollen tongue.

“Yes?”

Nina was about to pass out, but she forced her apology. “I’m so sorry I used your credit cards.”

Kemper was still nursing his brutalized face, but he was hardly crying about it. With the Amber Room beautifully converted to an aquarium of decorative gold carvings and stunning bright yellow amber over wooden patterns. It was a substantial aquarium right in the middle of his desert fortress, about 50m in diameter and 70m high, dwarfing the tank Purdue had been kept in during his stay there. Well-dressed, as always, the refined monster sipped his champagne, waiting for his scientific staff to isolate the first organism to be implanted into his brain.

A storm was raging over the Black Sun compound for the second day. It was a freak storm, unusual for that time of year, but the occasional bolts of lightning that struck were majestic and powerful. Kemper looked up to the sky and smiled. “I am God now.”

In the distance, Misha Svechin’s IL 76-MD cargo plane appeared through the raging clouds. The 93-ton aircraft careened along the turbulence and fluctuating currents. Aboard were Sam Cleave and Marko Strensky to keep Misha company. Tucked and safely secured in the bowels of the plane there were thirty drum loads of sodium metal, covered with oil to prevent contact with air or water — for now. The highly volatile element used in reactors as a heat conductor and coolant had two naughty traits. On contact with air it combusted. On contact with water it exploded.

“There! Down there. You cannot miss it,” Sam told Misha as the Black Sun compound came into view. “Even if his fish tank is out of reach this rain will do the job for us.”

“Correct, Comrade!” Marko laughed. “I have never seen it done on large scale before. Only in laboratory with small pea size sodium chunk in beaker. This is going on YouTube.” Marko always filmed everything he enjoyed. In fact, he had a questionable amount of video clips on his hard drive that had been recorded in his bedroom.

They circled the fortress. Sam winced with every flash of lightning, hoping it would not hit the plane, but the crazy Soviets seemed fearless and chirpy. “Will the drums break that steel roof?” he asked Marko, but Misha just rolled his eyes.

On the next turn, Sam and Marko cut loose the drums one by one, rapidly pushing them out of the aircraft to fall hard and fast through the roof of the compound. The volatile metal would take a few seconds on contact with water to ignite and explode, breaking the sheeting over the Amber Room plates and exposing the Plutonium to the heat of the explosion.

Once they had dropped the first ten drums, the roof in the middle of the UFO-shaped fortress collapsed, exposing the tank in the middle of the circle.

“There you go! Aim the others at the tank and then we must get the fuck out of this place quickly!” Misha shouted. He looked down on the scattering men and heard Sam say, “I wish I could see Kemper’s face one last time.”

Laughing, Marko looked down as the dissolving sodium started to build up. “This one is for Yuri, you Nazi bitch!”

Misha piloted the giant steel beast as far away as he could in the short time they had so that they could land a few hundred miles north of the impact zone. He did not want to be in the air when the bomb went off. They landed just over 20 minutes later in Kazaly. From the hard Kazakh ground, they looked to the horizon, beer in hand.

Sam hoped Nina was still alive. He hoped that Detlef had managed to find her and that he had refrained from killing Purdue after Sam explained that Carrington had shot Gabi while being in a hypnotic state under the influence of Kemper's mind control.