Nathan Archer - Cold War

Pale emptiness stretched from horizon to horizon before him. Despite the night and the heavy overcast, the world was dimly lit by reflected glow, trapped between clouds and snow; the sun would not be seen here again until the approach of spring, but there was still a faint light.

A strong wind was blowing down from the north, howling like a living thing, as if the air itself were in pain from the cold. Fine powdered snow, frozen as hard and sharp as ground glass, whipped across the icy gray desolation in bitter swirls and eddies.

Taro kept his head bent, shielding his face from the wind and cold, as he trudged across the wasteland. He didn’t need to see very far to know where he was going; despite the drifting, blowing snow and the dim light, he could see the tracks of his runaway.

The snow was packed down by wind and frozen into ice, so that Taro walked on a surface as solid as bare ground, and his prey’s tiny hooves hadn’t pierced it any more than his own heavy boots did. The sharp tips, though, which had evolved to keep reindeer from skidding on the ice, had chipped at the surface here and there, and the tiny marks had caught the snow as it blew across. Miniature drifts had formed in shifting chevrons a few centimeters across, growing from the chips like crystals growing in a supersaturated solution.

At the end of the trail Taro knew he would find his missing reindeer. He suspected that he would not find it alive-a healthy animal would not have wandered off aimlessly into the taiga, leaving the herd behind, and Taro expected to find this one dead or dying.

Still, it was his duty to find it and to retrieve whatever might still be of use. If the meat was unfit to eat there would still be the hide and bone.

If he lost the trail he would turn back, and hope to stumble across the carcass on some other, warmer day.

Another man, accustomed to a warmer climate, might have worried about spoilage ruining the meat, or about pilferage, if he left the carcass for a week or two, but Taro had grown up in this Siberian wasteland, had spent his life here; nothing ever spoiled here, nothing rotted, and there was no one, no thief or predator, to steal anything. The dead could lie untouched for millennia. Mammoths found in the ice near here had still been fit to eat.

He glanced up as something caught his eye, a glimpse of movement, a flicker across the ice. He blinked and peered upward.

Something was moving across the sky above the clouds, something that glowed brightly enough to be seen faintly even through the gray overcast.

A new American plane, perhaps, testing the borders? There had been rumors for years of a craft the Americans called “Aurora” that could evade every Russian defense-but that was supposed to be invisible from the ground, flying too high and too fast to be seen.

The glow was brightening steadily, descending through the clouds and moving nearer at a fantastic speed.

It had to be Aurora, Taro thought; what else could move so fast? He had seen Russian planes many times, on patrol, on maneuvers, bringing in the men and equipment for the pipeline and the drilling sites and the pumping stations all along the Assyma section of the Yamal oil fields, and none of them had ever moved anywhere near so fast as this.

And then the thing burst out of the clouds in a ball of brilliant orange flame, washing the pale landscape in vivid color. It roared overhead before Taro could see it clearly; the air itself rippled visibly with the ferocity of the thing’s passage.

It was huge, and made a sound louder than anything Taro had ever before heard, far louder than the howl of the worst storm he could remember. In its wake the air seemed warmer-but what sort of craft could warm the Siberian winter itself? That had to be an illusion, Taro told himself.

And then the thing crashed, with a boom that made the roar of its passage seem a mere whisper.

Taro turned and stared after it.

The horizon glowed orange, and again he thought he could feel heat, as if from an immense fire.

That had been unmistakably a crash, not a mere landing. If that had been the American Aurora spy plane, then it was down, and the authorities in Moscow would want to know-the long Cold War might be over, but that didn’t mean the Russian authorities would pass up a chance to get a good close look at some top-secret American technology. The Russian government wouldn’t mind a chance to score a few moral points against the Americans, either-a polite complaint about Americans spying on peace-loving post-Communist Russia might coax a few face-saving trade concessions out of somebody.

There might even be survivors, and a heroic rescue could be very good not just for Russia, but for Taro. He might be famous, might be taken to Moscow and given a medal or something. While he was reasonably content as a reindeer herder, he wouldn’t mind a taste of city life, or at least a chance to pick up a few modern comforts.

If he headed back to the village and the radio there was working, he could contact the army squad stationed at the Assyma pumping station, and they could send out a truck or helicopter-but that would take three hours back, and at least an hour for the truck or copter to find the crash site.

If he headed for the site directly, though, he judged that he could reach it in an hour and a half to two hours. If there were injured survivors that extra hour or two might be crucial. If there were valuables to be salvaged, he wouldn’t mind getting to them first rather than merely guiding in a bunch of soldiers.

He set out across the ice, walking straight toward the orange glow and abandoning his hunt. His lost reindeer would keep.

In the Siberian cold anything would keep.

After he had been walking for a little over an hour Taro began to notice the warmth more than ever. At first he still told himself it was his imagination, that he was dreaming that cookfire heat; after all, the glow had faded away, and he was steering now by more ordinary landmarks. He couldn’t really be feeling any heat from the downed aircraft, not when he was still, so far as he could judge, about two kilometers away, and when the craft had been down for so long.

Ten minutes later, though, he could no longer deny it; he was sweating in his heavy furs. He threw back his hood, and meltwater dripped down his brow.

He blinked it away and stopped in his tracks.

He was still a kilometer or so from the long, crooked ravine that cut across the icy plain, but he could see it ahead. That wasn’t what troubled him; he had known the ravine was there. No, he stopped because the ice between himself and the ravine didn’t look right; it glistened, not with the hard crystalline glitter it ought to have, but with a slick wet gleam.

Taro frowned, took several steps, then carefully knelt down. He put a gloved finger to the ground, then picked it up and looked at it.

The tanned leather of his glove had darkened with moisture. The ice was wet.

He wasn’t dreaming the heat. It was real.

He didn’t like that at all. A thaw in the Siberian winter? Something melting the permafrost? Even the American Aurora superplane surely couldn’t generate that much heat!

The rifle he carried on his back was rarely used. He had it not because he really needed it, but as a mark of status among his people, a reminder that his grandfather had fought the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War. There were few predators to defend against out here on the ice, either human or beast; the stories of wolves prowling the vicinity dated mostly from his grandfather’s time and might just be the lies of old men who wanted to reaffirm their own claims to manhood when they could no longer act as men.