Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

by now. No other whiffs had come. Was it likely that an old man of eighty-one had come up with something on his own? It was not likely. Far more likely, the years of isolation had brought on childish delusions. There was something childishly gleeful in the tone of the messages.
    Hendricks hesitated only briefly, then he closed the inquiry down: papers to be kept current for six months in case by chance something new did come up, although he didn’t expect anything to come up.
    But something did then come up. By chance something quite new came up.

7
    The satellite came up, over the Indian Ocean. And twenty minutes later it was over Siberia.
    The satellite was one of a group of three delivered to the USmilitary by Boeing, a development of the company’s Big Bird series. Each of the three had a telemetry package that allowed instantaneous relay, and each was in a slightly different orbit.
    This one was in a polar orbit. Travelling north-south, it made a complete circuit of the earth once every ninety-four minutes. Its intelligence-gathering equipment was turned on only over the territory of the old Soviet Union, however. There it had to monitor upwards of 500 land objectives.
    An hour before another satellite had overflown the site, and there had been no recordable activity. But when this one came round, 300 miles to the west of it, the fires were already burning.
    At first the fact went unnoticed for the satellite’s current objective was a missile base. Of this it had to take four still photographs and ten seconds of video. All the stills were good, despite freckling along the right-hand edges, but the results showed no change and were merely saved for reference.
    The video was different. Something was spotted moving in it. A loaded flat-bed truck was moving. This was unusual at three o’clock in the morning, and attention was diverted to it to find out what it might be carrying through deep snow at that hour. For this reason some time passed before it was noticed that the right-hand edge of the video was also freckled.
    Optical enhancement brought up the freckles as flames and interest rapidly switched to the new development.
    The location of the distant fire was soon established, as was its probable origin in an explosion: the flames were still shooting one hundred feet high. This was surprising, for the low-rated objective had not been known to house explosives. In earlier listings it had been marked as a weather station. Later analysis had shown the ground to be covered over a wide area with ventilators, indicating that work went on below ground, and too extensively for simple meteorology. The radio traffic and transport pattern showed no military significance, however, so the low rating was retained, but allvisible structures were marked and thereafter updated. They consisted of a few concrete buildings, telegraph poles, generator housings, power pylons, and a fenced area of sheds, evidently used for storage, just off the landing strip.
    The enhanced freckles were compared with earlier photographs, and some differences emerged. The largest concrete structure, apparently the dome of something below, had vanished, and so had the generator housings. Pylons and poles had been toppled, sheds blown down, and burning debris scattered over a wide area.
    More optical work brought other images into definition. A thin thread-like line of beads, at first glance glowing debris, was detached from its background of flame and translated into a formation of men. They were standing in line, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front. They were bandaged about the eyes, and dressed only in underpants – their clothing evidently abandoned in flight from the burning buildings.
    Slightly apart from this line was another man, also in underpants, but with no discernible bandage. This individual had something in his hands. It was not possible to see what it was, but a study of the video showed his head going up and down while