CHAPTER 21
Soledar, Ukraine
The last time Artem had been in Soledar, the fighting went from house to house, so confused and fast that nobody could keep track of who was dead or alive or where the line was.
Then it had been a matter of getting out however they could, looking like person-shaped rocks in their fatigues as they ducked from tree to broken tree, car to car, ditch to ditch to keep out of view of the drones, boots skidding on the frozen mud, and once or twice snatching glances back at the shell-blasted entrance of the salt mine.
All he’d been able to think was that he’d left his good belt in the locker room there at the end of his last shift.
He had come to a private conclusion that war was what happened when God crushed a century into an hour. Time and events compressed. He felt a hundred years old. Beside those desperate few months spent trying to defend the doomed city, the years that had followed felt like nothing in comparison.
Now that they were back, time was passing war-wise again.
Every single second was etched into him in laser detail.
He was always going to remember the briefing in the front room of what had been Mrs Chernychev’s end-of-terrace house, their map of the salt mine weighed down with eight of her porcelain models of kittens, which had survived, along with the horrifying flowery wallpaper, where grenade launchers had not.
He was always going to remember getting a lace doily stuck in the tread of his boot and hopping while he pulled it off.
And Anna staring at the enormous cross-stitched picture of dolphins on the wall, wondering aloud if they were sure Mrs Chernychev wasn’t a psychopath with bodies buried under the cherry tree, because, well, nobody liked dolphins that much.
“Okay, off we go,” said their captain, who conducted terrifying operations as if they were going for an afternoon stroll. He never spoke with any urgency, even if he was on fire.
They ran across the deserted railway, into the wreckage of the minehead. The stones from between the mauled tracks had been blasted everywhere, and it was impossible not to clatter them across the tarmac, but . . .
No rattle of gunfire. No whine of drones.
The intelligence was right. The Russians would be here somewhere, but they were not right here.
They clustered into the first shadows of the entryway.
“Artem, you’re up,” the captain said. “We’re following you. If you were five hundred tanks, where would you be?”
The intelligence had not stretched to where the five hundred tanks would be, only that they would be here, under a light garrison.
“This way,” said Artem, who had a decent idea.
He had worked in the mine for ten years.
Some of its main ways were vast: huge, echoing spaces carved into the eerie bulk of the salt, thirty metres high.
Others were little tunnels that delved deep, hewn by people, not machines.
Those were dangerous today, because nobody had any idea whether the Russians had stationed troops down here.
Probably they had: the mine was always fairly warm, it was safe from artillery, and it was difficult to hunt anyone down in the endless dark now that the electricity had been cut off.
Artem’s suspicion was that the tanks—if they existed at all and this wasn’t a horrible trap—would be in one of those main chambers, probably not far from the entrance. Tanks were wide: you wouldn’t fit them down the corridors much further.
Outside, the darkness had been silvery. In here, it was viscous, and much warmer.
The lights on their guns sliced it into pieces in the salt-glittering air.
Here and there, abandoned from the mine’s days as a health spa, there were café chairs and neat little tables, undamaged.
Some had ashtrays on them, and open magazines and books.
Russian. Everyone sharpened, but whoever those things belonged to, there was no sign of them.
The long, high hall was silent in the deep way of silence that had gone undisturbed for days.
Artem aimed his torch at the ground. There weren’t even footsteps in the salt. That was strange. It was just a perfect whiteness, like new frost.
It glittered on all the tables and chairs, too. On the magazines, even. It was thick in the air; he could taste it.
Despite all that, he felt like he had come home.
He always felt like that in the mine. Everyone did.
For all it was eerie, there was something welcoming about it, as though the ancient place was always pleased to see you.
It was what made people sing in the deep tunnels, and play jokes in the break rooms, and why it was such a lovely place to come to work.
It was why he’d missed it so much, and why he had volunteered to do this.
“Is it always like this?” the captain asked, coughing a little.
“No,” he whispered back. “This is weird.” He had to swallow. His throat felt like he had just choked on seawater. “Sir . . . what did your source say, exactly?”
“Five hundred tanks down here, and no obvious sign of the usual garrison for the last week. Why?”
“I don’t know, I just—it’s through here,” he interrupted himself as they reached the end of that first mammoth hallway.
He guided them left, to the broadest cavern.
There had been concerts down here, once.
He had once made friends with a beautiful violinist in that corner, over glasses of terrible wine.
“Oh, Artem, you shouldn’t have,” the captain breathed.
Tanks.
Row after row after row of them, vanishing back into the blackness, every one glimmering under a layer of new salt. When Artem moved his torchlight across them, he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that he was seeing images in the salt. He could only catch them from certain angles, though.
“Okay, let’s get some explosives into these,” the captain was saying. “You three, watch the hallway, we’re going to be making lots of noise.”
There were pictures in the salt. Birds, and trees, and people. Only, they weren’t drawn on. It was like they had grown that way.
His torch flickered. He smacked it, then realized other people were doing that too.
The captain held out a little device like a wand, and Artem almost swallowed his own tongue.
Krr. Krr. Krr.
“Dosimetry’s normal, it’s not radiation,” the captain said. “Come on, let’s go quick.”
Artem shook his head and clambered up the steps of a tank to open the top and chuck in a brick of PE8 plugged into one of the clever Bluetooth detonators that would mean the captain could set the whole lot off in one satisfying spectacular.
How many points did you get for five hundred tanks?
They were going to be able to get all the artillery they wanted from the government after this.
Away in the darkness, far into the great salt hall beyond the light of their torches, something thudded. It was a heavy noise, like a bomb landing a long way off, but it was inside the mine.
Everyone went still.
Another thud, and this time, there was light too. Red, just edging the darkness. Something was on fire.
A horrendous inhuman shriek howled out from the tunnels.
It was so loud that Artem had to smack his hands over his ears.
He had never heard anything like it, but deep down in his cells where the old memories of the time before fire still lay coiled, something recognised it.
He didn’t know what it was, but he knew to run.
His torch fluttered, and went out. Everyone’s did.
The dark thundered in, and so did something else.