prologue for my novel

Prologue

June, 1986

The wind tore across the ragged ridgeline, rattling the metal siding of the barracks just above the mine’s yawning mouth. A storm was building—an angry wall of clouds rolling up from the valley, swallowing the sky in slate and violet. To the villagers on the mountainsides, it was just another sign of the Andes’ unpredictable wrath. To the handful of scientists working inside the mine, it was a warning they no longer had the luxury of ignoring.

Colonel Yuri Morozov adjusted his greatcoat against the cold and stubbed out a cigarette with hands that did not tremble, though his stomach roiled with unease. The storm wasn’t what unsettled him. It was the silence of those working below, and the knowledge that they were all now complicit in something Moscow would deny ever existed.

The operation had been simple on paper: survey the tin and silver mines that were known to have other ores, extract anything useful. Hoping for a uranium deposit or anything else they could weaponize, the Soviet Union had established a hidden research station in the Bolivian highlands. What they’d found was not just ore.

It was sickness.

A bacteria grew in a cavern half a kilometer inside the mine, behind a stone wall the Quechua miners had once stacked with prayers and offerings. Local stories called it “the devils throat.” The Soviets had laughed, at first. But laughter turned to unease when their scientists and engineers got sick. The miners sacrificed to the spirit they blamed for the illness and went to work in other mineshafts, where the dangers were more familiar: chemicals, explosives, and rockfalls. Long before the Russians arrived, they knew how to treat the ancient illness well enough to recover in weeks, yet exposure was painful enough that no one dared enter the cavern. It belonged to the devil who lived there.

But Soviet field scientists had scraped samples off the black-stained rock and isolated the living bacteria. For months, they experimented with it deep inside the mountain.

Inside the mine, the air grew colder the deeper one went, tinged with a musty, metallic tang that clung to the tongue. Just past a lone guard clad in what looked like an orange space suit, the mine widened into a natural cavern lit by humming arc lamps. In there, behind the edges of the wall they’d removed, sat the laboratory.

A bank of microscopes, coolers filled with petri dishes, and a mass spectrometer sat on stainless tables alongside the scientists’ lockers. Cages held white rats that shivered and twitched in a restless frenzy. On the workbenches, rows of metal cases stood like soldiers, each housing a cylindrical containment vessel no larger than a loaf of bread. Floating within each glass vessel, cloudy suspensions alive with something microscopic—something that had already killed too many.

That was where Colonel Morozov found Dr. Anya Alekseev.

Her gloved hands adjusted the dials on a monitor as she leaned over one of the cases. Tubes fed mixtures of pulverized ore and chemical reagents into the vessel, where the bacteria bloomed like smoke in water.

“We’ve managed to keep this strain alive longer than the others,” she reported without looking up. Her voice was muffled, smothered behind her gas mask. “Exposure tests on the rats suggest a doubling in potency. Hours instead of days.”

Morozov sweat inside his hazmat suit, despite the frigid air.

Just beyond the entrance, the young guard leaned on his rifle and watched. He was bored, yes, but not blind. He had heard enough fragments—strain, potency, symptoms—to know this wasn’t geology or metallurgy. Every time Anya or Morozov raised their voices, he filed the words away, curious despite himself. He had begun to wonder if Moscow was less interested in ore than in plague.

Morozov exhaled fog inside his mask, staring at the box as if it might lunge at him. “Potency is not our problem. Containment is. Your men are still dying.”

Anya finally turned, and for the first time Morozov noticed the pallor of her skin, the sheen of sweat under her eyes. “No matter what protective gear we use, it finds a way in,” she admitted. “Four days, Colonel. That’s the longest anyone lasts without symptoms, and that’s with protective gear. With direct contact, they didn’t even last a day.”

Another cough wracked her body. She ignored the flecks of red that spattered her clear mask, as if pretending it hadn’t happened might make it so. “What good is a weapon if it kills our own people before we can deploy it?”

Morozov scanned the other researchers who watched him, praying he’d brought orders to stop. Instead, they saw the fiery rash climbing his cheeks.

“Any word from Moscow?” Anya asked.

His lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Their response was predictable. Continue the research. Do not fail.”

Anya’s eyes widened in despair.

Morozov’s gaze hardened. “So we take a sample to Moscow. Let the Politburo breathe it in themselves.”

Anya’s eyes widened. “You would risk—”

“I would end this. If they see the truth, they cannot ignore it.”

Within the hour, the two of them carried a sealed container up the slope to the narrow dirt strip the Soviets had been using for resupply drops. Their two-seater plane sat waiting, an ungainly little machine barely capable of lifting in the thin mountain air. Morozov strapped himself into the pilot’s seat while Anya clutched the case to her chest as though it were her child.

The engine coughed in the thin air, the wings shuddering as they clawed skyward. For a fleeting moment, it seemed they might escape. Anya’s body convulsed, blood spattering across the instrument panel with each heaving cough. Morozov gritted his teeth, fighting to steady the stick, but his vision blurred. The plane banked once, clipped the ridge, and vanished in fire against the mountainside.

Unaware of the crash, the remaining researchers in the mine carried on, every one of them showing symptoms. They staggered through the motions, mixing samples, logging data, hoping against reason for a breakthrough that would make sense of the nightmare. Instead, the bacteria grew stronger, faster, crueler. One by one, they died at their benches, slumped over their notes, blood dried at the corners of their mouths.

The young guard posted in the tunnel watched the scientists perish. He refused to enter, but his ears rang with every shouted observation, every fevered note. He didn’t fully understand, but he understood enough to know they had built a monster, and that Moscow had wanted it.

When the last man fell silent, the guard abandoned his post and fled into the mountains.

Ten days later, with no contact from the Russians, the mine’s owner, Frank Aguirre, grew impatient. A wealthy Bolivian entrepreneur with political connections, Aguirre had been happy to lease the Soviets his mine for their “survey work.” But silence meant trouble, and trouble meant lost profits.

He ordered a team of miners into the shaft to see what had happened.

They returned pale and trembling. They spoke of bodies scattered across the lab, of blood-caked mouths, of a stench that clung to their clothes. One of them coughed so hard he vomited on the spot.

Aguirre listened without expression and commanded them to seal the lab so no one else would enter. For hours, they lugged bags of mortar to reseal the stone wall the previous generation had stacked. When the men emerged, relieved to be done, Aguirre stood waiting near the mouth of the mine, revolver heavy in his hand. For a long moment he said nothing, weighing his loss of profit, hearing Moscow’s whispers in his mind and seeing his investors’ faces in La Paz.

Then he raised the pistol.

No one would know what was inside there.