The Source

It is now one hour since the American interceptors scrambled. Flying at close to Mach II, they have crossed the Hudson Bay from the Belcher Islands to a point about two hundred miles north of Churchill. In so doing they've just overtaken the AWACS and left it a few minutes behind. The AWACS has told them that their target is dead ahead, and that he's come down to 10,000 feet. And now, finally, just like the Migs before them, they spot the intruder.

That had been the narrative, the scenario that the CIA and MI6 had set for Simonov before showing him the AWACS film; and as the Briefing Officer had spoken those last three words, 'spot the intruder', so the film had started to roll. All very dramatic, and deservedly so ...

'Spot the intruder,' thought Simonov now, the words bitter on his tongue so that he almost spat them out loud. By God, yes! For that was the name of the game, wasn't it? In security, intelligence, spying: Spot the Intruder. And all sides playing it expertly, some a little better than others. Right here and now he was the intruder: Michael J. Simmons, alias Mikhail Simonov. Except he hadn't been spotted yet.

Then, as he re-directed all of his concentration back down onto the scene in the ravine, he sensed or heard something that didn't belong. From somewhere behind and below him had come the chink of a dislodged pebble, then lesser clatterings as the tumbling stone picked up smaller cousins on its way down the side of the mountain. The last leg of the climb had been along a steep, terraced ridge of rock, more a scramble than a real climb, and there had been plenty of loose scree and stony debris littered about. It could be that in his passing he'd left a pebble precariously balanced on some ledge, and that a strong gust had dislodged it. Simonov fancied that was all there was to it, but -

What if it was something else? He'd had this feeling recently - a sort of uneasy, half-formed suspicion - that someone, somehow, was aware of him. Someone he'd rather was not aware of him. He supposed this was a feeling spies learned to live with. Maybe it was just that everything had seemed to be going so smoothly, so that now he'd started to invent difficulties. He hoped that was all it was. But just to be sure...

Without looking back or changing his position, he unzipped his anorak, reached inside and came out with a blocky, wicked-looking short-barrelled automatic, its stubby silencer already attached. He checked the magazine, and silently eased it up again into the grip. And all of this done one-handed, with practiced ease, without pausing in the filming of the trucks in the ravine. Maybe the last couple of frames would be a bit off-centre. No big deal. Simonov was satisfied with what he'd got.

The tiny camera attached to Simonov's nite-lites clicked one last time and gave a warning whir, signalling that the sequence was complete. He undipped the camera and put it away. Then he wedged his binoculars securely in the base of a boulder, carefully cocked his pistol, squirmed about-face and got to his knees. Still concealed, he peered cautiously through the 'V formed where the tops of two rounded boulders leaned together. Nothing back there. Nothing he could see, anyway. Steep cliffs falling away for a thousand feet, with spurs extending here and there, and thinly-drifted snow lying white and gleaming on all flat surfaces. And way down there, obscured by the night, the tree-line and gentling lower slopes. Everything motionless and monochrome in dim starshine and occasional moonlight, where only the thin wind scattered little flurries of snow from the spurs and high ledges. There were plenty of places where men could hide themselves, of course - no one knew that better than Simonov, himself an expert in concealment - but on the other hand, if he'd been followed, why would they want to come up here? Easier to wait for him below, surely? Yet still the feeling persisted that he was not alone, that feeling which had grown in him increasingly over his last two or three visits to this place.

This place, this spawning ground for utterly alien monsters...

He got back down into his original position, recovered the nite-lites and brought them to his eyes. In the ravine, where the steep road hugged the face of the defile down to the towering twin walls of the dam and the curved lead surface between them, a cavernous opening in the cliff blazed with light. The last truck turned left off the road onto a level staging area, then passed in through huge, wheeled, steel-framed lead doors. A gang of yellow-clad traffic controllers flagged the truck rumblingly inside and out of sight, then followed it into the blaze of illumination under the cliff. Other men came hurrying down the road, gathering up flashing beacons. The great doors had clanged shut by the time they reached them, but a wicket-gate thick as the door of a vault had been left open, issuing a square beam of yellow light. It swallowed up the men with the traffic beacons, then was closed. The floodlights over the pass snapped out and left stark blackness in their wake. Only the dammed watercourse and the great lead shield were left to reflect the starshine.

But all of that lead down there. And these poisoned heights, a little more than mildly radioactive. And that Thing filmed by the AWACS as it did battle with the USAF jet fighters. Simonov couldn't suppress a small shudder, which this time wasn't due to the intense cold. He folded his nite-lites into a flat, leather-cased shape which he slipped inside his anorak with the strap still round his neck. Then for a moment longer he just lay there, his eyes staring into the enigmatic gulf below, his mind superimposing on the darkness the sequence of events he'd witnessed in London, recorded on that flickering AWACS film ...

But even remembering it, he cringed away from it. Bad enough that he still occasionally saw it in his dreams! But could that... that... whatever it had been, could it really have come from here? A monstrous mutation? A gigantic, hideous warrior clone conjured in some crazed geneticist's incredible experiment? A 'biological' weapon outside all of man's previous experience and understanding? That was what he was here to find out. Or rather, it was what he was here to prove conclusively: that indeed this was where that Thing had been born - or made. That seething, pulsing, writhing -

Snow crunched softly, compacted by a stealthy footfall!

Simonov thrust himself to his feet, turning as he rose, and saw a head and staring eyes outlined briefly above the low jumble of rocks. His automatic was in his hand as he launched himself into a dive to the left of the boulders, his right arm outstretched, ready to target his weapon. A man in a pure white parka was crouched behind the boulders, with a gun in his hand which he even now lifted to point at Simonov. In the instant before Simonov came down on his side in the snow he snapped off two shots; the first one struck the man in the shoulder, snatching him upright, and the second slammed into his chest, flinging him backwards and down onto the patchy snow.

The dull phut, phut, of Simonov's silenced weapon had caused no echoes, but he'd scarcely caught his breath when there came a hoarse, gasping grunt from close at hand and silver glinted in a sudden flood of moonlight. The snow on Simonov's left-hand side, not eighteen inches away, erupted in a spray of frantic activity. 'Bastard!' a voice snarled in Russian as a massive hand reached out to grasp Simonov's hair and an ice-axe came arcing down, its spike impaling his gun-hand through the wrist and almost nailing it to the stony ground.

The Russian had been lying in a snow-filled depression, waiting. Now he sprawled forward, trying to hurl his bulk on top of Simonov. The agent saw a dark face, a white bar of snarling teeth framed in a beard and a ruff of white fur, and drove his left elbow into it with as much force as he could muster. Teeth and bone crunched and the Russian gave a gurgling shriek, but he didn't release his grip on Simonov's hair. Then, cursing through blood and snot, the massive Soviet drew back his ice-axe for a second swipe.