Three months had passed since Major Pavel Ivanov had transmitted any data back to the West. He had to be careful with the data bursts.

Officially he was a free agent, a rogue agent if you got down to it, responsible to no one. He received no instructions from the Multinational Force command or the contemporary Allied intelligence services.

Unofficially two flexipads sat on standby in San Diego and Washington, always powered up and attuned to the ID tag coded into Ivanov’s comm-boosted unit. When he sent a compressed data burst into the ether, it would find a Fleetnet node and register on the two pads. The recipients would not acknowledge it, and no messages ever came back from them. That way both Kolhammer and the top British intelligence man in America, William Stephenson, had a deniable back-channel source of information about developments in the Soviet Union.

For two years Ivanov had been transmitting updates on the growing Red Army strength, on his never-ending search for any sign of missing 21C assets like the stealth destroyer HMS Vanguard, and on the progress or otherwise of a slew of nationalist resistance movements that had sprung up in the wake of Stalin’s separate “peace” with the Nazis. Some of these he had even fostered himself, moving secretly around the country, passing on the fruits of twenty years’ counterinsurgency experience in the Russian Federation Special Forces.

The former Spetsnaz officer did have his qualms about what he was doing. The Bolsheviks didn’t fuck around, agonizing over their response to “terrorist atrocities.” They simply cranked up their own atrocities, on a vastly greater scale. After a train carrying minor party officials was ambushed by Uzbek separatists trained by Ivanov, the NKVD swept through the republic and decimated it, killing 10 percent of the Uzbekistani population. Beria’s men had since been back and emptied entire towns, forcing the inhabitants onto trucks and trains and shipping them off to the gulags.

Ivanov had no concerns about the native population of this godforsaken hole. There were no natives left. When his guide, Kicji, took them through the final high pass of the Koryak Ranges at the head of the Kamchatka Peninsula, he had stopped and slowly swept one gnarled hand across the world, grunting in his heavily accented Russian, “All Koryak gone. Only soldiers now. And me.” Ivanov had trained a heavy pair of powered binoculars on the spot far off in the haze where Kicji was pointing. They had been standing on a small plateau at least two thousand meters up. The air was as sharp and as clear as he had ever known it to be, although tinged with a sulfurous smell from all the active volcanoes on the peninsula to the south.

He had seen brown haze localized around some sort of huge camp. It was difficult to be sure, due to the distance, but it looked like a prison camp with a heavy industrial component. It was much larger, and generated a lot more aerial pollution than the usual run of camps.

“Sharashka,” muttered the guide. “Koryak built it. They are buried inside, with many others.”

Ivanov handed the binoculars to his second in command, Lieutenant Vendulka Zamyatin, a female medical officer of the Russian navy who had been working on board HMS Fearless at the time of the Transition. She was one of the few survivors from that ship. The pale, good-looking woman they called Vennie played with the controls on the glasses, trying to bring the Sharashka-the “special technical prison”-into sharper focus, but without much luck, to judge by her furrowed brow.

“I cannot say, but it looks much bigger than the last one,” she commented. “Maybe three times the size of the one in the Urals. It must be significant. Atomics, you think?”

“Maybe,” Ivanov said. “Whatever the case, it’s too large to attack. I’d guess at a couple of regiments of security, maybe even a division of NKVD, given the extent of the operation.”

He turned and smiled at his small band. Kicji, ageless, bitter, looking like a totem carved from the root of a poisoned tree. Vendulka, her beauty marred by a line of scar tissue that ran from just below her left ear and across her face, before tapering off at the corner of her mouth. Sergo the Cossack, who stood six and a half feet tall and seemed to measure a couple of ax handles across the shoulders. And the smooth, dangerous Chechen jihadi Ahmed Khan, emissary of his Caliph, who laid claim to all the lands Ivanov had so recently fought to preserve from the likes of nutters just like them.

“So we won’t be kicking in the door,” Ivanov said.

Kicji leaned up against an outcropping of smooth black rock. “No need to get in,” he said. “There is only one road out to the coast. Every day convoys travel it. Some small, some large. But some with many more guards. These must be important, yes?”

Ivanov shrugged. “Probably.”

Kicji rustled around inside a stinking fur vest and pulled out a strip of dried meat, which he began to chew. “There are many places where it is possible to ambush these convoys.”

“Not with so few men,” Sergo said. “Not even with these.” He hefted his new and much-loved assault rifle, a genuine AK-47 with an underslung grenade launcher. Ivanov’s gift of more than two hundred Kalashnikovs to Sergo’s bandit tribe had secured their loyalty and the man’s services.

Kicji gnawed at the jerky, reminding Ivanov of a dog with a treat.

“We can get men from north. The Chukchi,” he said. “Many of them are buried in the Sharashka, too. They will fight.”

“They’re fishermen,” Vendulka said. “I served with some on the other side. They are good men, but they know nothing of fighting in the mountains.”

Kicji smiled, showing large gaps in his teeth. “Wrong Chukchi,” he said. “Those Chukchi are all gone. They lived in villages by the sea. Little buried huts. They couldn’t run when the Russians came. All dead now. The other Chukchi are reindeer people. They move. Many still died, those on big Russian farms. But some live. They have nothing now, just revenge. They will fight.”

Ivanov unwrapped a chocolate bar. He had never met a Chukchi, rein-deer man or fisherman. But he knew a little about them. He retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the federation’s many ethnic subgroups and their many, many blood feuds. The Chukchi were one of the smaller, more obscure, and infinitely less troublesome populations. As such, they tended to be overlooked. At best, he recalled, they were a shamanistic people, even after decades of Soviet rule and then democratic development. They believed that spirits inhabited the world, and they practiced animal sacrifice to appease those spirits. They had also been enemies of Kicji’s people.

“I thought the Chukchi attacked the Koryak,” he said. “Drove them from their homes.”

“Yes,” Kicji answered. “But no more Koryak now. Nobody to remember when I am gone.”

With a shake of his head and a minimal rise of the shoulders, he managed a gesture that captured the existential horror and despair of a man who thinks of himself as the last of his kind.

“If Chukchi die, I do not care,” he continued, “but they will kill Russians. And I care for killing Russians very much.”

Ivanov turned to peer questioningly at the others. The Cossack was sucking slowly at his beard. Ahmed Khan, more prince than guerrilla, regarded the guide like a bad penny. And Zamyatin was staring again at the shrouded prison, a frown digging deep fissures in her forehead.

The Spetsnaz officer finished his chocolate bar and balled up the wrapper, carefully placing it in a deep pocket. He would bury it later, with their other rubbish, when they reached softer ground, or burn it in a lava flow if they passed close to one. The morning was relatively warm, at least ten degrees Celsius. Down on the wide valley floor in the sun it might even get up to twenty or more. A pair of gyrfalcons rode a thermal a few hundred meters away, slate-gray plumage disappearing against the mountain background whenever their spiraling flight path carried them across the face of the range.