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UNDERGROUND 31
"Wait here, I'll check," he said.Victor wanted to ask something, but Pustovalov quickly nodded.Sergius slightly opened the door, darted inside, closed it behind him.“It’s strange that this adit…” Victor began, but Pustovalov interrupted him, putting his finger to his lips:- Shh, remember our agreement?Victor opened his mouth, but did not have time to say anything. Sergius appeared from behind the door, sighed somehow wearily.“It's all right,” he said, stepping aside, turning to Pustovalov, “go first. There are stairs ahead...Sergius did not agree. The barrel of the "Walter PPKS" rested against his wrinkled forehead.- How?Sergius was speechless. Victor, judging by the slack jaw - too.- How many are there?- D-two.- Open it.“W-why…” Sergius’s gray eyes looked frightened, as they had done in the tunnel. Nearly. Now the fear was real. Pustovalov knew that look very well – open the door. Victor, go back.But Victor remained where he was.- What?- Get back!Viktor backed away t
UNDERGROUND 32
At this time, a bright beam of a lantern illuminated her.- Well, here we are!In the opening stood an angular giant with a beard in a black uniform - this is probably what underground camouflage should look like. He was bigger and taller even than Kharitonov. The giant spoke Russian, but the machine gun on his broad chest and uniform, pouches on his belt and helmet were not familiar to Dasha, although thanks to her father she knew almost all Russian weapons.“Well,” said the giant, “come out to form.An Asian appeared from behind the giant. The Asian was just on a par with Kharitonov; quite large by Asian standards. Only in contrast to the pot-bellied and flabby Kharitonov, under the dense camouflage of the Asian, relief muscles bulged.- Let's live.Kharitonov screwed up his eyes from the light.“Guys,” he boomed out of nowhere in the tone of a sycophant joker who came from somewhere, “are you for ours or not ours?”Who brainwashed you? - Asked without any accent Asian. - All of us
UNDERGROUND 33
“I told you to keep quiet,” the giant said calmly, as if he was just making a polite remark.Romik hunched over and rubbed his bruised head. Dasha noticed a wry smile on Kharitonov's face.As soon as they passed the station and entered the tunnel, the "giant" again purred something in English, and this time Dasha could not make out anything. The Asiatic laughed and then loudly ordered in Russian that they turn into the nearest passage, which turned out to be a rather wide inter-tunnel gap. In its deepening, a black metal door was found, which apparently was the goal of their journey. The door was opened by an Asian, and they went into an elongated room.On the left, at the entrance, there was a rusty sink in a white corner with a closed carved brass shield of the ventilation manifold. Opposite the “sanitary corner”, fenced off from the rest of the space by a two-meter wall, boxes with dosimeters were thrown in a chaotic mountain. At the end, against the wall, there was a wide table fo
UNDERGROUND 34
“I think it’s ventilation,” he said.Do you hear voices? Pustovalov asked.- Yes, there is someone yelling ...As they got closer, the screams got louder. They were women's cries. Victor saw a square diffused light ahead. About three meters from it, a branch went to the left, but it was tightly walled up with a double grate.- Crap!- From there! Viktor whispered.Men's laughter was clearly audible, and an unexpected woman's cry made Victor flinch.- It's her! Viktor got excited.- Who?- Well, Katya, who was with us! Looks like something is going on there. Not good.Pustovalov understood everything, but he did not want to waste his energy on another attempt to re-educate Victor. He decided that, as a last resort, he would go on alone.- Let's go back, - said Pustovalov, seeing that Victor intends to crawl towards the square source of light, - there is a dead end here!An astonished face turned to Pustovalov:“But this is not a dead end!”- Get your ass over here!A heart-rending fema
UNDERGROUND 35
After the incident with the lineman, Pustovalov abandoned his last illusions and, obeying his innate instinct, was now preparing only for the worst. From now on, it was necessary to act differently, and first of all, it was necessary to find out what these unfortunate people had learned during their misadventures. However, looking around the room, strewn with bloody fragments, Pustovalov realized that everyone here, from Romik who suddenly “woke up” to Kharitonov, was in a state of shock. But the problem was not only that. Pustovalov was worried that in the last half hour he had killed three people in front of witnesses, and although the rest took part in the murder of the fourth - whoever they were - this circumstance could not pass by the attention of the competent authorities. However, none of the witnesses knew anything about Pustovalov himself, except for his name. There were no cameras in the tunnels,Victor was sitting against the wall, not noticing that the ribbed barrel of th
UNDERGROUND 36
Pustovalov's world, unlike other worlds, never changed colors depending on mood, "black swans" and chemical reactions in the body. Pustovalov's world has always remained gray. Someone, without delving into the essence, would call it a nightmare, but Pustovalov, by virtue of his natural ability to immerse himself in pathological calm, did not know what a black stripe was. For real, he was never in a complete ass, although 99.99% of the inhabitants of the Earth would not agree with him, having received at least a tenth of the problems that he had to solve. But 99.99% will not understand what bradycardia is, in conditions when someone is poking a Kalashnikov assault rifle at you. Although, if you think about it, the one who pokes wants something else from you besides your death, otherwise he would have pulled the trigger a long time ago. And for people like Pustovalov, this is already a thousand new opportunities, unless, of course, But as it turned out, congenital bradycardia can someti
UNDERGROUND 37
“More like an abandoned bomb shelter.- There's a passage further.A narrow corridor led twenty meters. On both sides there were small rooms of the same type with different devices: diesel generators, pumps, control cabinets, fuel and oil tanks. All of them were in a non-working condition and rather neglected in appearance.At the end, the corridor closed in a semicircular stone hall, in the center, surrounded by a bend, there was an inclined concrete ledge under a metal hermetic door. The door had no handles, and, apparently, closed from the inside.- And here is the exit, - Victor said, lighting up the suddenly expanded space, - yes, there is a fitness center right here!Old, mostly broken-down machines lined the curved walls. Two steppers, one broken rower. Several benches for the press with pieces of foam sticking out from under the torn upholstery. In the corner were rusty barbell plates and a pair of ancient boxing gloves for his left hand. Everything was covered with a thick la
UNDERGROUND 38
Dasha watched as the athlete's veined hands deftly deal with bolts and locks. When all the crossbars fell into the grooves, the athlete passed the bracket of a weighty lock through the eye, closed it with a long key and turned around.Dasha prepared for the worst, but the athlete only smiled good-naturedly.- How do I them, huh?The little eyes shone with joy. Dasha decided that there was nothing to fear, but the athlete's partner puzzled her again.- Inga, you're great!Restraining herself so as not to show surprise, Dasha looked at Inga, but her eyes did not deceive - she was standing in front of a one hundred percent man: broad-shouldered, short-haired, with a square, tanned face. Dasha decided that she had simply misheard.The athlete, meanwhile, stopped looking at the girl.Did they harm you?The lively face changed, showing concern, but Dasha did not believe him for a second.- Rather, they received it themselves. - Katya answered gloomily.The athlete laughed cheerfully.- Well
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- UNDERGROUND
Epilogue
From the panoramic window, Victor can see the San Francisco Bay, but the waters no longer impress him. He still can't get used to the Golden Gate, but the views are much duller in his research center. Somewhere out there, beyond the countryside, he discovered Sunnyvale Pond. This place reminded him of the Moscow region at all. However, this is rather a minus, Victor is too young to be nostalgic for his homeland.Out of habit, everything comes surprisingly easily to him. A psychologist friend said that there was nothing extraordinary in his phenomenon, he just pulled out a lucky lottery ticket called "beautiful parents." Victor won an international competition, and while still a student, he got a job at the Ames Research Center, and on Sunday he met the daughter of emigrants from Lithuania who work in Los Angeles. Dimon without exaggeration would put "ten". Victor never gave grades to girls. Dimon knows that Victor was born with a golden spoon in his mouth and tries to reach for him. Vi
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209
An old photograph, hitting the slimy walls, slowly spinning like an autumn leaf, slowly falls into a deep well. The well is so deep and bottomless that the round hole at the top has long turned into a bright dot, and is about to completely disappear. And the photo keeps falling and falling. It depicts three boys, three of them are twenty-nine years old. One of them, dark-haired, with curly hair, stands in the middle, hugging his friends. It is slightly lower and seems to hang slightly on their shoulders. All three are smiling. The photo is old, you can see it not only in the crumpled corners, scratches and faded palette, but also in stretched sweaters and old-fashioned shirts with rolled up sleeves.The photo keeps spinning and spinning, and in one of the turns, the image on it changes. Now there are only two boys. They also hug each other and look into the camera with smiles, but the black-haired man standing between them is no longer there. It's like it never happened. Maybe it's a
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208
The old man, Makarov, rushed after him, and only after them did the special forces pour out.Still running up, Boris saw a square hole in the center of the site - not at all like what he saw on the day of his last visit to the plant. Perfectly smooth, carved into cubes that were stacked near the tractor. Next to them lay a completely black device, which he saw in the photographs sent by the Special Metals Research Institute.Boris was the first to run up to the edge of the hole.Below, he saw what he had seen before - the shaft of the mine, only at the bottom of the bowl there was now a well. There was absolute bedlam going on: corpses, blood, weapons, overturned chairs, pieces of collapsed stairs and galleries. He did not immediately notice living people, but when he saw a figure crawling away from the wall, he immediately recognized it, although he had never seen it alive.- Daria! he shouted. - Daria Afanasyeva!The girl raised her head.Makarov, running up, heard Vindman's scream,
- UNDERGROUND
207
Before saying goodbye to life, Dasha managed to become a witness to strange events that replaced each other with kaleidoscopic speed. First, something flew from above right in the center and with a disgusting thud plopped behind the makeshift spectator box. Dasha could not see anything in such a short time, but for some reason she was sure that this was a human body. More terrible than the blow itself were the frightened cries.And here is how a deaf-mute worker jumped from the upper gallery, and with inhuman speed slipped somewhere into the darkness, she saw very well.Just then, a strange movement began. On the right, something overturned with a crash, and someone very frightened shouted something in an incomprehensible language. Apparently it was a command, because right there from the depths of the hall there was a coordinated stomp of feet.Dasha saw four of the six burner paws, above her, the other two were located on either side of her head. From above, the bright light of hang
- UNDERGROUND
206
Only one person directly looked at her - a stern, gloomy old man from the gallery on the second floor. She had seen him before, I think in the ninth block - an ordinary mute worker with the right of free movement. He seemed to her out of his mind, but in his current “hawkish” look there was some kind of repulsive meaningfulness, without a hint not only of compassion, but even of curbed hatred. He looked at her just like a log, dissatisfied with the fact that the log was too thin and would not give the required warmth. There was no life in that look, only cold. This is how a dead man who managed to challenge life itself would look.However, all this, even the dumb old man, she saw fragmentarily, as in a painful dream, and then completely disappeared, only the darkness above her head remained - real or in her imagination. She stopped hearing conversations, footsteps, and the creak of the wheels of the gurney; only dull pops were heard in her head, reminiscent of explosions of a gas-air
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205
- Stole?Boris nodded, pointing to the picture.- On the day of the visit to Novikov, Colonel Basurov, a well-connected former member of the procurement commission of the Ministry of Defense, was with Pustovalov. Most likely, he played the role of an intermediary. He went missing that day. Since Pustovalov himself is a ghost and it is impossible to track his movements, we tracked Basurov's movements before he disappeared in the warehouse. And through him they came across a certain Dementiev. We interrogated him. Dementiev is a professional safecracker, it was he who helped Pustovalov steal the installation. He also said that there were two installations. That is, one working sample, and a spare case without filling - in fact, a dummy. But it looks like the real one. He confirmed that Pustovalov was going to sell the unit to Yasin after learning that he was behind her order on the black market. In addition to Basurov, another person went missing that day, previously in contact with Pus
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204
The car ran into a minibus lying on its side, Boris opened the door, leaned half out of the passenger compartment, exposing his haggard face to the frosty wind. There was a false peace here. Distant screams and shots were drowned out by unobtrusive music, but this tiny lane adjoining Frunzenskaya Embankment bore little resemblance to the island of former life. Rather, the coldness of the future blew from him - the very one that none of them would ever find. Desolation oozed from the planed poplars gathering darkness, from the mangled cars sprinkled with snow, forever left after yesterday's accident, from under the architraves of the shifted "stalinok", from the black windows of the buildings deprived of power supply.Boris looked at the piece of paper with the address and saw how it was distorted by a five-centimeter wall, carved from a dark space ice floe. With a crackling, cascading arc, the wall passed through Windman and, outlining the front facade of a two-story Chinese restauran
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203
He appeared on the bridge in a couple of minutes. Maurice, who was sitting under the window of a high tower, calmly rose and aimed his rifle at him:- One, two, three, and well, freeze! - He said cheerfully.Pustovalov obeyed and, without raising his head, said:“Using your man as bait?” Clever.“You used yours to get out too, didn’t you?”Pustovalov raised his head. Maurice saw through the eyepieces of the night vision device that Pustovalov was without night vision devices and knew that he only saw the outline of a dark silhouette in the window.- Komsomolskaya, - Maurice nodded with a smile, - now I understand why Daniker began to be so lucky before his death.- You're confusing me with someone else. I happened to be there.“Just a subway passenger?”- Exactly.Maurice burst out laughing and at that moment Pustovalov disappeared. He quickly figured out that he just jumped through a hole in the bridge.Still laughing, Maurice jumped lightly onto the bridge and called out:"You're br
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202
Coming up to him, Maurice found a crumpled fireman's heat-reflecting suit and smiled. We must pay tribute, although Maurice was not upset at all. He could have guessed right away that the trick with heat guns only made sense if you were already inside. It didn't matter now. Maurice knew that infrared sensors would not be a problem for him, like everything else that they had already prepared. He knew that the one they were waiting for would go very far, perhaps even manage to reach the very end. Of course, to the end, to which he is allowed to reach. That's why Maurice was here. And Maurice was rather upset if the one they were waiting for deceived his expectations.After walking a few more meters, Maurice saw a shining helmet with a visor-mirror in the bushes, and his smile grew wider. No, as long as he did not deceive his expectations.***Having reached the northern section of the bypass route, Kruchina quieted down and took a step. Moving along the trodden path, he soon came to two
