Brian Lumley
 Necroscope 3: The Source
  
  
  
  
  1
  
  Simonov
  
  
  The agent lay on a patch of snow in a jumble of white boulders on the eastern crest of 
what had once been the Perchorsk Pass in the mid-Ural'skiy Khrebet. He gazed down through 
nite-lite binoculars on almost two acres of curved, silvery-grey surface covering the 
floor of the ravine. By the light of the moon that surface might easily be mistaken for 
ice, but Mikhail Simonov knew that it was no glacier or frozen river; it was a mass of 
metal some four hundred feet long by something less than two hundred wide. Along the 
irregular edges of its length, where its gently curving dome met the rocky walls of the 
gorge, and at both ends, where the arcing metal came up flush against massive concrete 
barriers or dams, the stuff was "only" six inches thick, but at its centre the moulded 
mass was all of twenty-four inches through. That was what had registered on the 
instruments of the American spy-satellites, anyway, and also the fact that this was the 
biggest man-made accumulation of lead anywhere in the world.
  It was like looking down on the three-quarters-buried, lead-wrapped neck of some giant 
bottle, thought Mikhail Simonov. A magic bottle-except that in this case the cork had 
already been pulled and the genie flown, and Simonov was here to discover the nature of 
that very dubious fugitive. He gave a quiet snort, pushed his flight of fancy to the back 
of his mind, focused his eyes and concentrated his attention on the scene below.
  The bottom of the ravine had been a watercourse subject to severe seasonal flooding. 
Up-river, above the "wet" dam wall, an artificial lake was now full, its surface flat and 
likewise leaden-but only its surface. Channelled under the great roof of lead through 
unseen sluices, the water reappeared in four great shining spouts issuing from conduits 
in the lower wall. Spray rose up from that deluge, froze, fell or drifted back to coat 
the lower ravine in snow and ice, where for all the apparent volume of water only a 
stream now followed the ancient course. Under the shield of lead, four great turbines lay 
idle, bypassed by the hurtling waters bled off from the lake. They'd been at rest like 
that for two years now, since the day the Russians had tested their weapon for the 
first-and the last-time.
  Despite all the USSR's technological camouflaging countermeasures, that test, too, had 
been "seen" by the American spy-satellites. What exactly they saw had never been made 
public or even hinted at outside of higher-echelon and correspondingly low-profile 
government departments, but it had been sufficient to jolt America's SDI or "Star Wars" 
concept into real being. In very small, very powerful and highly secretive defence 
circles throughout the Western World there had been worried discussions about APB 
(Accelerated Particle Beam) "shields", about nuclear- or plasma-powered lasers, even 
about something called a "Magma Motor" which might theoretically tap the energy of the 
small black hole believed by some scientists to lie at Earth's core, simultaneously 
feeding upon and fuelling the planet; but all such discussions had been purely 
conjectural. Certainly nothing substantial-other than the evidence provided by the 
satellites-had leaked out of Russia herself; nothing, that is, in the way of normal 
intelligence reporting. No, for the Ural Mountains in the region of Perchorsk had been 
for some time far more security-sensitive than even the Baikonur Space Centre in the days 
of the Sputniks.
  And it was a sensitivity which, in the aftermath of that single, frightful test, had 
suddenly increased fourfold.
  Simonov shivered in his white, fur-lined anorak, carefully demisted his binoculars, 
flattened himself more rigidly to the frozen ground between the boulders as scudding 
clouds parted and a nearly full moon blazed treacherously down on him. It was cold in the 
so-called "summer" up here, but in the late autumn it was a kind of frozen hell. It was 
autumn now; with a bit of luck Simonov would escape suffering through another winter. No, 
he mentally corrected himself, that would take a lot of luck. A hell of a lot!
  The scene below turned silver in the flooding moonlight, but the special lenses of 
Simonov's binoculars made automatic adjustment. Now he turned those lenses on the pass 
proper, or what had been the pass until the Perchorsk Projekt had got underway some five 
years ago.
  Here on the eastern side of the ravine, the pass had been eroded through the mountain's 
flank by one of the sources of the Sosva River on its way down to Berezov; on the western 
side, it had been dynamited through a deep saddle. Falling steeply from the mountains, 
its road roughly paralleled the course of the Kama River for two hundred and fifty miles 
to Berezniki and Perm on the Kirov-Sverdlovsk rail link.
  In the forty years prior to the Projekt, the pass had been used chiefly by loggers, 
trappers and prospectors, and for the transportation of agricultural implements and 
produce both ways across the range. In those days its narrow road had been literally 
carved and blasted from the solid rock, and so it had remained until recently: a rough 
and ready route through the mountains. But the Perchorsk Projekt had brought about 
drastic changes.
  With the construction of the Zapadno rail link to Serinskaja in the east, and the 
extension of the railway from Ukhta to Vorkuta in the north, the high pass had long since 
fallen out of favour as a route through the mountains; it had only remained important to 
a handful of local farmers and the like, whose livelihoods hardly mattered in the greater 
scheme of things. They had simply been "relocated". That had taken place four and a half 
years ago; then, with all the speed, ingenuity and muscle that a superpower can muster 
the pass had been reopened, widened, improved and given a two-lane system of good 
metalled roads. But not as a public highway, and certainly not for the use of the 
far-scattered "local" communities. Indeed, their use of the pass had been strictly 
forbidden.
  In all the project had taken almost three years to complete, during which time the 
Soviet intelligence services had leaked innocuous details of "a pass in the Urals which 
is undergoing repair and improvement". That had been the official line, to forestall or 
confuse the piecing together of the true picture as seen by the USA from space. And if 
additional proofs of the innocence of the Perchorsk Projekt were required, it could also 
be seen that gas and oil pipelines had been laid in the pass between Ukhta and the Ob 
gasfields. What the Russians couldn't conceal or misrepresent was the construction of 
dams and the movement of heavy machinery, the incredibly massive lead shield built up in 
layers over the erstwhile bed of a powerful ravine torrent, and perhaps most important, 
the gradual build-up of troop movement into the area to a permanent military presence. 
There had been a deal of blasting, excavation and tunnelling, too, with many thousands of 
tons of rock moved out by truck or simply dumped into local ravines, plus the 
installation of large quantities of sophisticated electrical equipment and other 
apparatus. Most of which had been seen from space, and all of which had intrigued and