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Samir was beautiful even when dead. Even lying on a slab, palms open, like Christ in His tomb. Only the ugly Y-shaped cut spoiled everything. This, and his taken out guts, sitting nearby in a large enameled bowl. Strangely enough, Philippenko helped to butcher pigs, like, a hundred times and felt no sickness, but now something cold crawled up his stomach, though Samir’s guts looked no different than pigs’.
“Here”, professor Erkind pointed with his scalpel at… something in that bloody mess, where Philippenko couldn’t make out a damn thing. Seeing the colonel’s embarrassment, the doctor reached into the mess with his bare hand. Something crunched like a dry twig, and in Erkind’s fingers it did look like a dry twig, covered with thick crimson blood.
“It’s his iliac vein,” the professor explained. “All the same with every major vessel. You see, they just… broke when he moved.”
“I see”, Philippenko nervously tugged on his mustaches. He had put great hopes on Samir, believed in him more than in others. Lean, strong as a leather belt, Samir was the best for all intents and purposes. Well, he was missing one kidney, but the remaining one worked well.
“He’s the fifth,” colonel snapped, knocking that… thing out of Erkind’s hand. “What do you think you are doing? Why do you make a pig's ear out of everything? Either overdosing or underdosing, either а vein blows up in a brain or an artery in a stomach. Do you think you have nothing to lose? They’d just throw you back in a camp? Some hope! We are at war, so you will face the firing squad just like me, just like anyone in this sharashka!”
Professor lowered his head. Then he raised it. His eyes blinked behind his spectacles.
“I tortured five young men to death. Five men invalided out of the army, who could have lived. Are you trying to scare me with the firing squad? I deserved it. Five times.”
His face was unhealthily dark and wrinkled like an old potato.
It was not bravado, Philippenko realized. Erkind was tired beyond fear, he was broken.
“Don’t give up. We have a number six.”
The professor shook his head.
“This boy did not survive the blockade to be killed by me. Let him go.”
“Are ye nuts?” when angry, Philippenko spoke with a heavy Ukrainian accent. “Twas ye who brought ‘im ’ere! Twas ye who ‘ung this millstone on my neck! And now ye wanna me to let ‘im go? No way, old man!”
“It’s the only way!” – Professor waved his half-withered hand, twice broken in jail. “When an experiment fails, it’s time to stop! I see that the serum's side effects kill people. How many dead boys it will take for you to see it?”
Philippenko grabbed him by the collar of his white coat and shook him violently enough for spectacles to fall off.
“There!” he bellowed, waving his hand towards Leningrad. “Boys are dying there! And there! And there!” – south, north, north-west… “What did you promise me? What ye promised me, cunt is ye mother?! A new soldier for the country! Invincible soldier! Where he is? Where?! In which shithole?”
He pusher Erkind so hard that professor stumbled on the slab and almost sat on Samir’s legs. Samir’s head turned with this motion and his dry eyes met colonel’s. A shiver crawled down Philippenko’s spine. He had seen many dead people, but…
He wiped his brow.
“I’m sorry, professor. I’m nervous. Everyone is. I understand you, I am not a monster. But Samokhin is breathing down my neck. He is eager to pin a diversion on you, he scribbles his reports so eagerly they are all blotched. Number six is our last chance. It’s a cross on your chest or a cross in the ground! Think over your formula again. Or we all get railroaded.”
And he left the morgue.
When he was washing his hands, he heard heels clip-clopping on a tiled floor. Masha.
“What do you want?”
“Comrade colonel… Number six is not the last chance.”
So, she was eavesdropping. Well, that’s what spies do.
“Here we go again…”
“Women's bodies are more resilient than men’s. We are used to harsh physiological stress and hormonal shifts…”
“Which part of “No” remained unclear?”
“Why?”
“Cause you are an op, not a guinea pig.”
“Neither were Larik, Samir, and Miho… Neither is Stephan. I am not any different.”
“You crossed the front line four times and you will do it again. You spreche Deutch and shoot the enemy on sound. You look like a goddess. You are a first-rate intelligence officer.”
“Stephan could make one, too. The head, not muscles, is important in intelligence. And he has a good head. He’s clever, perceptive, well-educated. He speaks French and he made drastic progress in German only in only two months. Shooting and radio – that he could master, too.”
Philippenko almost dropped the towel.
“Are you in love with him?”
“Negative,” she shook her head but her reddened ears betrayed her.
Women! How could we ever understand you? Five guys, each better than the next, hung around her for three months, and she moons after a wasted shrimp who could easily be killed with a flick of a finger. And she volunteers for the “Iron Maiden” to spare him.
Maybe, it’s for the better, though. Five picture-perfect men died terribly and painfully. And the wasted one… After all this time Philippenko had developed some kind of respect to Rogov. The man was as stubborn as hell. Maybe that stubbornness alone will keep him alive, as it kept him through illnesses and hunger. Maybe he is bewitched, that Rogov. Maybe it will work out. Maybe the devil will play some trick while God is asleep. Vasya, Miho, and Samir survived the procedure, it was the disastrous side effects that killed them. But Rogov’s life itself was a disastrous side effect. He was used to it.
Philippenko returned to his office. Opened Samir’s file and added an autopsy report. Then he opened the drawer and reached for a clean sheet of paper. Picked up a pen, dipped it into the inkpot.
“Dear Minavar Mahmudovna! I deeply regret to inform you that your son Samir Gandymov died in a blaze of glory during the battle for Leningrad…”
***
“That’s what you will write about me? “In a blaze of glory?”
“You have nobody to write to.”
Rogov smiled.
“There will be some papers somewhere.”
“Killed in action, that’s what we shall write.”
“Fair enough.”
How easy-going about death he is, thought Philippenko.
Rogov frightened him slightly. Colonel would never admit it, even to himself, but now, before the last procedure, it became as clear as sun at noonday. Philippenko thought they don’t make guys like Rogov anymore, and the last ones, who survived the Civil War, have been locked up long ago, the luckiest of them died of old wounds and diseases. And now, all of a sudden…
At first he suspected Rogov just wanted to put on some fat by volunteering to be a guinea pig. He was the sole survivor from a living dead transport that arrived in February 1942. They all died here in Volhov because of negligence: once they arrived and were situated in barracks, they received a whole brick of bread each, ate that bread at once and died of indigestion. Only Rogov had mastered enough willpower to get to the city and exchange this bread for a cup of soup and three pieces of sugar. He was clever and determined, as Masha said.
Once Rogov's health improved, he started to take combat training seriously, and when he fell under weight of his rifle, he got up and pushed on. He had the worst physical parameters, and if it was not for professor Erkind, Philippenko would have him dismissed at a wink. But Rogov learned Morse code first of all guys, he was stunningly good in encryption and performed perceptual tasks brilliantly, thanks to his artistic education. And he threw himself on that grenade, not knowing it was a dummy. Masha could have been right thinking he’d made a proper intelligence officer… But his fate was already sealed and signed, even by himself.
It seemed he worried the least about it.
What the hell! Everyone wants to live. When Larik died, burnt alive by a power surge, guys had quite a scare. Neither of them were cowards, all except Rogov were vets: a pilot, a paratrooper, a marine, two infantrymen… Everyone wanted to get back to frontline, everyone hoped the serum to reactivate them. But to die this way, foolishly, by mistake, in agony – it was a different matter.
When Vasya got his neck broken by an abrupt head movement, it became clear that something went wrong with the serum. Erkind warned them that the serum was unstable, and success with dogs and monkeys didn’t guarantee it would work on humans.
Tolya died in the “Iron Maiden” too: heart failure. Miho lived for a day and a night after the procedure, and it seemed that he would be alright, and suddenly he had a stroke. Samir went to the procedure as if to the scaffold. His hands were trembling so hard when he signed his consent, that he only managed to scribble an X.
Rogov was afraid, too. He entered the “Iron Maiden’s chamber” as stiff as a ramrod, ghastly pale with linen-white lips. But when he saw Erkind, equally pale, disheveled, he smiled encouragingly.
“It’s all right, professor. Negative result is a result, too. Next time you will know more.”
Philippenko felt sick. Why is he inviting bad luck?
When Rogov undressed and hung his clothes neatly on a chair, his hands were steady. Masha fell for him for a reason, though he looked ridiculously small against her tall and handsome frame.
Starkov and Roytman were still fiddling with the “Maiden” when he finished undressing and stood naked, shifting from foot to foot. It was chilly in the lab, so he hugged himself for warmth instead of covering up his private parts, and stared at the ceiling, from where ineptly plastered saints were staring back. The lab used to be a monastery canteen for a time being. The monastery was demolished in 1927, but its cellars remained intact. It was good stonework done by good, God-fearing people.
Rogov suddenly threw his head back and laughed silently. Philippenko, at last, realized that the art on the ceiling was of Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, naked on the icy lake, where they were freezing their asses off in the name of Christ. The icon-painter was no good, he drew them all skin and bone, and everyone had a ribcage as a fish. What army would enlist such wretches? Philippenko remembered them to be soldiers, he only forgot, when and whom they served. He understood what seemed so funny to Rogov, but wondered a little: Rogov never went to a parochial school, how could he know the story? Then he remembered that Rogov was an artist and Repinka graduate. Maybe, it was the painter’s ineptness that amused him, nothing else.
“Ready,” Starkov patted the “Iron Maiden” on the shell as if it was a horse and he was its master. “Lay down”.
Stephan got into the apparatus. It was made for men way bigger than him, and he looked in it like a plucked chicken in the oven. As if intentionally enhancing this similarity, he got covered with goose pimples.
“Don’t worry,” said Starkov, applying the first electrode. “If something goes pear-shaped, you will be the first to know it.”
Rogov laughed again.
The colonel didn’t like Starkov. He had nothing against Jews, changed skin and pretended to be Russians or Ukrainians. Starkov was recorded as Gregory in his birth certificate and as Georgy in his passport. Do you have to mess up our Christian names, why don’t you write honestly: Gershko? Philippenko wasn’t irritated by Roytman or professor Erkind, they were honest at least.
And Starkov’s arrogance only made it worse. He thought he can get away with anything because of his golden head and golden hands. As if he was untouchable as if he had angels’ seal on him. Why the hell, couldn’t he learn from his teacher Léon Theremin’s fate? Why did he bicker with Samokhin? Why did he keep going after Masha, despite being slapped on the hand no less than five times? Why he took people for suckers, especially the guys who were about to die, and had not a good word for them?
But now Starkov managed somehow to say to Rogov what was needed. And Philippenko felt a flick of thankfulness for him.
Starkov did all his best to keep away from subjects. My business is tech, he kept saying to himself. Automation. Specifications, clear and distinct. Maintaining proper radiation, voltage and amperage level. Technical solutions – how to prevent the current, running through body, from affecting the instrument readings? How to take X-ray photos during the procedure? How to sterilize eight hundred and twelve needles? Automatic injections, intravenous and intramuscular. Precise adjustment to the subject’s height and weight. The “Iron Maiden” should be tuned like a Stradivari violin, and the less you think of what it does to live people, the steadier is your hand.
That’s why he tried to keep distance with subjects. Roitman made that mistake and now he was suffering because of the guys who became somebody to him. He was suffering and Starkov should carry the can for him, for Roitman since the very beginning of every procedure tried to sneak away from the lab, and once, when he was forced to stay, just fainted.
Roitman also was scared shitless of Samokhin. Starkov despised Samokhin too much to be afraid of him. He knew that the “kum” held everyone’s lives in his freckled hands, but for the fuck’s sake, they were already doomed: Project “Revival” went down the drain, five subjects died in a blaze of fuckin’ glory – died dreadful, horrible, sickening deaths, but still, they were brave. No one hoped for Number Six. Erkind even tried to get drunk the night before, but he couldn’t stomach watered spirit, literally.
Starkov quit being afraid after First’s death. It was not his fault, it was a substation failure, but…
Adjustment of equipment for Number Six took its share of time. Intramuscular injections, oh crap! It will take a magnifying glass and hunting dogs to find muscles on this blockade survivor.
But Sixth suddenly revealed a keen sense of gallows humor, and it touched Starkov somehow. That’s why he said what he said. He glued the electrodes to the pale, almost transparent skin of the subject, backed away. It was the nurse’s job to stick IV dispensers into the blood vessels.
After that, all went almost smoothly: Sixth began to breathe heavily when needles were thrust into his body, then he started to pant when serum rushed through them. Then he groaned deeply with the first series of discharges and cried with the second. After the third discharge, he started to recite poetry. Everyone copes somehow, Fourth sang in Georgian, the same one song, all the time. Sixth, as it happened, remembered by heart “The Novice”, “Borodino”, “A Cloud in Trousers”, “Duma of Opanas” and a huge part of “Eugene Onegin”. He might have memorized all the “Onegin”, but they never learned if it was so: in the middle of the third chapter he passed out, again.
Philippenko wiped the sweat from his brow, Roitman slipped away to the toilet, Masha replaced him at the displays – pale, cold as a marble Athena. Erkind’s lips and hands trembled, but his commands were clear: hormones… serum… NS… glucose… heartbeat… pressure… discharge…
Every half an hour they took an X-ray. Comparing the last two, Erkind swore.
“His bones are growing. Just like Samir’s.”
Starkov was totally indifferent to biology and medicine, but working on the “Iron Maiden” made him accumulate some knowledge willy-nilly. Third snapped his own neck because of his muscles becoming too strong and his growing bones becoming too brittle. Fifth died because his vessels caked with calcium overdose when they tried to harden his growing bones. Others were already at full height, their skeletons fully formed. Now it remained only to pray for the dosage of calcium to be right.
They took a dinner break after four hours. Sixth was not to have dinner, he would throw up anyway, because of pain. He only had some rest.
Before the end of the break Starkov entered the lab. He shouldn’t have, everything was perfect on displays, but he did. Sixth was muttering poems in a choking, muffled voice. Starkov listened.
You will tire, you will slow, you will stop for just one note,
And the power will be gone from you to breathe or make a sound,
And the wolves in rabid bloodlust will at once lunge at your throat,
And their claws will crush your ribcage as their teeth will drag you down.
“ What if it was Samokhin, not me?” Starkov asked, checking the outer contacts.
There was a moaning laugh from the “Maiden”.
“And what would he do to me?”
Starkov laughed too. Indeed…
“ I like Gumilev too… but better stick to swearing.”
“Funny, I don’t really like him,” Starkov heard Sixth breathing through his teeth. “Only 'The Violinist'. It’s… the rhythm…”
Another tortured gasp.
“Hey, we stopped for almost an hour, you are still in pain?”
“Well… my bones never took a break. I’m like an aching tooth, all over. Grisha…”
It was the first time Rogov called him “Grisha”, not “comrade Starkov”.
“What?”
“Tell me… when we win… When we bury Hitler… Will we be afraid of Samokhins then?”
Starkov lowered his head. It was good Sixth couldn’t see his face through the iron shell.
In the pulpit room everyone was taking their seats. Starkov faked checking plug-ins.
“Stephan,” he patted the shell where guy’s shoulder should be. “Survive. I beg you.”
Stephan survived.
They all were afraid for his life in first two days. He couldn’t wake up. His EEG showed rhythms of sleep. He gained six centimeters of height in the “Maiden” and grew afterward until he reached 188. He looked as if descended from the cross. A small amount of fat he gained during the preparation period burned away, he was a skeleton covered with steel ropes.
He got fed intravenously on the first day. On the second day, Erkind ordered to rattle him up and fill him with some nutrient-rich mishmash. They also tested his sanity. They tried, at least, for he drifted off at every half of a word. Then they decided to wake him every three hours, fill him with nutritious mishmash, and let him sleep again.
He managed to break his wrist in his sleep. Samokhin panicked, but Erkind reminded him of Samir and severely refused to overhaul the calcium. Let him hake his share from food and supplements. And let him break his bones for a while, plaster will do. Besides, the fracture healed in several hours.
Another two days passed, and Stephan gained 12 kilos of muscle mass in that time. Then he woke up at last, asked for normal food and crushed a faceted glass while drinking cocoa. A regular table-glass, half a centimeter thick, he crushed casually as an eggshell.
“Give a glass dick to the fool, he will break it and cut himself!” muttered Philippenko while Stephan’s wound was being cleaned and stitched. Next day there was no sign of the cut.
Stephan learned to move without breaking bones and things. Bones soon have hardened enough to start the strength and endurance tests.
Philippenko gave Stephan a 32 kilos kettlebell. Stephan blistered his hands bloody before he even started to lose wind raising it. The test lasted for twenty minutes or so, and still, he was fresh. Two kettlebells made no difference. Front squat 420 kilos, back squat 420 kilos, bench press 420 kilos, well, there was a limit of a weight bar, it could hold only 400 kilos. They made him to clean and press the front part of a Studebaker US6. He did, and then fainted. That’s how they knew about “sugar burnout”, the aftermath of especially mighty effort.
Stephan ran 100 meters in 9 seconds. Fhilippenko urged him to run 10 000 – he managed in 25 minutes. “Vanin has to resign!” Samokhin rejoiced. He looked bright and happy as if he delivered Stephan himself, and others were just standing around.
Erkind took congratulations grimly. And when it became clear that the experiment was totally successful, and the Red Army has its own true Red Bogatyr, Erkind’s spirit hit the bottom.
Samokhin had a party on the occasion of success. Stephan was forbidden alcohol, so he was absent.
“What was our greatest mistake?” The “kum” cackled, gesturing with his glass. “We selected sturdy chaps while we should have selected the wretched orphans! So, comrades, we will kill two birds with one stone: make some deckbounds into decent soldiers and strengthen our army with first-class fighters! Hitler wanted to have an Uberman? He will! He’ll get a true Soviet Uberman! So, prof, how about it? Comrade Starkov? Are you ready to take bogatyrs to the assembly line?”
Vodka suddenly turned into the lead in Starkov’s stomach. He finally understood in what a mess he got himself into.
“L-listen”, Erkind mumbled. “This is but one single success, and one swallow does not make a summer! We have to go back to tests on animals, we need to research the hormonal response deeper…”
“You don’t say that!” – sober, the “kum” would have bellowed at Erkind, but in a seizure of drunken placability, he just pushed Erkind’s forehead with his open palm. “You stop these Jewish shticks! We succeeded once, we’ll succeed again!”
“We succeeded once in six attempts.”
“Good!” Samokhin roared. “One of the six is a good result! Or you wanna sabotage the work? Just say it! Just gimme a hint, ‘am smart!”
Next morning Erkind was found in his room, his veins cut. All his records have been burned; he left only a note on the table: don’t blame anyone of my death and so on.
Samokhin was out of his wits.
“So much for all the good I’ve done to this filthy traitor!” he cried. “This is what I get for letting him run around unguarded! Fucking contra!”
Stephan approached him and gave him a slow, deliberate slap on the jaw with his open hand. He already trained with Masha and learned to pull his punches. That’s why Samokhin remained alive and conscious, he only went head over heels down the hallway. Stephan approached once again, grabbed him by the throat, pulled him to his feet and hit him from the other side.
Samokhin pulled out his “Nagant”.
“Don’t get closer!” he yelled. “Don’t you dare!”
“Private Rogov, back off!” commanded Philippenko. Masha rushed at Stephan in an attempt to twist his left arm, Starkov hung on his right. Stephan hardly noticed them both.
“Or what?” he stepped forth. “Come on!”
There was a moment when Samokhin seemed about to shoot. But he suddenly howled, threw his “Nagan” at Stephan and ran up the stairway.
***
“You know you are a fuckead?” asked Starkov.
“Grisha,” Masha reproached.
“Why the hell Grisha? He’s a fuckhead, not me. Look, he doesn’t argue!”
“I don’t,” Stephan acknowledged.
“What if he shot you?” Philippenko poured more vodka in their glasses.
“Well, I would recover,” Stephan shrugged. “I heal compound fractures in hours.”
“What if he shot you straight in the heart? Or in your stupid head?”
“Your position would be stronger then. The 'kum' went off the hook and ruined all the work. But it’s good enough already. Is there more vodka?”
“No. I won’t waste a good drink on you,” said the colonel gruffly. Then he sighed, opened the drawer and extracted a wine bottle with a waxed cork. “It’s chacha, left after Miho. If it won’t affect you, you won’t get more. You are too stupid already, Stetzko. Too big to be clever. Well, let’s drink to the guys’ memory. To Abram Lvovich.”
They already drank to that twice, but the colonel was a bit bright in the eye.
“What he told you the night before… that?”
“He told me to remain myself. Remain… human.”
“Wrong. He told you nothing. He never visited you, gotcha?”
“Right you are, sir.”
***
Sharashka was disbanded. Samokhin covered his ass with a psychiatric diagnosis. Everyone confirmed that he went hysterical and Stephan slapped him on the cheek to calm him and slightly miscalculated. And then the “kum” grabbed at his weapon…
Project “Revival” was buried together with Abram Lvovich.
Roitman was transferred to Moscow, to the Central Scientific Research Institution of Communications. They wanted also to have Starkov, but he pulled some scheme and remained in the National Scientific Reserve with Masha under Philippenko’s command. They were supposed to have Stephan, who was to lead the special operative squad, but in the last moment, Stephan was yanked from them and assigned to the Main Directorate of Politics and Propaganda. Somebody high up there decided that the only supersoldier of Red Army is too expensive to be shot at.
Next time Starkov met him a year after.