Vasily opened a special storage compartment containing hazmat gear and they suited up. Then they went back to their own vehicles and fired up the engines, covering the last part of the journey without the soldiers.

When Sofia saw the massive rib cages sticking out of the snow, the sight took her breath away. They looked like the hulls of sunken boats.

“It’s a graveyard,” Vasily said.

Sofia’s heart raced. The satellite imagery from the military had been given to them almost a year before, and they’d had to wait for what seemed like forever before the conditions were right for an attempt.

She’d initially suggested flying in by chopper but the generals were against it.

“We can’t take that risk,” Yevchenko said. “If there’s any contamination, I don’t want it flying back to Yakutsk on a chopper. I want a slow, overland convoy.”

What he meant was that if Sofia and her crew didn’t contain the samples properly, he wanted them to die alone on the tundra, and any risk of contamination with them. She couldn’t blame him. At these temperatures, anthrax spores could lie dormant for thousands of years. If there really were some primordial strain of the bacillus among these carcasses, as the herds of dead reindeer in the satellite imagery suggested, there was every reason to be afraid.

What no one else on the team knew, and what was making her so uneasy, was the president’s suggestion, which had originally come from some madman at the GRU lab in Moscow, that the carcasses might also harbor an ancient virus strain.

Finding a previously unknown anthrax bacterium could be the beginning of a formidable new Russian bioweapons program. That was the official purpose of their mission and something that made Sofia uneasy to begin with. But what really made her lose sleep at night, what made her wake up soaked in sweat, what made her consider taking some sort of drastic action, was the last minute call from the president.

“Tell no one,” he said.

“But, sir. A virus, it would be communicable. It jumps from person to person. There’s no way we could ever use it on the battlefield.”

“You leave those details to the generals,” the president said. “I don’t need to remind you what’s at stake.”

“No, sir.”

“Let the team search for the anthrax bacillus. But you, Sofia, you’re the secret weapon. I want you to search for a virus.”

“A virus requires a host, sir. There’s no way one would survive out here all these centuries.”

“Just run the tests, doctor. When it comes to this thawing ice, anything is possible.”

As the next vehicle crested the rise, the voice of her lab technician came loudly over the comms.

“An entire herd,” he said excitedly.

There were hundreds of them.

“We could reconstruct the entire genome from this,” Vasily said.