Story-line for Triumvirate Episode Two, Scene One
Flash back to 1888 when the synthetic prototype of the Russian Avian Influenza was unleashed within a secluded Siberian penal colony and two isolated communal villages in Greenland and Canada’s Northwest Territories. The inhabitants of each of the camps died a horrible death, which because of their isolation went undiscovered for months. The H2N2 strain of bird flu was produced by the Czar's scientifically corrupt Imperial Ministry of Health and disbursed under the authority of his doting Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security. It was destined to be unleashed to the general population in the Russian Capital and then, by human hosts, be transported over the global rail and vessel systems throughout the civilized world.
Winter, 1887-1888 -- Siberia, Russian Empire
In the community's center, there existed a humble dry goods store with a crude but functional distillery in its rear quarter. The store also held a small bar space with a smattering of tables and chairs. The focal point of the bar was two 31-liter capacity hazel-wood barrels containing grain vodka that had been produced in-house. The beverage leached the essence from the barrel’s heady wood slats, giving the fiery spirit a pleasant Hazelnut flavor.
A carpentry shed sat in the center of the camp with tools useful to help slow the decay of the weathered cabins.
A trained army cobbler, under life sentence for deserting his post to protest the Czar's treatment of unsophisticated citizens, tended to the shed’s upkeep and should his specialized shoe repair services be needed, was available for a small bounty. Lastly and also in the center quadrangle, there sits a small but durable stable with two horses tethered in tightly enclosed stalls next to an equally sturdy, heated hen coop with rooster in residence. These buildings were positioned convenient to all cabins – insuring easy access to a ready supply of consumable and fertilized eggs.
The inhabitants all were tough-spirited political dissidents: turncoats, artists, deserters, writers and journalists cast out from all regions of the Empire as enemies of the Czar. They were provincial to a man, a single generation away from Serfdom. If they hadn’t become resilient following their first winter in that foreboding camp, they’d have died trying. Each person had been deported by the Czar’s Interior Minister to one of several eviction centers that dotted Siberia’s bleak landscape: units with no walls or boundaries, where wandering about was unchecked because to check was irrelevant.
The men had nowhere to escape to and no desire to try – they were raised in the millennia-long Russian culture of obedience, even though compliance was a concept abhorrent to them. Individual rights had been subordinated to the common good of the Czar’s community, as well as to his officials that managed each facet of a Russian’s life. They could but never would escape from the camp, and they’d fight to the death to protect it along with their fellow rebels.
The cruel climate, coarse family histories and skepticism about ever being able to secure a good life brought them to a point where they over-valued their personal stability, social order, security and predictability. They tended to avoid risk in captivity but found their lives to be treacherous nonetheless.
Domiciles accommodated two men in an open room with beds, dressers and small tables. The kitchen area contained a wooden table with two chairs, a combination wood-burning stove / heater with a bakery drawer, cook top and a larder. Dishes and utensils were washed in a large pot with stove top-heated water.
There was an unattached outhouse for each two cabins that had within it a small shelf to keep tools, fishing equipment and personal effects that would not freeze.
Temperature in winter could drop to -58°C necessitating the daily use of a community sauna – its temperature rising to above 90°C – a most popular meeting place from November to May. It sat adjacent to the store, carpenter’s shop, hen coop and stable. A lubricated fulcrum well-pump for extracting artesian water had been installed within a tiny walk-in shed that was likewise located in the central compound.
The closest city of any consequence to Village 121 was Vilyuysk, two-hundred kilometers west. The recent discovery of abundant gold and silver reserves in the Sakha Republic afforded that city a period of prosperous growth. The distinction also allowed strangers unnoticed entry into the city.
It took the four men two hard months overland to reach Vilyuysk from Sankt Peterburg. They arrived in the dead of morning, deposited their horses and coach at the transient livery and found nondescript lodging where they bathed and donned fresh clothes. At a café in the city center, they ate the first decent meal they’d had in weeks. One man toted with him a medical satchel that he handled with the doting care a mother would give to her newborn baby.
In the morning, they began a five day journey east to Village 121. The daylight was meager – barely three hours of slivering light in twenty-four. The temperature ranged from -15°C each morning to -5° at noon. They stopped for food for themselves and their horses and to sleep indoors on a bed when possible, otherwise they pitched their over-sized tent. These men knew the land of Russia, and what they needed to do to survive on it. It was not lost on them the importance of their mission to the Czar. Failure would not be forgiven; retaliation assured.
Upon arrival at Village 121, they found the ‘bar’ and purchased some soup and cheese, along with thick slices of heavy black bread. They drank Hazelnut vodka with the townspeople, the four strangers sitting at a single table; the man possessing the medical bag sat farthest away from their new company.
The visitors told their hosts that the project that enabled them to pass through Village 121 involved a replacement bridge that was to be constructed over the proximate Vilyuy River. They announced that they were engineers from the capital who were charged with deciding a favorable location to build the bridge and to determine whether or not it would be constructed to accommodate railroad traffic as well as coaches. They elaborated that a Trans Siberian railroad was under engineering design in Moscow, to extend from both that city and Sankt Peterburg to Vladivostok on the eastern coast of Russia.
The strangers were tall, lean and lanky, each of them, as though they were brothers were it not for the variety of hair colors and different eye shades. Hair was trimmed short; there were no beards and no one had dirt under his fingernails. They all drank vodka in moderation. Their appearance was in stark contrast to their hosts who were long-bearded, hard-faced and unconcerned about the reason the four had alighted in their desolate camp that winter evening.
They were generally welcomed by the outcast residents, but because their benefactor was the Czar’s Minister of Transport, the extent of the hospitality extended to them was tainted by skepticism and derision. They were allowed, after a time and for a price, to board their horses at the village's meager stable, pitch their winterized tent and wood stove next to the sauna, and draw limited supplies, including vodka, from the dry goods store.
The men asked for the use of two horses to supplement their own. The terrain, they said, would likely not be suitable for their coach once off-trail. The townspeople had just two horses, but agreed to rent them to the men. After a few slurred toasts and hearty bowls of chicken soup all around, two of the men left to pitch their single tent and fire up the heater while the other two fed and groomed their horses. They met in the sauna for a relaxing sweat and, in lieu of dunking in a lake or river cut open to accommodate them, they strolled naked back to their tent.
Later, the engineer carrying the medical bag left the tent and ambled to the nearest outhouse. He waited several minutes in the toilet before exiting it and moved to the hen coop. He opened its door and entered as he quickly and quietly as he could. The hens stirred, a few rustling, some cackled – the aged rooster though, couldn’t be bothered to make even the slightest noise. The man donned heavy gloves. He reached into the bag and removed a container and deposited fresh feed into the trough. He was in and gone in fifteen seconds.
In the morning, the engineers pulled their tent, extinguished the stove tinder with an ice pack. They gathered their gear onto their carriage, saddled the four horses and rode slowly west to the river. They set camp along the Vilyuy's banks two kilometers from Village 121. There they brewed a pot of black tea, ate cheese, bread and root vegetables and passed the time reading, playing chess or engaging in conversation. They covered the horses with blankets, fed to them oats from a bag and quenched their thirst with water warmed in the tent. They each saddled and rode a horse several times to limber its muscles and raise circulation.
On the second day, with the sun merely brushing the horizon, a man rushed toward them from the direction of the village screaming that a sickness had overcome his comrades – he needed a horse to ride for help! A single rifle shot from two hundred meters drove a bullet into his left eye socket at nine-hundred meters per second and restored the calm.
The following day, two of the engineers returned to Village 121. From a safe distance they observed no lights and all the chimneys were without smoke. The hamlet’s population of thirty-two appeared to have been exterminated – and if the contagion they’d unleashed was not the primary cause of death, freezing temperatures contributed to it.
A laboratory mutation of the H2N2 avian flu virus, named FHH for its uncanny ability to vault from an original Fowl host to a Human by physical contact with eggs, meat or feces, and then vault again, now airborne, to other Human hosts. It attacked the respiratory system and often brought pneumonia as a secondary infection. In that, and with an impoverished provincial population that had little or no access to medical care, it would prove itself to be a most effective weapon against the socially deprived. The four men, part of a larger team of eradication engineers, as they liked to refer to themselves, were eager to learn if identical contagions activated in the Northwest Territories of Canada and in Greenland were as lethal as their biological agent was in Siberia.
The two men returned to the river from Village 121, where they reported their observation, gathered their gear, and with the other two comrades, set off on their return to the the Czar’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security in Sankt Peterburg.
