Forty Days to Armageddon

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A Mi-8 chopper hovered twenty-five miles northwest of Lake Baikal sometimes called the “rich lake” near Irkutsk, and landed on a rocky forest of pine and elm. Two figures emerged, one sporting a leather coat, felt hat and Ray-Ban Aviators, the other a military uniform with gold and silver medals emblazoned across his chest.

“This is the place, then?” inquired the Russian president while he watched his breath drift off in the frosty air.

“The pipeline will pass over that ridge.”General Dimochka Sergeievich pointed to the north. “We were careful to move it far from Lake Baikal as originally planned. The Tomsk Oblast and Khanty-Mansi fields will pump into it and from there it will branch off into three separate lines that will feed the Asian markets including one directly to China. New fields discovered here can be fed into it if we make it large enough.”

Lake Baikal, “The Blue Eye of Siberia,” had waited silently for this moment for more than three hundred million years. The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cenozoic periods were but a blink of an eye for the largest inland lake in the world, larger than all of the Great Lakes combined. Great behemoths drank its waters and roamed in the forested woodlands then one day it rained fire from the heavens and they disappeared forever. As the waters rested, its surrounding lands matured and secreted a vast hidden reservoir of blackened sludge that was much larger than the lake.

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