Granted the weather would cooperate. Randi felt the chill grip her hands, and she drew her overmittens back on. It was growing colder, with ice crystals condensing out of the rapidly lowering overcast. Faintly, in the distance, she could hear a rising wind booming over the ridgeline.
Within a matter of minutes they were going to be socked in tight. If conditions continued to deteriorate, Jon and the others might not be able to make it down from the saddleback tonight, much less expect help showing up from Alaska.
But every cloud, even those of a polar storm, had a silver lining. If the good guys couldn’t make it in to Wednesday Island, then neither could the bad. Perhaps she could truss Kropodkin and Trowbridge up in their bunks tonight and get a little sleep.
Even the thought was soporific. The thin sift of snowflakes seemed to weigh her eyelashes down, and even here, on the ice sheathed hillside, her head began to sink down on her chest.
And then, dimly, beyond the faint rumble of the wind over the mountain, Randi became aware of something else. Her head snapped up. It wasn’t truly a sound at first, more of a heavy vibration in the air. It grew in gradual intensity until it became a thudding roar that echoed between the land and the overcast.
Randi scrambled to her feet, the island seeming to shudder around her. Like a scorpion instinctively lifting its tail, she slipped the MP-5 from her shoulder and into her hands.
A huge form condensed out of the sea smoke. Two mammoth Tumanski gas turbines howled atop a great, sleek glass-nosed fuselage fully the length of an airliner. Fifty-foot rotor blades whipped the air, creating the rhythmic rib-rattling thud Randi felt in her chest.
It came in low from the south, squeezing in beneath the cloud cover; the ferocious rotor blast whipped up a tornado of displaced snow, forcing Randi to cower and shield her face as the monster passed directly over her head at a meager hundred-foot altitude.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “It’s a Halo!”
The Mil Mi-26, dubbed the “Halo” by NATO, had been created during the 1980s under the Soviet military’s old “If it’s bigger then it must be better” design doctrine. It was the largest and most powerful helicopter ever built and that likely ever would be built.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the aircraft had passed into commercial service and now could be found working as a heavy industrial lifter in many nations around the world. This giant wore Canadian civil registration numbers on its Day-Glo red tail boom, and the winch control cab, projecting like a growth from its port side, marked it as a sky crane derivative.
Kropodkin’s sponsors had come for him and for the anthrax, and they had come in force.
As the huge flying machine began to settle into a touchdown beyond the camp, Randi broke the shock lock that had paralyzed her. She had only two options. To instantly go into escape-and-evade mode or to try for the repaired radios. She chose the radios. That was the mission. That was what she was here for, to collect intelligence and to report.
It was a nightmare’s run to the laboratory hut, the fresh snow dragging at each running step like wet concrete. As she ran she mentally composed the call she would make, compressing the maximum amount of information into the absolute minimum of words. She would send until she got an acknowledgment; then, if she had time, she would try to get out, taking Trowbridge with her. She must remember to grab the lab hut’s survival pack and the SINCGARS transceiver as they went out the door. She would also put a burst into Kropodkin, if for no other reason than sheer self-satisfaction.
If there wasn’t time, then she would put her back to the wall and take as many of them with her as she could. Maybe it would make a difference, for Jon and Valentina if for no one else.
She fell once cutting around the hut. Scrambling to her feet, her lungs burning, she charged through the snow lock doors, the first of her intended series of commands welling up in her throat. But her instincts recognized and reacted to the threat before her conscious mind did, and she was whipping the MP-5 to her shoulder before she realized exactly what she was aiming at.
Stefan Kropodkin was cowering back in the far corner of the laboratory, holding Dr. Trowbridge in front of him, a dissection scalpel gleaming at the academic’s throat. Trowbridge was tottering on his feet, barely able to stand, blood streaming down his face from a broken nose and from the cuts created by his smashed glasses.
No one spoke. No one needed to. The scene was totally self-explanatory. A pair of cut disposacuffs lay on the lab floor. Kropodkin’s cunning had manipulated Trowbridge’s willfulness and essential humanity.
Randi raged at herself. She never should have left the two men alone together. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! But that was an irrelevancy now. She had to get to that radio. Even if she had to do it over both of their bodies.
“Don’t move,” Kropodkin blurted. “Put down the gun or I kill him!”
Outside Randi could hear voices shouting over the fading scream of the Halo’s turbines. Ordering Kropodkin to put down the knife would be an act of futility. All the numbers were on his side, and he knew it!
Sorry, Doctor.
Steeling herself, she nestled the butt of the submachine gun more deeply into her shoulder, and her finger tightened on the trigger. Trowbridge could see it coming, and a faint denying moan escaped from his lips. Kropodkin could see it, too, and he cowered behind his human shield.
Then Randi’s gaze slipped past the two men and through the door of the radio shack. Kropodkin hadn’t been wasting any time, either. The transmitter chassis lay open and thoroughly smashed.
Slowly Randi let the muzzle of the MP-5 sink toward the floor, the bitterness of total defeat welling up in her throat. There was nothing of value that she could accomplish now. There was no reason to put Trowbridge’s blood on her hands. Running figures moved beyond the hut windows. Armed men were streaming into the camp. But even before they crashed through the door behind her, she had set the MP-5 on the worktable.
With her hands raised, she laced her fingers together behind the nape of her neck as gun barrels ground into her back.
Chapter Thirty-two
Saddleback Glacier
A ground-hugging wisp of snow flowed past the cave mouth, driven by a rising gust of wind.
“Penny for your thoughts, Jon?” Valentina said softly.
Smith shot an angled glance toward the lowering northern sky. “We’ve got another front coming in.”
“It will be interesting to see which arrives first: the weather or the sunset. Granola bar?”
“No, thanks.”
The colonel and the historian lay side-by-side in the shadow and shelter of the cave mouth, watching the approaches across the glacier. Since the initial identification and elimination of the first Spetsnaz scout there had been no movement on the ice. There was only the sensation of activity, born out of the knowledge that a hostile force was upon them, an enemy that would not sit back passively and allow them to live.
Smith looked across at the odd other half of his rifle team as she munched her snack in seeming contentment. Her fine-planed, rather exotic features were relaxed within the shelter of her parka hood. “You doing all right?” he inquired.
“Oh, yes. Quite good.” She glanced around at the black rock walls and roof of the tunnel. “It’s not exactly Cancun, but I can see marvelous development potential for winter sports.”
Smith chuckled softly and reset his attention on the cave approaches. A remarkable lady.
“Mind answering a question?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“What is that accent? It’s not quite English and not quite Australian. I can’t place it.”
“It’s from a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” she replied. “I was born in Rhodesia—not Zimbabwe, if you please, but Rhodesia. My father was a government game control officer there before Mugabe took over.”
“And your mother?”
“An American near-zoologist. She’d been a graduate student doing research on African wildlife
, but what with one thing or another, such as marrying Dad, she never went back to the States to finish her degree.”
Valentina frowned for a moment at some flash of memory. “It did give me dual citizenship, which proved rather handy when things went to their final hell back home. I was able to refugee to America to live with my mother’s family after...well, after.”
“I see. And how did you get here?”
She glanced at him, her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that question violate mobile cipher compartmentalization or something? Like the old ‘one question you cannot ask’ in the Foreign Legion?”
Smith shrugged. “Damned if I know. But you’re the one who said we were destined to become lovers. The question is probably going to come up again.”
“Valid point,” she agreed, looking back to the ice. “It’s a long and rather meandering story. As I said, my father was a game control officer and the commander of our local territorial commando—a hunter, a scholar, and a soldier, who probably would have been much happier living as a contemporary of Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Selous. I was born in a war zone and raised in a household where weapons were a fact and a necessity of life. My earliest memories are of the sound of gunfire beyond our compound. I was given a rifle at an age when most little girls in America were still being given Barbie dolls, and I shot my first leopard while it was trying to climb in through my bedroom window.”
She glanced wryly at Smith. “To say the least, I grew up with a somewhat different worldview than is the norm.”
He tilted his head in an acknowledging nod. “I can see how that could happen.”
“My father loved history and about learning how things came to be,” she continued. “He’d say, ‘To learn where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve come from.’ He put that love into me, and I majored in world history at college. My doctoral paper was titled The Cutting Edge: Armaments Technology as a Guiding Force in Sociopolitical Evolution. Later I expanded it into my first book.”
“Sounds like an impressive topic.”
“Oh, it is, and a valid one.” Valentina’s voice began to take on a lecturer’s enthusiasm. “Consider how different Europe might be today if the English longbow had not proven decisively superior to the French arbalest at the Battle of Agincourt. Or how World War Two might have played out had the Japanese not developed the shallow-water drop shroud for their aerial torpedoes, permitting the attack on Pearl Harbor. Or how the United States might never have come to exist had the British Army put Major Ferguson’s breech-loading rifle into general issue during the Revolutionary War...”
Smith laughed softly and lifted a gloved hand. “Points taken, but it’s still your history I’m interested in.”
“Oops, sorry, Pavlovian reflex. At any rate, after receiving my doctorate, I found I couldn’t get a decent teaching position. My views were considered somewhat un-PC in certain quarters. So, to stave off starvation, I became an authenticator, appraiser, and procurer of rare and historic weapons for museums and private collectors. It turned into a rather lucrative profession, and I found myself roving all over the world, chasing down various finds for my clients. Eventually it led to my curatorship of the Sandoval Arms Collection in California.”
“I’ve heard of it. But how did you get here?” Smith prodded gently, tapping the magazine of his leveled rifle on the cave floor.
She bit her lip lightly for a moment, the introspective look deepening in her eyes. “That’s...a little more esoteric. As you should have guessed by now, I am a firm member of the ‘If it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing’ school of thought.”
“I’ve had my suspicions.” Smith smiled.
“As my education developed I found I was not content to merely study about weapons. I wanted to learn how to use them and to see and feel how they were applied,” she continued. “I studied fencing and kendo. I learned the skills of the old Western gunfighters from the champion shootists of the Single Action Shooting Society. I bribed my way into Philippine prison cells to discuss technique with butterfly-knife artists. Before his untimely death I sat at the feet of the legendary ‘White Feather,’ Marine master sniper Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, and learned combat marksmanship. Firearms, blades, explosives, military heavy weapons: I learned how to make them, maintain them, and employ them. Everything from the flint axe to the H-bomb.”
She lifted her hand from the action of the model 70 and flexed her black-gloved fingers, studying them. “I found myself becoming a uniquely lethal individual, all on a purely theoretical level, of course. But then I visited Israel, following up a lead on a cache of genuine ‘garage factory’ Sten guns from their War of Independence. And one evening I found myself having dinner with a fellow historian from Tel Aviv University.”
Valentina’s voice grew softer. “He was a totally fascinating little man who not only taught history but had lived it. He was a holocaust survivor and had seen action in the first three of Israel’s wars of national survival.
“We were dining at a small outdoor restaurant near the University. I recall we were discussing the historic Mideastern Jewish communities as a possible bridge between the European Jewish and Arabic cultures. Our meals had just been brought to the table. I’d ordered steak and I’d just picked up my knife when the smartly-dressed Arabic couple at the next table stood up and started killing people.”
Smith listened and studied the subtle emotions playing across Valentina’s face. He could sense it wasn’t the remembering of a fear or revulsion, but an abstract reexamination of a defining moment in a life. A time and place this woman had revisited many times before.
“I heard gunshots and I was sprayed by the blood and brains of my dinner partner as he took a bullet through the head. Then the female terrorist shoved her pistol in my face and screamed ‘God is great...’”
The historian’s voice trailed off.
Gently Smith rested his hand on her back, letting the gesture grow into a few inches of caress. “And then?”
Valentina came back into herself. “And then I was standing over the thoroughly shredded bodies of the two Hamas terrorists. I was saturated with blood, none of it my own, and that steak knife was still in my hand, dripping. I had, in the vernacular, ‘flipped the switch’—spectacularly, although I have no conscious memory of doing so. My studies were no longer abstract, but very much applied.”
Smith could understand the spark that had jumped between them now; like had recognized like. He’d had his own defining moments, his own flipping of switches. “How did you feel afterward?”
“That’s the interesting point, Jon,” she mused. “I didn’t ‘feel’ anything. They were dead and I was alive, and I was quite pleased with that outcome. I found my only regret to be that I hadn’t reacted quickly enough to save my friend and the others in that restaurant. I’ve been told that I have the perfect sniper’s mentality. I can rationally divorce myself from the emotional trauma of physical violence.”
She shrugged and made a face. “If I work at it for a bit anyway.”
“And that incident brought you to the attention of Covert One?”
“That and a couple of under-the-table research and acquisition projects I’d done for the Departments of Defense and Justice. Mr. Klein seemed to think my rather esoteric talents might prove useful to his little organization. And they have. Now I view myself as following in my father’s footsteps. I’m a game control officer eliminating the rogues and man-eaters from our societal jungle. Maybe, eventually, I can make up for being slow that one night in Tel Aviv.”
“Fred Klein knows how to pick his people.” Smith smiled at her. “I’m pleased to know you, Professor Metrace.”
“Thank you, sir.” She nodded. “It’s a pleasure to be appreciated. Some men tend to look around for the garlic and holy water after delving a little too deeply into my past.”
Smith smiled without humor and looked over the barrel of the SR-25. “I make no claim on moral superiority.”
“That?
??s a relief. And now, Colonel Jon Smith, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“I have a fair idea of how you ended up with Mr. Klein, but just who are you? Where do you come from?”
Smith squinted at the sky. The cloud cover was definitely edging lower again. “My biography’s not nearly as interesting as yours.”
“I’m easily amused.”
Smith was considering his answer when a small clump of dislodged snow rolled over the edge of the cave overhang, dropping in front of them with a soft pelp.
“Oh, dear,” Valentina murmured, her eyes going wide.
Instantly, Smith snaked his legs under himself. Then he launched out of the cave mouth in a headlong dive. Landing flat on his stomach, he rolled onto his back, sweeping the long barrel of his rifle in an arc to bear on the cliff face above the cave.
The Spetsnaz trooper in arctic camouflage was a pale wart on the frost-streaked basalt. Stealthily, he had edged out along an almost nonexistent ledge to a point some thirty feet above the cave mouth. The gloved fingers of one hand were hooked into a fissure in the rock, those of the other were closed tightly around the object he carried.
Looking down, the Russian’s mouth opened in a scream as he saw Smith’s explosive emergence from the cave. The sound of the cry was drowned out by the flat crash of the SR-25 as Smith squeezed off half a dozen rounds of 7.62mm as rapidly as he could pull the trigger, the copper-jacketed mil-spec slugs blasting the enemy off the cliff face.
The limp body of the Russian soldier landed almost on Smith, piling up a couple of feet to his left with a sodden, dead-meat thud. There was a second, softer thump to his right, and Smith twisted to find a hand grenade lying beside his head, a thick jacket of puttylike plastic explosive wrapped around its spherical body to enhance the demolition effect.
For an instant Smith’s heart stalled in his chest; then he realized that the grenade’s pin and safety lever were both still in place.