Mess table chairs crashed to the floor.
Randi threw the shirts over the bottom edge of the window frame as protection from the glass shards and rolled through to the outside. Behind her, the door to the women’s quarters tore open.
She felt the blowing ice spicules stab at her face, and the explosion of outside cold. It all depended on that cold now. If the snow crust had frozen solidly enough in the night to support her weight, she would live. If she broke through and bogged down in a drift, she would die. Scrambling to her feet and clutching the shirts to her, she ran for the safety of the darkness.
She heard enraged shouting and started to weave and sidestep as she ran. A flashlight beam stabbed after her, and someone emptied a handgun out of the window. Bullet strikes sprayed snow around her feet. Pray that nobody in there had grabbed a submachine gun!
The toe of her boot broke through the snow crust, and for a hideous moment she stumbled; then she caught herself and ran on. Out of the light’s reach, she veered sharply to her left. An Agram SMG started its angry typewriter chatter, but the gunner was firing blind, wildly spraying the night.
Randi diverted laterally again, heading away from the camp, the cabin lights fading rapidly to indistinction in the swirl of the snow. She was clear! She paused, panting, and struggled with the stolen shirts, untangling them, shaking out the glass shards and drawing them on, augmenting her ski outfit. Already she was feeling the bite of the cold. They weren’t going to be enough protection out here tonight. Not nearly enough.
She ripped the tail off the flannel shirt and bound it over her face as an ad hoc snow mask and drew her already aching hands up into the overlong sleeves of the shirts. She looked around in the bleak near pitch blackness. The wind would be her compass. She would move north and try to join up with Jon and Valentina.
Randi’s one course of action, her one chance, was to keep moving and somehow find the others. She would work on the premise that they had come down from the crash site to find Wednesday Island Station occupied. Given that, she would further presume that they would divert and go to cover on the island’s central ridge, where they could both find shelter and keep the camp under observation. Knowing Jon, he would try to work in close during the night to try to establish the identity of the landing force and learn what had happened to her and Trowbridge.
The odds were not good. If her teammates hadn’t come down from the crash site or if she couldn’t find them, then she would die before morning. But the death out here looked cleaner and more defiant than the death back there. Hugging herself to conserve body warmth, Randi began her stumbling trudge through the growing blizzard.
Pouring through the broken window, the cold filled the bunkhouse like the touch of death. In the harsh white glare of the gas lantern, the naked body and bloody, ruined face of Stefan Kropodkin looked exceptionally obscene and grotesque. Kretek tore the sleeping bag from the bunk and covered his nephew.
His men stood by awkwardly, their faces impassive but with a suppressed glint of fear in their eyes. Someone had taken something from their leader. He did not react well to such acts, even in far lesser matters.
Kretek stared at the muffled mound at his feet. The one connection he’d had left to this thing called family. It was a current that ran deep through the Balkan cultures, even through a blackened soul such as his.
He had been a fool. He had made the mistake of viewing the blonde woman not as a threat but as a treat, like a bite of chocolate to be consumed casually in passing. Instead she had been a time bomb waiting for an opportune moment to explode.
He could read the signs. At her own choosing, she had torn loose, swatted Stephan like a cockroach, and made her escape. She was a professional in the deadliest possible definition of the term, and a pretty face and a nice pair of tits had blinded Kretek to this.
Stefan’s hand protruded from beneath the sleeping bag, his fingers half curled in beseechment, pleading for revenge.
“Find that whore.” Kretek’s words were a growling whisper. “Get out there and find her. The only way any of you will ever leave this island is if you bring her back to me alive. Do you hear me? Alive!”
Vlahovitch, his chief of staff, hesitated only a moment before speaking. “It will be done, Anton. Come on, the rest of you. Let’s get a sweep organized. She won’t get far in this weather. Move!”
Anton Kretek said nothing more as his men geared up to start the search. His thoughts were distant, planning what he would do when the golden-haired woman was brought before him.
Chapter Thirty-six
Saddleback Glacier
Behind them, Jon Smith heard the thud of the explosion, faint in the face of the gusting wind. Straight off the Pole and unchecked by terrain, its cold was searing. Still, Smith viewed that wind and the ice particles driven before it as allies tonight. They would cut their pursuers’ long-range vision and scour his party’s crampon marks from the surface of the glacier.
Then there was also the subliminal human instinct to seek the easier path and turn away from a direct confrontation with that river of freezing fire, to keep your back to it. Accordingly, Smith would leave instinct to his enemies while he and his people would drive into the gale.
“Our friends reacquired their hand grenade,” Valentina commented. She was a shadow at the end of the safety line, her words muffled by her snow mask.
“Sounds like,” Smith replied. “We’d better keep moving. They won’t be too pleased with us now.”
“They weren’t all that fond of us before, Jon. I see we’re still angling to the northwest. Shouldn’t we be turning south to pick up the flag trail back to the station?”
“We’re not taking the trail back. Presumably the Russians know about it. They’ll move to cut us off, or at least that’s what I hope they’ll do.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“To the station. But we’ll be taking the scenic route. We’ll drop out of the saddleback on the north side of the island and follow the shoreline around.”
“Uh, Jon, excuse me, but doesn’t that mean pioneering a two thousand-odd-foot descent down broken glacier fall and sheer rock cliff at night and in a bloody blizzard?”
“Essentially.”
Valentina’s voice lifted. “And you intend to do this with one total climbing tyro, i.e., me, and one trussed-up captive?”
The third member of the party had no commentary to add. Major Smyslov stood by silently, his hands bound in front him and the safety rope knotted to his pack harness.
“Play the glad game, Val,” Smith replied. “The Russians will never imagine us trying it.”
“With excellent reason!”
“We don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Val, you have the point and I’ll take the center slot. The farther down we go on the north side of the saddleback, the more broken and treacherous the ice will become. If a crevasse should open up under you, I can go on belay and haul you out.”
“All right, but a pox upon the man who came up with ‘ladies first.’”
Smith turned to confront his captive. “Major, I’m counting on you not being as suicidal as the Misha’s political officer. I am going to point out, however, that should you feel tempted to try any shoulder blocking from behind on any crevasses or cliff edges...” Smith gave the safety line a pointed tug. “Wherever we go, you go.”
“This is understood, Colonel.” Smyslov’s face couldn’t be seen inside the darkness of his parka hood, and his reply was emotionless.
“Right, let’s move out.”
The slow and careful advance across the glacier began. Visibility in the snow-racked night was all but nonexistent. Valentina felt her way forward, one cautious and deliberate step at a time, probing ahead continuously with the spike end of her ice axe. Smith held to his line of advance via the glowing green screen of his handheld GPS unit, carrying the precious little device next to his skin between each position fix to keep the batteries alive.
As predicted, as th
e descent down the glacier face steepened, the buckled, fractured ice grew increasingly unstable, the risk of crevasses escalating geometrically. Their creeping rate of advance slowed even further as they were forced to sidestep a growing number of man-devouring cracks in the glacial surface. Finally, the inevitable happened.
Valentina was edging along, forty feet ahead, a shadow silhouetted against the lesser shadow of the glacier. Then, suddenly, she simply vanished, a great puff of snow geysering around her previous position. Smith felt the heavy thud of the snow bridge giving way into the crevasse, and he was already throwing himself backward, digging in with his heel crampons. He felt the shock and snatch of the safety rope going taut as he went on belay, but he had been “fishing” the line carefully and he hadn’t given her slack enough to fall far.
It was a good belay, and Smith’s brace held. With one hand twisted tightly in the line, he groped for the lantern at his belt, filling his lungs to ask if she was all right. But almost immediately he felt furious activity at the other end of the safety line.
Snapping on the lantern, he played the beam down the climbing rope to the point where it disappeared over the lip of the crevasse. He was just in time to see the head of Valentina’s climbing axe whip over the edge of the ice. In seconds she had kicked herself a foothold and was scrambling out onto the surface.
“That was...rather interesting,” she wheezed, collapsing beside Smith.
Smith shoved his snow goggles up onto his forehead and turned his light into her face. “Are you okay?”
“Barring a brief experiment with stark terror, I’m fine.” Valentina pushed up her own goggles and tugged aside her snow mask for a moment of serious breathing. “What a marvelous invention adrenaline is. This damn pack weighs as much as Sinbad’s Old Man of the Mountain, but when I was trying to get out of that bloody hole, it might have been a box of Kleenex!”
She took another enormous gulp of air, resuming control. “Jon...Colonel...darling...I don’t mean to complain, but it’s getting just a tiny bit dicky out here.”
“I know.” He reached over clumsily and squeezed her shoulder. “We have to get some rock under us. According to the photo maps there’s a place a little way ahead where we can get off this glacier and traverse across to the face of West Peak. From there, a ledge stair-steps down to the beach. It shouldn’t be too bad.”
Smith kept to himself the fact the photomaps were not nearly detailed enough to make a truly accurate assessment of the descent. This was yet another lesson in command presence. A good commander must always appear sure of himself and his decisions, even when he wasn’t.
Switching off the lantern, Smith got himself under the load of his pack once more and stood up, offering Valentina a hand. Then he turned back to Smyslov, helping him to his feet as well. When the snow bridge had collapsed, Smith had felt the safety line behind him go taut. Smyslov had dropped into belay as well.
“Thanks, Major. I appreciated the backup.”
“As you said, Colonel...” The Russian’s voice was still emotionless. “Where you go, I go.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Eielson Air Force Base, Fairbanks, Alaska
The two Air Commando MV-22 Ospreys had been repainted in the mottled white and gray of arctic camouflage. With their wings and propeller/rotors folded back and their long air-refueling probes thrusting forward, the VTOL assault transports lay under the glare of the hangar arc lights like a pair of beached narwhales, their Air Force ground crews swarming around them.
Down one hangar wall, Army rangers and NBC warfare specialists, likewise clad in arctic camo, sat or sprawled. Some read paperbacks; others played pocket video games or tried to doze on the cold concrete, all phlegmatically engaged in the traditional military pastime of hurry up and wait.
Outside, on the floodlit tarmac of the parking apron, an MC-130 Combat Talon brooded, an auxiliary power unit thumping steadily under its broad left wing. In the green glow of the cockpit instrumentation, a bored flight engineer held the big tanker/transport at ready-to-start-engines.
In the operations office at the rear of the hangar, the Air Commando flight crews clustered around a desk, looking on in awe as their task force commander accepted a telephone call.
Major Jason Saunders, a burly, brush-haired Special Operations veteran, barked back into the telephone handset. “No, sir! I will not launch this mission before we have the weather for it...Yes, sir, I am fully cognizant of the fact that some of our people are in serious trouble up there. I want to get to them just as badly as you do, sir. But losing the rescue force because we executed prematurely is not going to do anybody any good!...No, sir, it is not just a matter of the weather at Wednesday Island or the weather here. It’s a matter of what we’ll hit in between...The only way we can reach that island is by using air-to-air refueling...Yes, sir, we are trained for it, but topping an Osprey off from a tanker aircraft is tricky under the best of conditions. Turbulence and icing are major concerns. Attempting it at night and inside an active polar storm front escalates the risks to the suicidal. If we fail to get fuel to the VTOLs, we could lose them and the landing teams over the pack. Or if we midair we could lose the whole damn force, tanker and all, and never get near that island.”
The major took a deep, controlling breath. “In my best professional judgment, we are dealing with an impossible operational scenario at this time. I will not throw my men and aircraft away on an act of futility! Not even on your orders!...Yes, sir, I understand...I am holding the entire force at ready-to-launch, and we are receiving met updates every quarter hour. I guarantee you we will be airborne within five minutes of getting the weather...The meteorologists are saying sometime after first light, sir...Yes, sir, Mr. President. I quite understand. We will keep you advised.”
Saunders returned the phone to its cradle and collapsed face-forward onto the desktop. With his voice muffled by his crossed arms, he spoke to his squadron mates. “Gentlemen, I am ordering you to never let me do anything like that again!”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Anacosta, Maryland
The windowless office offered no direct hint to the state of the world outside, and only the digital clock on his desk and his bone weariness told the director of Covert One that it was the middle of the night. Klein pushed his glasses onto his forehead and rubbed his burning eyes.
“Yes, Sam,” he said into the red telephone. “I’ve been in communication with the captain of the Haley. He managed to close to within fifty miles of Wednesday Island before encountering solid pack ice too heavy for his ship to penetrate. He’s been forced to fall back due to the gale conditions, but he intends to try again as soon as the weather improves.”
“Have they heard anything from Smith and his people?” President Castilla inquired, sounding fully as tired as Klein.
“The Haley’s radio watch reports they may have picked up possible trace transmissions from the island party’s mobile transceiver this afternoon, but nothing decipherable. Clearly Smith has not been able to get the big station transmitter or the satellite phone back online. This could mean something or nothing. We’ve had one good piece of news on this point. Air Force Space Command reports solar flare activity has peaked and ionospheric conditions are improving. We should have decent communications back by tomorrow.”
“And what about strategic reconnaissance?” Castilla demanded.
“We’ve had one satellite over Wednesday since Smith and his team inserted, and a Navy Orion out of Dutch Harbor overflew the island this evening. Both passes were inconclusive. There’s just too damn much snow in the clouds to give us a clean look at the ground, not even with infrared and thermographics. We have another sat pass scheduled for later tomorrow morning after the weather clears.”
“I keep hearing that same line from everyone,” Castilla said bitterly. “After the weather clears.”
“We are not yet entirely masters of our own destiny, Sam. There are still forces in this world we can’t even start to f
ight.”
“As is quite apparent.” There was a brooding pause at the White House end of the line. “What about the FBI investigation of the Alaskan intercept incident? Is there any hint on who may have been responsible for it yet?”
“It’s a literal dead end, Mr. President. We know for certain we were dealing with a Russian Mafia cell, but they were apparently acting as independent contractors. As for the identity of the true instigators, we still have no clue. The only men who could have told us died in the crash.”
The silence returned to the phone circuit.
“Fred,” Castilla said finally, “I’ve decided to put the backup force on Wednesday Island. Smith and his team might just be suffering from fouled-up communications, but I’m getting a bad feeling about this situation.”
Klein suppressed his sigh of relief. “Sam, I concur fully with that decision. In fact, I’ve been sitting here considering how I was going to phrase the request. I think we must have some kind of incident under way. Smith would have gotten a situation report out to us by now if he hadn’t encountered trouble, bad communications or not.”
“Unfortunately, like everything else, the backup force is on hold until after the Christless weather clears!” Castilla flared into the phone. “I just hope there’s something left for them to back up.”
“Have you informed the Russians of your decision, Mr. President?”
“No, nor do I intend to, Fred. That’s one of the reasons I’ve elected to go overt with the operation. General Baranov, our Russian liaison, has been on call and standing by ever since we initiated the Wednesday Island operation. He’s been practically hovering on the line. Now, and for about the last nine hours, he’s become ‘unavailable’ and his aide de camp is not authorized to say anything beyond hello when he picks up the phone. I’m beginning to smell a considerable rat.”
“We’ve suspected the Russians have been hiding something related to the Misha incident from the beginning. Maybe Smith found it.”