“But, damn it, they came to us! They asked for our help!”
Klein sighed and flipped his glasses down onto the bridge of his nose. “Again and again, Sam, we are dealing with the Russian government here. For a Russian political leader, konspratsia is like breathing; it’s a survival mechanism. We are also dealing with the Russian culture. Remember what Churchill called them: ‘Orientals with their shirttails tucked in.’ To assume their logics and motivations will always be the same as ours is a mistake.”
“But why would they risk alienating my administration now, with so much on the table between our countries?”
“It must be something...” Klein paused for a moment, seeking for a word. “...extraordinary. I’ve had my people within the Russian Federation probing the Misha crash since the inception of this operation, and all they’ve been able to ascertain so far is that a ferocious level of security is involved. They’ve also encountered a term, ‘the March Fifth Event.’”
“The March Fifth Event? What’s that?”
“As of yet we have no idea. It’s a euphemism for some larger scenario within the former Soviet regime. The crash of the Misha 124 is apparently only one facet of this larger whole. The term is used almost fearfully within the current Russian government.”
“Get me more,” Castilla said flatly.
“We’re already working the problem, but it may take a while. The Russians have the lid screwed down airtight on this thing.”
“Understood.” Castilla’s voice dropped an ominous octave. “In the meantime we’ve stuck our necks way the hell out to accommodate President Potrenko on this. If he’s backstabbing us now, whatever the reason, by God, he will rue the day...”
“I suggest we wait for Colonel Smith’s sitrep, Mr. President,” Klein interjected quietly. “That should give us a better idea of where we stand.”
“I only hope he’ll be able to give us one, Sam. I’ll be standing by at the White House.”
“I’ll be remaining here at headquarters until we get a resolution, Mr. President. We will keep you advised.”
“Understood, Fred. It’s going to be a long night until morning.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The South Face, Wednesday Island
A polar environment demands that a dreadful knife-edged balance be maintained. Vigorous exercise and activity could keep the cold at bay, at least for a time. But not so much as to cause perspiration. Moisture destroys insulation. It can freeze and conduct temperature extremes. Sweat could kill you.
Randi Russell understood the mechanism and took care to stay within the boundaries of exertion as she swung wide around the Science Station and worked her way toward the ridge, moving fast but not too fast. As she semijogged through the darkness she grimly assessed her prospects.
They didn’t look promising. Exercise or not, she was cold. The layers of clothing she possessed were adequate to ward off immediate hypothermic shock and to protect her from frostbite, but not over the long term. Exposure would become a critical factor within the next couple of hours. Furthermore, to keep warm she had to keep moving, and she recognized that her strength and energy reserves were already critically low.
Beyond that, twenty very nasty men on this island were out to kill her. Under other circumstances and with somewhat more lackadaisical security forces, she might hope pursuit might sensibly be put off until morning. But given she had just eliminated their employer’s nephew, they’d be on her trail now and staying there.
Suddenly the sky lit up in the direction of the science station—a hazy globe of light bobbing into existence in the belly of the overcast. A parachute flare, a big one.
Randi wasn’t particularly concerned. The blowing snow and sea smoke went opaque, absorbing the flare light, and the winds swept the flare to the south and away from her. It simply proved the point that they were actively in pursuit.
In a way, it was almost a favorable thing. It opened up possibilities. If there were men out here on the ice after her, there was the chance she might be able to ambush and kill one of them for his clothes and weapon.
Randi couldn’t count on it, though. They would have seen Kropodkin. They would know what she was capable of. They would be afraid of her now, and their fear would make them more cautious and more dangerous.
Something else was certain. If Jon was anywhere in the vicinity, he’d know something was up. If he realized a pursuit was under way, he would know who was being pursued, and he would come for her.
Randi paused in her in-place jogging, an odd random thought darting into her tired mind.
Jon would come for her.
Always at the core of her internal bitterness toward Smith there had been the sense that he had not been there for her fiancé or her sister, that somehow he had not done enough to save them. And yet, from all she had learned and judged of the man in their random encounters over the past few years, Randi knew, without the faintest shadow of a doubt, that if Jon Smith realized she was in trouble, he would come to her aid, against all odds or orders and without regard for his own life. That was simply who he was.
Would he, could he, have done any less for Mike or Sophie?
She lacked the time to ponder the past now. She thought she could make out faint probing fingers of light in the storm. Powerful hand lanterns were panning the snow—the hunting party from the camp, tracking her. And the cold was gnawing at her, triggering an uncontrollable burst of shivering. She had to move again. Randi faced into the wind cascading over the ridgeline and started to climb once more. Maybe she could find an avalanche she could push down on those bastards.
Chapter Forty
The North Face, Wednesday Island
Smith flexed an all-environment chemical glow stick, breaking the inner capsule. Shaking its green luminescence to life, he clipped it to an outer cargo pocket of his snow smock. He could only hope that none of the Spetsnaz force had a line of sight on them. For this next evolution they had to be able to see.
A second pale green specter materialized in the swirling snow as Valentina lit off another chemical light. In the combination of the two glows they could just make out the irregular edge of a glacial precipice a few yards away.
They had reached the interface. They could descend no further on the broken, tumbled ice of the glacier. They must cross to the solid rock of West Peak, if the mountain would accept them.
Smith shrugged off his pack and drew a flare and an ice screw from its side pouches. Kneeling, he cranked the screw into the surface of the glacier, angling it away from the edge. Clipping his safety line to the anchor, he stood and edged carefully to the unstable shoulder of the ice. Striking the flare’s igniter, he pitched the hissing red ball of flame into the black void below. He watched as it bounced and sputtered down the edge of the jumbled icefall to hang up on a ledge perhaps 120 feet down. In the ruddy glare he could make out the darkness of basalt, the peak facing. But beyond the ledge was the void of another, deeper drop-off.
“The photomaps were right.” Smith lifted his voice over the wind. “There is a ledge down there.”
Valentina edged to his side, her hand on the safety line. “It’s not really all that much of a ledge, is it?”
“It widens out and descends the farther west you go, like it does on the south side. I’m just glad there’s a valid traverse we can use to reach it. I wasn’t sure there’d be one.”
Valentina’s hood turned toward him. “What would you have done if there hadn’t been?”
“Let’s just say I’m pleased the subject isn’t going to come up. Once we get on that ledge it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to drop down to the shoreline.”
“The operative word in that sentence, Jon, is ‘once.’”
“We can make it.” Smith forced his confidence again, eyeing the descent. At this point, the glacier ice began its final cascade down the near vertical north wall of the central ridge, a frozen waterfall that extruded slightly from the mountain face. With luck they could wor
k their way down to the ledge in the joining angle between rock and ice.
“I’ll lower you first, Val, then the packs, then Smyslov. I’ll rappel down last.”
He saw Valentina shoot a glance back toward the Russian, who stood defiantly leashed a few feet away. “Jon, might I have a few private words with you?”
“Of course.”
They stepped away from the edge of the glacier, moving down the back trail until they were behind Smyslov. It was hard to tell with the darkness and the bulky clothing, but the Russian seemed to stiffen as they moved past him.
Valentina lifted her snow goggles and pushed down her ice-encrusted snow mask, her face underlit by her glow stick. “We have a problem here,” she said, keeping her voice modulated to be just audible over the wind.
“Just one?” Smith replied with grim humor.
She tilted her head toward Smyslov’s back, not smiling. “I’m serious, Jon. We’ve got to be able to move. He’s slowing us down and he’s complicating a situation that’s quite sticky enough as is.”
“I know it, but we don’t have much of a choice in the matter.” He shifted his own mask and goggles, granting her the right of reading his own facial expressions. “We can’t just turn him loose. If he rejoined the Spetsnaz force he could be a valuable asset for them, and the deck is already stacked against us.”
“I quite agree, Jon. We can’t allow him to return to his Russian friends.” Her expression was as arctic as the environment. “But we can’t very well keep him as a pet. As we lack a convenient POW camp to drop him off at, that leaves us with only one option...”
“Which I am not yet ready to consider.”
She frowned. “Jon, civilization is a marvelous institution and all that, but be practical. We are up against the wall here, literally! If it’s that whole Hippocratic oath thing, I can deal with it. Gregory and I can go for a little walk to admire the scenery—”
“No,” Smith replied firmly.
“Jon, we can’t afford—!”
“I’m not sure if he’s an enemy yet, Val.”
“Jon,” her voice lifted in protest, “I was there this afternoon when the bolshi bastard tried to drop the hammer on you! That doesn’t make him a friend!”
“I know it. Trust me on this. Something’s telling me that Smyslov isn’t sure just what he is yet himself. I want to give him the chance to decide. This is a command decision, Val. It’s not open for discussion.”
“What if he decides he’s a ‘them’ and not an ‘us’?”
“Then, as the book says, we will reassess the situation and take appropriate action as the tactical conditions dictate.”
“And what if hanging onto Smyslov gets us dead, Jon?”
“Then I will have royally fucked up my job, and the failure of this mission will rest entirely with me.”
She started a heated response, hesitated, than smiled wryly. “Well, as long as you’d be willing to admit to it,” she replied, redonning her snow mask. “But if you get us killed before you take me to bed properly at least once, I shall throw an absolute hissy and not speak to you for an entire week.”
Smith laughed aloud in spite of himself and their situation. “Thank you for that motivation, Val,” he replied, giving her shoulders a light squeeze. “Now, let’s get this descent out of the way.”
Chapter Forty-one
The South Face, Wednesday Island
Randi wanted more snow and more wind, badly. As she had feared, there wasn’t storm enough to completely cover her trail. Looking back, she could see the flare glows and light beams following her half-erased tracks. There must be at least half a dozen of them, and they were driving her steadily higher up the face of the ridge.
She wasn’t dodging gunfire yet. That was good. It meant they didn’t have a visual on her. But she couldn’t see or plan for more than a yard or two ahead, and she was losing orientation in the swirling night. Randi could no longer place herself in relation to the rest of the island. She was just somewhere on the central ridge. It was only a matter of time before she found herself trapped on a dead-end ledge or in a no-exit pocket.
She must find rock, bare rock, amid a universe of ice and snow, to lose her trail on. Then she had to find some kind of shelter. She was getting tired, so incredibly tired. She stumbled over a snow-covered pile of rubble and fell, striking her shoulder against a massive boulder.
No, not a boulder. Too big. A cliff face. God, if she could only just see where she was! If she could just lie here for a second and close her eyes... Jon, dammit, where are you?
She snapped her eyes open and forced herself to her hands and knees. Move, you stupid bitch! Don’t you remember? There’s no one in the world you can depend on but yourself. Everyone else dies on you. Move! You’re losing time and distance! The lights are getting closer.
Randi got to her feet and moved on, her right hand brushing the cliff face as a guide. What the hell did the world look like around her? All she could see were differing shades and textures of darkness.
They were well above the science station now. The cliff face was on her right, so she must be going west. Off to her left would be essentially nothing, the downslope. How steep would the drop-off be along here? Somehow it “felt” like another cliff edge. So she was on a ledge or shelf, then. What was ahead? That was impossible to say, but the ledge seemed to be tilting outward in an ominous trend.
She didn’t have to look back. She knew what was behind her.
Randi could be sure of only one thing. She wasn’t going to be taken. If she reached a dead end, she must find a way to make her pursuers kill her.
She heard the rattle of a machine-gun burst, and she instinctively threw herself facedown on the ledge before she realized there were no bullet strikes nearby. They weren’t that close yet. Someone back there was getting trigger-happy.
Randi’s relief lasted only a second. From somewhere above her she both heard and felt a deep, almost explosive crump. The reverberations of the gunfire had broken a snow cornice loose. Avalanche! Where? In front of her? Behind her? On top of her? It was impossible to tell beyond “close.” She cowered and threw her arms over her face.
There was a brief whispering rumble, and the ledge trembled. Feathery plumes of sprayed snow engulfed her, but there was no crushing impact, no frozen flood sweeping her away. After a wired, panicky moment she relaxed and dropped her arms. It had been only a small one. A few tons of freed snow at most, and it had passed a few yards ahead. She shook off the thin haze of snow that had caked atop her, and got back to her feet.
The question now was, could she get over the mound of loose snow that would be heaped on the ledge without losing herself over the side? Too bad it hadn’t fallen between her and the search party. It might have done her some good then.
Randi’s mind locked up for a second, then raced. The slide had done her some good. Possibly it had given her a chance.
What if her pursuers found her tracks leading up to the edge of the slide and then stopping? Would they think she had been swept away? They couldn’t be happy with being out here tonight, either. Maybe an excuse to quit the search would be all they’d need.
She took two or three strides forward to reach the edge of the loose slide snow. This would be it. She would have to go straight upslope from this point, and it didn’t matter what the cliff face might look like even if she could see it.
And then there was the other problem: her lack of gloves. So far she’d been able to protect her hands inside the overlength sleeves of the outer shirts she wore. But she would need them to climb with. How long would she have before she started to take skin damage at this temperature? Two minutes? Three?
There was one positive. The face immediately above her couldn’t be too high. The falling snow had reached the ledge in only a couple of seconds. She looked over her shoulder. The flashlights were growing brighter. She had to act, now!
Randi pulled the sleeves back from her hands and sprang upward as far as she coul
d. Her nails scrabbled across ice-sheathed rock; one tore in a stab of pain; then she caught a handhold. Breath hissed between her clenched teeth. She hauled herself upward by arm strength alone, not letting her boots touch and mark the cliff face. Supported by her left hand for a moment, she darted her right upward, and a merciful universe let her find another grip.
Once more she hauled herself upward, shoulder muscles cracking. She was high enough to use her boots now without leaving obvious marks, and she could start hunting for and using toeholds as well. She had rock climbed before, for pleasure, but there was nothing pleasant about this. Her hands were already on fire with the cold.
Come on, Randi! You’ve only got your eyes closed because the Utah sun is too bright. It’s ninety degrees in Zion National Park and you’re wearing shorts and a halter top and you can feel the climbing harness hugging you, keeping you safe. You’ve got just a few yards left to go and you’re at the top and you can dangle your feet over the edge and laugh and drink a cold Diet Pepsi from the cooler.
Just a few yards more.
She found a horizontal fissure she could stand in for a moment, and she beat her fists against the rock to force feeling back into them. She couldn’t let them go completely numb yet. She had to be able to touch her way up!
Voices! Reflecting lights. The search party! Limpetlike, Randi plastered herself against the rock face. They had reached the slide. They were on the ledge directly below her.
This would be it. Would they buy into her accidental death, or would they suspect the trick? Would a light beam play up the cliff face, followed by a stream of bullets or just one carefully aimed shot?
Her hands! Dear God! Her hands!
They were having an argument down there! Come on! Come on! Before I fall off and land on top of you! Who was going to win? The tired or the dedicated? I’m dead, damn it! Buried under an avalanche! Your red-haired bastard boss should be satisfied with that!
They were moving. They were going back. They were leaving. After an eternity they were leaving. And no one had looked up.