Smith got a leg up on the float and lunged into the helicopter’s cabin, collapsing on the deck. Valentina collapsed next to him, glaring.
“Don’t start about us coming back for you, Jon!” she yelled over the growing wind roar. “Just don’t even bloody start!”
The last two members of the Spetsnaz platoon, the radio operator and the junior demolitions man, watched the small orange helicopter buzz away over the central ridge. The senior demo man had died spectacularly in the last moments of the fight. Standing to fire at the aircraft, his head had exploded like a bursting balloon, struck by a bullet traveling at some ungodly velocity.
There was nothing to be done for him, and the pair of survivors were unsure of what they could do for themselves. At the moment they were among the most helpless of men: Russian soldiers without an officer to give them orders. They exchanged a few quiet words in their native Yakut tongue; then they started to trudge back toward the dead body of Lieutenant Tomashenko and the stranger he had shot down.
The stone- and snow-streaked flanks of the central ridge wheeled past below the Long Ranger. Randi’s hands hurt, but she could cope with it. Far more importantly, in the face of the cold start and the gunfire, all the instrument gauges were where they were supposed to be.
“How does it look?” Smith said, pulling himself up between the pilot seats.
“It looks like Bell builds a pretty good helicopter. Where do you want me to head, Jon?”
“The Misha crash site, as fast as you can get us there.”
“We’re on the way. What are we going to do when we get there?”
There was no sense in not telling her the truth. “I have no idea, Randi. We’re going to have to see what we’ve got and how it plays.”
Valentina pulled herself up beside him. “What happened to Gregori?”
Smith hated the sound of his own voice, cold and flat. “His own people shot him.”
“God, and I wanted to kill him myself once.” Valentina rested her forehead on the back of the pilot’s seat. When she straightened her voice had gone cold as well. “Once we’ve sorted out that lot at the crash site, I’d like to go back there and tidy up a few things.”
“You don’t have to. The issue has been dealt with.”
The Long Ranger swept around West Peak, and the jagged slopes fell away to the dirty gray white of the glacier.
“Stay high, Randi. We may have guns down there.”
“Understood. It should be right over on the far side of the saddleback, shouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, we should be over it in another second.”
And then they were.
“You bastards!” Valentina screamed in helpless rage, smashing her fists down on the cabin deck. “You filthy, stinking bastards!”
The scattered ruins of the Misha 124 lay on the ice below. The entire forward fuselage of the ancient bomber had been ripped open, first by shaped explosive charges and then by the enormous lift and leverage of Kretek’s flying crane. Chunks of aircraft skin and bulkheading lay scattered like discarded Christmas wrappings, and they could look down into the TU-4’s forward bomb bay.
The bioagent reservoir was gone, lifted out of the wreck like an egg out of a crumpled aluminum nest.
Randi let the Long Ranger slip into a hover over the crash site. “Oh, God, he’s got it!” she exclaimed, her voice despairing.
Two metric tons of weaponized anthrax. Half a continent’s worth of death in the hands of a man who cared less than nothing for human life.
Smith looked away from the crash site and toward the south, toward the threatened world, and in the distance he caught the faint repetitive flicker of rotors in the sunlight.
Chapter Fifty-one
Over the Arctic Ocean
“This is Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Do you copy?”
Major Saunders had repeated the call so often it had started to lose meaning for him. They had completed their final top-off from the tanker, and in the Osprey’s cargo bay the ranger strikers and the ABC men were tightening harness and running their final equipment checks. Soon they’d be coming in on their objective. For the first time in days the radio bands were clear of solar interference. But Saunders was beginning to suspect there was no one out there to answer.
“This is Black Horse Lead...”
“Black Horse Lead, this is Wednesday Island Point,” a crisp, businesslike voice crackled clearly into Saunders’s earphones. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith. I am coded Cipher Venger Five. Do you read me, Black Horse?”
Saunders’s thumb crushed the transmit button on his joystick. “We read you, Colonel, four by four. We are your Mike force. What is your situation?”
“We are off Wednesday and airborne at this time. Situation on the island is critical and unstable. What is your ETA, Black Horse, and do you have fighter assets attached?”
“We are approximately twenty-five minutes out from Wednesday. Negative on fighter assets; we are lift and tanker only.”
“That’s not going to do us any good then,” the voice replied. “Be advised Wednesday Island should be considered a potentially hot LZ. Hostiles may include Russian Spetsnaz elements. Also be advised the Primary Package is verified. I say again, the Primary Package is verified. Primary Package is also off the island and is being sling carried by a Mil 26, that is Mary...India...Lima...two...six, Halo heavy-lift helicopter, Canadian civil registry, Golf...Kilo...Tango...Alpha. Halo is now heading south-southeast from Wednesday Island at approximately ninety knots. We are in pursuit at this time. Require immediate interceptor launch. Engage and destroy Halo at all costs. I say again, engage and destroy at all costs!”
“Understood, Wednesday Point. We will relay intercept request, but it’s going to take a while. Even the jets will need a couple of hours to get out this far.”
“Roger that, Black Horse, understood.” There was a fatalism in the reply. “We’ll do what we can until they get here.”
Anton Kretek peered down from the crane operator’s cab on the port side of the Halo. Seventy feet below the huge helicopter, the lozenge-shaped containment vessel twisted slowly at the end of its heavy Kevlar cable. Torn wiring and ductwork trailed raggedly from either end of the silvery reservoir, and the lifting harness wasn’t as secure as it might have been, but the pearl had been stolen from the oyster.
It had been a tough, sloppy job, but what did it matter? It was the last. It had cost him a number of his best men, including his chief of staff, but that might have worked out for the best. Mikhail would have had to have been liquidated in due course anyway. The man simply knew too much. Now was as good a time as any to have done with it.
There was, of course, the chance he might be captured back on the island, along with his knowledge about the remainder of the anthrax retrieval operation, but Kretek had prepared for even that eventuality.
Then there was also the unavenged death of his sister’s son, but pish, be damned to the woman. The boy was dead. What profit was there in fussing about it now?
Kretek groped in the pocket of his parka for his Balkan-blend cigarettes and lighter, then recalled the big half-empty blivett of jet fuel filling the helicopter’s central cargo bay. Telling his nicotine-starved nerves to be patient for a few hours more, he went forward from the crane cab to the cockpit.
The demolitions men and the surviving members of the security force slouched on the cargo bay deck, their heads resting on their knees, or sprawled on the fuel blivet, using it as a waterbed. In the cockpit the Canadian pilot was on the controls while his Byelorussian copilot intermittently stuck his head into the observation bubble set in the cockpit side window, checking on the status of the sling load.
“There is a change in plans.” Kretek lifted his voice over the thrum of the rotors. “We won’t be returning to the trawler. We will turn directly south at the second refueling depot.”
“Whatever you say.” The pil
ot’s reply was laconic. “Where are we heading?”
“I will give you the GPS coordinates later.”
“However you want it.”
Kretek approved of the man. A true professional, he asked no questions. Were Kretek staying in the trade, he would have considered keeping the fellow around. Such men were useful. As it was, he, his crew, and his aircraft would end up at the bottom of an isolated Canadian lake instead of Hudson Bay.
As for the anthrax, it would be left well camouflaged near a logging road in the Canadian Northwest Territories. In a few months, after the heat was off and after he had negotiated a sale of the merchandise, it could be extracted by truck. This was the secondary plan that not even Mikhail Vlahovitch had known about. It meant sacrificing the men he’d left on the trawler as well, but so it went. He no longer needed them, either. A momentary smile tugged at Kretek’s mouth. What did they call it, “corporate downsizing”?
The arms merchant leaned against the side of the cockpit, bracing himself against the intermittent low-altitude turbulence, and again fought down the urge for a cigarette. He would rather miss the trade, but with the sale of the anthrax it would not be wise to continue. He would be too rich, too complacent. The wise man knew when to call enough.
The Halo’s copilot suddenly gave an explosive curse, staring out of the portside cockpit window. They were no longer alone in the sky. Another aircraft was paralleling their course, half a kilometer off. The small Day-Glo orange helicopter, the one they had left back on the island. The one he had been in too much of a rush to destroy.
Kretek echoed the copilot’s curse. Complacency was already biting him in the ass.
The arms merchant dove back into the cargo hold. Twisting the quick release handle on the escape hatch, port side, just aft of the cockpit, he took a grip on a grab bar and kicked the hatch out of its frame.
“Get two men with machine guns here!” he bellowed over the roar of the slipstream. “Then two others at each of the other hatches. Move, you bastards! Move!”
The Long Ranger held warily on the hip of the heavy lifter. Slowed by the ominous cylindrical shape dangling beneath its belly, the Halo hadn’t been difficult to overtake.
“It’s rather like a dog chasing an automobile,” Valentina mused as they studied the giant Russian-built helicopter. “Once you catch the damn thing what do you do with it?”
The larger aircraft stolidly continued its lumbering retreat away from Wednesday Island. To the southeast, the cloud-capped outlines of the next rank of arctic islands thrust above the horizon.
“This is not good, Jon,” she continued, kneeling on the deck beside the open side hatch. “If he drops down to fly nap-of-the-Earth inside of the archipelago, the DEW Line will never be able to pick him up amid that tangle of islands and channels. It’ll be blind luck if the interceptors can find him.”
“I know it. That’s why we’ve got to stay on him.”
Randi looked back over the pilot’s seat. “Just letting you know, Jon, we don’t have all that much of a fuel reserve.”
“I know that, too.” Again they were running out of assets, and every minute and mile was taking them deeper into the frozen wastes of the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago and farther from allies and aid.
“Watch it!” Valentina exclaimed. A black rectangle had suddenly appeared in the Halo’s fuselage, the jettisoned door fluttering away toward the pack ice below. “He’s opening his gun ports!”
Sparks of muzzle flame danced inside the open doorway, and gun smoke streaked down the flank of the heavy lifter. Randi countered, flaring the Long Ranger back. Climbing and sideslipping, she put her smaller, nimbler machine above and behind the shield of the larger helicopter’s blade arc, positioning so that Kretek’s gunners could not fire on them without damaging their own rotors.
Below them, the Halo weaved sluggishly, like an elephant waving its tusks at a prowling lion, the containment vessel swinging, pendulumlike, at the end of its tether.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely if they developed a bad case of butterfingers and just dropped the damn thing?” Valentina commented.
“A nice thought, but it’s something we can’t count on,” Smith replied. “Randi, what are the odds of our shooting out one of their engines?”
The blonde shook her head. “Not good at all! The Halo is built to Russian mil spec. It’s a flying tank, designed to absorb a lot of battle damage.”
“There’s got to be some point of vulnerability!” Smith insisted.
Randi frowned in thought. “Maybe the Jesus nut, the main rotor hub. If you can cut a push-pull rod or fracture a blade hinge, that might do it.”
“Val, it’s your rifle. What do you think?”
The historian looked dubiously at her old Winchester. “I don’t know. The .220 Swift is an excellent man killer but a stinkin’ antimateriel round. There’s too much velocity and not enough penetration.”
“Can you do it?” Smith insisted.
“I can but try. No promises, though. Randi, bring us in, close as you can and as steady as you can.”
She lay down on the deck in the prone firing position. Twisting the sling of the model 70 around her forearm, she aimed out of the side hatch, nestling in behind the sights.
Stacked almost on top of each other, the Long Ranger and the Halo thundered through the arctic sky, a crow mercilessly harrying a vulture. In the Halo’s cockpit, the deck below Kretek’s feet swayed ominously, the arcing swings of the containment vessel at the end of the cable wrenching at the heavy lifter.
“They’re firing at us!” the arms dealer bellowed into the ear of the Halo’s pilot. “Do something!” With the escape hatches kicked open, the interior of the big helicopter was a welter of wind roar and engine shriek.
“I can’t maneuver with a sling load!” the pilot yelled back. “The only way we can evade is by cutting loose!”
An automatic pistol appeared in Kretek’s hand. “Try it and I’ll kill you.”
It was no idle threat, as the Halo’s pilot was well aware. But the threat presented by that other rotor-winged gadfly was not idle, either. There was the tap and screech of a bullet strike on the upper fuselage.
“Climb, you bastard!” Kretek snapped. “Climb above them so we can shoot back!”
Gritting his teeth, the pilot twisted his throttle grip to maximum war power, pushing the Tumanski gas turbines to their limits and sending the tachometers and temperature gauges swinging up and into their red zones.
Randi Russell made the Long Ranger dance, maintaining her position and distance from the lumbering Halo as if connected to it by an invisible boom, keeping behind the invisible shield of the larger helicopter’s rotor plain, denying the hostile gunners a target.
Valentina Metrace worked her own skills to their limit as well. Lips curled into a snarl of concentration, she worked the model 70 like an automaton, tracking on target, jacking the bolt to eject the empties, and firing on the split-seconds the sight picture became right. Three times she paused to feed fresh shells into the rifle, but as the third magazine emptied, she lowered the weapon, shaking her head.
“It’s no good, Jon,” she yelled. “I’m connecting, but the damn bullets just explode when they hit. Too much vel. It’s not going to work.”
“What else can we try?”
She looked up at him from the deck. “We try for the pilots. There’s the same velocity-and-penetration problem, though. I’ll have to first blow out the windscreen and then fire through the hole to get at the men.”
“If that’s what we’ve got, we go with it.”
“One additional problem.” She shoved her hand into her sweatshirt pocket. When she removed and opened it, three slender, sharp-nosed cartridges gleamed in the palm of her glove. “That’s the lot. Then the cow’s dry.”
“Like I said, if that’s what we’ve got. Randi, set us up.”
She had been listening to the exchange. “I’ll have to drop below the rotor arc to give you a line of fire into the
cockpit. They’ll get to shoot back.”
“I’ll say yet again, if that’s what we’ve got.”
“Where are they?” the Halo’s pilot demanded, eyeing his sideview mirrors. “Where’d the cocksuckers go?”
“I do not know.” His copilot twisted in his seat and peered out the side bubble. “They dropped behind us.”
“What is it?” Kretek demanded from over the pilot’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” the pilot replied shortly. “They’re back on our six. They’re trying something.”
Then he felt the vibration through his controls as a second blast of rotor wash interfered with his own. A shadow tore over the cockpit as the floats of the Long Ranger flashed past, mere feet overhead, in a shallow accelerating dive. Pulling a couple of hundred feet ahead, the smaller helicopter skidded in midair, presenting its open side hatch to the Halo.
“What the f—”
The left side of the cockpit windscreen exploded in a hailstorm of pebbled glass. The copilot screamed incoherently, clawing at his shredded face. Then his scream was abruptly cut off as the second murderously precise rifle slug caught the Byelorussian in the throat, almost decapitating him.
A combat flier’s instincts took over, and the pilot locked his controls over. The nose of the Halo came around, sluggishly but quick enough to put the third bullet past his shoulder instead of into his head.
The Halo continued its wild turnaway, shuddering on the verge of a rotor stall. The pilot could hear the door gunner blazing wildly back at their attacker as he fought with the cyclic and collective, trying not to further stress the Halo’s critically overloaded airframe. His hand went to the T-grip handle of the emergency sling release.
“No!” The muzzle of Kretek’s automatic jammed into the pilot’s throat. Glaring like a wild boar at bay, the arms merchant wedged himself between the cockpit seats, his left arm a bloody ruin from the hypervelocity bullet that had missed the pilot. “No!”
Grimly Randi held her course until she heard Val’s rifle crack out its last shot. The Halo was turning on them like a ship of the line presenting its broadside, automatic weapons fire lashing from its side hatches. Submachine gun slugs dotted the flank of the Long Ranger. With her windscreen starring with bullet hits, Randi kicked up onto a rotor tip and dove under the firestreams.