The polar bear was not familiar with these creatures, but the wind had carried him the scent of their sweet, hot blood, and on the ice, meat was meat.
The bear dropped down from the pressure ridge onto the thin flat surface of a recently refrozen lead. Here, where the ice was thin and still pliant, he might find a more conventional meal: a seal gnawing its way to the surface and a breath of air. Padding silently to the center of the open lead, the polar bear paused, his head held low to the ice sheet, extending his senses, feeling and listening for the faintest hint of sound or vibration from below.
There! There was a sense of something moving below the ice.
And then came a titanic shock, and the bear was lifted off his feet and hurled through the air. Such indignities were simply not supposed to happen to the lords of the Arctic! He hit the ice sprawling. Scrambling to his feet, the bear fled in abject terror, bawling his protest to an uncaring night.
A great black axe blade pressed up from beneath the surface of the frozen lead, the shattered ice groaning and splintering as it opened, flowerlike, around it. The mammoth Oscar-class SSGN bulled its way through the pack, hatches crashing open atop its sail as it stabilized on the surface. Men poured out of those hatches, dark, weather-scarred faces contrasting against the white of their arctic camouflage clothing. Some of them swung lithely down to the ice using the ladder rungs inset in the sides of the submarine’s conning tower. Dropping to the surface of the lead, they fanned out, unslinging AK-74 assault rifles as they established their security perimeter.
The others focused on hoisting their gear up and out of the red-lit belly of the undersea vessel: loaded backpacks, white equipment, and ration-stuffed duffel bags, collapsible fiberglass man-hauling sledges, and cases of ammunition and explosives. All that they would need to live, fight, and destroy in a polar environment for a protracted time.
The commanders of both the naval Spetsnaz platoon and the submarine were the last up the ladder to the submarine’s bridge.
“Damnation, but this is cold,” the sub commander muttered.
Lieutenant Pavel Tomashenko of the Naval Infantry Special Forces grinned in self-superiority and repeated the old saw. “In weather like this the flowers bloom in the streets of Pinsk.”
The submarine commander was not amused. “I need to submerge as soon as possible. I want to give this lead a chance to refreeze before the next American satellite pass.” As was the case with all good submariners, he was a nervous and unhappy man on the surface. And he had reason to be so. He was inside Canadian territorial waters in an area forbidden to probing foreign submarines. And while the Canadian naval forces were totally incapable of enforcing this prohibition, the atomic hunter-killer boats of the United States Navy also cheerfully and routinely disregarded this restriction.
“Do not worry, Captain, we will be away in a few more minutes,” Tomashenko replied, glancing down at his men as they loaded their sleds. “We must be under cover by the time of the next pass as well. There will be no problems.”
“So we can hope,” the submariner grunted. “I will endeavor to keep to the communications schedule, but I must remind you, Lieutenant, I can make no promises. It will depend on my finding open-water leads for the deployment of my radio masts. I will return to these coordinates once every twenty-four hours, and I will listen for your sounding charges and your through-ice transponder. I can do no more.”
“That will be quite adequate, Captain. You run a very efficient taxi service. Dos ve danya.”
Tomashenko swung himself over the rim of the bridge and lowered himself toward the frozen lead.
The sub skipper only muttered his response under his breath. It galled to take such lip from a mere snot-nosed lieutenant, but these Spetsnaz types considered themselves God’s anointed under the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, this particular example came with a curt set of sealed orders from the Pacific Fleet Directorate that squarely placed the sub commander and his boat at the beck and call of Tomashenko. To disregard either the word or spirit of those orders would be extremely bad joss in the shrinking Russian navy.
The sub skipper watched as Tomashenko and his platoon lined out, dark shapes against the ice, trudging toward the shadowed silhouette of Wednesday Island. He was glad to see them go. His soul and his ship were his own again for a time. He was pleased to have that particular outfit clear of his decks as well. Tomasheko’s force had to be one of the most thoroughly cold-blooded– and murderous-looking crews he had ever encountered. And given his twenty years of service in the Russian military, that was saying something.
“Clear the bridge!” The submarine commander lifted his voice in a hoarse bellow. “All lookouts below!”
As his seamen brushed past him to clatter down the ladder, he pushed the brass button beside the waterproof intercom. “Control room, this is the bridge. Prepare to take her down!”
Chapter Eighteen
The USS Alex Haley
Randi Russell nudged a scarlet plastic disk an inch forward with a fingernail. “King me,” she said, staring across the game board with the focused intensity of a cougar preparing to pounce.
Muttering under his breath in Russian, Gregori Smyslov took a counter from his minimal pile of trophies and clapped it down where indicated.
“You’re in trouble, Gregori,” Valentina Metrace said, munching a chip from the bowl resting beside the tabletop battlefield.
“Draughts is a child’s game,” Smyslov said through gritted teeth. “A child’s game, and I am not in difficulty!”
“We call it checkers, Major.” Smith chuckled from where he sat beside Randi. “And yes, you are in trouble.”
“Even the great Morphy would find it impossible to concentrate with certain people incessantly crunching crackers in his ear!”
“They’re tortilla chips, to be precise,” Valentina said, enjoying another savory crunch. “But your real problem is, you’re trying to logic the game as you would chess. Checkers are more like fencing: a matter of finely-honed instinct.”
“Indeed.” Smyslov pounced, jumping one of Randi’s red checkers with a black. “I told you I was in no difficulty.”
The riposte was lethal, Randi’s freshly minted king clearing the board of black counters in a swift, final tic-tic-tic triple assault. “Best four out of six?” she queried with just the faintest hint of a smile.
Smyslov’s palm thumped into his forehead. “Shit, and for this I left Siberia!”
Smith grinned at the Russian. “Don’t feel too bad, Major; I’ve never beaten Randi at checkers, either. I don’t think it can be done. Now, who’s for bridge?”
Smyslov lifted his head and started to collect his dead soldiers. “Why not? Being tortured with hot irons can’t be worse than having one’s fingernails torn out.”
The ice cutter was four days out of Sitka. After rounding Point Barrow she was now driving hard for the northeast and the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago. Only a certain portion of those days could be filled with briefings and brainstorming sessions about what they might find on Wednesday Island. Many hours were left to kill, and as outsiders to the tight seaborne community aboard the Haley, Smith and his people had been thrown together on their own resources.
Smith was pleased with this mechanism. Team building was not purely an aspect of training and discipline. It was a matter of the components learning one other. How they thought. How they acted and reacted. Minutiae down to how they liked a cup of coffee. It all accumulated into a projection of how this individual might react in a given crisis. Precious information.
Fragment by fragment, he was expanding his mental files.
Randi Russell: She was one he had known before. He had a base to build on with her. She was solid, inevitably solid. But out on the edge of perception there was always that faint, frightening whiff of don’t-give-a-damn. Never about the mission, but only about herself.
Gregori Smyslov: Clearly a good soldier, but also a man thinking a great deal. And from the moods Sm
ith caught on occasion, he wasn’t happy with his thoughts. The Russian was working toward a decision. What that decision might be was something for Smith to think about.
Valentina Metrace: She was something else to think about. Specifically, just what lurked inside the history professor’s vivacious, smoothly polished shell. There was some other entity in there. In his lengthening conversations with her he had caught only the slightest flavor of this alternate being. It wasn’t the slipping of a mask so much as the tracing of the camouflaged gun ports of a Q-ship. “Weapons expert” could mean any number of things.
Not that her overt personality wasn’t interesting in its own right.
The cabin’s overhead speaker clicked on. “Wardroom, this is the bridge. Pick up, please.”
Smith rose and crossed to the interphone beside the hatchway. “Wardroom here. This is Colonel Smith.”
“Colonel Smith, this is Captain Jorganson. You and your people might want to come on deck and have a look to port. We’re passing what you might call a local landmark.”
“Will do.” Smith returned the interphone to its cradle. The others looked up at him from their places at the mess table. “The captain suggests we have some sights to see, people.”
The wind on deck was piercing now, numbing exposed flesh in only a matter of seconds. Piercing also was the gunmetal blue of the sea and sky, the latter marred by only a few streaming wisps of cirrus cloud. It made a vivid contrast to the stark white castle shape drifting slowly past the cutter’s quarter, the bulk of the iceberg showing as a wavering green mass below the ocean’s surface. This was only the first outrider of the pack. To the north, off the bow, the horizon shimmered with a hazy metallic luster, what the arctic hands called “ice blink.”
Smith felt someone brush lightly against his elbow. Valentina Metrace was standing close by at his side, and he could feel her shiver. Dr. Trowbridge had emerged from the deckhouse as well and stood at the rail a few feet away, not speaking or looking at Smith and his team. Other members of the cutter’s crew were also coming topside, watching the passage of the pallid sea specter.
The first enemy was in sight. Soon the battle would begin.
Chapter Nineteen
Wednesday Island
“Core water samples, series M?”
“Check.”
“Core water samples, series R?”
“Check.”
“Core water samples, series RA?”
Kayla Brown looked up from where she knelt beside the open plastic specimen case. “They’re all here, Doctor Creston,” she replied patiently, “just like yesterday.”
Dr. Brian Creston chuckled and flipped his notebook shut. “Have patience with an old man, child. I’ve seen Mr. Cock-up drop in on many an expedition at the last minute. There’s no sense in getting sloppy in the home stretch.”
Kayla snapped the latches on the case and tightened the nylon safety strap around it. “I hear you, Doctor. I don’t want anything to come between me and that beautiful, beautiful helicopter tomorrow.”
“Really?” Creston reclaimed his pipe from the cracked chemistry retort he’d been using for an ashtray, and bent down slightly to peer through one of the laboratory hut’s small, low-set windows. “Actually, I’ll rather miss the place. I’ve found it...restful.”
For the moment there was a hole in the weather over the island, and the low-riding sun struck white fire off the drifted snow outside. The Wednesday Island Science Station consisted of three small, green prefabricated buildings: the laboratory, the bunkroom, and the utility/generator shack, set side by side in a row and spaced some thirty yards apart to eliminate the risk of a spreading fire.
Established near the shore of the small frozen bay at Wednesday’s western end, the station was protected from the blast of the prevailing northerlies by a shoulder of the Island’s central ridge. Thus, each flat-roofed hut had been only half-buried in drift.
Kayla Brown stood up and brushed off the knees of her ski pants. “It’s been a great experience, Doctor, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but like we say back home, ‘Can we please stop having fun now?’”
Creston laughed. “Understood, Kayla. But aren’t you going up with the crash investigation team when they arrive? After all, you were the one to first spot the wreck.”
The young woman’s face fell. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve thought about it, and it would probably be interesting, but...the men aboard that plane might still be up there. I’m willing to give that a pass.”
Creston nodded. Leaning back against the big worktable in the center of the laboratory, he began to lightly fill his pipe from the dwindling stock in his tobacco pouch. “I quite understand. It might not be the most pleasant of experiences. But I must confess, I’m getting bloody curious about that old bomber, especially given how they keep ordering us to stay away from it. It makes a person suspect there might be a bit more to this story than’s being let out.”
Kayla Brown braced her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes in feminine practicality. “Oh, come on, Doctor! You know how historians and archeologists are. They hate to have amateurs fumbling around a dig, jumbling things up. You wouldn’t want someone messing with your core samples or radiosonde balloons, would you?”
“Point taken.” Creston struck a wooden kitchen match. Holding it to the bowl of his pipe, he puffed experimentally. “But trust a woman to squeeze all the mystery out of things.”
At that moment Ian Rutherford slid open the accordion door in the partition that separated the main laboratory from the little radio room that took up one end of the hut. “Got the latest met gen, Doctor,” he said, holding up a sheet of hard copy.
“How’s it look, Ian?”
The young Englishman grimaced theatrically. “I suppose you could say mixed. We’ve got a mild front moving in. It might hold off through tomorrow, but for a day or so after that we’re going to be spotty.”
“How big a spot, lad?”
“Variable northerly winds up to force five. Low overcast. Intermittent snow squalls.”
Kayla rolled her eyes once more. “Oh, nice! Perfect flying weather!”
“And that’s just the start,” the youthful Englishman went on. “We’ve been put on a solar flare warning. Commo’s going to be dicky as well.”
“Dear me.” Doctor Creston sighed a cloud of aromatic smoke. “Someone put the kettle on. I think I hear Mr. Cock-up coming up the walk.”
“Oh, come on, Doc,” Rutherford grinned. “It won’t be that bad. Ops should only be bitched for a day or two at the most.”
“I know, Ian, but just remember who’ll be waiting for us on the ship. Dear old Count-the-Pennies Trowbridge will be certain I deliberately brewed up a storm during extraction just to put him over budget.”
There was a shout from somewhere outside the lab building, muffled by the thickly insulated walls. Boots pounded in the snow lock entryway, the inner door crashed open, and Stefan Kropodkin pushed through into the laboratory, crumbs of compacted snow spraying off his Arctic gear. “Did Doctor Hasegawa and Professor Gupta get in?” he gasped, tearing back the hood of his parka.
Creston straightened from the edge of the worktable, setting his pipe back into the retort ashtray. “No, they haven’t. What’s wrong?”
The Slovakian gulped air. “I don’t know. They’ve disappeared.”
Creston frowned, “What do you mean, disappeared?”
“I don’t know! They’re just gone! We were on the south beach, about three kilometers out. Professor Gupta wanted a last look at the ice buildup rates along the shore, and we were assisting him. The professor told me to photograph some of the formations, and he and Dr. Hasegawa went on ahead, around the point. I lost sight of them.” Kropodkin took another shuddering breath. “When I followed after them, they were gone.”
“Damn it! If I’ve told Adaran once I’ve told him a hundred times. Keep your group together! Did they have a two-way?”
Kropodkin nodded. “The pro
fessor had a radio.”
Creston looked to Rutherford. “Did you hear anything on the local channel?”
The Englishman shook his head.
“Then get on the set. Call them.”
“Right-oh!” The Englishman disappeared through the door of the radio shack.
Kropodkin sank down on a stool, dragging off his heavy overmittens and gloves. Kayla Brown anxiously passed him a bottle of water. “I went on for about another kilometer,” he continued after taking a drink. “I called for them but there was no answer. No sign. I began to worry and I hurried back here. I thought maybe they had gotten past me somehow.”
“They must have gone inland or out onto the shore drift for some reason.” Creston scowled.
“There’s no answer on the local channel, Doc!” Rutherford yelled from the radio room.
Kropodkin looked from Dr. Creston to Kayla, a mix of concern and fear crossing his features. “There was one other thing, beyond where they disappeared. A half-eaten seal on the beach. A polar bear kill. Fresh.”
“Are you sure it was a seal?” Kayla asked, a tremor in her voice.
He nodded. “This time.”
“Steady on, everyone. Likely we’re all making a fuss over nothing,” Creston said crisply. “Still, it’s coming on dark soon. Ian, you bring the other portable transceiver, and I’ll get the medical kit. We’ll take one of the hand sleds, a tent, and a survival pack with us. Kayla, I want you to stand by the radio in case we have to tell the Haley we have a problem.”
“But...” The girl caught herself. This was no time to make a fuss. “Yes, sir.”
Kropodkin pulled his gloves on once more. “I will get the shotgun from the bunkhouse.”
Chapter Twenty
The USS Alex Haley
Jon Smith stared up drowsily at the springs of the overhead bunk, the lilting folk rock of Al Stewart’s “Sand in Your Shoes” flowing from the iPOD’s earphones. With tomorrow’s mission launch looming, sleep had been hard to come by. Now, finally, after an hour of assiduous courting, it was almost within reach.
Robert Ludlum's The Arctic Event Page 14