Robert Ludlum's The Arctic Event

by Robert Ludlum

  Turning back to the computers, Randi methodically set to work, checked the four open systems first, skimming through the e-mail files and address lists. Nothing sprang out at her from the stored correspondence. Professional and personal business, letters from wives, families, and friends. The English boy, Ian, was apparently on very good terms with at least three different girlfriends, and the American girl, Kayla, was discussing a marriage with a fiancé.

  No one seemed to be openly chatting up any known terrorist groups or exchanging missives with the Syrian Ministry of Defense. Which, of course, was meaningless. There were any number of covert contact and relay nodes for such organizations infesting the Internet, just as there were any number of simple transposition codes and tear-sheet ciphers that could be used to mask a covert communication. But these days there were better ways to go about things.

  Randi moved on, cross-checking the control panels and programming screens and the memory reserves of the laptops. What she was looking for could be hidden, but it would also absorb a fair-sized chunk of hard drive space.

  Again nothing sprang out at her. That left the locked-out laptops.

  Getting up from the stool she had been using, she stretched for a moment and crossed to her pack that she had lugged in from the helicopter. Opening it, she took out a software wallet and removed a numbered compact disk. Returning to the laboratory table, she popped open the CD drive of the first locked computer and inserted the silvery disk.

  The locked laptop made the error of checking the identification of the inserted disk, and in seconds the sophisticated NSA cracking program was raping its operating system. The desktop’s welcome screen came up, the system’s lockout protocols erased and supplanted.

  Randi began to repeat the process with the second laptop. “Dr. Trowbridge, please don’t come up behind me like that,” she murmured, not taking her eyes from the screens. “It makes me nervous.”

  “Excuse me,” he replied, his footsteps withdrawing toward the stool in the corner of the laboratory. “I was just thinking about going over to the bunkhouse for a cup of coffee.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. There’s a jar of instant coffee, some mugs, and a pot for heating water in the cupboard beside the coal stove.”

  The academic’s voice grew heated as well. “So I gather I’m under suspicion of something as well?”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I do not understand any of this!” It was a vocal explosion.

  God, and she didn’t have time for this! She spun around on the lab stool. “Neither do we, Doctor! That’s the problem! We don’t understand how word about the anthrax got off this island. Nor do we understand who may be coming for it. Until we do we are going to be as suspicious as hell of everybody! What you apparently don’t understand is that entire national populations can be at stake here!”

  She turned back to the computers. There was a long silence from the far end of the lab, followed by the clatter of coffee paraphernalia.

  Dr. Hasegawa used Japanese kanji script on her personal computer, and it wasn’t difficult to learn the great secret she was shyly locking away from the world. The female meteorologist was also a budding novelist. Randi, who was as capable in kanji as she was in several other languages, scanned a page or two of what was obviously a sweeping and rather sultry historical romance set in the days of the shogunate. Actually she’d read worse.

  As for the computer of Stefan Kropodkin, he conveniently used English, and there was nothing out of the way on his system beyond a not excessive amount of downloaded cyber porn.

  But there was one blip on his scope. Almost nothing in the way of personal e-mail traffic had been saved.

  “Dr. Trowbridge, what do you know about Stefan Kropodkin?”

  “Kropodkin? A brilliant young man. A physics major from McGill University.”

  “That was in his file, along with the fact he holds a Slovakian passport and is in Canada on a student visa. Do you know anything about his family? Was any kind of a background check done on him?”

  “What kind of a background check were we supposed to do?” Trowbridge swore softly as he struggled with the lid of the jar of powdered coffee. “This was a purely scientific research expedition. As for his family, he doesn’t have one. The boy is a refugee, a war orphan from the former Yugoslavia.”

  “Really?” Randi sat back on her stool. “Then who is financing his education?”

  “He’s on a scholarship.”

  “What kind of a scholarship?”

  Trowbridge spooned coffee crystals into his mug. “It was established by a group of concerned Middle European businessmen specifically for deserving refugee youth from the Balkan conflicts.”

  “And let me guess: this scholarship was established shortly before Stefan Kropodkin applied for it, and so far, he’s the only deserving refugee youth to receive it.”

  Trowbridge hesitated, his spoon poised over his steaming cup. “Well, yes. How did you know?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  Randi refocused on Kropodkin’s laptop. Again, that unaccounted-for block of hard drive space she was looking for wasn’t present.

  She bit her lip. All right, somebody was being smart again. If it wasn’t locked up in one of the computers, it must be somewhere else. Where might that be?

  She closed her eyes, resting her hands on her thighs. Let’s say he’s being very, very smart and very careful. Where would he hide it?

  In his personal effects? No, there would be a risk in that. The same with carrying it on his person. It would be elsewhere.

  Maybe where it would be employed.

  Randi slipped off her stool. Crossing to her cold-weather gear on the wall hooks, she took her thin leather inner gloves out of her parka pocket. Donning them, she brushed past Trowbridge, recrossing the lab and entering the radio shack.

  It was little more than a large closet containing only the radio console, a single swivel chair, a small filing cabinet for hard copy, and a second small cabinet containing tools and electronic spares.

  It wouldn’t be inside the radio chassis or in the cabinets, simply because other people might have reason to poke around in there.

  The floor, ceiling, exterior walls, and interior partition were solid slabs of insulated fiber ply; the window, a sealed double thermopane. No hiding places. But where the wall and ceiling panels joined, there was a narrow ledge above man height and maybe an inch in depth. Carefully Randi started to feel her way around it.

  When her fingertips finally came to rest on it, she said, “Got you!” aloud.

  “What is it?” Trowbridge had been watching her actions from a wary distance.

  Randi carefully held up a chewing gum–sized stick of gray plastic. “A remote computer hard drive. Somebody hid it in here where it would be nice and convenient.”

  Randi returned to the lab table. Popping the end cap off the mini hard drive, she plugged it into the USB port of the nearest computer and called up the removable-disk access prompt.

  “Got you!” she repeated with greater exaltation. Randi lanced around to find Doctor Trowbridge trying to ease a look at the screen. “Be my guest, Doctor,” she said, stepping aside.

  “What is it?” he repeated, staring at the title screen.

  “It’s an Internet security program,” Randi replied, “used to encrypt e-mails and Internet files that you don’t want the world at large to be able to read. This one is a very sophisticated and expensive piece of work, totally state-of-the-art. It’s available on the open market, but usually you’d see something like this only in the hands of a very security-conscious business firm or government agency.”

  Randi’s gloved fingers danced over the keyboard for a moment. “There’s a secured document file in here as well. But even with the program, I can’t open it without the personalized encryption key. That will be somebody else’s job.”

  For the first time she looked around at Trowbridge. “Why would anyone at this station need something li
ke this?”

  “I don’t know,” Trowbridge said, all trace of his former belligerence erased. “There would be no reason. This was all open research. Nothing secretive was being done here.”

  “That you know of.” Randi delicately removed the minidrive from the computer and dropped it into a plastic evidence envelope.

  “Do you think...” He hesitated. “Do you think this has something to do with the disappearance of the expedition staff?”

  “I think this is the way the word about the bioweapons aboard the Misha 124 got out,” Randi replied. “But this leaves us an even more interesting question.”

  “What’s that, Ms. Russell?” For the moment, in the face of this discovery, they were at a truce.

  “This island has been a totally sealed environment for over six months. Somebody brought this thing here long before that bomber was ever found, for some totally different reason. Its use in this situation is a coincidence, not a cause.”

  Trowbridge started to protest. “But if it’s not for the bomber, why would anyone have a reason...”

  “As I said, Doctor, that’s a very interesting question.”

  Rosen Trowbridge had no answer. Instead he turned to the little coal stove with the little pot of water steaming atop it. “Would...would you care for a cup of coffee, Ms. Russell?”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Saddleback Glacier

  Smith studied the row of glowing green numbers in the LED strip of the handheld “Slugger” Global Positioning unit. “Don’t quote me on it, but I think we’re close,” he said, lifting his voice over the wind rumble.

  Whatever weather Wednesday Island received, the glacier between the two peaks got the worst of it, the mountains channeling the polar katabatics between them. On this afternoon, the sea smoke and cloud cover had blended, streaming through the gap between the mountains in a writhing river of mist intercut with stinging bursts of airborne ice crystals too hard and piercing to be called snow.

  As Smith had hoped, the rappel down the mountainside to the glacier’s surface had not proved excessively difficult, but the crossing of the glacier itself had turned into a slow, painful crawl. Visibility had varied from poor to nonexistent, and the threat of crevasses had mandated a wary roped advance, probing constantly with their ice axes. Away from the shield of the mountains, the incessant winds tugged and burned, penetrating even their top-flight arctic shell clothing. Frostbite and hypothermia would soon become a factor.

  They weren’t in trouble yet, but Smith knew his people were tiring. He was feeling it himself. Night was coming on rapidly as well. Soon they would have to break off the hunt for the plane and start the hunt for shelter, if such existed up here.

  That thought decided him. If he was thinking “soon,” it should be “now,” while they still had some reserves remaining. He must conserve his team’s strength and endurance. Time was critical, but squandering it by stumbling around in this freezing murk would accomplish nothing.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s pack it in. We’ll dig in for the night and hope for better visibility tomorrow.”

  “But, Jon, you said we’re close.” Valentina’s muffled protest leaked through her snow mask. “We must almost be on top of it!”

  “It’s been here for fifty years, Val. It’ll be here tomorrow. We just have to make sure we’re here to find it. Major, we’ll try and make it across to East Peak. That’ll be our best bet to find some cover out of this wind. You’ve got the point. Let’s move.”

  “Yes, Colonel.” Obediently Smyslov turned and started his hunched trudge, probing ahead with the spike end of his climbing axe and slamming his crampons into the wind-abraded ice with each step.

  How’s that for command, Sarge? Smith grinned to himself, telepathing the thought to his distant mountain warfare instructor.

  In the saddleback, the prevailing wind was as good as any compass. They only had to keep it on their left shoulder to eventually reach the far side of the glacier. Last on the safety line, Smith’s attention was centered on the other two members of his team, ready to brace and hold should either suddenly fall through into a hidden crevasse in the ice. Accordingly it took him a moment to comprehend why Gregori Smyslov came to such an abrupt halt.

  “Look!” The Russian’s excited yell was torn by a wind gust. “Look there!”

  Almost directly ahead of them, a towering finlike shape had materialized, ghostlike in the streaming mist: the vertical stabilizer of an aircraft, a big aircraft, the outline of a storm-scoured red star still faintly visible.

  “Yes!” Valentina Metrace lifted her fists in triumph.

  Wasn’t that always the case? When you weren’t looking for it, you found it.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Wednesday Island Station

  Randi Russell trudged up the trail to the knoll overlooking the station. Every few feet she stopped and heaved on the heavy, weatherproof coaxial cable that led up to the radio mast, peeling a length of it up and out of the snow cover. Carefully she ran each exposed cable section through her mittened hands, looking for breaks or cuts.

  It had to be the antennas. She’d checked everything else on both the sat phone and the sideband set. The little SINCGARS transceiver they’d brought with them was useless. It simply lacked the power to override the solar flare that was demolishing communications. Once they’d broken the line of sight she hadn’t even been able to raise Jon and the others on the aircraft party.

  She was on her own. As much as one could get. Impatiently she shook her head, displeased with the pang of loneliness that had flared within her. Giving the MP-5 a hitch onto her shoulder, she doggedly plowed another few feet up the compacted snow trail.

  Reaching the base of the ice-coated radio mast, Randi knelt down and traced the last few inches of cable into the booster box at the tower base. It was intact, and all the connectors were still screwed tight. Frustrated, she rocked back on her heels. The radios should be working. Given they weren’t, she was missing something. Randi suspected sabotage, but if such was the case, some very subtle methodology had been used.

  Somebody was being very, very clever, and she hoped that soon she would have the opportunity to make him suffer for it.

  Standing, Randi took her binoculars from her belt case. From her position on the knoll she had a fair view of the immediate cove area. Degree by degree, to the limits of the haze and the fading daylight, she made another scan of her environs, her augmented gaze lingering on the jumbled piles of pressure ice along the shoreline and on the shadows and swales of drift at the foot of the central ridge.

  That clever person was out there now, somewhere nearby, possibly even watching her. He was waiting, maybe for assistance or maybe for her to make that one mistake. To defeat him she was going to have to be a little bit more clever than he was.

  She had one immediate advantage. Movement in this snow-blanketed environment meant leaving obvious and unerasable tracks. The science station was centered in a straggling, lopsided web of flag-marked snow trails that interconnected the buildings, supply dumps, and more distant experiment and research sites. Randi ran her glasses down each track, seeking for fresh ground disturbances or sets of snowshoe or boot tracks angling off from the regular routes of travel.

  She found one. Disconcertingly, it was almost immediately below her, branching off from the trail to the knoll she had followed just a few minutes before in her climb to the radio mast. In her intent study of the communications cable, she hadn’t paid attention to the short lateral stretch of broken snow that led out to a small disturbed drift. She did so now, and a chill rippled down her spine that had nothing to do with the sinking evening temperature.

  She hastened downslope to the divergent trail and followed it for a dozen yards, kicking her way along and restirring the surface. She found what she had feared: red-stained snow, covered over and hidden. Reaching the end of the trail, she dropped to her knees and dug into the drift. It didn’t take long to uncover the parka-cla
d body.

  Kayla Brown wouldn’t be going home to her fiancé in Indiana. Gently Randi brushed the snow from the young woman’s face. She had died from a smashing blow to the temple from some heavy, pointed object, possibly an ice axe. Traces of shock and terror, her last expression, lingered frozen on the student’s face.

  Kneeling beside the girl’s body, Randi Russell decided that it would not be adequate for this clever person to suffer. He was going to die, and it would please her to be his executioner.

  Randi reburied the body with a few sweeps of her arm. She would not tell Trowbridge about this discovery. Not immediately, at any rate. Kayla Brown would keep here for a time, at least until Randi could arrange for her avenging.

  Randi continued to the hut row. The lights were already on within the bunkhouse. Doctor Trowbridge had volunteered to prepare an evening meal. Pausing on the main trail that led past the hut entrances, she judged vision angles and distances. Near the front of the bunkhouse, Randi veered off the trail, plowing out into the virgin snow for a few yards.

  Then, dropping onto the snow, she burrowed and rolled, compacting a pit large and deep enough for her to lie in with her back almost flush with the surrounding surface. It brought back unbidden childhood memories of making snow angels up at Bear Lake. Her intents now, though, were quite different.

  Satisfied with her efforts, she got to her feet, shook off the ice rime, and went in to dinner.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Misha Crash Site

  “It strikes me that a lot of people are going to feel awfully stupid if we get in there only to find that containment vessel has been lying on the bottom of the ocean for the past fifty years.” The MOPP biochemical warfare suit had been designed to fit over his cold-weather clothing, and Jon Smith suspected that he looked very much like the Michelin Tire man.

  “That is a stupidity I could live with,” Smyslov replied, passing him the headset for the Leprechaun tactical radio.

  “So could I.” Smith flipped back his parka hood and settled the headset in place, wincing a little as the searing chill bit at his momentarily exposed ears. “Radio check.”