Burkhart waited in the rampant storm. Then, suddenly, he once again became aware of the swelling, pulsing sound of engines under the wind's louder clamor . . . this time coming from all around him.
The corners were closing in.
The dark smudges of smoke Burkhart noticed outside the dome were no trick of the eye.
Behind its roll-down door, his solgel incendiaries had ignited with brilliant, white-hot slashes of flame, instantly reducing the desalinization unit's flow-pump motor to a tarry mire of fused steel and plastic. The pump quit with a shudder, chuffing out acrid, concentrated fumes that bleared the dials and alarm lights on its control panel as they floated past. Bristling vines of fire circled its butterfly inlet valve and coiled over the meshwork of low-pressure PVC pipes around the water tanks. They seared, sagged, and blistered, their melted plastic segments springing distorted fish-mouthed leaks, showering the dome's instrumentation with jets of distilled water. Raw seawater began flushing from the main pipeline, pouring down onto the tank platform, running over its sides. The smoke rose, spread, seeking fresh air. It eddied against the door, slipping through its weather seals in thready wisps.
Out in the wind and snow, Burkhart continued his waiting game.
Further away, Pete Nimec and his men pushed their snowmobiles toward the dome as quickly as they could. Nimec did not think getting inside would be easy, but still he hoped they might have time to somehow prevent the machinery that produced Cold Corners' entire usable water supply from becoming severely maimed.
He didn't have a shot.
The moment Burkhart had put his combustive charges in place, time had run out.
"Sir--I've spotted some of them."
"Where? I can't see a thing."
"A little ways ahead of us," Ron Waylon said. "I'd guess maybe forty, fifty yards. At about ten o'clock."
Nimec kept Waylon's blaze-orange parka in his headlights as he whirred along behind him. He had mostly gotten the hang of the snow bike, but the bare ice patches that would come up on it without warning kept threatening to rob its skis of traction and wrench the handlebars out of his grasp.
He squinted through his goggles.
"You said some?"
"Right--"
"How many? Still can't see anything . . ."
"I'm not sure. There could've been three, four. They were on bikes. Moving. Wearing winter camouflage." Waylon paused. "The bikes were white too," he added.
Nimec thought a moment. His instincts had been right.
"We made more than three of them inside the dome," he said over the com-link. "Looks like it's how I figured. They've deployed around it."
"Looks like," Waylon said.
Nimec swooped on toward the dome, a guy named Mitchell pacing at his rear, the rest having split off at his direction.
"Okay, both of you reading me?"
He received two affirmatives in his earpiece.
"This is it," he said, then let go of his right handgrip to reach for the weapon strapped over his shoulder.
The dome to his near left, Burkhart was still poised to throttle his snowmobile into action when one of his floating patrols hailed him over their radio link.
"Kommandant, ich sehe sie."
It was Langern, at the opposite side of the water-treatment facility.
"Wie viele?" Burkhart replied.
"Mindestens drei Manner. Sind auf rotes Schneemobilen."
Burkhart clicked his teeth. At least three men had been sighted. On red snowmobiles.
As he'd suspected, the enemy had broken up into harrier teams.
"Schatzen?" he asked.
"Ungefahr funfzig meter ostlich."
Burkhart tasted adrenaline at the back of his tongue. The machines Koenig had reported were approaching from fifty meters to the east.
His alertness notched to its utmost level, Burkhart looked over his right shoulder, glimpsed the noses of two more snowmobiles through the snow--these speeding toward him from a westerly direction.
It further confirmed his assessment of the enemy's diversionary tactics. But he had no doubt their main thrust still would be reserved for the dome's entrance.
"Lass keinen naher kommen," he ordered, thinking that they had gotten close enough.
Much about Antarctica was alien to Nimec, but he would have recognized the sound of automatic gunfire anyplace on earth.
The initial burst came from approximately where Waylon had seen the snow bikes, its distinctive crackle carrying across the distance even in the high, wild wind.
His opponents were throwing themselves into an outright confrontation, forfeiting stealth to delay his Sword ops from reaching the dome.
The nasty little cold war they'd initiated had just gotten very hot.
Nimec mentally bold-faced a decision that he'd known had to be. Sword was a civilian security outfit whose international presence was licensed through a clutter of separate arrangements with UpLink's host governments, most of them skittish about having armed foreigners on their real estate. Nonlethal threat response was Sword's option of first choice, and its techies had developed a collection of ingenious suppressive tools toward that end. Nimec's operatives were not cowboys on horses riding the range in search of desperados. But he had never allowed them to be victims-in-waiting either. Their rules of engagement were right in line with those followed almost universally by police and military forces. Deadly fire was to be returned in kind.
It made things stickier in theory that Antarctica was a piece of real estate unlike any other, demilitarized by global pact, everybody here supposedly living a harmonious coexistence, one big happy human family, their baser impulses and ambitions renounced. But in practice it didn't change a thing.
Nimec's people were under attack, taking fire, and getting killed by a bullet was the same the world over.
Gordian's words surfaced from recent memory: They can't always be protected from violence. But we have to keep our watch.
"Guns on max settings," Nimec told his men over their comlink.
He pressed a stud over the trigger guard of his own compact variable-velocity rifle-system assault weapon, an action more than slightly hampered by his thick cold-weather gauntlet. The baby VVRS, as Tom Ricci called it, used embedded microelectromechanical circuitry to switch the gun's muzzle speed between less-than-lethal and deadly-fire modes with a touch. At the low-speed setting, its subsonic rounds would remain enclosed within plastic sabots designed to blunt their penetrating capacity. Shot from the barrel at a higher pressure, the frangible sabots petaled off to release 5.56mm tungsten-alloy cores that struck with the murderous force of standard submachine-gun ammunition.
Now there was another spatter of fire, closer than before, barely up ahead.
Nimec heard a gaining whoosh from over to his left, and snapped his eyes in that direction, but saw nothing except dense, whipping white fans of snow.
And then, suddenly, the whiteness bulged out at him.
"Everybody, heads up--"
That was all Nimec had time to say.
His semiautomatic rifle raised, spitting angrily, Burkhart's storm-rider made his pass.
The half-dozen men Nimec had chosen for the fire-suppression team advanced on the dome, their bikes pushed to top speed against the wind, treads slinging up snow in rapidly collapsing arcs. Strapped to their backs were eighteen-pound canisters of FM-200 and inert-gas flame extinguishant. As instructed, they'd locked their VVRS rifles into man-killer mode.
They'd expected a fight, knowing their access to the dome would be blocked regardless of whether their cover teams managed to draw off the opposition. What they did not yet know was how much resistance they would have to tackle . . . but that was certain to become evident in short order.
They glided on, the curve of the dome rising before them, tendrils of smoke scratching into the white around it.
Then they saw snowmobiles crossing the flat, open span of ground between themselves and the water-treatment plant, a row of machines
spreading out to the left and right in bow-wing formation.
The fire-out team's designated leader, a veteran of Operation Politika named Mark Rice, knew the score the instant he observed their widening pattern of movement.
"Scatter!" he shouted into his mike. "They're trying to outflank us!"
Nimec had a chance to register the bike coming on fast from his left, darting out of the snow, its rider a blur as he triggered his first rounds, then sharpening in his vision like a wraith assuming form and substance.
The Sturmgewehr rattled out a second volley, and Nimec banked sharply off to elude its fire, leaning hard into the turn--almost too hard. He overbalanced, keeling his snowmobile sideways, but somehow managed to recover an instant before the bike would have leaped out from under him, spilling him from his seat as its handlebars wrenched free of his grasp.
Nimec heard the whine of his pursuer's engine from behind now, and glanced over his shoulder, wind slapping his masked, goggled face. The rider had stayed at his right rear flank, his sleek helmet visible behind fluttering tapers of whiteness. His throttle was wide open, and smoke spewed from his exhaust into the sheering wind.
Nimec swung evasively again as his pursuer's gun barrel emitted a third staccato burst, staying looser, trying not to fight the machine.
This time he held it in control. Gliding clear of the gunfire, he saw sugary powder gout upward where the bullets intended for him pecked the ground, felt what he thought might have been flying, splintered chips of ice lash across his coat sleeve.
His eye caught a flash of orange ahead of him--Ron Waylon's coat--and then glimpsed the streaky white uniform of another apparitional rider hurtling at Waylon, the two of them engaging, maneuvering around each other, dueling in snow-spraying, cat-and-mouse circles.
Several yards to Nimec's left, the figure of a third attacker had swung toward Mitchell at a full tear. Mitchell launched his bike's front end off the ground like a motorcyclist pulling a wheelie, one hand on its rubber grip, then started firing VVRS rounds over the top of the rider's windshield. The rider sprawled from his seat, his helmet visor shattered and bloody.
Nimec raced on straightaway, trying to put some distance between himself and the man at his back. Then he heard a prolonged exchange of fire between Waylon and his opponent stitch rhythmically through the wind. For an interminable moment both were lost from sight, surrounded by a spreading, churning cloud of kicked-up snow.
A shrill scream. Plucked away by the cheating gusts.
The gunfire stopped.
"Waylon, you all right?" Nimec exclaimed into his mouthpiece.
Silence over his radio. The snow cloud drifted milkily in the unsettled air.
"Waylon, do you copy . . . ?"
Nimec was still moving rapidly on his own bike, no more than fifteen seconds having elapsed since the riders launched their attack. He turned back to see the one on his tail accelerate and pull alongside him to the right, staring at him through his tinted visor, the bore of his Steyr rifle practically in Nimec's face.
His heart knocking, his fingers easy on the bike's left handlebar grip, Nimec flicked up the baby VVRS with his right hand, leveled it, released a tight spurt of ammunition. Blood boiled from the rider's chest and he flew from his seat, landing spread-eagled in the snow cover, his bike careening off in a skidding, plowing, crazily weaving run.
Nimec returned his attention to where he'd last seen Waylon just as a white cammo snowmobile came shredding out of the cloud of raised snow, riderless, its headlights blown out, its chassis studded with bullet holes. It plunged ahead for the barest of moments, then flipped over twice to land on its cowling and handlebars, the wraparound windshield breaking away, its upended skis pointed skyward on their extended struts.
Waylon in his headphone: "Okay here, sir."
Then Mitchell: "Check."
Nimec breathed hard, and took hold of both handlebars again, his weapon hanging from its shoulder strap.
"We better get on over to the dome, see what help we can be there," he said.
"I'm sorry everyone's been inconvenienced, and realize most of you were pulled out of bed," Megan Breen was saying. "But as you know, we've received a fire alert from one of the outbuildings. It's our normal practice to gather all non-base personnel into a single area during occurrences of this sort. Having you in one place benefits our ability to coordinate a response."
Annie Caulfield, Russ Granger, and the entire Senatorial gang of three looked at her from their respective chairs in the small, pleasantly furnished common room provided to guests sharing Cold Corners' DV accommodations.
It was now fifteen minutes since Pete and his men had gone out into the storm to face God only knows what kind of threat, and Megan was thinking that if she could somehow get this next piece of business done without revealing her agitation, she could probably keep a grip on herself through anything.
Still in his robe and slippers, Bernard Raines wrinkled his face, snuffling as if he'd gotten a whiff of something foul.
"You say a fire," he said. "I hope it isn't serious. For the sake of your people's well-being, of course." He cleared his throat. "It seems to me getting outside assistance in the storm would be difficult."
Megan responded to the fear in his eyes.
"I appreciate your concern, Senator," she said. "But a strong point of pride throughout UpLink International's entire organization is that we're very good at avoiding disruptions to our operations in any environment. That's especially true for those of us stationed at Cold Corners--our contingency planning staff takes its responsibilities very seriously."
Bravo, Meg, Annie thought, listening to the exchange. Couldn't have finessed that one better myself. It even might've topped my interview performance on the Mc-Cauley Stokes Show.
Raines had almost reassembled his poise.
"Why, yes," he said. "I see what you mean. And we have the highest regard for UpLink's capabilities." He looked around at his fellow Senators and waved his hands in an expansive gesture. "That's speaking for everyone in my party, I'm sure."
Both of his colleagues were nodding.
"I suppose bringing us together in here was only prudent," Wertz said. "A sensible precaution." She paused, crossing her arms. "Without making too much of it, though, when do you think the alert condition will be called off?"
Megan looked at her.
"That depends on when we hear from our firefighting team," Megan said. "With a little luck we'll have you safely and comfortably back in your quarters tonight . . . before anyone gets too homesick for civilization. Then we can all relax and can get some sleep."
Across the room, Granger sat quietly in his chair. The redhead was as cool and slick as the block of ice she probably snuggled up to at night. He wasn't sure how much she knew about the fire's cause. But she would at the very least know where it had broken out, and was minimizing its impact to the politicos . . . which made him wonder what else she realized and was keeping to herself.
Granger crossed his arms, feeling a chill in his stomach despite the more than adequate warmth of his surroundings.
He felt neither safe nor comfortable, and sleep was the furthest damn thing from his mind.
Phil Corben wanted to know how he'd gone from a night of beer and darts at the Meat Locker to lying outside in the cold to die.
Thrown face-down off his bike, snow mashed into his eyes, nose, and mouth, halfway burying him where he'd fallen, the flesh under his insulating garments damp with blood from his monstrous gunshot wounds, Corben wanted to know.
It wasn't that he was muddled about the events that had brought him to this point. Although his wounds had left him slack and disoriented, he could have recounted what happened in something very close to a coherent, sequential order. There wasn't that much to it . . . he'd sped toward the water-treatment dome with Rice's squad, and the men who'd set fire to it had rushed to meet them, and the shooting had started, and he'd gotten in the way of a burst of bullets.
Easy
to follow.
The problem for him was believing it was all real as opposed to being part of some grotesquely implausible nightmare.
He didn't understand why this was so. At thirty-two years old, Corben had already taken his disproportionate share of hard knocks. In fact, adversity had fairly well cleaned up on him--his daughter Kim succumbing to childhood leukemia when she was just five years old, the breakup of his marriage afterward, and then, months before he'd retired from his U.S. Naval EOD command and hitched up for a civilian post with UpLink on the ice, losing three of his best friends and teammates to an accidental chopper crash as they were returning home from land-mine-disposal operations in Sierra Leone, a humanitarian United Nations effort that had been a trip to the beach until their MH-47 Chinook troop transport went down due to unexplained engine failure.
While experience had taught Corben the futility of seeking reasons for the calamities that far too often slammed people on their heads, he'd gone on looking for them just the same. Maybe because bad luck didn't seem a good enough explanation for him, or mostly didn't, and he'd needed something else--if not necessarily better--to carry him through his days and nights.
Sprawled deep in snow, choking on his own blood, blown from his bike like a shooting-gallery duck, Corben desperately wanted to know how any of what had happened could have happened. How he could be about to perish from an act of brutal aggression here in Antarctica. Here. The one place where he'd envisioned finding an outer calm and stillness that might somehow penetrate his troubled heart, and where he was instead leaking blood from a chestful of bullet holes.
Figuring there probably wasn't a chance he'd get his reasons even with another hundred years tacked onto his life, Corben still wanted more damned time to hunt them out . . . and now suddenly wondered with a kind of dazed, stubborn truculence if he had the giddyup to keep his pursuit going maybe, maybe just a little while longer.
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