by Tom Clancy
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.
Blood slicking his trigger-finger mitten shells, Corben tried to raise himself on his elbows and forearms, pushed his chest up out of the snow a few inches, then sank into it again — but not before managing to turn over onto his back. He expelled thick clots of blood, snow, and snot from his nose and mouth, feeling glassy particles of flying snow drill into the weave of his balaclava as they cascaded relentlessly down from the cloud sheet. You gave and you got, he supposed.
He could hear bikes swerving around him, see sparkles of gunfire at the corners of his eyes, see smoke puffing up into the turbulent sky overhead, and knew the white-suited men who’d come out of the storm like mechanized ghosts were continuing to hold Rice and the others off from the dome. The longer they hindered the squad’s entry, succeeded in keeping their arson fire burning, the less of the plant’s equipment would be salvageable.
Corben rasped in a miserable breath of cold air and turned his head from side to side, trying to locate his fallen VVRS. The pressurized red cylinders of fire-extinguishant and oxygen he’d been lugging on his back rig were bedded together in snow over to his left. Fine and dandy. But what about the weapon? Unable to see it, he reached out his arms, began probing the snow around him with tremulous hands, thinking it might have gotten hidden somewhere under the surface.
It was then that Corben became aware of an engine sound in the gale — the unmistakable buzz of a snow bike.
He lay on his back and groped more urgently for his weapon as the buzzing gained in volume, using his bloodied mitten like a rake, scrubbing it over the snow cover… and at last made contact with something thin and hard and smooth.
Corben glided his hand over the object, knew he’d found his VVRS, and brushed away the granular deposit covering it. He was desperate to scoop the weapon out of the snow, get it fully into his grasp. The bike was very close now and he needed it in his grasp.
And then he had it. His fist around its stock, he snatched it up with a huge swell of relief, clutching it against his body almost like someone who’d rescued a cherished pet from drowning. But that was only for a moment, and he wasn’t about to congratulate himself. Things were moving too fast, the bike approaching with what had now become a roar.
Corben slipped his finger around the sabot gun’s trigger, angled its barrel upward. The baby VVRS only weighed something like ten pounds loaded, but felt heavy as a cannon in his weakness. He was sure he didn’t have the strength to keep it raised.
Not for very long.
Perhaps ten seconds elapsed before the snow bike finally swept toward him through the blinding whiteness, bumping to a sudden halt just a few feet away.
Staring up past his gunsight, Corben lowered the rifle, once again overtaken by acute relief.
The bike was red, its rider wearing a parka shaded a little closer to orange.
He hopped off his seat, knelt, bent close to Corben. All around them guns were still firing
“Phil,” the rider said, and looked Corben over carefully. “It’s all right, don’t worry. Gonna have to get you on my bike, strapped onto my grab-rail. Then we head back to base, okay? Your fighting’s done, I’m taking you out of it.”
Corben recognized Cruz’s voice through his face mask.
“Tie me up, Sam,” he said, nodding faintly.
Burkhart was also ready to pull out of the fight.
He raced evasively astride his snowmobile, followed close on by an UpLink rider, wishing only to end the chase and extract his men before any more of them lost their lives. Considering the dimensions of his blunder, they had gotten off cheaply having taken just three casualties. But the dome’s entrance had been blocked long enough, and their job here was done. They had struck at the UpLink team’s corners, only to be outflanked themselves, a countermove that hadn’t surprised or daunted Burkhart. The thick smoke pouring from the dome told him the flames inside would have devastated its crucial desalinization apparatus — and that had been his single objective. He had no interest whatsoever in continued one-upsmanship.
It was time to finish things.
Squeezing fuel into the snowmobile’s engine cylinders, he leaned partway from its saddle, swung the Sturmgewehr around in his gun hand, and pressed back its trigger. The gun clapped fire at the red bike behind him. There had been two in pursuit moments ago, but he had been able to shake off one of them, losing it after a pitched, breakneck series of evasive maneuvers.
The rider who’d stayed on top of Burkhart was better than the other by far.
He kept right with him now, surging up from behind, swerving to avoid Burkhart’s stream of ammunition, lifting his own weapon above his handlebars to release an answering salvo.
Burkhart heard lead rounds chew at his rear bumper, felt the percussive rattle of their impact. Bits of the snowmobile’s pocked, gouged chassis spewed up around him.
Finish things, he thought.
Bent low behind his windshield, he opened the bike’s throttle, accelerated with a rush, and then sharply jerked into a full turn, swinging around to face his pursuer, applying the brakes with gentle pumps of his fist, aware he would tailspin if he worked their lever too hard.
Burkhart could feel his suspension rods quiver from stress as the bike hauled to an abrupt stop, its skis swashing up thick billows of snow.
His feet planted on the boards, he straddled his seat and poured a continuous volley out of his submachine gun, his fire cutting through the encompassing whiteness, aimed directly at the snowmobile coming head-on toward him.
The move caught his harrier off guard. The UpLink rider slewed, tilted high onto the edge of his right ski, then was flung from his bike as it suddenly ran away from under him, overbalanced, and tipped sideways into the snow yards from where he’d landed.
Burkhart released his brake lever, launched forward, brought himself to a second jolting halt in front of the thrown rider, and jumped off his bike.
The UpLink man was badly hurt. Dumped onto his right side, his leg bent where it shouldn’t have been — broken in at least two places below the knee, Burkhart saw — he struggled to pull himself out of the snow, rolled off his hip, and somehow got into a twisted semblance of a sitting position, his VVRS still in his grip.
Burkhart rushed toward him, kicked the weapon from his hand before he could fully bring it up, retrieved it, and pointed his own gun at the rider.
The men looked at one another in silence, their eyes meeting through their dark goggles for the briefest of moments.
Then Burkhart pivoted away from him, scoured the back of the overturned snowmobile with sustained gunfire, riddling the gas tank with bullets, puncturing the spare fuel container on its rear rack. Mixed gasoline and oil blurted greasily into the snow.
Burkhart flicked a glance back over at the injured rider.
“Man kann nie wissen,” he said.
You never know.
A moment lat
er he shouldered his weapon, turned to remount his snowmobile, and radioed out the order to withdraw.
* * *
As he approached the dome, Nimec heard the chatter of a baby VVRS to his left, and snapped a look through the flowing whiteness. He saw blood erupt from a storm rider’s chest, then saw both bike and rider capsize into the snow. An instant later, the Sword op who’d done the shooting sped over to where one of his teammates had been downed by the storm rider, got off his snowmobile, and crouched beside him, shaking his head in horrified denial.
Nimec braked and sat absolutely motionless, pods of snow bursting in the air around him. He heard a choked-back cry from the kneeling op, and was grateful when the wind pulled it away.
Even from a distance of some yards, he knew it was too late for the guy’s partner. His goggles were shattered and most of his forehead was gone.
“I can’t believe this.” Waylon had slid up beside Nimec and was staring out at the bloody scene. “It’s just so hard to believe this… ”
Nimec said nothing. It was hard, yes. And the decision he needed to make was harder still.
He turned and peered straight ahead at the dome. The smoke lacing from its entrance hadn’t abated, but the fire-suppression squad was almost there now, riding toward it unopposed. And although he could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire at their fringes, CC’s mounted attackers had vanished from sight.
Nimec unexpectedly thought of the day that he and Meg had first talked to Tom Ricci about joining up with UpLink, on a spring afternoon a year or so back. They had met with him at his place in Maine, and were on his deck overlooking Penobscot Bay when a bald eagle had soared from a nearby tree, prompting every other bird in sight to flutter off into nowhere, all of them dispersing at the same time.
“It’ll generally stay quiet for five, ten minutes after she’s gone,” Ricci had remarked. “Then you’ll see the gulls, terns, and ducks come back, sometimes a few at a time, sometimes hundreds of them at once, like there’s been an all-clear.”
Nimec felt an odd twinge. He supposed this was his day for recalling other people’s words.
“They scattered,” he said. “Just like that.”
Waylon glanced out toward the dome, then faced Nimec.
“The men who hit us,” he said with understanding.
Nimec nodded.
“They did what they wanted. And now somebody’s given them the word to retreat.”
Waylon looked at him.
“We have to go after them—”
“No.”
“No?”
Nimec gave him a second nod.
“We don’t know how many of them are out there, where they came from, or where they might be planning to hole up. Probably don’t know a bunch of other things that I haven’t thought of, and that we ought to know before flinging ourselves into a manhunt. And our priority’s to safeguard the base,” he said. “Besides, the storm’s getting worse. It’d be craziness to have our people riding blind in it.”
Waylon kept looking at him.
“What are we supposed to do?”
Nimec hesitated a moment.
“Call off our troops and put out the fire,” he said, then juiced his engine and went racing off toward the dome.
* * *
The fire-suppression agents carried into the water-treatment dome by CC’s Sword ops shared the capacity to arrest intense flames without leaving a damaging residue on sensitive computer and telecommunications equipment — an almost certain collateral effect of foam or water. Both nonconductive formulations were certified environmentally green, and as such had gained approval for use on the Antarctic continent.
These important similarities apart, each possessed separate and unique properties.
FE-13 was the commercial name for trifluromethane, a cryogenic substitute for Halon, which had been banned from global production in 1989 for its ozone-depleting qualities. Stored as a liquid in an airtight steel container, FE-13’s minus-115° Fahrenheit boiling point meant it discharged as a colorless, odorless gas that would lower the temperature of exposed areas to levels that were too cold to sustain a burn.
Inergen was a blend of argon, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide gas that quite literally strangled flames in an enclosed space by depriving them of the oxygen they fed upon, while leaving sufficient O2 for humans to breathe. Though it had been proven effective in fixed systems where a facility’s normal air ventilation could be closed off as Inergen was dispensed — the very sort installed in Cold Corners One — the base’s scientists and support personnel had been evaluating its value as a firefighting accessory that could be used on the move, both in conjunction with FE-13 and as a possible backup. The key had been to develop special ultra-high-pressure canisters that held and released the mixture in sufficient concentration to dampen a blaze where airflow couldn’t be easily inhibited.
Until now their redundant firefighting technique had been successful only in controlled trial conditions.
It performed as well as anyone could have hoped to put out the dome blaze.
The fire-out team converged on the desalinization plant even as their white-clad opposition swept off into the storm, leaving them with unimpeded access to its entrance. Flameproof Nomex cowls pulled over their balaclavas, breathing masks covering their noses and mouths, oxygen tanks on their backs, they rushed into the smoke-filled space in practiced fashion, holding their extinguishant cylinders in front of them, nozzles hissing out their gaseous contents.
There were several things going in their favor as they waded across the dome’s flooded interior to the central platform. Its power generators had kicked into automatic shutdown, eliminating the threat of electric shock. And the sickly yellow-gray fumes that filled the dome had started brimming out into the cold as soon as its door was raised, sucked away in churning, convection-induced funnels. The enclosure cleared of smoke fast, allowing them to work their way over to the water-treatment unit in bare seconds.
The fire they encountered was intense but contained, and already doused in numerous spots by the water that had poured in torrents from the seared, ruptured flow lines. It took just over three minutes to get it under control, another one or two to smother the last of its hot orange blooms.
Unfortunately, it was obvious to every man present that the critical harm had been done long before they arrived.
* * *
Nimec and Waylon climbed down off their bikes and then stood in the entry to the dome, staring at the mangled desalinization equipment within as reeking dregs of smoke flitted toward them and were skimmed raggedly away into the wind.
“It’s a mess,” Waylon said. “A goddamned mess.”
Nimec looked at him.
“Where does this leave us?” Nimec said.
Waylon was silent a perceptible while. His gaze did not move at all from the drenched, smoldering equipment.
“I haven’t got any idea,” he replied at last.
* * *
Darting through the tempest on his snowmobile, leading the surviving members of his team back toward their sheltered camp, Burkhart weighed his operation’s failures against its successes and tried to determine on which side the balance fell.
His assigned goal had been met; he had ravaged the desalinization plant. Perhaps not irreparably destroyed it, but that was never the plan. His blow to the UpLink base never had been meant to be mortal, just sufficiently forceful to make its tenants concentrate on nursing their open wounds.
That was all on one side of the scale. But what about the other?
He had lost four of his best. He had exposed himself, revealed what was supposed to have looked like an accident to be a manned attack… and as a consequence assured that UpLink would have its hounds out in force once the storm relaxed its grip on the coast.
It would be acceptable to Burkhart if they only came after him — he was a professional whose occupation demanded putting his neck on the line. What was more significant, however, was that he had opened a path
to their learning the truth about the whole Bull Pass endeavor.
Where did the balance of success and failure fall?
He knew the answer, knew he could not hide from it.
Its opprobrious weight hung heavy as a mountain on his back.
SEVENTEEN
COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 15, 2002
Pete Nimec’s face betrayed no emotion as he looked down at the five zippered white body bags laid out on the floor of the utilidor. The line of four to his right bore no name tags. A fifth, set apart from them, did.
It read: Sprague, Wm. Sword ID: 45734-CC12.
Disturbing as it had been for the men to bring their casualties here prior to evac, it had made undeniable, practical sense. And in Antarctica practical considerations were always the last word.
Like all of the base’s subsurface tunnels, the utilidor was twice as cold as a morgue refrigerator compartment, which would be typically kept at 40° Fahrenheit. Indeed, its temperature more closely matched that of the super-freezers used in cryogenic preservation banks, making it ideal for its current purpose.
Consistent with USAP and Antarctic Treaty rules, Cold Corners’ strict waste-disposal procedures required that all refuse generated by human habitation, including byproducts of laboratory experiments, effused motor oil and gasoline, food scraps, paper wrappers, plastic and metal throwaway containers, bodily excreta, sanitary napkins, condoms, contraceptive sponges, and any other rubbish that could not be recycled on-site, was to be either compacted and baled, or sealed away in large drums for transport off the continent. Some of the retrograde — as prepped waste is called on the ice — was then repositoried near the airfield in rows of milvans, trailerlike metal storage containers manufactured for loading aboard military cargo ships.