by Tom Clancy
“We can land a chopper here. Off-load our equipment, and one of those radio-frequency-shielded tents that we can use as a command and communications center,” he said. “It’s a nice pocket of concealment. And as close to Earthglow as I want to set down.”
“The RF-secure tents are cold-weather white, and should blend right in with the snow on the ground and slopes,” Oskaboose added. “Guess we can hide the copter under some cammo pretty easy, too.”
“Sounds good.” Ricci’s laser dot jumped up and to the left onto the blacktop leading to the facility. “We’ll have an escape vehicle ready to roll around this area west of the bridge, not far from where the two-laner swings around the bottom of the hill toward the perimeter gate. My team’ll have to reach it on foot once we’re out of the building. Then it takes us across the bridge, the chopper picks us up on the other side, and we’re off.”
“You catch a break, make a clean getaway, sure,” Thibodeau said. “But we can’t depend on it. Got to figure there might be somebody on your tail wants to stop that from happenin’.”
Ricci looked at him. “So your team prepares something to stop them from stopping us.”
Thibodeau scratched his beard.
“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I got me an idea or two.”
Ricci nodded again. Then he turned back to the photo image on the wall, slid the red dot down onto the icy stream spanned by the bridge, and tracked its course through the basin that divided Two Shoulders from the larger hill.
“Our approach is going to be what’s trickiest,” he said. “From where we strike camp at Two Shoulders, my insertion team needs to hike to the stream, ski across its banks, then climb the northeast side of the hill and go down the northwest. That’ll leave us behind the building. From there we move along its side to the guard station at the gate, take out the sentries, and carry on with the rest of the program.” He inclined his head toward Pokey Oskaboose. “I know it seems like you’d have to be a damn spider to make it up that big slab of rock, but Pokey mentioned a couple of things I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“You and whoever built Earthglow figuring the hill would guarantee protection from the rear,” Oskaboose said. “Anybody knows this country could see how it’s tough but not anything near the worst. You’ve got all kinds of plants clumped on its slopes: juniper, pines, spruce, cedar, berry bushes. That means root systems to keep the ground from slipping out from underfoot. Also means plenty of handholds and matted branches to break your fall in case you do take a slide.”
Thibodeau gave him a look. “An’ you intend on bein’ there to point out them mats an’ handholds?” he said.
Oskaboose seemed unbothered by his dubious tone. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I usually prefer to get my high-altitude kicks in a pilot’s seat, but for special company like you boys, I’m thrilled to make an exception.”
That night, before his group set out on their cross-country hike, Ricci emerged out of the metalized fabric igloo tent and stood surrounded by the humped granite rises of Niish Obekwun, their furrowed contours other-worldly in the darkness. The temperature had fallen well below freezing with sundown, and continued to drop at a precipitous rate. The wind had also picked up. Swirling into, over, and through the snow- and brush-covered crannies and ledges of the hillsides, it filled the cavity below with a toneless idiot chant, as if the landscape itself was astir with some impersonally menacing ritual.
Ricci stood there, alone, outfitted in a snow cammo shell jacket and pants, a polar liner, his Zylon vest, and thermal undergarments. He carried his baby VVRS on a shoulder sling and wore an ALICE pack on his back. His hands were covered with ultrathin-insulate gloves that wouldn’t get in the way of firing his weapon. On his feet were white rubber boots and tapered-tail aluminum alloy snowshoes. His sleekly molded full-head helmet was equipped with an integrated, hands-free wireless audio/video system, its dime-sized color digital camera lens invisible above his forehead, its microphone embedded in the chin guard. Ricci’s polycarbonate ballistic visor was pulled down over his eyes-only balaclava and shielded the exposed portion of his face from the fiercely cold air. But he could still feel its bite through his breathing vents, feel its tingle in his lungs with each inhalation. Never in the coldest, bleakest Maine winter had he experienced such inimical cold. No sane human being would expose himself to it without good reason. Ricci hadn’t had any desire to contemplate his own reason. He had simply wanted to be by himself before leaving: to be still, without thought, quiet inside. That was really all.
He turned around now, stepped back toward the tent, and then leaned his head through its entrance flap to signal his men to gear up and assemble. He’d had his moment of solitude and was ready to get under way.
The glazed surface of the stream gave out with occasional complaints as they tramped across its banks, making crumpled-cellophane noises under the glittering snow cover. They proceeded in single file, Oskaboose at the head of the column, followed by Ricci and his Cape Green graduates: Seybold, Beatty, Rosander, Grillo, Simmons, Barnes, Harpswell, and Nichols. Three additions had been made to boost the number of men in the insertion team, a seasoned hand from Kaliningrad named Neil Perry, and Dan Carlysle and Ron Newell, both veterans of the Brazilian affair and recommended by Thibodeau.
Oskaboose kept his eyes downward, wary of thin ice. He would test any suspect area by putting one leg carefully forward, shifting his weight onto it, and pressing in hard with the crampons of his snowshoe, alert for the slightest hint of cracking or buckling or a telltale flit of shadows around the snowshoe’s edges that would reveal the movement of water beneath a shallow, weakened crust. Although the group was on a networked communications link, he remained entirely silent, using hand gestures to wave the others forward when he was confident of the footing or to steer them clear of places where its soundness was questionable. Ricci didn’t need for him to explain why. It was the habit of someone who had spent a lifetime in this terrain, knew it inside out, and preferred to negotiate it without technological mediation. Who wanted his senses freed up to listen and feel for its hazards.
The cold had seemed to deepen after they left the Two Shoulders camp, but perhaps as a result they only encountered a few potential trouble spots during their crossing of the stream... although on a single instance, just yards from its west bank, the ice cracked under Oskaboose’s foot with a sound that reverberated between the dark walls of the cleft like a rifle shot. The men started in their heavy packs, Ricci’s eyes briefly going to the slope, the buttstock of his VVRS gun raised against his shoulder. But then he heard a splash and turned to see Oskaboose pull his snowshoe out of the break, water gushing up around its frame, droplets of moisture wicking off the leg of his shell pants.
“Sorry, fellas,” Oskaboose said over their comlink. They were the first words he’d spoken since they’d trod onto the ice. “Bad step there.”
Ricci loosened his grip on his weapon and followed him the rest of the way across the stream without incident.
Ricci’s recollections of the climb would later streak to gether in his mind, staying with him as a mostly random shuffle of images and impressions.
He would remember his men pausing at the base of the hill to remove their snowshoes and sling them over their backs, and then their first adrenaline-charged push up the lower ledges, the group surrendering themselves entirely to forward motion. Remember seeking out Pokey Oskaboose’s ascending shadow, following his lead, trying not to fall too far behind. Remember the feel of coarse, cold stone against his flattened body. And the gusts tugging at him. Snow spilling around him in loose talc-white clouds. Icicles snapping apart under his fingers. His gloved hands twisting into notches, grabbing hold of needled juniper branches, clutching at bare tangles of scrub that grew precariously out of hairline fissures in the rock. And, once, a startled bird bearing aloft with a querulous shriek, its wings flaying the air. He would clearly recall the moment he heard the scuff of Seybold’s boots below him and turned to see t
hat he had stumbled, lost traction, and was swaying backward off a ledge, chunks of ice and pebbly material fragmenting underfoot to skitter down the slope. Then reaching for him with one hand, catching his wrist, driving his own feet against the rock as he pulled upward and steadied him. And drawing a long inhalation, and moving on, and on, always with Oskaboose in sight, toiling upward in that fury of wind and billowing powder.
And then finally the crest of the hill was above him. And his right arm was over it. His left arm. His chest. His legs. And almost to his own surprise, he was standing beside Oskaboose, and both were giving Seybold a hand up, the rest of his party appearing in ones and twos and threes, helping each other gain the final bit of ground, gathering there atop the rise overlooking the blockish spread of the Earthglow facility.
They had allowed themselves only a brief period to catch their breath before starting the climb down. Two or three minutes, as Ricci recalled. They had made progress, yes, but that wasn’t the same thing as having achieved their objective. Not nearly.
The job they had come to do was still ahead of them, and there was no time whatsoever to lose.
They descended the hill as they had started up its opposite side, in single file, and again the elements proved equal parts advantage and handicap.
Open to the constant force of wind and storm unlike its basin wall, the hill’s western slope was almost scrubbed of vegetation and bore the insults of constant battery: crumbling juts of granite, craggy scars and pockmarks, and deep gouges that looked as if they were bites taken out of its stony hide by some great, vicious set of jaws. Any of these could have been serious pitfalls for someone who didn’t know the territory. But to Oskaboose they represented options: handholds, footholds, covered niches where his teammates could take momentary respite.
The drawback was that the weather-blasted pieces of hillside had nowhere to go but down, an inevitable consequence of gravity that gave Oskaboose his full share of problems for the last fifteen or twenty yards of the descent toward its base. Picking his steps over and around tumbled boulders, pulverized rocks, and slippery cascades of pebbles, snow, and ice was a strenuous challenge complicated by his mindfulness of having to select a path that would be least difficult for those behind him.
The guide’s effort was not lost on Ricci. When his boots touched ground, a glance at the tritium dial of his wristwatch showed that over two hours had passed since his group had left camp. Longer than he’d expected, maybe, but thanks to Pokey Oskaboose, they had gotten this far without a single injury worse than a bump or bruise.
And straight ahead of them now was Earthglow, its shadow deeper than the black of night.
The dangers were supposed to seem real during tac exercises, and indeed they had to an outstanding degree. But there were parts of the mind that refused even voluntary surrender to illusion, and the spilling of simulated blood did not equal loss of life, no matter how true its shade of red.
Pressed against Earthglow’s windowless back wall, Ricci watched Rosander nose his telescoping probe around its corner with a powerful sense of déjà vu. Still, he was acutely aware that Cape Green had been little more than a stage set: Africa one day, Balkan Europe the next, Motor City if you wanted it to be. The here and now was what it was, and it never would be anything else, he thought. And this time the men who fell under his watch would not rise to joke, complain, or be chastised about it afterward.
“Picture any clearer on your HUD?” Rosander asked. He fingered a rocker switch on the probe’s pistol grip handle to adjust its nonvisible IR illumination level. “I’ve maxed the output, can’t get better res past about ten yards in this darkness.”
“It’ll do.” The image superimposed on Ricci’s field of view by his visor display showed a pair of guards in hooded parkas, goggles, and wool scarves taking relaxed strides along their patrol of the building’s north side. Their shoulder-slung FN P90 assault weapons fired the same ammunition as his Five-Seven pistol: small rounds, big punch. “Get rid of the sound, though. I don’t need to hear their horseshit about boffing townie high school girls.”
Rosander pressed another switch to cut his rod’s surveillance mike.
“These guys go down fast and quiet,” Ricci said. The comlink’s acoustical gain was set to output his whisper as a normal speaking voice to his team members. “Can’t let them get off a shot. Rather we don’t have to, either.”
He reached into his belt pouch for the DMSO, looked quickly over his shoulder, then gestured for Seybold to produce his canister.
“On my signal,” he said, raising his fist.
Seybold nodded to him, and they edged up beside Rosander.
They waited. The guards appeared to be in no hurry to complete their rounds. Just a couple of gun-toting chums on a leisurely stroll through the meat-locker cold of night in the Canadian Shield.
After what seemed an age, they approached the corner of the wall.
Ricci’s arm came up like a semaphore.
Seybold moved with him at once. They rounded the corner and got right in the guards’ faces with their canisters, knowing the high-pressure spurts of fluid would not disperse in the wind at close range and that the permeable fabric scarves wrapped around their mouths would do nothing to stop the sedative from acting instantaneously.
Silently and painlessly kayoed, the guards hit the ground unconscious and then were flex-cuffed and dragged into the shadows at the base of the hill. They would be out for hours.
Ricci turned to his men.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the gatehouse.”
Pokey Oskaboose’s guidance had been a blessing for more reasons than his familiarity with the physical terrain. He had also imparted a critical tip about area transport during the mission’s planning stage: Pretty well everything that made its way to and from the rest of the world was conveyed three times weekly via Toronto on the wilderness train. A single train. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Like other outposts located many miles from the nearest railway depot, Earthglow would need to connect with the station by truck over the Trans Canada Highway. There was simply no other practical means.
Of course, Oskaboose hadn’t known the facility’s specific shipping and receiving schedules. But that hadn’t been necessary. These were the boonies, last stop on the civilization express. Conduct the insertion in the long, murky period that bridged Thursday and Friday—say at two, three, four o’clock in the morning—and you could safely assume that the delivery gate would be manned by a skeleton crew. Warm bodies, if the expression was applicable here at world’s end. You could also figure they would go on shift expecting to do little more than gulp coffee and pick their noses. Because not for a million bucks would a driver try rolling his wagon over the frosted local roads at such an hour, especially the black, winding spools of blacktop off the main highway, where painted lanes were nonexistent, and you had to sort of guess whether you were in danger of getting smacked by opposing traffic. Well, maybe for a million bucks, Oskaboose had reconsidered. But far as he knew, nobody had gotten offered that amount yet.
It was now a few ticks of the minute hand short of three A.M., and Ricci was thinking that Oskaboose’s skinny had been worth a fortune and more.
The gatehouse was nothing fancy. A lighted, heated modular steel booth designed for a small handful of personnel, it could have been lifted from where it stood and dropped at the entry to any commercial building anyplace, maybe a factory that manufactured fountain pens, or fan belts, or soda bottles, or zippers for ladies’ skirts. It was hard for Ricci to imagine it as a breeding farm for a killer germ of a type never before known to man. Hard for him, sometimes, to remember that the shape of evil could be so drummingly bland and commonplace. The devil as the guy next door.
Hugging the north wall of Earthglow about a hundred feet from the gatehouse, his men drawn up behind him, Ricci could see three guards through the plate glass windows of the booth. Two were seated behind a control panel with a bank of video monitors on it, talk
ing, neither of them apparently paying attention to the screens. A third was dozing on a chair behind a desk or counter, legs stretched, arms folded, head tucked to his chest.
Ricci thought a minute. The door was on his side of the booth, a magnetic swipe card reader on the frame. It would automatically lock when closed, but these pre-fab housings weren’t designed to store the crown jewels. He was sure one good kick would take care of it.
He called four men over to him. Grillo, Barnes, Carlysle, and Newell. The rest would stay put. This would have to be perfectly coordinated, and he wanted experience with him.
His instructions took seconds: Fast, quiet. The guards at the other perimeter posts had to remain oblivious.
Ricci shuffled forward in a squat, the others close behind him, all of them sticking to the shadows along the main building’s wall. At the edge of the wall he signaled a halt. There were ten yards of open ground to the gatehouse. Dark yards. His group would be fine if they stayed low. He gave his command, and they made the stealthy dash.
Out of sight beneath the windows now, pulse racing, epinephrine flooding his system, its taste filling his mouth like he’d bitten into an allergy pill, Ricci waited for his men to hastily take their positions, Grillo and Barnes to the right of the door, gripping their VVRS guns, Newell right behind him on the left side, Carlysle crouched back in the darkness facing the door, ready for the kick.
Three fingers of one hand raised, Ricci drew his expandable ASP baton from its belt scabbard with the other and counted off. Vocally and manually. One finger went down.
“... two, three!”
In a heartbeat, Carlysle sprang erect and took two giant steps forward, his leg thrusting up and out. The sole of his boot hit the door under the handle, and it banged inward.
Ricci rushed into the gatehouse, clenching the tactical baton’s foam grip, thumbing the release stud to extend its tubular-steel segments. The guards seated side by side at the control panel twisted around toward the entrance, agape with stunned surprise. Peripherally aware of his own men moving in around him, Ricci saw assault rifles slung over the guards’ chair backs: a P-90 for Mr. Left, and an H&K for Mr. Right.