The Arctic Event

by Robert Ludlum

  “I’ve got you.” Valentina Metrace hunkered down on the ice beside him, wearing a second tactical headset. “We’re all right for line-of-sight distances at least.”

  The team had set up some fifty yards upwind of the crash site, behind the meager windbreak afforded by their backpacks and a low ledge of extruded ice. Evening was standing on, but there was nothing in the way of a sunset; the grayness around them simply grew darker and the wind colder. Time and environment were becoming critical.

  “Okay, people, this will be a fast in-and-out to learn if the anthrax is still aboard the aircraft, and to see if anyone else has been in there.” Smith popped the plastic safety covers off the MOPP suit’s filter mask. “You two know what I should be looking for, and you’ll walk me through it. There shouldn’t be any problems, but I’m putting one absolute in place now. If, for any reason, something goes wrong—if I don’t come out, or if we lose contact—nobody goes in after me. Is that clearly understood?”

  “Jon, don’t be silly...” Valentina started to protest.

  “Is that understood?” Smith barked the words.

  She nodded, looking unhappy. “Yes, I understand.”

  Smith looked at Smyslov. “Understood, Major?”

  In the shadow of his parka hood, Smith could see some emotion roiling beneath the Russian’s stony features, an effect Smith had noticed several times before during the past week. Again Smyslov was struggling with something down in his guts where he lived.

  “Colonel, I...It is understood, sir.”

  Smith pulled the anticontamination hood over his head, adjusting the mask straps and sealing tabs. He took his first breath of rubber-tainted filtered air and drew on the suit’s overgauntlets.

  “Okay.” His voice sounded muffled even in his own ears. “Dumb question of the day: how do I get inside?”

  “The fuselage appears to be essentially intact,” Valentina’s voice crackled over the radio channel, “and the only way into the forward bomb bay is through the forward crew compartment. Unfortunately the conventional access doors are located in the nose wheel well and in the forward bomb bay itself, both of which are blocked. Your alternatives are through the port and starboard cockpit windows, which would be hard to wriggle through in that outfit, or the crew’s access tunnel to the aft compartment. The latter is your best bet.”

  “How do I get into the aft compartment, then?”

  “There is an access door in the tail just forward of the horizontal stabilizer on the starboard side. You’ll have to work your way forward through the pressurized crew spaces from there.”

  “Right.” Smith stood awkwardly and waddled toward the murky outline of the downed bomber.

  The port-side wing of the TU-4 had been torn loose in the crash and folded back almost flush against the fuselage, but the starboard approaches to the bomber were clear. As he circled around the great aluminum slab of the horizontal stabilizers Smith found himself marveling a little. Even in an age of giant military transports and jumbo jet airliners, this thing was huge. And they were actually flying these monsters during the Second World War.

  Smith approached the great cylindrical body and ran a hand over the ice-glazed metal.

  “Okay, I’m here and I’ve found the entry door. There’s a flush-mounted handle, but it looks like it’s been popped out.”

  “The emergency release will have been pulled from the inside,” Valentina replied. “It should open, but you might have to pry it a bit.”

  “Right.” Smith had a small tool kit slung at his belt, and he drew a heavy long-hafted screwdriver from it. Fitting the tip of the blade into the frost-clogged slit around the door, he slammed the heel of his hand against the butt of the tool. After a couple of blows there was a sharp crack as the ice seal broke. A few more moments of levering, and the door swung outward, the wind catching at it, leaving a rectangular shadowed gap in the fuselage.

  “You were right, Val. It’s open. Going inside now.”

  Bending low, he ducked through the small door.

  It was dark inside the fuselage, with only the trace of dull exterior light at his back. Smith removed a flashlight from his tool kit and snapped it on.

  “Damn,” he murmured. “I never expected this.”

  “What are you seeing, Jon?” Valentina demanded.

  Smith panned the flashlight beam around the fuselage interior. No appreciable amount of snow had leaked inside, but ice crystals glittered everywhere, thinly encrusting the battleship gray frames and cable and duct clusters. “It’s incredible. There’s no sign of corrosion or degradation anywhere. This thing might have rolled out of the factory yesterday.”

  “Natural cold storage!” the historian exclaimed over the radio. “This is fabulous. Keep going!”

  “Okay, there’s a catwalk leading aft past a couple of large flat rectangular boxes to a circular dished hatch right in the tail of the airplane. The hatch is closed, and there is a round window set in its center. A couple of what look like ammunition feed tracks are set on either side of it. I guess that must be the tail gunner’s station.”

  “Correct. Is there anything else noteworthy back there?”

  “There’s some kind of a mount or pedestal with a couple of unbolted cables hanging from it. It looks like some piece of equipment has been dismantled.”

  “That would be the generator set of the auxiliary power unit,” the historian mused. “That’s rather interesting. Now, just to your right there should be a bulkhead with another pressure hatch centered in it, leading forward.”

  “There is. It’s closed.”

  “The B-29/TU-4 family was one of the first military aircraft designed specifically for high-altitude flight. A number of its compartments were pressurized to allow its crew to survive without the need for oxygen masks. You’re going to have to work forward through a series of these pressure hatches.”

  “Got it.” Smith shuffled over to the hatch and tried to peer through the thick glass of the port, only to find that it was frosted over. “What should be in this next compartment?”

  “It should be the crew’s in-flight rest quarters.”

  “Right.” Smith gripped the dogging handle of the hatch and twisted it. After a moment’s resistance, the lever started to yield.

  “Jon, wait!”

  Smith yanked his hand away from the handle as if it had gone red hot. “What?”

  Smith heard a background muttering in his earphones. “Oh, Gregori was just saying that it’s very unlikely there would be booby traps on the hatches or anything.”

  “Thank you both for sharing that with me, Val.” Smith leaned on the lever again until it gave. The hatch swung inward, and he probed with the flashlight.

  “Crew’s quarters, all right. There’s a set of fold-out bunks on either side and there’s even a john—no relation—up in one corner. The cabin appears to have been stripped. There are no mattresses or bedding in the bunks, and I can see a number of empty, open lockers.”

  “That’s understandable.” Valentina sounded thoughtful, obviously cogitating on something. “The next space should be the radar-observer compartment. Let’s see what you find there.”

  Working his way forward, Smith ducked through a low nonpressure hatch. Here there was dim outside light. Plexiglas bubbles, sheathed in ice and hazed with decades of wind spalling, were set into the port and starboard bulkheads and into the overhead. Skeletal chairs faced the two side domes, and a third seat on an elevated pedestal was positioned under the astrodome in the top of the fuselage. In a bomber mounting its full defensive armament, Smith imagined that these would have been the gunners’ targeting stations for the remotely controlled gun turrets. Valentina verified the supposition as he described the space.

  “This compartment has been emptied out, too,” Smith reported. “A lot of empty lockers, and even the padding has been stripped out of the seats.”

  “All of the survival gear will have been taken, along with anything that could serve as insulation.
There should also be a large electronics console against the forward bulkhead.”

  “There is,” he concurred. “The chassis has been completely gutted.”

  “That’s the radar operator’s station. They’d have wanted the components,” Valentina finished cryptically.

  “There are also two circular doors or passages in the forward bulkhead, one above the other. The larger lower passage has a pressure hatch on it. The upper one has a short aluminum stepladder leading up to it.”

  “The lower hatch opens into the aft bomb bay. There won’t be anything in there but fuel tanks. The upper passage is the one you want. It’s the crew crawlway that runs over the bomb bays into the bow compartment.”

  Smith crossed the compartment and peered down the aluminum-walled tunnel. It had been designed large enough for a man in bulky winter flight gear to negotiate, so he shouldn’t have a problem with his MOPP suit.

  “Going on.” He put his boot toe in a ladder step and heaved himself into the tunnel, hitching and shouldering his way awkwardly toward the circle of pale light at its far end.

  The forty-foot crawl down the frost-slickened tube seemed to take forever, dislodged ice crystals raining around him with each inch gained. Smith was startled when he finally thrust his head into the comparatively open space of the forward compartment.

  The last of the outside light trickled in dully through the navigator’s astrodome and the hemispheric glazed nose of the old bomber, and again the state of preservation was astounding. The plane was frozen in time as well as in temperature. Ice diamonds sheathed controls that hadn’t moved for five decades, and glittered over the ranked instrument gauges frozen on their last readings.

  “I’m in the cockpit,” he reported into his lip mike, panting a little with the exertion.

  “Very good. Is there much crash damage?”

  “It’s not bad, Val. Not bad at all. Some of the windows in the lower curve of the bow were caved in. Some snow and ice has packed in around the bombardier’s station. A drift seems to have built up around the nose. Beyond that, everything’s in pretty fair shape, although some inconvenient SOB unshipped the tunnel ladder. Just a second; let me get down from here.”

  Smith rolled onto his back and used the grab rail mounted above the entry to draw himself out of the crawlway. “Okay, on the deck.”

  “Excellent, Jon. Before you examine the bomb bay could you check a couple of things for me?”

  “Sure, as long as it won’t take too long.”

  “It shouldn’t. First, I want you to examine the flight engineer’s station. That will be the aft-facing seat and console behind the copilot’s position.”

  “Okay.” Smith snapped on his flashlight once more. “It’s a lot roomier in here than I figured.”

  “In a standard TU-4 a lot of the space in the bow compartment would be taken up by the basket of the forward dorsal gun turret. That was one of the weapons mounts pulled in the America bombers.”

  “Yeah.” Smith tilted his hood faceplate up. “I can see the turret ring in the overhead. Again, I’m seeing the empty lockers, and the seat cushions and parachutes are gone. Looking toward the bow, I’ve got what looks like the navigator’s table on my left, and another stripped electronics chassis to my right.”

  “That was the radio operator’s station. I suspect the plane’s crew built a survival camp somewhere around here, someplace that would provide a bit more protection than the wreck’s fuselage. They must have transferred all of the survival and radio gear there along with the plane’s auxiliary power generator.”

  “That camp will be the next thing we’ll be hunting for.” Smith lumbered to the flight engineer’s station and played the light across the gauge- and switch-covered panel. “Okay, I’m at the engineer’s station. What am I looking for?”

  “Good, there should be three banks of four levers across the bottom of the console, a big one, a middle-sized one, and a small one—papa bear, mama bear, and baby bear. The big ones are the throttles. They should be pulled all the way back, I imagine, to the closed position. The others are the propeller and fuel mixture controls. How are they set?”

  Smith scrubbed at his faceplate and swore softly as the haze turned out to be on the inside. “They’re both sort of in the middle.”

  “Most interesting,” the historian mused over the radio circuit. “There would have been no reason to fiddle with them after a crash. All right, there is one more lever I want you to check for me, Jon. It will be located on the control pedestal outboard of the pilot’s seat. It will be very distinctive in appearance. The knob on the end of it will be shaped like an airfoil.”

  Smith turned in the aisle between the flight control stations, peering awkwardly over the back of the pilot’s chair. “Looking for it...There’s a hell of a lot of levers all over this thing...Okay, I found it. It’s all the way up, forward, whatever.”

  “That’s the flap controller,” Valentina murmured. “This is coming together...This is making sense...” There was a moment of silence over the channel, and then the historian continued with a rush. “Jon, be careful! The anthrax is still aboard that aircraft!”

  “How can you be sure?” Smith demanded.

  “It will take too long to explain. Just take my word for it. The crew never jettisoned the bioagent reservoir. It’s still in there!”

  “Then I’d better have a look at it.” Smith straightened and returned to the forward bomb bay access.

  In a mirror image of the rear compartment, it was a circular dished pressure hatch with a round window in its center, located directly below the crawlway tunnel. Smith knelt down.

  “Okay, I’m at the bomb bay,” he reported. He paused for a moment to catch his breath and reached for the undogging lever. “I’m opening the ha...” His words trailed off.

  “Jon, what is it?”

  “So that’s why the tunnel ladder was been moved. Somebody has been here, Val, and recently. Everything in here is covered with frost. Everything but the release handle on the hatch. It’s been wiped off. I can make out the finger marks.”

  Smith twisted and whipped the flashlight beam around the cockpit. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could spot the smears and scrapes in the frost cover where someone had moved around the cabin. “He got in through the pilot’s-side window.”

  “Did he get inside the bomb bay?”

  “We’ll know in a second.” Smith got a grip on the dogging lever, twisting it. The hatch unlatched and swung open with disconcerting ease. Hunkering lower, he peered into the dark opening.

  Smith’s strained breath caught in his throat.

  It filled the entire upper half of the bomb bay: a great lozenge shape held in place by a network of struts and braces, the iced stainless steel of the case sparkling. The latent death of entire cities whispered from within it, billions upon billons of lethal disease spores slumbering in icy suspension, waiting for revival, waiting for release.

  Confronting such horrors were part of Jon Smith’s profession, but he still had to suppress a shudder.

  “Val, you were right. It’s in here. Put Major Smyslov on. I’m going to need him.”

  As he waited for the Russian to come online, he quartered the interior of the bay with his light, looking for damage to the containment vessel or for the deadly telltale gray-brown stain of spore spillage. After a few moments Smyslov’s filtered voice filled his earphones.

  “I gather we have a hit, Colonel.”

  “We surely do, Major,” Smith replied. “I’m looking at the reservoir now. From this end at least, it appears to have survived the crash in good shape. The bomb bay doors are partially caved in, but the casing doesn’t appear to be involved. The mounts and bracings seem to be intact as well. Did Val tell you that we’ve had at least one snooper inside the aircraft?”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “He’s been in here as well. There is an instruction plate on the front of the reservoir casing directly opposite me. The frost’s been
wiped from it. I can see a Soviet Air Force badge, a hammer-and-sickle insignia, and a lot of bright red writing. I’m not up on my Cyrillic, but I gather it’s a bioagent warning advisory.”

  “Quite correct, Colonel. That would tell the inquisitive one everything he would need to know about the payload.”

  “Then I think we’ve found our information leak. Now, Major, the containment vessel and the anthrax dispersal system are your babies. Walk me through what I should be looking for.”

  “Very well, Colonel. If the casing is intact, you should next inspect the dispersal system manifolds to ensure that the manual containment valves on the pressurization ducts are still closed and sealed. The valves shouldn’t have been opened and the system armed until the bomber was coming in on target, but...”

  “But, indeed. From those diagrams you showed me, those containment valves should be right over my head.”

  With his head and shoulders inside the bomb bay, Smith carefully rolled onto his back and found himself looking up into a tangle of large-diameter stainless steel piping.

  “Okay, I’m looking up into the manifold assembly. I see two large lever valves directly above me. The valve gradations seem to just be marked with red and green zones.”

  “That is correct. Those are the forward containment valves. How are they set?”

  “The levers are turned all the way to the left and right, with their pointers aimed at the green zones. There appear to be intact wire seals on both valves, and the frost buildup hasn’t been disturbed.”

  “Very good.” Smyslov sounded relieved. “The containment valves are still closed. The system was never armed for drop. Now, just to the right, looking aft, next to the access hatch, you should see two more levers marked and sealed as were the overhead valves. These control the valves on the dispersal vents at the rear of the reservoir.”

  Smith squirmed onto his left shoulder. “Okay, I see them. They are set vertically, in the green, and the wire seals are still in place.”

  “Excellent!” Smyslov exclaimed. “Those are all metal-to-metal knife valves with single-use lead gaskets. Nothing will get past them. We still have full containment.”