Phoenix Force 06 - White Hell

by Gar Wilson

  There had been eight. But one now lay along the west wall, drenched in blood from the direct hit he had taken. The other technician, finding expedience the better part of valor, had fled through a rear door, breaking for the distant ordnance shops to sound the alarm.

  The remaining personnel had seized whatever operable weapons came to hand, carbines, M-1s, M-16s. Mostly they carried regulation issue .45 automatics. Ammo, because of the panicky, emergency situation, was in critically short supply, thus they wisely husbanded rounds.

  As Devane, Flaherty and Swaine leapfrogged to where Toolan and Tom Lynch crouched behind a table, they were half deafened by the intermittent chatter of the Sten, of an M3A1, by the Yanks' return fire.

  "We'll have to be quick about it, Coletta," Toolan called back to where she had dropped behind the wall forming the office area. He craned his neck cautiously and panned the tangle of high-standing storage bins with his Sten Mark 6. His nostrils flared with excitement, an eerie paranoid glitter in his eyes. He was impatient for a real bloodbath to begin. "The runner there, he'll be bringing help. Them boys we won't take by surprise. Martin, is he at it?"

  "Listen for y'rself," Coletta Devane said with a supercilious smirk. At the moment a muffled blast carried from the rear of the building. "I imagine that should do it. Come on, Sean. Let these boys be. They're no match for us . . . they've got shit in their blood. They'll help us load up if we ask 'em nice. Time's running out, man."

  Toolan's lips drew back over his teeth, the bloodlust in his gaze absolutely blazing now. "No," he spit. "Dead is how we leave this scum. Payback for what the Yanks did to Redfern and the rest in Seattle." He chuckled. "A little calling card. To let them know we ain't gone yellow all at once." The Sten punched out three rounds to punctuate his meaning. A gurgled scream from the stacks testified to the accuracy of his aim.

  Sean Toolan, in his mid-thirties, was definitely "black Irish." Compact and lean, standing five-ten, his eyes were dark, his skin ruddy, his hair coal black. There was a deceiving sensuousness in the full lips, in the evasive gaze, that hinted at vulnerability. It was these eyes—Toolan's "lost sheep" look—that particularly appealed to Coletta Devane and turned her to so much mush when they were alone together.

  Toolan's jawline, ever set in tension, was prominent, his brows thick, craggy, providing a strong overhang to his piercing glare. His teeth clenched, a cruel grin forming. Then the man was up, darting to the right, his machine gun chattering, carrying the fight to the enemy.

  "Move in," he roared, hitting the concrete, flopping onto his stomach, elbow-walking himself deeper into the storage-bin alleyways.

  His sheer bravado thrilled Devane. Instantly she flung herself forward, taking the place Toolan had just deserted. She fired her AK-47 high into the opposite wall, a quick burst, hoping for the slugs to ricochet down into the GI rear guard.

  The Americans opened up, pinning the Irish force down momentarily. In the gloom Coletta saw Toolan snaking his way along the far alley. She waved Flaherty up and simultaneously lunged to the left. She advanced twenty feet, then darted behind a wheeled trash dumpster. From the edge of the steel box she saw a GI in green fatigues at the end of his steel tunnel, eyes searching the shadows, his M-16 pointed in Sean Toolan's direction.

  It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Devane tripped off a half-dozen rounds and took the man down, blood spurting like a miniature fountain from his back.

  The attack was over in minutes.

  The GIs, caught unawares and without adequate firepower, were no match for the casehardened Grey Dogs. Tom Lynch took a hand. Inspired by Toolan, he literally ran the length of the room, pausing a moment at each opening in the bins, firing a quick burst of .45 slugs down each alley. Toolan, meanwhile, was providing a withering cross fire between the opening of two medium-height shelves.

  Instant slaughter.

  The sound of cursing groans, shrill screams built up immediately as Lynch completed his route. There was no more return fire from the Americans.

  Breaking the silence of the American wipeout, was a squeaky voice. "Please, you guys," it called, "no more. I give up. Take the stuff. Take anything you want. Only don't shoot anymore. Don't kill me.... "

  Toolan emerged from behind the first bin. "You," he commanded. "Throw out your weapon."

  A Colt .45 automatic instantly sailed from the depths of the shelving and bounced off one of the workbenches.

  "No tricks, you bastard," Toolan barked. "If you pull anything, we'll chop you up for dog meat. Come out with your hands clamped behind your head."

  The GI could not have been more than twenty. He was blond, ashen-faced. Pure fear contorted his face; a betraying darkness stained his trousers where he had involuntarily emptied his bladder. When he saw the enemy, his eyes went runny; he blubbered. "Please. I don't wanna die.... "

  A contemptuous sneer on her lips, Coletta Devane advanced on the soldier, his Colt .45 now in her hand. "He's just a wet-nosed kid. He's gone and pissed his drawers." Her laughter was shrill, harsh.

  "C'mon, Coletta," Toolan snapped. "Get on with it. Put him away."

  "Must we, Sean?" she said softly, a sensual yearning clouding her gaze. "He's a good-looking lad. Tall, too. All things being in proportion, you know ...."

  "Christ, Coletta," Toolan barked. "Do it."

  The GI, his fear beyond words, just stood there and shook.

  Coletta raised the kid's gun. The .45 boomed a point-blank shot at his skull. The GI's head bucked back violently, the force of the slug straightening him, his arms flailing. A jet of blood and brain matter sluiced across the surface of a nearby workbench. The soldier dropped to his knees then pitched onto his face.

  Devane turned, regarded Toolan contemptuously. She took pains tucking the gun into her belt. "You can be such a pain in the arse sometimes."

  "Bitch," he spit, his voice a ridiculous croak.

  At that moment the glass in the upper panes exploded, the sound of rapid fire carried clearly from outside. A thousand shards of glass rained down.

  "The marines have landed," Coletta remarked, a strange flatness in her tone. Reflexively she ducked and ran in a low crouch toward the rear door, reloading her AK-47 as she went. The rifle began spitting fire the moment she kicked open the door.

  "Lynch," Toolan called in staccato command, "you and Swaine get out that side door. Keep the bastards away from the helicopter. Get Cafferty outta the cockpit for backup if you have to."

  Reluctant to miss out on the firefight, he sluggishly turned to the back of the building. "You, Flaherty. Help me and Martin load up."

  The INLA vanguard was, however, in no serious jeopardy. The Fort Greely soldiers, still shell-shocked, incredulous over the terrorists' audacity, were not getting any closer to the action than was absolutely necessary. They peppered the terrorists listlessly, most of the shots wide. The cold, their half-dressed state and their confusion contributed to wholesale ineffectiveness.

  One GI boldly advanced on the rear door in a zigzag run. Only one terrorist stood in his way. The GI's M-16 was swung down, the muzzle punching red holes into the thickening gloom.

  But suddenly he felt as if someone had slammed him across the knees with a baseball bat. He screamed, crashed to the ground, flopped wildly. He continued shrieking, aware that his legs were gone.

  In the doorway Coletta Devane giggled, lifted her AK and raised hell with a Jeep to her right, where another GI crouched.

  In the weapons-storage compartments, Sean Toolan, smarting beneath the snide, sidelong looks Bernard Flaherty sent him from time to time, exorcised his resentment by working like a sweathog at the loading. He and Flaherty struggled with case upon case of M-16s, slamming them onto the helicopter deck at breakneck pace. Inside the chopper—a Bell XH-40, UH-1, a special heavy-duty "Huey" Model 214B built to lift 16,000 pounds—Marty Hoy and Bryan Cafferty strained mightily to keep up, shifting crates to equalize the load.

  When they had loaded two hundred M-16s on board, along with 20,000
rounds of ammo, they spread out to see what other military toys they might find. Two cases of Colt .45 automatics were loaded, along with a thousand rounds of ACP. Grenades, a couple of mortars and a hundred shells went on board almost as an afterthought. Two Browning .50s took Toolan's fancy, and they threw those in—with sufficient ammo—also.

  Cold as it was, the men's faces were bathed with sweat by the time the last items were loaded.

  Two minutes later, after a devastating eighteen-minute visit at Fort Greely, the Bell "Huey" was lifting off. The doors were open wide, two hard-men hanging out on each side, firing and picking off any GIs who tried to take a last shot at the lumbering aircraft.

  The chopper swung sluggishly and headed due north. It gained altitude then leveled off. It was then swallowed up in the arctic twilight. The shapes below dissolved into watery nothingness.

  Below, in the savaged ordnance building, the post constabulary was convening, but too late. They fought nausea and undermining terror as they appraised the swift slaughter the terrorist shock troops had so offhandedly inflicted.

  4

  "Welcome to the Twilight Zone," McCarter muttered as he stared down from the cockpit of the Bell 206L Long Ranger that Clark Jessup had requisitioned through civilian sources. Though they cruised at snail's pace, hovering a scant fifty feet above the tortuous snake that was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, visibility was poor.

  "And isn't it a pretty sight?" McCarter added. "What you can see of it," Keio Ohara said. "Which is not very much."

  It was a fair appraisal, for conditions were even worse than at Fort Greely. The farther north they went, the darker the days got. It was eternal night, the stars twinkling around the clock.

  "I can see more than this when I'm in scuba gear," Encizo, their underwater expert, said. "Sixty feet down. In a river."

  Gary Manning offered no comment, maintaining his hunched-over pose, his eyes fixed on the dim outlines of the forty-eight-inch pipe beneath them. The gray snake floated in graceful curves over the flattest of terrain; it traversed a frozen river on an ingeniously designed bridge, and in other spots it went underground to avoid blocking centuries-old migration pathways of caribou and reindeer.

  Ahead, in vague configuration, lay a back-and-forth arrangement resembling a badly gapped zipper. As with all the surface layouts viewed thus far, the fish-trap pattern here rode on steel vertical support members (VSMs,) the pipe clamped into Teflon "shoes" that allowed it to flex and slide, thus providing for thermal contraction and expansion, for the frequent and severe quakes Alaska takes for granted.

  Like the others, Gary Manning was frustrated by the short-range visibility. And they were supposed to find the Irish terrorists in this, he thought. It was like trying to see through Vaseline-coated wind goggles.

  "Will someone adjust the contrast, please?" Rafael quipped.

  It was December twenty-sixth, 1000 hours. Almost two days had passed since the Fort Greely massacre, and nothing more had been heard from the Irish National Liberation Army. Apparently they had gone to ground and would bide their time before striking again.

  At that moment, according to calculations made by copter pilot Mitch Ransome, Phoenix Force was heading due south, crossing the North Slope, sixty-six miles from Prudhoe. It was at Prudhoe, after leaving Fort Greely, that they had spent what remained of Christmas in briefings at pumping station one, located on the edge of Prudhoe Bay, an extension of the Beaufort Sea.

  Tomorrow, if things went according to schedule, they would have a grand tour of the Valdez shipping-and-receiving installation.

  It would be, however, anticlimactic; they had already seen more than enough to boggle their minds.

  Beneath them, stretching as far as the eye could see, was a virtual ocean of snow ribbed with constantly changing, blowing drifts. With the exception of the pipeline, there was no other indication of man's presence on a seemingly snowbound planet. The landscape awed the men of Phoenix Force, humbling them, nailing down the magnitude of their mission with crushing force.

  A smudge on the southern horizon caught Encizo's eye. "What's that?" he asked Ransome, shouting to be heard above the roar of the engine and the clatter of the rotors.

  "The Brooks mountain range, sir," Ransome replied. "Roughly eighty-five hundred feet high where we'll be crossing."

  "God," McCarter exploded. "Will somebody turn on the goddamned lights?"

  "We're north of the Arctic Circle here," Bill Davey, the copilot, offered, enjoying the discomfiture of their odd-lot charter. He had helped load their duffel at Prudhoe and had had opportunity to poke his fingers into the long, plastic-wrapped bags as he had stored their stuff aft. Men do not hunt caribou with assault rifles. "It won't brighten up for a while."

  Neither fly-boy discounted the men's competence with the weapons. They were not greenhorns. They would not tangle with these men for any kind of money—even the older gent with stainless steel where his right hand should be. He would take your eyes out with one quick swipe.

  Outside it was twenty degrees below. With a mild wind-chill factor, the temperature easily fell to sixty-five below; exposed human flesh would freeze solid within a minute.

  But inside the Bell 206L it was a toasty sixty degrees. The helicopter had capacity for greater warmth, but to its passengers, all bundled in winter gear—Phoenix Force in white, special Fort Greely issue—the heat was stifling. When the customers unzipped their jackets, the pilot's suspicions were further confirmed. Shoulder leather was visible everywhere. The cutthroat team was armed to the hilt.

  "What do you think, Yakov?" Rafael spoke quietly, so the pilots would not hear. "We got any chance at all? How can we ever hope to head these bastards off at the pass?"

  "Eight hundred miles," Katz mused. "Incredible. And we've got to guard that."

  Gary Manning stuck his head into the huddle. "That complex at Prudhoe," he offered, "there's enough there alone to keep us busy for months. If you ask me, this blasted pipeline is indefensible."

  "Absolutely," Yakov replied. "Maybe that's why the Irish chose the pipeline in the first place. They'll go for America's jugular. And with minimal risk." He smiled. "That's why they invited us in. The impossible will take a day extra."

  "Destiny's darlings is what we are," McCarter mocked from over Manning's shoulder. "We get all the easy ones."

  "If I was one of those Paddies," Rafael said, "I'd concentrate my efforts at Prudhoe. Cut off the oil at the source."

  "Hitting Valdez wouldn't do the U.S. much good either," Keio Ohara joined in. "Just the same, I would plan to strike four or five critical spots at the same time."

  "Perhaps that accounts for the lack of activity in the past forty-eight hours," Yakov observed. "That's probably what they're in the process of setting up. There will be multiple strikes, mark my words."

  "They blow the TAP in a half-dozen places," said McCarter, "and everything stops automatically. The computers do it. But that still doesn't take out the oil already in the pipe. By the time they fix the holes, winter will have done its damnedest. Alaska will be proud owner of the biggest Chapstick in the world. They'll be six months cleaning out that shit."

  "And America will be having a new love affair with the bicycle," Manning said.

  "There are twelve pumping stations down there, fully housed and manned around the clock, more than any other pipeline in the world," Keio said, spitting back info the team had gleaned from yesterday's critique by the Sohio engineering staff.

  "There are one hundred fifty-one control valves spaced along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, seventy-one of them mainline valves. With targets like that, the Irish are probably running in circles deciding which to hit."

  Recalling the tour of the vast complex at Prudhoe yesterday, each man stunned by the enormity of the process involved in pressuring raw crude into the pipeline, Katz repeated, "I'd say Prudhoe would be their first priority. The computer rooms, the heating areas, the refining and cutting plants, the initial flow operation, the generators . . . It
would take a billion dollars to rebuild that."

  "But that's a high-profile site," Manning, Phoenix's engineer-in-residence, remarked. "There is security of sorts. Not security to my mind, but somebody must have been satisfied with the half-assed setup they got stuck with. No, I'd say they'll hit the TAP somewhere down the line. Maybe a strike on Prudhoe, but the main attack will come at one of the pumping stations, on the pipeline itself."

  "Then," Katzenelenbogen said, "you'd say that the INLA would most likely be holed up in this very area."

  "Perhaps. But I'd bet they'd light somewhere closer to the Brooks mountain range. There's more cover there." Manning surveyed the sea of snow beneath them. "Couldn't hide anything down there."

  "But where in the mountains?" Rafael asked. "We quizzed the Prudhoe experts on that one. All the construction camps were dismantled or blown up, just to prevent that sort of thing."

  "Stands to reason they've got a base camp somewhere in this quadrant," Manning replied.

  "But why set up a base?" McCarter challenged. "Why not just zip in, do their dirty work and be gone? End of lesson."

  "Multiple strike," Gary Manning repeated emphatically. "That kind of thing takes time to set up. I wouldn't be surprised to find they already have a double agent on staff at Prudhoe. That last electrical engineer we met with yesterday, he didn't take to us that much. Fred Avancini, was it? I didn't like the look of him at all."

  "C'mon now, Gary," McCarter scoffed. "An inside man? Hell, this is just one of your everyday hit-and-run setups. Remember how clumsy they were in Seattle? The way they went into hysterics, just because we spooked 'em?"

  "It's very possible," Manning insisted.

  It was something to consider. And for the next ten minutes the men of Phoenix Force fell silent, mulling over the myriad options left to Sean Toolan, Bryan Cafferty, or whoever the Grey Dog top man was. The more they thought about the hopelessness of their mission, the more depressed they got.