by Tom Clancy
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 later 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 t
hat 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.
Because the flights that carried away the discard arrived with irregular frequency during austral summer—and in winter months arrived not at all—the volume produced by CC’s inhabitants often exceeded the storage capacity of the milvans. At such times, all retro except segregated toxic chemical, medical, and biological waste was brought down into designated utilidor chambers, which allowed for its interim cold storage in conditions that prevented decomposition and posed no threat to health or the environment.
In practical terms, frozen human remains met the definition of retrograde to the letter.
Nimec turned to see the strapping figure of Ron Waylon come up beside him. They exchanged a serious glance. “How’s it going at the dome?” Nimec asked.
Waylon made an indeterminate gesture with his shoulders.
“It’ll be a while before I can tell whether we can get the pump back in action.” He offered a bleak smile. “Wish I’d known what was in store when I went and bragged about us being good at patching things up.”
“Say we can’t get it running,” Nimec said. “What then?”
“Good question,” Waylon said. “I’ve ordered a replacement unit, but the whole system’s manufactured to spec in California. The components have to be assembled, shipped, installed, and operational before our freshwater reserves run out.” He shook his head. “It cuts things awful close.”
“Maybe closer than we can stand?”
“Maybe,” Waylon said. “And that’s with crisis usage restrictions in place. No way around it, sir, we’re in a scrape.”
Nimec grunted, then stood in quiet thought.
“Okay,” he said. “What about those volunteers I wanted?”
“The men should be down here soon,” Waylon said. “They’re getting a Delta out of the garage to move the bodies out to the airstrip.”
“You hear anything from the comm tech . . . Huberman, that his name . . . ?”
Waylon nodded.
“Clay Huberman,” he said. “He verified the transport aircraft are on their way. A pair of de Havillands out of Punta Arenas.”
Nimec looked at him. “That’s Chile. And aren’t those planes little eight seaters?”
Waylon nodded again.
“Twin Otters,” he said. “They’re flown by a private Canadian outfit that specializes in polar aviation, does a lot of contract work for NSF. Everything from ferrying around researchers to rescue operations. The crews really know their stuff. Brought that doctor out of South Pole station last winter—”
“That’s not the point. The 109th Guard was supposed to handle this from Christchurch. We were expecting a Herc. I asked for Captain Evers . . . he’s somebody we can trust.”
“I know, sir. But the weather’s still spotty around Herbie Alley—that’s out on the South Sea between Black Island and White Island—and it doesn’t look like anybody’s going to be able to take off from Cheech for another couple of days.”
Nimec dropped his eyes to the body bags and then raised them back to Waylon’s face.
“There’s no rush for these men,” Nimec said. “And if it’s only a short time, we can adjust our drinking water rations so the Senators won’t have to worry about getting too thirsty. They’ll just have to give up their showers and smell as bad as the rest of us.”
Waylon was momentarily silent.
“This isn’t a decision we can make here on base, sir,” he said then. “When it comes to emergency extractions, it’s Air Force, NSF, and Department of Interior who get together for the call.” He paused. “They’ve got other considerations. Besides the weather or even our water plant going down, that is.”
Nimec looked at him. “What else is there?”
“Clay tells me it’s the solar flare activity NASA’s been making a fuss about. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin’s been consulting with them, thinks it might pan out sometime over the next week. I guess the main concern is that flights could be grounded indefinitely if it’s severe enough to foul radio communications. The bottom line is they want the Senators out right away.”
Nimec shook his head with displeasure.
“NASA,” he muttered. “We’ve got too many cooks standing over the pot. And I don’t like it.”
Waylon was quiet again. He appeared to be waiting for something. Nimec couldn’t tell what it was, but figured the base chief would get around to letting him know.
Meanwhile, he had his own preoccupations.
“Those twin-props,” he said. “How soon they arriving?”
Waylon thought for a moment.
>
“The trip’s got two legs,” he said. “It takes about five hours for the planes to cross the Strait of Magellan. Then they stop at Rothera station out at the western tip of the peninsula.”
“That’d be the Brits, right?”
“Right,” Waylon said. “They’re being about as helpful as we could ask. The most accessible place to refuel’s a depot outside their base, and Rothera’s providing a thousand gallons.” He moved his shoulders. “After the layover, I’d figure the second half of the flight to take another dozen hours.”
Nimec rubbed his chin.
“Okay,” he said. “The situation’s what it is, and we’ll make the best of it. But I don’t want any passed balls. As far’s what went down here during the storm, the only thing the Senators know is there was a fire at the dome and we lost one of our men putting it out. And that’s all they need to know. When they climb aboard their plane, I don’t want them seeing these four”—he indicated the untagged body bags—“loaded onto the other prop. If they do, and ask us about it, we’ve got no choice except to tell them the truth. UpLink depends on government support. There are relationships we have to protect. If we’re seen as not honoring them, we might as well pack our suitcases and go home. Here and everywhere in the world.”
Nimec left his explanation at that. Waylon seemed to know the stakes well enough on his own.
He also seemed to be still waiting to say something. And having a hard time getting it out.
“What haven’t I covered?” Nimec asked.
Waylon was quiet another few seconds.
“About Sprague,” he said then, struggling to control his emotions. “We want to give him some kind of service.”
Nimec looked at Waylon. How could that have failed to occur to him?
“Sure,” he said. “I mean, of course.” He expelled a breath. “Is there a chaplain on base?”