by Tom Clancy
“Describe what you feel,” he said.
Her heart was knocking. “I don’t know—”
“Describe it to me,” he said.
Bradley commanded herself not to cry, and the tears began streaming from her eyes.
“I don’t know what to say,” she told him. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I only feel your face.”
He pressed her hand against his cheek for several more seconds, his eyes radiant with that terrible intensity.
Then he relaxed his grip on her, let her pull back.
“All right,” he said. “Listen well, scientist. I’m going to tell you something you’ll surely wish to remember. . . .”
Cold Corners Base
Nimec entered the water-treatment dome, strode to its central platform, asked the group working on the pump where he could find the man he was seeking, and was pointed in his direction.
“You Mark Rice?” Nimec said, approaching him from behind.
The man glanced up over his shoulder and nodded. He was crouched at a warped metal pipe-coupling near the platform, a small plasma cutter in his hand, a welding helmet and mask covering his head.
“I’d like to talk,” Nimec said. “When you’ve got a minute.”
“Got one right now.”
Rice switched off the torch, rose, carefully set it down on the wheeled tool cart beside him, turned off the oxygen supply to his face mask, and raised its glass hatch.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
Nimec looked at him. A few spikes of hair showed over Rice’s brow, sweaty despite the penetrating cold inside the dome. They were blond with dyed cobalt-blue streaks.
“I’ve seen your folder,” Nimec said. “You were with the Sword detail in Ankara, my old friend Ghazi’s section.”
Rice nodded silently.
“Ghazi sent your team to flush those terrorists out of the mountains a couple, three years ago. On horseback.”
Rice nodded again.
“Before UpLink, you were Army Ranger,” Nimec said. “The 3/75th, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Saw your share of action in the service . . . Task Force Somalia, an anti-narc unit in Colombia . . .”
“Right.”
“And earned some impressive commendations,” Nimec said. “The Distinguished Service Cross, a couple of sharp-shooter’s medals . . .”
Rice flicked a Nomex-gloved hand into the air between them.
“With all due respect,” he said. “It’s been a long while since I wore a black beret. Or rode a horse—”
“Or fired a rifle,” Nimec said.
Rice looked steadily at him.
“True,” Rice said. “Before the attack on this plant the other night.”
Nimec met his gaze. “You were going to resign from Sword until Rollie Thibodeau talked you out of it, and even then only agreed to stay if you could ship out to Cold Corners,” he said. “Feel comfortable telling me the reason?”
Rice regarded him another moment, then shrugged.
“I didn’t want to shoot anything anymore except with a camera,” he said. “What I do here is mostly work for the beakers. Photographic ecosystem profiles. It suits me fine.”
“And still puts that trained eye of yours to good use.”
Rice made no comment.
“I need a sniper,” Nimec said. “Someone who’s dependable. Who won’t make mistakes. A bunch of lives are going to be on the line. Mine’s incidentally one of them.”
Rice looked at him.
“The talk’s been that you’re going out to bring back the missing search team,” Rice said.
Nimec gave him a nod. Their eyes were still in contact.
“I’m not a quitter,” Rice said.
“Nobody thinks that.”
Rice nodded.
“Go ahead and count me in,” he said.
Bull Pass
Burkhart led his men from the ascending passage’s mouth onto a black rock uplift, whipped by freezing wind, his boots stepping across striations that memorialized the labored seaward slide of ancient ice.
A hundred feet below him Bull Pass was congested with shadows. Faded orange, the sun floated on an almost even plane with his line of sight, giving the illusion that he could have squeezed it in his hand if only his reach were longer. It had been like that for days as wintry gloom made its onset.
His attention now, however, was captured by the writhing purple-red blot of light in the sky beside the sun. He had never before seen anything like it. Nor most certainly had any of the others.
Here was the first outward sign of the sun’s advancing fever.
“Mein Gott,” Langern said behind him, staring with awe at the bruisy radiance. “Was ist das?”
Burkhart turned to him.
“Der Gott des Krieges,” he said. “Kann sein, eh?”
Langern’s eyes remained wide behind his goggles.
“Ja, mein Herr,” he said. “Kann sein.”
Burkhart was silent. Then he tapped Langern’s arm to stir him from his rapt absorption, motioning down at the pass.
“Hier müssen alle durchhalten,” he said. “Verstehen?”
“Ja,” Langern said, nodding to show he indeed understood.
This bitter windswept terrace was where they would position themselves for the enemy’s arrival.
Cold Corners Base
Pete Nimec watched his hookup teams finish rigging their all-terrain vehicles to the pair of choppers requested from MacTown, each Sikorsky S-76 moments from bearing away its maximum sling-load of three vehicles. As the cargo hooks were slipped into their apex fittings, the wand men waved their static wands and the teams jumped off the ATVs to move out from under the downwash of lifting rotors.
Then the birds climbed from their hover, pulling slack from the sling legs, flying off against the strange, wavery orchid of color that had appeared in the sky near the slipping sun.
Nimec turned to Megan. His backpack heavy on his shoulders, loaded with his own gear, he was ready to join his strike force aboard one of the two UpLink helicopters on the pad.
“How you holding up?” he said.
“Fine.” She lowered her eyes from the auroral radiance and studied his face. “I only wish I were going with you, if you want to know the truth.”
Nimec smiled a little.
“You’ve been awful scrappy since I taught you to box,” he said.
She gave his chest a light swat with her mittened hand.
“Fisticuffs are my thing,” she said. “Before long I’ll have to watch out for cauliflower face.”
“I think,” he said, “You mean ‘cauliflower ear.’ ”
“Close enough.”
They stood there facing each other.
“Got to head off,” Nimec said, and nodded toward the waiting choppers.
“Yes,” Megan said.
“You mind the store. There should be enough men here to—”
“I’m really okay,” she said. “I’ll be okay. And so will this base.”
They stood a few seconds longer in the blowing cold. Then Megan stepped forward and hugged him.
“Thanks, Pete,” she said, her voice catching, her arms tight around him. “Thanks very much.”
Nimec cleared his throat.
“What for?” he said.
“Just for being you,” Megan said.
Over Bull Pass
“We’re seeing . . . nk . . . think the . . . tch . . . can . . . sn . . . us . . . down where . . . sss . . . ssssss . . . sk . . . ”
“Chinstrap One, you’re breaking up. Say again?”
“Srks . . . siss . . .”
“I’m losing you, Chinstrap One,” the UpLink chopper pilot said as Nimec listened from the passenger seat. “Repeat your status. Over.”
“Crkrrsssss—”
The pilot frowned, tried to reach the other MacTown bird. He was a wire-thin black man named Justin Smith who wore a sparse, tightly kinked chin beard an
d spoke with an occasionally strong peppering of a Caribbean accent. Nimec thought it sounded like Trinidad.
“Chinstrap Two, we’ve lost contact with Brother Penguin,” he said, pronouncing the word Brother as Brudda. “We need to confirm you’ve made your tick mark. Acknowledge.”
“Ngg . . . you . . . rppttt—”
“Say again—”
“Still cnnttrd. Extnr . . . ssssszzzdrr . . . rceee . . . ”
Nimec turned to Smith. “Snap, crackle, pop,” Nimec snorted in disgust. “There any way to get a lock?”
Smith shook his head.
“Our radios are already hopping,” he said. “The disturbance cuts across all bands.”
“Try our own bird again,” Nimec said. The trail ship carrying Waylon’s team had peeled away toward its rendezvous moments earlier.
Smith radioed it, got more garbled noise, cursed under his breath.
Nimec wondered if Smith missed palm trees and white sand. “We’ll have to forget about any of them reporting for now,” Nimec said. “Keep our fingers crossed they’re in position.”
“They’ll be doing the same for us.”
“Yeah.”
Nimec looked out his windscreen at the coiling lights in the sky. What had started out as an isolated purplish stain near the sun had become a moving, living rope of color across the horizon, twined with a glowy spectrum of greens, reds, and blues.
“Damned freakish,” he said. “The weatherman says it’ll be a sunny day, you can count on having to leave your house with an umbrella and galoshes. But solar flares, radio interference . . . this they can all get on the mark.”
Smith flew in silence, making unconscious, minute adjustments to his sticks as a highway driver would to his steering wheel.
“Sir,” he said after a while. “We’re reaching the notch.” His flight helmet dipped downward. “See it down there?”
Down dere.
Nimec’s eyes traced the pass seaming its way between jagged mountain slopes, saw the dark shark’s-tooth crosscut coming up fast.
He nodded. “The intercom working?”
Smith reached for a switch, and static burst loudly into the cabin.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, and flicked off the com.
Nimec started unstrapping himself from his seat.
“Keep her steady,” he said. “I’m going back to talk to Rice while my vocal cords can still transmit.”
Bull Pass
Outside the tunnel entrance on the notch’s spiny eastern shoulder, Langern thumbed off his radio handset, and then stood pensive and silent under the ribboning polar lights. He had scarcely spotted the helo through his binoculars before attempting to contact Burkhart, but all he had gotten from the handset was a senseless bark of static.
It was the same signal breakup he had received when he’d hailed Koenig on the western side of the notch, and Reymann’s squad at the far end of the pass.
Meanwhile, the Bell helo was close enough now for its UpLink markings to be seen with the unaided eye.
Zum Teufel mit ihnen, he thought. Zum Teufel mit dem ganzen verfluchten Land.
To the Devil with them. With this whole accursed land.
He turned toward the other men waiting on the crest with him, ordered them to stand to arms.
From this point forward they would be on their own.
The Sikorsky helicopter designated Chinstrap One after the ubiquitous chinstrap penguins of the peninsula had lowered its own “strap” of ATVs at the intersection of Bull Pass and McKelvey Valley—or the point where the shank of the valley system anchor would be seen to meet its ring end on a map. The pass walls were at their widest distance apart here, and katabatics weren’t too bothersome a factor for the bird’s pilot.
This was only one of the reasons the site was chosen for the linkup with Ron Waylon and his group. The other was because of its coordination with the separate rendezvous Sam Cruz’s team was making elsewhere.
Dropped by the UpLink tail ship on its second hop, Waylon’s team was waiting to receive the sling-load as Chinstrap One came in over the ridge and bellied low above their heads.
They took less than five minutes to get it unhooked and derigged.
Waylon stared up at the S-76, waved to the men in the cockpit as it lifted away into a sky swirling with brilliant color.
“Don’t know if I’d want to be heading back up into that weirdness,” said the man beside Waylon.
Waylon looked at him.
“Don’t know if he’d want to be going where we are either,” Waylon said.
Then he turned toward the ATVs and gestured for the others to mount up.
Within moments they were speeding south into the pass.
McKelvey Valley
“Chinstrap Two . . . wvv . . . lzzzzt . . . tktyr . . . brother . . . gnnn,” came Justin Smith’s voice over the radio. “Wnud . . . confizzzz . . . tkmk . . .”
Pulling pitch at the sticks of his Sikorsky, the MacTown pilot frowned as his UpLink counterpart’s transmission was munched by static, incidentally noting the Carribean island accent. He thought it sounded like Jamaica.
“I’m not getting you,” he answered into his headset. “Repeat.”
“Saygggn—”
“Still can’t read you,” said the MacTown pilot, his consternation deepening. He paused, tried to guess what the radio call was about, and went for the obvious—UpLink’s lead bird would want a basic status report.
“External load successfully dropped and received,” he said, hoping his message would be intelligible at the receiving end.
Bull Pass
On Burkhart’s orders, the Light Strike Vehicle had waited just around the eastward bend of Bull Pass, hidden in shadow behind a toppled granite colonnade opposite Mount Cerberus’s massif face, guarding its territory like the solitary feline hunter with which Shevaun Bradley had once associated it. A camouflaged leopard perhaps. Or a panther.
Now Ron Waylon’s incursion team came shooting past, paired up in their three all-terrain vehicles, rusty sand reeling off from the spin of their tires as they hooked into the narrow stretch that led toward the notch and Wright Valley.
The LSV’s crew continued to wait a short while longer, tending to their patience, allowing the little UpLink vehicles to gain some distance, get deeper into the trench. Liquid jewels of color rained down from the narrow band of sky overhead, sliding over Cerberus’s plated black flank in vivid, oily droplets.
Unglaublich, the man named Reymann told himself in his driver’s seat, thinking he would never see anything like it again if he lived until the last day of the world.
Then he fisted the vehicle’s clutch and pounced from behind the weather-chewed slope to spring his ambush.
Bull Pass
After overseeing the movement of the 150-ton haul trucks to their places in front of the mine entrance, Burkhart gathered the drivers and excavation crew together inside the shaft and detailed what he expected of them.
“No, it’s impossible. We won’t. You can’t ask that of us!” one of the nervous foremen said. A Canadian who had gained his experience in the uranium mines in Saskatchewan, he unnecessarily restated his objection in German. “Das kommt nicht in Frage!”
“What else would you wish to do?” Burkhart said, speaking perfect English.
“Get out of here!” The foreman’s insistent shouting echoed in the gloom around them. “We have to get the hell out!”
Burkhart suddenly felt very tired.
“Out to where?” he asked quietly.
Over Bull Pass
It wasn’t an M24 SWS. It wasn’t the Barrett Light Fifty he’d used to take down armored troop carriers at long range in Mogadishu. It wasn’t the slightly lighter Haskins of the sort favored by Green Beret spec-op shooters. It was a VVRS rifle, the original full-sized version, a little over a yard long, a little under ten pounds loaded, about the same size and weight as a standard M16A2 combat gun. Built for pouring out heavy fire with some resultant sacrific
e in accuracy.
It was what Mark Rice had available to him, and he would have to make it work for him.
He knelt in position behind the slid-open starboard door panel of the Bell, wind screaming into the passenger/cargo compartment around him, his goggles off so he could keep his eye against the aperture of his scope mount.
The men below him on the ridge-back had opened up on the bird with their Sturmgewehr assault weapons as Smith wove evasively in the air above the notch, trying to avoid their fire and lower his skids. Rice rocked and swayed on one knee. He estimated there were five, possibly six opponents. They had traded their white winter cammo garb for something closer to desert dun. Some of them were sheltered behind boulders and rock projections. Others were in full view. All were firing at the unarmored bottom of the UpLink chopper’s fuselage—the ding of metal on metal audible over the roar of wind and props as some of the rounds made contact.
Rice knew he had to take them out fast.
He inhaled, exhaled, squinting down the barrel. Then he triggered a shot at the center of a parka the color of coppery sand.
A shower of red and the parka tumbled away down the steep hillside.
Rice shifted his gun barrel. With that first trigger pull he had grooved into instinctive action. Later he would think of torn flesh and spilled blood. Later his gorge would rise at the waste and death. But right now these were no longer men down there, no longer even living creatures. These were targets. Simply targets.
He sighted between the crosshairs again, but momentarily lost his alignment as the chopper swung sideways to avoid an upward stream of bullets. Then he regained the mark, and fired.
There was more spraying blood and his target folded backward. Rice shifted to yet another, this one moving, breaking for cover, looking up at the chopper, shooting up at the chopper, making a target of Rice himself as it dashed toward a protective shield of rock. Rice released a breath, released a round, and got the target in mid-run.