The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  What had Director Klein told him? “Assume there are other agendas in play. Watch for them.”

  He would have to stay braced for whatever might come looming out of the mist.

  At least he’d have good people backing him. Valentina Metrace was…interesting. They certainly hadn’t made professors like that back when he was going to college. There was a story to be learned about her. And as one of Klein’s mobile ciphers, she had to be exceptionally good at whatever it was she did.

  And he’d have Randi again. Fierce, valiant, and self-contained, there could be no doubting her. Past all personal pain or anger she would not fail him. She would do whatever she might be tasked with, or die trying.

  And that was the problem within himself. Smith had seen so much of Randi Russell’s life and world die, he sometimes had the feeling he was destined to oversee her death as well. Or be responsible for it. It was a personal nightmare that had grown every time they had been thrown together on an operation.

  Angrily he shook his head. He must not take the counsel of that particular fear. If it was to be, then it would be. In the meantime they had a job to do.

  The elevator door chimed and slid open. His rented Ford Explorer was parked out in the hotel’s front lot, and as Smith passed through the lobby he diverted for a moment. Entering the glass-walled combination newsstand and gift shop, he purchased both a USA Today and a Seattle Times, as part of an agent’s instinct for staying aware of his environment.

  Back in the lobby he paused to study the headlines, and his operator’s hackles rose.

  It must have been a slow news day. On the front page of the Times there was a brief Department of Defense press release. It concerned the joint U.S.-Russian investigation team being sent to the crash site of the polar mystery plane, complete with its departure time from Seattle, its route, and means of travel.

  The news story was entirely appropriate for the mission cover; the information given out, routine. A failure to advise the media of the operation could have aroused suspicion in its own right.

  But to Smith it was a shout into the darkness, and there was no way of knowing who might overhear.

  In her hotel room, Randi Russell sank down on the edge of the bed. Aimlessly running her hand over the golden-toned coverlet, her thoughts jumbled between the past and future.

  Damn it, she was a good pilot, or at least a fair one, but she didn’t have near the hours needed to consider herself a competent arctic bush aviator. But that was always a problem with the Agency. Admit you knew how to fix a leaky faucet, and the assumption would be that you knew how to manage a flood control project.

  The compounding half of the equation was, of course, the personal pride that always choked off the words “No, I can’t do this.”

  Most particularly she couldn’t bring herself to say those words to Jon Smith.

  What curse chained her to that man?

  She would always remember the worst fight she’d ever had with her older sister, the cold fury she had felt when Sophia had appeared with Smith’s engagement ring on her finger, and the searing words of betrayal she had rained upon Sophie before stalking out of her apartment.

  The worst had been that Sophie had refused to fight back. “Jon’s sorry for what he’s done to you, Randi,” she’d said, smiling that wise, rather sad, big sister’s smile of hers, “more sorry than you can ever know, or at least be willing to understand.”

  Randi would never understand, not now.

  She was starting to unzip one suede boot when a soft knock sounded at the door. Tugging the zip up again, Randi crossed to the room’s entryway, carefully checking the door’s security peephole.

  A pair of level, narrowed gray eyes looked back.

  Randi went through the motions of clearing the dead bolt and the security chain and removing the wet molded tissue wedge from the foot of the door. “Is anything wrong, Professor?” she asked, opening it.

  “I’m not sure,” Valentina Metrace replied, her voice cool. “That’s what I’m here to find out. We need to talk, Miss Russell, specifically, about you.”

  A little startled, Randi stepped back, and the historian brushed past her into the room. “Are we secure here?” she asked bruskly.

  “I’ve scanned for bugs,” Randi replied, closing and relocking. “We’re clean.”

  “Good. We can get down to it, then.” Valentina paced into the middle of the room, her arms crossed. Abruptly she turned to face Randi. “What the hell is wrong between you and Smith?”

  In her casual amiability over the dinner table, Professor Metrace had not seemed quite such a formidable personality. But in attack mode now, her eyes were steel, and Randi was aware that even without heels, the brunette was an inch or two the taller.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Professor,” Randi replied stiffly. “There are no problems between Colonel Smith and myself.”

  “Oh, please, Miss Russell. The atmosphere over that table was so charged it would have registered on a Geiger counter. I’ve never worked with either you or Smith before, but I gather you must have operated with the colonel in the past. I must also assume that you both must be reasonably competent members of the Club, or you wouldn’t be here. But it is also obvious something has gone off between you.”

  Damn it! And Randi had been priding herself on the way she’d been keeping the lid on. “It’s nothing for you to concern yourself about, Professor.”

  Metrace shook her head impatiently. “Miss Russell. I am a professional at this game. That means I don’t work with people I don’t trust, and right now I’m not trusting anybody. Before I take another step forward on this operation, I want to know what exactly the bloody hell is going on between my theoretical teammates-in detail!”

  Randi could recognize the gambit in play: belligerence, probably feigned, and a sudden slashing assault. Metrace was not merely demanding information. She was probing, testing Randi’s reaction.

  The CIA operative strove to suppress her instinctive flare of anger. “I suggest that you discuss this matter with Colonel Smith.”

  “Oh, I fully intend to, darling. But he’s not available at the moment, and you are. Beyond that, Smith seemed to be handling affairs better. You seem to be the one with her knickers in a knot. Illuminate me.”

  This woman was infuriating, or at least that was how she desired to be at the moment. “I can assure you that any dealings I may have had with Colonel Smith in the past will have no effect on our current assignment whatsoever.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Metrace replied flatly.

  Randi felt her control cracking. “Then you may judge that it’s none of your damn business!”

  “Keeping my skin intact is my business, Miss Russell, one that I devote a great deal of loving attention to. And right now I am sensing a sour team and a mission aborted before it launches, because of personnel problems. I’m one of the mission specialists, thus, indispensable. I suspect Colonel Smith is as well. That leaves the little helicopter girl to get the black ball. I assure you that you can be replaced, darling. Now, watch me walk out of here and make it happen!”

  The confrontation hovered on the verge of critical mass. But both women recognized that if a blow was thrown, it would be no scratch-and-slap cat fight; one or the other or both of them would be dead or critically maimed in seconds.

  Finally, Randi took a deep, shuddering breath. Damn this woman and damn Jon Smith and damn herself. But if they were going to be operating together, Metrace had the right to ask and Randi the responsibility to answer.

  “Ten years ago a young army officer that I was very much in love with was serving with a peacekeeping force in the Horn of Africa. We were going to be married when he got home. But he contracted something out of the African disease pool, something that medical science was just beginning to recognize. He was evacuated to a Navy hospital ship and placed under the care of an army doctor who was serving aboard at the time.”

  Valentina relaxed minu
tely. “Colonel Smith?”

  “He was a captain then. He made a misdiagnosis. It wasn’t really his fault, I suppose. Only a few tropical disease specialists really understood the illness at the time. But my fiancé died.”

  The silence returned to the room. Randi took another deep breath and went on. “Some time later, Major Smith met my older sister, Sophia. She was a doctor, too, a research microbiologist. They fell in love and were engaged to be married when he convinced her to come and work with him at the U.S. Army Medical Institute for Infectious Diseases. Do you remember the Hades plague?”

  “Of course.”

  Randi kept her eyes fixed on the blandly patterned wallpaper. “USAMRIID was one of the first agencies called in to try and isolate the disease and find a cure. While working with the plague, my sister caught it.”

  “And she died as well.” Valentina Metrace’s voice softened into compassion. The test was over.

  Randi could meet the other woman’s gaze now. “Since then I’ve found myself working with Jon on a number of different assignments. For some reason we just keep getting tangled up with each other.” She continued with a wry, self-derogatory smile. “I’ve come to recognize that he’s a good operative and essentially a good person. I’ve also come to recognize that what’s happened in the past is…past. I promise you, Professor, that I’ll have no problem working with him as my team leader. He knows his business. It’s only that I have some memories to work through whenever we first come together.”

  Valentina nodded. “I see.”

  She turned for the door but paused halfway through the move. “Miss Russell, would you like to have breakfast with me tomorrow, before we get on the plane?”

  She put no special emphasis on the “we” in the sentence. It was offered as a given.

  Randi’s responding smile was open this time. “I’d like that, Professor. And call me Randi.”

  “And Val for me. I apologize for coming on quite so strong. I was a bit uncertain about the scenario. I wasn’t sure if I might not be getting caught up in the fallout of some former romantic entanglement.”

  “Between Jon and me?” Randi chuckled ruefully. “Not likely.”

  The other woman’s smile deepened. “Good.”

  After Valentina Metrace had left, Randi frowned. There had been no reason for the black-haired historian to look quite so pleased with that last answer she had been given.

  Chapter Eleven

  Over the Straits of Juan de Fuca

  The Alaska Airlines 737-400 swept over the island-studded band of water separating the Olympic Peninsula and the United States from Vancouver Island and Canada. With cloud tendrils licking at its belly, it angled away to the northwest. As the Boeing leveled off at its cruising altitude, Jon Smith loosened his seat belt. The midweek morning flight to Anchorage was half empty, and he had the dual luxuries of no seat partner and a spot in the spacious A row just behind the cockpit bulkhead.

  For the first time in weeks he was in civilian clothes, his uniform exchanged for Levi’s and a well-worn bush jacket. The change was a pleasant one. Glancing over the seat back, he could see Randi Russell and Professor Metrace spaced out farther back in the cabin.

  Since last night Randi had apparently reestablished her equanimity with him. Looking up from the helicopter flight manual she’d been studying, she gave him a brief smile.

  The professor was also reading, her nose buried in a massive bookmark-studded study of the Warsaw Pact Air Forces.

  Professor. It still sounded odd.

  His own briefcase rested under his seat, loaded with the latest USAMRIID downloads on the rapid diagnosis and identification of anthrax variants and their treatments. He’d get to them presently, but for the moment it felt good to sit back, stretch his legs out, and close his eyes against the warm morning sun pouring through the cabin window. Soon he’d have no time or opportunity to unload so totally.

  “Mind if I sit down, Jon?”

  He snapped out of the semidoze he’d drifted into. Valentina Metrace was standing in the aisle, a cup of coffee steaming in her hand and a mildly amused expression on her face.

  Smith grinned back. “Why not?”

  She flowed past him to curl up in the window seat. The professor was apparently one of those women who preferred to be elegant at all times. This morning she wore a form-molding black sweater and ski pants set, and her hair was up in the sleek chignon she seemed to favor. Smith found himself wondering for a moment how far that dark, glossy cascade might flow down her back should it be set free.

  Despite the pleasant distraction, he still shot a fast look around, checking the immediate environment. The seat rows across and behind them were still unoccupied, granting them a pocket of privacy.

  Valentina was security wary as well, for when she spoke she kept her voice pitched below the whine of the fan jets.

  “I was thinking we could use this opportunity to talk freely before our liaison joins up. Tell me, Colonel, what’s your policy going to be toward our gallant Russian ally?”

  It was a good question. “Until proven otherwise, we are to assume all of the brothers are valiant and all of the sisters virtuous,” Smith replied. “As long as the Russians appear to be playing straight with us, we’ll do the same for them. But the operative word is ‘appear.’ Our instructions are to play like the deck is loaded. We’re to assume the Russians have another layer on this thing.”

  Metrace took a sip of her coffee. “I think that we may call that a blinding flash of the obvious.”

  They had to lean close to speak, and Smith couldn’t help but note that his executive officer smelled pleasantly of Guerlain’s Fleurs des Alpes. So if the Russians are trying to pull a fast one,” Smith interlaced his fingers over his stomach, “what is it and why? What aren’t we seeing?”

  “I daresay it would be better to approach this as a question of what is it they don’t want us to see,” she replied. “I’ve been networking with some of my fellow history buffs since catching this rocket, and I’ve discovered something rather interesting about the Misha 124 crash.

  “Since the end of the Cold War there has been a huge…I suppose you could call it a glasnost under way between military historians on both sides of the conflict. Without having to worry about security restrictions, we’ve been asking why was this done, where, and by whom. For the most part, we’ve been getting answers.

  “To date, our opposite numbers in the Russian Federation have been remarkably forthcoming, even about their major military bloopers like sunken atomic submarines and nerve gas spills.

  “But not on this point. Prior to the discovery of the Misha crash site, in all of the ex-Soviet air force service records we’ve been granted access to, there has been no mention of any TU-4 squadron losing any aircraft in March of 1953, on any kind of routine exercise, anywhere.”

  “And no mention of a biological broken arrow in the Arctic involving two tons of anthrax?” Smith prompted.

  She shook her head, then brushed back a lock of raven hair from above her brow. “Not a whisper, until the Russians brought the subject up with our President.

  “Now, information on a bioweapons warload being carried by a specific aircraft might very well have been compartmentalized for security purposes. But this particular Bull and its entire aircrew have been completely erased from all standard Red Air Force documentation. They urgently wanted to make it go completely away. And I think the only reason the Russian Federation is admitting to its existence now is because it’s sitting there in front of God and everybody.”

  Smith looked past Valentina for a moment and out the glare-bright window, digesting the information. “That is interesting,” he replied slowly. “Here’s one I’ve been wondering about. It seems damn peculiar to me that anyone would risk uploading a live biowar agent as part of a training exercise. Common sense would dictate you’d use some kind of harmless inert testing compound.”

  Valentina shrugged. “You’d think so, and so would I. But then
, we aren’t Russian. They tend to do things differently.

  “Consider the Chernobyl disaster,” she went on. “We wouldn’t build a big electric power reactor with a combustible graphite core, but the Russians did. We wouldn’t build a big nuclear reactor of any kind without a proper radiation containment dome, but the Russians did. And we wouldn’t run a series of radical systems-failure tests on a big, unsealed graphite-core power reactor while it was up and critical, but the Russians most certainly did. I don’t think we can make any assumptions on that point.”

  Smith nodded. “Then we won’t. Now, let’s move on to something else. I know the status of the Russian Federation’s current biowar program, but you’re our expert on past Soviet systems. What’s the possibility that bomber might be carrying something other than plain old anthrax?”

  She sighed. “It’s difficult to say. The Misha 124 was the kind of aircraft that would have been used on a one-way transpolar strike mission against strategic targets in the United States. With that as a given, and given the plane was armed, it would have been carrying some kind of ABC warload: atomic, biological, or chemical. The Soviets wouldn’t expend a long-range bomber and an elite aircrew to deliver anything less potent.”

  She took another sip of her coffee and squirmed around to face him directly, tucking her feet under her in the seat. “As for the specific agent, those were the days before the exotics like Ebola and before advanced genetic engineering. You had to make do with what Mother Nature provided. The big three everyone was fooling with were anthrax, smallpox, and the bubonic plague. Anthrax was favored because it was simple and cheap to manufacture in bulk, and militarily controllable because it isn’t a contagion.”

  Smith frowned and considered. “If it were the plague or smallpox, we’d likely have nothing to worry about. The pathogens would probably be long inert by now. Besides, why lie about it? All three of the alternatives would have been equally nasty, and once we reach the crash site we’d know anyway.”