The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  “There have been similar crashes in the Arctic and Antarctic,” she continued in her whisper, “when aircrews have lost situational awareness in whiteout conditions. To put a bottom line on this, this aircraft was not in an emergency state when it went down. They weren’t lost, and they weren’t landing. They were in a controlled cruise configuration, bound for somewhere else.”

  “If that’s the case, wouldn’t they have seen the island on their charts?” Smith asked.

  “You have to remember that in 1953 detailed navigational information on this part of the world was all but nonexistent. The closest thing to an accurate chart was an American military secret. Wednesday Island is also something of a freak. It’s one of the highest points within the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago. At that time, whoever plotted this plane’s course had no idea that a bloody great mountain would be parked out here in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.”

  “It’s not all that much of a mountain,” Smith mused. “We’re only about twenty-five hundred feet above sea level here. Wouldn’t that be a pretty low cruising altitude for a pressurized aircraft like this one?”

  “Very much so,” she agreed. “In fact, a TU-4 or B-29 would only follow such a low flight profile for one reason: if its crew were worried about being picked up by long-range radar.”

  Jon forced himself to play devil’s advocate. “Wouldn’t they have seen the island on their own navigational radar?”

  “Only if they were using it. What if they were maintaining full EMCON, full emission control, with all of their radio and radar transmitters deliberately shut down to avoid detection?”

  If such was conceivable, it seemed to grow colder. “So what do you think, Professor?” Smith asked.

  “I don’t know what to think, Colonel,” she replied. “Or rather, I don’t know what I want to think. One thing I am certain of. Tomorrow morning we have got to find the crew of this plane. It might be more important in the greater scheme of things than the anthrax.”

  “Do you think this might have something to do with this Russian alternate agenda?”

  He saw her nod. “In all probability. I suspect when we find the survival camp, we’ll know.”

  “I suspect we’ll know about Major Smyslov by then as well,” Smith replied grimly.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Smyslov watched Smith disappear into the tail. All evening he had been waiting for the opportunity to act, for a moment when the others were involved or distracted. This might be the best, if not his only chance.

  He headed for the crawlway tunnel leading forward, snaking down its length as rapidly and as quietly as he could. He knew exactly what he was to look for and exactly where it should be. He also had the set of fifty-year-old keys in his pocket.

  Earlier in the day, when he had been in the cockpit with Smith and Metrace, he hadn’t dared to search. He couldn’t risk drawing possible attention to the Misha 124’s official documentation until he could ascertain its status.

  Bellying into the forward compartment, he removed a pocket flash from his parka. Clenching it between his teeth, he sank down on one knee beside the navigator’s station and sent the narrow beam stabbing across the map safe below the table. Drawing the key ring, he fumbled with the safe’s lock.

  This had been a Soviet Air Force bomber, and in the old Soviet Union, maps had been state secrets, denied to all but authorized personnel.

  After a moment’s resistance the tumblers of the lock turned for the first time in half a century. Smyslov swung open the small, heavy door.

  Nothing! The safe was empty. The navigational charts and the targeting templates that were to have been issued to the radar operator were gone.

  Wasting no time, he closed and relocked the safe. The bomber’s logbook and the aircraft commander’s orders would be next. Moving forward to the left-hand pilot’s seat, Smyslov thrust the second key into the lock of the pilot’s safe located beneath it. Opening it, the Russian groped in the small, flat compartment. Again nothing!

  That left the political officer’s safe. The most critical of the three. He squeezed in between the pilots’ stations to the bombardier’s position in the very nose of the aircraft. Here the glass of the unstepped greenhouse had been caved in by the crash, and snow had drifted in and had refrozen. The bombsight itself was gone-it hadn’t been needed for this mission-and the rest of the station was buried in caked semi-ice. Drawing his belt knife, Smyslov hacked his way down to the deck-mounted safe.

  Damnation! The lock mechanism had been frozen solid. Swearing under his breath, the Russian tore off his gloves. Pulled his lighter from his pocket, he played the little jet of butane flame over the keyhole area. Burning his fingers, he muffled another curse and tried the key again. The stubborn lock yielded grudgingly.

  Empty. The targeting photographs and maps. The tasking orders. The political officer’s log and contingency instructions and the crew’s postmission action plan-all were gone.

  Smyslov resecured the safe door, repacking and smoothing the snow over it, trying to erase the signs of his tampering. Standing, he drew his gloves on again, his thoughts racing. It was all gone. All the mission documentation. That was how it was supposed to be. The Misha 124’s political officer had been ordered to destroy every last scrap of evidence concerning the bomber’s mission and the March Fifth Event.

  But the political officer had also been ordered to destroy the aircraft and its payload. The thermite incendiary charges in the bomb bay were proof that he had been in the process of doing so when he had been interrupted. But what about the documents? Had he been prevented from destroying them as well?

  And what of the men? Tomorrow Smith would go looking for the bomber’s crew. What would be left for him to find?

  Smyslov tugged down the zip of his parka and restowed the pen flash. He also removed the cigarette lighter from his shirt pocket. Not the little plastic butane he had purchased at the airport shop in Anchorage, but the other one, the stainless steel Ronson-style reservoir lighter he had brought with him from Russia. Balancing it in his palm, his mind raced through his rapidly shrinking number of options.

  He could comfort himself with the thought that much of the decision making had been taken out of his hands. If the Russian Spetznaz troopers had killed the science station’s personnel, fate must run its inevitable course. The coming confrontation between the United States and Russia would not be his responsibility.

  He need only concern himself with betrayal on a far more personal level. Today he had saved the life of a friend in this strange cold metal room. Tomorrow he might have to kill that friend as an enemy. And the disclaimer that it wasn’t his fault rang hollow.

  “Hey, Major, you okay up there?” Smith’s voice rang up the crawl tube from the aft compartment.

  “Yes, Colonel,” Smyslov replied, his fingers tightening around the little silver box. “I only…dropped my cigarette lighter.”

  Several hundred feet up the face of East Peak, on a ledge that overlooked both the glacier and the Misha crash site, the wide lens of a powerful spotting scope peered out through a crevice in an artfully camouflaged stone and snow windbreak. Two men lay behind the windbreak, sheltered by an ice-encrusted white tarp spread and supported over their heads. Even with the protection it was searingly cold on the exposed mountainside. Yet the two watchers stolidly endured, the one peering through the night-vision photomultiplier attached to the spotter scope, the other listening intently to the small radio receiver he had been issued.

  At regular intervals the two men conducted a survival ritual, their free hands moving between their crotches and armpits and their faces, transferring body warmth to their exposed skin, keeping at bay the vicious, scarring frostbite.

  Slithering on his belly like a lizard, a third parka-clad man crawled to join the two behind the windbreak.

  “Anything to report, Corporal?”

  “Nothing of importance, Lieutenant,” the man at the telescope grunted. “They have set up their camp inside the wr
eck. You can see lights through the windows of the rear compartment. Sometimes in the front as well.”

  “Let me have a look,” Lieutenant Tomashenko said.

  The Spetsnaz corporal rolled aside, making room for his platoon commander, and Tomashenko worked his way behind the night-vision scope, peering into the green and gray world it revealed. The bomber lay on the glacier below the observation post like a stranded whale. The faint wisp of illumination leaking from the downed plane’s astrodomes, all but undetectable to the naked eye, was magnified to a bright kelly glow by the photomultiplier. Intermittently the glow would pulse as a figure moved past the bubble windows.

  “Apparently the anthrax spores are not loose inside of the airplane,” Tomashenko muttered. “That is something anyway.”

  Tomashenko and his men had not ventured near the downed TU-4, nor had they even set foot on the glacier. The platoon’s orders were specific and stringent. Keep the crash site and the investigation team under long-range observation. Conceal their presence on the island. Avoid detection at all cost. Await the issuance of the alpha command by the point agent attached to the American party. Be positioned to intervene instantly on the transmission of said command. Be prepared to withdraw to the submarine should it not be issued.

  Tomashenko started to ask the radio monitor if he had heard anything, but caught himself. If the signal had been heard, he would hear. Until that moment they must wait.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Wednesday Island Station

  Randi Russell lay quietly in the darkness. Beyond the partition, in the main room of the bunkhouse, she could hear the heavy slumber breathing of Doctor Trowbridge, the sound she had been waiting for.

  An hour before, she and Trowbridge had banked the fire in the bunkhouse and theoretically had turned in for the night. However, in the women’s quarters, Randi had only stretched out fully dressed atop Kayla Brown’s bunk, refusing sleep. Now, rolling silently to her feet, she began to prepare for the out-of-doors. She squeezed three pairs of socks inside the white thermoplastic “bunny boots.” Then came the parka and insulated overpants with the Lady Magnum and its speedloaders fitted into the holster pocket. Thin Nomex inner and leather outer gloves were pulled on, along with a white balaclava and finally the snow camouflage.

  She worked in total darkness. Before shutting down for the night she had carefully positioned everything she would need and had mentally mapped out every move she would make.

  Stepping to where she had left her pack, she removed a small plastic envelope from an outer compartment. Then, slinging her ammunition pouches and submachine gun, she took a folded Hudson’s Bay blanket from the sleeping room’s upper bunk.

  Sliding open the door in the partition, she moved the length of the bunk room to the outside door, navigating unerringly by the faint rectangular lessening of black of the windows and the light brush of a fingertip on a table or countertop, easing each footstep soundlessly onto the floor. Trowbridge was still deeply asleep as she slipped through the snow lock.

  Sinking onto her hands and knees, she crawled through the outer door, keeping low in the snow trench beyond the entry. Snaking down the compacted paths, she made her way to the foxhole she had molded for herself covering the bunkhouse. There she constructed her hunting hide.

  The heavy Hudson’s Bay blanket went beneath her, insulation between her body and the ice. The contents of the plastic envelope went over her. It was a silvered foil survival blanket, incredibly warm for its cellophane-light weight. But unlike the usual blanket of its type, the backing on this one was not high-visibility orange but arctic camo white.

  Covering herself with it, Randi merged with her surroundings, making of herself nothing but an unevenness in the snow’s surface.

  Here, in the lee of the island, the night was almost still. Yet the wind could faintly be heard, roiling and gusting over the sheltering ridgeline. Even with her night-adapted vision, Randi could only make out the slightly variegated shades of darkness around her, the hut’s solid shadow geometrics against the slightly grayish black of the snow pack. Gradually, as the minutes and eventual hours passed, she began to note a faint wavering in these shades of night. She puzzled over it for a time, then realized the northern lights must be playing somewhere overhead, a meager hint of their illumination leaking through the cloud cover above the island.

  It was cold, a bitter, infiltrating cold that gradually seeped through her armor of blankets and heavy clothing. Still, as silent, patient, and invisible as an arctic fox, Randi waited, breathing as lightly as she could to minimize her breath plume.

  Under the survival blanket she cuddled the MP-5 close, not to protect the rugged weapon itself-it had been lubricated with an all-environment synthetic proof against arctic temperatures-but to keep the batteries of the tactical combat light clipped under its barrel warm and energized.

  Time crawled past like one of the island’s glaciers. Still, she waited. If she was cold, then he was cold, and he would know there would be a warm coal fire and a cozy bed waiting for him inside, with no reason not to claim them.

  Finally Randi heard the first ever-so-faint squeaking crunch of a boot step on snow. Her thumb moved half an inch, flipping the fire selector on her primary weapon from “Safe” to “Auto.”

  An amorphous blob of total blackness moved slowly down the trail from beyond the camp. Gradually it defined itself as the upright form of a man carrying a slender, elongated shape in each hand. Moving with a stalker’s care, he approached the bunkhouse entry.

  The thumb that had flipped off the MP-5’s safety moved to the button on the SMG’s handgrip.

  The figure paused for a moment outside the snow lock, taking a final protracted look around and missing the faint bumpy irregularity in the snow a few yards away. Then he leaned the elongated object in his right hand against the door frame and transferred the one in his left hand to the right. Using the freed left hand, he reached for the door handle.

  Randi heaved aside the thermal blanket and came up onto her knees, the MP-5 lifting to her shoulder. Her thumb pressed the switch of the tactical light, and the narrow, dazzling blue-white beam lashed out, encompassing and paralyzing the man who stood at the bunkhouse door, his ice axe half raised.

  “Hello, Mr. Kropodkin,” Randi said, her voice as cold as the barrel of the leveled submachine gun. “Shall I cut you in two now, or should we wait until later?”

  The MP-5 lay on the bunkhouse dining table, its muzzle aimed at the dark-stubble-bearded youth seated in the wall-side bunk. Randi Russell’s hand rested a short grab away from the SMG’s trigger. They had both shed their heavy outdoor snow gear, and she had used a set of nylon disposacuffs to bind Kropodkin’s hands behind his back. Now she stared at the man with ebon-eyed intensity.

  “Where did you leave the bodies of the other members of the science team?”

  “Bodies?” Kropodkin turned to the third party in the room. “Dr. Trowbridge, please. I don’t know what this madwoman is talking about! I don’t even know who she is!”

  “I…don’t either, really.” Trowbridge blinked uneasily in the glare of the gas lantern, smoothing back his sleep-rumpled fringe of white hair. Still clad only in thermal long johns and socks, he had been jarred awake a few minutes before when Randi had prodded Kropodkin in through the snow lock.

  “Don’t worry about who I am,” Randi said coldly. “Don’t even worry about standing trial for murder yet. Focus on staying alive long enough to be handed over to the authorities. Answering questions is your best chance. Now, who do you report to? Who’s coming for the anthrax?”

  “Anthrax?” The Slovakian’s eyes darted once more to his only potential ally in the room. “Dr. Trowbridge, please help me! I don’t know what is happening here!”

  “Please, Ms. Russell. Don’t you think we might just be getting ahead of ourselves here?” The academic fumbled his glasses onto his nose.

  “I don’t think so,” Randi replied flatly. “This man killed the other memb
ers of your expedition in cold blood, the teammates he’d lived and worked with for over six months. He slaughtered them all like sheep, and I’ll bet for no better reason than money.”

  Kropodkin’s jaw dropped. “The others…dead? I do not believe this! No! This is insane! I am no killer! Doctor, tell her! Tell this woman who I am!”

  “Please, Ms. Russell!” Trowbridge’s voice strengthened in protest. “You have no grounds to make such…drastic accusations. We have no real proof that anyone has been killed here yet.”

  “Yes, we do, Doctor. Last evening I found Kayla Brown’s body on the hill below the radio tower. Someone had used an ice axe on her. That one, I suspect.” Randi nodded toward the axe that lay on the table beside the submachine gun, the axe Kropodkin had been carrying. “I have no doubt DNA testing will prove the point. They’ll probably also find blood traces from Dr. Gupta and Dr. Hasegawa as well. You took out Creston and Rutherford by other means, didn’t you, Kropodkin?”

  The graduate student half rose from the bunk, straining at the nylon bands around his wrists. “I tell you, I have killed no one!”

  Randi’s hand covered the grip of the MP-5. The muzzle traversed half an inch, indexing in line with Kropodkin’s chest. “Sit down.”

  He stiffened and subsided into the bunk.

  Trowbridge stood watching the developing tableau, a totally blasted expression on his face. The revelation about Kayla Brown’s corpse had been another of those things that shouldn’t happen in his existence, another boulder in the accelerating avalanche that was sweeping his life and carefully ordered career into scandal and chaos. His only escape lay in denial. “You have no proof that any of the expedition members are responsible for any of this,” he protested hoarsely.

  “I’m afraid I do.” Leaning back in her chair, Randi caught up the model 12 Winchester Kropodkin had been carrying, the camp’s polar bear deterrent. “This shotgun has a three-round magazine capacity. It’s a safe assumption that there were three shells in it when it left this camp.”