The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  “Not a problem.” She hurried for the entrance tunnel.

  By the lantern light Smith dug a Mylar survival blanket and a couple of pairs of disposacuffs out of his pockets. Binding Smyslov’s wrists and ankles, he rolled the Russian onto the insulating sheet of the blanket. Glancing around, Smith noted a sizable stump of candle stuck in a wall niche by its own wax. A half century old or not, it still burned when Smith lit it, providing a scrap of long-term illumination within the cave.

  Kneeling down once more, he rechecked Smyslov’s vital signs. Pulse strong, breathing regular, and the slight puffiness at the back of his head indicated that the swelling from Valentina’s butt stroke was developing outward. He’d live and should regain consciousness shortly. Even though Smyslov had declared himself a member of the opposing camp and had pulled that trigger on him, Smith didn’t bear a personal grudge. Smyslov was a soldier in the service of his nation, just as Smith was. It was the fortunes of war, and now, likely, it was war. One with no guarantees of victory for either side.

  Smith caught up his own rifle and started for the cave mouth.

  Valentina was lying prone behind the frozen rubble of the snow wall, using the telescopic sights of the model 70 to scan the glacier.

  “Any activity?” Smith dropped beside her and drew back the bolt of the SR-25.

  “I haven’t seen anything yet,” she replied, lifting her face from the rifle scope. “Of course, that may not mean all that much.”

  Smith took her meaning. As both the ninja of medieval Japan and the Apache warrior of the American Southwest had proved, it was completely possible to be invisible in plain sight. It was just a matter of knowing how to go about it.

  “I did find this just outside of the cave mouth, though.” Valentina held up a silver cigarette lighter.

  “Smyslov’s?”

  “So I would suspect. Look…” She turned the lighter upside down and squeezed some concealed catch. There was a soft snick of a releasing spring, and a short spike antenna extended from what had looked like the filler cap. “A radio transponder beacon operating on a preset frequency. When the penny dropped with its loud resounding clang, friend Gregori only had to push the button to call down the wolves.”

  “That’s a pretty small transmitter,” Smith replied, uncasing his binoculars. “They must be close by. I wonder what’s holding them back.”

  “It could be they’re waiting for their Judas goat to give them the final high sign.” Valentina pressed the antenna back into the lighter/transponder, then snuggled in behind her rifle sights again. “I wonder why he tried to take us alone as he did. Grandstanding?”

  “It’s just barely possible he was trying to keep us from getting killed, Val,” Smith replied.

  “Oh, really? You think?”

  “I like to maintain a positive worldview.”

  From the protection of the shadowed interior the two scanned the approaches to the cave mouth for long, silent minutes. Nothing seemed to move on the ice save for an occasional wisp of snow slithering past in the wind. Then the tracking barrel of the model 70 stopped and steadied like a pointer dog fixing on a game bird.

  “Jon.” Valentina’s voice was casual. “At our two o’clock, about two hundred and fifty yards out, just beside that little uplift.”

  Smith swung his binoculars onto the called target. It took him a few moments to pick up the low ridge in the glacier surface. There was nothing out there that looked like a man. But there was a small drift built up at the foot of the ridge. There was nothing exceptional about the lump of snow. Nothing outstanding. But there was something subtly wrong just the same. The drift’s contours didn’t quite match the fractile flow of its surroundings.

  “I think there’s something there,” Smith said finally, “but I can’t be sure.”

  “Neither can I. So let’s…just…make sure.” There was a piercing whip-crack report as the vicious little.220 round screamed on its way. The “snowdrift” quivered under the impact of the hypervelocity hollowpoint. Then as Smith looked on, a dot of color became apparent on the whiteness. Spreading, it became a stain, the red of the spilling blood darkened by the overcast.

  Valentina flipped open the Winchester’s bolt, ejecting the spent brass. “Well, now we know.”

  “Indeed we do.” Smith nodded slowly. “Probably one of their fourteen-man Spetsnaz platoons. Anything bigger would have been spotted by our satellites.”

  “Um-hum.” She drew a fresh round from the shell carrier, pressing it into the Winchester’s magazine. “I’ll wager they’ll be out of the Vladivostok garrison, either Mongolian Siberians or Yakut tribesmen under a Russian officer. The Soviets used them to guard the gulags. They’re totally adapted to an arctic environment and generally nasty to cross. Arms-wise, I think we can expect AK-74 assault rifles and at least three RPK-74 squad automatic weapons. They’ll be in light marching order in this terrain, so I don’t think we’ll see an RPG grenade launcher.”

  “But they will have rifle grenades.” Smith looked across at her. “I figure you understand where that leaves us.”

  Valentina lifted an eyebrow. “Very much so. For the moment we’ve got the range on them. As long as we can keep them out there with the long guns, we’re all right. But as soon as night falls or the weather closes in and they can work closer to, oh, say, about seventy-five yards, we’re quite dead.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Wednesday Island Base

  “Wednesday Island Base calling Haley, calling Haley. Do you copy? Over.” Randi repeated the call for the dozenth time. Lifting her thumb from the transmit button, she tried to listen through the static that squalled from the speaker of the little transceiver.

  For a moment her heart leaped. Beyond the electronic rage of the solar flare she heard a faint voice responding with what sounded like the Haley’s call sign. Then she caught the repetitive cadence of the transmission. It wasn’t a reply. It was an interrogative.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. It was on the hour, and the Haley’s radio operators were calling Wednesday Island, trying to establish contact from their end according to the radio schedule. And if this was the best the ice cutter’s powerful transmitters could do in this anarchistic communication environment, there was no hope of the little SINCGARS set being heard.

  Angrily she twisted the frequency knob to the tactical channel and lifted the mike once more. “Wednesday Island base to aircraft party. Wednesday Island base to aircraft party. Jon, are you receiving me? Over.”

  She lifted her thumb, listening impatiently, wanting to scream back at the jagged static roar issuing from the speaker.

  “Jon, damn it, this is Randi! Can you hear me? Over!”

  Nothing discernable.

  Solar storm or not, she should be hearing from the others. They should be on their way back by now and clear of the mountain. What in the hell was going on up there? Randi had the growing sensation that things were rapidly reaching some kind of a nexus, that the situation was collapsing in on her in a way she didn’t and couldn’t understand.

  “What will happen when they don’t hear from us?” Dr. Trowbridge inquired.

  Randi resumed awareness of the room around her. After a sleepless night spent keeping a vigil over Kropodkin, she had moved the station party across to the laboratory hut, where she had spent the morning fruitlessly rechecking the station’s big SSB radio and satellite phone and making equally futile calls on their backup transceiver.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor. If we’re out of communication for a certain length of time, a contingency plan goes into effect.” Randi snapped off the transceiver and replaced the microphone on its clip. “We’ll get all the help up here that we can ever use.”

  “Good, perhaps we will get someone in here other than the Gestapo.”

  Randi ignored Kropodkin. With his hands bound behind his back, he sat perched on a stool in the far corner of the lab. He’d spoken intermittently and ingratiatingly with Dr. Trowbridge, mostly about inconsequent
ial matters, but he’d been sullenly silent with her, barring the occasional barbed comment.

  But he was listening, his eyes intently taking in everything. Randi could almost hear him thinking. She could sense expectancy in him. Kropodkin knew that something was going to happen.

  Randi sank down on another of the stools and braced her elbows on the lab table. God, but she was tired. She hadn’t slept or even gone off alert for two nights. She had her little packet of go-pills in her kit, but she didn’t like the chemically enhanced overconfidence that came with them. She also knew that when she came down off the drug, she would crash into total worthlessness.

  She rubbed her burning eyes and looked out of the frost-fogged windows of the hut. What she hoped to see was Jon coming into camp. She wanted to be able to let her guard down just for a little while. Just to close her eyes for a minute or two.

  “Ms. Russell, are you all right?” Dr. Trowbridge asked warily.

  Randi snapped erect. Her eyes had closed for a moment, and she had swayed on the stool.

  “Yes, Doctor, I’m fine.” She got to her feet, mentally slapping herself back into wakefulness.

  Over in the corner she caught Kropodkin smirking at her, sensing her growing vulnerability.

  “All right,” she said, turning abruptly to face him. “It’s time somebody tells us how he sabotaged the big transceiver.”

  “I did nothing to the radio! I did nothing to anything.” His words were mushy through his bruised and swollen lips. “Or anyone.” The malevolent glitter lingered in his eyes as he met Randi’s eyes, but his words were plaintive. “Dr. Trowbridge, can’t you keep this madwoman off me until I can be turned over to the proper police? I’m not eager for another beating.”

  “Please, Ms. Russell,” Trowbridge began in a weary monotone, “if the authorities are on their way, can’t this be put off…”

  Randi gave an impatient shake of her head. “All right, Doctor, I’ll drop it.”

  All morning Trowbridge had been moving and speaking like a man trapped in a nightmare, with Randi as one of the premiere monsters. A modern, upscale urbanite, he lived in a world where violence and death were essentially abstracts, something to be clucked over in a television news bite or enjoyed vicariously in media entertainment. Now he was being confronted with the genuine article, up close and personal. And like the victim of a violent car crash or natural disaster, the academic was slipping steadily deeper into a state of emotional traumatic shock. Randi recognized the symptoms.

  What was worse, she was the heavy in the scenario. So far, she had been the visible purveyor of the violence. In a popular culture caught up in the fad of elaborate conspiracy theories and X-File fears, she was the figurative “woman in black.”

  Stefan Kropodkin represented normality. He was the honor student, the eager face in the front row of the classroom, the recognized and comfortable name on the test paper and expedition roster. Randi was the “agent working for the shadowy government agency,” the twenty-first-century incarnation of the boogeyman.

  She could see the fear in Trowbridge’s eyes every time he looked at her. She could also see Kropodkin working that fear. Any denials of the scenario she might make would be an act of futility.

  Lord, what a total mess!

  Catching up the MP-5, she crossed into the radio shack. Settling down before the open console, she checked the components and settings of the big sideband set for the hundredth time, making the final futile gesture of switching it on to listen to the soft hiss issuing from the set.

  Randi closed her eyes and rested her face in her hands.

  It had to be the antennas! The receiver circuits were working, but they weren’t picking up the clamor of the solar storm. At this gain the static should be blasting the speakers off the walls.

  When Kropodkin had disabled the set, it also must have been from outside. Again, the antennas. But it hadn’t been anything as simple as just cutting the leads. She had been meticulous in following and checking the cable between the laboratory hut and the radio mast, checking for breaks. She had run every inch of the cable through her hands, looking for the old saboteur’s trick of shorting the leads with a pin pushed through the insulation. She had made sure the all-weather connectors were screwed down tightly…

  Randi sat up abruptly in the chair. The connectors.

  A second later she was in the main room of the hut, hauling on her heavy outdoor shell clothing as rapidly as she could.

  “What is it?” Trobridge demanded, rising from his seat by the coal stove.

  “Maybe something positive for a change, Doctor,” Randi replied, zipping her parka and hauling on her gloves. “We’ll know in a few minutes. In the meantime keep an eye on Kropodkin while I go out.”

  She glanced at the suddenly alert youth in the corner. “On second thought, just don’t go near him, for any reason, until I get back. I won’t be long.”

  That expression of indignant truculence crossed Trowbridge’s face, and his mouth opened in the beginning of a knee-jerk protest.

  “I said, don’t go near him!” she snapped.

  Randi took a moment to make sure that the nylon disposacuffs binding Kropodkin’s wrists were still tight, and then, slinging the submachine gun, she was out through the snow lock.

  She hastened up the knoll behind the camp. A half foot of fresh snow had fallen and been windblown during the early morning hours, clogging the trails and making the climb to the base of the radio mast a plowing struggle. Reaching her objective, she dropped to her knees at the foot of the mast. Shoveling aside the white overburden with her mittened hands, she exposed the antenna power booster box at the mast’s base. Exposed also were the weatherproof connectors that linked the cable from the radio shack to the booster box. There were two of them, the heavy main cable bifurcating into the separate leads for the satellite phone and the sideband transceiver.

  Each connector was a heavy-duty screw-on piece of hardware, fully weatherproof, of a golden-tinted alloy. Randi struggled with them, and they resisted stubbornly. Swearing under her breath, she tore off her mittens and strained on the connectors with her thin undergloves. Abruptly the first connector yielded.

  A shredded fragment of plastic film fluttered to the snow. Randi recognized the simple mechanism of the sabotage now. Kropodkin had unscrewed the connectors and had wrapped the thin plastic around the male end, carefully packing it in around the central prong. Screwing the female half down over the nonconductive plastic had created an insulating barrier that had broken the connection. With the excess plastic trimmed away, there was no outside hint of the tampering.

  Randi swore again, both at Kropodkin and at herself. She opened the connector for the satellite phone and cleared that as well. She reassembled them both, then sat with her back against the radio mast, resting for a minute.

  She’d done her job, or rather her jobs. She had learned the fate of the station crew and had secured the culprit responsible, and she had regained their contact with the outside. She could let the ship know what was going on here and expedite the arrival of their reinforcements.

  Granted the weather would cooperate. Randi felt the chill grip her hands, and she drew her overmittens back on. It was growing colder, with ice crystals condensing out of the rapidly lowering overcast. Faintly, in the distance, she could hear a rising wind booming over the ridgeline.

  Within a matter of minutes they were going to be socked in tight. If conditions continued to deteriorate, Jon and the others might not be able to make it down from the saddleback tonight, much less expect help showing up from Alaska.

  But every cloud, even those of a polar storm, had a silver lining. If the good guys couldn’t make it in to Wednesday Island, then neither could the bad. Perhaps she could truss Kropodkin and Trowbridge up in their bunks tonight and get a little sleep.

  Even the thought was soporific. The thin sift of snowflakes seemed to weigh her eyelashes down, and even here, on the ice sheathed hillside, her head began to sink dow
n on her chest.

  And then, dimly, beyond the faint rumble of the wind over the mountain, Randi became aware of something else. Her head snapped up. It wasn’t truly a sound at first, more of a heavy vibration in the air. It grew in gradual intensity until it became a thudding roar that echoed between the land and the overcast.

  Randi scrambled to her feet, the island seeming to shudder around her. Like a scorpion instinctively lifting its tail, she slipped the MP-5 from her shoulder and into her hands.

  A huge form condensed out of the sea smoke. Two mammoth Tumanski gas turbines howled atop a great, sleek glass-nosed fuselage fully the length of an airliner. Fifty-foot rotor blades whipped the air, creating the rhythmic rib-rattling thud Randi felt in her chest.

  It came in low from the south, squeezing in beneath the cloud cover; the ferocious rotor blast whipped up a tornado of displaced snow, forcing Randi to cower and shield her face as the monster passed directly over her head at a meager hundred-foot altitude.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “It’s a Halo!”

  The Mil Mi-26, dubbed the “Halo” by NATO, had been created during the 1980s under the Soviet military’s old “If it’s bigger then it must be better” design doctrine. It was the largest and most powerful helicopter ever built and that likely ever would be built.

  Following the collapse of the USSR, the aircraft had passed into commercial service and now could be found working as a heavy industrial lifter in many nations around the world. This giant wore Canadian civil registration numbers on its Day-Glo red tail boom, and the winch control cab, projecting like a growth from its port side, marked it as a sky crane derivative.

  Kropodkin’s sponsors had come for him and for the anthrax, and they had come in force.

  As the huge flying machine began to settle into a touchdown beyond the camp, Randi broke the shock lock that had paralyzed her. She had only two options. To instantly go into escape-and-evade mode or to try for the repaired radios. She chose the radios. That was the mission. That was what she was here for, to collect intelligence and to report.