Charon's Landing

Fifteen Miles South of Fairbanks, Alaska

At five thousand feet above the low bowl of ground on the banks of the Chena River that is Fairbanks, Alaska’s largest interior city, the swelling fires raging to the southwest of the urban center were easily discernible. They seethed and roiled upward and outward into the night, unaffected by the rain that fell in a wind-driven downpour. The fire was centered near the International Airport at Alyeska’s new equipment depot. Eddie, Mercer, and Mike Collins could see the frantic movement of men and equipment trying to battle the fierce blaze. Revolving lights atop the emergency vehicles winked furiously. From their high vantage, it appeared that the number of fire engines was woefully inadequate for the size of the conflagration. At least a couple of acres were obscured by undulating sheets of flame and black chemical smoke.

“Jesus Christ, what’s going on down there?” asked the fourth man in the helicopter, a young sergeant assigned by Colonel Knoff to handle communications between Eddie Rice and the two Huey gunships about half a mile in front of them.

“One hell of a diversion,” Mercer replied from his place in the back of the JetRanger. “Looks like we’re not going to get any ground support from Fort Wainwright.”

Before leaving Elmendorf, Colonel Knoff had suggested sending a convoy of Military Police from the Fort Wainwright Military Airfield in Fairbanks up the Dalton Highway toward Pump Stations 5 and 6. Mercer had agreed, knowing that the three choppers would reach the pump stations long before the MPs, but if Kerikov had already left, he would run right into the army vehicles.

An emergency as large as the fire burning below would surely take precedence over Mercer’s mission in the eyes of the local government. Any able-bodied soldier from Wainwright would certainly be assisting in crowd control, search and rescue, and medical treatment. The three helicopters thundering north were on their own.

Mike Collins sat next to Mercer and stared out the window, his face pressed tightly to the Plexiglas as he studied the devastation. His lips were compressed and bloodless and his hands flexed nervously in his lap. “Do those lunatics realize that there’re about a thousand tons of seismic charges and other explosives warehoused at that facility?”

“Probably,” Mercer observed mildly.

“This isn’t some joke.” Collins turned and glared at Mercer.

“Mike, I know it’s not, but I guarantee that this is just a sideshow; the main event is still to come. Kerikov knows there would be a response once we lost communications from the pump stations, and he’s trying to sidetrack us.”

“How do you know that? How do you know the fire isn’t what he wanted all along?”

“Because I know how the bastard thinks, and this just isn’t big enough for him.” Mercer was going to continue, but the sergeant interrupted. Colonel Knoff wanted to speak with him. Mercer put on his headset. “Yes, Colonel, what’s up?”

“I just got a priority message from Wainwright. They need our choppers for medical evacs to Anchorage. Facilities in Fairbanks are swamped; they need every available aircraft to get patients south and doctors and supplies north.”

“Negative, we go on.”

“You said yourself this might be a wild-goose chase, and there are people dying down there. They need us.”

“There wouldn’t be a fire down there if one of those pump stations hadn’t been attacked. It’s a distraction, Colonel, nothing more.”

“That distraction has already claimed twenty-three lives, Dr. Mercer,” Knoff said acidly.

“My mission takes precedence. I’m sorry. Mercer out.”

“You cold son of a bitch,” Mike Collins said, then turned back to the window as Fairbanks vanished behind the helicopter’s flat bottom.

Mercer sat quietly, arms folded across his chest, eyes flat and unpenetrable. Behind the facade, his mind was working furiously. Am I right? he asked himself. Or am I consigning innocent people to death by refusing them these helicopters?

“Mercer, call from Andy Lindstrom,” Eddie Rice said through the headset. “He says no answer from Pump Station 5, but 6 is on line, a skeleton crew standing by. He’s asking if he should send some men down to 5.”

“No! Under no circumstances are those men to leave Pump Station 6. They’d be cut to ribbons long before they reached the control building. Number 5 is under the control of terrorists. Sergeant, call Colonel Knoff. Tell him the target is Pump Station 5. Eddie, what’s our ETA?”

“At least another hour and twenty minutes. This weather is really killing us, and those Hueys are even slower than we are, especially fully loaded.”

“Shit! Pump Station 5 went off line hours ago. It’s possible Kerikov’s already gone.”

Time slowed. Whenever Mercer twisted his wrist to look at his watch, a shorter and shorter arc of the minute hand had swept by. The rhythmic throbbing of the rotor blades over his head had a lulling effect, sending him into a kind of daze, his mind emptied of everything, so he was just barely aware of the JetRanger’s turbine engine and the occasional mutterings between Eddie Rice and the pilots of the two Hueys. And then the thoughts came, fear and doubt the strongest, but also a deep exhaustion, a gritty feeling behind his eyes that made blinking painful. He had been awake for twenty-two hours. But that wasn’t what was really nagging him.

Suddenly the quest for the unknown, the search for knowledge that had dominated his life, that made him who he was, was no longer so important. He felt like telling Eddie to turn the chopper around and head back to Anchorage. This wasn’t his problem, it wasn’t their fight. He had done this too many times now, put his life on the line for an ideal, a belief that he couldn’t really define or name.

This was always the worst, the waiting. He’d been here before, with Eddie in fact, but with other men, too, hurtling into harm’s way, fear like a weight in his stomach, doubt like a nagging headache behind his temples. He’d long ago stopped wondering why he found himself constantly surrounded by danger, but he still questioned how much longer his strange obsession would allow him to live. How many more times could he descend into the earth in some mine shaft in need of immediate repairs? How many times could he climb aboard a helicopter to face someone like Ivan Kerikov and actually return? Pessimism burned hotly behind his ribs.

God, I’m tired.

“Ten minutes to the Pump Station,” Eddie called.

Mercer straightened up, noting the queer look Mike Collins shot him, as if Alyeska’s Chief of Security had been reading his mind. He ignored Collins, leaning forward to peer out the cockpit canopy. In the darkness, the running lights of the two Air Force Hueys looked like flashing jewels, a cold, comforting light signifying the presence of other humans amid the great expanse of forested nothingness below. Thousands of square miles of birch and white spruce separated the Alaskan Range mountains from the Brooks Range, whose foothills they were approaching. The area was crisscrossed by dozens of rivers, streams, and tiny lakes.

“Any traffic on the Dalton Highway?”

“I haven’t seen anything, and we’ve been over it for nearly half an hour. I didn’t even see any police cars where the Alyeska vans reportedly went off,” Eddie replied. “It’s like the road isn’t even there.”

“Call Knoff. Tell him we’re almost there.”

“Already done. His boys are chomping at the bit.”

“Good. I want you to hang back at least a mile until they’ve landed and Knoff gives us the all-clear sign. If Kerikov and his men are still here, Knoff’s troops should be able to handle them. He won’t be expecting this strong a reprisal because of his pyrotechnic display in Fairbanks.”

“Does this mean you’ve lost your death wish?” Eddie teased. “Last time we flew together you had me land at ground zero of a nuclear explosion with about two minutes to go.”

Mercer laughed. “Government cutbacks have slashed my danger pay to below minimum wage again. I only raid liquor cabinets unless given a direct presidential order. Which reminds me, I could really go for a… What the hell?”

A flash of light, like a laser beam, streaked up from the dark ground so quickly it appeared as a solid line rather than a moving object. It intercepted the lead Huey, the two coming together in a violent blast, the helicopter outlined briefly in the fire of its destruction. In an instant, the chopper was falling to the earth in a flaming ruin. The pilot of the second Huey had just started evasive action when a second SA-7 Grail missile rocketed skyward on a brilliant cone of expended solid fuel.

Known by NATO forces to be wholly inaccurate and under-armed with just six pounds of high explosive in its warhead, the Grail was still deadly against low-flying helicopters, especially those with exposed exhaust ports like the UH-1. The Grail fired at the Huey didn’t have the upgraded cryo-cooling unit to aid its infrared sensors at finding hot signatures, yet it still had no trouble locking onto its target against the cold background of the Alaskan night. The second Huey disintegrated.

Mercer was just recognizing the attack for what it was when Eddie Rice banked the JetRanger, applying max power to the turbines and the rotors, eking out every bit of speed as he tried to get them out of range of the shoulder-fired missiles. Debris from the first two choppers fell to the earth like meteor showers, the hulls hitting in explosive wrecks, fuel and metal and bits of their crews thrown up in fountains of flame and shrapnel. Patches of forest around the crash sites were ignited by the burning choppers, pine trees flaring like matchsticks. It would take hours for the rain to douse such a fuel-rich fire.

“Watch for those missiles!” Eddie shouted, jerking the controls first one way then the next in an attempt to foul the aim of the terrorists below them. The JetRanger, designed more for comfort than agility, groaned at Eddie’s flying, the bulkheads and structural members straining well beyond their design specifications.

“I’ve got a launch, starboard side,” Mercer called out, watching with morbid fascination as another missile lifted from the black forest.

“Got it.” Eddie hauled the JetRanger onto its side, tightening his turn so quickly that the helicopter lost nearly a thousand feet in just a few seconds.

The Grail passed behind them, its infrared sight unable to lock onto the exhaust ports of their chopper. Its rocket motor ran out of fuel and toppled the missile back to earth. During the violent maneuver, no one saw another Grail hurtle into the air.

It was almost directly ahead of them, its guidance system seeking them out with single-minded resolution. At last finding the heat signature it had been hunting for, the fifty-three-inch-long missile slightly altered its attack vector, shallowing its approach so as to come up under the Bell helicopter.

“Oh, God!” Mike Collins shouted, while the young soldier in the copilot’s seat screamed and screamed.

Mercer let himself go limp. The fear that had squeezed his chest when the first two helicopters were hit released him at this last moment so he could face his death calmly, watching it happen with almost clinical dispassion.

Of them all, only Eddie Rice hadn’t given up. The moment before the warhead struck the underside of the JetRanger, he again jerked the craft hard over, presenting the now tilted bottom of the chopper to the missile. It struck a glancing blow where the secondary rotor boom attached to the fuselage, and exploded.

Most of the blast was directed away from the helicopter because of Eddie’s quick thinking and exceptional reflexes, yet the JetRanger was mortally wounded. Smoke filled the cabin even as the chopper was thrown violently through the air, turned almost completely upside down by the explosion. The electrical system failed and a second later the turbine skipped, caught briefly, then began faltering as it starved for the fuel gushing from the severed lines. The raw stench of avgas gagged the four men as they struggled to regain proper seating in the bucking aircraft. Mercifully, it hadn’t ignited. Yet.

Relying on instinct alone, Eddie managed to get the JetRanger onto an even keel; the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t see the instrument panel only feet from him. They had started to auto rotate as they fell to the ground, the chopper spinning on its own axis in a tightening circle, pressing the men outward against the fuselage. Eddie used this to his advantage, slowing the descent by using what little lift remained in the still-spinning main rotor.

“I can’t see,” he shouted above the jarring noise of the fragmenting helicopter.

Mercer leaned forward, groping blindly through the smoke until his hands felt the cold metal of the Heckler and Koch MP- 5 submachine gun the sergeant had lost when the chopper was hit. Straightening, he cocked the weapon. “Cover your face!”

Aiming over Eddie’s shoulder, he loosed a hail of bullets against the windscreen.

The Plexiglas starred, then lost all integrity, flying into space in nearly one whole chunk. A few fragments whipped into the cockpit, one dagger-size shard burying itself in the shoulder of an unconscious Mike Collins. The swirling torrent of wind sucked the smoke out of the cabin, taking with it the paralyzing smell of avgas. Once again Eddie could see, his hands taking tighter control of the spiraling aircraft.

“We ain’t gonna make it,” Eddie yelled over the din.

A thousand feet below, the ground was a featureless, dark abyss, the starless night revealing nothing. They couldn’t tell if there were rocky mountains or a soft field or water below them. Eddie would have to try to make the landing blind, not even able to rely on the altimeter to get a fix on their position. It had frozen when they were hit.

“There!” Mercer shouted, pointing to their left.

Out of the gloom came a stand of tall, straight spruce trees, their high pyramidal tops like medieval church spires. The grove appeared tightly packed and would soften the controlled crash of the falling helicopter. Eddie banked toward the site, the engine coughing as the remaining fuel was burned up at a prodigious rate.

“It ain’t happening, man. It looks close, but it’s at least half a mile away,” Eddie shouted. Rain soaked them all. The soldier used a sleeve of his BDUs to wipe the water from Eddie’s dark face because the pilot couldn’t afford to take his hands from the controls for even a second. Suddenly Eddie was struck with an idea. “Both of you, your doors have emergency release pins on the hinges. Pull them and let the doors drop away.”

Mercer and the sergeant did what Eddie asked, tugging at the large red handles and kicking the doors outward. More rain surged through the cabin, wild eddies swirling in all directions at once. The wind reached a banshee pitch.

“I can hold it for only a second, and the drop is still gonna be about twenty feet to the tops of the trees, but it’s the best I can do.”

“No way, Eddie,” Mercer shouted. “I’m not leaving you and Collins.”

“Mercer, either we all die in the crash or just maybe I can save the two of you. Don’t take that chance from me, goddamn it.”

Mercer didn’t argue with Eddie’s dying wish. Bracing himself near the open doorway, his clothes rippling and snapping around him, he watched as Eddie brought them to the edge of the forest, just above treetop level. Echoes of the beating rotors kicked back from the hard earth below. On closer inspection, the evergreens were not nearly as dense as he’d first thought. There were huge gaps between many of the trees, and a straight fall from this height would split a man like a dropped sack of cement. He held the MP-5, waiting for Eddie’s signal, one hand clutching the empty door frame as the wind tried to suck him into the void.

“Jump!” Eddie screamed, reining in the chopper to an unsteady hover for an instant. He then turned the JetRanger away so when the rotors hit the trees and flew apart, the fragments wouldn’t slice into Mercer and the sergeant.

The soldier hesitated for a second, not launching himself until the helicopter was already heeled over. The delay threw off his timing and he missed his intended tree, his body falling through space, picking up speed exponentially so that he barreled into the loamy ground at eighty miles an hour. The impact broke his skull, spine, ribs, shoulders, hips, arms, and legs. He was dead before his nervous system could perceive the injuries.

Mercer had been watching Eddie and jumped the moment the African-American opened his yellow-toothed mouth, not waiting to even hear the order. He tumbled only eleven feet before crashing into the topmost branches of a particularly tall tree, the thin boughs grabbing at him as he fell, each impact jarring him mercilessly but nonetheless slowing his descent. He hit the first thick branch with his shoulder, the rough, scaly bark rasping against the layers of his leather jacket.

Downward he plunged, branches whipping him like switches, flaying his hands and face, one catching him in the stomach, knocking the air from his chest, another on the thigh, deadening his entire right leg from groin to toes. The ground rushed at him too fast. Each new contact was a torment, the tree tearing at him like a wild animal even as it saved his life. Finally, after almost forty feet of torture, he fell onto a larger branch. Scrabbling to hook his hands around it, he missed but managed to clutch the next one down, arresting his descent with only six feet to go before he dropped from the tree’s canopy and plummeted to the ground. He hung there, exhausted, one arm and a leg hooked over the bough, dangling like a gibbon, blood dripping from his face and hands.

Then he felt the JetRanger crash, the rotor blades chopping through the tops of nearby trees and then coming apart, spiraling outward like scythes, sending bits of wood and whole branches swirling in their destructive path. A bit of the rotor passed only a foot above Mercer’s position, and rather than chance another close call, he let go, falling the last few feet and landing in a tangled heap.

The helicopter struck the high canopy so violently that the weakened tall boom separated and fell independently, cutting a six-foot gouge in the earth. The rest of the aircraft became enmeshed in the thick branches of several closely packed trees, the fuselage never actually hitting the ground but hanging up nearly twenty feet in the air, swinging precariously as the trees resettled themselves.

Mercer lay on his back. The rainwater that struck him in the face was slightly acidic because of its contact with the spruce tree. It burned his eyes and forced him to turn over. It took a minute for him to gather enough strength to actually stand, moaning as his back and shoulders cracked and popped from the strain they’d just endured. When he heard a clear call for help, he moved quickly, gathering up the machine pistol that had landed next to him and taking off at a fast trot. Torn bits of metal and whole sections of newly cut trees littered the ground.

After only a couple dozen yards he came upon the crushed body of the sergeant. Mercer needed only a quick, gruesome glance to tell that the young soldier had not been the source of the distress call. Continuing on, he came upon the crash site, or more accurately, he stumbled underneath it. Looking up, he could see the main cabin of the JetRanger tangled over his head, the chopper secured by tightly entwined branches. Eddie shouted again and then coughed wetly.

“Eddie, what the hell are you doing up there?” Mercer forced levity into his voice. “Don’t you know when you crash you’re supposed to hit the ground?”

“Oh, man, did anyone get the license of that truck that just hit me?”

“How you doing?”

“Not bad, considering. A branch came into the cockpit and snapped off about ten of my teeth. I think my jaw’s broken too. Shit, I’m probably as ugly as you now.” Eddie paused, fighting off waves of blackness. “Collins didn’t make it. I can see his neck is broken.”

“The kid didn’t make it either. But two out of four is better than none. You did real good. Can you hold on up there until the cavalry arrives? I’ve got no way of getting you down.”

“Don’t worry about me, but if you’re in any shape to go on, kill those motherfuckers for me, will you?”

“Doesn’t matter what shape I’m in. They’re gonna pay.” There was a flinty edge to Mercer’s voice. The hidden spring of his endurance had just been tapped, and the doubts he’d felt before were gone. “Eddie, the sergeant had a combat harness in the cockpit with him. It was on the floor by his feet. Do you see it?”

“Hold on.” A second later Eddie called back down to the ground, “Yeah, I got it.”

“Throw it down; I’m gonna need it. But keep the pistol for yourself.” The heavy harness came crashing through the branches, almost hanging up a couple of times before landing a few feet from Mercer. He picked it up, looping the nylon suspenders over his shoulders and cinching the belt around his waist. Along with a knife, med kit, flashlight, and most important, a compass, he had four additional clips for the machine pistol.

“Eddie, it may take a while for the Air Force to send out a search and rescue team. I doubt we were on radar when the missiles hit. But when they do arrive, use the Beretta to signal to them. You know the distress call, three rapid shots. Just in case I fail at the pump station and Kerikov sends out a party to make certain none of us survive, be sure it’s the good guys before you call to them.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow over drinks at the Great Alaskan Bush Company,” quipped Mercer, mentioning Anchorage’s most famous strip joint.

“You’re buying,” Eddie laughed back, but Mercer had already taken bearings from the compass and moved off.

The heavy rain masked the sound of him moving through the trees, allowing him to break into an easy loping run. His eyes were very sensitive to even minimal light, so he could find a clear path, avoiding stumps and thick brambles and anything else that might slow him. He figured that Eddie had flown at least two miles from the area where the missiles had been fired, so he didn’t worry about stumbling into a recce patrol.

Ignoring the aches that cramped his body, he made it to the Dalton Highway in just thirty minutes, the last quarter mile being a ragged struggle up a steep defile. Calling it a highway was presumptuous — it was nothing more than a tightly packed gravel strip originally built as the haul road for the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Mercer was badly winded, and sweat mingled freely with the rain that soaked through his clothing. The temperature was hovering just over thirty-five degrees, and as wet as he was, he ran a real chance of becoming hypothermic, his skin leaching away his core body heat until he collapsed and died.

The pipeline was on the other side of the road, held off the ground by spindly supports, the VSMs. In the rainy darkness, the forty-eight-inch pipe had a silver, maggoty sheen as it stretched north and south into both murky horizons. The gravel of the highway had been heavily compacted by years of fully loaded semitrailers tracking to and from the oil-rich Prudhoe Bay fields. Along its verges, fireweed grew, the countless purple blossoms all but wasted by the summer so that the topmost parts of the stalks were barren, sticking in the air like arthritic fingers.

Somewhere to Mercer’s right was Pump Station Number 5, an unknown number of terrorists holding it, armed with rockets and God alone knew what else, while to his left was an open stretch of road leading back to civilization. He would find help only a few miles away, a warm ranger’s cabin, a cup of scalding coffee, a bed. He snicked off the safety of the H&K and turned to the right, continuing northward into the unknown, relying on his superior eyesight and instincts to keep him from falling into an ambush.

The second mile on the Dalton Highway merged with the third and into the fourth, Mercer’s mind all but shutting down, conserving his energy to keep his feet running. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been so utterly exhausted, both mentally and physically. His stamina was waning and, with it, his coordination. He found himself stumbling more, lurching forward and one time pitching to the ground, the gravel digging deeply into the already torn meat of his palms.

Lying on the slick road, his face pressed against the dirt, his eyes closed in pain and weariness, he heard the unmistakable sound of a truck engine starting, revving up and then settling as the transmission was engaged. He looked up and through the drizzle saw headlights retreating back into the night. Had he been five minutes quicker, he would have jogged right into Kerikov’s rear guard. The vehicle retreated northward toward Pump Station 5.

Mercer wasn’t certain if this meant Kerikov was about to pull out of his position, or that he no longer feared a land-based assault up the Dalton Highway and wanted his men in a tighter defensive position. A new sense of urgency gripped him. If Kerikov was about to leave the pump station, Mercer would never have his chance. There was nothing he could do with a single machine pistol against a convoy of trucks. A single vehicle, yes, but he was sure that Kerikov would have used at least four trucks to transport enough men and equipment to seize the station and be able to deploy troops armed with missile launchers. He had to get to the station before they evacuated if he was to get his chance to eliminate Kerikov before the Russian was whisked to safety once again.

His strides felt lighter, more sure as he began running again, his focus sharper. The rain intensified, turning the hardened gravel road into a thick morass, clay lodging into the heavy tread of his boots. Mercer edged closer to the verge where the road had a rougher aggregate and he could gain a stronger purchase. Clearing a blind corner around a jagged tor of rock that cut off his view northward, Mercer dove off the road, rolling down the low shoulder and landing in a small stream of rain runoff. Ahead of him was the pump station, lit by powerful truck-mounted halogen lamps, the squat building and its immediate surroundings bathed in a pool of white light. And suddenly Mercer understood why Kerikov had taken the risk of attacking the pipeline directly.

Six flatbed trucks were pulled up against the pipe, cranes mounted on two of them swinging long cylindrical collars into place over the oil conduit. Men and women scurried around the site, and even at this extreme range, Mercer could hear their cries and oaths and shouts. This was what Kerikov was doing with the liquid nitrogen. He was placing it around the pipeline, encapsulating strategic parts of its eight-hundred-mile length in supercooled gas in an attempt to stop the flow of oil. This must be the last of it, he surmised, the replacement for the cylinders that he’d discovered aboard the Jenny IV.

Watching closely as the protective sleeve surrounding the pipeline was cut loose with a torch and its virtual twin was set in place, Mercer realized how cleverly they had carried out the operation. Had he not seen it actually happen, he never would have believed that there was anything out of the ordinary to the doctored section of pipe. Who knew how much of the line they had laced with liquid nitrogen?

He moved forward, wriggling through the water and mud in the drainage ditch, shutting his mind off from the rain and the cold and his own pain. Even with their yellow rain jackets and water-darkened hats, Mercer was able to recognize a couple of the PEAL activists he had seen at the bar in Valdez. They moved with the competence of an experienced construction crew, hoisting the original sections of pipe sleeve onto a truck. When they released the nitrogen within their fake lining, it would take weeks or even months to discover the sabotage, and even then, who would believe such a bold and cunning plan?

Remembering what Andy Lindstrom said about freezing the oil in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, he could believe that PEAL would be satisfied with shutting down the pipeline for the months it would take to clear the solidified oil from it and replace any damaged sections, but Mercer had a hard time accepting that Ivan Kerikov would work on such a symbolic but otherwise worthless act of eco-terrorism. There was something else to this, something that Mercer couldn’t quite grasp. The steady whine of the pump station’s main turbine sounded like a muffled dentist’s drill, droning on and on despite everything happening around it.

The hard prod at the back of his neck was a concentric circle, its inner ring exactly nine millimeters in diameter. The barrel of an Uzi pressed into his flesh was held by one of Kerikov’s former East German assassins. Mercer hadn’t heard him approach — he’d been too rapt by the sight before him — and as he slowly locked his fingers behind his back, he cursed himself for his lack of caution.

“Up,” he was ordered, and as he stood, he was warned to do so slowly, the gun pulling back so that he couldn’t twist around and grab its barrel. The man who captured him knew precisely how to handle a prisoner.

Mercer dragged himself to his feet, turned, letting the H&K machine pistol dangle from its strap against his chest. Seeing the weapon for the first time, the German took an involuntary step back, tightening the grip on his own weapon. His left foot slid a fraction of an inch in the mud at the edge of the drainage ditch, his concentration switching from his prisoner to his own balance for just an instant. Mercer used it to his full advantage, predicting it so accurately he was already in motion when the man slipped.

He dove forward, pounding into the man, throwing up his arm so that the Uzi rose harmlessly, its stubby barrel pointed into the trees. The bullet wound from Burt Manning’s attack on his house screamed with newfound pain as the lips of the long gash split open again, fresh blood welling through the opening. Mercer’s momentum took both men down into the ditch, the German pinned in the wet mud by Mercer’s body. Mercer cocked his right arm, punching as hard as he could, one, two, three powerful shots to the jaw. The German was still conscious, but just barely. Without a second thought, Mercer held the assassin’s head under the babbling stream flowing at the bottom of the ditch until his body went completely still.

Only after the man was dead did Mercer become aware that his heart was racing with fear, his chest pumping as though he couldn’t get enough oxygen. His fingers twitched with adrenaline. Lying in the ditch, his back pressed into the greasy mud, he tilted his neck and opened his mouth, letting cold, sweet water seep to the back of his throat, easing the raging thirst the sudden adrenaline rush had given him. He rested a moment longer, then crawled out of the mire to see if the fight had caught the attention of the workers at the pump station.

Peeking over the rise, he saw that no one had noticed; they were still working at securing the final nitro pack to the pipeline. The sound of the big turbine within the building and the rumbling diesel engines of their trucks must have masked the noise Mercer made killing the picket.

Without warning, a fountain of dirt exploded in Mercer’s face, throwing wet grit into his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and filling his mouth. He ducked again, burrowing into the ground as the sound of machine gun fire reached him an instant later. Just to his left, another burst kicked mud from the embankment, so close he could feel the heat of the bullets as they hit the dirt. He was pinned down and very vulnerable. The next move belonged to whoever held the gun.

“The man you just killed had been a member of the East German Secret Police and had received the finest training possible under Soviet sponsorship. I must congratulate the competence of America’s Special Forces. You did very well indeed.” The voice that called out into the darkness was thick, gutturally accented, the words clipped so tightly that all emotion had been trimmed from them. “However, I don’t believe that you are bulletproof. You will throw your weapon away from your position, hold your hands over your head, and step out of the ditch.”

Twice caught in under two minutes, Mercer tossed the Heckler and Koch and stood. A flashlight snapped on from about forty feet up the road, just outside the perimeter of the pump station, rain slashing through the beam. The man who’d seen him had been able to watch the entire fight from his position though he had not interfered, even when he had a clear shot while Mercer was drowning the guard. Mercer had no explanation why his life was spared, but he knew that he wouldn’t like the reason.

“So tell me” — the flashlight bobbed and weaved as the man approached Mercer — “are you an Army ranger or Marine force recon? I know that your government hasn’t had the time to activate a SEAL or Delta unit and get them to Alaska this quickly.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but no one thought your threat was worth sending in real troops. I’m a Boy Scout leader. Dan Gerous is the name. Heck, I’m not even a soldier. I’m a geologist.”

Rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition chewed up the ground at Mercer’s feet, bullets zinging off stones and ricocheting back into the forest. He could do nothing but stand there as the earth around him was clawed with deadly ferocity.

“I came out here to investigate when my picket radioed he had spotted an intruder. I never imagined it would be you, Dr. Mercer. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hold your life in my hands. You are going to die a very horrible death, geologist. That I can assure you.” Mercer realized that he’d been captured by Ivan Kerikov himself.

Seconds later, two men flanked him, yanking his hands from over his head and wrapping his wrists with tape so tightly that blood drained from his hands and wrists. He was shoved toward the backlit figure of Kerikov with a well-placed rifle butt to his kidney. From this distance, it appeared that the Russian’s shoulders spanned the entire width of the Dalton Highway.

“I have been anticipating this day for a year now,” Kerikov said as the henchmen held Mercer before the former spymaster. “After I heard it was you who destroyed operation Vulcan’s Forge, I considered hiring an assassin to kill you in your Arlington town house, but I decided that I really wanted the opportunity personally.”

There was a cruel twist to Kerikov’s mouth as he spoke, and his eyes, washed-out and pale blue, glittered like flat chips of glass. Even in his moment of triumph, he showed little emotion. The juxtaposition of his words and his expression was unnatural, far more frightening than had he raved and gloated.

No matter how revolted Mercer was by Kerikov, by the malignant taint he possessed, he wasn’t about to show it. He would not give in to his own fear, not now, not in front of the Russian. “If you dedicated your life to getting revenge on a nobody like me, Kerikov, I really think you should reevaluate your career goals. You’re pathetic.”

Kerikov dropped his assault rifle to the road and rushed forward, his right hand swinging. He caught Mercer on the point of the chin with so much force that Mercer’s eyes turned back into his skull before he hit the ground. He would be out for hours.

“Take this sack of shit back to the helicopter,” Kerikov ordered his men. “And tell the pilot to get ready. We’re leaving.”

Kerikov turned away, heading back toward the pump station compound, secretly massaging his right fist. He winced once as he popped a dislocated knuckle back into place, but the pain didn’t break his stride.

The work on the pipeline was almost complete. The last sleeve of liquid nitrogen was slung under the line, its two halves hinged open so they could clamp it around the pipe. The leader of the work crew signaled the crane operator. He hoisted the cradle holding the false section of pipe sleeve, deftly following the quick hand signals of the PEAL activist standing on the pipe itself. Once the bottom of the nitrogen pack hit the underside of the pipeline, the crane operator heaved it up another couple of feet, and the two halves closed together naturally, encasing another twenty-foot section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline with two more tons of supercooled nitrogen, held in stasis by a thin vacuum seal. Cleverly hidden bolts were shot home, tightening the sleeve to the pipe. Another section of the line was vulnerable to Kerikov’s attack.

A female technician climbed up to the pipe as workers unhooked the crane. With a portable computer, she activated the electronic triggering device built into the nitrogen pack, setting it to the frequency Kerikov had chosen to detonate the device. She also checked to ensure that it was reading the tiny transmitters in the other packs PEAL had set in place, guaranteeing they would go off in predetermined series, a cascade that would cause the most damage. With fingers made stiff by the cold, she checked the primary and backup circuits, making certain there were no faults or shorts. She unplugged the computer from the jack built into the sleeve, then snapped off the jack so that only a microscopically thin filament remained as evidence. The released nitrogen and a small explosive charge would take care of the other electronics, leaving behind nothing but a few pieces of shattered plastic and wires when the device was set off. The pack was virtually undetectable. She gave a thumbs-up to the foreman.

“That’s the last one, Jan,” the foreman yelled to Voerhoven, who stood a little way off.

Kerikov came up to Voerhoven, wondering silently why the Dutchman wasn’t frozen to death wearing just a thin windbreaker over his T-shirt. “Tell your people to pack up. The trucks must be destroyed and everyone must get to the Hope as quickly as possible. When we release the nitrogen tomorrow, I want all of your people back in Valdez, looking as innocent as schoolchildren.”

Having them aboard the Hope by morning would also make it that much easier for Abu Alam to kill them quickly. The Arab butcher wanted to do it singly or in small groups, but Kerikov decided that blowing up the research vessel made more sense.

“They performed better than you expected, didn’t they?” Voerhoven said with obvious pride.

“You’ve all done well,” Kerikov replied, knowing that Voerhoven needed another dose of ego building. “You have excellent people, and their loyalty to you is remarkable. In fact, as a reward, I want to give you this.” Kerikov handed over a black cellular phone. “This is the trigger for the devices. All you have to do is dial 555-2020, then hit SEND. The signal will reach the nitrogen detonators within a tenth of a second. You hold in your hands the future of this entire state, Jan — that is how much I trust and admire you. You will go down as the earth’s greatest protector.”

“Sometimes I’ve wondered about you, Ivan, about your motivations, your convictions. But this,” Voerhoven held up the phone, “this shows me more than your words can ever tell. When the time comes, I won’t hesitate.”

Kerikov wanted to laugh at the environmentalist, but he managed to keep his voice level and authoritative. “It’s time to go. I want you to come back with me on the helicopter. When he regains consciousness, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Are we going back to the Hope?”

“No. We’re taking a short detour to drop off my prisoner first, and then we’ll go to Valdez.”

Walking back up the road to the waiting helicopter, Kerikov called Ted Mossey at the Alyeska Marine Terminal on another cell phone. The computer genius assured him that the original KGB program was now installed and just needed the activation code to cycle through the system. As soon as Kerikov sent the code into the computer, they would have complete control of the entire eight hundred miles of pipe and the ten pump stations. Once in their control, there would be no way to stop the preprogrammed series of events.