Cold War

SIXTEEN

Nimec had owned a motorcycle when he was in his twenties, and had rented a snowmobile on two separate winter vacations with his ex-wife and son. Riding them was similar, but it could be dangerous to think they were exactly alike. A snowbike’s lower center of gravity demanded a light touch when you leaned and cornered. There were differences in surface traction speeding across snow and ice. And you had to keep your feet on a snowmobile’s running boards, avoiding the habit of kicking one of them out for balance. That was bad enough on a cycle because it could easily hit a road obstruction; it was worse when deep snow might drag hold of you, tearing up an ankle or knee.

He was not a man to make foolhardy mistakes.

Waylon’s experience qualified him for the lead position, and Nimec had jumped his machine out of the utilidor’s exit ramp right at his back, the others following in single file as Cold Corners One vanished behind them in a swirling curtain of snow.

Nimec thought about their next move as they approached the dome. He couldn’t make assumptions about his opposition’s force size or resources. He didn’t have time to worry about their reasons for striking at the base. But their strike’s intent was clear; they’d stuck it to one of the CC’s critical life-sustaining functions, and the immediate question was what they would do next. Whether they would break for it, or wait to ensure that the bleeding they’d inflicted wasn’t stopped.

He gripped his handlebars, plunging directly into the teeth of the wind, his knees bent against the snowmobile’s metal flanks, its powerful engine vibrating underneath him. The best he could manage was a guess, and that guess would determine his tactics. Meaning it had damned well better be a good one. So what did he know about the men who’d hit the water-treatment plant?

The important things weren’t hard to deduce. He didn’t know where they’d come from, but there was only cold desolation for miles around. Since they hadn’t popped out of a hole in the sky, he presumed they must have traveled a very long distance. Someone would need extensive skill and knowledge of the terrain to manage that under the best of circumstances, and in this storm it would be incredibly rough going by any means. In fact, it would have seemed unthinkable to Nimec just a small packet of minutes ago.

Whoever these people were, they had already demonstrated themselves to be capable, selective about their target, and committed to taking it out. Above all, they had shown they had moxie to spare. They would count on the weather getting worse before it got better, know it would be impossible to remount their strike, know they only had one real shot. Nimec thought it apparent that they’d hoped to accomplish their mission on the sneak — but say they had a notion they’d been discovered. They definitely would’ve had to contemplate it. Would men of their caliber and determination withdraw before they were positive of success?

Nimec wondered about it a second. Would he?

“Waylon, you reading me?” he said into the voice-activated radio headset under his hood.

“Loud and clear.”

“How far to the dome?”

“Close,” he said. “Under a thousand yards.”

Nimec was taken by surprise. That was much too close. He couldn’t see anything past Waylon’s tail, and had no intention of rushing in blind.

“Okay,” he said. “Listen up. Here’s how I want to do this… ”

Snow splayed around Burkhart’s bike as he brought it to a stop. The dome was just ten or fifteen yards to his left, its tetrahedral planes and angles smeary in his vision.

Straightening in his seat, he listened to his men move into position around the dome and then abruptly cut their engines. He thought he could see gray scribbles of smoke issue into the flying whiteness from the hair-thin spaces between the dome’s lowered door and doorframe.

Burkhart stared out toward the base. The low wave of light he’d spotted before had fragmented, but that did not mean it had ceased advancing. His eyes narrow behind his helmet shield, he looked over his right shoulder. Was that a faint, rippling trace of it out there?

He believed so. As Musashi had written in his Book of Five Rings, it was better to move strong things from the corners than to push at them straight on. From what Burkhart had learned about the enemy through his intelligence sources, they would know this as well as he did.

His Sturmgewehr across his chest, Burkhart watched, listened, waited. The mission had strayed far from his intentions. He had wanted to get in, deliver a clean blow, and get out. That he was now heading toward an engagement meant he’d very seriously stumbled. No good could come of it — but there was also no retreat.

Burkhart waited in the rampant storm. Then, suddenly, he once again became aware of the swelling, pulsing sound of engines under the wind’s louder clamor… this time coming from all around him.

The corners were closing in.

The dark smudges of smoke Burkhart noticed outside the dome were no trick of the eye.

Behind its roll-down door, his solgel incendiaries had ignited with brilliant, white-hot slashes of flame, instantly reducing the desalinization unit’s flow-pump motor to a tarry mire of fused steel and plastic. The pump quit with a shudder, chuffing out acrid, concentrated fumes that bleared the dials and alarm lights on its control panel as they floated past. Bristling vines of fire circled its butterfly inlet valve and coiled over the meshwork of low-pressure PVC pipes around the water tanks. They seared, sagged, and blistered, their melted plastic segments springing distorted fish-mouthed leaks, showering the dome’s instrumentation with jets of distilled water. Raw seawater began flushing from the main pipeline, pouring down onto the tank platform, running over its sides. The smoke rose, spread, seeking fresh air. It eddied against the door, slipping through its weather seals in thready wisps.

Out in the wind and snow, Burkhart continued his waiting game.

Further away, Pete Nimec and his men pushed their snowmobiles toward the dome as quickly as they could. Nimec did not think getting inside would be easy, but still he hoped they might have time to somehow prevent the machinery that produced Cold Corners’ entire usable water supply from becoming severely maimed.

He didn’t have a shot.

The moment Burkhart had put his combustive charges in place, time had run out.

“Sir — I’ve spotted some of them.”

“Where? I can’t see a thing.”

“A little ways ahead of us,” Ron Waylon said. “I’d guess maybe forty, fifty yards. At about ten o’clock.”

Nimec kept Waylon’s blaze-orange parka in his headlights as he whirred along behind him. He had mostly gotten the hang of the snow bike, but the bare ice patches that would come up on it without warning kept threatening to rob its skis of traction and wrench the handlebars out of his grasp.

He squinted through his goggles.

“You said some?”

“Right—”

“How many? Still can’t see anything…”

“I’m not sure. There could’ve been three, four. They were on bikes. Moving. Wearing winter camouflage.” Waylon paused. “The bikes were white too,” he added.

Nimec thought a moment. His instincts had been right.

“We made more than three of them inside the dome,” he said over the com-link. “Looks like it’s how I figured. They’ve deployed around it.”

“Looks like,” Waylon said.

Nimec swooped on toward the dome, a guy named Mitchell pacing at his rear, the rest having split off at his direction.

“Okay, both of you reading me?”

He received two affirmatives in his earpiece.

“This is it,” he said, then let go of his right handgrip to reach for the weapon strapped over his shoulder.

The dome to his near left, Burkhart was still poised to throttle his snowmobile into action when one of his floating patrols hailed him over their radio link.

“Kommandant, ich sehe sie.”

It was Langern, at the opposite side of the water-treatment facility.

“Wie viele?” Burkhart replied.

“Mindestens drei Männer. Sind auf rotes Schneemobilen.”

Burkhart clicked his teeth. At least three men had been sighted. On red snowmobiles.

As he’d suspected, the enemy had broken up into harrier teams.

“Schätzen?” he asked.

“Ungefähr fünfzig meter östlich.”

Burkhart tasted adrenaline at the back of his tongue. The machines Koenig had reported were approaching from fifty meters to the east.

His alertness notched to its utmost level, Burkhart looked over his right shoulder, glimpsed the noses of two more snowmobiles through the snow — these speeding toward him from a westerly direction.

It further confirmed his assessment of the enemy’s diversionary tactics. But he had no doubt their main thrust still would be reserved for the dome’s entrance.

“Lass keinen näher kommen,” he ordered, thinking that they had gotten close enough.

Much about Antarctica was alien to Nimec, but he would have recognized the sound of automatic gunfire anyplace on earth.

The initial burst came from approximately where Waylon had seen the snow bikes, its distinctive crackle carrying across the distance even in the high, wild wind.

His opponents were throwing themselves into an outright confrontation, forfeiting stealth to delay his Sword ops from reaching the dome.

The nasty little cold war they’d initiated had just gotten very hot.

Nimec mentally bold-faced a decision that he’d known had to be. Sword was a civilian security outfit whose international presence was licensed through a clutter of separate arrangements with UpLink’s host governments, most of them skittish about having armed foreigners on their real estate. Nonlethal threat response was Sword’s option of first choice, and its techies had developed a collection of ingenious suppressive tools toward that end. Nimec’s operatives were not cowboys on horses riding the range in search of desperados. But he had never allowed them to be victims-in-waiting either. Their rules of engagement were right in line with those followed almost universally by police and military forces. Deadly fire was to be returned in kind.

It made things stickier in theory that Antarctica was a piece of real estate unlike any other, demilitarized by global pact, everybody here supposedly living a harmonious coexistence, one big happy human family, their baser impulses and ambitions renounced. But in practice it didn’t change a thing.

Nimec’s people were under attack, taking fire, and getting killed by a bullet was the same the world over.

Gordian’s words surfaced from recent memory: They can’t always be protected from violence. But we have to keep our watch.

“Guns on max settings,” Nimec told his men over their comlink.

He pressed a stud over the trigger guard of his own compact variable-velocity rifle-system assault weapon, an action more than slightly hampered by his thick cold-weather gauntlet. The baby VVRS, as Tom Ricci called it, used embedded microelectromechanical circuitry to switch the gun’s muzzle speed between less-than-lethal and deadly-fire modes with a touch. At the low-speed setting, its subsonic rounds would remain enclosed within plastic sabots designed to blunt their penetrating capacity. Shot from the barrel at a higher pressure, the frangible sabots petaled off to release 5.56mm tungsten-alloy cores that struck with the murderous force of standard submachine-gun ammunition.

Now there was another spatter of fire, closer than before, barely up ahead.

Nimec heard a gaining whoosh from over to his left, and snapped his eyes in that direction, but saw nothing except dense, whipping white fans of snow.

And then, suddenly, the whiteness bulged out at him.

“Everybody, heads up—”

That was all Nimec had time to say.

His semiautomatic rifle raised, spitting angrily, Burkhart’s storm-rider made his pass.

The half-dozen men Nimec had chosen for the fire-suppression team advanced on the dome, their bikes pushed to top speed against the wind, treads slinging up snow in rapidly collapsing arcs. Strapped to their backs were eighteen-pound canisters of FM-200 and inert-gas flame extinguishant. As instructed, they’d locked their VVRS rifles into man-killer mode.

They’d expected a fight, knowing their access to the dome would be blocked regardless of whether their cover teams managed to draw off the opposition. What they did not yet know was how much resistance they would have to tackle… but that was certain to become evident in short order.

They glided on, the curve of the dome rising before them, tendrils of smoke scratching into the white around it.

Then they saw snowmobiles crossing the flat, open span of ground between themselves and the water-treatment plant, a row of machines spreading out to the left and right in bow-wing formation.

The fire-out team’s designated leader, a veteran of Operation Politika named Mark Rice, knew the score the instant he observed their widening pattern of movement.

“Scatter!” he shouted into his mike. “They’re trying to outflank us!”

Nimec had a chance to register the bike coming on fast from his left, darting out of the snow, its rider a blur as he triggered his first rounds, then sharpening in his vision like a wraith assuming form and substance.

The Sturmgewehr rattled out a second volley, and Nimec banked sharply off to elude its fire, leaning hard into the turn — almost too hard. He overbalanced, keeling his snowmobile sideways, but somehow managed to recover an instant before the bike would have leaped out from under him, spilling him from his seat as its handlebars wrenched free of his grasp.

Nimec heard the whine of his pursuer’s engine from behind now, and glanced over his shoulder, wind slapping his masked, goggled face. The rider had stayed at his right rear flank, his sleek helmet visible behind fluttering tapers of whiteness. His throttle was wide open, and smoke spewed from his exhaust into the sheering wind.

Nimec swung evasively again as his pursuer’s gun barrel emitted a third staccato burst, staying looser, trying not to fight the machine.

This time he held it in control. Gliding clear of the gunfire, he saw sugary powder gout upward where the bullets intended for him pecked the ground, felt what he thought might have been flying, splintered chips of ice lash across his coat sleeve.

His eye caught a flash of orange ahead of him — Ron Waylon’s coat — and then glimpsed the streaky white uniform of another apparitional rider hurtling at Waylon, the two of them engaging, maneuvering around each other, dueling in snow-spraying, cat-and-mouse circles.

Several yards to Nimec’s left, the figure of a third attacker had swung toward Mitchell at a full tear. Mitchell launched his bike’s front end off the ground like a motorcyclist pulling a wheelie, one hand on its rubber grip, then started firing VVRS rounds over the top of the rider’s windshield. The rider sprawled from his seat, his helmet visor shattered and bloody.

Nimec raced on straightaway, trying to put some distance between himself and the man at his back. Then he heard a prolonged exchange of fire between Waylon and his opponent stitch rhythmically through the wind. For an interminable moment both were lost from sight, surrounded by a spreading, churning cloud of kicked-up snow.

A shrill scream. Plucked away by the cheating gusts.

The gunfire stopped.

“Waylon, you all right?” Nimec exclaimed into his mouthpiece.

Silence over his radio. The snow cloud drifted milkily in the unsettled air.

“Waylon, do you copy…?”

Nimec was still moving rapidly on his own bike, no more than fifteen seconds having elapsed since the riders launched their attack. He turned back to see the one on his tail accelerate and pull alongside him to the right, staring at him through his tinted visor, the bore of his Steyr rifle practically in Nimec’s face.

His heart knocking, his fingers easy on the bike’s left handlebar grip, Nimec flicked up the baby VVRS with his right hand, leveled it, released a tight spurt of ammunition. Blood boiled from the rider’s chest and he flew from his seat, landing spread-eagled in the snow cover, his bike careening off in a skidding, plowing, crazily weaving run.

Nimec returned his attention to where he’d last seen Waylon just as a white cammo snowmobile came shredding out of the cloud of raised snow, riderless, its headlights blown out, its chassis studded with bullet holes. It plunged ahead for the barest of moments, then flipped over twice to land on its cowling and handlebars, the wraparound windshield breaking away, its upended skis pointed skyward on their extended struts.

Waylon in his headphone: “Okay here, sir.”

Then Mitchell: “Check.”

Nimec breathed hard, and took hold of both handlebars again, his weapon hanging from its shoulder strap.

“We better get on over to the dome, see what help we can be there,” he said.

“I’m sorry everyone’s been inconvenienced, and realize most of you were pulled out of bed,” Megan Breen was saying. “But as you know, we’ve received a fire alert from one of the outbuildings. It’s our normal practice to gather all non-base personnel into a single area during occurrences of this sort. Having you in one place benefits our ability to coordinate a response.”

Annie Caulfield, Russ Granger, and the entire Senatorial gang of three looked at her from their respective chairs in the small, pleasantly furnished common room provided to guests sharing Cold Corners’ DV accommodations.

It was now fifteen minutes since Pete and his men had gone out into the storm to face God only knows what kind of threat, and Megan was thinking that if she could somehow get this next piece of business done without revealing her agitation, she could probably keep a grip on herself through anything.

Still in his robe and slippers, Bernard Raines wrinkled his face, snuffling as if he’d gotten a whiff of something foul.

“You say a fire,” he said. “I hope it isn’t serious. For the sake of your people’s well-being, of course.” He cleared his throat. “It seems to me getting outside assistance in the storm would be difficult.”

Megan responded to the fear in his eyes.

“I appreciate your concern, Senator,” she said. “But a strong point of pride throughout UpLink International’s entire organization is that we’re very good at avoiding disruptions to our operations in any environment. That’s especially true for those of us stationed at Cold Corners — our contingency planning staff takes its responsibilities very seriously.”

Bravo, Meg, Annie thought, listening to the exchange. Couldn’t have finessed that one better myself. It even might’ve topped my interview performance on the Mc-Cauley Stokes Show.

Raines had almost reassembled his poise.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I see what you mean. And we have the highest regard for UpLink’s capabilities.” He looked around at his fellow Senators and waved his hands in an expansive gesture. “That’s speaking for everyone in my party, I’m sure.”

Both of his colleagues were nodding.

“I suppose bringing us together in here was only prudent,” Wertz said. “A sensible precaution.” She paused, crossing her arms. “Without making too much of it, though, when do you think the alert condition will be called off?”

Megan looked at her.

“That depends on when we hear from our firefighting team,” Megan said. “With a little luck we’ll have you safely and comfortably back in your quarters tonight… before anyone gets too homesick for civilization. Then we can all relax and can get some sleep.”

Across the room, Granger sat quietly in his chair. The redhead was as cool and slick as the block of ice she probably snuggled up to at night. He wasn’t sure how much she knew about the fire’s cause. But she would at the very least know where it had broken out, and was minimizing its impact to the politicos… which made him wonder what else she realized and was keeping to herself.

Granger crossed his arms, feeling a chill in his stomach despite the more than adequate warmth of his surroundings.

He felt neither safe nor comfortable, and sleep was the furthest damn thing from his mind.

Phil Corben wanted to know how he’d gone from a night of beer and darts at the Meat Locker to lying outside in the cold to die.

Thrown face-down off his bike, snow mashed into his eyes, nose, and mouth, halfway burying him where he’d fallen, the flesh under his insulating garments damp with blood from his monstrous gunshot wounds, Corben wanted to know.

It wasn’t that he was muddled about the events that had brought him to this point. Although his wounds had left him slack and disoriented, he could have recounted what happened in something very close to a coherent, sequential order. There wasn’t that much to it… he’d sped toward the water-treatment dome with Rice’s squad, and the men who’d set fire to it had rushed to meet them, and the shooting had started, and he’d gotten in the way of a burst of bullets.

Easy to follow.

The problem for him was believing it was all real as opposed to being part of some grotesquely implausible nightmare.

He didn’t understand why this was so. At thirty-two years old, Corben had already taken his disproportionate share of hard knocks. In fact, adversity had fairly well cleaned up on him — his daughter Kim succumbing to childhood leukemia when she was just five years old, the breakup of his marriage afterward, and then, months before he’d retired from his U.S. Naval EOD command and hitched up for a civilian post with UpLink on the ice, losing three of his best friends and teammates to an accidental chopper crash as they were returning home from land-mine-disposal operations in Sierra Leone, a humanitarian United Nations effort that had been a trip to the beach until their MH-47 Chinook troop transport went down due to unexplained engine failure.

While experience had taught Corben the futility of seeking reasons for the calamities that far too often slammed people on their heads, he’d gone on looking for them just the same. Maybe because bad luck didn’t seem a good enough explanation for him, or mostly didn’t, and he’d needed something else — if not necessarily better — to carry him through his days and nights.

Sprawled deep in snow, choking on his own blood, blown from his bike like a shooting-gallery duck, Corben desperately wanted to know how any of what had happened could have happened. How he could be about to perish from an act of brutal aggression here in Antarctica. Here. The one place where he’d envisioned finding an outer calm and stillness that might somehow penetrate his troubled heart, and where he was instead leaking blood from a chestful of bullet holes.

Figuring there probably wasn’t a chance he’d get his reasons even with another hundred years tacked onto his life, Corben still wanted more damned time to hunt them out… and now suddenly wondered with a kind of dazed, stubborn truculence if he had the giddyup to keep his pursuit going maybe, maybe just a little while longer.

Blood slicking his trigger-finger mitten shells, Corben tried to raise himself on his elbows and forearms, pushed his chest up out of the snow a few inches, then sank into it again — but not before managing to turn over onto his back. He expelled thick clots of blood, snow, and snot from his nose and mouth, feeling glassy particles of flying snow drill into the weave of his balaclava as they cascaded relentlessly down from the cloud sheet. You gave and you got, he supposed.

He could hear bikes swerving around him, see sparkles of gunfire at the corners of his eyes, see smoke puffing up into the turbulent sky overhead, and knew the white-suited men who’d come out of the storm like mechanized ghosts were continuing to hold Rice and the others off from the dome. The longer they hindered the squad’s entry, succeeded in keeping their arson fire burning, the less of the plant’s equipment would be salvageable.

Corben rasped in a miserable breath of cold air and turned his head from side to side, trying to locate his fallen VVRS. The pressurized red cylinders of fire-extinguishant and oxygen he’d been lugging on his back rig were bedded together in snow over to his left. Fine and dandy. But what about the weapon? Unable to see it, he reached out his arms, began probing the snow around him with tremulous hands, thinking it might have gotten hidden somewhere under the surface.

It was then that Corben became aware of an engine sound in the gale — the unmistakable buzz of a snow bike.

He lay on his back and groped more urgently for his weapon as the buzzing gained in volume, using his bloodied mitten like a rake, scrubbing it over the snow cover… and at last made contact with something thin and hard and smooth.

Corben glided his hand over the object, knew he’d found his VVRS, and brushed away the granular deposit covering it. He was desperate to scoop the weapon out of the snow, get it fully into his grasp. The bike was very close now and he needed it in his grasp.

And then he had it. His fist around its stock, he snatched it up with a huge swell of relief, clutching it against his body almost like someone who’d rescued a cherished pet from drowning. But that was only for a moment, and he wasn’t about to congratulate himself. Things were moving too fast, the bike approaching with what had now become a roar.

Corben slipped his finger around the sabot gun’s trigger, angled its barrel upward. The baby VVRS only weighed something like ten pounds loaded, but felt heavy as a cannon in his weakness. He was sure he didn’t have the strength to keep it raised.

Not for very long.

Perhaps ten seconds elapsed before the snow bike finally swept toward him through the blinding whiteness, bumping to a sudden halt just a few feet away.

Staring up past his gunsight, Corben lowered the rifle, once again overtaken by acute relief.

The bike was red, its rider wearing a parka shaded a little closer to orange.

He hopped off his seat, knelt, bent close to Corben. All around them guns were still firing

“Phil,” the rider said, and looked Corben over carefully. “It’s all right, don’t worry. Gonna have to get you on my bike, strapped onto my grab-rail. Then we head back to base, okay? Your fighting’s done, I’m taking you out of it.”

Corben recognized Cruz’s voice through his face mask.

“Tie me up, Sam,” he said, nodding faintly.

Burkhart was also ready to pull out of the fight.

He raced evasively astride his snowmobile, followed close on by an UpLink rider, wishing only to end the chase and extract his men before any more of them lost their lives. Considering the dimensions of his blunder, they had gotten off cheaply having taken just three casualties. But the dome’s entrance had been blocked long enough, and their job here was done. They had struck at the UpLink team’s corners, only to be outflanked themselves, a countermove that hadn’t surprised or daunted Burkhart. The thick smoke pouring from the dome told him the flames inside would have devastated its crucial desalinization apparatus — and that had been his single objective. He had no interest whatsoever in continued one-upsmanship.

It was time to finish things.

Squeezing fuel into the snowmobile’s engine cylinders, he leaned partway from its saddle, swung the Sturmgewehr around in his gun hand, and pressed back its trigger. The gun clapped fire at the red bike behind him. There had been two in pursuit moments ago, but he had been able to shake off one of them, losing it after a pitched, breakneck series of evasive maneuvers.

The rider who’d stayed on top of Burkhart was better than the other by far.

He kept right with him now, surging up from behind, swerving to avoid Burkhart’s stream of ammunition, lifting his own weapon above his handlebars to release an answering salvo.

Burkhart heard lead rounds chew at his rear bumper, felt the percussive rattle of their impact. Bits of the snowmobile’s pocked, gouged chassis spewed up around him.

Finish things, he thought.

Bent low behind his windshield, he opened the bike’s throttle, accelerated with a rush, and then sharply jerked into a full turn, swinging around to face his pursuer, applying the brakes with gentle pumps of his fist, aware he would tailspin if he worked their lever too hard.

Burkhart could feel his suspension rods quiver from stress as the bike hauled to an abrupt stop, its skis swashing up thick billows of snow.

His feet planted on the boards, he straddled his seat and poured a continuous volley out of his submachine gun, his fire cutting through the encompassing whiteness, aimed directly at the snowmobile coming head-on toward him.

The move caught his harrier off guard. The UpLink rider slewed, tilted high onto the edge of his right ski, then was flung from his bike as it suddenly ran away from under him, overbalanced, and tipped sideways into the snow yards from where he’d landed.

Burkhart released his brake lever, launched forward, brought himself to a second jolting halt in front of the thrown rider, and jumped off his bike.

The UpLink man was badly hurt. Dumped onto his right side, his leg bent where it shouldn’t have been — broken in at least two places below the knee, Burkhart saw — he struggled to pull himself out of the snow, rolled off his hip, and somehow got into a twisted semblance of a sitting position, his VVRS still in his grip.

Burkhart rushed toward him, kicked the weapon from his hand before he could fully bring it up, retrieved it, and pointed his own gun at the rider.

The men looked at one another in silence, their eyes meeting through their dark goggles for the briefest of moments.

Then Burkhart pivoted away from him, scoured the back of the overturned snowmobile with sustained gunfire, riddling the gas tank with bullets, puncturing the spare fuel container on its rear rack. Mixed gasoline and oil blurted greasily into the snow.

Burkhart flicked a glance back over at the injured rider.

“Man kann nie wissen,” he said.

You never know.

A moment later he shouldered his weapon, turned to remount his snowmobile, and radioed out the order to withdraw.

As he approached the dome, Nimec heard the chatter of a baby VVRS to his left, and snapped a look through the flowing whiteness. He saw blood erupt from a storm rider’s chest, then saw both bike and rider capsize into the snow. An instant later, the Sword op who’d done the shooting sped over to where one of his teammates had been downed by the storm rider, got off his snowmobile, and crouched beside him, shaking his head in horrified denial.

Nimec braked and sat absolutely motionless, pods of snow bursting in the air around him. He heard a choked-back cry from the kneeling op, and was grateful when the wind pulled it away.

Even from a distance of some yards, he knew it was too late for the guy’s partner. His goggles were shattered and most of his forehead was gone.

“I can’t believe this.” Waylon had slid up beside Nimec and was staring out at the bloody scene. “It’s just so hard to believe this… ”

Nimec said nothing. It was hard, yes. And the decision he needed to make was harder still.

He turned and peered straight ahead at the dome. The smoke lacing from its entrance hadn’t abated, but the fire-suppression squad was almost there now, riding toward it unopposed. And although he could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire at their fringes, CC’s mounted attackers had vanished from sight.

Nimec unexpectedly thought of the day that he and Meg had first talked to Tom Ricci about joining up with UpLink, on a spring afternoon a year or so back. They had met with him at his place in Maine, and were on his deck overlooking Penobscot Bay when a bald eagle had soared from a nearby tree, prompting every other bird in sight to flutter off into nowhere, all of them dispersing at the same time.

“It’ll generally stay quiet for five, ten minutes after she’s gone,” Ricci had remarked. “Then you’ll see the gulls, terns, and ducks come back, sometimes a few at a time, sometimes hundreds of them at once, like there’s been an all-clear.”

Nimec felt an odd twinge. He supposed this was his day for recalling other people’s words.

“They scattered,” he said. “Just like that.”

Waylon glanced out toward the dome, then faced Nimec.

“The men who hit us,” he said with understanding.

Nimec nodded.

“They did what they wanted. And now somebody’s given them the word to retreat.”

Waylon looked at him.

“We have to go after them—”

“No.”

“No?”

Nimec gave him a second nod.

“We don’t know how many of them are out there, where they came from, or where they might be planning to hole up. Probably don’t know a bunch of other things that I haven’t thought of, and that we ought to know before flinging ourselves into a manhunt. And our priority’s to safeguard the base,” he said. “Besides, the storm’s getting worse. It’d be craziness to have our people riding blind in it.”

Waylon kept looking at him.

“What are we supposed to do?”

Nimec hesitated a moment.

“Call off our troops and put out the fire,” he said, then juiced his engine and went racing off toward the dome.

The fire-suppression agents carried into the water-treatment dome by CC’s Sword ops shared the capacity to arrest intense flames without leaving a damaging residue on sensitive computer and telecommunications equipment — an almost certain collateral effect of foam or water. Both nonconductive formulations were certified environmentally green, and as such had gained approval for use on the Antarctic continent.

These important similarities apart, each possessed separate and unique properties.

FE-13 was the commercial name for trifluromethane, a cryogenic substitute for Halon, which had been banned from global production in 1989 for its ozone-depleting qualities. Stored as a liquid in an airtight steel container, FE-13’s minus-115° Fahrenheit boiling point meant it discharged as a colorless, odorless gas that would lower the temperature of exposed areas to levels that were too cold to sustain a burn.

Inergen was a blend of argon, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide gas that quite literally strangled flames in an enclosed space by depriving them of the oxygen they fed upon, while leaving sufficient O₂ for humans to breathe. Though it had been proven effective in fixed systems where a facility’s normal air ventilation could be closed off as Inergen was dispensed — the very sort installed in Cold Corners One — the base’s scientists and support personnel had been evaluating its value as a firefighting accessory that could be used on the move, both in conjunction with FE-13 and as a possible backup. The key had been to develop special ultra-high-pressure canisters that held and released the mixture in sufficient concentration to dampen a blaze where airflow couldn’t be easily inhibited.

Until now their redundant firefighting technique had been successful only in controlled trial conditions.

It performed as well as anyone could have hoped to put out the dome blaze.

The fire-out team converged on the desalinization plant even as their white-clad opposition swept off into the storm, leaving them with unimpeded access to its entrance. Flameproof Nomex cowls pulled over their balaclavas, breathing masks covering their noses and mouths, oxygen tanks on their backs, they rushed into the smoke-filled space in practiced fashion, holding their extinguishant cylinders in front of them, nozzles hissing out their gaseous contents.

There were several things going in their favor as they waded across the dome’s flooded interior to the central platform. Its power generators had kicked into automatic shutdown, eliminating the threat of electric shock. And the sickly yellow-gray fumes that filled the dome had started brimming out into the cold as soon as its door was raised, sucked away in churning, convection-induced funnels. The enclosure cleared of smoke fast, allowing them to work their way over to the water-treatment unit in bare seconds.

The fire they encountered was intense but contained, and already doused in numerous spots by the water that had poured in torrents from the seared, ruptured flow lines. It took just over three minutes to get it under control, another one or two to smother the last of its hot orange blooms.

Unfortunately, it was obvious to every man present that the critical harm had been done long before they arrived.

Nimec and Waylon climbed down off their bikes and then stood in the entry to the dome, staring at the mangled desalinization equipment within as reeking dregs of smoke flitted toward them and were skimmed raggedly away into the wind.

“It’s a mess,” Waylon said. “A goddamned mess.”

Nimec looked at him.

“Where does this leave us?” Nimec said.

Waylon was silent a perceptible while. His gaze did not move at all from the drenched, smoldering equipment.

“I haven’t got any idea,” he replied at last.

Darting through the tempest on his snowmobile, leading the surviving members of his team back toward their sheltered camp, Burkhart weighed his operation’s failures against its successes and tried to determine on which side the balance fell.

His assigned goal had been met; he had ravaged the desalinization plant. Perhaps not irreparably destroyed it, but that was never the plan. His blow to the UpLink base never had been meant to be mortal, just sufficiently forceful to make its tenants concentrate on nursing their open wounds.

That was all on one side of the scale. But what about the other?

He had lost four of his best. He had exposed himself, revealed what was supposed to have looked like an accident to be a manned attack… and as a consequence assured that UpLink would have its hounds out in force once the storm relaxed its grip on the coast.

It would be acceptable to Burkhart if they only came after him — he was a professional whose occupation demanded putting his neck on the line. What was more significant, however, was that he had opened a path to their learning the truth about the whole Bull Pass endeavor.

Where did the balance of success and failure fall?

He knew the answer, knew he could not hide from it.

Its opprobrious weight hung heavy as a mountain on his back.