Cold War

NINETEEN

Megan watched Pete Nimec and Ron Waylon enter her office.

“Red dog,” Nimec said, shouldering through the door first.

She remained quiet behind the desk, where she’d sat for over an hour, waiting for them to complete their latest interrogation of Russ Granger and report on whether they’d gotten anything out of him.

Waylon pulled up a chair opposite her. Nimec strode over to the big Dry Valley satellite map.

She looked at him.

“I gather,” she said, “you’re going to explain what you mean.”

“Red dog,” Nimec repeated. “It’s the name of a card game I learned—”

In your pool-shark days with your reprobate father, she thought.

“—in pool halls when I was a kid,” Nimec said. “My old man used to play with some Philly Inquirer beat reporters. Everybody’s dealt five face-down cards. Then the dealer starts around the table, deals each player a card face-up. If the player owns a higher card in the same suit, he shows it and wins double his bet for that round. If he doesn’t, he tosses his hand and his stake gets added to the pot. If they want to make the game more interesting, the dealer burns a card from the top of the deck… shows it to everybody, then tosses it to give the bank an edge.”

Megan nodded.

“So Granger displayed a burn card when he let us know Scar and Shevaun Bradley are alive,” she said.

“Right.”

“What’s he shown you now?”

“The notch.” Nimec stabbed a finger at the blue pin identifying the area of Scout IV’s disappearance. “They’re being held prisoner in the notch. At some kind of underground base.”

Her eyes widened.

“Pete, that’s incredible… ”

“Don’t unbuckle your seat belt yet,” he said. “He gave us the exact location. There’s some kind of tunnel or mine shaft. He wouldn’t tell us what’s being dug up. Or stored. I figure he knows, or has a damned good idea—”

“But that’s another burn card he can show when it’s advantageous to him.”

“Yeah. Granger’s got a full deck. And he intends to use it to win himself the sweetest deal possible with INR at State, CIA, Interpol… whoever winds up with custody of the slug once they can sort that out.”

“Meanwhile he’s playing UpLink…”

“Dealing us what he figures we want most…”

“The whereabouts of our people, in other words…”

“In exchange for our agreeing to testify that he was cooperative when the time comes to face the music,” Waylon said.

Megan looked from one man to the other.

“This explains a lot,” she said. “Explains almost everything, in fact. Our rover coincidentally rolls too close to the notch… we’d programmed it to explore the area… and then whoever is out there in Bull Pass takes preemptive action. Disables or destroys it before we can receive telemetry that exposes their presence.”

Nimec was nodding.

“Next our S&R team arrives,” Megan said. “They pick up Scout’s trail, follow it to where it ends—”

“Come too close to the notch themselves with Granger sounding the alert…”

“And stumble into the same concealed pitfall as the rover,” Megan said.

Nimec and Waylon gave her near-synchronous nods. Then they were all silent for some moments.

“Why would they want to kill David Payton if they were going to let the others live?” Megan said.

“Granger swears he doesn’t have any idea,” Nimec said.

“And you believe him?”

Nimec shrugged.

“Hard to be sure, but my gut sense is he’s on the level,” he said.

Waylon looked at Megan.

“You know how Doc Payton was,” he said. “I want to say the crew here got along with him. But the truth is there isn’t anybody at CC that didn’t have the urge to strangle him at least once.” Waylon shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s terrible what happened to him. I wish it hadn’t happened. But I’m thinking it’s possible he could have done something to provoke it.”

There was more silence.

“Okay,” Megan said. “We have to make some decisions—”

“Like how we get Scarborough and Bradley out, you mean?” Nimec said.

Megan exchanged glances with him.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “It isn’t that simple. I won’t allow any more of our own to find themselves in a situation where they’re easy targets. There’s a question of how we can accomplish it. Whether we should request help—”

“From who? And when’s it going to reach us? I thought we went through this together once before. The boss got us the authority to act.”

“No argument about that,” Megan said. “But we have a small force here… and a slice of it’s been allocated to recovering function at the desalinization plant.”

“You know the pump kicked in for a little while this morning,” Nimec said. It had been a good piece of news he’d gotten upon his return from Marble Point, where he and his rescue pilot had spent an overnight due to passing fog whiteout. “Don’t ask me how the crew did it. For all I can tell they used string, scotch tape, and chewing gum. But they got it to show signs of life. And they figure to have some of its capacity back soon.”

Megan looked at Waylon.

“How much?” she said. “And how soon?”

“I’m estimating we can get to almost a quarter of our regular freshwater output in a couple of days. That’s with four or five of us on it round the clock.” Waylon spread his hands. “I can’t guarantee the pump’ll stay up, but if we lose it again manpower won’t matter. We’ve done about all we can with the parts we’ve cannibalized.”

Megan shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There are other considerations to weigh. Before she left yesterday, Annie Caulfield advised me about a range of problems we can expect because of the solar flares—”

“Just another reason we should move fast.”

“Pete, we’ve already felt some effects,” she said. “Though they haven’t even emerged from the far side of the sun, it appears we’ve already had some irregularities in our satellite and radio connections. Dead spots.” Megan gestured toward her timed-out desktop computer. “I’ve experienced them myself. Annie provided an access code for a turnkey NASA Web site. A half hour ago I tried to log on and access the latest models for when the activity’s going to peak. And couldn’t. The data link broke on me. It’s still fouled up. We might be looking at periods when our radio connections go partially or entirely down over the next couple of days… can you imagine what kind of tactical problems that would lead to in the field?”

Nimec nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’d be an equal disadvantage. The other side would run into the same complications.”

She shook her head. “Still…”

“I’m no world-beater,” Nimec said. “I wouldn’t take anybody out there to the Valleys without a solid plan.”

“I’m not implying that. I trust you. But it’s my job to measure the risks. Make the final decision. Nobody else can do it. I can’t unload the responsibility. I own it… ”

She trailed off, her features tight with concentration.

Nimec watched her a moment. Then he stepped away from the map and softly rested a hand on her shoulder.

“Meg, listen,” he said. “One thing I learned from the boss… from Gord… is that part of owning it is knowing when to trust somebody enough to let go.”

Silence in the room.

Megan sat with her face turned up toward Nimec’s as that silence spooled out between them like an invisible thread. Then she took a deep breath, seemed to hold it a moment, and released a long, deep sigh.

Nimec could feel her muscles loosen under his palm.

“You said you’ve come up with a plan?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Not me.”

She looked at him.

“Who?” she said.

Waylon thumbed his chest, moved his shaved head up and down in a single nod.

“You,” she said.

He nodded again, his long-sword earrings gleaming softly under the fluorescent lights.

Megan half smiled.

“Tell it to me, Ron,” she said.

“Sure,” he said, “I was just waiting for you to ask.”

And then he told her.

Burkhart did not decide upon a conclusive plan of action until several hours after Granger failed to report — convincing him the pilot’s true failure was more critical than that.

The plan’s crucial elements, however, had germinated in his mind much earlier. In fact, its rough contours had emerged after his return to Bull Pass. He had known that even Granger’s success — his elimination of UpLink’s head of security — would only forestall the inevitable.

Looking backward, Burkhart could see the road to his fall so clearly. With all veils of conceit and ambition lifted from his eyes, now he could see. The destruction of UpLink’s robotic probe, his taking of its recovery team, his exposed sabotage attempt and the bloodletting that followed, and at last, his hastily necessitated reliance on Granger to do what Burkhart had recognized was far beyond the pilot’s competence… from the day he’d set foot on that road, and perhaps onto the many forking junctures he had walked along the way, it now seemed there had been something almost deterministic about where he was headed.

Gabriel Morgan was dead. The Albedo Consortium’s vast and elaborate underpinnings were on the verge of complete breakdown, a thunderous crash that would send legal and political ground quakes through scores of nations.

What options remained before him then? What roads on which to push toward success… or if not that, then some little measure of self-redemption? There was no way to erase — or substantially reduce — the evidence of the uranium digging and transshipping operation in whatever scant time was left to him. Not even if the mines were razed would that evidence be concealed for long. He could, perhaps, physically remove himself from it, arrange to be carried off in a small plane from one of the South American gateways… but that would mean abandoning all or most of his men.

They were men who had fought bravely beside him. Men who had been loyal and true to him in the darkest face of his own failure.

He would not do it.

Would not desert them.

Deep beneath the frozen earth, Burkhart had decided to make his stand in the pass above, and hold the high ground where he was certain the enemy would show his own resolute face.

“These ATVs were shipped from Kaliningrad a few months back, when they ordered and got themselves updated models,” Waylon was saying. “They’re two-passenger, fully automatic, and have noise-dampened engines. Our field researchers love zipping around in them.”

Megan stood beside Nimec and Waylon in the heated garage arch outside CC1, looking at the ten parked, neatly aligned vehicles, and remembering.

“They were used by Max Blackburn in Operation Politika,” she said. “I was… we were together in Russia at the time.” She paused and glanced at Nimec. “When you and I signed off on the upgrade request right before leaving San Jose, it came to me that the older vehicles might be perfect for the ice. Waste not, want not, you know?”

Nimec was quiet a moment. He had tried very hard to ignore the sadness in her voice as she’d spoken of Max.

“Their VVRS pintle guns,” he said. “They were transported with the ATVs?”

Megan nodded.

“And stored away, yes. It’s ironic, I suppose, that we stripped down the weapons. It was the one feature we never thought we’d need here.”

Nimec nodded thoughtfully.

“Waylon, you grab some men, take care of getting the guns remounted,” he said. Then he turned to Megan. “In the meantime we better see about getting those extra choppers from MacTown.”

The cage door grated open, then shut with a dull clang.

Shevaun Bradley was startled. A while ago the echoing of the machines had stopped and left her in almost total silence. The sounds of the door seemed very loud against it.

Sitting on the cot that doubled as her chair and bed, her back against the wall of the enclosure, she lifted her eyes as the marked man came inside.

He was alone, unaccompanied by guards.

It was the first she had seen him since the time of the screaming in the black. The first instance in which he’d appeared without his guards.

He stepped over to the cot and stood watching her in silence.

She could see him easily now. The cage was no longer in darkness. Her conditions had improved after she’d talked to him, answered his questions. His men had returned to screw a bare lightbulb into an overhead socket and wheel in the cot. And the food had gotten better.

They hadn’t brought Scarborough back, though. She hadn’t heard anything from him.

Not since the time of those screams…

“You deceived me,” the marked man said at once.

She stared at him in tense silence, trying to pretend she didn’t know what he meant. Except she did, of course.

“It was an artful deception,” he said. “The dome’s outer cameras were precisely where you revealed they would be. But you neglected to mention the internal cameras.”

She felt her heart pound in her chest, but said nothing.

“It was what you call a lie of omission, nicht wahr?” he said. “Is that not true?”

Bradley said nothing.

The marked man came closer to her. His hand slowly lowering toward the pistol holstered at his waist, hovering inches above its grip.

“You were loyal to your own. You showed courage. But your guile killed four of my comrades,” he said. “Does the knowledge please you?”

She looked at him, but continued to say nothing.

“Does it please you?” he repeated with a vehemence that made her flinch.

“No,” she said, her voice trembling as she gave her answer. “I’m not happy that men died.”

The marked man scrutinized her features a moment, and then suddenly crouched in front of her.

His right hand still near his gun.

His face level with her face.

“I could kill you out of vengeance,” he said. “Without pity or moral constriction. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you.”

A pause.

He reached out his left hand, clamped her wrist in it, and forced her palm against the crescent birthmark on his cheek.

“Describe what you feel,” he said.

Her heart was knocking. “I don’t know—”

“Describe it to me,” he said.

Bradley commanded herself not to cry, and the tears began streaming from her eyes.

“I don’t know what to say,” she told him. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I only feel your face.”

He pressed her hand against his cheek for several more seconds, his eyes radiant with that terrible intensity.

Then he relaxed his grip on her, let her pull back.

“All right,” he said. “Listen well, scientist. I’m going to tell you something you’ll surely wish to remember… ”

Nimec entered the water-treatment dome, strode to its central platform, asked the group working on the pump where he could find the man he was seeking, and was pointed in his direction.

“You Mark Rice?” Nimec said, approaching him from behind.

The man glanced up over his shoulder and nodded. He was crouched at a warped metal pipe-coupling near the platform, a small plasma cutter in his hand, a welding helmet and mask covering his head.

“I’d like to talk,” Nimec said. “When you’ve got a minute.”

“Got one right now.”

Rice switched off the torch, rose, carefully set it down on the wheeled tool cart beside him, turned off the oxygen supply to his face mask, and raised its glass hatch.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

Nimec looked at him. A few spikes of hair showed over Rice’s brow, sweaty despite the penetrating cold inside the dome. They were blond with dyed cobalt-blue streaks.

“I’ve seen your folder,” Nimec said. “You were with the Sword detail in Ankara, my old friend Ghazi’s section.”

Rice nodded silently.

“Ghazi sent your team to flush those terrorists out of the mountains a couple, three years ago. On horseback.”

Rice nodded again.

“Before UpLink, you were Army Ranger,” Nimec said. “The 3/75th, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Saw your share of action in the service… Task Force Somalia, an anti-narc unit in Colombia…”

“Right.”

“And earned some impressive commendations,” Nimec said. “The Distinguished Service Cross, a couple of sharp-shooter’s medals…”

Rice flicked a Nomex-gloved hand into the air between them.

“With all due respect,” he said. “It’s been a long while since I wore a black beret. Or rode a horse—”

“Or fired a rifle,” Nimec said.

Rice looked steadily at him.

“True,” Rice said. “Before the attack on this plant the other night.”

Nimec met his gaze. “You were going to resign from Sword until Rollie Thibodeau talked you out of it, and even then only agreed to stay if you could ship out to Cold Corners,” he said. “Feel comfortable telling me the reason?”

Rice regarded him another moment, then shrugged.

“I didn’t want to shoot anything anymore except with a camera,” he said. “What I do here is mostly work for the beakers. Photographic ecosystem profiles. It suits me fine.”

“And still puts that trained eye of yours to good use.”

Rice made no comment.

“I need a sniper,” Nimec said. “Someone who’s dependable. Who won’t make mistakes. A bunch of lives are going to be on the line. Mine’s incidentally one of them.”

Rice looked at him.

“The talk’s been that you’re going out to bring back the missing search team,” Rice said.

Nimec gave him a nod. Their eyes were still in contact.

“I’m not a quitter,” Rice said.

“Nobody thinks that.”

Rice nodded.

“Go ahead and count me in,” he said.

Burkhart led his men from the ascending passage’s mouth onto a black rock uplift, whipped by freezing wind, his boots stepping across striations that memorialized the labored seaward slide of ancient ice.

A hundred feet below him Bull Pass was congested with shadows. Faded orange, the sun floated on an almost even plane with his line of sight, giving the illusion that he could have squeezed it in his hand if only his reach were longer. It had been like that for days as wintry gloom made its onset.

His attention now, however, was captured by the writhing purple-red blot of light in the sky beside the sun. He had never before seen anything like it. Nor most certainly had any of the others.

Here was the first outward sign of the sun’s advancing fever.

“Mein Gott,” Langern said behind him, staring with awe at the bruisy radiance. “Was ist das?”

Burkhart turned to him.

“Der Gott des Krieges,” he said. “Kann sein, eh?”

Langern’s eyes remained wide behind his goggles.

“Ja, mein Herr,” he said. “Kann sein.”

Burkhart was silent. Then he tapped Langern’s arm to stir him from his rapt absorption, motioning down at the pass.

“Hier müssen alle durchhalten,” he said. “Verstehen?”

“Ja,” Langern said, nodding to show he indeed understood.

This bitter windswept terrace was where they would position themselves for the enemy’s arrival.

Pete Nimec watched his hookup teams finish rigging their all-terrain vehicles to the pair of choppers requested from MacTown, each Sikorsky S-76 moments from bearing away its maximum sling-load of three vehicles. As the cargo hooks were slipped into their apex fittings, the wand men waved their static wands and the teams jumped off the ATVs to move out from under the downwash of lifting rotors.

Then the birds climbed from their hover, pulling slack from the sling legs, flying off against the strange, wavery orchid of color that had appeared in the sky near the slipping sun.

Nimec turned to Megan. His backpack heavy on his shoulders, loaded with his own gear, he was ready to join his strike force aboard one of the two UpLink helicopters on the pad.

“How you holding up?” he said.

“Fine.” She lowered her eyes from the auroral radiance and studied his face. “I only wish I were going with you, if you want to know the truth.”

Nimec smiled a little.

“You’ve been awful scrappy since I taught you to box,” he said.

She gave his chest a light swat with her mittened hand.

“Fisticuffs are my thing,” she said. “Before long I’ll have to watch out for cauliflower face.”

“I think,” he said, “You mean ‘cauliflower ear.’ ”

“Close enough.”

They stood there facing each other.

“Got to head off,” Nimec said, and nodded toward the waiting choppers.

“Yes,” Megan said.

“You mind the store. There should be enough men here to—”

“I’m really okay,” she said. “I’ll be okay. And so will this base.”

They stood a few seconds longer in the blowing cold. Then Megan stepped forward and hugged him.

“Thanks, Pete,” she said, her voice catching, her arms tight around him. “Thanks very much.”

Nimec cleared his throat.

“What for?” he said.

“Just for being you,” Megan said.

“We’re seeing… nk… think the… tch… can… sn… us… down where… sss… ssssss… sk… ”

“Chinstrap One, you’re breaking up. Say again?”

“Srks… siss…”

“I’m losing you, Chinstrap One,” the UpLink chopper pilot said as Nimec listened from the passenger seat. “Repeat your status. Over.”

“Crkrrsssss—”

The pilot frowned, tried to reach the other MacTown bird. He was a wire-thin black man named Justin Smith who wore a sparse, tightly kinked chin beard and spoke with an occasionally strong peppering of a Caribbean accent. Nimec thought it sounded like Trinidad.

“Chinstrap Two, we’ve lost contact with Brother Penguin,” he said, pronouncing the word Brother as Brudda. “We need to confirm you’ve made your tick mark. Acknowledge.”

“Ngg… you… rppttt—”

“Say again—”

“Still cnnttrd. Extnr… ssssszzzdrr… rceee… ”

Nimec turned to Smith. “Snap, crackle, pop,” Nimec snorted in disgust. “There any way to get a lock?”

Smith shook his head.

“Our radios are already hopping,” he said. “The disturbance cuts across all bands.”

“Try our own bird again,” Nimec said. The trail ship carrying Waylon’s team had peeled away toward its rendezvous moments earlier.

Smith radioed it, got more garbled noise, cursed under his breath.

Nimec wondered if Smith missed palm trees and white sand. “We’ll have to forget about any of them reporting for now,” Nimec said. “Keep our fingers crossed they’re in position.”

“They’ll be doing the same for us.”

“Yeah.”

Nimec looked out his windscreen at the coiling lights in the sky. What had started out as an isolated purplish stain near the sun had become a moving, living rope of color across the horizon, twined with a glowy spectrum of greens, reds, and blues.

“Damned freakish,” he said. “The weatherman says it’ll be a sunny day, you can count on having to leave your house with an umbrella and galoshes. But solar flares, radio interference… this they can all get on the mark.”

Smith flew in silence, making unconscious, minute adjustments to his sticks as a highway driver would to his steering wheel.

“Sir,” he said after a while. “We’re reaching the notch.” His flight helmet dipped downward. “See it down there?”

Down dere.

Nimec’s eyes traced the pass seaming its way between jagged mountain slopes, saw the dark shark’s-tooth crosscut coming up fast.

He nodded. “The intercom working?”

Smith reached for a switch, and static burst loudly into the cabin.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, and flicked off the com.

Nimec started unstrapping himself from his seat.

“Keep her steady,” he said. “I’m going back to talk to Rice while my vocal cords can still transmit.”

Outside the tunnel entrance on the notch’s spiny eastern shoulder, Langern thumbed off his radio handset, and then stood pensive and silent under the ribboning polar lights. He had scarcely spotted the helo through his binoculars before attempting to contact Burkhart, but all he had gotten from the handset was a senseless bark of static.

It was the same signal breakup he had received when he’d hailed Koenig on the western side of the notch, and Reymann’s squad at the far end of the pass.

Meanwhile, the Bell helo was close enough now for its UpLink markings to be seen with the unaided eye.

Zum Teufel mit ihnen, he thought. Zum Teufel mit dem ganzen verfluchten Land.

To the Devil with them. With this whole accursed land.

He turned toward the other men waiting on the crest with him, ordered them to stand to arms.

From this point forward they would be on their own.

The Sikorsky helicopter designated Chinstrap One after the ubiquitous chinstrap penguins of the peninsula had lowered its own “strap” of ATVs at the intersection of Bull Pass and McKelvey Valley — or the point where the shank of the valley system anchor would be seen to meet its ring end on a map. The pass walls were at their widest distance apart here, and katabatics weren’t too bothersome a factor for the bird’s pilot.

This was only one of the reasons the site was chosen for the linkup with Ron Waylon and his group. The other was because of its coordination with the separate rendezvous Sam Cruz’s team was making elsewhere.

Dropped by the UpLink tail ship on its second hop, Waylon’s team was waiting to receive the sling-load as Chinstrap One came in over the ridge and bellied low above their heads.

They took less than five minutes to get it unhooked and derigged.

Waylon stared up at the S-76, waved to the men in the cockpit as it lifted away into a sky swirling with brilliant color.

“Don’t know if I’d want to be heading back up into that weirdness,” said the man beside Waylon.

Waylon looked at him.

“Don’t know if he’d want to be going where we are either,” Waylon said.

Then he turned toward the ATVs and gestured for the others to mount up.

Within moments they were speeding south into the pass.

“Chinstrap Two… wvv… lzzzzt… tktyr… brother… gnnn,” came Justin Smith’s voice over the radio. “Wnud… confizzzz… tkmk…”

Pulling pitch at the sticks of his Sikorsky, the MacTown pilot frowned as his UpLink counterpart’s transmission was munched by static, incidentally noting the Carribean island accent. He thought it sounded like Jamaica.

“I’m not getting you,” he answered into his headset. “Repeat.”

“Saygggn—”

“Still can’t read you,” said the MacTown pilot, his consternation deepening. He paused, tried to guess what the radio call was about, and went for the obvious — UpLink’s lead bird would want a basic status report.

“External load successfully dropped and received,” he said, hoping his message would be intelligible at the receiving end.

On Burkhart’s orders, the Light Strike Vehicle had waited just around the eastward bend of Bull Pass, hidden in shadow behind a toppled granite colonnade opposite Mount Cerberus’s massif face, guarding its territory like the solitary feline hunter with which Shevaun Bradley had once associated it. A camouflaged leopard perhaps. Or a panther.

Now Ron Waylon’s incursion team came shooting past, paired up in their three all-terrain vehicles, rusty sand reeling off from the spin of their tires as they hooked into the narrow stretch that led toward the notch and Wright Valley.

The LSV’s crew continued to wait a short while longer, tending to their patience, allowing the little UpLink vehicles to gain some distance, get deeper into the trench. Liquid jewels of color rained down from the narrow band of sky overhead, sliding over Cerberus’s plated black flank in vivid, oily droplets.

Unglaublich, the man named Reymann told himself in his driver’s seat, thinking he would never see anything like it again if he lived until the last day of the world.

Then he fisted the vehicle’s clutch and pounced from behind the weather-chewed slope to spring his ambush.

After overseeing the movement of the 150-ton haul trucks to their places in front of the mine entrance, Burkhart gathered the drivers and excavation crew together inside the shaft and detailed what he expected of them.

“No, it’s impossible. We won’t. You can’t ask that of us!” one of the nervous foremen said. A Canadian who had gained his experience in the uranium mines in Saskatchewan, he unnecessarily restated his objection in German. “Das kommt nicht in Frage!”

“What else would you wish to do?” Burkhart said, speaking perfect English.

“Get out of here!” The foreman’s insistent shouting echoed in the gloom around them. “We have to get the hell out!”

Burkhart suddenly felt very tired.

“Out to where?” he asked quietly.

It wasn’t an M24 SWS. It wasn’t the Barrett Light Fifty he’d used to take down armored troop carriers at long range in Mogadishu. It wasn’t the slightly lighter Haskins of the sort favored by Green Beret spec-op shooters. It was a VVRS rifle, the original full-sized version, a little over a yard long, a little under ten pounds loaded, about the same size and weight as a standard M16A2 combat gun. Built for pouring out heavy fire with some resultant sacrifice in accuracy.

It was what Mark Rice had available to him, and he would have to make it work for him.

He knelt in position behind the slid-open starboard door panel of the Bell, wind screaming into the passenger/cargo compartment around him, his goggles off so he could keep his eye against the aperture of his scope mount.

The men below him on the ridge-back had opened up on the bird with their Sturmgewehr assault weapons as Smith wove evasively in the air above the notch, trying to avoid their fire and lower his skids. Rice rocked and swayed on one knee. He estimated there were five, possibly six opponents. They had traded their white winter cammo garb for something closer to desert dun. Some of them were sheltered behind boulders and rock projections. Others were in full view. All were firing at the unarmored bottom of the UpLink chopper’s fuselage — the ding of metal on metal audible over the roar of wind and props as some of the rounds made contact.

Rice knew he had to take them out fast.

He inhaled, exhaled, squinting down the barrel. Then he triggered a shot at the center of a parka the color of coppery sand.

A shower of red and the parka tumbled away down the steep hillside.

Rice shifted his gun barrel. With that first trigger pull he had grooved into instinctive action. Later he would think of torn flesh and spilled blood. Later his gorge would rise at the waste and death. But right now these were no longer men down there, no longer even living creatures. These were targets. Simply targets.

He sighted between the crosshairs again, but momentarily lost his alignment as the chopper swung sideways to avoid an upward stream of bullets. Then he regained the mark, and fired.

There was more spraying blood and his target folded backward. Rice shifted to yet another, this one moving, breaking for cover, looking up at the chopper, shooting up at the chopper, making a target of Rice himself as it dashed toward a protective shield of rock. Rice released a breath, released a round, and got the target in mid-run.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, heard a raised voice behind his ear. Nimec.

“Hang on, Rice!” he said. “We’re bringing her down!”

Langern volleyed continuous fire at the helicopter as it landed precariously on the windswept crest of the notch’s southern slope and men came leaping from its passenger hold beneath the still-rotating blades.

Crouched behind a large boulder, Langern had seen three of his fellows die before its skids touched down, one of them bouncing down the slope like a rag doll.

The man in the cabin door had a falcon’s eye, but now it would be his turn to be raked with death’s talons.

Langern stopped shooting long enough to push a fresh magazine stack into his weapon, sprang up on the balls of his feet, and pushed himself from behind the boulder, his finger locked over his trigger, aiming directly for the sniper as he jumped from inside the helo.

Nimec did not pause to think. Could not afford to think. He saw one of the men on the hilltop bound from the protection of a boulder and make an outright charge for Rice, his weapon spitting bullets. He saw Rice standing with his eyes momentarily turned elsewhere, hunting out another source of fire. And he reacted.

Nimec’s baby VVRS swept up from his side and rattled in his hand. The man went down onto the hard stone ridge, falling on his bullet-riddled chest, then rolling over onto his back, his lips moving faintly, his eyes staring skyward behind his snow goggles in the instant or two before life flickered out of them.

In the agitated heavens above Langern, the whorling auroral lights seemed to briefly assume the shape of a terrible multihued iris.

“Der Gott des Krieges,” he muttered, gazing upward as he hitched his final breath.

Then the cold, chaotic eye drew closer and blinked shut around him.

Still exchanging light gunfire with the men hunkered behind the rocks, Nimec’s team had gotten pitons and lines out of their rucksacks and were driving the metal anchors into the cliff head. Nimec didn’t know how many of the ridge’s defenders were left. Probably no more than two or three to judge from their fitful salvos.

Amid the clang of hammers and continued smatters of fire, he swept his eyes in a semicircle, seeking the tunnel entrance Granger had offered up information about.

Then, abruptly, he spotted it.

He called to Waylon over his headset, heard static crackle in return, didn’t pause to consider the odds of his brief message having been communicated.

Grabbing Rice’s shoulder, waving another two men over to them, he whirled toward the tunnel, turned on the high-powered tactical flashlight mounted under the barrel of his baby VVRS, and led the way inside.

Nimec’s voice cut through the white noise in Waylon’s earpiece like an isolated sun ray penetrating dense overcast.

“I’m headed into the tunnel, rappel team’s on its way down,” Nimec said. “Keep pushing forward, they’re going to need cover.”

“Got you, sir.” Waylon heard a hack of static in his ear, and wondered whether his own response had slipped through the parted wave of electromagnetic interference. “Can see the notch in front of me.”

And he could. It was an ugly, angular gash that looked like it had been hastily carved from the wall of the pass with a gigantic serrated butcher knife.

Waylon could also hear something of equivalent nastiness — the growl of a muscular engine at his rear, rising above the buzz of the two other Sword ATVs speeding along with him.

Something was coming on. And closing.

He tossed a glance over his shoulder at the man in his aft gunner’s seat.

“What kind of problem have we got?” he shouted over the blasting wind.

The gunner turned to look, spotted the Light Attack Vehicle in pursuit.

“Bad one,” he said.

Waylon eased off his accelerator and radioed out an urgent message to Sam Cruz.

Cruz didn’t pick up Waylon’s signal, but fortunately that wasn’t imperative.

He knew the plan.

In the lead slot of the three-ATV incursion team that had met Chinstrap Two in McKelvey — dropped there so they would enter Bull Pass behind Waylon’s men and guard their backsides — Cruz had spotted the Light Strike Vehicle up ahead moments after it launched from the pass’s crumbled west wall.

As he sped forward at maximum horsepower, pushing within range of the opposition’s militarized dune buggy, Cruz waved his accompanying vehicles into attack formation and hollered for his gunner to open fire.

The Light Strike Vehicle’s driver had been outwitted and he knew it.

The motor-pack of ATVs that had appeared from McKelvey were gaining behind him like angry hornets. Reymann swerved to elude their firing guns, his own rear gunner turned toward them in his elevated weapons station, swinging his.50-caliber in wide arcs, disgorging a torrent of ammunition from its link feed-belt.

The hornet vehicles continued to close distance nonetheless, two of them splitting to his left and right while the third stayed at his rear and dodged the lashing machine gun volleys. There was no room for his larger vehicle to maneuver in the tight-walled pass. No time to use his grenade launcher as the hornets nimbly hopped alongside his flanks, trapping him between them. Nowhere for him to go but straight ahead toward the leading trio of ATVs that had now molted speed before him, their tail guns pouring ammunition in his direction.

Boxed-in, caught in a vicious four-way cross fire, Reymann was cursing under his breath with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief when a sleet of bullets knocked him back in his seat, turning his head and most of his body into a crimson mire.

One of Pete Nimec’s biggest unanswered questions was resolved minutes after he entered the tunnel, Rice and the others following him down a metal stairwell into the darkness.

They had descended three long flights in a hurry when the beam of his tac light chanced on a kind of niche in the stone wall to his right — and then held there as he paused briefly on a landing.

The recess was filled with sealed steel drums.

Large fifty-five-gallon drums, stacked two and three high and going several rows deep into the surrounding rock.

Their warning labels were printed in various different languages, but it was easy enough to see they all said the same thing.

Nimec glanced over them.

“Goddamn,” Rice said. He stood slightly behind Nimec on the riveted metal landing, his own flash trained on one of the English drum labels. “Radioactive waste. They’re storing rad waste.”

Nimec grunted. He doubted that was all they were doing there. Before entering the tunnel, he’d looked down from atop the ridge-back and noticed heavy equipment at the bottom of the notch. Earth-hauling trucks. They were stashing this stuff, true. Hoarding it deep in the ground. But he had a feeling their operation would prove to be a two-way street. That they were pulling something out of the ground too.

He moved his eyes further down the stairs, angling his tac light in that direction to illuminate the way.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll worry about this later.”

Burkhart waited in the dimness near the foot of the stairway, flattened against a rough stone wall on its right, his Sturmgewehr angled toward its upper levels. One of his men stood beside him, his back also to the cold stone. Three more men were hugging the opposite wall. All wore night-vision goggles.

They could hear the enemy sprinting downward.

Burkhart had counted three sets of footfalls. And while he could not be certain of it, he would have wagered the first of those sets belonged to the UpLink security chief… Peter Nimec.

Burkhart had never met him, of course. But he believed he understood him. The man had come from a world away with only a single purpose, a single mission, and that was to locate and rescue the vanished members of his organization. Nimec would care little at this stage for anything besides, something Granger would have quickly realized if he were captured — as the UpLink strike verified had happened.

To what else could its timing and accuracy be attributed? Burkhart thought. He saw a flicker of light from above now, pulled further back against the wall. There was a great deal of information Granger had obviously divulged. Enough to bring Nimec and his men here to Bull Pass. To the notch. But his greatest bargaining chip would have been the knowledge he possessed about the whereabouts of the UpLink field team. And if he had told Nimec about the tunnel — a fact made evident by the helicopter’s landing on the ridge-back — then he would have surely told him its descending stairs were the fastest route to the cage in which the woman scientist was being held.

This man Peter Nimec…

A man who led on the ground, risked his life along with those who followed him…

Burkhart knew he would not delegate the actual rescue to others.

It would be Nimec leading the way down the stairs, just as Burkhart himself had chosen to meet him.

Nimec suddenly halted on the stairs and raised his hand, stalling up the three men behind him. He wasn’t sure why. Or at least he couldn’t have stated why. It might have been simple caution. Or that he’d noticed a trace of movement below, heard something below, a subtle forewarning that someone might be down there — except he wasn’t even positive about that. But he told himself that they had better proceed very slowly until he knew.

“Hang back,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder at Rice. “I want to check things ou—”

The first outpouring of fire from below silenced him mid-sentence.

Nimec ducked sideways as the gunfire split the darkness, throwing himself against the stairway’s handrail, motioning for the others to do the same. He twisted his tac light to its flood setting, saw the figure of a man launch off the wall to the right of the bottom stair, and triggered a burst of return fire from his VVRS. The man slipped out of sight, into the shadows, but then Nimec saw another man swing his gun up at him. He released a tight hail of bullets, saw the man drop to the floor, or ground, or whatever the hell was waiting for him down there at the base of the stairs.

There was a second volley from the bottom, this time coming out of the darkness at his left. Rice had his gun up, his own tactical light set on “spot,” beaming a concentrated circle of brightness onto the center of the shooter’s chest.

He squeezed out a rapid burst and the man crumpled.

“Okay, move it!” Nimec shouted, bounding down the stairs, leading his men down the stairs, thinking there was no sense in them making stationary targets of themselves here on these goddamned stairs at this point.

More movement as he reached the bottom landing — a third gunner. Nimec raked the gloom with fire, heard an agonized cry, saw a body fall straight from the knees, a fine mist of blood glittering in the throw of his flash. At the same moment one of the Sword ops racing down the stairway behind him — Rice? — he wasn’t sure in the confusion — loosed a sustained barrage and took out another of the waiting shooters.

Silence then. Absolute silence.

Nimec took a quick glance back at his men, all of them down on the lower landing with him now.

“Everybody okay?”

Three nods.

Nimec stood warily, moved his gun from side to side, sweeping the area in front of the stairs with his tac light. Four men lay dead below them, NVGs over their eyes. He wondered if there had been any more waiting, thought of the one who’d opened fire and slipped clear of his initial return burst. Was he among those sprawled on the ground?

He had no sooner asked himself that question than the answer was violently delivered.

Burkhart sprang from where he’d concealed himself to the right of the bottom landing, raised the barrel of his weapon, released a crisp stream of fire. Bullets studded the risers beneath Nimec, throwing up a bright shower of sparks.

Nimec gestured his men back, his finger continuously squeezing the trigger of his VVRS as he leaped down the stairs and attempted to track the source of the volley with its flash attachment.

Darting clear of his shots, Burkhart brought up his gun for another staccato burst, heard a single sharp tak! as one of his own bullets ricocheted off the handrail… and then felt a slap on the upper left side of his chest, followed immediately by a hot needle of heat in the same region.

His finger still looped around his rifle’s trigger, Burkhart looked down at himself. Blood seeping through the front of his parka where the rebounded bullet had struck his heart, the strength seeping from his hand as shots continued to spurt from the Sturmgewehr’s barrel in loose, wildly straying patterns, he looked down at himself.

He could have almost smiled at the sublime jest as he fell.

Nimec crouched beside the dying man, heard him struggling to say something to him, couldn’t make out what it was.

He leaned closer, removed the man’s night-sight goggles, pulled the balaclava from his face, and for a moment focused on an odd crescent-moon scar on the man’s right cheek.

“Die Ironie des Lebens,” Burkhart said in German.

Nimec shook his head, unable to understand.

Burkhart realized his mistake. He pushed his head off the stone ground, coughed up blood.

“The irony of life,” he managed to say in English.

Or thought he did in his fading confusion.

In fact, the words never left his mouth.