The Arctic Event

Chapter Eleven

Over the Straits of Juan de Fuca

The Alaska Airlines 737-400 swept over the island-studded band of water separating the Olympic Peninsula and the United States from Vancouver Island and Canada. With cloud tendrils licking at its belly, it angled away to the northwest. As the Boeing leveled off at its cruising altitude, Jon Smith loosened his seat belt. The midweek morning flight to Anchorage was half empty, and he had the dual luxuries of no seat partner and a spot in the spacious A row just behind the cockpit bulkhead.

For the first time in weeks he was in civilian clothes, his uniform exchanged for Levi’s and a well-worn bush jacket. The change was a pleasant one. Glancing over the seat back, he could see Randi Russell and Professor Metrace spaced out farther back in the cabin.

Since last night Randi had apparently reestablished her equanimity with him. Looking up from the helicopter flight manual she’d been studying, she gave him a brief smile.

The professor was also reading, her nose buried in a massive bookmark-studded study of the Warsaw Pact Air Forces.

Professor. It still sounded odd.

His own briefcase rested under his seat, loaded with the latest USAMRIID downloads on the rapid diagnosis and identification of anthrax variants and their treatments. He’d get to them presently, but for the moment it felt good to sit back, stretch his legs out, and close his eyes against the warm morning sun pouring through the cabin window. Soon he’d have no time or opportunity to unload so totally.

“Mind if I sit down, Jon?”

He snapped out of the semidoze he’d drifted into. Valentina Metrace was standing in the aisle, a cup of coffee steaming in her hand and a mildly amused expression on her face.

Smith grinned back. “Why not?”

She flowed past him to curl up in the window seat. The professor was apparently one of those women who preferred to be elegant at all times. This morning she wore a form-molding black sweater and ski pants set, and her hair was up in the sleek chignon she seemed to favor. Smith found himself wondering for a moment how far that dark, glossy cascade might flow down her back should it be set free.

Despite the pleasant distraction, he still shot a fast look around, checking the immediate environment. The seat rows across and behind them were still unoccupied, granting them a pocket of privacy.

Valentina was security wary as well, for when she spoke she kept her voice pitched below the whine of the fan jets.

“I was thinking we could use this opportunity to talk freely before our liaison joins up. Tell me, Colonel, what’s your policy going to be toward our gallant Russian ally?”

It was a good question. “Until proven otherwise, we are to assume all of the brothers are valiant and all of the sisters virtuous,” Smith replied. “As long as the Russians appear to be playing straight with us, we’ll do the same for them. But the operative word is ‘appear.’ Our instructions are to play like the deck is loaded. We’re to assume the Russians have another layer on this thing.”

Metrace took a sip of her coffee. “I think that we may call that a blinding flash of the obvious.”

They had to lean close to speak, and Smith couldn’t help but note that his executive officer smelled pleasantly of Guerlain’s Fleurs des Alpes. So if the Russians are trying to pull a fast one,” Smith interlaced his fingers over his stomach, “what is it and why? What aren’t we seeing?”

“I daresay it would be better to approach this as a question of what is it they don’t want us to see,” she replied. “I’ve been networking with some of my fellow history buffs since catching this rocket, and I’ve discovered something rather interesting about the Misha 124 crash.

“Since the end of the Cold War there has been a huge…I suppose you could call it a glasnost under way between military historians on both sides of the conflict. Without having to worry about security restrictions, we’ve been asking why was this done, where, and by whom. For the most part, we’ve been getting answers.

“To date, our opposite numbers in the Russian Federation have been remarkably forthcoming, even about their major military bloopers like sunken atomic submarines and nerve gas spills.

“But not on this point. Prior to the discovery of the Misha crash site, in all of the ex-Soviet air force service records we’ve been granted access to, there has been no mention of any TU-4 squadron losing any aircraft in March of 1953, on any kind of routine exercise, anywhere.”

“And no mention of a biological broken arrow in the Arctic involving two tons of anthrax?” Smith prompted.

She shook her head, then brushed back a lock of raven hair from above her brow. “Not a whisper, until the Russians brought the subject up with our President.

“Now, information on a bioweapons warload being carried by a specific aircraft might very well have been compartmentalized for security purposes. But this particular Bull and its entire aircrew have been completely erased from all standard Red Air Force documentation. They urgently wanted to make it go completely away. And I think the only reason the Russian Federation is admitting to its existence now is because it’s sitting there in front of God and everybody.”

Smith looked past Valentina for a moment and out the glare-bright window, digesting the information. “That is interesting,” he replied slowly. “Here’s one I’ve been wondering about. It seems damn peculiar to me that anyone would risk uploading a live biowar agent as part of a training exercise. Common sense would dictate you’d use some kind of harmless inert testing compound.”

Valentina shrugged. “You’d think so, and so would I. But then, we aren’t Russian. They tend to do things differently.

“Consider the Chernobyl disaster,” she went on. “We wouldn’t build a big electric power reactor with a combustible graphite core, but the Russians did. We wouldn’t build a big nuclear reactor of any kind without a proper radiation containment dome, but the Russians did. And we wouldn’t run a series of radical systems-failure tests on a big, unsealed graphite-core power reactor while it was up and critical, but the Russians most certainly did. I don’t think we can make any assumptions on that point.”

Smith nodded. “Then we won’t. Now, let’s move on to something else. I know the status of the Russian Federation’s current biowar program, but you’re our expert on past Soviet systems. What’s the possibility that bomber might be carrying something other than plain old anthrax?”

She sighed. “It’s difficult to say. The Misha 124 was the kind of aircraft that would have been used on a one-way transpolar strike mission against strategic targets in the United States. With that as a given, and given the plane was armed, it would have been carrying some kind of ABC warload: atomic, biological, or chemical. The Soviets wouldn’t expend a long-range bomber and an elite aircrew to deliver anything less potent.”

She took another sip of her coffee and squirmed around to face him directly, tucking her feet under her in the seat. “As for the specific agent, those were the days before the exotics like Ebola and before advanced genetic engineering. You had to make do with what Mother Nature provided. The big three everyone was fooling with were anthrax, smallpox, and the bubonic plague. Anthrax was favored because it was simple and cheap to manufacture in bulk, and militarily controllable because it isn’t a contagion.”

Smith frowned and considered. “If it were the plague or smallpox, we’d likely have nothing to worry about. The pathogens would probably be long inert by now. Besides, why lie about it? All three of the alternatives would have been equally nasty, and once we reach the crash site we’d know anyway.”

“Exactly.” Valentina gave an acknowledging tilt of her head. “That’s why it can’t just be the presence of the bioagent alone. They’ve already confessed to it. There must be some X factor involved that we don’t understand. Beyond that, the present deponent knoweth not. But I can be reasonably certain about one other thing.”

“What would that be?”

She took another sip of her coffee. “Something damn peculiar is going to happen when we get inside that airplane.”