The Arctic Event

Chapter Thirty-two

Saddleback Glacier

A ground-hugging wisp of snow flowed past the cave mouth, driven by a rising gust of wind.

“Penny for your thoughts, Jon?” Valentina said softly.

Smith shot an angled glance toward the lowering northern sky. “We’ve got another front coming in.”

“It will be interesting to see which arrives first: the weather or the sunset. Granola bar?”

“No, thanks.”

The colonel and the historian lay side-by-side in the shadow and shelter of the cave mouth, watching the approaches across the glacier. Since the initial identification and elimination of the first Spetsnaz scout there had been no movement on the ice. There was only the sensation of activity, born out of the knowledge that a hostile force was upon them, an enemy that would not sit back passively and allow them to live.

Smith looked across at the odd other half of his rifle team as she munched her snack in seeming contentment. Her fine-planed, rather exotic features were relaxed within the shelter of her parka hood. “You doing all right?” he inquired.

“Oh, yes. Quite good.” She glanced around at the black rock walls and roof of the tunnel. “It’s not exactly Cancun, but I can see marvelous development potential for winter sports.”

Smith chuckled softly and reset his attention on the cave approaches. A remarkable lady.

“Mind answering a question?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“What is that accent? It’s not quite English and not quite Australian. I can’t place it.”

“It’s from a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” she replied. “I was born in Rhodesia-not Zimbabwe, if you please, but Rhodesia. My father was a government game control officer there before Mugabe took over.”

“And your mother?”

“An American near-zoologist. She’d been a graduate student doing research on African wildlife, but what with one thing or another, such as marrying Dad, she never went back to the States to finish her degree.”

Valentina frowned for a moment at some flash of memory. “It did give me dual citizenship, which proved rather handy when things went to their final hell back home. I was able to refugee to America to live with my mother’s family after…well, after.”

“I see. And how did you get here?”

She glanced at him, her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that question violate mobile cipher compartmentalization or something? Like the old ‘one question you cannot ask’ in the Foreign Legion?”

Smith shrugged. “Damned if I know. But you’re the one who said we were destined to become lovers. The question is probably going to come up again.”

“Valid point,” she agreed, looking back to the ice. “It’s a long and rather meandering story. As I said, my father was a game control officer and the commander of our local territorial commando-a hunter, a scholar, and a soldier, who probably would have been much happier living as a contemporary of Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Selous. I was born in a war zone and raised in a household where weapons were a fact and a necessity of life. My earliest memories are of the sound of gunfire beyond our compound. I was given a rifle at an age when most little girls in America were still being given Barbie dolls, and I shot my first leopard while it was trying to climb in through my bedroom window.”

She glanced wryly at Smith. “To say the least, I grew up with a somewhat different worldview than is the norm.”

He tilted his head in an acknowledging nod. “I can see how that could happen.”

“My father loved history and about learning how things came to be,” she continued. “He’d say, ‘To learn where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve come from.’ He put that love into me, and I majored in world history at college. My doctoral paper was titled The Cutting Edge: Armaments Technology as a Guiding Force in Sociopolitical Evolution. Later I expanded it into my first book.”

“Sounds like an impressive topic.”

“Oh, it is, and a valid one.” Valentina’s voice began to take on a lecturer’s enthusiasm. “Consider how different Europe might be today if the English longbow had not proven decisively superior to the French arbalest at the Battle of Agincourt. Or how World War Two might have played out had the Japanese not developed the shallow-water drop shroud for their aerial torpedoes, permitting the attack on Pearl Harbor. Or how the United States might never have come to exist had the British Army put Major Ferguson’s breech-loading rifle into general issue during the Revolutionary War…”

Smith laughed softly and lifted a gloved hand. “Points taken, but it’s still your history I’m interested in.”

“Oops, sorry, Pavlovian reflex. At any rate, after receiving my doctorate, I found I couldn’t get a decent teaching position. My views were considered somewhat un-PC in certain quarters. So, to stave off starvation, I became an authenticator, appraiser, and procurer of rare and historic weapons for museums and private collectors. It turned into a rather lucrative profession, and I found myself roving all over the world, chasing down various finds for my clients. Eventually it led to my curatorship of the Sandoval Arms Collection in California.”

“I’ve heard of it. But how did you get here?” Smith prodded gently, tapping the magazine of his leveled rifle on the cave floor.

She bit her lip lightly for a moment, the introspective look deepening in her eyes. “That’s…a little more esoteric. As you should have guessed by now, I am a firm member of the ‘If it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing’ school of thought.”

“I’ve had my suspicions.” Smith smiled.

“As my education developed I found I was not content to merely study about weapons. I wanted to learn how to use them and to see and feel how they were applied,” she continued. “I studied fencing and kendo. I learned the skills of the old Western gunfighters from the champion shootists of the Single Action Shooting Society. I bribed my way into Philippine prison cells to discuss technique with butterfly-knife artists. Before his untimely death I sat at the feet of the legendary ‘White Feather,’ Marine master sniper Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, and learned combat marksmanship. Firearms, blades, explosives, military heavy weapons: I learned how to make them, maintain them, and employ them. Everything from the flint axe to the H-bomb.”

She lifted her hand from the action of the model 70 and flexed her black-gloved fingers, studying them. “I found myself becoming a uniquely lethal individual, all on a purely theoretical level, of course. But then I visited Israel, following up a lead on a cache of genuine ‘garage factory’ Sten guns from their War of Independence. And one evening I found myself having dinner with a fellow historian from Tel Aviv University.”

Valentina’s voice grew softer. “He was a totally fascinating little man who not only taught history but had lived it. He was a holocaust survivor and had seen action in the first three of Israel’s wars of national survival.

“We were dining at a small outdoor restaurant near the University. I recall we were discussing the historic Mideastern Jewish communities as a possible bridge between the European Jewish and Arabic cultures. Our meals had just been brought to the table. I’d ordered steak and I’d just picked up my knife when the smartly-dressed Arabic couple at the next table stood up and started killing people.”

Smith listened and studied the subtle emotions playing across Valentina’s face. He could sense it wasn’t the remembering of a fear or revulsion, but an abstract reexamination of a defining moment in a life. A time and place this woman had revisited many times before.

“I heard gunshots and I was sprayed by the blood and brains of my dinner partner as he took a bullet through the head. Then the female terrorist shoved her pistol in my face and screamed ‘God is great…’”

The historian’s voice trailed off.

Gently Smith rested his hand on her back, letting the gesture grow into a few inches of caress. “And then?”

Valentina came back into herself. “And then I was standing over the thoroughly shredded bodies of the two Hamas terrorists. I was saturated with blood, none of it my own, and that steak knife was still in my hand, dripping. I had, in the vernacular, ‘flipped the switch’-spectacularly, although I have no conscious memory of doing so. My studies were no longer abstract, but very much applied.”

Smith could understand the spark that had jumped between them now; like had recognized like. He’d had his own defining moments, his own flipping of switches. “How did you feel afterward?”

“That’s the interesting point, Jon,” she mused. “I didn’t ‘feel’ anything. They were dead and I was alive, and I was quite pleased with that outcome. I found my only regret to be that I hadn’t reacted quickly enough to save my friend and the others in that restaurant. I’ve been told that I have the perfect sniper’s mentality. I can rationally divorce myself from the emotional trauma of physical violence.”

She shrugged and made a face. “If I work at it for a bit anyway.”

“And that incident brought you to the attention of Covert One?”

“That and a couple of under-the-table research and acquisition projects I’d done for the Departments of Defense and Justice. Mr. Klein seemed to think my rather esoteric talents might prove useful to his little organization. And they have. Now I view myself as following in my father’s footsteps. I’m a game control officer eliminating the rogues and man-eaters from our societal jungle. Maybe, eventually, I can make up for being slow that one night in Tel Aviv.”

“Fred Klein knows how to pick his people.” Smith smiled at her. “I’m pleased to know you, Professor Metrace.”

“Thank you, sir.” She nodded. “It’s a pleasure to be appreciated. Some men tend to look around for the garlic and holy water after delving a little too deeply into my past.”

Smith smiled without humor and looked over the barrel of the SR-25. “I make no claim on moral superiority.”

“That’s a relief. And now, Colonel Jon Smith, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I have a fair idea of how you ended up with Mr. Klein, but just who are you? Where do you come from?”

Smith squinted at the sky. The cloud cover was definitely edging lower again. “My biography’s not nearly as interesting as yours.”

“I’m easily amused.”

Smith was considering his answer when a small clump of dislodged snow rolled over the edge of the cave overhang, dropping in front of them with a soft pelp.

“Oh, dear,” Valentina murmured, her eyes going wide.

Instantly, Smith snaked his legs under himself. Then he launched out of the cave mouth in a headlong dive. Landing flat on his stomach, he rolled onto his back, sweeping the long barrel of his rifle in an arc to bear on the cliff face above the cave.

The Spetsnaz trooper in arctic camouflage was a pale wart on the frost-streaked basalt. Stealthily, he had edged out along an almost nonexistent ledge to a point some thirty feet above the cave mouth. The gloved fingers of one hand were hooked into a fissure in the rock, those of the other were closed tightly around the object he carried.

Looking down, the Russian’s mouth opened in a scream as he saw Smith’s explosive emergence from the cave. The sound of the cry was drowned out by the flat crash of the SR-25 as Smith squeezed off half a dozen rounds of 7.62mm as rapidly as he could pull the trigger, the copper-jacketed mil-spec slugs blasting the enemy off the cliff face.

The limp body of the Russian soldier landed almost on Smith, piling up a couple of feet to his left with a sodden, dead-meat thud. There was a second, softer thump to his right, and Smith twisted to find a hand grenade lying beside his head, a thick jacket of puttylike plastic explosive wrapped around its spherical body to enhance the demolition effect.

For an instant Smith’s heart stalled in his chest; then he realized that the grenade’s pin and safety lever were both still in place.

An instant more, and terror of the grenade was forgotten. Splintered ice sprayed as automatic weapons raked the glacier around him. The dead Spetsnaz trooper saved Smith’s life. Convulsing grotesquely, it absorbed bullets meant for him. Valentina was screaming something, and he heard the piercing reports of the model 70 as she returned fire.

Unseen things tugged viciously at Smith as he rolled onto his stomach and scuttled backward into the cave like a frightened lobster. He made it behind the low snow wall across the cave mouth. Throwing his arm around Valentina, he hauled her down beside him, and for a long second they huddled together as a storm of vengeance-aimed gunfire sparked and shrieked off the sides of the tunnel.

Out on the glacier, clips emptied and guns fell silent. The hollow ghost-moan of the wind returned.

“Val, are you all right?”

“No hits. What about you?”

Smith noted a couple of bullet rips through the loose cloth of his snow smock. “Close, but nobody won the cigar.”

“Cuban, no doubt.” Valentina squirmed loose and eased a look over the snow wall. “Damn, but this lot is good! I never had a hint they were out there until they opened up and I could pick out their muzzle flashes. They have us targeted from at least half a dozen different positions.”

Smith had been given vivid proof of that. The cave mouth was covered by a complete arc of fire. Come the inevitable nightfall, that arc would begin to contract as patient, deadly men wormed closer across the ice. The climax would be a concentrated and overwhelming blast of high explosives and autofire poured down the throat of the tunnel.

He and Valentina could retreat deeper into the cave, but they would merely be rats retreating deeper into the trap, to be systematically grenaded out of existence. Nor did surrender appear to be an option.

There had to be something else. There had to be!

“Can you hold the fort here for a while, Val? I want to go check a few things out.”

“I can manage,” she replied, thumbing reloads into the magazine of her rifle. “I don’t think they’ll be in a mood to play any more pranks for a time.” She nodded toward the corpse sprawled beyond the cave mouth.

“Right.” He left her the SR-25 and his cartridge belt and backed to the bend in the tunnel on his hands and knees. Beyond the bend he stood and switched on the hand lantern. For a moment he considered the generator set and the Russian transmitter, then disregarded the notion. The batteries were decades dead, and the available gasoline had been reduced to wax and varnish. Even if they could get the set operational, whom could they call who would make any difference? The only way out of this mess would be one of their own making.

Smith descended into the main cavern, working toward the small puddle of light produced by the candle he had left burning.

“Colonel?”

“It’s me, Major.”

Smyslov was awake and had worked himself to a sitting position on the survival blanket. Smith knelt down and steadied the bound man with one hand. “How are you doing? Any dizziness? Double vision?”

“Nothing bad.”

“How about the cold? Getting to you? Is your circulation being cut off anywhere?”

“No. Not bad.”

“How about some water?”

“Yes, please.”

Smith gave Smyslov a swallow from his canteen. The Russian rolled the water around in his mouth and spat a glob of congealed blood to one side. “Thank you. A cigarette?”

“It’s against my principles, but under the circumstances…” Smith went through Smyslov’s pockets until he found the Russian’s smoking materials. “What does this one do?” he asked, holding up the butane lighter.

“It lights cigarettes,” Smyslov replied laconically.

“Good enough.” Smith slipped the filter tip between Smyslov’s lips and kindled it.

“Thank you,” the Russian said around the smoke. “What’s happening? I have heard gunfire.”

“Your people made a try for us,” Smith replied, returning the canteen to its pocket.

“Is the professor all right?”

“Yeah. But your side’s lost two so far.”

Smyslov closed his swollen eyes. “Shit! This was not supposed to happen!”

“What was supposed to happen, Major?”

Smyslov hesitated.

“Damn it, this situation’s already blown!” Smith said urgently. “I’m open to the possibility that something is going on here that neither of our countries really wants to have happen. Give me something to work with and maybe we can stop this thing!”

Smyslov shook his head. “No, Colonel, I’m sorry, but it is already too late. The escalation has begun. It is now inescapable.”

“Then answer me one question. Why?”

Smyslov sighed heavily. “My government has always known that the Misha 124 had gone down on Wednesday Island. They also knew that the anthrax was still aboard the aircraft and that the aircrew had survived the crash. They had succeeded in establishing radio communications with our Siberian bases. They called for rescue. But the Politburo felt that a rescue mission would present…difficulties. There were no atomic submarines at the time. Wednesday Island was beyond the range of the ski planes then available, and trying to reach the island by icebreaker would draw the attention of the Canadian and American militaries. It was feared that the United States might learn of our aborted attack on North America and you would retaliate with your own nuclear first strike. Accordingly the Misha’s political officer was ordered to eliminate all evidence of the bomber’s mission.”

“Including the crew?”

Smyslov nodded, not meeting Smith’s eyes. “Yes. The crew was considered the greatest security risk. It was feared that when they realized that no help was forthcoming from the Soviet Union, they might try to contact the Western powers for rescue. Cold and starvation are not pleasant ways to die. The Misha’s political officer was instructed to…deal with this potential threat to the state.”

“Including himself?”

Smyslov shrugged. “He was a political officer of the Strategic Attack Forces of the Soviet Union. Such men were fanatical party members. He would consider dying for the glory of Mother Russia and the Communist Revolution the greatest of honors, even if that death came by his own hand at the party’s order.”

“But the aircraft commander apparently didn’t take too well to the whole glorious-death concept.”

Smyslov half-smiled. “Apparently. The Soviet government feared that something had gone wrong when they received no final acknowledgment from the political officer verifying that he had carried out his duty, but there was nothing more they could do. They chose, as the saying goes, to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ They hoped the wreck would simply never be found.”

“But it was.”

“Quite so, and apparently intact. My government knew the wreck would be investigated. I was attached to your team to learn if the political officer had succeeded in eliminating the evidence of the Misha 124’s mission. If not, I was supposed to see to its destruction myself. But the political officer and I have both failed. An alternative plan is now in effect to ensure the truth never reaches the outside world.”

Smith tightened his grip on Smyslov’s shoulder. “Can you order the troops outside to stand down? Or can you contact someone who has the authority to call this mess off before we take any more casualties out here?”

“I wish I could, Colonel. But the Spetsnaz have their orders from a higher authority, and I am outside their chain of command. Wednesday Island is now to be sterilized. All evidence of the Misha’s mission is to be eliminated, including the investigation team. To my government, the threat of the anthrax is lesser than the threat represented by the truth about the Misha’s mission.”

“But why?” Smith demanded. “Why all of this for something that happened over fifty years ago?”

There was a sad irony in Smyslov’s voice as he replied. “In my culture we would say ‘only fifty years ago.’ You Americans are mayflies. You forgive and forget quickly. One day you make war on a nation, and the next you are giving them foreign aid and arranging for tourist groups. It is not so in Russia and in the nations surrounding Russia. Our memories are long, and we nurse the bitter ones.

“If word got out that Russia had come within a hairsbreadth of unleashing a nuclear holocaust upon the world, even after half a century, there would be a reaction: anger, fear, retaliation-things my government does not want or need. Within your own country, there are political leaders who would remember the Cold War and would work to cut off the aid we are receiving from you. Even among our own people there would be outrage, enough perhaps to fuel further secessionism and a final collapse of our national authority.”

“And your government thinks there won’t be repercussions for killing a team of American agents and a group of innocent civilian scientists?” Smith demanded.

Smyslov shook his head. “I will not attempt to justify my nation’s actions to you, Colonel, but our leaders are afraid, and frightened men sometimes do not react sensibly.”

“Christ!” Smith rocked back on his boot heels.

“I hope you will believe me when I say this, Colonel, but I am sorry, truly sorry, you and the others were caught up in this.”

“I’m sorry, too, Major.” Smith caught up the lantern and rose to his feet. “But I’m like the bomber commander. I don’t intend to lie down and die for the convenience of the Motherland.”

“I understand. We are soldiers, the two of us. We each do what we must.”

Smith played the lantern beam in Smyslov’s face. “Could you at least tell me why the attack was launched and then recalled at the last second?”

“I cannot do that, Colonel.” Smyslov’s face was impassive as he squinted into the light. “That is a state secret even greater than that of the Misha 124.”

Smith stepped back from his prisoner. There was nothing more to be gained here, and his time was running out.

There was one possibility he had yet to fully investigate. Smith began a slow and deliberate examination of the walls of the cavern, probing with the lantern beam into the numerous crevices and fissures in the jagged lava rock. He had almost despaired of finding anything when, high up on the tumbled rear slope of the cave, beyond the cove where they had found the bodies of the aircraft commander and political officer, he spotted something that sheened palely.

Smith scrambled up the jumbled blocks of basalt to a point near the cavern roof. The paleness was a piece of doubled parachute silk, staked out and held in place by wedged chunks of stone.

A windblock.

Smith tore out the stones and pulled the cloth aside and felt the icy, dank flow of air on his face. The lava tube continued beyond the survival camp cavern! At some time in the past there had been a rockfall that had created a natural bulkhead in the tunnel. But a gap remained, large enough for a man to crawl through to another open section that lay beyond.

Smith snaked through the gap and worked his way down the slope of the inner face. Probing ahead, the beam of the lantern faded into the darkness. The tube flared out to the size of an automobile tunnel and seemed to continue for some distance. Taking a compass from his pocket, he flipped it open and checked the glowing luminescent dial. Orienting himself and making the mental correction for the nearness of the magnetic pole, Smith judged that the tunnel roughly paralleled the outer facing of the mountain.

Maybe…just maybe. It depended on how far the tube ran and if there was a second way out. With deliberation he started to work his way deeper into the tunnel, trying to gauge the angle of the slope. Was he above or below the level of the glacier?

The going was slow and treacherous. Olive-tinted puddles of slick, transparent glaze ice lay congealed around furniture-sized slabs of fallen basalt. The floor of this tube section was more broken and uneven than the camp cavern, possibly an indication that it was more unstable as well. Smith had neither the time nor the inclination to be concerned about it. A hundred yards…two hundred…

There! A ribbon of white against the black rock, a spill of snow down the tunnel wall!

Smith scrambled up the glassy slope of the miniature glacier to where the compacting snow was being forced into the lava tube. It was at a point maybe eight feet above the cave floor and took in an area the size of a coffee table. Bracing a foot on a solid stone ledge, he snapped off the lantern and let his eyes adapt. After a couple of minutes he could make out the faintest luminescence radiating through the snow plug from the outside. Daylight!

Drawing his bayonet, Smith started to dig, tunneling his way carefully toward the outside world. The luminescence grew brighter, and Smith recognized that he was digging through another of the ice-crusted snowdrifts such as they had found caking the first lava tube entrance. This was the back door he’d been seeking.

Suddenly Smith froze. Something more was leaking in from the outer world beyond the light.

Voices-faint, muffled, and not speaking English.

Smith resumed his digging, but he moved slowly, quietly, and with infinite care not to break through the drift. He eased a last knife thrust through the ice shell, creating a single blade-wide horizontal penetration to the outside. Daylight gleamed, bright to Smith even through the heavy overcast. He squinted through the narrow observation slit he had created.

This second entrance opened into a shallow notch in the cliff face. A bare forty feet away, two armed figures in snow camouflage crouched behind the shoulder of the notch, peering around the corner toward the main cave entrance.

Like a man moving on nitroglycerin-filled eggs, Smith backed out of the snow tunnel and down to the cave floor, easing each step and testing each foot and handhold. He had found an option.