The Arctic Event

Chapter Thirty-six

Saddleback Glacier

Behind them, Jon Smith heard the thud of the explosion, faint in the face of the gusting wind. Straight off the Pole and unchecked by terrain, its cold was searing. Still, Smith viewed that wind and the ice particles driven before it as allies tonight. They would cut their pursuers’ long-range vision and scour his party’s crampon marks from the surface of the glacier.

Then there was also the subliminal human instinct to seek the easier path and turn away from a direct confrontation with that river of freezing fire, to keep your back to it. Accordingly, Smith would leave instinct to his enemies while he and his people would drive into the gale.

“Our friends reacquired their hand grenade,” Valentina commented. She was a shadow at the end of the safety line, her words muffled by her snow mask.

“Sounds like,” Smith replied. “We’d better keep moving. They won’t be too pleased with us now.”

“They weren’t all that fond of us before, Jon. I see we’re still angling to the northwest. Shouldn’t we be turning south to pick up the flag trail back to the station?”

“We’re not taking the trail back. Presumably the Russians know about it. They’ll move to cut us off, or at least that’s what I hope they’ll do.”

“Where are we going, then?”

“To the station. But we’ll be taking the scenic route. We’ll drop out of the saddleback on the north side of the island and follow the shoreline around.”

“Uh, Jon, excuse me, but doesn’t that mean pioneering a two thousand-odd-foot descent down broken glacier fall and sheer rock cliff at night and in a bloody blizzard?”

“Essentially.”

Valentina’s voice lifted. “And you intend to do this with one total climbing tyro, i.e., me, and one trussed-up captive?”

The third member of the party had no commentary to add. Major Smyslov stood by silently, his hands bound in front him and the safety rope knotted to his pack harness.

“Play the glad game, Val,” Smith replied. “The Russians will never imagine us trying it.”

“With excellent reason!”

“We don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Val, you have the point and I’ll take the center slot. The farther down we go on the north side of the saddleback, the more broken and treacherous the ice will become. If a crevasse should open up under you, I can go on belay and haul you out.”

“All right, but a pox upon the man who came up with ‘ladies first.’”

Smith turned to confront his captive. “Major, I’m counting on you not being as suicidal as the Misha’s political officer. I am going to point out, however, that should you feel tempted to try any shoulder blocking from behind on any crevasses or cliff edges…” Smith gave the safety line a pointed tug. “Wherever we go, you go.”

“This is understood, Colonel.” Smyslov’s face couldn’t be seen inside the darkness of his parka hood, and his reply was emotionless.

“Right, let’s move out.”

The slow and careful advance across the glacier began. Visibility in the snow-racked night was all but nonexistent. Valentina felt her way forward, one cautious and deliberate step at a time, probing ahead continuously with the spike end of her ice axe. Smith held to his line of advance via the glowing green screen of his handheld GPS unit, carrying the precious little device next to his skin between each position fix to keep the batteries alive.

As predicted, as the descent down the glacier face steepened, the buckled, fractured ice grew increasingly unstable, the risk of crevasses escalating geometrically. Their creeping rate of advance slowed even further as they were forced to sidestep a growing number of man-devouring cracks in the glacial surface. Finally, the inevitable happened.

Valentina was edging along, forty feet ahead, a shadow silhouetted against the lesser shadow of the glacier. Then, suddenly, she simply vanished, a great puff of snow geysering around her previous position. Smith felt the heavy thud of the snow bridge giving way into the crevasse, and he was already throwing himself backward, digging in with his heel crampons. He felt the shock and snatch of the safety rope going taut as he went on belay, but he had been “fishing” the line carefully and he hadn’t given her slack enough to fall far.

It was a good belay, and Smith’s brace held. With one hand twisted tightly in the line, he groped for the lantern at his belt, filling his lungs to ask if she was all right. But almost immediately he felt furious activity at the other end of the safety line.

Snapping on the lantern, he played the beam down the climbing rope to the point where it disappeared over the lip of the crevasse. He was just in time to see the head of Valentina’s climbing axe whip over the edge of the ice. In seconds she had kicked herself a foothold and was scrambling out onto the surface.

“That was…rather interesting,” she wheezed, collapsing beside Smith.

Smith shoved his snow goggles up onto his forehead and turned his light into her face. “Are you okay?”

“Barring a brief experiment with stark terror, I’m fine.” Valentina pushed up her own goggles and tugged aside her snow mask for a moment of serious breathing. “What a marvelous invention adrenaline is. This damn pack weighs as much as Sinbad’s Old Man of the Mountain, but when I was trying to get out of that bloody hole, it might have been a box of Kleenex!”

She took another enormous gulp of air, resuming control. “Jon…Colonel…darling…I don’t mean to complain, but it’s getting just a tiny bit dicky out here.”

“I know.” He reached over clumsily and squeezed her shoulder. “We have to get some rock under us. According to the photo maps there’s a place a little way ahead where we can get off this glacier and traverse across to the face of West Peak. From there, a ledge stair-steps down to the beach. It shouldn’t be too bad.”

Smith kept to himself the fact the photomaps were not nearly detailed enough to make a truly accurate assessment of the descent. This was yet another lesson in command presence. A good commander must always appear sure of himself and his decisions, even when he wasn’t.

Switching off the lantern, Smith got himself under the load of his pack once more and stood up, offering Valentina a hand. Then he turned back to Smyslov, helping him to his feet as well. When the snow bridge had collapsed, Smith had felt the safety line behind him go taut. Smyslov had dropped into belay as well.

“Thanks, Major. I appreciated the backup.”

“As you said, Colonel…” The Russian’s voice was still emotionless. “Where you go, I go.”