The Arctic Event

Chapter Forty

The North Face, Wednesday Island

Smith flexed an all-environment chemical glow stick, breaking the inner capsule. Shaking its green luminescence to life, he clipped it to an outer cargo pocket of his snow smock. He could only hope that none of the Spetsnaz force had a line of sight on them. For this next evolution they had to be able to see.

A second pale green specter materialized in the swirling snow as Valentina lit off another chemical light. In the combination of the two glows they could just make out the irregular edge of a glacial precipice a few yards away.

They had reached the interface. They could descend no further on the broken, tumbled ice of the glacier. They must cross to the solid rock of West Peak, if the mountain would accept them.

Smith shrugged off his pack and drew a flare and an ice screw from its side pouches. Kneeling, he cranked the screw into the surface of the glacier, angling it away from the edge. Clipping his safety line to the anchor, he stood and edged carefully to the unstable shoulder of the ice. Striking the flare’s igniter, he pitched the hissing red ball of flame into the black void below. He watched as it bounced and sputtered down the edge of the jumbled icefall to hang up on a ledge perhaps 120 feet down. In the ruddy glare he could make out the darkness of basalt, the peak facing. But beyond the ledge was the void of another, deeper drop-off.

“The photomaps were right.” Smith lifted his voice over the wind. “There is a ledge down there.”

Valentina edged to his side, her hand on the safety line. “It’s not really all that much of a ledge, is it?”

“It widens out and descends the farther west you go, like it does on the south side. I’m just glad there’s a valid traverse we can use to reach it. I wasn’t sure there’d be one.”

Valentina’s hood turned toward him. “What would you have done if there hadn’t been?”

“Let’s just say I’m pleased the subject isn’t going to come up. Once we get on that ledge it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to drop down to the shoreline.”

“The operative word in that sentence, Jon, is ‘once.’”

“We can make it.” Smith forced his confidence again, eyeing the descent. At this point, the glacier ice began its final cascade down the near vertical north wall of the central ridge, a frozen waterfall that extruded slightly from the mountain face. With luck they could work their way down to the ledge in the joining angle between rock and ice.

“I’ll lower you first, Val, then the packs, then Smyslov. I’ll rappel down last.”

He saw Valentina shoot a glance back toward the Russian, who stood defiantly leashed a few feet away. “Jon, might I have a few private words with you?”

“Of course.”

They stepped away from the edge of the glacier, moving down the back trail until they were behind Smyslov. It was hard to tell with the darkness and the bulky clothing, but the Russian seemed to stiffen as they moved past him.

Valentina lifted her snow goggles and pushed down her ice-encrusted snow mask, her face underlit by her glow stick. “We have a problem here,” she said, keeping her voice modulated to be just audible over the wind.

“Just one?” Smith replied with grim humor.

She tilted her head toward Smyslov’s back, not smiling. “I’m serious, Jon. We’ve got to be able to move. He’s slowing us down and he’s complicating a situation that’s quite sticky enough as is.”

“I know it, but we don’t have much of a choice in the matter.” He shifted his own mask and goggles, granting her the right of reading his own facial expressions. “We can’t just turn him loose. If he rejoined the Spetsnaz force he could be a valuable asset for them, and the deck is already stacked against us.”

“I quite agree, Jon. We can’t allow him to return to his Russian friends.” Her expression was as arctic as the environment. “But we can’t very well keep him as a pet. As we lack a convenient POW camp to drop him off at, that leaves us with only one option…”

“Which I am not yet ready to consider.”

She frowned. “Jon, civilization is a marvelous institution and all that, but be practical. We are up against the wall here, literally! If it’s that whole Hippocratic oath thing, I can deal with it. Gregory and I can go for a little walk to admire the scenery-”

“No,” Smith replied firmly.

“Jon, we can’t afford-!”

“I’m not sure if he’s an enemy yet, Val.”

“Jon,” her voice lifted in protest, “I was there this afternoon when the bolshi bastard tried to drop the hammer on you! That doesn’t make him a friend!”

“I know it. Trust me on this. Something’s telling me that Smyslov isn’t sure just what he is yet himself. I want to give him the chance to decide. This is a command decision, Val. It’s not open for discussion.”

“What if he decides he’s a ‘them’ and not an ‘us’?”

“Then, as the book says, we will reassess the situation and take appropriate action as the tactical conditions dictate.”

“And what if hanging onto Smyslov gets us dead, Jon?”

“Then I will have royally fucked up my job, and the failure of this mission will rest entirely with me.”

She started a heated response, hesitated, than smiled wryly. “Well, as long as you’d be willing to admit to it,” she replied, redonning her snow mask. “But if you get us killed before you take me to bed properly at least once, I shall throw an absolute hissy and not speak to you for an entire week.”

Smith laughed aloud in spite of himself and their situation. “Thank you for that motivation, Val,” he replied, giving her shoulders a light squeeze. “Now, let’s get this descent out of the way.”