The Arctic Event

Chapter Fifty-one

Over the Arctic Ocean

“This is Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Do you copy?”

Major Saunders had repeated the call so often it had started to lose meaning for him. They had completed their final top-off from the tanker, and in the Osprey’s cargo bay the ranger strikers and the ABC men were tightening harness and running their final equipment checks. Soon they’d be coming in on their objective. For the first time in days the radio bands were clear of solar interference. But Saunders was beginning to suspect there was no one out there to answer.

“This is Black Horse Lead…”

“Black Horse Lead, this is Wednesday Island Point,” a crisp, businesslike voice crackled clearly into Saunders’s earphones. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith. I am coded Cipher Venger Five. Do you read me, Black Horse?”

Saunders’s thumb crushed the transmit button on his joystick. “We read you, Colonel, four by four. We are your Mike force. What is your situation?”

“We are off Wednesday and airborne at this time. Situation on the island is critical and unstable. What is your ETA, Black Horse, and do you have fighter assets attached?”

“We are approximately twenty-five minutes out from Wednesday. Negative on fighter assets; we are lift and tanker only.”

“That’s not going to do us any good then,” the voice replied. “Be advised Wednesday Island should be considered a potentially hot LZ. Hostiles may include Russian Spetsnaz elements. Also be advised the Primary Package is verified. I say again, the Primary Package is verified. Primary Package is also off the island and is being sling carried by a Mil 26, that is Mary…India…Lima…two…six, Halo heavy-lift helicopter, Canadian civil registry, Golf…Kilo…Tango…Alpha. Halo is now heading south-southeast from Wednesday Island at approximately ninety knots. We are in pursuit at this time. Require immediate interceptor launch. Engage and destroy Halo at all costs. I say again, engage and destroy at all costs!”

“Understood, Wednesday Point. We will relay intercept request, but it’s going to take a while. Even the jets will need a couple of hours to get out this far.”

“Roger that, Black Horse, understood.” There was a fatalism in the reply. “We’ll do what we can until they get here.”

Anton Kretek peered down from the crane operator’s cab on the port side of the Halo. Seventy feet below the huge helicopter, the lozenge-shaped containment vessel twisted slowly at the end of its heavy Kevlar cable. Torn wiring and ductwork trailed raggedly from either end of the silvery reservoir, and the lifting harness wasn’t as secure as it might have been, but the pearl had been stolen from the oyster.

It had been a tough, sloppy job, but what did it matter? It was the last. It had cost him a number of his best men, including his chief of staff, but that might have worked out for the best. Mikhail would have had to have been liquidated in due course anyway. The man simply knew too much. Now was as good a time as any to have done with it.

There was, of course, the chance he might be captured back on the island, along with his knowledge about the remainder of the anthrax retrieval operation, but Kretek had prepared for even that eventuality.

Then there was also the unavenged death of his sister’s son, but pish, be damned to the woman. The boy was dead. What profit was there in fussing about it now?

Kretek groped in the pocket of his parka for his Balkan-blend cigarettes and lighter, then recalled the big half-empty blivett of jet fuel filling the helicopter’s central cargo bay. Telling his nicotine-starved nerves to be patient for a few hours more, he went forward from the crane cab to the cockpit.

The demolitions men and the surviving members of the security force slouched on the cargo bay deck, their heads resting on their knees, or sprawled on the fuel blivet, using it as a waterbed. In the cockpit the Canadian pilot was on the controls while his Byelorussian copilot intermittently stuck his head into the observation bubble set in the cockpit side window, checking on the status of the sling load.

“There is a change in plans.” Kretek lifted his voice over the thrum of the rotors. “We won’t be returning to the trawler. We will turn directly south at the second refueling depot.”

“Whatever you say.” The pilot’s reply was laconic. “Where are we heading?”

“I will give you the GPS coordinates later.”

“However you want it.”

Kretek approved of the man. A true professional, he asked no questions. Were Kretek staying in the trade, he would have considered keeping the fellow around. Such men were useful. As it was, he, his crew, and his aircraft would end up at the bottom of an isolated Canadian lake instead of Hudson Bay.

As for the anthrax, it would be left well camouflaged near a logging road in the Canadian Northwest Territories. In a few months, after the heat was off and after he had negotiated a sale of the merchandise, it could be extracted by truck. This was the secondary plan that not even Mikhail Vlahovitch had known about. It meant sacrificing the men he’d left on the trawler as well, but so it went. He no longer needed them, either. A momentary smile tugged at Kretek’s mouth. What did they call it, “corporate downsizing”?

The arms merchant leaned against the side of the cockpit, bracing himself against the intermittent low-altitude turbulence, and again fought down the urge for a cigarette. He would rather miss the trade, but with the sale of the anthrax it would not be wise to continue. He would be too rich, too complacent. The wise man knew when to call enough.

The Halo’s copilot suddenly gave an explosive curse, staring out of the portside cockpit window. They were no longer alone in the sky. Another aircraft was paralleling their course, half a kilometer off. The small Day-Glo orange helicopter, the one they had left back on the island. The one he had been in too much of a rush to destroy.

Kretek echoed the copilot’s curse. Complacency was already biting him in the ass.

The arms merchant dove back into the cargo hold. Twisting the quick release handle on the escape hatch, port side, just aft of the cockpit, he took a grip on a grab bar and kicked the hatch out of its frame.

“Get two men with machine guns here!” he bellowed over the roar of the slipstream. “Then two others at each of the other hatches. Move, you bastards! Move!”

The Long Ranger held warily on the hip of the heavy lifter. Slowed by the ominous cylindrical shape dangling beneath its belly, the Halo hadn’t been difficult to overtake.

“It’s rather like a dog chasing an automobile,” Valentina mused as they studied the giant Russian-built helicopter. “Once you catch the damn thing what do you do with it?”

The larger aircraft stolidly continued its lumbering retreat away from Wednesday Island. To the southeast, the cloud-capped outlines of the next rank of arctic islands thrust above the horizon.

“This is not good, Jon,” she continued, kneeling on the deck beside the open side hatch. “If he drops down to fly nap-of-the-Earth inside of the archipelago, the DEW Line will never be able to pick him up amid that tangle of islands and channels. It’ll be blind luck if the interceptors can find him.”

“I know it. That’s why we’ve got to stay on him.”

Randi looked back over the pilot’s seat. “Just letting you know, Jon, we don’t have all that much of a fuel reserve.”

“I know that, too.” Again they were running out of assets, and every minute and mile was taking them deeper into the frozen wastes of the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago and farther from allies and aid.

“Watch it!” Valentina exclaimed. A black rectangle had suddenly appeared in the Halo’s fuselage, the jettisoned door fluttering away toward the pack ice below. “He’s opening his gun ports!”

Sparks of muzzle flame danced inside the open doorway, and gun smoke streaked down the flank of the heavy lifter. Randi countered, flaring the Long Ranger back. Climbing and sideslipping, she put her smaller, nimbler machine above and behind the shield of the larger helicopter’s blade arc, positioning so that Kretek’s gunners could not fire on them without damaging their own rotors.

Below them, the Halo weaved sluggishly, like an elephant waving its tusks at a prowling lion, the containment vessel swinging, pendulumlike, at the end of its tether.

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if they developed a bad case of butterfingers and just dropped the damn thing?” Valentina commented.

“A nice thought, but it’s something we can’t count on,” Smith replied. “Randi, what are the odds of our shooting out one of their engines?”

The blonde shook her head. “Not good at all! The Halo is built to Russian mil spec. It’s a flying tank, designed to absorb a lot of battle damage.”

“There’s got to be some point of vulnerability!” Smith insisted.

Randi frowned in thought. “Maybe the Jesus nut, the main rotor hub. If you can cut a push-pull rod or fracture a blade hinge, that might do it.”

“Val, it’s your rifle. What do you think?”

The historian looked dubiously at her old Winchester. “I don’t know. The.220 Swift is an excellent man killer but a stinkin’ antimateriel round. There’s too much velocity and not enough penetration.”

“Can you do it?” Smith insisted.

“I can but try. No promises, though. Randi, bring us in, close as you can and as steady as you can.”

She lay down on the deck in the prone firing position. Twisting the sling of the model 70 around her forearm, she aimed out of the side hatch, nestling in behind the sights.

Stacked almost on top of each other, the Long Ranger and the Halo thundered through the arctic sky, a crow mercilessly harrying a vulture. In the Halo’s cockpit, the deck below Kretek’s feet swayed ominously, the arcing swings of the containment vessel at the end of the cable wrenching at the heavy lifter.

“They’re firing at us!” the arms dealer bellowed into the ear of the Halo’s pilot. “Do something!” With the escape hatches kicked open, the interior of the big helicopter was a welter of wind roar and engine shriek.

“I can’t maneuver with a sling load!” the pilot yelled back. “The only way we can evade is by cutting loose!”

An automatic pistol appeared in Kretek’s hand. “Try it and I’ll kill you.”

It was no idle threat, as the Halo’s pilot was well aware. But the threat presented by that other rotor-winged gadfly was not idle, either. There was the tap and screech of a bullet strike on the upper fuselage.

“Climb, you bastard!” Kretek snapped. “Climb above them so we can shoot back!”

Gritting his teeth, the pilot twisted his throttle grip to maximum war power, pushing the Tumanski gas turbines to their limits and sending the tachometers and temperature gauges swinging up and into their red zones.

Randi Russell made the Long Ranger dance, maintaining her position and distance from the lumbering Halo as if connected to it by an invisible boom, keeping behind the invisible shield of the larger helicopter’s rotor plain, denying the hostile gunners a target.

Valentina Metrace worked her own skills to their limit as well. Lips curled into a snarl of concentration, she worked the model 70 like an automaton, tracking on target, jacking the bolt to eject the empties, and firing on the split-seconds the sight picture became right. Three times she paused to feed fresh shells into the rifle, but as the third magazine emptied, she lowered the weapon, shaking her head.

“It’s no good, Jon,” she yelled. “I’m connecting, but the damn bullets just explode when they hit. Too much vel. It’s not going to work.”

“What else can we try?”

She looked up at him from the deck. “We try for the pilots. There’s the same velocity-and-penetration problem, though. I’ll have to first blow out the windscreen and then fire through the hole to get at the men.”

“If that’s what we’ve got, we go with it.”

“One additional problem.” She shoved her hand into her sweatshirt pocket. When she removed and opened it, three slender, sharp-nosed cartridges gleamed in the palm of her glove. “That’s the lot. Then the cow’s dry.”

“Like I said, if that’s what we’ve got. Randi, set us up.”

She had been listening to the exchange. “I’ll have to drop below the rotor arc to give you a line of fire into the cockpit. They’ll get to shoot back.”

“I’ll say yet again, if that’s what we’ve got.”

“Where are they?” the Halo’s pilot demanded, eyeing his sideview mirrors. “Where’d the cocksuckers go?”

“I do not know.” His copilot twisted in his seat and peered out the side bubble. “They dropped behind us.”

“What is it?” Kretek demanded from over the pilot’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” the pilot replied shortly. “They’re back on our six. They’re trying something.”

Then he felt the vibration through his controls as a second blast of rotor wash interfered with his own. A shadow tore over the cockpit as the floats of the Long Ranger flashed past, mere feet overhead, in a shallow accelerating dive. Pulling a couple of hundred feet ahead, the smaller helicopter skidded in midair, presenting its open side hatch to the Halo.

“What the f-”

The left side of the cockpit windscreen exploded in a hailstorm of pebbled glass. The copilot screamed incoherently, clawing at his shredded face. Then his scream was abruptly cut off as the second murderously precise rifle slug caught the Byelorussian in the throat, almost decapitating him.

A combat flier’s instincts took over, and the pilot locked his controls over. The nose of the Halo came around, sluggishly but quick enough to put the third bullet past his shoulder instead of into his head.

The Halo continued its wild turnaway, shuddering on the verge of a rotor stall. The pilot could hear the door gunner blazing wildly back at their attacker as he fought with the cyclic and collective, trying not to further stress the Halo’s critically overloaded airframe. His hand went to the T-grip handle of the emergency sling release.

“No!” The muzzle of Kretek’s automatic jammed into the pilot’s throat. Glaring like a wild boar at bay, the arms merchant wedged himself between the cockpit seats, his left arm a bloody ruin from the hypervelocity bullet that had missed the pilot. “No!”

Grimly Randi held her course until she heard Val’s rifle crack out its last shot. The Halo was turning on them like a ship of the line presenting its broadside, automatic weapons fire lashing from its side hatches. Submachine gun slugs dotted the flank of the Long Ranger. With her windscreen starring with bullet hits, Randi kicked up onto a rotor tip and dove under the firestreams.

In the cargo bay, Smith locked one arm around a seat brace and the other around Valentina as the radical evasion threatened to hurl them both out of the plunging aircraft. For a fragment of a second they could see the anthrax reservoir lashing wildly at the end of its sling cable, threatening to sweep down on them like Thor’s hammer. Then they were past and diving clear, beneath and behind the Halo.

Smith stuck his head out into the slipstream, looking after the fate of the stricken heavy lifter, hoping, praying to see the sling cable breaking or the big helicopter spinning down out of the sky. For a few heartening moments the Halo did seem to stagger on the verge of departing control. Then it stabilized and resumed its remorseless drone to the southeast.

The outer islands of the archipelago lay very close now.

Randi swung in behind the larger helicopter once more, climbing for position. When she called back, her voice was light. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had it with this. I’m just going to go up there and stick a pontoon in his rotors. We’ll land a little lopsided, but that’s okay.”

It was the casual declaration of a kamikaze run. Tapping the Halo’s rotor with one of the Ranger’s floats would indeed finish the job. But the odds of the Long Ranger surviving the resulting kinetic explosion and spray of disintegrating blade fragments were almost nonexistent.

Randi knew this full well. So did Smith and so did Valentina. The black-haired historian gave him an ironic smile and a faint throwaway shrug of her shoulders. It was the way of the trade. It must always be the job and getting the job done. Survival was not mandatory, especially with the lives of thousands in the balance.

There was no sense in prolonging matters. Randi had them positioned above and behind the lumbering Halo once more, poised to strike. Before giving the word, Smith took a final look around the Long Ranger’s interior, seeking for some asset, some option, that he might have overlooked.

There was simply nothing left. Only the big aluminum carryall of lab gear and his half-emptied backpack, a few loops of well-used climbing rope drooling out of it.

And then Jon Smith grinned, a tight, humorless, feral grin.

“What are they doing now?” It was growing harder to yell over the engines. Kretek could feel the weakness creeping upon him. The crude tourniquet on his shattered arm was only slowing the growth of the blood pool at his feet.

“How the fuck should I know?” the pilot raged back, casting a longing look at the release lever. “They’re hanging behind us again.”

“Hold your course.” Kretek stumbled back toward the crane cab amidships. From where they huddled near the open doorways he could feel his men’s eyes upon him. They were starting to fail; they were beginning to fear death more than they feared Anton Kretek. And Kretek felt the first shadow of that fear himself.

How could he be beaten by someone called Jon Smith?

Somehow the arms merchant knew it was the American team leader from Wednesday Island back there. The man the college professor had spoken of but whom he, Kretek, had never met face to face. Who was he? Who was this anonymous man with the bland name to end so many dreams and plans?

Painfully Kretek hauled himself into the glass-walled crane cab, looking astern.

There it was! The Long Ranger was almost on top of them again, diving in like a striking hawk. And this time there was something suspended beneath the smaller helicopter.

As if it were aping the Halo and its sling load of anthrax, a silver metal case dangled below one of the Long Ranger’s pontoons on a rope. And a man was braced in the side hatch of the Ranger, feeding the rope over the side. Kretek had an impression of dark hair flattened in the rotor wash, and hard, fine-planed features and narrowed, intent eyes that cut across the distance between them like a cold blue death ray. This, then, was Smith. This was his executioner. Kretek bellowed a wordless cry of denial and rage and horror.

The heavy equipment case dipped into the Halo’s rotor sweep. Smith felt the end of climbing rope smoke out from between his gloved hands as the case was smashed and hurled away by a blade tip.

Smith rolled back into the Long Ranger’s cargo compartment, Valentina helping to drag him through the side hatch. “Randi,” he yelled, “get us out of here!”

A savage, racketing vibration jackhammered through the Halo’s frame as Kretek staggered back toward the cockpit. The pilot was fighting with the blood-smeared controls, his dead copilot looking on, his near-severed head shaking sardonically.

“That’s it!” the pilot screamed. “We’ve got to jettison and land!”

“No,” Kretek fell back on the threat of his leveled automatic. “Keep going.”

“You stupid son of a bitch! We’ve taken a major blade strike! The fucking rotor assembly’s coming apart! If we don’t land now we are going to fucking die!”

The pilot grabbed for the sling release, and Kretek used the last of his strength to smash his gun butt down on the groping hand.

“No!”

Then all time for debate was past. The Halo’s tortured transmission exploded like a howitzer shell. Centrifugal force hurled fifty-foot rotors away like thrown sword blades, and the Halo pitched over into its death dive, the white ice and black water of the pack below filling the shattered windscreen as it rushed toward them.

Anton Kretek screamed like the trapped animal he was. Emptying his pistol into the pilot, he denied the Canadian an extra second or two of life.

They watched as smoke and sparks streamed back from the Halo’s engine bays; then the rotor assembly came apart and tore away, and the massive helicopter assumed the flight dynamics of a filing cabinet.

Pitching over onto its nose, it plummeted toward the sea ice. With gravity’s tension off the sling tether, the bioagent reservoir seemed to float beside the falling hulk of the heavy lifter, the maimed aircraft and its canister of death tangled in an entwining, dream-slow dance.

Then they hit, and a mushroom of black and scarlet flame sprouted and grew over the huge hole blasted through the ice.

“What about the anthrax, Jon?” Valentina inquired, watching the fireball.

“Flame and seawater,” Smith replied. “You couldn’t ask for two better spore destroyers.”

“That’s it, then?’

“That’s it.” Smith looked forward into the cockpit. His throat was raw from yelling and his lungs burned from the cold. As his adrenaline load burned out he was suddenly aware of the aching bruises from the previous night’s icefall. It was becoming harder to force the words out. “Randi, do you think you can find the Haley from here?”

“With the radios working, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

“Then take us back to the ship. Somebody else can pick up the pieces back on Wednesday.”

“I hear that!”

Smith slammed the side hatches shut and collapsed with his back to the pilot seats. Unbidden, his eyes closed, and he was only dimly aware of a warmth beside him: Valentina’s head resting lightly on his shoulder.