White Death

Nineteen

Naked, Nick Carter couldn't pursue Anna. He ran back into the tent, threw on clothes, and raced back outside. He stared into the thick whiteness. There was no sign of her. There wouldn't be. She'd see to that, and the storm would help. The blizzard poured a curtain of thick wet flakes down. The wind hurled snow back up from the ground. The temperature must have been forty below zero.

He struggled through drifts, making wider arcs around the tent. She could have been gone eight hours. With the right conditions, she'd have been dead in fifteen minutes.

He forced his way on, the tent fading in and out of the sheets of whiteness. The cold pierced his bones. He pushed the danger from his mind. She'd left so that he could move swiftly to complete the mission. The dream about Scott's empty dog sled, the remarks that she was holding him back, all came back to haunt Carter. He shuddered and stumbled on, hoping, searching for the bright blue snowsuit.

Then he fell into the drift.

It was soft, wet, like quicksand sucking him deeper and deeper. He clawed the snow, coughed for air. He felt himself sinking into oblivion. It was easy. He was tired, and it was very easy just to stay in the womb of snow. And die.

He jerked with the thought. His mind had grown sluggish with the cold. Soon he wouldn't care.

He struggled, found the rock ledge that the drift sided, and pushed up through the snow. He made his arms and legs work until he emerged, clawing his way out to lie on the surface, panting.

He couldn't stay there. Had to go on. Find Anna. He rolled off the drift and stumbled to his feet. Where next? Where had he come from?

He looked around. He didn't know. He was going to die because he didn't know. And Silver Dove would complete their plan to take over the world.

With all his tremendous will, the Killmaster forced himself to focus his numb mind. He had to get back to the tent or perish. He had to accept Anna's sacrifice.

Then he saw it. The brief shine of chrome. The skimobile. The curtain of white closed, but Carter held the direction steady in his mind and, stunned and grieving, fought his way back to the shelter of the tent.

The next day, the blizzard stopped. Stone-cold silence enveloped the lonely tent Immediately Carter tried the radio. All he got was static. He dressed and went outside.

She'd taken nothing with her. She'd put on her blue snow-suit and walked away. Any direction. As far away as she could get. Where he couldn't find her. Couldn't rescue her.

He went to the skimobile and kicked it. Once. Twice. He wanted to throw it over the side of the mountain. He wanted to smash the mountain into a million pieces and hurl them into the face of the merciless gods.

Instead, the AXE agent packed supplies and took down the tent. He loaded everything onto the skimobile. He knew where he was going. He'd planned the shortest, quickest route to the closest base that he was sure he could trust.

He started the motor and drove off, Anna's beautiful face with the flowing flaxen hair set forever in his mind.

Northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula on the Weddell Sea sat the cereal-box structures of the United Kingdom's Halley Station. After a loss of funding during the fighting on the Falkland Islands, the station again pulsed with activity, much of it centered on new high-speed satellite communications equipment and a new geophysical observatory.

It was a clear Antarctic day, the sun gleaming above the horizon. Assorted scientists and maintenance crew walked and rode around the snowy compound, checking for damage caused by the blizzard.

Inside a quiet office, alerted at last by Carter's helicopter radio, sat David Hawk and Chester ffolkes, their faces grim.

"Sorry about Anna," Hawk said. He pulled a cigar from his pocket and stared at it thoughtfully. "Blenkochev and Leslee Warner. Their daughter. Must have been a damned fine agent." He looked up at Carter. "You thought a lot of her. It happens."

"So that's how that bloody bastard got away, David," ffolkes said and smiled. The gold on his teeth shone in the overhead lights. "He never did take the usual way out. And all these years we thought he'd killed poor Leslee. Sorry she ended up in Moscow. Boring place. Gray. They say Siberia's worse, but I don't believe it. I suppose that's what she gets for defecting."

Hawk nodded and lit the cigar. His cheeks bellowed as he drew it to life. He looked at Carter, waiting.

"I've radioed Lev Larionov," Carter reported. "He'll relay the plan to Blenkochev and tell him about Anna. Her death should keep him in line, although I think he's sincere about not wanting General Skobelev and the Silver Doves in power."

"A bit ticklish," ffolkes said, "breaking into a place that manufactures bacteria for biological warfare. We'll need all three of you. We'll have the troops ready by the time you get there."

Carter nodded. His thoughts, energy, and emotions were now focused on only one thing: the mission.

"Good luck, Nick," Hawk said solemnly. "I'm afraid you'll need it."

Mike Strange was waiting for him in the little nuclear helicopter. Her face was flushed pink with excitement. A ski cap hid her chestnut hair, only a few glossy strands blowing in the breeze.

"I'll pilot," she said happily. "God! It's so good to be out!"

Her enthusiasm made him smile.

"All right," he said. "Glad you're well again. We'll head toward. Novolazarevskaya, I found a place we can land that's close to the Silver Dove installation."

She turned on the helicopter, listened with satisfaction to its noise.

"And our antiterrorist backup troops?" she said.

"They'll be flown in from the opposite direction. Americans, New Zealanders, English, and Russians through Blenkochev's Silver Dove sleeper. An international force to solve a global problem. They'll wait hidden outside on skimobiles. Our job is to sneak in seize General Skobelev, and isolate the lab. If the timing's right, the units will be able to come in then and take care of the rest of the Silver Doves before the Doves get us."

She looked at him, her dark eyes worried.

"There are so many things that can go wrong," she said. "Too many," he agreed.

"And if we can't prevent one of the fanatics from setting free some lethal bacteria?"

"Then it won't matter," Carter said somberly. "We're all dead anyway."

Silently involved with their own thoughts and worries, they flew up into the glassy Antarctic air, over the snow and rock of Coats Land into Queen Maud Land and toward the mountains that rimmed the Princess Astrid Coast. Alert, they watched the skies for Silver Dove aircraft.

Ahead, the mountains where the Silver Dove installation was concealed rose raw and rocky, the snow settled fluffy and innocent as clouds into valleys and crevasses. Some where in those snowy depths brave Anna's body was buried.

"I'm sorry about her," Mike said at last. "Anna Blenkochev. Rotten break."

"Yes."

They flew above a pair of snow petrels, hardy Antarctic birds that nest on mountain crags as much as two hundred miles inland, and then above a striated caracara, dark and hawklike, one of the world's rarest birds of prey. The two agents flew on as the sun slowly circled the horizon and shadows moved like sluggish wraiths across the sparkling, rocky earth.

They landed on the flatlands where Carter and Anna had camped. The marks of their tent and skimobile were still there.

While Mike unleashed the new skimobile from the back of the helicopter, Carter walked in widening arcs around the area. He knew it was hopeless, but he had to be sure. And he wanted to give Anna's body a proper burial.

But there was no sign of her. Snow from the blizzard was piled an additional fifteen feet in some places. He covered the entire flat area and then ranged around the rim. She couldn't have gotten any farther in the thick, bitter storm. He remembered stories of some bodies being found thirty years after they'd been lost in Antarctic blizzards.

"Nick!" Mike called. "Let's go!"

It was over. Anna was dead, and he wouldn't find her body. It was unrealistic to think otherwise. He needed to put her out of his mind. Get back to the living. Get back to the vital work he had to do.

He slogged back toward the skimobile, and Mike met him in it halfway. Her vibrant face watched him compassionately.

"I'll drive," he told her.

She nodded, sliding across the seat. He hopped in, and felt the wheel hum under his hands. It was a familiar sensation. Machinery at work. Reliable. Trustworthy. Depending on you for care. But without emotion and passion. What made humanity special. Why he loved his work, making a better world for people.

He smiled, turned the skimobile, and headed back the familiar trail toward the Silver Dove installation.

"Keep close watch," he warned Mike. "The Doves will be out patrolling. And they wear white suits. It's almost impossible to see against the snow and ice."

She nodded, then glanced at her and Carter's khaki snow clothing.

"But when our antiterrorist troops go to work," she said, "they'll at least be able to tell us and themselves from the Silver Doves."

"That's the idea."

Skillfully Carter drove the skimobile along the trail, along ridges, over crests, between slopes, and down valleys as they drew closer and closer to the mountain mat housed the Silver Doves.

At last Carter stopped the machine. He gestured for Mike to put on her cross-country skis, and he put on his. With backpacks and ski poles, they silently, stealthily made their way on a new path that Carter hoped…

Suddenly he raised the special air rifle that Lev Larionov had given him so long ago in the Doves' dungeon. He had to be quick before he was spotted.

Mike's eyebrows went up with surprise. She looked around for a target.

Carter shot across a wide gorge. The shot made a dull, quiet sound.

Mike's gaze followed the line of his trajectory. Across from them, a tall figure dressed all in white suddenly stood, grasping his chest. He was far enough away that he was as small as a child's doll. He let out a low cry of pain and toppled down over the high mesa, spinning end over end, until he landed silently below, almost invisible in the snow.

"One of the sentries?" Mike said, impressed.

Carter nodded grimly.

The one who radioed the Dove headquarters for reinforcements when Anna, Blenkochev, and I wanted to be captured," he said. "One of the reasons to let yourself be captured at a secret base is to get enough information so that you can break in later undetected."

"It's a dangerous way to get the information."

"But sometimes it's the only way," he said. "Now we can backtrack and follow the trail for a while with less chance of discovery. On the other side of that mesa is the valley where the Silver Doves have dug in."

They skied back and around to the sheer rock wall where they could look down. Mike watched the white stick figures below through binoculars.

"They'd be impossible to see from the air," she murmured. "They may be bigots, but they're smart ones."

She handed the binoculars back to Carter. He tucked them into his backpack and checked his watch.

"Sixty-four minutes," he said. "Should be plenty of time."

She smiled, and they skied silently down the mountain. They stopped behind a house-size boulder. They could hear the noisy motors of trucks and jeeps not far away.

They took off their skis and backpacks, opened the backpacks, and unfolded white suits made by personnel at Halley to fit Carter's description. The two agents put the snowsuits on over their khaki suits. Each white suit had a silver dove embroidered over the heart.

They dug a hole in the snowdrift behind them and buried their backpacks. They stepped into their white cross-country skis and locked them to their boots. They slung the authentic Silver Dove air rifles over their shoulders, pulled white ski masks down over their hair and faces, and like two sentries returning for dinner, they skied around two behemoth boulders and into the Silver Dove valley.

Carter looked at his watch.

"Thirty-three minutes," he told Mike.

She checked her own watch and nodded.

They skied on as white jeeps and trucks carrying construction crews and boxes drove sedately on the packed-snow road. Boulders had been bulldozed aside. A taped Russian folk tune played from someone's skimobile.

The two disguised agents skied on toward the massive doors that opened into the Silver Dove installation. None of the valley workers looked at Carter and Mike with more than idle curiosity, probably grateful they didn't have the boring job of sentry.

Tension growing, using the information his careful observations had given him, Carter and Mike skied through the doors and into the exhaust-filled warehouse. Inside the tall doors they look off their skis and put them over their shoulders.

"Twenty-one minutes," he told her.

They carried their skis and ski poles past the rows of vehicles and workers. Carter leading, Mike silently behind, toward the doors hewn into the granite.

There Carter stopped and lilted his ski mask to encircle his head. Mike did the same, her long chestnut hair hidden beneath the remaining cap. Without makeup, walking with her shoulders swinging rather than with her hips, a stern expression on her usually radiant face, she looked masculine enough to pass a superficial visual examination.

They left their skis propped against the rough granite wall, took off their mittens, and went through the door into the heated hallway. Their quiet, efficient, and safe passage couldn't continue forever.

They walked down the hall past clattering typewriters and ringing telephones. Office workers in white slacks and shirts moved back and forth across the hail carrying clipboards and sheaves of papers.

Carter and Mike looked straight ahead, businesslike. They were two ordinary sentries on the way back to their bunks.

They continued down the hall, around corners, toward the door of General Yevgeny Skobelev's office. Carter checked his watch.

"Fifteen minutes," Carter muttered under his breath to Mike.

She nodded, whistling tunelessly.

They stopped at a water fountain and drank, people passing up and down the hall.

In a short lull, the hall briefly empty, they swung their air rifles into their hands.

"Twelve minutes," Carter said.

They were cutting it close. But if they had no problems, the timing would be perfect.

Weapons aimed straight ahead, Carter opened Skobelev's door.

"Drop the guns!" Skobelev ordered harshly.

He held Carter's Luger, Wilhelmina, and it was aimed directly at Carter's heart. Carter could kill Skobelev. A shot through the head and it would be over. But he needed Skobelev, and time was running out.