The Arctic Event

Finally, she stood on rock once more. The target ledge left a great deal to be desired. At its glacier-side end, it was barely as wide as a man was tall, and slick with glaze ice. Yet it was still an improvement over dangling at the end of a rope. Pressing back against the cliff face, she unlatched from the main line and gave it a signaling tug. It slithered back up the edge of the glacier and out of her light stick’s illumination.

Valentina closed her eyes to the wind- and snow-wracked blackness of the night and took a moment to slap down that shrieking, weeping thing in the back of her mind.

A few minutes later the first of the packs skidded down to the ledge. Signaling for more slack on the safety line, she dragged the equipment to a wider section of the ledge, beyond her judged reach of any avalanche, methodically repeating the process with the other packs and the cased rifles as they were lowered. Pausing, she studied the mound of equipment and weapons for a moment. This wasn’t a particularly auspicious environment for controlling a hostile and potentially dangerous prisoner.

“Damn it, Jon,” she murmured, “this could have been so much easier-just scrick, and over and done with.”

She took a piton and a rock hammer from the gear stack and hunted for a fissure in the cliff face at about head height. Finding one, she sank the piton into it. Taking a short hank of loose rope from one of the packs, she ran it through the fixed ring of the piton, whipping a loop and slipknot into one end.

Looking up, Valentina saw a pair of green glows at the top of the glacier. Jon’s light stick and a second, starting the descent of the glacier edge, moving slowly and painfully. Smyslov was on his way down. Supporting the Russian’s full weight, Smith was feeding the line through the belaying point a few jerky feet at a time.

Again Val wondered about both men, but especially about Jon Smith. Her professional survivor’s instincts told her Smith was wrong about the Russian, that Smyslov was a foolish risk to be taking. And yet, maybe that was one of the things that drew her to Jon. Scruples were perforce rare within the profession. Maybe this was a man strong enough not to be totally expedient.

With a clatter of dislodged ice chips, Smyslov backed off the glacier face and onto the ledge, his bound hands gripping the main rope. Valentina flipped her safety line aside and came in behind the Russian.

She slid the M-7 utility knife/bayonet out of her harness sheath and lightly pressed the tip of its heavy blade into the small of his back. “I’m right behind you, Gregori. I’m going to take you off the climbing rope now and I’m going to tuck you out of the way for a little bit. Colonel Smith wants to keep you alive, so let’s both work toward that goal, shall we?”

“I am agreeable,” the Russian replied, his voice flat. “What do you think about it?”

“I think I am under Colonel Smith’s orders.” Cautiously she used her free hand to reach around in front of Smyslov, to unclip the climbing rope from his harness. “But I wouldn’t push the point. Now, I will step in close to the cliff face, and you will turn around slowly, facing outward, and step past me. Please recall it’s still a long way down and I’m the one on the safety line. All right, let’s go.”

They accomplished the maneuver like a cautious dance step, Smyslov moving past her down the ledge. Taking a grip on his climbing harness with one hand, Valentina followed, the knife poised and aimed at the base of his spine.

Valentina caught the metallic glint of the piton she had driven into the rock face. She let Smyslov move under it.

“Stop…Face the cliff…Easy, now.”

Smyslov obeyed. Valentina swiftly looped the slipknot over Smyslov’s disposacuff-bound wrists. Hauling on the free end of the line, she lifted his wrists to the piton. She ran a second loop around the join of the disposacuffs and drew both tight, snubbing the rope off.

“That should keep you out of mischief,” she said, sheathing her knife.

“Why?” Smyslov asked, his voice toneless.

“Why what?”

“Why go through all this? Why not simply kill me?”

“I must confess, Gregori, the thought has occurred,” she replied, leaning against the cliff face for a moment. “But Jon doesn’t fancy the idea for some reason. When you called your Spetsnaz friends down on us last afternoon…Was it just last afternoon?…And when you tried to shoot Jon in the cave, that would have been quite good enough for me, but not for our colonel. He seems to think you are not totally beyond redemption. Or possibly he just doesn’t play the game that way.”

“He is a good man,” Smyslov murmured over the rush of the wind.

“Probably better than you or I or anyone else on this island.” A wistfulness crept unbidden into her reply. “He’ll die being a good man one of these days. Well, we’ll be back with you shortly. I do hope you won’t mind hanging around for a bit.”

She edged back down the ledge to the glacier interface, the bergschrund, as Smith had called it. Then she remembered his final instruction. She went back to the gear cache for a second piton. Returning to the glacier face, she dropped to her knees on the ledge, searching for a belaying point. It wasn’t easy; her light source was feeble, and the ledge seemed a solid slab of stone. Finally she found a narrow crack near the lip of the ledge, and she took care to drive the piton in as deeply as possible. Not wanting to unhitch herself from the safety rope, she hooked a snap carabiner through the piton ring and latched a loop of the line through that, leaving herself enough slack for free movement. Standing once more, she moved below the glacier face and gave the main rope a signal tug.

At the top of the glacier, she saw the ball of green luminance that marked Jon Smith start its bounding descent down the ice extrusion.

Not long now and he would be with her. A hundred feet to go…seventy…fifty…

Valentina heard a creaking groan, the yielding of inorganic matter on a massive scale, followed by a series of explosive cracks. She threw herself back against the cliff face, pressing spine to stone just as the entire vertical edge of the glacier fractured and dissolved into a thundering cascade of tumbling, grinding ice.

Val was aware of the strike and brush of ice fragments, none of them quite large enough to bludgeon her or carry her away. The big stuff, the car- and truck-sized slabs of glacier, were tipping outward, their weight and momentum carrying them beyond the shelf of rock. Then a streak of green light plummeted past en route to oblivion, and she dimly heard her own scream of denial over the grating roar of the icefall. Then something seized her with irresistible force, snatching her off her feet and hurling her to the ledge. Her head slammed into stone; white light blazed behind her eyes; then blackness took her.

Consciousness returned with the sound of an accented voice calling her name. She found herself lying facedown on the rock shelf, u

It was the safety line, and the thing that was prodding her so uncomfortably was the piton and carabinier that she had looped it through. Drawn taut, the line ran from her climbing harness, through the carabiner, and over the lip of the ledge. Valentina’s last few seconds of memory returned, and she recalled the avalanche and Smith’s chem light falling past her.

“Jon!”

There was no answer from the black void beside her. The lifeline hung rigid, a dead weight hanging suspended from its end. She pushed and writhed, trying to draw back from the edge against the merciless drag of the rope, only to find she couldn’t gain even an inch.