The Arctic Event

Laughing, Valentina scrambled back into the cabin. Throwing her arms around the pilot’s seat, she administered a gleeful hug.

“What were Jon’s orders?” Randi yelled over her shoulder.

“Oh, he said a lot of things! Let’s go fetch him!”

Smith felt the contrast of the heat beating on his back, and the cold beneath his belly. He’d gone prone beside the flaming frame of the bunk hut, using the swirling smoke for cover. Two of the surviving Spetsnaz were still out ahead of him somewhere, firing short, economical bursts. The third was off to his right at about two o’clock and still working steadily around to an enfilade position. Soon the third man would be in position to lay down suppressive fire, and the first two men could start working in.

Rolling onto his side, Smith squeezed off half a dozen rounds offhand toward the third man, emptying the magazine and driving the Russian to ground momentarily. Snaking back a couple of yards, he found another shallow depression in the snow and reloaded.

This was getting nasty. In another minute he was going to have to fall back to the lab hut, and the smoke cover would start working in favor of the Spetsnaz.

In an action movie this would be an excellent time for the relief force to come thundering over the horizon. But Smith didn’t believe in Hollywood anymore. Incrementally he lifted his head and peered around, judging his terrain. No, on second thought, he wouldn’t fall back any farther. If the Russians reached the first hut, they’d have a line of sight and fire on the helipad. He’d make his stand here.

It was interesting, he noted, how abstractly a person could decide on his dying ground. The scientist and diagnostician within him said it was due merely to the numbing effect of shock and emotional overload. Psychologically, he was not actually comprehending the concept of his own death.

The romantic and the soldier counterpointed that one man’s life really wasn’t that important in the greater scheme of the world, and if it could be expended in the saving of things and people one cared about, the spending was not so bitter.

Behind him he heard the rising metallic whistle of a helicopter’s engines. Good girl, Randi, you always manage. That bastard out at two o’clock would have the best angle of fire on a departing copter, so Smith nestled his cheek against the chill stock of the SR-25. Laying the sighting crosshairs on the knob of snow the Russian was crouching behind, he started knocking chunks off it.

The whine of the turbines intermixed with the drone of lifting rotors. That was it. His people were out of it and clear.

And then Smith realized the drone wasn’t drawing away; it was coming closer. He twisted around and bellowed an incoherent curse.

Hovering in ground effect at a mere ten feet altitude, the Long Ranger was sidling in over the station, snow and smoke swirling in the lift wash. A slender gun barrel protruded from the open side hatch, the venomous crack of Valentina’s Winchester echoing as she put fire in on the Spetsnaz positions.

To rage, hesitate, or even think would see them all dead. One end of the laboratory building was not yet fully involved; its roof not yet burning. Scrambling to his feet, Smith backed toward the lab hut, emptying the SR-25’s magazine, not hoping to hit, but just to keep hostile heads down for a few critical seconds.

The bolt slammed on an empty chamber, and he turned and sprinted the last few yards. He threw his rifle at the rooftop, swearing again as it rebounded and skidded off. There was no time to fool with it. He vaulted for the roof edge, straight-arming himself onto the unburned section. It proved to be not nearly as stable as it had looked, and flame licked at him.

Randi had him spotted, and the Long Ranger moved in, easing past the wind turbine tower, the starboard pontoon pushing closer through the smoke.

Wind-whipped embers seared Smith’s face and charred his clothing. He sprang again, throwing his arms over the top of the float, the helicopter bobbling wildly as his weight came aboard. Squad automatic fire tore into the compressed foam beside him. “Go! Go! G-” His yell strangled off as Valentina grabbed the hood of his parka, heaving furiously to drag him in through the hatch.

Centrifugal force swung his legs out as Randi pivoted the Long Ranger around its rotor mast, putting its tail to the enemy. The nose dipped as she firewalled the throttles, powering away from the firefight.

Smith got a leg up on the float and lunged into the helicopter’s cabin, collapsing on the deck. Valentina collapsed next to him, glaring.

“Don’t start about us coming back for you, Jon!” she yelled over the growing wind roar. “Just don’t even bloody start!”

The last two members of the Spetsnaz platoon, the radio operator and the junior demolitions man, watched the small orange helicopter buzz away over the central ridge. The senior demo man had died spectacularly in the last moments of the fight. Standing to fire at the aircraft, his head had exploded like a bursting balloon, struck by a bullet traveling at some ungodly velocity.

There was nothing to be done for him, and the pair of survivors were unsure of what they could do for themselves. At the moment they were among the most helpless of men: Russian soldiers without an officer to give them orders. They exchanged a few quiet words in their native Yakut tongue; then they started to trudge back toward the dead body of Lieutenant Tomashenko and the stranger he had shot down.

The stone- and snow-streaked flanks of the central ridge wheeled past below the Long Ranger. Randi’s hands hurt, but she could cope with it. Far more importantly, in the face of the cold start and the gunfire, all the instrument gauges were where they were supposed to be.

“How does it look?” Smith said, pulling himself up between the pilot seats.

“It looks like Bell builds a pretty good helicopter. Where do you want me to head, Jon?”

“The Misha crash site, as fast as you can get us there.”

“We’re on the way. What are we going to do when we get there?”

There was no sense in not telling her the truth. “I have no idea, Randi. We’re going to have to see what we’ve got and how it plays.”

Valentina pulled herself up beside him. “What happened to Gregori?”

Smith hated the sound of his own voice, cold and flat. “His own people shot him.”

“God, and I wanted to kill him myself once.” Valentina rested her forehead on the back of the pilot’s seat. When she straightened her voice had gone cold as well. “Once we’ve sorted out that lot at the crash site, I’d like to go back there and tidy up a few things.”

“You don’t have to. The issue has been dealt with.”

The Long Ranger swept around West Peak, and the jagged slopes fell away to the dirty gray white of the glacier.

“Stay high, Randi. We may have guns down there.”

“Understood. It should be right over on the far side of the saddleback, shouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, we should be over it in another second.”

And then they were.

“You bastards!” Valentina screamed in helpless rage, smashing her fists down on the cabin deck. “You filthy, stinking bastards!”

The scattered ruins of the Misha 124 lay on the ice below. The entire forward fuselage of the ancient bomber had been ripped open, first by shaped explosive charges and then by the enormous lift and leverage of Kretek’s flying crane. Chunks of aircraft skin and bulkheading lay scattered like discarded Christmas wrappings, and they could look down into the TU-4’s forward bomb bay.

The bioagent reservoir was gone, lifted out of the wreck like an egg out of a crumpled aluminum nest.

Randi let the Long Ranger slip into a hover over the crash site. “Oh, God, he’s got it!” she exclaimed, her voice despairing.

Two metric tons of weaponized anthrax. Half a continent’s worth of death in the hands of a man who cared less than nothing for human life.