“My mission takes precedence. I’m sorry. Mercer out.”
“You cold son of a bitch,” Mike Collins said, then turned back to the window as Fairbanks vanished behind the helicopter’s flat bottom.
Mercer sat quietly, arms folded across his chest, eyes flat and unpenetrable. Behind the facade, his mind was working furiously. Am I right? he asked himself. Or am I consigning innocent people to death by refusing them these helicopters?
“Mercer, call from Andy Lindstrom,” Eddie Rice said through the headset. “He says no answer from Pump Station 5, but 6 is on line, a skeleton crew standing by. He’s asking if he should send some men down to 5.”
“No! Under no circumstances are those men to leave Pump Station 6. They’d be cut to ribbons long before they reached the control building. Number 5 is under the control of terrorists. Sergeant, call Colonel Knoff. Tell him the target is Pump Station 5. Eddie, what’s our ETA?”
“At least another hour and twenty minutes. This weather is really killing us, and those Hueys are even slower than we are, especially fully loaded.”
“Shit! Pump Station 5 went off line hours ago. It’s possible Kerikov’s already gone.”
Time slowed. Whenever Mercer twisted his wrist to look at his watch, a shorter and shorter arc of the minute hand had swept by. The rhythmic throbbing of the rotor blades over his head had a lulling effect, sending him into a kind of daze, his mind emptied of everything, so he was just barely aware of the JetRanger’s turbine engine and the occasional mutterings between Eddie Rice and the pilots of the two Hueys. And then the thoughts came, fear and doubt the strongest, but also a deep exhaustion, a gritty feeling behind his eyes that made blinking painful. He had been awake for twenty-two hours. But that wasn’t what was really nagging him.
Suddenly the quest for the unknown, the search for knowledge that had dominated his life, that made him who he was, was no longer so important. He felt like telling Eddie to turn the chopper around and head back to Anchorage. This wasn’t his problem, it wasn’t their fight. He had done this too many times now, put his life on the line for an ideal, a belief that he couldn’t really define or name.
This was always the worst, the waiting. He’d been here before, with Eddie in fact, but with other men, too, hurtling into harm’s way, fear like a weight in his stomach, doubt like a nagging headache behind his temples. He’d long ago stopped wondering why he found himself constantly surrounded by danger, but he still questioned how much longer his strange obsession would allow him to live. How many more times could he descend into the earth in some mine shaft in need of immediate repairs? How many times could he climb aboard a helicopter to face someone like Ivan Kerikov and actually return? Pessimism burned hotly behind his ribs.
God, I’m tired.
“Ten minutes to the Pump Station,” Eddie called.
Mercer straightened up, noting the queer look Mike Collins shot him, as if Alyeska’s Chief of Security had been reading his mind. He ignored Collins, leaning forward to peer out the cockpit canopy. In the darkness, the running lights of the two Air Force Hueys looked like flashing jewels, a cold, comforting light signifying the presence of other humans amid the great expanse of forested nothingness below. Thousands of square miles of birch and white spruce separated the Alaskan Range mountains from the Brooks Range, whose foothills they were approaching. The area was crisscrossed by dozens of rivers, streams, and tiny lakes.
“Any traffic on the Dalton Highway?”
“I haven’t seen anything, and we’ve been over it for nearly half an hour. I didn’t even see any police cars where the Alyeska vans reportedly went off,” Eddie replied. “It’s like the road isn’t even there.”
“Call Knoff. Tell him we’re almost there.”
“Already done. His boys are chomping at the bit.”
“Good. I want you to hang back at least a mile until they’ve landed and Knoff gives us the all-clear sign. If Kerikov and his men are still here, Knoff’s troops should be able to handle them. He won’t be expecting this strong a reprisal because of his pyrotechnic display in Fairbanks.”
“Does this mean you’ve lost your death wish?” Eddie teased. “Last time we flew together you had me land at ground zero of a nuclear explosion with about two minutes to go.”
Mercer laughed. “Government cutbacks have slashed my danger pay to below minimum wage again. I only raid liquor cabinets unless given a direct presidential order. Which reminds me, I could really go for a… What the hell?”
A flash of light, like a laser beam, streaked up from the dark ground so quickly it appeared as a solid line rather than a moving object. It intercepted the lead Huey, the two coming together in a violent blast, the helicopter outlined briefly in the fire of its destruction. In an instant, the chopper was falling to the earth in a flaming ruin. The pilot of the second Huey had just started evasive action when a second SA-7 Grail missile rocketed skyward on a brilliant cone of expended solid fuel.
Known by NATO forces to be wholly inaccurate and under-armed with just six pounds of high explosive in its warhead, the Grail was still deadly against low-flying helicopters, especially those with exposed exhaust ports like the UH-1. The Grail fired at the Huey didn’t have the upgraded cryo-cooling unit to aid its infrared sensors at finding hot signatures, yet it still had no trouble locking onto its target against the cold background of the Alaskan night. The second Huey disintegrated.
Mercer was just recognizing the attack for what it was when Eddie Rice banked the JetRanger, applying max power to the turbines and the rotors, eking out every bit of speed as he tried to get them out of range of the shoulder-fired missiles. Debris from the first two choppers fell to the earth like meteor showers, the hulls hitting in explosive wrecks, fuel and metal and bits of their crews thrown up in fountains of flame and shrapnel. Patches of forest around the crash sites were ignited by the burning choppers, pine trees flaring like matchsticks. It would take hours for the rain to douse such a fuel-rich fire.
“Watch for those missiles!” Eddie shouted, jerking the controls first one way then the next in an attempt to foul the aim of the terrorists below them. The JetRanger, designed more for comfort than agility, groaned at Eddie’s flying, the bulkheads and structural members straining well beyond their design specifications.
“I’ve got a launch, starboard side,” Mercer called out, watching with morbid fascination as another missile lifted from the black forest.
“Got it.” Eddie hauled the JetRanger onto its side, tightening his turn so quickly that the helicopter lost nearly a thousand feet in just a few seconds.
The Grail passed behind them, its infrared sight unable to lock onto the exhaust ports of their chopper. Its rocket motor ran out of fuel and toppled the missile back to earth. During the violent maneuver, no one saw another Grail hurtle into the air.
It was almost directly ahead of them, its guidance system seeking them out with single-minded resolution. At last finding the heat signature it had been hunting for, the fifty-three-inch-long missile slightly altered its attack vector, shallowing its approach so as to come up under the Bell helicopter.
“Oh, God!” Mike Collins shouted, while the young soldier in the copilot’s seat screamed and screamed.
Mercer let himself go limp. The fear that had squeezed his chest when the first two helicopters were hit released him at this last moment so he could face his death calmly, watching it happen with almost clinical dispassion.
Of them all, only Eddie Rice hadn’t given up. The moment before the warhead struck the underside of the JetRanger, he again jerked the craft hard over, presenting the now tilted bottom of the chopper to the missile. It struck a glancing blow where the secondary rotor boom attached to the fuselage, and exploded.
Most of the blast was directed away from the helicopter because of Eddie’s quick thinking and exceptional reflexes, yet the JetRanger was mortally wounded. Smoke filled the cabin even as the chopper was thrown violently through the air, turned almost completely upside down by the explosion. The electrical system failed and a second later the turbine skipped, caught briefly, then began faltering as it starved for the fuel gushing from the severed lines. The raw stench of avgas gagged the four men as they struggled to regain proper seating in the bucking aircraft. Mercifully, it hadn’t ignited. Yet.