The dark smudges of smoke Burkhart noticed outside the dome were no trick of the eye.
Behind its roll-down door, his solgel incendiaries had ignited with brilliant, white-hot slashes of flame, instantly reducing the desalinization unit’s flow-pump motor to a tarry mire of fused steel and plastic. The pump quit with a shudder, chuffing out acrid, concentrated fumes that bleared the dials and alarm lights on its control panel as they floated past. Bristling vines of fire circled its butterfly inlet valve and coiled over the meshwork of low-pressure PVC pipes around the water tanks. They seared, sagged, and blistered, their melted plastic segments springing distorted fish-mouthed leaks, showering the dome’s instrumentation with jets of distilled water. Raw seawater began flushing from the main pipeline, pouring down onto the tank platform, running over its sides. The smoke rose, spread, seeking fresh air. It eddied against the door, slipping through its weather seals in thready wisps.
Out in the wind and snow, Burkhart continued his waiting game.
Further away, Pete Nimec and his men pushed their snowmobiles toward the dome as quickly as they could. Nimec did not think getting inside would be easy, but still he hoped they might have time to somehow prevent the machinery that produced Cold Corners’ entire usable water supply from becoming severely maimed.
He didn’t have a shot.
The moment Burkhart had put his combustive charges in place, time had run out.
“Sir — I’ve spotted some of them.”
“Where? I can’t see a thing.”
“A little ways ahead of us,” Ron Waylon said. “I’d guess maybe forty, fifty yards. At about ten o’clock.”
Nimec kept Waylon’s blaze-orange parka in his headlights as he whirred along behind him. He had mostly gotten the hang of the snow bike, but the bare ice patches that would come up on it without warning kept threatening to rob its skis of traction and wrench the handlebars out of his grasp.
He squinted through his goggles.
“You said some?”
“Right—”
“How many? Still can’t see anything…”
“I’m not sure. There could’ve been three, four. They were on bikes. Moving. Wearing winter camouflage.” Waylon paused. “The bikes were white too,” he added.
Nimec thought a moment. His instincts had been right.
“We made more than three of them inside the dome,” he said over the com-link. “Looks like it’s how I figured. They’ve deployed around it.”
“Looks like,” Waylon said.
Nimec swooped on toward the dome, a guy named Mitchell pacing at his rear, the rest having split off at his direction.
“Okay, both of you reading me?”
He received two affirmatives in his earpiece.
“This is it,” he said, then let go of his right handgrip to reach for the weapon strapped over his shoulder.
The dome to his near left, Burkhart was still poised to throttle his snowmobile into action when one of his floating patrols hailed him over their radio link.
“Kommandant, ich sehe sie.”
It was Langern, at the opposite side of the water-treatment facility.
“Wie viele?” Burkhart replied.
“Mindestens drei Männer. Sind auf rotes Schneemobilen.”
Burkhart clicked his teeth. At least three men had been sighted. On red snowmobiles.
As he’d suspected, the enemy had broken up into harrier teams.
“Schätzen?” he asked.
“Ungefähr fünfzig meter östlich.”
Burkhart tasted adrenaline at the back of his tongue. The machines Koenig had reported were approaching from fifty meters to the east.
His alertness notched to its utmost level, Burkhart looked over his right shoulder, glimpsed the noses of two more snowmobiles through the snow — these speeding toward him from a westerly direction.
It further confirmed his assessment of the enemy’s diversionary tactics. But he had no doubt their main thrust still would be reserved for the dome’s entrance.
“Lass keinen näher kommen,” he ordered, thinking that they had gotten close enough.
Much about Antarctica was alien to Nimec, but he would have recognized the sound of automatic gunfire anyplace on earth.
The initial burst came from approximately where Waylon had seen the snow bikes, its distinctive crackle carrying across the distance even in the high, wild wind.
His opponents were throwing themselves into an outright confrontation, forfeiting stealth to delay his Sword ops from reaching the dome.
The nasty little cold war they’d initiated had just gotten very hot.
Nimec mentally bold-faced a decision that he’d known had to be. Sword was a civilian security outfit whose international presence was licensed through a clutter of separate arrangements with UpLink’s host governments, most of them skittish about having armed foreigners on their real estate. Nonlethal threat response was Sword’s option of first choice, and its techies had developed a collection of ingenious suppressive tools toward that end. Nimec’s operatives were not cowboys on horses riding the range in search of desperados. But he had never allowed them to be victims-in-waiting either. Their rules of engagement were right in line with those followed almost universally by police and military forces. Deadly fire was to be returned in kind.
It made things stickier in theory that Antarctica was a piece of real estate unlike any other, demilitarized by global pact, everybody here supposedly living a harmonious coexistence, one big happy human family, their baser impulses and ambitions renounced. But in practice it didn’t change a thing.
Nimec’s people were under attack, taking fire, and getting killed by a bullet was the same the world over.
Gordian’s words surfaced from recent memory: They can’t always be protected from violence. But we have to keep our watch.
“Guns on max settings,” Nimec told his men over their comlink.
He pressed a stud over the trigger guard of his own compact variable-velocity rifle-system assault weapon, an action more than slightly hampered by his thick cold-weather gauntlet. The baby VVRS, as Tom Ricci called it, used embedded microelectromechanical circuitry to switch the gun’s muzzle speed between less-than-lethal and deadly-fire modes with a touch. At the low-speed setting, its subsonic rounds would remain enclosed within plastic sabots designed to blunt their penetrating capacity. Shot from the barrel at a higher pressure, the frangible sabots petaled off to release 5.56mm tungsten-alloy cores that struck with the murderous force of standard submachine-gun ammunition.
Now there was another spatter of fire, closer than before, barely up ahead.
Nimec heard a gaining whoosh from over to his left, and snapped his eyes in that direction, but saw nothing except dense, whipping white fans of snow.
And then, suddenly, the whiteness bulged out at him.
“Everybody, heads up—”
That was all Nimec had time to say.
His semiautomatic rifle raised, spitting angrily, Burkhart’s storm-rider made his pass.
The half-dozen men Nimec had chosen for the fire-suppression team advanced on the dome, their bikes pushed to top speed against the wind, treads slinging up snow in rapidly collapsing arcs. Strapped to their backs were eighteen-pound canisters of FM-200 and inert-gas flame extinguishant. As instructed, they’d locked their VVRS rifles into man-killer mode.
They’d expected a fight, knowing their access to the dome would be blocked regardless of whether their cover teams managed to draw off the opposition. What they did not yet know was how much resistance they would have to tackle… but that was certain to become evident in short order.