Burkhart turned to him.
“Der Gott des Krieges,” he said. “Kann sein, eh?”
Langern’s eyes remained wide behind his goggles.
“Ja, mein Herr,” he said. “Kann sein.”
Burkhart was silent. Then he tapped Langern’s arm to stir him from his rapt absorption, motioning down at the pass.
“Hier müssen alle durchhalten,” he said. “Verstehen?”
“Ja,” Langern said, nodding to show he indeed understood.
This bitter windswept terrace was where they would position themselves for the enemy’s arrival.
Pete Nimec watched his hookup teams finish rigging their all-terrain vehicles to the pair of choppers requested from MacTown, each Sikorsky S-76 moments from bearing away its maximum sling-load of three vehicles. As the cargo hooks were slipped into their apex fittings, the wand men waved their static wands and the teams jumped off the ATVs to move out from under the downwash of lifting rotors.
Then the birds climbed from their hover, pulling slack from the sling legs, flying off against the strange, wavery orchid of color that had appeared in the sky near the slipping sun.
Nimec turned to Megan. His backpack heavy on his shoulders, loaded with his own gear, he was ready to join his strike force aboard one of the two UpLink helicopters on the pad.
“How you holding up?” he said.
“Fine.” She lowered her eyes from the auroral radiance and studied his face. “I only wish I were going with you, if you want to know the truth.”
Nimec smiled a little.
“You’ve been awful scrappy since I taught you to box,” he said.
She gave his chest a light swat with her mittened hand.
“Fisticuffs are my thing,” she said. “Before long I’ll have to watch out for cauliflower face.”
“I think,” he said, “You mean ‘cauliflower ear.’ ”
“Close enough.”
They stood there facing each other.
“Got to head off,” Nimec said, and nodded toward the waiting choppers.
“Yes,” Megan said.
“You mind the store. There should be enough men here to—”
“I’m really okay,” she said. “I’ll be okay. And so will this base.”
They stood a few seconds longer in the blowing cold. Then Megan stepped forward and hugged him.
“Thanks, Pete,” she said, her voice catching, her arms tight around him. “Thanks very much.”
Nimec cleared his throat.
“What for?” he said.
“Just for being you,” Megan said.
“We’re seeing… nk… think the… tch… can… sn… us… down where… sss… ssssss… sk… ”
“Chinstrap One, you’re breaking up. Say again?”
“Srks… siss…”
“I’m losing you, Chinstrap One,” the UpLink chopper pilot said as Nimec listened from the passenger seat. “Repeat your status. Over.”
“Crkrrsssss—”
The pilot frowned, tried to reach the other MacTown bird. He was a wire-thin black man named Justin Smith who wore a sparse, tightly kinked chin beard and spoke with an occasionally strong peppering of a Caribbean accent. Nimec thought it sounded like Trinidad.
“Chinstrap Two, we’ve lost contact with Brother Penguin,” he said, pronouncing the word Brother as Brudda. “We need to confirm you’ve made your tick mark. Acknowledge.”
“Ngg… you… rppttt—”
“Say again—”
“Still cnnttrd. Extnr… ssssszzzdrr… rceee… ”
Nimec turned to Smith. “Snap, crackle, pop,” Nimec snorted in disgust. “There any way to get a lock?”
Smith shook his head.
“Our radios are already hopping,” he said. “The disturbance cuts across all bands.”
“Try our own bird again,” Nimec said. The trail ship carrying Waylon’s team had peeled away toward its rendezvous moments earlier.
Smith radioed it, got more garbled noise, cursed under his breath.
Nimec wondered if Smith missed palm trees and white sand. “We’ll have to forget about any of them reporting for now,” Nimec said. “Keep our fingers crossed they’re in position.”
“They’ll be doing the same for us.”
“Yeah.”
Nimec looked out his windscreen at the coiling lights in the sky. What had started out as an isolated purplish stain near the sun had become a moving, living rope of color across the horizon, twined with a glowy spectrum of greens, reds, and blues.
“Damned freakish,” he said. “The weatherman says it’ll be a sunny day, you can count on having to leave your house with an umbrella and galoshes. But solar flares, radio interference… this they can all get on the mark.”
Smith flew in silence, making unconscious, minute adjustments to his sticks as a highway driver would to his steering wheel.
“Sir,” he said after a while. “We’re reaching the notch.” His flight helmet dipped downward. “See it down there?”
Down dere.
Nimec’s eyes traced the pass seaming its way between jagged mountain slopes, saw the dark shark’s-tooth crosscut coming up fast.
He nodded. “The intercom working?”
Smith reached for a switch, and static burst loudly into the cabin.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, and flicked off the com.
Nimec started unstrapping himself from his seat.
“Keep her steady,” he said. “I’m going back to talk to Rice while my vocal cords can still transmit.”
Outside the tunnel entrance on the notch’s spiny eastern shoulder, Langern thumbed off his radio handset, and then stood pensive and silent under the ribboning polar lights. He had scarcely spotted the helo through his binoculars before attempting to contact Burkhart, but all he had gotten from the handset was a senseless bark of static.
It was the same signal breakup he had received when he’d hailed Koenig on the western side of the notch, and Reymann’s squad at the far end of the pass.
Meanwhile, the Bell helo was close enough now for its UpLink markings to be seen with the unaided eye.
Zum Teufel mit ihnen, he thought. Zum Teufel mit dem ganzen verfluchten Land.
To the Devil with them. With this whole accursed land.
He turned toward the other men waiting on the crest with him, ordered them to stand to arms.
From this point forward they would be on their own.
The Sikorsky helicopter designated Chinstrap One after the ubiquitous chinstrap penguins of the peninsula had lowered its own “strap” of ATVs at the intersection of Bull Pass and McKelvey Valley — or the point where the shank of the valley system anchor would be seen to meet its ring end on a map. The pass walls were at their widest distance apart here, and katabatics weren’t too bothersome a factor for the bird’s pilot.
This was only one of the reasons the site was chosen for the linkup with Ron Waylon and his group. The other was because of its coordination with the separate rendezvous Sam Cruz’s team was making elsewhere.
Dropped by the UpLink tail ship on its second hop, Waylon’s team was waiting to receive the sling-load as Chinstrap One came in over the ridge and bellied low above their heads.
They took less than five minutes to get it unhooked and derigged.
Waylon stared up at the S-76, waved to the men in the cockpit as it lifted away into a sky swirling with brilliant color.