“Look, I’m not going to hurt you, unless you move. I have to go,” I spotted the captain’s phone in the snow, probably still on, probably with Homza’s adjutant on the other end, listening. Damn.
“Colonel, come with us,” the captain reasoned smoothly, friendly now that our situation was reversed. “You’re hurt, sir.”
He started to get up.
“If you do that, I will fire. Pick up that phone. Give it. Slowly.”
I took their weapons and ammo. I took the key off my snowmobile. I motioned the captain away from his Polaris and stole the key. They could not chase me now.
A quick scan of the captain’s saddlebag showed a welcome sight; a bunched up thermal snowmobile suit, an extra he’d probably been ordered to give to some Ranger riding without proper protection. I saw thermal gloves.
They’d be sending people after me. Rangers were probably coming right now. I had to get out of here. I’d change clothing later.
I mounted up, armed now at least with two M4s and extra ammunition pouches, each containing three magazines, each of those holding thirty .223-caliber bullets. The M4 can fire selectively, in three-round bursts, or it can be used on fully automatic.
But could I catch Jens Erik Holte even if he was really heading toward lake number nine?
Gotta try.
I told the captain, “Get to General Homza. Tell him, please tell him that I said that Jens Erik Holte is the guy we’re looking for!”
No answer.
“Captain?”
“Fuck you,” the captain said.
I hit the throttle and almost toppled off as the snowmobile lurched forward. In the left side-mirror two sorry-looking soldiers stood and brushed themselves off, staring at a disappearing Marine colonel who they regarded as a full-fledged enemy now.
Pursuers would be coming. I prayed that no one would reach me until I found Jens. I did not know if the Wilmington had drones up looking for the sniper. The pain spiked again with the bumping and the lurching. It was everywhere. It was in my skull, chest, hands, and feet. It kept me alert. I let it fuel me. I was running on pain and hate.
The early night sky was beautiful. Vega glowing. Polaris the jewel. But I would much rather have had clouds, no vision, no chance of the drone, no chance of a chopper.
I followed the shallow indentations in the snow, left by Jens’s snowmobile, but they were dissipating.
You need to get rid of the sat phone. You need to rip off the GPS. You can’t be carrying anything enabling them to track you.
But I could not do that for a little while longer, because I had to call Eddie before jettisoning the equipment. And I had to get farther away before I could stop and make a call.
The wind rose and the tracks disappeared, and I traveled after an invisible opponent.
I navigated by intuition.
Navigated, truth be told, by guess.
TWENTY-ONE
I looped out to sea and, at approximately the place I saw him turn, swung back toward land. The snow here was marked by a mass of crisscrossing tracks left by escapees. They all looked the same.
I hit land again and turned south by southwest and gunned the engine. After ten minutes I judged myself far enough from the soldiers to take a few minutes to change into warmer clothing and take better inventory of what I’d stolen, what I could use.
The thermal suit gave warmth instantly, as did the insulated gloves. The helmet cut down on peripheral visibility, but would lessen the abrasive scouring of wind.
I also found a headlamp, which I affixed to the helmet, and some peanut butter — flavored PowerBars and a thermos which, when opened, gave off steam and smelled of coffee. I drank some for the caffeine jolt. But added awareness ratcheted up the pain.
Also in the saddlebags was a small, plastic snap-up pouch containing a folded terrain map of the region; helpful, but not much since, to me, the geography here looked basically similar, its differences so subtle that an outsider would miss them. At night especially, there were no mountains or forest, trees or boulders. I could match the map to the GPS for a while, but that was risky. As long as I kept GPS functioning, a sat could find where I was.
And there were lots of lakes.
Too many. They call Chile the nation of lakes, and Minnesota the land of lakes, but both pale beside the North Slope, which seems more lake than land half the time.
I strapped one M4 over my back, tied the other by bungee cord onto a saddlebag. I mounted up and the pain flared. The vista looked flat but, I knew from ATV experience, would not turn out to be flat at all. It would trick any rider with dips and falls and sudden ice mounds.
Get going. I took a final glance at the stars. I checked the GPS and decided on the approximate route that would take me to the cabin that the Harmon party had never visited. I needed to call Eddie… but if I couldn’t let him know where I was, without mentioning specific coordinates, the call would be useless, or worse.
In short, I needed a landmark that we both knew, and no other listener would know. Great.
The lakes I rolled over were similarly long and thin. It would be easy to mistake one for another. The map, clipped to my handlebars, helped a little, and perhaps every once in a while some particular feature might stand out, give an extra hint of where I was.
I headed south by southwest, into the void. I gambled that tracking me by satellite would take time. That the Rangers might not know I had a phone the general had provided, might not know whose stolen GPS unit I carried. And unlike TV shows, where satellites fly around ubiquitous in space, available for surveillance twenty-four hours a day, in real life they’re not always overhead. The entirety of Earth’s surface is not under permanent surveillance. Unless on a preset route, unless a sat is there at the exact time you need it, you have to send it if you want a snapshot from space.
If the Rangers needed a shot now, it could take hours to get equipment in position. My gamble was that there was no satellite above me at the moment.
At top speed a snowmobile can cover one hundred miles in an hour. But to go even fifty on this slick, deceptive surface would be suicide. I kept the speedometer at thirty-five, risked thirty-six, thirty-nine. Several times the Polaris threatened to tip over and crush me.
I mushed over soft spots and skittered across a frozen lake that I’d not known was there until I was on top. The hard ride ended abruptly as the surface grew spongier and I knew I was on tundra again. Mist spread in the sky. The stars were getting dimmer. Uh-oh.
Then, five minutes later I had a break. Coming up fast was the wrecked remains of a trio of small, lumpy, abandoned sod houses, built a century ago by Eskimos, long unoccupied, probably dens for foxes now.
I’ve been here with Eddie.
Basically the homes were dugouts with sod roofs. If you didn’t know what they’d been, you would mistake them for mounds. The entrances were low so you needed to crouch or crawl to enter. Whale jawbone “frames” supported the narrow entranceways. Crawling in, you risked a fox bite, and smelled the cloying wet-wool/fur and urine residue of centuries of wild visitors.
The sod houses give me a fix for navigation, triangulation, a call.
I eased up on the throttle. The snowmobile glided to a halt. I checked the location of the houses against the map… Got ’em… and looked up again at the stars I could still see. Three fixed points! Breathing hurt. So did my head. Here we go!
I pulled out the sat phone and punched in Eddie’s number, fully aware that someone else might hear everything we said.