Taking a small torpedo-shaped Danish cigarillo from the ashtray, the arms merchant puffed and read, the strong tobacco smoke blending with the salon’s background smell of diesel and fish oil.
Kretek frowned. There was good news and bad in the dispatches. The attempts to disrupt the joint Russian-American investigation had failed. Kretek hadn’t had high hopes for the effort in the first place. The group’s point man in Alaska had been forced to hire and equip whatever was available at short notice, in this case, local Russian mafia street trash.
The ad hoc interceptor dispatched to kill the investigators’ helicopter had failed to return. As there had been no news reports of an attack on the government expedition, or of a plane lost, it had probably gone down at sea or in the wilderness in an accidental crash.
So be it. Let the investigation team come. If they beat him on site, he would rely on his agent on the island and on the shock effect of his main force’s arrival. If a few history buffs made a nuisance of themselves at the wrong time, that would be their problem. Timing, planning, and the weather would be his allies against the outside world.
Kretek took another draw from the cigarillo, followed by a throat-clearing sip of the liquor. Unless, of course, there had been more to the investigation team than had met the eye. Was it possible that the governments involved knew of the incredible prize that was still aboard the bomber?
That seemed unlikely. If the truth was known, the Americans would be racing to secure the aircraft with all their considerable assets, and their national media would be having hysterics over the anthrax threat. The Russians must have assured them that the bomber’s payload had been jettisoned, if they had mentioned it at all. The former Soviet weapons experts within the Kretek Group had assured their leader that this would be standard operating procedure.
For some reason SOP had not been followed aboard this particular aircraft, and Anton Kretek was prepared to take full advantage of the fact.
The second dispatch, from Vlahovich and the Canada group, was far more favorable. Suitable aircraft had been procured, and suitable aircrewmen had been brought in through Canadian customs. Refueling base A was being established, and sites for bases B and C were being surveyed. Very favorable. Very favorable indeed.
The final dispatch secured the arms merchant’s good mood. It was from Wednesday Island, indicating that no alarm had been raised. The station staff was preparing for the arrival of the aviation historians and for their own winter extraction. No problems noted. Operations proceeding.
Now that the plan was under way, Kretek would be able to send their ETA and his final phase instructions on to Wednesday. If all continued to go as well as it had so far, it would be a most pleasant reunion.
Kretek grinned and poured another finger of liquor in his glass. It was tasting better all the time.
Chapter Seventeen
Off the Eastern End of Wednesday Island
The stars stabbed through rents in the cloud cover, their light refracting and reflecting off the jumbled pressure ridges of the ice pack, granting hunting illumination to the great, shambling bulk that moved spectrally among them.
The polar bear was still a comparative youngster, a mere eight hundred pounds of rippling muscle and perpetual hunger thickly sheathed in glossy white fur. His instincts were driving him southward, to follow the edge of the expanding freeze up. But he had paused for a time in the vicinity of Wednesday Island. The stressed ice around the island had provided hauling-out leads and breathing holes for a lingering population of ring and hood seals, and a profitable hunting ground for a polar bear.
The bear had slain twice in the past week, crushing the skulls of his prey with swift, precise swats of his massive paws, his powerful jaws stripping the seal carcasses of the rich blubber that he needed to fuel his biological furnaces against the piercing cold of the arctic environment. But winter loomed, and the seals were fleeing ahead of it. The bear must commit to his own southward drift as well. Either that or he must explore the possibilities of his only other potential food source: the odd, decidedly unseallike animals that inhabited the island itself and that walked upright on two legs.
The polar bear was not familiar with these creatures, but the wind had carried him the scent of their sweet, hot blood, and on the ice, meat was meat.
The bear dropped down from the pressure ridge onto the thin flat surface of a recently refrozen lead. Here, where the ice was thin and still pliant, he might find a more conventional meaclass="underline" a seal gnawing its way to the surface and a breath of air. Padding silently to the center of the open lead, the polar bear paused, his head held low to the ice sheet, extending his senses, feeling and listening for the faintest hint of sound or vibration from below.
There! There was a sense of something moving below the ice.
And then came a titanic shock, and the bear was lifted off his feet and hurled through the air. Such indignities were simply not supposed to happen to the lords of the Arctic! He hit the ice sprawling. Scrambling to his feet, the bear fled in abject terror, bawling his protest to an uncaring night.
A great black axe blade pressed up from beneath the surface of the frozen lead, the shattered ice groaning and splintering as it opened, flowerlike, around it. The mammoth Oscar-class SSGN bulled its way through the pack, hatches crashing open atop its sail as it stabilized on the surface. Men poured out of those hatches, dark, weather-scarred faces contrasting against the white of their arctic camouflage clothing. Some of them swung lithely down to the ice using the ladder rungs inset in the sides of the submarine’s conning tower. Dropping to the surface of the lead, they fanned out, unslinging AK-74 assault rifles as they established their security perimeter.
The others focused on hoisting their gear up and out of the red-lit belly of the undersea vesseclass="underline" loaded backpacks, white equipment, and ration-stuffed duffel bags, collapsible fiberglass man-hauling sledges, and cases of ammunition and explosives. All that they would need to live, fight, and destroy in a polar environment for a protracted time.
The commanders of both the naval Spetsnaz platoon and the submarine were the last up the ladder to the submarine’s bridge.
“Damnation, but this is cold,” the sub commander muttered.
Lieutenant Pavel Tomashenko of the Naval Infantry Special Forces grinned in self-superiority and repeated the old saw. “In weather like this the flowers bloom in the streets of Pinsk.”
The submarine commander was not amused. “I need to submerge as soon as possible. I want to give this lead a chance to refreeze before the next American satellite pass.” As was the case with all good submariners, he was a nervous and unhappy man on the surface. And he had reason to be so. He was inside Canadian territorial waters in an area forbidden to probing foreign submarines. And while the Canadian naval forces were totally incapable of enforcing this prohibition, the atomic hunter-killer boats of the United States Navy also cheerfully and routinely disregarded this restriction.
“Do not worry, Captain, we will be away in a few more minutes,” Tomashenko replied, glancing down at his men as they loaded their sleds. “We must be under cover by the time of the next pass as well. There will be no problems.”
“So we can hope,” the submariner grunted. “I will endeavor to keep to the communications schedule, but I must remind you, Lieutenant, I can make no promises. It will depend on my finding open-water leads for the deployment of my radio masts. I will return to these coordinates once every twenty-four hours, and I will listen for your sounding charges and your through-ice transponder. I can do no more.”
“That will be quite adequate, Captain. You run a very efficient taxi service. Dos ve danya.”