“I fully understand, Colonel. There is indeed no choice.”
Smyslov’s reply was unexpressive, and Smith had to wonder if the Russian was speaking in agreement with his words or with some thought of his own.
“Ah, me! That’s all for tomorrow’s worry list,” Valentina said, glancing toward the hatch set in the rear bulkhead. “In the meantime, there is something else I need to have a look at.”
“Can’t it wait until morning?” Smith asked.
She looked toward Smith so the minute tilt of her head and the lift of her eyebrow would be masked from Smyslov. “It’s nothing really. Shan’t take a second.”
Catching up a flashlight, she got to her feet and moved aft. Undogging the pressure door, she ducked low through it. Assorted thumps and bangs followed as she worked toward the very tail of the aircraft, followed by a few minutes of involved silence. “Now, this is interesting,” her voice reverberated with a metallic hollowness. “Jon, could you please give me a hand back here for a second?”
“On my way.” Smith followed Valentina into the dark of the passage. The historian was crouching on the gangway between the stinger turret’s ammunition magazines. With her flashlight aimed at her face, she silently mouthed the words “Shut the hatch.”
“Damn, Val. Were you raised in a barn! It’s even colder out here.” He pulled the pressure door closed and twisted the dogging lever to the locked position. Moving back to the magazines, he sank down on one knee beside Valentina. She was turning a wicked-looking autocannon shell over and over in her gloved fingers.
“What’s that?” Smith inquired over the whine of the wind playing around the tail surfaces.
“A Soviet 23mm round. From the tail gun belts,” she replied.
“All right. What’s going on?”
“Something odd, Jon. Things aren’t adding up, or rather, they’re adding up in a very peculiar way. That’s why I cut you off up in the cockpit this afternoon.”
“I thought as much,” he replied. “What are you seeing?”
“This airplane was fully outfitted for combat. In addition to having its anthrax warload aboard, its defensive armament was also fully charged. Furthermore, this plane didn’t make an emergency landing here. This was an accidental crash.”
Smith wasn’t quite sure of the differentiation. “Are you sure?”
“Quite. The bomber wasn’t configured for an emergency landing when it hit the ice. Remember when I asked about the propeller and fuel mixture controls in the cockpit? They had been left at their cruise settings. Also, I asked about the flap lever. The wing flaps hadn’t been lowered, as would have been done for any kind of a deliberate landing.”
Valentina rapped the top of the magazine housing with her knuckles. “Finally they didn’t eject the gun turret ammunition magazines. In a B-29 Superfortress or a TU-4 Bull, that would be a standard procedure in a ditching or emergency landing scenario.”
“Then what the hell did happen?”
“As I said, a freak crash, a total accident,” she continued. “According to the maps of Wednesday Island, this glacier has a gradual descending gradient toward the north. The bomber must have come in from the North. They also must have been coming in at night, flying low and on instruments because they never knew the island was here. They came in between the peaks, and the terrain rose up underneath the aircraft. Before the pilots realized what was happening they struck the ground, or rather the ice. They must have been traveling at full cruising speed, way too fast for a conventional landing, but as fate would have it, the glacier’s surface at that time must have been comparatively smooth, without any ledges or crevasses to trip the aircraft. So they hit flat and skidded cleanly.
“There have been similar crashes in the Arctic and Antarctic,” she continued in her whisper, “when aircrews have lost situational awareness in whiteout conditions. To put a bottom line on this, this aircraft was not in an emergency state when it went down. They weren’t lost, and they weren’t landing. They were in a controlled cruise configuration, bound for somewhere else.”
“If that’s the case, wouldn’t they have seen the island on their charts?” Smith asked.
“You have to remember that in 1953 detailed navigational information on this part of the world was all but nonexistent. The closest thing to an accurate chart was an American military secret. Wednesday Island is also something of a freak. It’s one of the highest points within the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago. At that time, whoever plotted this plane’s course had no idea that a bloody great mountain would be parked out here in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.”
“It’s not all that much of a mountain,” Smith mused. “We’re only about twenty-five hundred feet above sea level here. Wouldn’t that be a pretty low cruising altitude for a pressurized aircraft like this one?”
“Very much so,” she agreed. “In fact, a TU-4 or B-29 would only follow such a low flight profile for one reason: if its crew were worried about being picked up by long-range radar.”
Jon forced himself to play devil’s advocate. “Wouldn’t they have seen the island on their own navigational radar?”
“Only if they were using it. What if they were maintaining full EMCON, full emission control, with all of their radio and radar transmitters deliberately shut down to avoid detection?”
If such was conceivable, it seemed to grow colder. “So what do you think, Professor?” Smith asked.
“I don’t know what to think, Colonel,” she replied. “Or rather, I don’t know what I want to think. One thing I am certain of. Tomorrow morning we have got to find the crew of this plane. It might be more important in the greater scheme of things than the anthrax.”
“Do you think this might have something to do with this Russian alternate agenda?”
He saw her nod. “In all probability. I suspect when we find the survival camp, we’ll know.”
“I suspect we’ll know about Major Smyslov by then as well,” Smith replied grimly.
Out of the corner of his eye, Smyslov watched Smith disappear into the tail. All evening he had been waiting for the opportunity to act, for a moment when the others were involved or distracted. This might be the best, if not his only chance.
He headed for the crawlway tunnel leading forward, snaking down its length as rapidly and as quietly as he could. He knew exactly what he was to look for and exactly where it should be. He also had the set of fifty-year-old keys in his pocket.
Earlier in the day, when he had been in the cockpit with Smith and Metrace, he hadn’t dared to search. He couldn’t risk drawing possible attention to the Misha 124’s official documentation until he could ascertain its status.
Bellying into the forward compartment, he removed a pocket flash from his parka. Clenching it between his teeth, he sank down on one knee beside the navigator’s station and sent the narrow beam stabbing across the map safe below the table. Drawing the key ring, he fumbled with the safe’s lock.
This had been a Soviet Air Force bomber, and in the old Soviet Union, maps had been state secrets, denied to all but authorized personnel.
After a moment’s resistance the tumblers of the lock turned for the first time in half a century. Smyslov swung open the small, heavy door.
Nothing! The safe was empty. The navigational charts and the targeting templates that were to have been issued to the radar operator were gone.
Wasting no time, he closed and relocked the safe. The bomber’s logbook and the aircraft commander’s orders would be next. Moving forward to the left-hand pilot’s seat, Smyslov thrust the second key into the lock of the pilot’s safe located beneath it. Opening it, the Russian groped in the small, flat compartment. Again nothing!
That left the political officer’s safe. The most critical of the three. He squeezed in between the pilots’ stations to the bombardier’s position in the very nose of the aircraft. Here the glass of the unstepped greenhouse had been caved in by the crash, and snow had drifted in and had refrozen. The bombsight itself was gone-it hadn’t been needed for this mission-and the rest of the station was buried in caked semi-ice. Drawing his belt knife, Smyslov hacked his way down to the deck-mounted safe.