“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “It’s a Halo!”
The Mil Mi-26, dubbed the “Halo” by NATO, had been created during the 1980s under the Soviet military’s old “If it’s bigger then it must be better” design doctrine. It was the largest and most powerful helicopter ever built and that likely ever would be built.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the aircraft had passed into commercial service and now could be found working as a heavy industrial lifter in many nations around the world. This giant wore Canadian civil registration numbers on its Day-Glo red tail boom, and the winch control cab, projecting like a growth from its port side, marked it as a sky crane derivative.
Kropodkin’s sponsors had come for him and for the anthrax, and they had come in force.
As the huge flying machine began to settle into a touchdown beyond the camp, Randi broke the shock lock that had paralyzed her. She had only two options. To instantly go into escape-and-evade mode or to try for the repaired radios. She chose the radios. That was the mission. That was what she was here for, to collect intelligence and to report.
It was a nightmare’s run to the laboratory hut, the fresh snow dragging at each running step like wet concrete. As she ran she mentally composed the call she would make, compressing the maximum amount of information into the absolute minimum of words. She would send until she got an acknowledgment; then, if she had time, she would try to get out, taking Trowbridge with her. She must remember to grab the lab hut’s survival pack and the SINCGARS transceiver as they went out the door. She would also put a burst into Kropodkin, if for no other reason than sheer self-satisfaction.
If there wasn’t time, then she would put her back to the wall and take as many of them with her as she could. Maybe it would make a difference, for Jon and Valentina if for no one else.
She fell once cutting around the hut. Scrambling to her feet, her lungs burning, she charged through the snow lock doors, the first of her intended series of commands welling up in her throat. But her instincts recognized and reacted to the threat before her conscious mind did, and she was whipping the MP-5 to her shoulder before she realized exactly what she was aiming at.
Stefan Kropodkin was cowering back in the far corner of the laboratory, holding Dr. Trowbridge in front of him, a dissection scalpel gleaming at the academic’s throat. Trowbridge was tottering on his feet, barely able to stand, blood streaming down his face from a broken nose and from the cuts created by his smashed glasses.
No one spoke. No one needed to. The scene was totally self-explanatory. A pair of cut disposacuffs lay on the lab floor. Kropodkin’s cunning had manipulated Trowbridge’s willfulness and essential humanity.
Randi raged at herself. She never should have left the two men alone together. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! But that was an irrelevancy now. She had to get to that radio. Even if she had to do it over both of their bodies.
“Don’t move,” Kropodkin blurted. “Put down the gun or I kill him!”
Outside Randi could hear voices shouting over the fading scream of the Halo’s turbines. Ordering Kropodkin to put down the knife would be an act of futility. All the numbers were on his side, and he knew it!
Sorry, Doctor.
Steeling herself, she nestled the butt of the submachine gun more deeply into her shoulder, and her finger tightened on the trigger. Trowbridge could see it coming, and a faint denying moan escaped from his lips. Kropodkin could see it, too, and he cowered behind his human shield.
Then Randi’s gaze slipped past the two men and through the door of the radio shack. Kropodkin hadn’t been wasting any time, either. The transmitter chassis lay open and thoroughly smashed.
Slowly Randi let the muzzle of the MP-5 sink toward the floor, the bitterness of total defeat welling up in her throat. There was nothing of value that she could accomplish now. There was no reason to put Trowbridge’s blood on her hands. Running figures moved beyond the hut windows. Armed men were streaming into the camp. But even before they crashed through the door behind her, she had set the MP-5 on the worktable.
With her hands raised, she laced her fingers together behind the nape of her neck as gun barrels ground into her back.
Chapter Thirty-two
Saddleback Glacier
A ground-hugging wisp of snow flowed past the cave mouth, driven by a rising gust of wind.
“Penny for your thoughts, Jon?” Valentina said softly.
Smith shot an angled glance toward the lowering northern sky. “We’ve got another front coming in.”
“It will be interesting to see which arrives first: the weather or the sunset. Granola bar?”
“No, thanks.”
The colonel and the historian lay side-by-side in the shadow and shelter of the cave mouth, watching the approaches across the glacier. Since the initial identification and elimination of the first Spetsnaz scout there had been no movement on the ice. There was only the sensation of activity, born out of the knowledge that a hostile force was upon them, an enemy that would not sit back passively and allow them to live.
Smith looked across at the odd other half of his rifle team as she munched her snack in seeming contentment. Her fine-planed, rather exotic features were relaxed within the shelter of her parka hood. “You doing all right?” he inquired.
“Oh, yes. Quite good.” She glanced around at the black rock walls and roof of the tunnel. “It’s not exactly Cancun, but I can see marvelous development potential for winter sports.”
Smith chuckled softly and reset his attention on the cave approaches. A remarkable lady.
“Mind answering a question?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“What is that accent? It’s not quite English and not quite Australian. I can’t place it.”
“It’s from a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” she replied. “I was born in Rhodesia-not Zimbabwe, if you please, but Rhodesia. My father was a government game control officer there before Mugabe took over.”
“And your mother?”
“An American near-zoologist. She’d been a graduate student doing research on African wildlife, but what with one thing or another, such as marrying Dad, she never went back to the States to finish her degree.”
Valentina frowned for a moment at some flash of memory. “It did give me dual citizenship, which proved rather handy when things went to their final hell back home. I was able to refugee to America to live with my mother’s family after…well, after.”
“I see. And how did you get here?”
She glanced at him, her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that question violate mobile cipher compartmentalization or something? Like the old ‘one question you cannot ask’ in the Foreign Legion?”
Smith shrugged. “Damned if I know. But you’re the one who said we were destined to become lovers. The question is probably going to come up again.”
“Valid point,” she agreed, looking back to the ice. “It’s a long and rather meandering story. As I said, my father was a game control officer and the commander of our local territorial commando-a hunter, a scholar, and a soldier, who probably would have been much happier living as a contemporary of Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Selous. I was born in a war zone and raised in a household where weapons were a fact and a necessity of life. My earliest memories are of the sound of gunfire beyond our compound. I was given a rifle at an age when most little girls in America were still being given Barbie dolls, and I shot my first leopard while it was trying to climb in through my bedroom window.”
She glanced wryly at Smith. “To say the least, I grew up with a somewhat different worldview than is the norm.”
He tilted his head in an acknowledging nod. “I can see how that could happen.”