Smith turned to confront his captive. “Major, I’m counting on you not being as suicidal as the Misha’s political officer. I am going to point out, however, that should you feel tempted to try any shoulder blocking from behind on any crevasses or cliff edges…” Smith gave the safety line a pointed tug. “Wherever we go, you go.”
“This is understood, Colonel.” Smyslov’s face couldn’t be seen inside the darkness of his parka hood, and his reply was emotionless.
“Right, let’s move out.”
The slow and careful advance across the glacier began. Visibility in the snow-racked night was all but nonexistent. Valentina felt her way forward, one cautious and deliberate step at a time, probing ahead continuously with the spike end of her ice axe. Smith held to his line of advance via the glowing green screen of his handheld GPS unit, carrying the precious little device next to his skin between each position fix to keep the batteries alive.
As predicted, as the descent down the glacier face steepened, the buckled, fractured ice grew increasingly unstable, the risk of crevasses escalating geometrically. Their creeping rate of advance slowed even further as they were forced to sidestep a growing number of man-devouring cracks in the glacial surface. Finally, the inevitable happened.
Valentina was edging along, forty feet ahead, a shadow silhouetted against the lesser shadow of the glacier. Then, suddenly, she simply vanished, a great puff of snow geysering around her previous position. Smith felt the heavy thud of the snow bridge giving way into the crevasse, and he was already throwing himself backward, digging in with his heel crampons. He felt the shock and snatch of the safety rope going taut as he went on belay, but he had been “fishing” the line carefully and he hadn’t given her slack enough to fall far.
It was a good belay, and Smith’s brace held. With one hand twisted tightly in the line, he groped for the lantern at his belt, filling his lungs to ask if she was all right. But almost immediately he felt furious activity at the other end of the safety line.
Snapping on the lantern, he played the beam down the climbing rope to the point where it disappeared over the lip of the crevasse. He was just in time to see the head of Valentina’s climbing axe whip over the edge of the ice. In seconds she had kicked herself a foothold and was scrambling out onto the surface.
“That was…rather interesting,” she wheezed, collapsing beside Smith.
Smith shoved his snow goggles up onto his forehead and turned his light into her face. “Are you okay?”
“Barring a brief experiment with stark terror, I’m fine.” Valentina pushed up her own goggles and tugged aside her snow mask for a moment of serious breathing. “What a marvelous invention adrenaline is. This damn pack weighs as much as Sinbad’s Old Man of the Mountain, but when I was trying to get out of that bloody hole, it might have been a box of Kleenex!”
She took another enormous gulp of air, resuming control. “Jon…Colonel…darling…I don’t mean to complain, but it’s getting just a tiny bit dicky out here.”
“I know.” He reached over clumsily and squeezed her shoulder. “We have to get some rock under us. According to the photo maps there’s a place a little way ahead where we can get off this glacier and traverse across to the face of West Peak. From there, a ledge stair-steps down to the beach. It shouldn’t be too bad.”
Smith kept to himself the fact the photomaps were not nearly detailed enough to make a truly accurate assessment of the descent. This was yet another lesson in command presence. A good commander must always appear sure of himself and his decisions, even when he wasn’t.
Switching off the lantern, Smith got himself under the load of his pack once more and stood up, offering Valentina a hand. Then he turned back to Smyslov, helping him to his feet as well. When the snow bridge had collapsed, Smith had felt the safety line behind him go taut. Smyslov had dropped into belay as well.
“Thanks, Major. I appreciated the backup.”
“As you said, Colonel…” The Russian’s voice was still emotionless. “Where you go, I go.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Eielson Air Force Base, Fairbanks, Alaska
The two Air Commando MV-22 Ospreys had been repainted in the mottled white and gray of arctic camouflage. With their wings and propeller/rotors folded back and their long air-refueling probes thrusting forward, the VTOL assault transports lay under the glare of the hangar arc lights like a pair of beached narwhales, their Air Force ground crews swarming around them.
Down one hangar wall, Army rangers and NBC warfare specialists, likewise clad in arctic camo, sat or sprawled. Some read paperbacks; others played pocket video games or tried to doze on the cold concrete, all phlegmatically engaged in the traditional military pastime of hurry up and wait.
Outside, on the floodlit tarmac of the parking apron, an MC-130 Combat Talon brooded, an auxiliary power unit thumping steadily under its broad left wing. In the green glow of the cockpit instrumentation, a bored flight engineer held the big tanker/transport at ready-to-start-engines.
In the operations office at the rear of the hangar, the Air Commando flight crews clustered around a desk, looking on in awe as their task force commander accepted a telephone call.
Major Jason Saunders, a burly, brush-haired Special Operations veteran, barked back into the telephone handset. “No, sir! I will not launch this mission before we have the weather for it…Yes, sir, I am fully cognizant of the fact that some of our people are in serious trouble up there. I want to get to them just as badly as you do, sir. But losing the rescue force because we executed prematurely is not going to do anybody any good!…No, sir, it is not just a matter of the weather at Wednesday Island or the weather here. It’s a matter of what we’ll hit in between…The only way we can reach that island is by using air-to-air refueling…Yes, sir, we are trained for it, but topping an Osprey off from a tanker aircraft is tricky under the best of conditions. Turbulence and icing are major concerns. Attempting it at night and inside an active polar storm front escalates the risks to the suicidal. If we fail to get fuel to the VTOLs, we could lose them and the landing teams over the pack. Or if we midair we could lose the whole damn force, tanker and all, and never get near that island.”
The major took a deep, controlling breath. “In my best professional judgment, we are dealing with an impossible operational scenario at this time. I will not throw my men and aircraft away on an act of futility! Not even on your orders!…Yes, sir, I understand…I am holding the entire force at ready-to-launch, and we are receiving met updates every quarter hour. I guarantee you we will be airborne within five minutes of getting the weather…The meteorologists are saying sometime after first light, sir…Yes, sir, Mr. President. I quite understand. We will keep you advised.”
Saunders returned the phone to its cradle and collapsed face-forward onto the desktop. With his voice muffled by his crossed arms, he spoke to his squadron mates. “Gentlemen, I am ordering you to never let me do anything like that again!”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Anacosta, Maryland
The windowless office offered no direct hint to the state of the world outside, and only the digital clock on his desk and his bone weariness told the director of Covert One that it was the middle of the night. Klein pushed his glasses onto his forehead and rubbed his burning eyes.
“Yes, Sam,” he said into the red telephone. “I’ve been in communication with the captain of the Haley. He managed to close to within fifty miles of Wednesday Island before encountering solid pack ice too heavy for his ship to penetrate. He’s been forced to fall back due to the gale conditions, but he intends to try again as soon as the weather improves.”