“Every once in a while you can be pleasantly surprised.”
Chapter Forty-three
The North Face, Wednesday Island
Randi Russell was on her feet and moving again before she regained true consciousness. Nor was there any clarity to that consciousness. She had no memory of how she had freed herself from the snowslide. Nor did she have any idea where she was or where she was going. It was all dying-animal reflex now.
She no longer felt particularly uncomfortable or fearful. The false warmth of hypothermia was on her, and point by point, she was detaching from the world. The imperative to keep moving was still present, but even that was fading. The next time she fell would be the last.
There were no destinations left in the cold, black emptiness surrounding her. She moved downward toward the shoreline simply because that was the easiest direction to go, the terrain working in her favor.
Randi did not realize the meaning of the jumbled piles of ice blocks she’d started to encounter. It was the broken rim of sea ice building up along the northern coast of Wednesday Island. She was only dimly aware that the searing, deadening wind was being blocked, and she turned parallel to the ghostly stacked rubble, stumbling along the snow-jacketed gravel of the beach.
The ghosts were dominating her now-sounds, voices, visions out of her past, pleasant and not, replaying in random fragments. Santa Barbara, Carmel, UCLA, Iraq, China, Russia, the lesser places in between. People known. Things experienced.
She tried to cling to the pleasant memories: playing on the beach below her parents’ home, conspiring in happy sisterhood with Sophia, Mike undressing her and lowering her to the soft grass on that first sweet, trembling time.
But the blackness and the cold kept bringing in the other occasions: standing at Sophia’s side, scattering their parent’s ashes. The awful pain of the open grave at Arlington, hearing taps played for the bold, smiling other half of herself. The anger and the need to strike out at something, anything, that had changed her from a CIA linguist-analyst to a wet-work field agent. The face of the first person she’d ever been forced to kill. Standing at the edge of that second grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, with the last person she had to love in the world leaving her behind.
Randi’s boot twisted on a frozen stone. She made no effort to catch herself as she fell. A faint voice in the back of her mind raged at her to get up, but it was too much bother to listen. She crawled a few feet into the lee of an ice mass and curled up, husbanding the last fading remnants of body warmth as the snow sifted over her.
This would be where she would die. Randi would fight it no further. There was no sense to it. She gave herself to the phantoms, reliving the dimming, fragmented kaleidoscope of memory.
The recall of Sophia became especially strong, and Randi was pleased. She was with her sister again.
But Sophie kept taking her to the wrong places. Back to Mike’s death. Back to stand before that other tall, sober soldier in a black beret. Back to the one truly serious argument she’d ever had with her sister. Back to the one unforgivable thing Sophia had ever done to her.
“I’m going to marry Jon, Randi,” Sophie said again.
No!
“Jon is sorry for what he’s done to you, Randi. More sorry than you will ever know or be willing to understand.”
“I don’t want for him to be sorry! I want for him to have saved you!” Randi cried back, their argument flaring, as raw and as painful as ever.
“No one could have saved me, Randi. Not Jon, nor even you.”
“There must have been a way!”
Sophia’s eyes filled her universe now. “If there had been a way, Jon would have found it. Just as you would have found it.”
“No!”
“Say Jon’s name for me, Randi.”
“I won’t! I don’t want to!”
Sophie’s voice grew urgent. “Say his name, Randi!”
Randi couldn’t refuse her. “Jon,” she sobbed.
“Louder, Randi.” Sophie’s eyes were loving, frightened, demanding, “Say it louder!”
“Jon!”
Why was her sister doing this? Randi just wanted to sleep. To go away.
Sophia wouldn’t allow it. She was bending over her now, shaking her. “Again, Randi! Call to him! Scream it! Scream Jon’s name!”
“JON!”
Smith broke step and looked up, scanning the night. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Valentina inquired, coming up behind him. Smith had taken the point, breaking trail with Valentina and Smyslov trailing on the safety line. Following the icefall, fortune had turned in their favor, and the remaining descent to the north shore had gone easily and swiftly. They had been trudging steadily along the beach, making good time in the shelter of the pressure ice, when Smith had checked at the faintest alien sounds rising above the storm.
“I don’t know. It sounded like somebody calling my name.”
“Not likely.” Valentina shoved up her snow goggles. “Who could be out here to call you?”
“Randi! Who else?” Smith unlatched from the safely line and snapped on the lantern clipped to his belt. “Illuminate and fan out! Start looking! Move!”
They found her within five minutes.
“Jon! Over here! Hurry!”
Kneeling in a notch in the wall of pressure ice, Valentina was brushing the snow away from a huddled form. Smith was on his knees beside them in seconds, struggling out of the straps of his pack frame. Smyslov came in behind him a moment later.
“You were right!” Valentina exclaimed. “What in all hell is she doing out here rigged like this?”
“Escape and evasion,” Smith snapped back. “The Spetsnaz must have hit the science station.”
“That’s not possible,” Smyslov protested. “Only the one platoon was inserted on the island, the one that engaged you at the crash site.”
“Then somebody else is here.” Smith spread a survival blanket on the snow, gently lifting Randi onto it. He tore off mittens and gloves, sliding a hand under the mismatched and inadequate jumble of clothing she wore, seeking for a heartbeat.
“She’s out solid,” Valentina commented, leaning over Jon’s shoulder.
“She’s dying,” Smith replied curtly. “There are chemical heat pads in the packs. Two each. Get them out. All of them.”
Valentina and Smyslov obeyed with all the speed they could, flexing the heat pads to trigger the thermal reaction.
“Shove them down her sleeves and pant legs,” Smith ordered. “When we start to move her the chilled blood in her limbs will circulate into her body core, and the shock could kill her.”
“Jon. Look at this.” Valentina had worked Randi’s left arm out from under the oversized sweatshirt. A handcuff had been locked around it.
“Son of a bitch! That explains the abrasions on her other wrist. She was a prisoner.”
“But whose?”
“I don’t know, Val. If it’s not the Spetsnaz, then it must be the others. The ones who tried to shoot us down in Alaska.”
“How bad is she, Colonel?” Smyslov asked from behind his other shoulder.
“If we don’t get her to some shelter and warmth fast, she’s gone.” Smith wrapped the survival blanket tightly around Randi. They had done all they could do out here.
“I will carry her, Colonel,” Smyslov offered.
“All right. I’ll take your pack. Let’s go.”
The Russian lifted his new burden with care. “It is all right, devushka,” he murmured. “You are with friends. Don’t leave us now.”
Valentina took up both the rifles. “We’ve got to assume the science station’s either been occupied or destroyed. Where can we go?”
“We either find another cave or build a snow shelter,” Smith replied, playing his lantern beam along the man-high stacks of pressure ice mounding along the shoreline. “Keep your eyes open for any place that looks good.”