“Then get on with it!” Kretek snapped back impatiently. “We’re taking off.”
“What about Vlahovitch and the others?”
At that instant the faint ripple of distant gunshots reverberated over the knoll-automatic weapons exchanging fire, many of them.
Everyone froze in place, listening. Then Kretek broke the lock with his bellow. “Everyone aboard! Everyone aboard now! Get those goddamned engines started! We’re getting out of here!”
The gas turbines began to crank with their hollow baritone moan, the huge rotor blades sweeping past overhead. The security perimeter collapsed in on the helicopter, men hurling their weapons through the open side hatch and scrambling in after them. Kretek was last aboard as displaced snow started to swirl, tornadolike, around the mammoth heavy lifter.
Kretek raced forward to the cockpit. “Get us in the air!” he yelled, leaning in between the pilots’ seats. “Take us to the crash site!”
The pilot twisted in his seat, looking back at his employer. “Aren’t we going after the others?” He was a former Canadian naval aviator who had been cashiered for wife beating. He had fallen a great distance, but he still remembered how things had once been done.
“The sea is frozen,” Kretek said, glaring out of the windscreen. “They can walk home.”
They were half a mile short of the station when they saw the gleaming red bulk of the Halo lifting from behind the antenna knoll. The big machine swung parallel to the ridge, climbing under full power. Instinctively, Smith and the others went facedown flat on the snow, camo-merging into their background. The aircraft thundered almost directly overhead, heading for the central peaks and the saddleback between.
“Damn it!” Smith raged, scrambling to his feet and staring after the departing helicopter. “I’d hoped splitting them up would keep them pinned! They’re bailing out on their own men!”
Randi shook her head, coming up onto her knees. “They don’t give a damn, Jon. They’re criminals, not soldiers. They well and truly don’t give a damn.”
“What do we do now, Colonel?” Smyslov asked.
“We fall back to Plan B.”
“What is Plan B?”
“That depends on what’s left at the station. Let’s go!”
Mikhail Vlahovitch fumbled the little Belgian-made pocket grenade out of his parka, feeling the bullets hitting on the far side of the ice slab he crouched behind. Pulling the pin, he let the safety lever flick free, counted two, and pitched overhand. He waited for the flat crack of the grenade detonation, then lunged out from behind the slab, rolling across the frozen beach to get the angle on the men who had been firing on him.
Vlahovitch came up onto his knees, saw a wounded Spetsnaz trooper kneeling beside a second downed man, and leveled the Agram, emptying the submachine gun in a single prolonged figure-eight burst that engulfed both the wounded and the dying.
As the bolt clicked open on an empty chamber, Vlahovitch was caught by the silence. His had been the last gun firing. The only sounds remaining were the creak and whine of the pack ice and the hiss of his own breath. Staggering, he got to his feet, drawing a fresh clip out of his belt pouches.
The Russians had come out of nowhere while Vlahovitch and his men had been distracted by their search for the woman. The Spetsnaz had apparently been taken as much by surprise by the presence of the arms smugglers as the reverse. It had been an unexpected-meeting engagement, inevitably the most chaotic and savage of battles.
“Lazlo,” he yelled, ejecting the empty and forcing the reload into the Agram’s magazine well. “Lazlo!…Vrasek!…Prishkin! To me!”
No one answered. Blood streaked the ice. The scattering of bodies lay unmoving. Their men and his.
“Lazlo!…Prishkin!”
He turned in place slowly, looking around. It was a wipeout. A mutual massacre. He was the only one left of either side.
“Lazlo?”
Then he heard the distant, rhythmic thudding of rotors. It was the Halo. He couldn’t see it from the base of the point, but he could follow the sound of its flight. It was heading up to the glacier. Kretek was going after the anthrax, and Vlahovitch knew without the faintest shadow of a doubt that he wouldn’t be coming back.
And Vlahovitch finally acknowledged something else that he had known down deep in his belly for a long time: that Anton Kretek would eventually betray and abandon him like this.
“Kretek, you bastard!” He almost burst his throat with the scream.
“He’s not a very nice man really.” The voice was conversational, feminine, and coming from directly behind him.
Vlahovitch spun to find the woman standing some twenty feet away. She hadn’t been there a few moments before, but she was there now, her materialization as silent as the arrival of a stalking cat. She wore the red ski pants worn by the blonde they had captured the day before, and the green sweatshirt she had stolen from the body of Kretek’s nephew, the overlong sleeves rolled up. But this wasn’t the brown-eyed American blonde. The thrown-back hood of the shirt revealed high-pinned raven black hair and chill gray eyes, and the accent to her words was vaguely British. She stood relaxed with her arms held loosely crossed over her stomach.
“But then, you really aren’t a very nice man, either,” she went on. And then she smiled.
A strange, uncontrollable horror welled up within Vlahovitch. There was no justification for it. He was a man cradling a loaded machine gun, and she an unarmed woman. Yet he was stricken with the fear a condemned prisoner feels when he hears the approaching footfalls of his hangman. He brought up the Agram, trying to draw back the SMG’s bolt, his terror making him fumble.
The first thrown knife sank into his right shoulder, paralyzing his arm. The second struck in the center of his chest, driving through his breastbone and into his heart.
Valentina Metrace allowed herself that single, deep, deliberate breath. An enemy was dead and she and her friends were alive, and that was how it should be. She knelt down beside Vlahovitch’s body, reclaiming her knives. She cleaned each blade with a handful of snow, drying them on the clothing of the arms smuggler before resheathing them.
She’d started to salvage the man’s weapon and remaining ammunition when a new factor intruded. From this position, she had a fair view down the eastern side of the point. Standing, she shielded her eyes against the growing sun glare and peered down the revealed reach of the shoreline trail. “Oh, dear,” she murmured under her breath.
Chapter Fifty
Wednesday Island Station
“Jon, look!” Randi exclaimed, pointing. “They didn’t torch the copter!”
From their position atop the antenna knoll they could look down on the ruins of the science station. All three of the prefab huts were in flames, but beyond the camp, at the helipad site, the Long Ranger sat apparently intact under its protective shroud of snow-covered tarpaulins.
Smith kicked free of his snowshoes and unslung the SR-25. “If they didn’t wreck it some other way we may still be in business. Let’s go, but keep your eyes open for any stay-behinds.”
Weapons readied, they dropped down off the hill to the station area. The low-lying smoke stank of burning plastic and hot metal, and there was a faint tinge of roasting pork to it that all three recognized but none commented on.
It took only a few moments of wary inspection to prove that the station’s ruins were deserted. “They’ve pulled out,” Randi commented, lowering Valentina’s rifle, “bag and baggage.”
“They must have bolted when they heard the firefight. They realized more was going down around here than they’d figured.” Smith looked across at her. “How about it, Randi? What are the chances they’re aborting?”