Wind-whipped embers seared Smith’s face and charred his clothing. He sprang again, throwing his arms over the top of the float, the helicopter bobbling wildly as his weight came aboard. Squad automatic fire tore into the compressed foam beside him. “Go! Go! G-” His yell strangled off as Valentina grabbed the hood of his parka, heaving furiously to drag him in through the hatch.
Centrifugal force swung his legs out as Randi pivoted the Long Ranger around its rotor mast, putting its tail to the enemy. The nose dipped as she firewalled the throttles, powering away from the firefight.
Smith got a leg up on the float and lunged into the helicopter’s cabin, collapsing on the deck. Valentina collapsed next to him, glaring.
“Don’t start about us coming back for you, Jon!” she yelled over the growing wind roar. “Just don’t even bloody start!”
The last two members of the Spetsnaz platoon, the radio operator and the junior demolitions man, watched the small orange helicopter buzz away over the central ridge. The senior demo man had died spectacularly in the last moments of the fight. Standing to fire at the aircraft, his head had exploded like a bursting balloon, struck by a bullet traveling at some ungodly velocity.
There was nothing to be done for him, and the pair of survivors were unsure of what they could do for themselves. At the moment they were among the most helpless of men: Russian soldiers without an officer to give them orders. They exchanged a few quiet words in their native Yakut tongue; then they started to trudge back toward the dead body of Lieutenant Tomashenko and the stranger he had shot down.
The stone- and snow-streaked flanks of the central ridge wheeled past below the Long Ranger. Randi’s hands hurt, but she could cope with it. Far more importantly, in the face of the cold start and the gunfire, all the instrument gauges were where they were supposed to be.
“How does it look?” Smith said, pulling himself up between the pilot seats.
“It looks like Bell builds a pretty good helicopter. Where do you want me to head, Jon?”
“The Misha crash site, as fast as you can get us there.”
“We’re on the way. What are we going to do when we get there?”
There was no sense in not telling her the truth. “I have no idea, Randi. We’re going to have to see what we’ve got and how it plays.”
Valentina pulled herself up beside him. “What happened to Gregori?”
Smith hated the sound of his own voice, cold and flat. “His own people shot him.”
“God, and I wanted to kill him myself once.” Valentina rested her forehead on the back of the pilot’s seat. When she straightened her voice had gone cold as well. “Once we’ve sorted out that lot at the crash site, I’d like to go back there and tidy up a few things.”
“You don’t have to. The issue has been dealt with.”
The Long Ranger swept around West Peak, and the jagged slopes fell away to the dirty gray white of the glacier.
“Stay high, Randi. We may have guns down there.”
“Understood. It should be right over on the far side of the saddleback, shouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, we should be over it in another second.”
And then they were.
“You bastards!” Valentina screamed in helpless rage, smashing her fists down on the cabin deck. “You filthy, stinking bastards!”
The scattered ruins of the Misha 124 lay on the ice below. The entire forward fuselage of the ancient bomber had been ripped open, first by shaped explosive charges and then by the enormous lift and leverage of Kretek’s flying crane. Chunks of aircraft skin and bulkheading lay scattered like discarded Christmas wrappings, and they could look down into the TU-4’s forward bomb bay.
The bioagent reservoir was gone, lifted out of the wreck like an egg out of a crumpled aluminum nest.
Randi let the Long Ranger slip into a hover over the crash site. “Oh, God, he’s got it!” she exclaimed, her voice despairing.
Two metric tons of weaponized anthrax. Half a continent’s worth of death in the hands of a man who cared less than nothing for human life.
Smith looked away from the crash site and toward the south, toward the threatened world, and in the distance he caught the faint repetitive flicker of rotors in the sunlight.
Chapter Fifty-one
Over the Arctic Ocean
“This is Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Do you copy?”
Major Saunders had repeated the call so often it had started to lose meaning for him. They had completed their final top-off from the tanker, and in the Osprey’s cargo bay the ranger strikers and the ABC men were tightening harness and running their final equipment checks. Soon they’d be coming in on their objective. For the first time in days the radio bands were clear of solar interference. But Saunders was beginning to suspect there was no one out there to answer.
“This is Black Horse Lead…”
“Black Horse Lead, this is Wednesday Island Point,” a crisp, businesslike voice crackled clearly into Saunders’s earphones. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith. I am coded Cipher Venger Five. Do you read me, Black Horse?”
Saunders’s thumb crushed the transmit button on his joystick. “We read you, Colonel, four by four. We are your Mike force. What is your situation?”
“We are off Wednesday and airborne at this time. Situation on the island is critical and unstable. What is your ETA, Black Horse, and do you have fighter assets attached?”
“We are approximately twenty-five minutes out from Wednesday. Negative on fighter assets; we are lift and tanker only.”
“That’s not going to do us any good then,” the voice replied. “Be advised Wednesday Island should be considered a potentially hot LZ. Hostiles may include Russian Spetsnaz elements. Also be advised the Primary Package is verified. I say again, the Primary Package is verified. Primary Package is also off the island and is being sling carried by a Mil 26, that is Mary…India…Lima…two…six, Halo heavy-lift helicopter, Canadian civil registry, Golf…Kilo…Tango…Alpha. Halo is now heading south-southeast from Wednesday Island at approximately ninety knots. We are in pursuit at this time. Require immediate interceptor launch. Engage and destroy Halo at all costs. I say again, engage and destroy at all costs!”
“Understood, Wednesday Point. We will relay intercept request, but it’s going to take a while. Even the jets will need a couple of hours to get out this far.”
“Roger that, Black Horse, understood.” There was a fatalism in the reply. “We’ll do what we can until they get here.”
Anton Kretek peered down from the crane operator’s cab on the port side of the Halo. Seventy feet below the huge helicopter, the lozenge-shaped containment vessel twisted slowly at the end of its heavy Kevlar cable. Torn wiring and ductwork trailed raggedly from either end of the silvery reservoir, and the lifting harness wasn’t as secure as it might have been, but the pearl had been stolen from the oyster.
It had been a tough, sloppy job, but what did it matter? It was the last. It had cost him a number of his best men, including his chief of staff, but that might have worked out for the best. Mikhail would have had to have been liquidated in due course anyway. The man simply knew too much. Now was as good a time as any to have done with it.
There was, of course, the chance he might be captured back on the island, along with his knowledge about the remainder of the anthrax retrieval operation, but Kretek had prepared for even that eventuality.
Then there was also the unavenged death of his sister’s son, but pish, be damned to the woman. The boy was dead. What profit was there in fussing about it now?
Kretek groped in the pocket of his parka for his Balkan-blend cigarettes and lighter, then recalled the big half-empty blivett of jet fuel filling the helicopter’s central cargo bay. Telling his nicotine-starved nerves to be patient for a few hours more, he went forward from the crane cab to the cockpit.