The piercing scream continued.
Unnoticed, Carter and Anna edged along the wall to the bank of skimobiles. The enormous jaws of the warehouse doors were slowly closing. Anything that big took a while to move. Snow flumes showed beyond the doors. It could be another storm.
"Ready?" Carter said, jumping into the skimobile Larionov had told them to take.
Anna nodded, and Carter turned on the motor, a small noise compared to the alarm's torturous complaint. The opening to the outside world had grown smaller.
He turned the wheel, and the skimobile dashed down the center of the busy warehouse. He was relying on surprise.
The Silver Doves were surprised, but stubborn and well trained as well.
They raised their air rifles and fired.
Crouching, Anna fired back while Carter pushed the skimobile to speeds greater than it was built for.
Shots whizzed around them, hitting the metal sides of the skimobile.
The big doors' opening grew smaller.
Carter pressed on while Anna fired.
They rounded a group of trucks amid a hail of fire and sped toward the closing doors.
The opening was so narrow that the skimobile's sides brushed against it as they passed through.
Air rifle fire and shouts followed them through the opening, then the automatic doors closed It would be a while before the Silver Doves could reopen them.
They were alone in sudden, dense silence.
For the moment, they were safe from the fanatics in the secret installation. Now they faced perhaps a greater foe — the Antarctic weather.
In the open skimobile, the icy air slashed at them as they sped down the valley. They did up their clothes as snowflakes whipped like streamers in the wind. The sky was clouded over gray and brown. It looked like a developing blizzard, but there was nothing to be done. They had to go on.
Anna opened a compartment in front of them and quickly searched until she found a radio. Her fingers were red and wet.
"You're hurt!" Carter said.
She shrugged, pulled on mittens, and went to work on the radio.
"It's nothing," she said. "Anyway, there's nothing to be done about it now."
"Where?" he asked, worried.
"Thigh."
She put headphones over her ears, listened, then talked. Carter leaned over and saw Anna's wound. Her blood-soaked blue snowsuit would freeze soon.
"The radio doesn't work," she said.
"I'm not surprised. Once the weather lifts, it'll be okay."
He glanced at her and saw the drawn face. She was shaking with the bitter cold. The skimobile was wide open. No protection at all.
"Either you take care of that wound now or I stop here and do it myself."
She reached behind them and dug through their gear. She pulled a thermal blanket over her lap, tucked her legs in, and opened a first aid kit. At last she pulled the blanket up and poured antibiotic powder through her snowsuit into the rifle hole. She bit her lip.
"Bullet still in there?"
"Yes."
She wrapped gauze bandages around the leg. They'd have to wait to take the bullet out. If they tried now, hypothermia would set in and she would literally freeze to death. She needed to keep warm, and not move so that she didn't bleed so much.
A beginning fever reddened her cheeks and glazed her eyes. She pulled a knit balaclava over her face.
"Where to?" she said bravely.
"We'll never make Novolazarevskaya in this weather. We'll try to get out of the mountains and find my helicopter. We can lent it and stay warm there." He needed to keep her warm.
They drove on into the brutal Antarctic, the blizzard slowly growing in intensity. She kept the insulated blanket wrapped around her. Still she shook with the cold and fever. Worried, helpless, Carter watched her as he did the only thing he could do — forge ahead.
Eighteen
In the skimobile, Nick Carter and Anna Blenkochev traveled back down the valley, around, and up to the sheer mesa where the Silver Doves had captured them.
From there, using his trained memory and the traces of their old ski trail, Carter backtracked in the thickening snow flurries.
They traveled for hours, the brown-gray skies not yet opening to blast them with the threatened blizzard. The sunlight was hazy, the conditions bad. Mounds of snow stood frozen in dull diamondlike crystals, statues of immobility. The visibility lessened.
Anna's head fell back against the seat.
"Don't go to sleep!" Carter warned her.
"I won't," she said. "I'm just so tired."
"Sit up."
He shook her shoulder. She rolled her head to the side and looked at him.
"Come on, sit up!" he said.
She struggled up.
"Talk to me," he commanded.
In a halting voice she told him about Russia, about Moscow where she had grown up. Saint Basil's Cathedral of onion domes. Lenin's tomb. The Kremlin. Gorki Park. Slowly her voice strengthened with interest. About music lessons, violin concertos. About the mother who raised her while the absent father came to stay occasionally on weekends. She talked on as the snow thickened and the cold Antarctic day closed around them like a fist.
"And then, one day, he appeared with his suitcase and said he was home for good," she said, wonder in her voice. "After that, he was home most nights. I was like other little girls. I had both a mother and a father."
"She must be remarkable, your mother."
"Yes." She smiled.
"Someone he met while working?"
"Probably another reason why I'm an agent too."
"No one in my government knew he was even married. He kept her secret, and you, too. There's a reason for that," Carter said thoughtfully "Is she a foreigner?"
Anna smiled broadly.
"I suppose it doesn't hurt to tell now. It's been so many years."
"American?" Carter's voice was incredulous.
"Leslee Warner She was with AXE."
They drove on. Carter could feel her laugh quietly beside him. A family joke.
"Blenkochev would never have married an American unless he had good reason to trust her," Carter said. "Did she save his life?"
"Maybe." Anna smiled. "She saved him at least from imprisonment Your Hawk had captured him and turned him over to other agents to take back to your country for questioning. She was one of the other agents. Everyone thought he killed her while escaping."
Again Anna leaned back against the seat.
"So that's how he got away," he said. "I never knew."
Carter contemplated the radical swing of events that occurred when human emotions became involved. How much information the United States had lost because one woman had lost her heart to the source of information.
And Blenkochev must have loved her, too, or else he'd never have bothered to marry her. Instead, she would have been imprisoned in a Moscow cold-water flat and pumped dry, then exiled to a labor camp in Siberia.
Now she lived in bureaucratic luxury in a Moscow apartment and had a dacha for weekends and the summer overlooking the Moscow River. No wonder Blenkochev was always aware of how tenuous his position was. He must have pulled strings, bribed, and threatened to keep her from the fate of most captive foreign agents in Russia. There would be a dozen jealous, grudge-bearing bureaucrats waiting to depose him first chance they could.
"Is she happy?" Carter asked.
"Restless, but happy as any of us," Anna said, her heavy-lidded eyes closing.
"Dammit, Anna! Sit up!"
"I'm sorry," she said feebly. She struggled up again.
Her lips were blue surrounded by the face mask. They shivered with cold and fever.
Ahead the ribbons of snow had thickened into curtains. The wind howled along the top of the ridge they traveled. The skimobile rocked with the gales as if slapped around by the hand of a giant.