Ice War (2 page)

“The other crewmember, Nicholas Able, made it back alive,” Bilal said. “Legrand did not.”

“Even so, there was no reason to suspect foul play,” Russell said.

“Perhaps,” Bilal said.

The others at the table all turned to look at him.

“What haven’t you told us?” Russell asked.

“Legrand was not a regular soldier,” Bilal said.

“What kind of ‘not regular’?” Gonzales asked.

“He was one of ours,” Bilal said.

“Military intelligence.” Russell said it like it was some kind of a disease.

“He was undercover,” Bilal said. “Making sure that nothing at that station could possibly go wrong.”

“So he was a spy,” Russell said. “His death might still be an accident.”

“And it might not,” Bilal said. “Can we afford that risk?”

“Any sign that the station has been infiltrated by the Bzadians?” Gonzales asked.

“All code signs were confirmed; no distress signals have been given,” Russell said. “Comprehensive background checks were done on the crew. They all came up clean. The remaining crew on Little Diomede are solid.”

“Could they be under duress?” Gonzales asked. “Are there Bzadians hiding in the shadows with guns on our guys’ backs?”

“There are duress codes,” Russell said. “None have been given. I repeat, there is no reason to think that anything is wrong out there.”

“If it wasn’t in the Bering Strait, then I might agree with you and we might just wait for the storm to pass,” Bilal said. “But we don’t have that luxury. If we don’t stop the Bzadians on the ice, we sure as hell won’t be able to stop them when they hit dry land. We’ve spent the last year building up our arctic warfare capabilities exactly for that reason.”

“How sure are you that they will attack?” Gonzales asked. “We beat them back once, and they haven’t tried again since.”

“They weren’t ready,” Bilal said. “They learned their lesson in 2028. They would have attacked last year, but they didn’t have the fuel, thanks to Operation Magnum.”

He stood and moved to the map. “To the west, Big Diomede Island. To the east, Little Diomede. Right bang in the middle of the strait. A couple of kilometres apart. Little Dio is bristling with every kind of detector you could imagine and controls a string of sensor buoys that extend for kilometres in each direction. It is also home to our control and maintenance centre here on the south-western tip. This gives the Pukes a big problem. If they try to sneak across the strait, we’ll know they’re coming. If they take out Little Dio, we’ll still know they’re coming. But if they could compromise our sensors in some way, and slip across under the cover of one of these ice storms, then the first thing we’d know about it could be when their battle tanks are spinning into Anchorage.”

“Compromise our sensors?” Gonzales asked. “How?”

“On Operation Magnum we replaced a couple of circuit boards in their SONRAD station and made our invasion fleet invisible to their scopes,” Bilal said. “Who’s to say they can’t do the same to us?”

“What about Big Diomede?” Gonzales asked.

Russell shook his head. “Deserted. It used to be a Russian outpost, but the Bzadians have never had a use for it. The only people who set foot on that rock are the local Inupiat people.”

“You’re sure they’re Inupiat, and not Bzadians in disguise?” Gonzales asked.

“We’re sure,” Bilal said. “And in any case, there are only a few of them, and they don’t go anywhere near Little Diomede.”

“So what’s your plan?” Gonzales asked. “You’ve sent in two Seal teams and lost them both. If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, it seems to me that you’re going to run out of Seals.”

“I agree,” Bilal said. “That’s the reason for this meeting. We want to send in the Angels.”

“Recon Team Angel?” Gonzales asked.

“The same,” Bilal said.

“Children,” Russell said, shaking his head.

“There would be Bzadians sitting in these chairs by now if not for those ‘children’,” Whitehead said.

“You are aware that the Angel program was shut down, along with the Demon program?” Gonzales asked.

“I think that is common knowledge,” Bilal said. “But the personnel are still in barracks at Fort Carson. They could be reactivated in a matter of days.”

“And why do you think a bunch of kids might succeed where highly trained Special Forces operatives have failed?” Gonzales asked.

“If it’s holes in the ice, polar bears, or the abominable snowman, then they won’t,” Bilal said. “But if it’s enemy activity, then they just might. That’s what they do. Go behind enemy lines and pass themselves off as Bzadians.”

“And this is our only option?” Gonzales asked.

“No, not our only option,” Russell said.

“So what’s your plan B?” Gonzales asked.

“More Seals,” Bilal said.

“Find another option,” Gonzales said. “The backlash against the Angels after the last debacle is not going away in a hurry. I’d never get this past the oversight committee.”

“Helluva way to run a war,” Whitehead said. “Command by committee.”

Gonzales ignored him.

“In that case, we’ll have to wait for the storm to pass to get satellite and aerial recon again,” Bilal said. “And if that means we wake up in a few days time with aliens on our doorsteps, I want it on the record that you refused to reactivate the Angels.”

“The Angels are off the table,” Gonzales said. “They’re not even trained for this kind of arctic stuff.” She studied her notes for a moment. “How long before we get a break in the weather?”

“There’ll be a short window tomorrow,” Russell said. “We’ll get some satellite data.”

“What are you looking for?” Gonzales asked.

“Anything,” Bilal said. “Anything that gives us reason to believe that a million Bzadians are heading in our direction.”

Bilal held the elevator door for Gonzales when they finished. The others were staying for another meeting.

The elevator, although ornate, was armoured. It was the only entrance to the underground bunker.

“Convincing enough for you?” Gonzales asked, when the heavy sheet metal doors had closed, cutting off all sound, as well as all sight, of the command centre.

“You almost had
me
fooled,” Bilal said.

“When do the Angels go in?” she asked.

“They’re already on their way,” he said.

[MISSION DAY 1, FEBRUARY 16, 2033. 1025 HOURS LOCAL TIME]

[BERING STRAIT, SOUTH-WEST OF LITTLE DIOMEDE ISLAND]

The cold was startling, even through the armoured, thermally heated combat suit. Part of that was the adjustment period, Price knew, as the thermals sensed the rapid temperature drop and slowly warmed to compensate. Part of it was psychological. Just looking around at this desert of sea ice; feeling the spray of ice particles that clattered against the suit; hearing the low throbbing moan of the arctic wind: it was enough to cause an involuntary shiver no matter what the temperature inside the suit.

Price’s leg itched. The new one. Grown for her by human scientists using Bzadian technology. According to Monster, she was part Bzadian now, and no amount of arguing that it was her own cells they had cloned would convince him otherwise.

Or maybe he just liked to tease.

It was not long after dawn. At this time of year, in this part of the world, the sun could not be bothered making an entrance until well after ten in the morning. It would hover tiredly above the horizon for a paltry eight hours then sink, as if exhausted, below the ice.

That gave them only a few hours to reach their mission objective. It was too dangerous to move out on the icefloes in the darkness, even with night-vision goggles. And overnight the temperature dropped to even more dangerous lows.

“Com check,” she said. She watched the fin of the submarine disappear down the hole in the ice as the five other Angels sounded off, two to six. Two was Sergeant Panyoczki: Monster. She was glad he was here, and not only for his soldiering skills. He was someone she trusted, absolutely, without question. But more than that. He was someone she cared deeply about. Whatever they faced out here, they would face it together.

It had taken the submarine over four hours to find the lead – a fracture between two floes, where the water had not had time to refreeze and was covered by only a thin crust.

The winter ice in the turbulent Bering Strait has a life and a geography all of its own, due to the constant buffeting of the currents that run through the narrow passage between Russia and Alaska, bringing with them the outflow of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean. Great floes collide with each other, erupting into ridges and hummocks, piggybacking on top of each other to create rafted floes. All of this constantly scoured by the wind-born ice.

For years the great Bering Strait currents had prevented the strait from freezing, but a relatively recent, and inexplicable, change in the local climate had led to the accumulation of more and more sea ice, “drift ice” latching onto land-fixed “fast ice” and gradually spreading until a bridge of ice connected the two continents, with the Diomede Islands, Big and Little, at its centre.

The submarine had located numerous leads in the ice canopy above, but most were too small, unstable, or in the wrong location.

Once this lead had been found, the submarine had surfaced at speed, using the top of its fin as a battering ram to smash its way through three or four centimetres of ice.

The submarine was gone now and Price sensed, rather than saw, its grey bulk slip away beneath the ice. On the surface of the water, delicate petals of frost flowers were already starting to form. Pretty, fractal shapes, like miniature white ferns, spreading and branching off, again and again.

Within minutes, the water would wear a white coat of frost, and within the hour it would be strong enough to walk on.

“Oscar Mike in five mikes,” Price said. “Check your battery levels.”

Batteries could behave strangely in these temperatures, and a dead or low battery meant no thermals, and that meant death in this bitter and frigid world. They each carried a spare battery for that reason, and there were more on the equipment sled.

“Rope up,” Monster said.

The ropes were lightweight nylon cords, thin but immensely strong. They had to be.

“We’re sheltered here,” Price said, clipping hers on and checking that it was secured properly. “You’d better prepare yourselves for what we’re going to hit once we get out of this lead.”

“I can hardly wait,” The Tsar said. He smiled his confident, charming smile. Another good addition to the team. He had proved that on Operation Magnum. He was still a bit cocky and full of himself, but that had diminished as he had got to know them better.

PFC Emile Attaya was the next in line, standing in front of Price, who double-checked the karabiner clips at his end. Emile was a good-looking Lebanese kid who smiled constantly and seemed to burn energy the way other people breathed air. Having Emile around was like having a new puppy in the house and although it went against protocol, nobody, not even the commanders back at Fort Carson, called him by his surname. He was always just “Emile”. Like Monster, English was not his first language. But unlike Monster, he spoke it well, with merely a trace of an accent.

“We should have brought parasails,” Emile said. “We could have used the wind and sailed there.”

“If it was blowing in the right direction,” Wall said. “Which it’s not.”

Specialist Hayden Wall. The other new Angel. He talked constantly and was usually moaning about something. He did it with the broad “A” and missing “R” of the native New Englander. His dour moping was a complete contrast from Emile’s infectious enthusiasm and quick smile.

“Or bobsleds,” Emile said. “We could have had dogs to pull us along.”

“Somebody find his off button,” Barnard said, but she smiled as she said it. Even cynical, sarcastic Barnard was not immune to Emile’s puppy dog charm.

Price took an ice-axe from the equipment sled and slipped the loop over her wrist. The others followed suit.

She watched each of them, thinking about the faith they were putting in her as leader of the mission. She hoped it wasn’t misplaced.

She shouldn’t even be here. With a new leg and the intense trauma, both physical and psychological, of the disastrous Operation Magnum, nobody would have blamed her for turning down the mission. But she had said yes, and told anyone who asked that it was because she didn’t feel her fight was finished, that she didn’t want to let down her comrades, that she felt she had something to offer. She had a thousand reasons.

But the truth was that six months lying in a hospital bed plus another six months of rehab had bored her senseless. Fort Carson too had bored her with its regimented mealtimes and mindless routines. She needed the buzz: the thrill, the coil-gun jumping in her arms, adrenaline coursing through her body. Sometimes it seemed she only felt alive when she was in imminent danger of death. But she couldn’t tell that to anyone. Not even Monster. If the counsellors back at Carson heard her say that, they would never let her out of their sight.

Someday the war would be over, one way or another, and she would have to deal with it. But that day was a long way off, and by then she might not even be alive to worry about it.