The Arctic Event (17 page)
Saddleback Glacier
Smith studied the row of glowing green numbers in the LED strip of the handheld “Slugger” Global Positioning unit. “Don’t quote me on it, but I think we’re close,” he said, lifting his voice over the wind rumble.
Whatever weather Wednesday Island received, the glacier between the two peaks got the worst of it, the mountains channeling the polar katabatics between them. On this afternoon, the sea smoke and cloud cover had blended, streaming through the gap between the mountains in a writhing river of mist intercut with stinging bursts of airborne ice crystals too hard and piercing to be called snow.
As Smith had hoped, the rappel down the mountainside to the glacier’s surface had not proved excessively difficult, but the crossing of the glacier itself had turned into a slow, painful crawl. Visibility had varied from poor to nonexistent, and the threat of crevasses had mandated a wary roped advance, probing constantly with their ice axes. Away from the shield of the mountains, the incessant winds tugged and burned, penetrating even their top-flight arctic shell clothing. Frostbite and hypothermia would soon become a factor.
They weren’t in trouble yet, but Smith knew his people were tiring. He was feeling it himself. Night was coming on rapidly as well. Soon they would have to break off the hunt for the plane and start the hunt for shelter, if such existed up here.
That thought decided him. If he was thinking “soon,” it should be “now,” while they still had some reserves remaining. He must conserve his team’s strength and endurance. Time was critical, but squandering it by stumbling around in this freezing murk would accomplish nothing.
“That’s it,” he said. “Let’s pack it in. We’ll dig in for the night and hope for better visibility tomorrow.”
“But, Jon, you said we’re close.” Valentina’s muffled protest leaked through her snow mask. “We must almost be on top of it!”
“It’s been here for fifty years, Val. It’ll be here tomorrow. We just have to make sure we’re here to find it. Major, we’ll try and make it across to East Peak. That’ll be our best bet to find some cover out of this wind. You’ve got the point. Let’s move.”
“Yes, Colonel.” Obediently Smyslov turned and started his hunched trudge, probing ahead with the spike end of his climbing axe and slamming his crampons into the wind-abraded ice with each step.
How’s that for command, Sarge?
Smith grinned to himself, telepathing the thought to his distant mountain warfare instructor.
In the saddleback, the prevailing wind was as good as any compass. They only had to keep it on their left shoulder to eventually reach the far side of the glacier. Last on the safety line, Smith’s attention was centered on the other two members of his team, ready to brace and hold should either suddenly fall through into a hidden crevasse in the ice. Accordingly it took him a moment to comprehend why Gregori Smyslov came to such an abrupt halt.
“Look!” The Russian’s excited yell was torn by a wind gust. “Look there!”
Almost directly ahead of them, a towering finlike shape had materialized, ghostlike in the streaming mist: the vertical stabilizer of an aircraft, a big aircraft, the outline of a storm-scoured red star still faintly visible.
“Yes!” Valentina Metrace lifted her fists in triumph.
Wasn’t that always the case? When you weren’t looking for it, you found it.
Wednesday Island Station
Randi Russell trudged up the trail to the knoll overlooking the station. Every few feet she stopped and heaved on the heavy, weatherproof coaxial cable that led up to the radio mast, peeling a length of it up and out of the snow cover. Carefully she ran each exposed cable section through her mittened hands, looking for breaks or cuts.
It had to be the antennas. She’d checked everything else on both the sat phone and the sideband set. The little SINCGARS transceiver they’d brought with them was useless. It simply lacked the power to override the solar flare that was demolishing communications. Once they’d broken the line of sight she hadn’t even been able to raise Jon and the others on the aircraft party.
She was on her own. As much as one could get. Impatiently she shook her head, displeased with the pang of loneliness that had flared within her. Giving the MP-5 a hitch onto her shoulder, she doggedly plowed another few feet up the compacted snow trail.
Reaching the base of the ice-coated radio mast, Randi knelt down and traced the last few inches of cable into the booster box at the tower base. It was intact, and all the connectors were still screwed tight. Frustrated, she rocked back on her heels. The radios should be working. Given they weren’t, she was missing something. Randi suspected sabotage, but if such was the case, some very subtle methodology had been used.
Somebody was being very, very clever, and she hoped that soon she would have the opportunity to make him suffer for it.
Standing, Randi took her binoculars from her belt case. From her position on the knoll she had a fair view of the immediate cove area. Degree by degree, to the limits of the haze and the fading daylight, she made another scan of her environs, her augmented gaze lingering on the jumbled piles of pressure ice along the shoreline and on the shadows and swales of drift at the foot of the central ridge.
That clever person was out there now, somewhere nearby, possibly even watching her. He was waiting, maybe for assistance or maybe for her to make that one mistake. To defeat him she was going to have to be a little bit more clever than he was.
She had one immediate advantage. Movement in this snow-blanketed environment meant leaving obvious and unerasable tracks. The science station was centered in a straggling, lopsided web of flag-marked snow trails that interconnected the buildings, supply dumps, and more distant experiment and research sites. Randi ran her glasses down each track, seeking for fresh ground disturbances or sets of snowshoe or boot tracks angling off from the regular routes of travel.
She found one. Disconcertingly, it was almost immediately below her, branching off from the trail to the knoll she had followed just a few minutes before in her climb to the radio mast. In her intent study of the communications cable, she hadn’t paid attention to the short lateral stretch of broken snow that led out to a small disturbed drift. She did so now, and a chill rippled down her spine that had nothing to do with the sinking evening temperature.
She hastened downslope to the divergent trail and followed it for a dozen yards, kicking her way along and restirring the surface. She found what she had feared: red-stained snow, covered over and hidden. Reaching the end of the trail, she dropped to her knees and dug into the drift. It didn’t take long to uncover the parka-clad body.
Kayla Brown wouldn’t be going home to her fiancé in Indiana. Gently Randi brushed the snow from the young woman’s face. She had died from a smashing blow to the temple from some heavy, pointed object, possibly an ice axe. Traces of shock and terror, her last expression, lingered frozen on the student’s face.
Kneeling beside the girl’s body, Randi Russell decided that it would not be adequate for this clever person to suffer. He was going to die, and it would please her to be his executioner.
Randi reburied the body with a few sweeps of her arm. She would not tell Trowbridge about this discovery. Not immediately, at any rate. Kayla Brown would keep here for a time, at least until Randi could arrange for her avenging.
Randi continued to the hut row. The lights were already on within the bunkhouse. Doctor Trowbridge had volunteered to prepare an evening meal. Pausing on the main trail that led past the hut entrances, she judged vision angles and distances. Near the front of the bunkhouse, Randi veered off the trail, plowing out into the virgin snow for a few yards.
Then, dropping onto the snow, she burrowed and rolled, compacting a pit large and deep enough for her to lie in with her back almost flush with the surrounding surface. It brought back unbidden childhood memories of making snow angels up at Bear Lake. Her intents now, though, were quite different.
Satisfied with her efforts, she got to her feet, shook off the ice rime, and went in to dinner.
The Misha Crash Site
“It strikes me that a lot of people are going to feel awfully stupid if we get in there only to find that containment vessel has been lying on the bottom of the ocean for the past fifty years.” The MOPP biochemical warfare suit had been designed to fit over his cold-weather clothing, and Jon Smith suspected that he looked very much like the Michelin Tire man.
“That is a stupidity I could live with,” Smyslov replied, passing him the headset for the Leprechaun tactical radio.
“So could I.” Smith flipped back his parka hood and settled the headset in place, wincing a little as the searing chill bit at his momentarily exposed ears. “Radio check.”
“I’ve got you.” Valentina Metrace hunkered down on the ice beside him, wearing a second tactical headset. “We’re all right for line-of-sight distances at least.”
The team had set up some fifty yards upwind of the crash site, behind the meager windbreak afforded by their backpacks and a low ledge of extruded ice. Evening was standing on, but there was nothing in the way of a sunset; the grayness around them simply grew darker and the wind colder. Time and environment were becoming critical.
“Okay, people, this will be a fast in-and-out to learn if the anthrax is still aboard the aircraft, and to see if anyone else has been in there.” Smith popped the plastic safety covers off the MOPP suit’s filter mask. “You two know what I should be looking for, and you’ll walk me through it. There shouldn’t be any problems, but I’m putting one absolute in place now. If, for any reason, something goes wrong—if I don’t come out, or if we lose contact—nobody goes in after me. Is that clearly understood?”
“Jon, don’t be silly...” Valentina started to protest.
“Is that understood?” Smith barked the words.
She nodded, looking unhappy. “Yes, I understand.”
Smith looked at Smyslov. “Understood, Major?”
In the shadow of his parka hood, Smith could see some emotion roiling beneath the Russian’s stony features, an effect Smith had noticed several times before during the past week. Again Smyslov was struggling with something down in his guts where he lived.
“Colonel, I...It is understood, sir.”
Smith pulled the anticontamination hood over his head, adjusting the mask straps and sealing tabs. He took his first breath of rubber-tainted filtered air and drew on the suit’s overgauntlets.
“Okay.” His voice sounded muffled even in his own ears. “Dumb question of the day: how do I get inside?”
“The fuselage appears to be essentially intact,” Valentina’s voice crackled over the radio channel, “and the only way into the forward bomb bay is through the forward crew compartment. Unfortunately the conventional access doors are located in the nose wheel well and in the forward bomb bay itself, both of which are blocked. Your alternatives are through the port and starboard cockpit windows, which would be hard to wriggle through in that outfit, or the crew’s access tunnel to the aft compartment. The latter is your best bet.”
“How do I get into the aft compartment, then?”
“There is an access door in the tail just forward of the horizontal stabilizer on the starboard side. You’ll have to work your way forward through the pressurized crew spaces from there.”
“Right.” Smith stood awkwardly and waddled toward the murky outline of the downed bomber.
The port-side wing of the TU-4 had been torn loose in the crash and folded back almost flush against the fuselage, but the starboard approaches to the bomber were clear. As he circled around the great aluminum slab of the horizontal stabilizers Smith found himself marveling a little. Even in an age of giant military transports and jumbo jet airliners, this thing was huge. And they were actually flying these monsters during the Second World War.
Smith approached the great cylindrical body and ran a hand over the ice-glazed metal.
“Okay, I’m here and I’ve found the entry door. There’s a flush-mounted handle, but it looks like it’s been popped out.”
“The emergency release will have been pulled from the inside,” Valentina replied. “It should open, but you might have to pry it a bit.”
“Right.” Smith had a small tool kit slung at his belt, and he drew a heavy long-hafted screwdriver from it. Fitting the tip of the blade into the frost-clogged slit around the door, he slammed the heel of his hand against the butt of the tool. After a couple of blows there was a sharp crack as the ice seal broke. A few more moments of levering, and the door swung outward, the wind catching at it, leaving a rectangular shadowed gap in the fuselage.
“You were right, Val. It’s open. Going inside now.”
Bending low, he ducked through the small door.
It was dark inside the fuselage, with only the trace of dull exterior light at his back. Smith removed a flashlight from his tool kit and snapped it on.
“Damn,” he murmured. “I never expected this.”
“What are you seeing, Jon?” Valentina demanded.
Smith panned the flashlight beam around the fuselage interior. No appreciable amount of snow had leaked inside, but ice crystals glittered everywhere, thinly encrusting the battleship gray frames and cable and duct clusters. “It’s incredible. There’s no sign of corrosion or degradation anywhere. This thing might have rolled out of the factory yesterday.”
“Natural cold storage!” the historian exclaimed over the radio. “This is fabulous. Keep going!”
“Okay, there’s a catwalk leading aft past a couple of large flat rectangular boxes to a circular dished hatch right in the tail of the airplane. The hatch is closed, and there is a round window set in its center. A couple of what look like ammunition feed tracks are set on either side of it. I guess that must be the tail gunner’s station.”
“Correct. Is there anything else noteworthy back there?”
“There’s some kind of a mount or pedestal with a couple of unbolted cables hanging from it. It looks like some piece of equipment has been dismantled.”
“That would be the generator set of the auxiliary power unit,” the historian mused. “That’s rather interesting. Now, just to your right there should be a bulkhead with another pressure hatch centered in it, leading forward.”
“There is. It’s closed.”
“The B-29/TU-4 family was one of the first military aircraft designed specifically for high-altitude flight. A number of its compartments were pressurized to allow its crew to survive without the need for oxygen masks. You’re going to have to work forward through a series of these pressure hatches.”
“Got it.” Smith shuffled over to the hatch and tried to peer through the thick glass of the port, only to find that it was frosted over. “What should be in this next compartment?”
“It should be the crew’s in-flight rest quarters.”
“Right.” Smith gripped the dogging handle of the hatch and twisted it. After a moment’s resistance, the lever started to yield.
“Jon, wait!”
Smith yanked his hand away from the handle as if it had gone red hot. “What?”
Smith heard a background muttering in his earphones. “Oh, Gregori was just saying that it’s very unlikely there would be booby traps on the hatches or anything.”
“Thank you both for sharing that with me, Val.” Smith leaned on the lever again until it gave. The hatch swung inward, and he probed with the flashlight.
“Crew’s quarters, all right. There’s a set of fold-out bunks on either side and there’s even a john—no relation—up in one corner. The cabin appears to have been stripped. There are no mattresses or bedding in the bunks, and I can see a number of empty, open lockers.”
“That’s understandable.” Valentina sounded thoughtful, obviously cogitating on something. “The next space should be the radar-observer compartment. Let’s see what you find there.”
Working his way forward, Smith ducked through a low nonpressure hatch. Here there was dim outside light. Plexiglas bubbles, sheathed in ice and hazed with decades of wind spalling, were set into the port and starboard bulkheads and into the overhead. Skeletal chairs faced the two side domes, and a third seat on an elevated pedestal was positioned under the astrodome in the top of the fuselage. In a bomber mounting its full defensive armament, Smith imagined that these would have been the gunners’ targeting stations for the remotely controlled gun turrets. Valentina verified the supposition as he described the space.
“This compartment has been emptied out, too,” Smith reported. “A lot of empty lockers, and even the padding has been stripped out of the seats.”
“All of the survival gear will have been taken, along with anything that could serve as insulation. There should also be a large electronics console against the forward bulkhead.”
“There is,” he concurred. “The chassis has been completely gutted.”
“That’s the radar operator’s station. They’d have wanted the components,” Valentina finished cryptically.
“There are also two circular doors or passages in the forward bulkhead, one above the other. The larger lower passage has a pressure hatch on it. The upper one has a short aluminum stepladder leading up to it.”
“The lower hatch opens into the aft bomb bay. There won’t be anything in there but fuel tanks. The upper passage is the one you want. It’s the crew crawlway that runs over the bomb bays into the bow compartment.”
Smith crossed the compartment and peered down the aluminum-walled tunnel. It had been designed large enough for a man in bulky winter flight gear to negotiate, so he shouldn’t have a problem with his MOPP suit.
“Going on.” He put his boot toe in a ladder step and heaved himself into the tunnel, hitching and shouldering his way awkwardly toward the circle of pale light at its far end.
The forty-foot crawl down the frost-slickened tube seemed to take forever, dislodged ice crystals raining around him with each inch gained. Smith was startled when he finally thrust his head into the comparatively open space of the forward compartment.
The last of the outside light trickled in dully through the navigator’s astrodome and the hemispheric glazed nose of the old bomber, and again the state of preservation was astounding. The plane was frozen in time as well as in temperature. Ice diamonds sheathed controls that hadn’t moved for five decades, and glittered over the ranked instrument gauges frozen on their last readings.
“I’m in the cockpit,” he reported into his lip mike, panting a little with the exertion.
“Very good. Is there much crash damage?”
“It’s not bad, Val. Not bad at all. Some of the windows in the lower curve of the bow were caved in. Some snow and ice has packed in around the bombardier’s station. A drift seems to have built up around the nose. Beyond that, everything’s in pretty fair shape, although some inconvenient SOB unshipped the tunnel ladder. Just a second; let me get down from here.”
Smith rolled onto his back and used the grab rail mounted above the entry to draw himself out of the crawlway. “Okay, on the deck.”
“Excellent, Jon. Before you examine the bomb bay could you check a couple of things for me?”
“Sure, as long as it won’t take too long.”
“It shouldn’t. First, I want you to examine the flight engineer’s station. That will be the aft-facing seat and console behind the copilot’s position.”
“Okay.” Smith snapped on his flashlight once more. “It’s a lot roomier in here than I figured.”
“In a standard TU-4 a lot of the space in the bow compartment would be taken up by the basket of the forward dorsal gun turret. That was one of the weapons mounts pulled in the America bombers.”
“Yeah.” Smith tilted his hood faceplate up. “I can see the turret ring in the overhead. Again, I’m seeing the empty lockers, and the seat cushions and parachutes are gone. Looking toward the bow, I’ve got what looks like the navigator’s table on my left, and another stripped electronics chassis to my right.”
“That was the radio operator’s station. I suspect the plane’s crew built a survival camp somewhere around here, someplace that would provide a bit more protection than the wreck’s fuselage. They must have transferred all of the survival and radio gear there along with the plane’s auxiliary power generator.”
“That camp will be the next thing we’ll be hunting for.” Smith lumbered to the flight engineer’s station and played the light across the gauge- and switch-covered panel. “Okay, I’m at the engineer’s station. What am I looking for?”
“Good, there should be three banks of four levers across the bottom of the console, a big one, a middle-sized one, and a small one—papa bear, mama bear, and baby bear. The big ones are the throttles. They should be pulled all the way back, I imagine, to the closed position. The others are the propeller and fuel mixture controls. How are they set?”
Smith scrubbed at his faceplate and swore softly as the haze turned out to be on the inside. “They’re both sort of in the middle.”
“Most interesting,” the historian mused over the radio circuit. “There would have been no reason to fiddle with them after a crash. All right, there is one more lever I want you to check for me, Jon. It will be located on the control pedestal outboard of the pilot’s seat. It will be very distinctive in appearance. The knob on the end of it will be shaped like an airfoil.”
Smith turned in the aisle between the flight control stations, peering awkwardly over the back of the pilot’s chair. “Looking for it...There’s a hell of a lot of levers all over this thing...Okay, I found it. It’s all the way up, forward, whatever.”
“That’s the flap controller,” Valentina murmured. “This is coming together...This is making sense...” There was a moment of silence over the channel, and then the historian continued with a rush. “Jon, be careful! The anthrax is still aboard that aircraft!”
“How can you be sure?” Smith demanded.
“It will take too long to explain. Just take my word for it. The crew never jettisoned the bioagent reservoir. It’s still in there!”
“Then I’d better have a look at it.” Smith straightened and returned to the forward bomb bay access.
In a mirror image of the rear compartment, it was a circular dished pressure hatch with a round window in its center, located directly below the crawlway tunnel. Smith knelt down.