The Arctic Event (22 page)

“These are snow blocks!” Valentina exclaimed.

It was true. Someone had used building blocks of compacted snow, igloolike, to build a wall within the overhang. Over the decades, the blocks had cold-welded together into a solid glassy mass that resisted the stabbing knife blades, but their resistance couldn’t prevent them from eventually yielding.

“Canvas! This is it! It’s a cave!”

The snow wall and the ancient canvas windscreen behind it collapsed into darkness. And the icy dankness of long unstirred air flowed out.

Smith retrieved the big electric lantern from his pack and played the beam into the mouth of the cavern. The tunnel was perhaps six feet wide and low enough so that even Valentina would be forced to stoop to enter. Small, jagged stalactites of black rock studded the cave roof.

“A lava tube,” Smith commented.

“To be expected on a volcanic island,” Valentina agreed. “Look, on the floor.”

The antenna wire and what looked like a hose extended from beneath the small avalanche of snow and ice they had created, to loop around a bend in the tunnel perhaps ten feet ahead.

“This must be it,” Valentina repeated. Hunching down, she started along the tunnel.

“Just a second.” Smith passed the historian her rifle, then caught up his own SR-25. “Let’s get the gear inside and out of sight, just in case.”

“I will take care of it, Colonel,” Smyslov spoke up.

“All right, we’ll wait for you if we find anything interesting.” Smith removed a couple of hand flares from his pack and moved into the cave after Valentina.

Smyslov lugged the packs inside the cave, then paused for a moment outside its mouth, taking a last long look around.

The others, the members of the Spetsnaz covering force, were here. He had seen no sign of their presence, but that wasn’t surprising. The men chosen for this task would be snow devils, invisible in this white world, leaving no hint of their presence or passage.

But they were present. He could feel them. They had been ordered to keep the crash site and its environs under strict observation. They would be watching him now, waiting for the one order Smyslov was authorized to give. The one command that would bring them in to kill.

If only the bloody political officer had done his bloody job!

Maybe then this all could be mended somehow. Maybe then he could regain control of the situation and stop any further escalation. But he must also be prepared to invoke the alternative. He must be ready to perform his duty.

Smyslov unzipped his parka and moved the stainless steel cigarette lighter to an outside pocket. Then he pulled the Velcro retaining tab on his belt holster and drew the model 92 Beretta he had been issued by the Americans. Ignoring the irony of readying a weapon for use against its owners, he checked the clip seating with a pop of his palm against the bottom of the handgrip. Drawing back the slide, he manually jacked a shell into the pistol’s chamber.

Snapping off the safety, he returned the Beretta to its holster. Soon he would know if he would need it.

“Quite the setup,” Valentina murmured.

Around the bend in the tunnel they had found the auxiliary power unit that had been taken from the bomber. The length of hose led from the mouth of the cave to the exhaust outlet of the engine. Just beyond the generator set and connected to it via a set of batteries and power leads was a patched-together but impressive-looking radio rig.

The ever-present frost covered its exposed banks of old-fashioned vacuum tubes and control dials. Tools and unused electronics components were stacked around the set, and a transmitter key lay on a scrap-wood table positioned in front of the set, along with a set of earphones removed by an operator half a century before.

“I knew it,” she went on in a whisper. “I knew it the minute I saw the stripped chassis in the bomber!”

The duralumin radio operator’s stool had been taken from the plane, and Valentina sank onto it. Her hands lifted, but she acted as if she were afraid to touch anything. “There’s a pencil here, Jon. There’s a pencil but no paper. This is a communications desk. There should be paper! A log, notes, something!”

Smith panned the wide beam of the lantern around the gut of the passage. “Wait a minute...” The light fell on a blackened bucket set against the rocky wall. “Here we go.”

He took up the bucket by its bail and set it beside the stool.

“What is it?” Valentina asked, looking down.

“It’s a fire can,” Smith replied, hunkering beside the bucket. “It’s been half-filled with crushed pumice. It acts like a wick, like sand. Slosh a little gasoline in there and light it, and you’d have a steady flame for heat and cooking.”

Valentina nodded. “And they would have a few thousand gallons of aviation fuel lying about.”

“But something else has been burned in this one.” Smith drew his knife and probed amid the charred rock. “See that? That’s paper ash, a lot of it. I’ll bet that’s your radio log and maybe a set of code books, too.”

“Somebody cleaned house.”

In the lantern light their eyes met, and they communicated without words for a moment. There was no reason that this radio set shouldn’t have worked. There was no reason for this castaway aircrew not to have communicated with the world. There was no reason they shouldn’t have summoned help.

Gregori Smyslov shuffled around the corner of the tunnel from the outside, snapping on his own flashlight. “All is secure, Colonel.”

Smith kept his face poker-neutral. “Okay, let’s keep going.”

He turned and continued down the tunnel. A few yards farther on, the lava tube they were in broke through into a second larger, lower chamber. Slabs of basalt had been crudely aligned to create a set of uneven steps down a jagged collapsed facing. The porous black volcanic rock simply drank up the flashlight beams, and the darkness continued to predominate. It was not until Smith and his team had made the cautious descent to the floor of the chamber that they realized they were not alone.

Smith heard Valentina gasp from close by at his side, and Smyslov swore under his breath in Russian. The lantern beam panned across scattered items of survival gear, the bits of random trash produced around a lived-in camp, and finally, against the rear cavern wall, a row of huddled unmoving forms in canvas-skinned sleeping bags.

Their search for the crew of the Misha 124 was over.

Smith took one of the flares from his parka pocket and struck the igniter. Brilliant red chemical flame spewed from it, pushing back the darkness. He shoved the base of the flare into a crack in the wall.

“I wonder what got them in the end?” Valentina spoke softly, almost to herself.

“I don’t think it was the cold,” Smith replied. “They seemed pretty well set up for that.”

The sleeping bags were heavy arctic issue, and they were well insulated from the cavern floor by heavy pads of seat cushioning, life raft fabric, and parachute silk, all the materials that had been stripped from the downed aircraft. There were also several fire buckets positioned around the floor of the house-sized cavern, and a couple of gasoline jerry cans had been cached in one corner. It was obvious the bomber’s crew had known their polar survival procedures.

“It wasn’t starvation, either.” Valentina stepped up beside the first of the bodies and pointed to an open tin of survival ration crackers and a half bar of chocolate balanced on a small ledge in the cavern wall.

The historian glanced at the body at her feet and frowned. “Jon, come here. Look at this.”

Smith stepped to her side and instantly spotted the point of concern.

Before going to sleep fifty-odd years before, the sleeping bag’s occupant had drawn a flap of parachute silk over his face as a frost shield. A small circular hole was punched neatly in the center of that fabric.

Smith leaned his rifle against the cave wall and sank to one knee, flipping back the ice-crinkly silk. Revealed was a pleasant-featured young man’s face, pale, sleep-peaceful, frozen in time. The eyes were closed, and in the center of the forehead was another small circular hole, smeared with a few drops of blood, made red once more by the flickering light of the flare.

“Well, now,” Smith murmured. “A handgun, medium caliber, low velocity. Fired at close range, but not point-blank. No powder burns.”

“7.65mm subsonic, I’ll wager,” Valentina agreed, bending down with her hands braced on her knees, “probably fired through a silencer.”

“Probably.” Smith rose and circled to the next body. “The same here. One shot, through the temple. Execution style.”

“Very much so,” Valentina agreed, walking slowly down the row of bedrolls. “They were asleep, and someone just walked down the line and took the crew out, one after another...but not all of them.”

“Why do you say that, Val?”

“There are only six men here, Jon. The minimum complement for an America bomber would be eight.” She played the beam of her flashlight back into the shadowed corners of the cavern, beyond the pool of flare light. “There will be at least two others...Ah, here we are.”

She stepped deeper into the cavern, making her way around several table-sized chunks of fallen basalt. Smith went after her. Neither of them noted Gregori Smyslov silently falling back toward the lava tube entrance.

A man clad in khaki-colored duffel pants and parka lay on the black rock floor of the lava tube. The front of his coat was black with blood and punctured by multiple bullet holes. Curled in a frozen death writhe, the dead man’s lips were drawn back from his teeth in a half-century-old snarl. A few inches from his outstretched hand lay a small automatic pistol with the long cylinder of a silencer screwed to its barrel.

Smith lifted the lantern beam beyond the seventh man and found the eighth.

There was a niche in the back wall of the cave. Within it were two bedrolls, one of which was empty. An older aviation officer lay on his back, half out of the second sleeping bag, a hand-sized patch of blood frozen in place in the middle of his chest. A Soviet-issue Tokarev service pistol was still clutched in his fist.

His killer had apparently learned too late that a man with a bullet through his heart can still have fourteen seconds of life and consciousness left to him.

Valentina made her way to the seventh man. Bending down, she undid the top button of his parka and examined the insignia on the flight suit collar underneath. “The bombardier and political officer.”

Straightening, she crossed to the eighth man and repeated her examination. “The aircraft commander.”

“Apparently there was a falling-out among the upper echelons.”

“Apparently.” She looked back at Smith. “It seems pretty straightforward. They’d turned in for the night, and the political officer either had the watch or he got up again after the others had fallen asleep. He walked down the line and methodically murdered his fellow crewmen. Then he came back here to kill the aircraft commander. The problem was that a silencer’s effectiveness degrades with every bullet you put through it, and that last round must have made a wee bit too much noise.”

“But, damn it, Val, why?”

“Orders, Jon. It had to be under orders, given to the one member of the crew fanatically dedicated enough to the will of the Communist Party to commit both mass murder and suicide.”

Smith’s brows shot up. “Suicide?”

“Um-hum,” the historian nodded. “I’m reasonably certain that his orders included using the last round in the clip on himself. I daresay he didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter, because it’s apparent nobody was coming after them. I suspect that another aspect of his program was to torch the wreck, and probably this material along with it.”

She extended the toe of her boot and tapped a canvas-covered aircraft log and a stack of heavy buckram envelopes that lay beside the bomber commander’s bedroll, some of them still bearing Soviet Air Force security seals over their flaps. “Oh, but I wish I could read Russian.”

“Randi can,” Smith replied, shaking his head. “But ordering one of your own aircrews slaughtered like this? That doesn’t make any sense!”

“It doesn’t make sense to you, Jon, and it doesn’t make sense to me, but it made sense to the Stalinists. Remember the KGB barrage battalions that would follow Soviet Army units into battle. Their mission tasking wasn’t to shoot at the enemy, but at any Soviet soldiers reluctant to die for the glory of the Workers’ Revolution. If it was a matter of state security they wouldn’t have even blinked.”

“But what the hell were they trying to hide?”

“Speaking frankly, I’ve been scared to think about it...Hello, what have we here?”

She knelt down and picked up something from beside the logbook. Smith saw that it was a man’s wallet. With her flashlight tucked awkwardly between her cheek and shoulder, Valentina started to leaf through it. Suddenly she stiffened, the flashlight slipping away to bounce on the cavern floor. “My dear God!”

Smith hastily stepped up beside her. “Val, what is it?”

Wordlessly she thrust the wallet into his hands. Balancing the lantern on a boulder top, Smith sank down on one knee and examined its contents.

Money, American money: half a dozen twenties, two fives, and a ten. Worn, well-used bills. A driver’s license, Michigan 1952, issued to an Oscar Olson. A Marquette city library card and a social security card both made out to the same name. A pair of ticket stubs to the AirView Drive-in Theater. A cash register slip for eighty-seven cents from Bromberg’s corner grocery.

“Val, what does this mean?...Val?”

The historian was standing beside him, a blank, totally stunned expression on her face. Suddenly, without speaking, she dropped to her knees beside the body of the aircraft commander, tearing at the front of the long-dead man’s flight suit. Buttons popped as she ripped it open, revealing a black and red checked lumberjack shirt. She clawed furiously at the collar, fighting the resistance of the stiffly frozen corpse. Cloth tore, and she produced the maker’s tag from the back of the neck.

“Montgomery Ward!” She almost threw the tag at Smith. Then she scrambled across the cavern floor and was at the body of the Misha’s political officer, forcing open his parka and flight suit, revealing a civilian suit jacket layered beneath it.