The Arctic Event (32 page)

The best bet would have been to skid the knife across the surface of the ledge to Smyslov’s feet, but given the way she’d tethered him to the cliff face, he couldn’t reach down to collect it.

Valentina peeled off her overmittens and gloves. Lying on her side, she pivoted around the piton to face Smyslov, the move putting her legs over the cliff edge from the knees down. She slid the utility blade out of its belt sheath, judging its throwing balance. “Here’s how it’s going to work, Gregori. I’m going to try to put this knife on the cliff face just above your head. You’re going to have to catch it as it slides down past you. Got it?”

“I understand, Professor. I will be ready.”

“All right, get ready. I’ll throw at the count of three. One...two...three!”

She made the throw, biasing the spin of the knife so it would strike haft foremost. Over the wind she heard the
tink
of steel hitting. Then she heard his explosive curse in Russian. “I missed it! It bounced off and over my shoulder.”

Probably that damn composite plastic grip. It wouldn’t hit and lie dead.

“All right,” she replied, keeping her voice level. “We’ll try that again.”

She drew the first of her handmade throwing blades, the steel of the little weapon warmed by her own body heat.

“Ready? Again, it will be over your head. Throwing on three. One...two...three.”

Her arm whipped back and forward, easing the throw into a toss instead of a strike. Steel rang on stone again, and she saw Smyslov’s silhouette lunge, trying to pin the sliding knife between his body and the cliff face. Again he cursed as the blade landed at his feet, wasted.

“I am sorry, Professor. I missed again.”

One chance left. Valentina blew into her cupped palms, flexing and wringing her aching fingers to renew warmth and sensitivity. “Once more, Gregori, only this time we’re going to work it a bit differently.”

“However you say, Professor.”

She slid the second throwing knife out of its forearm sheath. “All right. This time, lean back.”

“Lean back?”

“That’s right. Lean all the way back, with your arms extended out in front of you. Hang on the piton.”

Smyslov obeyed, tilting his body away from the cliff face. “Like this?” he questioned.

She studied his outline in the glow-stick light for a moment. “Yes, just right, perfect. Now, hold still, very, very still...And, Gregory, one more thing.”

“What is that?”

“Sorry about this.”

She heard Smyslov’s startled bellow as the steel fang spiked into his left forearm, just above the wrist.

“I apologize again, Gregori, but that was the only place I could make the damn thing stay.”

She watched the Russian cross his bound wrists and awkwardly yank the knife out of his blood-blotched sleeve. The razor-edged blade made short work of both the tether rope and the nylon handcuffs. Now he was the one free, and she the one bound.

No matter what, at least one of them would get off this ledge alive tonight. Jon would approve. With her own knife in his hand, Smyslov loomed over her now, his face impassive. What happened next would be out of her hands. Wearily, she rested her cheek on the ledge and closed her eyes.

Smith felt himself floating, adrift, but it wasn’t a pleasant, dream-state float. His body was twisted, distorted, and a broad spectrum of aches and pains stabbed at him. And there was the cold and the growing numbness. This wasn’t right. He must react.

His eyes snapped open, and he saw only snow-streaked blackness. Lifting his head, he could make out a twisted tangle of rope and harness enmeshing him, greenly outlined by the chem light. There was nothing else, nothing around him. He was hanging suspended, faceup in his climbing harness, swinging slightly in the gusting wind, a single thin line extending, bar rigid, above him.

Memory reactivated. He’d been rappelling down to the ledge when the whole vertical face of the glacier had disintegrated under him. The ice, under heavy compression, had given way explosively, and simple luck must have blown him outward, so he had not been caught and carried away under the fall. Nor had he hit the ledge. He must be hanging somewhere below it.

Cautiously, he reached around himself, exploring his surrounding block of space, trying to find something solid. The fingertips of his right hand just brushed a rock wall. The mountain face under the ledge must be slightly concave. He couldn’t call how far below the ledge he was suspended. Nor could he tell how much empty air was below him—possibly two feet, possibly two hundred.

He took a fast inventory of his physical condition. He was bruised and battered, but everything seemed to work. He must have ridden the outer edge of the fall, and the natural elasticity of the nylon climbing rope had absorbed some of the shock of the drop. However, both cold and weakness were settling in fast.

Unfortunately his direct-action options appeared to be limited to a hand-over-hand ascent up the safety line, and he lacked a pair of prusik rope climbers.

And what about the others? Had Val and Smyslov been caught in the avalanche? Squinting upward through the snow, he could make out a ruddy smudge of light outlining the edge of the shelf above him. The first flare they’d dropped to the ledge had gone out. Somebody must have ignited a second one up there. Somebody must have survived. Fighting the constriction of the climbing harness, he tried to inflate his lungs to yell.

Then something entered his sphere of illumination, sliding down the rigid length of his safety line. Another rope, a loop bent onto its end, had been shackled to the safety line by a carabiner. The foot loop for a Z-pulley rescue rig.

Smith caught the new rope. Unshackling it, he hooked the loop over one boot. Pulling himself upright on the safety line, he stood in the loop and gave the rescue line a haul-away tug. The rescue rig went taut, and someone on the ledge began to heave him up in incremental pulls, the slack in the safety rope being taken in as well.

As he was lifted to the ledge, Smith had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to find. One thing was certain: Valentina Metrace didn’t have the mountaineering expertise to set up a Z-pulley like this one.

He reached the ledge ceiling and was distracted by having to fend himself off the cliff face. Accordingly the lip of the shelf took him by surprise. Suddenly hands were reaching down and gripping his harness, helping to heave him up and over the edge.

The feeling of rock under him was one of the grandest sensations he had felt for a long time. For a few moments he knelt on his hands and knees, luxuriating in its solidity. He allowed the trembling to take over then but fought off the recurrent surge of blackness that threatened to break over him. He shook his head like a wounded bear and looked around the ledge. By the sputtering red light of the half-consumed flare, he could make out the multiple anchors and interlacing rope loops of the Z-rig, and the sprawled bodies of Valentina and Smyslov, the two looking fully as totaled as he felt.

Smith inhaled a pull of icy air. “Hydration and energy bars,” he said hoarsely. “Now!”

They huddled together on the ledge, gulping down alternating mouthfuls of body-warmed water and vitamin-augmented chocolate, their metabolic furnaces catching up with the crisis load thrown on them.

Smith noted the black bloodstains on the sleeve of Smyslov’s snow smock. “How bad’s the arm?”

The Russian shook his head. “Not bad. I have a first aid pack on it.”

“Hurt in the icefall?”

Smyslov shot a wry look at Valentina. “Not exactly. It is complicated. I’ll tell you later.”

“If you say so,” Smith replied. “Now that the rush is over, I suppose I should ask just who is whose prisoner at the moment.”

Smyslov shook his head, that self-derisive grin still on his cold-reddened face. “It beats the shit out of me.”

“I’m a little vague on the question myself,” Val interjected, “but may I propose that, for now, we just get down off this damn mountain. We can sort out the fiddly bits in the morning.”

“That sounds like a sensible notion to me, Major. What do you say?”

“I agree, Colonel, eminently sensible.”

“Then let’s move, people. This mountain isn’t getting any shorter.”

Wincing against the objections of bruised and stiffening muscles, Smith pulled himself to his feet. Val helped him up and paused for a moment, mittened hands resting on his chest. “It appears there might be something to this scruples business after all,” she said.

“Every once in a while you can be pleasantly surprised.”

Chapter Forty-three

The North Face, Wednesday Island

Randi Russell was on her feet and moving again before she regained true consciousness. Nor was there any clarity to that consciousness. She had no memory of how she had freed herself from the snowslide. Nor did she have any idea where she was or where she was going. It was all dying-animal reflex now.

She no longer felt particularly uncomfortable or fearful. The false warmth of hypothermia was on her, and point by point, she was detaching from the world. The imperative to keep moving was still present, but even that was fading. The next time she fell would be the last.

There were no destinations left in the cold, black emptiness surrounding her. She moved downward toward the shoreline simply because that was the easiest direction to go, the terrain working in her favor.

Randi did not realize the meaning of the jumbled piles of ice blocks she’d started to encounter. It was the broken rim of sea ice building up along the northern coast of Wednesday Island. She was only dimly aware that the searing, deadening wind was being blocked, and she turned parallel to the ghostly stacked rubble, stumbling along the snow-jacketed gravel of the beach.

The ghosts were dominating her now—sounds, voices, visions out of her past, pleasant and not, replaying in random fragments. Santa Barbara, Carmel, UCLA, Iraq, China, Russia, the lesser places in between. People known. Things experienced.

She tried to cling to the pleasant memories: playing on the beach below her parents’ home, conspiring in happy sisterhood with Sophia, Mike undressing her and lowering her to the soft grass on that first sweet, trembling time.

But the blackness and the cold kept bringing in the other occasions: standing at Sophia’s side, scattering their parent’s ashes. The awful pain of the open grave at Arlington, hearing taps played for the bold, smiling other half of herself. The anger and the need to strike out at something, anything, that had changed her from a CIA linguist-analyst to a wet-work field agent. The face of the first person she’d ever been forced to kill. Standing at the edge of that second grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, with the last person she had to love in the world leaving her behind.

Randi’s boot twisted on a frozen stone. She made no effort to catch herself as she fell. A faint voice in the back of her mind raged at her to get up, but it was too much bother to listen. She crawled a few feet into the lee of an ice mass and curled up, husbanding the last fading remnants of body warmth as the snow sifted over her.

This would be where she would die. Randi would fight it no further. There was no sense to it. She gave herself to the phantoms, reliving the dimming, fragmented kaleidoscope of memory.

The recall of Sophia became especially strong, and Randi was pleased. She was with her sister again.

But Sophie kept taking her to the wrong places. Back to Mike’s death. Back to stand before that other tall, sober soldier in a black beret. Back to the one truly serious argument she’d ever had with her sister. Back to the one unforgivable thing Sophia had ever done to her.

“I’m going to marry Jon, Randi,” Sophie said again.

No!

“Jon is sorry for what he’s done to you, Randi. More sorry than you will ever know or be willing to understand.”

“I don’t want for him to be sorry! I want for him to have saved you!” Randi cried back, their argument flaring, as raw and as painful as ever.

“No one could have saved me, Randi. Not Jon, nor even you.”

“There must have been a way!”

Sophia’s eyes filled her universe now. “If there had been a way, Jon would have found it. Just as you would have found it.”

“No!”

“Say Jon’s name for me, Randi.”

“I won’t! I don’t want to!”

Sophie’s voice grew urgent. “Say his name, Randi!”

Randi couldn’t refuse her. “Jon,” she sobbed.

“Louder, Randi.” Sophie’s eyes were loving, frightened, demanding, “Say it louder!”

“Jon!”

Why was her sister doing this? Randi just wanted to sleep. To go away.

Sophia wouldn’t allow it. She was bending over her now, shaking her. “Again, Randi! Call to him! Scream it! Scream Jon’s name!”

“JON!”

Smith broke step and looked up, scanning the night. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Valentina inquired, coming up behind him. Smith had taken the point, breaking trail with Valentina and Smyslov trailing on the safety line. Following the icefall, fortune had turned in their favor, and the remaining descent to the north shore had gone easily and swiftly. They had been trudging steadily along the beach, making good time in the shelter of the pressure ice, when Smith had checked at the faintest alien sounds rising above the storm.

“I don’t know. It sounded like somebody calling my name.”

“Not likely.” Valentina shoved up her snow goggles. “Who could be out here to call you?”

“Randi! Who else?” Smith unlatched from the safely line and snapped on the lantern clipped to his belt. “Illuminate and fan out! Start looking! Move!”

They found her within five minutes.

“Jon! Over here! Hurry!”

Kneeling in a notch in the wall of pressure ice, Valentina was brushing the snow away from a huddled form. Smith was on his knees beside them in seconds, struggling out of the straps of his pack frame. Smyslov came in behind him a moment later.

“You were right!” Valentina exclaimed. “What in all hell is she doing out here rigged like this?”

“Escape and evasion,” Smith snapped back. “The Spetsnaz must have hit the science station.”

“That’s not possible,” Smyslov protested. “Only the one platoon was inserted on the island, the one that engaged you at the crash site.”

“Then somebody else is here.” Smith spread a survival blanket on the snow, gently lifting Randi onto it. He tore off mittens and gloves, sliding a hand under the mismatched and inadequate jumble of clothing she wore, seeking for a heartbeat.

“She’s out solid,” Valentina commented, leaning over Jon’s shoulder.

“She’s dying,” Smith replied curtly. “There are chemical heat pads in the packs. Two each. Get them out. All of them.”

Valentina and Smyslov obeyed with all the speed they could, flexing the heat pads to trigger the thermal reaction.

“Shove them down her sleeves and pant legs,” Smith ordered. “When we start to move her the chilled blood in her limbs will circulate into her body core, and the shock could kill her.”

“Jon. Look at this.” Valentina had worked Randi’s left arm out from under the oversized sweatshirt. A handcuff had been locked around it.

“Son of a bitch! That explains the abrasions on her other wrist. She was a prisoner.”

“But whose?”

“I don’t know, Val. If it’s not the Spetsnaz, then it must be the others. The ones who tried to shoot us down in Alaska.”

“How bad is she, Colonel?” Smyslov asked from behind his other shoulder.

“If we don’t get her to some shelter and warmth fast, she’s gone.” Smith wrapped the survival blanket tightly around Randi. They had done all they could do out here.

“I will carry her, Colonel,” Smyslov offered.

“All right. I’ll take your pack. Let’s go.”

The Russian lifted his new burden with care. “It is all right,
devushka,
” he murmured. “You are with friends. Don’t leave us now.”

Valentina took up both the rifles. “We’ve got to assume the science station’s either been occupied or destroyed. Where can we go?”

“We either find another cave or build a snow shelter,” Smith replied, playing his lantern beam along the man-high stacks of pressure ice mounding along the shoreline. “Keep your eyes open for any place that looks good.”

“Right. We might as well run ourselves out of batteries along with everything else. God, she looks like she’s had a job of it.”

“I know.” His voice was as bleak as the night. “Maybe I’ve finally done it.”

She puzzled over Smith’s words, but she sensed this wasn’t the time to ask about them.

The probing sword of Smith’s lantern beam had started to cold-fade when it found the triangular gap in the ice wall. Hunkering down, he shined the light into it.

This was what he’d been seeking. A heavy slab of sea ice had been driven up onto the beach and lifted on edge by another, following shoulder of the pack, leaving a blue-white triangular cavern, twenty feet deep by six wide and high enough for a tall man to stand stooped in.

“This is it! We’ll fort up here! Major, take Randi to the back of the cave; then come up here and start walling off this entrance with snow and ice blocks. Val, you’re with me.”

Smith used the last of their light sticks to fill the little ice cave with a misty green chemical glow, and he took a moment to set up and light their tiny pellet stove. There wasn’t much fuel left for that, either, but if it couldn’t make their shelter warm, at least it could make it less freezing. As he worked with the stove he issued commands.

“Val, spread a couple of survival blankets on the cave floor; then zip your sleeping bag and mine together.”

“Right. Doing it.”

They eased the comatose Randi onto the combined sleeping bags.

“Okay Val, I’m putting you in with her. While I get Randi undressed, get out of your clothes. Everything has to come off.”

“Understood,” she replied, tugging down the zip of her parka. “But I was hoping to hear that request under decidedly different circumstances.”

As he stripped Randi he used a flashlight to run a lightning-swift white-light examination of her body, checking for the overt ravages of frostbite. Thank God she’d at least had the arctic boots. They’d protected her feet, the point of greatest vulnerability.

Valentina squirmed out of her heavy outer shell garments. Taking a deep, deliberate breath, she whipped her sweater and thermal top off over her head. Her bra and socks followed, as did the forearm sheaths. She positioned her knives within reach near the head of the bed, then pushed ski pants, thermal bottoms, and panties off in one wadded mass. Naked, she stretched out beside Randi, her head pillowed on a pack, the cold a flame against her skin.

“Ready,” she said, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering.

Smith supervised the nestling of the two nude ivory bodies together, Valentina shivering and Randi too deathly still.

He packed the thermal pads around the women, then zipped the sleeping bags closed. He spread Smyslov’s opened bag over them, along with their discarded clothing.

Valentina curled herself around the other woman’s unconscious form, cradling Randi’s head against the soft pillow of her breast and shoulder. Randi stirred, whimpered faintly, and tried to nuzzle closer to the source of warmth.

“She’s like ice, Jon,” Valentina murmured. “Will this be enough?”

“I don’t know. A lot depends on how much of this is simple exhaustion and how much is exposure. Hypothermia can be very mean and very tricky.” Smith rested his fingertips against Randi’s throat, taking a carotid pulse. “She’s been preloaded with a massive dose of antibiotics. That’ll help with any pulmonary complications. And she was keeping her hands and face covered. I don’t think she’s been too badly frostbitten.”

Smith shook his head, lightly stroking Randi’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. “If her core temperature hasn’t fallen too far, she might be able to bounce back. She’s tough, Val, as tough as they make them. If her temperature has dropped too low...I don’t know. All we can do is keep her warm and wait.”

Valentina half-smiled. “You care a great deal about this lady, don’t you?”

Smith tucked the mouth of the sleeping bag closer around the two women. “I’m responsible for her. Both for her being here and for her being who she is.”

“You’re responsible for all of us, Jon,” Valentina replied, looking up at him. “And may I say that’s a rather comforting thought at the moment.”

Smith grinned back and lightly stroked back her dark hair. “I hope that confidence isn’t misplaced. Try and get some sleep.”

Taking the SR-25 and his medical kit with him, Smith moved up toward the mouth of the cave. En route he paused to fill an aluminum pan with ice fragments, balancing it atop the pellet stove.

Smyslov had finished walling off the entrance, leaving only an air vent at the top. Eliminating the wind chill gave their arctic clothing a chance to cope with the still air temperature, making the little cavern seem warm.

“How’s the arm doing, Major?”

Smyslov shrugged. “It isn’t a problem.”

“I’ll have a look at it anyway. You up on your tetanus shots?”

“I am good.”

With their backs to the opposing sides of the cave, Smith treated Smyslov’s arm. Working around the Russian’s blood-sodden sleeves, he removed the crudely applied field dressing. Cleaning and disinfecting the wound, he dusted it with sulfa powder and applied a fresh water-and-cold-proof bandage.

“You’re lucky,” Smith commented. “It’s a nice, clean penetration.” He lifted an eyebrow at the Russian. “In fact, it looks like it was made by one of Val’s knives.”

Smyslov grimaced. “It was, but with my approval.”

“What
did
happen up on that ledge while I was hanging at the other end of that safety line?”

Smyslov sketched out the chain of events from the icefall through Smith’s rescue. “Thanks for the assist.” Smith nodded. “It was greatly appreciated. Mind if I ask you a personal question, though?”

“Go ahead, Colonel.”

“Why didn’t you just cut Val’s throat and the safety rope?”

Smyslov was quiet for a moment. “That would have been in line with the standing orders I have received from my government,” he replied finally. “But you have a term in the American military for a situation such as I find myself in: ‘FUBAR.’ I believe it means ‘fucked up beyond all recall.’”

Smith applied a last strip of surgical tape. “It does.”

“Such is my current state,” the Russian continued. “I was placed within your team to prevent an international embarrassment for Russia and a shattering of relations between our nations. The Spetsnaz were inserted onto this island for that purpose as well. But now it is all FUBAR. Even had I chosen to kill you and the professor on the mountain, there would have been no realistic way to prevent this embarrassment and alienation. Things are too out of control now. Too chaotic. Your nation would investigate, and the truth would undoubtedly come out in the end. Probably it has been so from the beginning. This I have come to recognize, and I did not wish to murder my...comrades in an act of futility.”