Arctic Floor

by Mark Aitken

  ~ * ~

  Ford dialled in one twenty-one point five on the MHZ band and started relaying the message.

  ‘Mayday, mayday. Aircraft down. Survivors at CAM fifteen. Repeat . . .’

  Before he could finish the message the display switched from one twenty-one point five to Home. After it happened several times, Gallen asked him to simply say ‘CAM fifteen’ and then switch to ‘Mayday’ on the next burst.

  They sent the mayday for twenty minutes and then reverted to the presets on the mercenaries’ radio. They stayed silent, waiting for a giveaway voice or comment, but whoever was sitting at ‘Home’ had discipline and was not answering.

  Gallen led Winter out of the room, into the main buildings. ‘I don’t want to have the discussion where Florita can hear it. But let’s find our shooting points in case we have another wave of mercenaries.’

  ‘That roof gantry?’ said Winter.

  ‘What I was thinking. This time, they won’t be able to stand off and mop us up with the minigun. They’ll have to come in, so we get to counter-attack.’

  ‘If it’s a Little Bird again, they’ll only have three shooters and the pilot,’ said Winter. ‘You’d like to take ‘em out on the ground?’

  ‘Without losing the helo,’ said Gallen.

  They secured the ladder that led to the trapdoor in the ceiling and Winter climbed it first, knocking his big shoulder against it until the door gave way. Pushing through drift snow, they clambered onto a gantry that ran in a square around the white dome.

  ‘This goes around the whole facility,’ said Winter, zipping his parka further to his chin as the wind squalled. ‘There’s also a door into the dome.’

  ‘What’s in there?’ said Gallen, scoping the area around the building and deciding that a roof vantage point was about the best they’d get if attacked.

  ‘It’s radar scoops, back to back,’ said Winter. ‘The thing is, it’s enclosed. If we decide to use a sentry, there’s at least shelter from the wind.’

  Lifting his binoculars, Gallen swept the terrain on a three-sixty-degree scan. ‘What’s that, from the north?’

  Winter squinted. ‘Storm, big one by the height of it.’

  About fifty miles away, a wall of white and purple-black rose out of the tundra, thousands of feet into the air. Another squall struck them, this one forcing Gallen to move his feet.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ he said, moving back to the trapdoor. ‘We’ll take two-hour revolving shifts up here. I don’t want anyone freezing to death.’

  As Gallen got to the door, he turned and saw Winter squatting slightly, the rifle sliding off his shoulder.

  The Canadian lifted a finger to his lips and then trained the weapon. Looking out into the glare, Gallen couldn’t see what he was aiming at but unholstered his SIG as a precaution.

  The rifle jumped and a puff of cordite wafted away on the breeze.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Gallen.

  Winter smiled. ‘Dinner.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 31

  The fox stew tasted better than anything they could have served Gallen at the Ritz. Certainly it beat the Denver Hilton’s lobster mac and cheese, the single most expensive item he’d ever ordered at a restaurant.

  But it didn’t stop Florita holding forth on the rights and wrongs of killing and eating an arctic fox.

  ‘It’s endangered, isn’t it?’ she demanded of Gallen, even though he hadn’t shot the beast.

  ‘Is now,’ said Winter, chewing.

  ‘That’s not even funny, Kenny,’ she said.

  ‘Try some,’ said the Canadian. ‘It’s pretty good.’

  ‘I’d rather starve.’

  ‘Nice you got the choice,’ said Winter.

  ‘Actually,’ she glowered, ‘the choice was taken when you shot that poor animal, Kenny.’

  ‘Like we say in the military . . .’ Winter paused to wipe juice off his chin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes a simple thank you would suffice.’

  Florita stood in a huff and sat on her cot, flipping through a Time magazine but not reading it.

  Gallen checked his G-Shock: twelve minutes before he relieved Mike Ford on the gantry and the winds sounded as though they had risen to beyond fifty mph—the speed at which things broke and people got swept away.

  Getting up, he eyed Durville’s satchel and had an idea. ‘Florita, can you get us into Harry’s BlackBerry? It’s password protected.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know who bombed us? Who shot at you in the snow?’

  ‘Of course I do, Gerry,’ she said, looking both annoyed and scared. ‘But that could be a job for the police.’

  ‘That could be a job for the head of Harry’s personal security,’ said Winter, shovelling stew. ‘They killed Harry too.’

  Turning for her magazine, Florita sighed. ‘I don’t know the code.’

  The remains of the stew sat on the back burner of the wood stove, waiting for Ford to devour it when he came down from his shift. Gallen and Winter were hungry and both eyed the mound of fox stew that sat on Florita’s plate.

  ‘So, you really don’t want the stew?’ said Winter.

  ‘Kenny!’ Gallen growled. ‘No one touches Florita’s meal.’

  ~ * ~

  The gantry was buffeted by high winds and visibility had reduced to about ten feet as the blizzard developed into a white-out. Climbing into the dome, Gallen stamped his feet and took a look at the six holes Ford had dug in the tin with his Ka-bar knife. The dim half-light of the northern night permeated the landscape as the snow was thrown across it by the ton.

  The last surviving radio headset sat on Gallen’s ears, with the agreement not to use it unless there was danger. The batteries were close to expiring and they didn’t have rechargers. Below, Gallen knew that the maydays would continue to be broadcast every five minutes and, in between times, they’d be monitoring the Home frequency for traffic.

  Stamping to keep the blood flowing into his toes, Gallen kept moving from hole to hole, preventing himself from thinking about the obviously dire circumstances by doing what they used to do while on combat tours: dream about what you’d do when you were back on civvie street.

  He thought about the family farm and Roy, and what he’d have to do to bring the place back into the black. His pay cheques were being diverted into the Sweet Clover account, so the trust lawyer would have some funds to pay the creditors. But Gallen needed a bigger plan than that; he needed to decide what he was going to do with his life, a life no longer owned by the Marine Corps.

  As he watched the ground, listening to the increasing howl of the blizzard, the radio headset crackled: Ford was on the line.

  ‘Good news, boss. Baker Lake Mounties are sending a chopper. They’re advising five hours but they don’t have this weather in town.’

  ‘You spoken with them?’

  ‘Yeah. Bloke called Detective Sergeant Jim Ballagh. He asked for the cords but I said I didn’t know—just said it’s a building called CAM fifteen, out in the snow.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Got back three minutes later, said they had the location and were on their way.’

  ‘What about our friends?’

  ‘Getting faint chatter but can’t confirm. Could be someone else. You’ll know when I do.’

  Swapping shifts with Winter twenty minutes later, Gallen warmed himself by the stove as Ford monitored the radio.

  Looking around, Gallen couldn’t see a spare plate of fox stew. ‘She eat it?’ he asked softly.

  Ford smiled. ‘Kenny apologised, said he felt terrible about it—’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ said Florita, sitting up from what looked like a sleep. ‘And I ate it, only because I’m starving.’

  Gallen laughed. ‘How was it? ‘

  ‘About the same as goat.’

  ‘Well I thought it was better than roo,’ said Ford, and both Gallen and Florita made faces.


  ‘What’s wrong with kangaroo?’ said Ford, going back to the radio. ‘If it’s good enough for me dogs, it’s good enough for me.’

  Thawing out, Gallen noticed something beside the stove, against the wall. It was the aluminium briefcase from the sunken helicopter, now dried out.

  Placing it on the table, he flipped the latches and opened the lid. Inside was a black ionised-steel box with a flip-up lid. Opening it, he saw the screen and a keyboard. He knew what this machine was, he just couldn’t put his finger on it.

  ‘Mike, what’s this?’

  Ford looked at it and reached over, pulled out a retractable aerial that extended from behind the box. ‘Location receiver. You follow people or cars or luggage with it.’

  Gallen stared at Ford, looked down at it again, his pulse hammering. ‘What could it track?’

  Ford left the radio, turned the briefcase towards him and had a closer look at the water-damaged machine. ‘Micro-beacons the size of the smallest watch battery. Standard homing beacons the size of a casino chip. Magnetic beacons that are more the size of a cell phone and give a signal for almost two hundred miles. Transport companies and bus fleets use them.’

  ‘It’ll track anything?’

  Ford nodded. ‘Pretty much. If it gives a signal in the right range, you lock on to it and track it until you lose signal. The Pentagon operates the world’s largest container shipment operation, and it’s all tracked on large versions of that.’

  Gallen thought about it: there was nothing to tie Reggie’s people to the attack helo or to the tracking technology. Yet that was the only connection he could see.

  What really concerned him was the chance of another merc helo in the vicinity, waiting to complete what the first team couldn’t. They’d have the same locator boxes.

  ‘What’s up, boss?’ said Ford, getting more static on the Home preset.

  ‘If the bad guys had beacons on us, then the beacons are probably still among us, right?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Ford.

  They had all the fatigues and weapons on the table inside of thirty seconds, Gallen and Ford picking off the RFDs and throwing them in the fire—the tags on the guns requiring the flat side of a knife, given their solid bonding to the gunmetal.

  Taking apart Durville’s BlackBerry, they searched for tags and came up empty. When Winter came down for his break, they stripped the tags off his parka and fatigues, but the only location technology was the RFDs Aaron had claimed were innocent.

  Gallen took the next turn as sentry: he wanted Ford working the radio. Taking a look through every hole in the radar dome, he started his routine for keeping the blood moving: gripping his hands, stamping his feet, flapping his arms. The wind was dying and the blizzard abating, but he had the temperature up there in the dome at minus forty, at least.

  The blasts of drift made reconnaissance difficult. With the half-light of the northern spring and the rising moon, the light was bouncing strangely off the snow and ice. The noise was still deafening, which was why Gallen missed the first words of Ford’s radio message.

  ‘Repeat.’

  ‘That watch with the temperature in it?’ said the Aussie, yelling over the howl of the northerly.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Donny gave it to me, boss.’

  Gallen wasn’t getting it. ‘So?’

  ‘So it was the only thing that the three of us down here couldn’t vouch for,’ said Ford. ‘We opened it up.’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘There’s a beacon in it. Flat model, like a sticker, with circuitry in it.’

  ‘Crap,’ said Gallen.

  ‘Doesn’t sound private, right?’

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Gallen, not able to help himself. The beacon Ford was describing was used by government intelligence agencies.

  Then he was distracted by something through the west-facing hole in the dome. He thought he saw a different kind of light about a hundred yards away, but in the wind-driven drift he couldn’t be sure. Looking harder, he saw a yellowish shading that didn’t fit with the white swirls of snow.

  ‘Search-and-rescue call lately?’

  ‘Yeah, boss,’ said Ford. ‘Just told us they’re ten minutes away.’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Okay, Mike. Send Kenny, tooled up,’ said Gallen, convinced there was an electronic light west of the base.

  ‘Seen something?’

  ‘Just send him. You’re staying with the girl,’ said Gallen, breath coming fast and shallow.

  ‘Wait,’ said the Aussie, his voice breaking up.

  ‘You there, Mike?’

  ‘Got traffic on the preset,’ said Ford.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sounds like a pilot. Said, “We’re in position.” Their base told—’

  The voice crackled out and there was dead air. Checking the Heckler & Koch for load and safety, Gallen focused through his peephole, wiping the back of his nose with his glove. The yellow glow disappeared and he strained his eyes in the gloom of the moonlight as the dying wind left calm patches between the squalls.

  The trapdoor clanged and Winter’s boots sounded on the gantry before the big Canadian squeezed into the dome, panting with the shock of the cold air in his lungs.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Possible boogies, your eleven,’ said Gallen, letting Winter get close to the peephole.

  ‘Don’t see anything,’ said Winter.

  ‘Keep watching. How’s your mag?’

  ‘Four-fifths. Yours?’

  ‘Two-thirds.’ Gallen pushed Winter aside for another look. ‘I saw something out there.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Winter.

  Gallen paused, sensing a joke. ‘You know?’

  ‘Lost you on the radio,’ said Winter.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the Harris went down, too,’ said Winter.

  ‘Even to search-and-rescue?’

  ‘That went down first, just after you came up here,’ said Winter, eyes steady

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Yeah, boss. Mike thinks we’re being jammed.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 32

  They took a revolving sentry, Winter and Gallen at opposite sides of the dome, but moving to the hole to their left every minute. The snow drifted and abated, swirled and then wound down like a huge jet motor being de-throttled. The light changed with each squall, bringing different pieces of ground into focus and then covering them over again.

  ‘What’s this about Donny’s watch?’ said Gallen, nibbling on two raisins he’d found in his parka pocket. He was sensitive about Donny McCann being disrespected, but he still had to know.

  ‘Mike and Donny swapped watches back in Kugaaruk,’ said Winter. ‘Mike was amazed at the cold—him bein’ an Aussie and all—and he kept askin’ what the temp was. So Donny says, Here, swap with me—this G-Shock gives you the temperature too.’

  ‘You see this beacon?’

  ‘Sure did, boss.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I ain’t seen that kit since I was in the Ghan, and from time to time we was working with the Agency.’

  ‘This beacon is CIA?’

  Winter moved to the hole on his left. ‘Or Pentagon. It’s government spook gear. Hell, when I was at ISAF they’d put that shit in our watches, in our weapons, underneath our radios—you name it, boss, the Agency and the Pentagon was tracking everyone with those stickers.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Gallen softly. He remembered once seeing one of those circuitry-loaded stickers on the back of a map he was returning after a ten-day recon stint. It was the size of a quarter, had a green base and gunmetal circuit board, and he’d decided not to follow it through.

  They swapped a look in the dark. ‘Probably tracked you too, boss.’

  Gallen saw a movement in the snow. ‘Got something, Kenny. My two o’clock.’

  Joining Gallen, Winter had a look.

  ‘See where that long ridge dips back to
the bowl?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Yep,’ said Winter. ‘I make two boogies, snow-cam suits.’

  When Gallen looked through the hole again, the drifts had closed the sight-line.