Robert Ludlum's The Arctic Event

by Robert Ludlum

  “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.

  “Sears and Roebuck,” she whispered. “Sears...and...bloody...Roebuck!” Her voice rose to a strangled scream. “Smyslov, you son of a bitch! Where are you?”

  “I am here, Professor.”

  Smith stood up and turned at the quiet voice, and then he froze. Smyslov had come in behind them. He stood outlined in the glare of the flare Smith had left in the main part of the chamber, the ruddy light reflecting off the leveled Beretta automatic in his hand. “Put up your hands. Both of you. Please do not attempt anything. Other Russian troops will be here shortly.”

  “What the hell is this, Major?” Smith demanded, slowly lifting his hands shoulder high.

  “A very regrettable situation, Colonel. If you do not resist, you will not be harmed.”

  “That’s a lie, Jon,” Valentina said calmly, coming to stand beside Smith, her voice and anger back under control. “The Russians’ alternate agenda is now fully in play. They can’t allow us to leave this cave alive.”

  The Beretta’s barrel jerked in her direction. “That’s not...Something can be worked out...alternatives...” Smyslov gritted the words through clenched teeth.

  “There are none.” Valentina’s words were understanding, almost kindly. “You know that. The Misha’s political officer made a cock-up of his job. There was too much left for us to find, and you couldn’t stop us from finding it. I know, Gregori, and, given a reference book or two, Colonel Smith could figure it out. We have to die, just like these other poor bastards in this cave had to die. There’s no other way to keep the secret.”

  Smyslov didn’t reply.

  “Since I can figure it out, how about letting me in on it now?” Smith asked, his eyes fixed on the shadowed features of the Russian.

  “Why not indeed?” Valentina replied. “It all leads back to the attack doctrines of the Soviet Long Range Aviation Forces during the early Cold War...”

  The gun muzzle elevated. “Keep silent, Professor!”

  “There’s no sense in letting the colonel die in ignorance, Gregori.” Valentina’s tone was almost bantering but with a biting edge to it. “After all, you’re going to be putting a bullet through his brain here presently.”

  She glanced across at Smith. “Remember, Jon, when I told you how all of the American bomber missions must, perforce, be one-way? The TU-4 Bull just barely had the range to reach targets in the northern states by flying over the Pole, but they didn’t have the fuel to get back again. The aircrews would have to bail out over the United States after dropping their bomb loads.

  “With this as a given, the Soviets decided it was a matter of waste not, want not. The America bomber crews received special training. They were taught how to speak idiomatic American English. They were cycled through the KGB’s American town mock-up to adapt them to the nuances of the Western lifestyle, and they were instructed in espionage and sabotage techniques.

  “It was intended that the surviving Soviet aircrewmen would merge with the masses of refugees that would be produced in the aftermath of a massive ABC attack on the United States. Once in place, they would spy, spread defeatist propaganda, and conduct sabotage, hastening the day of the theoretical Soviet triumph. Do I have that down properly, Gregori?”

  Again there was no reply.

  “And the wallet, the civilian clothes?” Smith prompted.

  “All part of it, Jon. The KGB were meticulous about such details. The crews would be issued American-manufactured clothing purchased in the United States, real American currency, and superbly forged identification, complete down to the inconsequential little bits and pieces a person would routinely carry in a wallet or a pocket.

  “But there was one problem.” Valentina’s voice flowed on, almost hypnotically. “The raving paranoia that raged inside Stalinist Russia. The party and high presidium knew that a fair proportion of their populace, including members of their most elite military formations, desired nothing more out of life than a suit of civilian clothes, a set of documents identifying them as anything other than a Soviet citizen, and a clean run at an unguarded border.

  “While the Soviets might have loaded a live bioagent aboard a long-range bomber for a simple training mission, they would never have given the flight crew their American identity kits. The potential for defection would have been viewed as too great.”

  Valentina’s hand stabbed at the wallet still held in Smith’s hand. “The clothing and identification would only have been issued for an actual combat operation. The real thing!”

  Smith found himself staring at the wallet in his hand. “Are you saying what I think you are, Val?”

  “Oh, I am, Jon.” Her voice began to lift, growing more piercing. “This is why the Russians were so bloody shaken over the discovery of that old bomber. That’s w
hy their official schizophrenia over the whole subject. The damn anthrax has been a secondary concern for them all along. What they’ve really been worried about is our learning the truth! That the Misha 124 was a pathfinder aircraft for an all-out strategic bombing attack on the United States using nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons! The Pearl Harbor of World War Three!”

  She let the words hang in the chill air of the cavern for a moment; then she tilted her head and addressed Smyslov directly. “How about it, Gregori? I dare you to tell me I’m wrong.”

  They could hear Smyslov’s breath rasp, the mist it produced swirling around his head in the back glow of the flare. “Nations make mistakes, Professor. Yours has made its mistakes. We have made ours, greater perhaps than some. Can you blame us for trying to hide the fact that we almost destroyed the world?”

  “You’re making another mistake now, Major,” Smith said. “Killing us won’t make things any better.”

  “Please, Colonel.” There was an earnestness in Smyslov’s reply. “I give you my word! I will communicate with my superiors. I will make every effort to protect you and Professor Metrace and Miss Russell. I will get the orders changed! We will find...some other way!”

  “You’ll reopen a gulag just for us?” Smith smiled and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.” He lowered his hands and tucked the wallet into a parka pocket. “Put down the gun, Major. This thing is over. We’ve learned what we’ve come for.”

  The barrel lifted, ominously steadying on Smith’s chest. “Don’t force me to act, Colonel. I may regret the situation, but I am still a Russian officer.”

  “And that’s an American firearm, issued to you by us. Believe me, Major, it’s not going to do you any good.”

  A hint of amusement crept into Smyslov’s voice. “I trust you are not going to attempt anything as puerile as telling me you have removed the firing pin.”

  “Oh, no,” Valentina said, dropping her own hands. “You might have spotted a missing firing pin. But the Beretta 92-series automatic pistol does have an internal bar lock safety intended to prevent the accidental discharge of the weapon. If you diddle with it a bit, it can be made to prevent deliberate discharges as well. And yes, Gregori, in addition to my myriad other gifts, talents, and charms, I am a rather capable gunsmith.”