Robert Ludlum's The Arctic Event

by Robert Ludlum

  Jon and the others should be well on their way by now. They’d be moving toward the station along the base of the ridge. With this batch of guns drawn off and theoretically engaged by the Spetsnaz, they’d have a better chance when they put the station and landing ground under sniper fire. Divide and conquer. Good strategy, Jon.

  She gulped and wished she could sneak a mouthful of snow. Let’s see, what to do should the Spetsnaz not show? Don’t wait to be fallen over. Jump and knife the nearest man. Drop the second closest with a throw. Commandeer a submachine gun and ammunition. Keep to the cover of the pressure ridge, maximize casualties, and buy Jon and Randi their time yourself.

  There, that was something of a plan anyway.

  Where in the hell were those bloody Russians? Wasn’t that just the way of the world? There was never a Bolshevik around when you needed one.

  Someone nearby gave a startled yell and an SMG chattered. Valentina went stark stiff for an instant, then realized there had been no shock of a bullet impact. Another automatic weapon replied—the sharper, more piercing crackle of a small-caliber assault rifle. Valentina recognized an AK-74. The Spetsnaz had just put their foot in it!

  More shouts followed. A scream trailed off. The exchange of gunfire built explosively.

  Valentina allowed herself a full, deep breath. Blinking for a moment in the snow-refracted sunlight, she slipped out from under the camo blanket. Drawing one of her knives, she began to slither on her belly through the buckled ice, moving toward the heart of the burgeoning firefight.

  Jon’s orders had been specific. When their enemies engaged each other she was to fall back and disengage immediately. But Valentina had decided upon a loose definition of “immediate.” She intended to linger a bit, extending military assistance to both sides of the conflict.

  At the first crash of automatic weapons fire, Jon Smith had drawn up sharply and looked back. Then, when it was returned and built in volume, he managed a grin. That was a battle, not an execution.

  They’d been double-timing along the base of the central ridge, keeping out of sight of the shoreline trail. It had been snowshoe work and hard going, but they’d already covered a fair portion of the distance back to the science station. Now if they could only make the high ground overlooking the helipad and Kretek’s helicopter without being seen, they’d stand a chance of bitching somebody’s works.

  The question marks were Val and Randi. Would Val be able to get clear and rejoin, and could Randi keep it together? Randi was slumped against Smyslov with her eyes closed and with the concerned Russian half-supporting her as she gasped for breath. She was carrying neither pack nor weapon, and he couldn’t doubt her will. But running in snowshoes was murderous even for someone who hadn’t already been half-killed by hypothermia.

  “Randi?”

  She looked up, her shadow-rimmed eyes fierce. “Go!” she whispered. “Just go!”

  Three plumes of smoke rose over Wednesday Island Station. All three huts had now been torched. The remaining security teams had been pulled in tight around the Halo, the flight and demolition men were on board, and the heating tents around the engines had been stricken. Kretek paced warily beside the big aircraft, his sense of unease growing.

  He glanced down at the submachine gun he carried. The MP-5 was a professional’s weapon, and the woman who had carried it had been a consummate professional. What of the others he had been told of? This history professor, the Russian and American military officers. Had they been of the same breed as the lethal little blonde? What of the team leader, this Jon Smith? Obviously it was the crudest of cover names. Who was he really?

  For the thousandth time Kretek’s eyes swept the high ground above the station, tasting the blood from his cold-cracked lips. He could smell more than the smoke of the burning huts. He could smell the stink of an operation going rotten.

  This was wrong. He’d acted without thinking when he’d sent Mikhail after the girl. Appearing above the camp at that moment had been too convenient, and he had snapped at the dangled bait too rapidly. Somebody was setting something up.

  On an ordinary job, any other job, he would abort and run. But this was the job. The one that would never come again.

  Abruptly he stopped his pacing and yelled up through the Halo’s open fuselage door, “Prepare to start the engines.”

  One of the demolitions men leaned out of the hatch. “I haven’t rigged the time fuse on the other helicopter yet, sir.”

  Because of its proximity to the parked Halo, the smaller Jet Ranger couldn’t be blown until after they were in the air.

  “Then get on with it!” Kretek snapped back impatiently. “We’re taking off.”

  “What about Vlahovitch and the others?”

  At that instant the faint ripple of distant gunshots reverberated over the knoll—automatic weapons exchanging fire, many of them.

  Everyone froze in place, listening. Then Kretek broke the lock with his bellow. “Everyone aboard! Everyone aboard now! Get those goddamned engines started! We’re getting out of here!”

  The gas turbines began to crank with their hollow baritone moan, the huge rotor blades sweeping past overhead. The security perimeter collapsed in on the helicopter, men hurling their weapons through the open side hatch and scrambling in after them. Kretek was last aboard as displaced snow started to swirl, tornadolike, around the mammoth heavy lifter.

  Kretek raced forward to the cockpit. “Get us in the air!” he yelled, leaning in between the pilots’ seats. “Take us to the crash site!”

  The pilot twisted in his seat, looking back at his employer. “Aren’t we going after the others?” He was a former Canadian naval aviator who had been cashiered for wife beating. He had fallen a great distance, but he still remembered how things had once been done.

  “The sea is frozen,” Kretek said, glaring out of the windscreen. “They can walk home.”

  They were half a mile short of the station when they saw the gleaming red bulk of the Halo lifting from behind the antenna knoll. The big machine swung parallel to the ridge, climbing under full power. Instinctively, Smith and the others went facedown flat on the snow, camo-merging into their background. The aircraft thundered almost directly overhead, heading for the central peaks and the saddleback between.

  “Damn it!” Smith raged, scrambling to his feet and staring after the departing helicopter. “I’d hoped splitting them up would keep them pinned! They’re bailing out on their own men!”

  Randi shook her head, coming up onto her knees. “They don’t give a damn, Jon. They’re criminals, not soldiers. They well and truly don’t give a damn.”

  “What do we do now, Colonel?” Smyslov asked.

  “We fall back to Plan B.”

  “What is Plan B?”

  “That depends on what’s left at the station. Let’s go!”

  Mikhail Vlahovitch fumbled the little Belgian-made pocket grenade out of his parka, feeling the bullets hitting on the far side of the ice slab he crouched behind. Pulling the pin, he let the safety lever flick free, counted two, and pitched overhand. He waited for the flat crack of the grenade detonation, then lunged out from behind the slab, rolling across the frozen beach to get the angle on the men who had been firing on him.

  Vlahovitch came up onto his knees, saw a wounded Spetsnaz trooper kneeling beside a second downed man, and leveled the Agram, emptying the submachine gun in a single prolonged figure-eight burst that engulfed both the wounded and the dying.

  As the bolt clicked open on an empty chamber, Vlahovitch was caught by the silence. His had been the last gun firing. The only sounds remaining were the creak and whine of the pack ice and the hiss of his own breath. Staggering, he got to his feet, drawing a fresh clip out of his belt pouches.

  The Russians had come out of nowhere while Vlahovitch and his men had been distracted by their search for the woman. The Spetsnaz had apparently been taken as much by surprise by the presence of the arms smugglers as the reverse. It had been an unexpected-mee
ting engagement, inevitably the most chaotic and savage of battles.

  “Lazlo,” he yelled, ejecting the empty and forcing the reload into the Agram’s magazine well. “Lazlo!...Vrasek!...Prishkin! To me!”

  No one answered. Blood streaked the ice. The scattering of bodies lay unmoving. Their men and his.

  “Lazlo!...Prishkin!”

  He turned in place slowly, looking around. It was a wipeout. A mutual massacre. He was the only one left of either side.

  “Lazlo?”

  Then he heard the distant, rhythmic thudding of rotors. It was the Halo. He couldn’t see it from the base of the point, but he could follow the sound of its flight. It was heading up to the glacier. Kretek was going after the anthrax, and Vlahovitch knew without the faintest shadow of a doubt that he wouldn’t be coming back.

  And Vlahovitch finally acknowledged something else that he had known down deep in his belly for a long time: that Anton Kretek would eventually betray and abandon him like this.

  “Kretek, you bastard!” He almost burst his throat with the scream.

  “He’s not a very nice man really.” The voice was conversational, feminine, and coming from directly behind him.

  Vlahovitch spun to find the woman standing some twenty feet away. She hadn’t been there a few moments before, but she was there now, her materialization as silent as the arrival of a stalking cat. She wore the red ski pants worn by the blonde they had captured the day before, and the green sweatshirt she had stolen from the body of Kretek’s nephew, the overlong sleeves rolled up. But this wasn’t the brown-eyed American blonde. The thrown-back hood of the shirt revealed high-pinned raven black hair and chill gray eyes, and the accent to her words was vaguely British. She stood relaxed with her arms held loosely crossed over her stomach.

  “But then, you really aren’t a very nice man, either,” she went on. And then she smiled.

  A strange, uncontrollable horror welled up within Vlahovitch. There was no justification for it. He was a man cradling a loaded machine gun, and she an unarmed woman. Yet he was stricken with the fear a condemned prisoner feels when he hears the approaching footfalls of his hangman. He brought up the Agram, trying to draw back the SMG’s bolt, his terror making him fumble.

  The first thrown knife sank into his right shoulder, paralyzing his arm. The second struck in the center of his chest, driving through his breastbone and into his heart.

  Valentina Metrace allowed herself that single, deep, deliberate breath. An enemy was dead and she and her friends were alive, and that was how it should be. She knelt down beside Vlahovitch’s body, reclaiming her knives. She cleaned each blade with a handful of snow, drying them on the clothing of the arms smuggler before resheathing them.

  She’d started to salvage the man’s weapon and remaining ammunition when a new factor intruded. From this position, she had a fair view down the eastern side of the point. Standing, she shielded her eyes against the growing sun glare and peered down the revealed reach of the shoreline trail. “Oh, dear,” she murmured under her breath.

  Chapter Fifty

  Wednesday Island Station

  “Jon, look!” Randi exclaimed, pointing. “They didn’t torch the copter!”

  From their position atop the antenna knoll they could look down on the ruins of the science station. All three of the prefab huts were in flames, but beyond the camp, at the helipad site, the Long Ranger sat apparently intact under its protective shroud of snow-covered tarpaulins.

  Smith kicked free of his snowshoes and unslung the SR-25. “If they didn’t wreck it some other way we may still be in business. Let’s go, but keep your eyes open for any stay-behinds.”

  Weapons readied, they dropped down off the hill to the station area. The low-lying smoke stank of burning plastic and hot metal, and there was a faint tinge of roasting pork to it that all three recognized but none commented on.

  It took only a few moments of wary inspection to prove that the station’s ruins were deserted. “They’ve pulled out,” Randi commented, lowering Valentina’s rifle, “bag and baggage.”

  “They must have bolted when they heard the firefight. They realized more was going down around here than they’d figured.” Smith looked across at her. “How about it, Randi? What are the chances they’re aborting?”

  She shook her head. “I think the guy running this show, Kretek, would be willing to risk everything at this point but the anthrax. I think he’s operating in bull-in-the-china-shop mode now. He’s going for it.”

  “Then so do we. Let’s look at the copter.”

  They had to circle wide around the blazing lab hut. As they did so Smith almost tripped over a form half-buried in the snow.

  “Ah, hell!”

  It was the body of Professor Trowbridge, casually kicked aside out of the camp walkways and frozen solid in an undignified sprawl. Smith was glad the previous night’s snowfall had encrusted the dead man’s face so that he didn’t have to look down into Trowbridge’s accusing eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Jon,” Randi spoke quietly, coming to stand beside him. “I kind of made a hash of things here.”

  “It’s not your fault. I set up the situation. I let him come with us.”

  The final lesson, Sarge. When you command, you don’t just live with your decisions for today, but forever.

  “He asked to come, Jon,” she said, looking at the still form, “and it was his call to make. None of us knew what was waiting for us here.”

  “I guess that’s true enough.” He glanced at her, a grim half-smile crossing his face. “Does it make you feel any better?”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  They moved on.

  When they reached the helipad, they found only a single set of tracks leading up to the Long Ranger through the fresh snow. They also found an ugly brick-sized package strapped around one landing gear strut with electrician’s tape. Smith and Smyslov froze when they saw it, but Randi dropped to her knees beside the float, intently examining the charge. “It’s plastique,” she reported after a moment, “and it hasn’t been fused. Let me have a knife, please.”

  Smith passed her his bayonet. “They were probably interrupted by the firefight.”

  She carefully cut through the tape binding the charge to the helicopter. Standing, she pitched the explosives as far beyond the wind berm as she could. “It stands to reason that if they were going to blow up the Ranger they wouldn’t bother with sabotaging it as well.”

  “That’ll be for you and the major to check out.” Smith looked back toward the burning camp. Where in the hell was Val? After she finished her decoy run she was supposed to rejoin. “How long will it take for you to get this ship airworthy?”

  Randi frowned and brushed back her parka hood. “It’s been sitting out here cold-soaking for two days. The book says at least two hours for warm-up, prep, and preflight in this kind of environment.”

  “The book doesn’t exist on this island.”

  “Right. I’ll see what I can do. Major, help me get the tarps and engine covers off.”

  Smith twisted the handle on the Long Ranger’s side hatch. Sliding it open, he peered inside the cabin. Everything looked intact and as they had left it, including the big aluminum case of lab equipment they had left strapped to the deck. A fat lot of good that had done them.

  He unslung his pack and swung it into the cabin, laying Valentina’s model 70 beside it. The sight of the rifle reminded him again of the weapon’s owner.

  She’d been so sure she could pull off an escape and evasion on her own. What if she’d been wrong? Smith felt his guts knot. He didn’t want her to become another of those failed things he’d have to live with.

  “Colonel, look!” Smyslov threw aside one of the engine covers and pointed. A small figure had appeared beyond the burning huts, coming around the knoll and running—no, staggering—along the shoreline trail. Smith caught up his own rifle and ran to meet her, Smyslov following a few steps behind.

  They interc
epted her just short of the huts. “Are you all right?” Smith demanded as Valentina half-collapsed in the curve of his arm.

  “Fine,” she gulped and wheezed, bracing her hands against her knees. “Just winded...but we have...complications, Jon...Complications.”

  “What’s happening?”

  She forced herself erect, still panting from her sprint. “Our arranged mutual ambush worked magnificently...almost a draw. I hung back to tidy up and maybe acquire a spare weapon or two...but I was...interrupted...and had to take off.”

  “By?”

  “The other section of the Spetsnaz force. There were only six taken out in the firefight with the smugglers. Four more are coming in behind me, and I strongly suspect they are not pleased with current events.”

  “Did they spot you?” Smith demanded.

  “Not sure. Maybe.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “They stopped to check their dead. I think we’ve got about ten minutes.”

  “Christ! Now they show up!” Smith paused to rub his aching eyes, wondering if he’d ever not be tired again. “All right. Major, you and Randi have got to get that helicopter ready to fly. Val, your rifle’s back at the Ranger. I want you to cover the helipad approaches from there. I’ll stay here and put the trail under fire.”

  Valentina swiped a sweat-damp lock of hair back from her brow. “Jon, these fellows likely know the old German infantry trick of maintaining the unit firebase. The survivors will swap out their assault rifles for the squad automatic weapons taken from their dead. They may have lost seventy percent of their platoon manpower, but they’ll still possess eighty percent of their firepower.”

  “That’s why I’d like that helicopter ready before they get here.”

  “Jon, we are talking about three bloody machine guns!”

  “That’s a given, Val. Get going!”

  “Colonel,” Smyslov said slowly. “May I suggest an alternative?”

  “I’ll be happy to consider one, Major.”

  “Let me go out to meet them. Let me order them to stand down.”