by Paul Kenyon
Farnsworth gripped the glass of Scotch he was holding. The glass shattered, and blood mingled with the whiskey, but he didn't notice.
"We'll have to hope that Coin's able to complete the mission by then," he said.
"Hope?" the voice crackled. On the screen, Marshal Dillon smiled at Miss Kitty. "What the hell do you mean, liope? Get on the stick and tell Coin that he's got to do it by then. No matter what the cost. When that capsule is breached, the whole world goes down the drain — starting with the Kanin Peninsula and your agent. He's got to go in and snatch the capsule now — even if it's suicide." Marshal Dillon took off his hat and set it on the bar. "If he doesn't, your agent is dead anyway."
"There's a problem," Farnsworth said.
"Problem? What kind of a problem?"
"Coin's out of communication. I can't get through with your message."
Chapter 12
The Baroness flattened herself against the snow and listened. Somewhere nearby in this white and silent waste was another human being. The chemical scent detector on her wrist was going wild. The air was loaded with butyric acid molecules.
Human sweat.
She didn't need the detector now. There was a little breeze blowing her way from up ahead. She raised her head and sniffed cautiously. Whoever it was hadn't bathed or changed his socks for months, if ever.
She inched forward, a white wraith in her skintight hotsuit. It was high noon, and she was almost invisible in the bright glare. It was better than trying to penetrate the Russian defenses at night, when the low, never-setting sun cast long shadows.
Skytop and the others were dispersed several miles away, awaiting her signal. Reconnoitering the germ warfare laboratory was a one-man job. She'd get as far as she could, then call for help if she needed it.
She hoped she'd get all the way.
But even then, she'd probably need help getting out Or a diversion.
The source of the smell was in view now, a bare forty feet away. It was a wooden sentry booth with a black stove pipe sticking out of its conical roof. As she watched, a soldier came out.
She stayed motionless as an Arctic hare, her face mask a featureless blank.
The soldier was a shambling ape in a fur cap, a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. He had a slack mouth and a week's worth of stubble. Penelope wondered why his commanding officer allowed it. She smiled. Perhaps this was the one they scraped the germ specimens from.
The soldier yawned, scratched and unbuttoned his trousers. A yellow stream spattered against the snow. It seemed to go on forever. Penelope held her breath and waited.
He finished, yawned again and took a long look around. He stared directly at her without seeming to see anything and then went back into the booth.
Penelope made a wide detour, crawling forward by inches, using the long telescoping brush to wipe out her trail behind her. She'd penetrated the first security ring. It had been easy. What lay ahead?
The scent detector saved her life. She'd set its pinhead electronic brain for a random scan of the two dozen or so scents she was most interested in. Now a red flag showed on the dial. She punched the stem to find out what she'd run into.
Lead azide. A high explosive detonator. And she was almost directly over it.
A mine. She was in a mine field.
What set it off? Pressure? Body heat? She couldn't be sure.
She backed off ten feet and tried again, ten feet to the right. There usually was some sort of a checkerboard grid to a mine field. If she could figure out the pattern, she could get through.
The red flag winked again. Parallel to the first mine. She crawled carefully backward and tried again, this time to the left.
Another mine! She began to worry.
Another fifteen minutes of crawling on her belly, and her worst suspicions were confirmed. There was no path through the mines. It was an overlapping barrier, stretching a deadly line that she could not cross. The Russians must get across at specific points, probably well guarded.
She fingered the butt of the Spyder in its holster. The powerful pistol-winch was useless to her. It could get her over a fifty foot wall, or let her down the sheer side of a cliff. But here, in this flat expanse of snow, there was nothing high enough to fire the piton-tipped plastic line at.
She thought it over. If she couldn't fly over the mine field, she'd have to go under.
She fumbled in a pocket of the hotsuit and got out the instant digital thermometer. She held it up and triggered it. It changed color along a portion of its length. Twelve degrees Fahrenheit. More than twenty degrees below freezing.
She unzipped the lifesaving garment and peeled it off. The freezing cold gripped her naked body like a fist of ice. She shivered, her teeth chattering uncontrollably.
She managed to get the hotsuit turned inside-out before her fingers turned numb. She spread it out in the snow and lay on top of it, stretching her arms along its sleeves. The cruel Arctic air still punished her back and paralyzed her toes and fingers, but enough of the blessed warmth wafted upward to keep her alive. She turned the healing element up to high and waited.
After a few moments she felt herself sinking. She melted her way downward through the fluffy snow, riding a raft of synthetic fibers and platinum wires.
In fifteen minutes, anyone who might have happened along would have seen a seven-foot shaft in the shape of a woman sunk in the snow, with a smooth white back and a pair of rounded buttocks shimmering at the bottom. Penelope twisted her head to look up the smooth sides of the shaft and decided she was deep enough. She picked herself up off the hotsuit and pressed it against the wall of snow in front of her.
She walked on her knees at the rate of almost a foot a minute, the accumulating warm slush getting her legs wet. It wasn't too bad once she'd made a few feet of tunnel. The overhead snow trapped the heat escaping from the hotsuit. By the time she'd gone a couple of yards, the temperature was almost comfortable.
Once her hand encountered something hard. She peeled the hotsuit away from the forward wall and saw the ugly metal bulge of a mine. This one had been planted deeper than the others, or she was underneath a declivity. She'd bumped it pretty hard, but it hadn't gone off.
That answered her question. The mines weren't set off by heat or vibration. It was the victim's weight that did it. Fortunately the detonator could only detect pressure from above.
All the same, she made a wide detour around it.
Now it was getting dark inside the tunnel. The air was stuffy. She judged she'd tunneled twenty or thirty feet. It was far enough. With a continuous perimeter of mines, there was no reason to plant them more than two rows deep.
She began melting herself upward at a forty-five degree angle. Rivulets of water trickled past her, down the shaft. After another quarter-hour, a translucent light appeared in front of her, and a moment later she broke through into the frigid air.
The first thing she saw was the startled face of a Russian soldier.
She shot out of her burrow like a striking cobra, giving him no time to think. They rolled around in the snow, his rough woolen greatcoat against her naked flesh. She had him by both wrists, trying to keep him from getting his hands on the submachine gun slung over one shoulder. She could feel the buttons of his coat digging into her tender breasts and bare belly. His breath was hot against her cheek.
She had the advantage of surprise. He must have been shocked as hell to see a naked woman suddenly pop out of the ground in front of him and clamp her body around his like a vise. It was all unreal. He still hadn't recovered.
She had to kill him soon, before he thought to shout, before the cold got to her. But she daren't let go of his wrists.
She inserted a bare knee between his legs and stabbed with it. But the heavy greatcoat protected his groin. He grunted with surprise. Now it had dawned on him that all this was serious. He strained with his right hand to reach his weapon.
She wrestled with him, looking longingly at his throat. If only she
could afford to let go long enough to get her thumbs into it. There was no weapon except her teeth. She'd used them before. She didn't mind the taste of blood in her mouth, not when she was fighting for her life. But she couldn't get past the high military collar.
His mittened hand had reached the trigger guard now, despite her efforts. Her fingers were growing stiff. It was only a matter of time before they'd be too frozen to hold him. A couple of minutes' worth, at best.
She had one more weapon. Her head.
Tensing her powerful neck muscles, she drove the top of her skull like a pile driver upward into his nose. He cried aloud in pain. She was sure she'd broken his septum.
Before he had time to recover, she let go of his left wrist and sunk her fingers into his right biceps. She swung her body away from his and doubled up, getting her shin underneath his right elbow. She leaned on his arm with both hands, and heard the sharp crack of bone. He screamed.
She scrambled off him and tugged the submachine gun off his floppy arm. He had time to realize what she was going to do.
"Nyet, nyet!" he pleaded, his eyes popping, as he stared uncomprehendingly at the naked woman standing over him, her breasts swinging and her long black hair tumbled over her white shoulders, the gun in her hands, butt forward.
It was the last thing he ever saw. Penelope swung the heavy stock into his skull and crushed it.
She dropped the gun and scrambled for the hotsuit, lying twenty feet away in the snow. It already had melted its way into a foot-deep bowl of slush. She fished it out with fingers that had ceased to feel. She thought she'd never get it turned right-side out. Her body was wracked with great uncontrollable shivers. The cold cut like a knife.
She got it on at last. It was sopping wet. It didn't matter. It was a warm wetness. With the heating element on high, the permeable membrane of the suit began to pass moisture through. In ten minutes, she was dry.
She turned the heater down to normal. She frowned when she read the gauge. In the last hour, she'd used up more than twelve hours of survival time.
It couldn't be helped. And after all, she'd survived.
She dragged the body of the Russian soldier over to the hole she'd come out of and pushed it inside. She dropped the gun in after him. Across the mine field, she could see the other hole, in the shape of an outstretched person. She hoped it wouldn't be recognizable for what it was from a flat angle at a moderate distance.
She found the soldier's lunch nearby in the snow. Garlic sausages and black bread, with a jar of tea. It was an encouraging sign. If he hadn't eaten yet, he still had more than half a shift to do. No one would miss him for a while. The tea was warm. That was even more encouraging. It meant he'd just come out.
She trudged onward. She could see something glittering in the distance. The glass of the laboratory windows. They looked like fragments of ice.
She didn't like it. There was a wide open expanse between her and that distant glitter. There had to be something on it. Another mine field? Sentries in camouflaged foxholes? A microwave detection field?
She plastered herself against the snow and looked it over very carefully. Nothing.
It was too good to be true. She lowered the flaring goggles and thumbed the little wheel that polarized them. There! She could see them now. Dark patches against the snow. There was one about a quarter-mile ahead of her, and she could see more of them stretching in a line at fifteen-hundred foot intervals. There was something exerting pressure, tons of it, on the underlying permafrost.
Bunkers. Buried under the surface.
Each would have two or three men in it, scanning the sector through periscopes, listening through earphones for the vibrations of anything larger than a lemming. This was as close as she could get without being detected.
The solution came with the sound of twin diesels. There was something coming almost directly toward her from outside the security perimeter, at an angle to the direction she herself had traveled. Whatever it was wouldn't run across whatever traces of trail she'd left, or the melted shaft with the dead soldier in it, but it would intersect her.
She burrowed into the snow and reached one hand upward to smooth the surface. The ground rumbled and there was a stink of diesel fuel.
Almost it crushed her. A big clanking track passed less than a foot from her head. The sky was suddenly blotted out by an enormous shadow. It looked as if a tank was passing over her.
A vezdekhod! Literally, a "go-anywhere." The Russians used them in Siberia and the frozen north.
Her hands scrabbled upward, groping for something to hold. But the underside was smooth as ice, a slippery belly that would help the vezdekhod keep from getting stuck if the treads sank too low.
It kept going, and as the rear deck passed over her head, she saw the metal tow bar, like the stump of a dragon's tail, sticking out behind.
She grabbed it with both hands and swung herself upward. The big snow tank was traveling about fifteen miles an hour, and she felt as if her arms were being wrenched from their sockets. But she straddled the dragon tail and worked her way forward.
She lay at full length crosswise, flattened to keep below the level of the narrow slot of the rear window. The steel surface vibrated boneshakingly from the engines. The huge tracked monster bore her toward the line of buried bunkers.
Scooping snow from the surface of the rear deck, she arranged it around herself to break her outline. By the time the angle of sight allowed the sunken observers to see above the rim of the deck, she'd be far enough away to pass scrutiny.
The snow vehicle lumbered onward. Once she thought she saw a face like a lobster's claw appear at the rear window, but it disappeared almost immediately. The distant installation grew in size. There was a collection of frosty cubes, sparkling in the sunlight. A somber brooding structure the color of lead towered over them: some kind of administration building. And at each corner, a round watch tower topped with battlements.
Here, riding the broad back of the vezdekhod, she'd be invisible to the watch towers.
A bloodcurdling chorus of howls filled the air as she approached. Dogs? No. No dogs howled like that. Wolves!
She could see them as the vezdekhod veered toward the triple fence: gray demoniac shapes that paced restlessly behind the wire mesh. They were huge. One of them stood up on his hind legs, wagging his tail, as the vezdekhod came close. He was taller than a man.
She tried to fathom the quality of a mind that would pen a pack of wolves in a dog run like that. It had to be the mysterious Penkin, the security officer Vana had warned her about. What had Vana called him? A monster. A troll. A man more savage than a wolf. A sadist who staked living people in the snow to be devoured by animals. She looked at the pack and shivered. She could believe it.
The vezdekhod lurched, turning on a course parallel to the fence. It was heading toward the main gate.
Penelope looked up over her shoulder at the watch tower behind her. This was the dangerous part. If anybody happened to be looking at the vezdekhod at this moment, they'd see her sprawled across its rear deck.
And she couldn't ride in with the vezdekhod. She sighed. It would have been so easy that way! But she'd be in full view of the sentries at the gate house.
She rolled off sideways and hit the snow with a jarring crunch. One heavy steel-link tread crawled like a metal snake past her cheek, reeking of lubricating oil. By the time it was past her, she was safely burrowed into the snow, level with the surface, with only the white camouflage of the hotsuit showing.
A new problem started to develop.
A few of the wolves were drifting over to the part of the fence closest to her, sniffing. In a minute or two, their behavior was going to attract the attention of the guards in the watch tower.
Moving her arm carefully, she brought the dial of the scent detector into view. She punched a digital code into the stem. The pinhead electronic brain wrinkled its metal-oxide brow and set to work puzzling out the odor of the person who was wearing it. The
answer appeared a couple of seconds later, in the form of a series of numbers on the dial.
Penelope found the little scent generator in the sleeve pocket of the hotsuit. It was a tiny box containing four bean-size phials filled with the volatile molecules of the four primary scents: fragrant, acid, rancid and burnt. By combining them in the right proportion, you could reproduce any odor on earth.
The scent generator had a little dice-size computer that could do just that.
She thumbed in the formula that glowed on the scent detector's dial. The scent generator mixed its molecular brew in a little chamber about the size of a cocktail onion, and released them into the air around Penelope.
They weren't Penelope's odor. They were exactly the opposite. They were her odor turned inside out. The complex molecules worked like antigens, locking into the structure of the individual molecules that comprised her distinctive scent, nullifying them.
Now she lacked what every living thing on earth had: an odor.
The wolves stopped, puzzled. The world of a wolf — like the world of a dog — is composed more of smells than of sights. Its nose is an incredible million times more sensitive than a man's. To the wolves, it was as if Penelope had suddenly flipped a switch that made her disappear.
As long as she didn't move, she'd be safe.
The wolves drifted away, losing interest. There was nothing outside the fence except an oddly shaped mound of snow. Their noses told them so.
She waited in her shallow trench until the midnight sun was low on the opposite side of the laboratory complex. Now the long shadows were working for her, not against her. Cautiously she lifted her head.
Lights were going on in the laboratories and the nearby barracks. A searchlight winked on at the top of the watch-tower near her and began probing the field of snow beyond.
Now all she had to do was get over the fence, wade through a pack of wolves and cross an electrified barrier!
There was nothing on the other side of the fence in her vicinity except an empty expanse. Nothing she could fire the Spyder at.