Phoenix Force 06 - White Hell

by Gar Wilson

  Particularly preoccupied was Manning, who considered Alaska an extension of Canada proper, his native stomping grounds. To him the impending pipeline attack was dramatic testament to the growing terrorist contagion. If such an unlikely invader as the Irish National Liberation Army could strike Alaska, who then was safe? This new threat spurred, cemented his dedication to the new war.

  It was a responsibility the taciturn, thirty-two-year-old security consultant lived with twenty-four hours a day. Indeed, his dedication to the cause had already cost him his marriage. A workaholic to start with, a perfectionist to boot, he had been a token husband to Lorraine almost from the start. Still, she had remained steadfast. But when Colonel John Phoenix had summoned him, his abrupt and secret departures from hearth and kin had written finis to what could have been a storybook romance.

  Gary often thought of Lorraine. He envied her second marriage, the son she had given her new husband. He wondered if he could ever love another woman as much as he had loved her. At the same time he doubted that he would ever marry again. Why ruin another woman's life?

  There were female relationships, to be sure. But he would be the first to admit that they were matters of convenience: companionship at times when he tired of his own company, a release of certain physical pressures, nothing more. Should any woman press for a more permanent commitment, it would mean a discreet goodbye.

  He accepted his priorities squarely. It was a monasticism he could live with.

  His needs were simple. The ruddy-faced, rawboned man was a consummate woodsman, a jogging fanatic, a dilettante gambler and sports-car buff. His flourishing security-consultant career afforded him his collection of handguns, hunting rifles, Ferrari 308GTS and an occasional jaunt to Caribbean gambling haunts.

  His hair the same tawny shade as McCarter's but worn close-cropped to his head, his body firm, lithe, yet decidedly muscular, Manning was considered handsome by those women who got past his blunt manner.

  Looking down on the bleak, icy wastes of Alaska, Manning puzzled over the INLA impasse with an unflinching sense of reality. If the terrorists did not beat them, the merciless Arctic would; it was double jeopardy all the way. The slightest miss cue could mean death for any or all of them. Again the quiet mood of dedication. He vowed he would hold up his end of things. If each Phoenix Force member did likewise, they would come through all right.

  He looked about the cabin at the others and savored a private smile.

  He would trust his life to any of them. He was positive that the feeling was mutual.

  And, little by little, the tension in his gut eased.

  Satisfied with what they had seen of the North Slope, Katz told the pilot to take the helicopter up and make for the mountains with all safe speed. As they cruised through an all-enshrouding ground fog, visibility worsened. The pilot, activating the radar and relying on "bush" instincts, carefully dropped beneath the clouds and picked his course by landmark sightings. He had flown in six times a day during construction of this leg of the pipeline; he knew the terrain like the back of his hand.

  He pointed out where the pipeline ran—the main portion of it was buried in the rugged setting—and he indicated a vaguely defined pumping station. "That's Atigun Pass," he yelled over the engine racket. "It's the last of four stations on this side of the divide. It provides the final kick in the ass as the oil comes over the Atigun Saddle. It's the highest elevation point in the whole pipeline. Four thousand eight hundred feet."

  "That's some layout," said Keio. "Looks like a whole village. Is all that necessary to pump oil?"

  "You bet," Ransome replied. "Each station's got four, 13,500-horsepower gas turbine engines, three working, one on reserve. They put the crude—heated to a hundred-forty degrees to keep it moving—through at one mile per hour."

  Again Yakov gave the word, and the copter jerked itself upward, the rotors clawing the sky. "We're due in Valdez by four," he said. "Wouldn't want to be late for chow."

  The rest of the trip was uneventful, and again the individual team members fell into silence, their minds troubled. Some recalled the Fort Greely stopover early Christmas morning—there they had heard eyewitness accounts of the slaughter. Seven men dead, including the hapless guard; one severely wounded.

  Someone would pay. In spades.

  But when it came to the bottom line, it was the same as in Seattle. No loose ends. Nothing left behind. Nobody at the Army base had gotten a fix on any of the Grey Dog terrorists.

  The witnesses said a heavy helicopter had set down, a highly trained kill force, numbers unknown, had charged out and made mincemeat of the dazed personnel. The terrorists had known which building housed the weapons cache; they had known what they wanted and had seized it with dispatch, even remembering parts kits in their haste.

  One thing was certain, the Irish renegades were armed to the teeth. If Hal Brognola's body count was on the money, each man had an M-16 for every other day of the week.

  Ransome pointed out landmarks as they moved south: the pipeline bridge at the Yukon River and its accompanying pumping station—the first permanent crossing of the river in Alaskan history. The rotors blasted through the foothills near Livengood. Then a refueling stop at Fairbanks. Mount McKinley, highest point in North America, loomed on their left. Southward to the Tanana River, where a 1200-foot span of pipe shifted the oil south. Tanana, site of Fort Greely, made a special impression. Now the 650-foot bridge across the Tazlina stood below them.

  By then things had begun to blur. The harsh scenery added up to but one thing—an almost in-human, insurmountable challenge for Phoenix Force.

  It was 1550 hours when the pilot broke into the team's deepening funk. "Valdez coming up, gentlemen," he announced. "We'll be setting down in five minutes."

  "Kindly check for all personal belongings," McCarter quipped. "Especially your bloody brats. Please take all small children by the hand . . ."

  5

  Two geodesic domes, dimly glowing, poked their heads above the raging, twenty-foot-high sheets of blowing snow. A bank of radar shields flanked the USAF top-secret installation, while inside the electronic palisade, radio-telescopic dish antennas scanned the skies around the clock. The adjoining buildings housing the Satellite Control Facility—two, long, arctic-reinforced, Quonset-type barracks—issued the faintest speck of light from random windows and door tunnels, snowdrifts piled almost to the eaves.

  The relentless storm obliterated even the puny traces of human habitation upon the endless, barren ice plain that was the North Slope.

  But inside the billeting area, usually occupied by a fifteen-man USAF complement, all was calm. The blizzard's howl was muted by the constant hum of the fans and by the mutter and laughter—even at 2300 hours—of the Grey Dog invaders.

  In one room, originally intended for two Air Force technicians, five Irish hardmen were crowded around a table playing poker. The two bunks in the room had been jammed together to make room for three bedrolls on the floor. It was the same in all the rooms opening on the corridor, except in the room occupied by the topcock, Sean Toolan.

  Other Grey Dog personnel maintained a hap-hazard patrol of the storage, mess and power-generating areas of the second building. In the main dome, a skeleton crew of terrified, dog-tired controllers spelled one another in the monitoring of the instrumentation contained therein. They kept open communication lines between AFSAT-COM in Denver, between backup installations at Eileson and Shemya Air Force bases in Alaska, and between advance-warning stations at Cambridge Bay, Canada and Thule, Greenland.

  All part of an interconnected early-warning link, none of the sister installations could be allowed to suspect that they were under siege. To stress the point, the terrorists aimed pistols at each GI's head during every minute, every hour of the crewman's watch.

  The illusion of normalcy must be preserved at all cost, Toolan had roared, vowing to skin alive any of his forty-four soldiers who might allow their captives to leak an alert to the outside world during
routine transmissions. Six days remained before a relief crew would be flown in from Eileson AFB; the terrorists must be long gone before then.

  The computer consoles winked and clicked, the digital counters flickered nonstop. The huge interior dishes and radio beacons made their precise, clock-driven rounds. Computerized printouts flashed in from matching consoles at all privileged stations. And from the terrorist-conquered site, located on the Colville River, halfway between Umiat and the Beaufort Sea, roughly a hundred sixty miles west of Prudhoe, lulling word went out: everything was copacetic.

  The attack on QSS 0022 had been swift and deadly, the double copter landing obscured by eternal night and by ceaseless wind-howl. The attack had been abetted by the smug, insular over-confidence of the military men within. Before the nerve-center personnel could even think to zap Mayday into the Arctic ozone, they had found the icy muzzles of the M-16s snugly pressed to their temples.

  Lieutenant Grant Pollard, his nose caved in, three fingers on his right hand shattered by a rifle butt, had quickly babbled all security codes and procedures to Toolan and Cafferty, and had instructed his com-center technicians to cooperate to the fullest with the terrorists.

  The facility commander had never been seen again.

  So, in the dead of the Alaskan hibernation... Business as usual.

  At that moment, in the lieutenant's quarters, now commandeered by Sean Toolan, a scene of domesticity was unfolding.

  Coletta Devane, clad in a navy blue robe formerly owned by Pollard, emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, applying finishing touches to her fiery tresses with a brush. "Some place, huh, love?" she addressed Toolan. "A regular Taj Mahal. These Yanks really go first class, don't they?"

  Toolan, sprawled in a chair in one corner of the room, looked up from the glass of Scotch he was regarding. "Nice enough, I guess," he muttered. "Don't go gettin' used to it now. It's a nasty bit o' work we have before us."

  She put down the brush, shook out her hair. She lifted the half-empty bottle and frowned. "Work like this is it, man?"

  "Don't start again, woman," he snapped. "A man's entitled to a dram now and then. It's been a raw day."

  "All your days are raw, Sean. Keep it up, and Bryan will be finishing this mission, mark my word."

  "Is that all you know, Col? If I needed nagging I'd have remained home with me mother."

  Devane jutted one hip provocatively at him, the robe falling partially open to reveal smooth slender legs. "Just as well, I suppose," she sneered. "Sure an' bejasus she'd ask no odds of you."

  "A real broken record you are, Col," he blustered, no real steam behind the words. He averted his eyes. "Is sex all you ever think of? I thought we took care of that just last night."

  "Use it or lose it," she smirked. "That's what I always say, darlin' . . ."

  When he did not answer but continued to sullenly suck back the liquor, she said, "Maybe I should peddle my fish elsewhere, duck? There's men down the hall who wouldn't have to be asked twice. Always had a curiosity in me t'see how many men I could take on in one night. It's a common female fantasy."

  "Well," he gritted, "go do it then. If that's what you want. I swear, I don't know what to make of you. Go, then."

  Her eyes softened, a winsome yearning reflected there. "But don't you see, Sean?" She sighed. "That's not what I want. What I want is you. What's gone wrong? You used to be so eager. You couldn't get enough of me. What happened?" She sank onto his lap, wound her arms around his head, dragged his face to her breasts. She opened the robe and guided his fingers to the swollen nipples.

  "Dammit, Coletta," he protested, "can't you see I ain't in the mood?"

  Her eyes glittered. "Maybe I could get you in the mood, lover," she sighed. She dislodged herself and slid between his thighs. She began opening his clothes.

  "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he muttered, feebly forestalling her bold fingers. "Don't be doing that. It's a blot in God's eyes. Coletta!" He jerked, stiffened as he felt her hot lancing tongue. Then, a moment later, the suffocating wet heat of her mouth.

  "Coletta . . ." he groaned. "You bitch. You sweet bitch."

  Outdoors the wind had picked up, whipping viciously at the exposed corners of the buildings.

  The temperature stood at thirty below, the wind-chill factor at seventy-five below. It was, in truth, hell's deep freeze.

  In one sheltered angle where the buildings butted, lay a grisly scene—nine airmen, bodies flung heedlessly, like so much cordwood, all frozen in a grotesque tangle. Some lay flat, eyes distended, wide with horror. Others were contorted, limbs askew, mouths open wide, where they had pleaded to the last against the killer's single bullet to the brain.

  Minute by minute the blizzard layered the bodies with snow. An hour later all were covered, placed in frozen storage until spring would find them again.

  6

  "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," Jack Grimaldi said, his dark eyes flashing. "This is your tour director speaking. Today we'll be taking an exciting excursion to Alaska's fascinating North Slope, where we'll spend hours exploring the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Now if you'll look out the window on your left . . ."

  "Turn if off," Rafael Encizo protested, smiling despite himself. "Travelogues we don't need."

  Dispatched directly from a successful mission in Japan, Grimaldi, Stony Man's free-lance flying ace, had joined Phoenix Force in Valdez late the previous night.

  Now manning the controls of an Army issue Bell Long Ranger, Grimaldi, his brown, curly hair in disarray, his bulky frame at ease in the helicopter's flight seat, was carefully checking the pipeline's northernmost meanderings. Hovering at thirty feet, moving at snail's pace, they searched for signs of unauthorized activity below.

  And though each member of Phoenix Force seethed inwardly at the apparent futility of the search, each knew it was their only course of action.

  There had been no break in the info blackout. No more Grey Dog raids, no sign of movement on any front. It was as if the Arctic had swallowed them up.

  So. Run the pipeline. Foot by foot, mile by mile.

  Phoenix was not alone on search-and-destroy. The U.S. Army was laboriously gearing up for a pipeline patrol of its own. At this moment, farther south between the Yukon and Valdez, military copters were up, running the same drills as Katz and his team. And, from Fort Richardson at Anchorage, and Fort Wainwright at Fairbanks, Sikorsky S-65s were being loaded with troops. Simultaneously Sikorsky CH-54Bs were sky-hooking to M113 APC's—armored personnel carriers. Other M113s were being shipped to the closest railheads; they would proceed overland from there.

  The sky cranes would be lowering the first of the APCs at Prudhoe to provide perimeter defense later in the afternoon.

  The INLA would find a formidable welcoming committee waiting should they be foolhardy enough to launch a frontal attack on the critical installation.

  To Colonel Yakov Katzenelenbogen, seated next to Grimaldi—the cocksure pilot never tolerated a copilot—it was poor tactics. Deterrent force was no way to fight a war.

  And while he fumed, Katz pondered their plan. Locate the INLA hideout. Hit them hard, demolish them to the last man, before that first slab of C-3 could even be placed.

  Which brought them back to square one.

  Grimaldi and the Bell 206L. The gray snake belly-winding itself across the bleak landscape.

  Repeatedly Katz put the Bausch & Lomb 10x50 binoculars to his eyes and surveyed the contrast-less terrain unfolding bleak, unvarying beneath the chopper. Frustration mounted.

  "Please remember, folks," Grimaldi said, trying to cut the tension, "while it doesn't look like much, Exxon, Arco, British Petroleum and all the rest have spared no expense in bringing this majestic wonder to you. Two years in the building, it cost over eight billion dollars before it was completed in 1977. The line pumps two million barrels of crude into Valdez every day of the year. Not only that, dear travelers, but . . ."

  "Knock it off, will you," Encizo objected.

  "A ca
st of thousands . . ." Grimaldi persisted.

  "Enough." It was Yakov who cut Grimaldi off this time. "We are quite familiar with that PR."

  "Bears repeating." Grimaldi grinned, in no way squelched. "It's the engineering feat of the century."

  "So, I'm impressed," the Phoenix headman snapped. "Now may we go on to other things?"

  Today, at 1500 hours, they were again working toward the foothills of the Brooks range, all convinced that if Grey Dog had established a base camp, the craggy, forested terrain would be the most logical place for it. As the endless snow prairie gradually gave way to the first out croppings of rock—jet black against the luminous whiteness—the team stirred and searched the gloom more intently.

  The pipeline eased down off its stilts, dug slowly into an underground bedding, duplicating the contours of moraine scree and talus, high-legging it again when the bottom dropped out too precipitously.

  The day was more murky than before, cloud cover concealing the stars—a storm definitely brewing.

  Ohara studied the terrain beneath the slow-moving chopper, his eyes on super fine-tune. Abruptly, glimpsing a shadowy muddling in the snow near one stretch of pipe, a trail streaking to the left, his pulse quickened. He adjusted, straining harder to see.

  They were near Toolik—pumping station three, according to their charts—a likely spot for sabotage. Then suddenly, a movement off to the left. Keio jerked and sucked in a quick breath. "Down there." He pointed. "Something moved."

  Instantly everyone's nose was pressed to the glass. Desperate eyes followed Ohara's finger to an expanse of meadow, over which the TAP again rode its steel trestles.

  "Swing her around, Jack," Katz ordered. "Let's have a second look."

  This time the Bell Long Ranger came in lower and executed an agonizingly slow pass over the area. "There," Encizo said excitedly, "I see it. Just past that rock pile to the right. All kinds of tracks there. But there's nobody around."