Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Scarborough stopped beside Payton, waited to be acknowledged, and was ignored.

  He made a loud affair of clearing his throat. “Any luck? We’re close to where Scout fell off our screens.”

  Still examining the ground, Payton merely shook his head.

  Bradley was more responsive. “We weren’t expecting much,” she said. “Scout traversed the area. I’m certain from the feeds it sent before our link broke. But its wheels probably couldn’t have left imprints in this stony surface.”

  Scarborough considered that a moment.

  “My sat maps show lots of sand in the lower pass, close to where it hooks into Wright,” he said. “Sand cover holds tracks, and the rover’s would be damned hard to miss. There’re no other mechanical ponies on the range.”

  His last remark prompted a mild chuckle from Bradley.

  “Cute,” she said.

  Payton finally looked up at Scarborough. “Scout isn’t some twenty-five-cent children’s ride,” he said curtly, sharing none of his colleague’s amusement. “We should move on instead of wasting our time here.”

  Scarborough hesitated. Restraint, he thought. As the rover’s project director, Payton was used to the golden-boy treatment, and seemed miffed that even an act of God could screw with his agenda. He had urged an immediate start to their recovery mission, but a chain of sudden Force 10 storms with winds blowing at upward of sixty miles per hour—base meteorologists called them weather bombs—had imposed a week’s delay. A week of hand-wringing and restless conjecture. It was understandable that he’d be wound tight. His superior attitude was more exasperating.

  “Okay,” Scarborough said in a controlled tone. “Let’s go.”

  And so they did, Scarborough leading in silence for better than a mile. True to his prediction, the pass’s terrain changed radically toward its juncture with Wright Valley. Sand the color of tarnished copper first sprinkled its gritty top crust, then fanned out in thicker accumulations, then coated every inch of ground underfoot with dark, heavy drifts. But however useful Scarborough’s GPS unit had been in reckoning their progress, it hadn’t helped prepare them for the gaining intensity of the wind. It barreled down from the higher elevations, roaring and growling, flinging tattered sheets of sand over them, making every step forward a slow effort.

  Scarborough soon found himself concerned that the tumultuous gusts would have blotted out any sign of the rover’s path, a feeling that deepened to quiet worry as they toiled onward with nothing for results. It had become almost oppressive when Payton abruptly halted and touched his shoulder.

  “Wait!” He pointed. “Over there.”

  Scarborough and Bradley turned to look. Scant yards to their left a chain of humpbacked dunes extended along the wall of the pass, unmistakable wheel marks threading up and down their flanks.

  The group scurried across the sand to inspect them, crouching together at the base of a dune.

  “The deeper, the fresher. And these are pretty deep,” Scarborough said. “They can’t be more than a couple weeks old, puts ’em in the right ballpark time-wise.”

  “It’s our baby, Alan.” Bradley indicated a stippled pattern in the tracks and got out her digital camera for some snapshots. “We couldn’t ask for better identification.”

  Scarborough nodded. Scout’s cleated titanium wheels would have left just such imprints. And their close spacing suggested the vehicle was too small to be anything but an unmanned drone. Also, his earlier remark to Bradley hadn’t been a colorful exaggeration. There truly weren’t any other mechanical ponies on the range. To reduce the environmental impact of their activities and preserve the dry valleys as a scientific resource, field workers refrained from operating wheeled or tractor-belted vehicles on ice-free ground, making the snowmobiles that towed their supplies and equipment across lake crusts the only motorized conveyances in use. This self-imposed restriction had been observed for three decades before it was formalized in a multinational code of conduct to which the United States was a signatory. In their negotiations to secure approval for the rover’s trials, UpLink and NASA had been firm about guaranteeing participant states that they would avoid leaving behind a mess—or in the language of their written application, would “minimize and remedy any disturbances caused to the natural landscape.”

  Ultimately, though, the good name of Roger Gordian, UpLink’s founder and standard bearer, had carried more weight than diplomatic niceties or signed promises. As a practical matter, implementation of any treaty in this freezing, desolate wilderness relied on the honor system. Somebody broke the rules, who was going to catch on?

  The story was in the math, and Scarborough had done his calculations long ago. Antarctica’s total land area was five and a half million square miles, double the size of Australia, triple that of Europe. With a winter population of about two thousand cocooned in the research stations, and maybe four times that many summer residents, it averaged between fifty and a hundred fifty thousand miles of open space per person, depending on the season. A tough chunk of real estate to police and patrol. Almost impossible, in fact, because the same agreement that regulated experimentation in the dry valleys imposed a continent-wide ban on military bases, effectively forbidding armed enforcement of its protocols.

  But none of this presently concerned Scarborough. He rose from his squat, took his binoculars from the case strapped around his neck, and raised them to his eyes. What he saw of the rover’s trail encouraged him. Yes, the wind had scrambled the trail. Completely erased entire segments of it. And was dissipating it into spindling little wisps of sand even as he watched. However, it remained plain enough for several hundred yards before cutting around a sharp eastward bend in the pass.

  “All right,” he said. “Looks like we’re in business—”

  Scarborough stopped. He’d noticed something out of the corner of his vision. A momentary wink of brightness far above him on the pass’s left wall, formed by the great soaring flank of Mount Cerberus. Curious, he turned the binoculars toward the slope for a better look, but saw only a series of naked ledges climbing to its uppermost reaches between vertical thrusts of stone.

  “Find something of interest?” Bradley asked, coming over from behind him.

  Scarborough waited before he replied. The flash of light did not repeat. Nor could he be sure exactly where it had originated. Then his view through the glasses blurred and he grunted with annoyance. In extreme cold weather conditions, the vapor from your exhalations puffed up into the air, condensed on the optical lenses of your field glasses, and quickly skimmed them with frost. It was the same with the snow goggles. Worse, really, since your eyelashes could freeze together if you removed them. This charming ECW phenomena didn’t get mentioned much in survival handbooks, presumably because their authors considered it a nuisance rather than a hazard. Polies knew the distinction could shift in a heartbeat.

  He lowered the binoculars, wiped them with his mitten, and slid them back into their case.

  “The sun reflecting off a glaze of ice, I think.” He shrugged. “Just happened to catch my eye.”

  Payton had also approached now, his rigid stance the image of impatience. Scarborough hastened along Scout’s trail before he could invite another complaint that they were dawdling.

  Bull Pass narrowed as it turned east, its walls pressing in close. Shadows spilled down their sides and pooled on the floor of the trench like black syrup. Channeled into rapid currents, the wind seemed to have inflicted its worst punishment upon the crumbled and broken left slope, a slow erosional process that must have begun untold centuries before. In his mind’s eye, Scarborough pictured some colossal ruminant grazing away at the ridgeline with stubborn, tireless persistence, leaving a huge projection of stone here, a fallen granitic slab there, spitting irregular mounds of rubble into the breaches. Opposite, Cerberus loomed in stark contrast: dominant, monolithic, its grooved face darkened with mountain shadows from base to icy brow.

  It was perhaps thirty minutes lat
er when Scarborough rounded a broad shoulder of rock and first saw the notch about a half mile up ahead. He paused for a long moment, suddenly reminded of the time he’d visited the Grand Canyon as a youngster. His parents had given him an assortment of educational materials in advance of that summer trip. Books, videos, travel brochures, the works. He’d digested them until he thought he had learned everything there was to know about the place. But when he actually stood gazing out over the chasm from the South Rim, Scarborough realized that neither words nor pictures could capture how it felt to see it with his own eyes. He recognized the natural landmarks. Shiva Temple. Hale’s Needle. Point Hanover. They looked just as they did in photos, yet were altogether different. This did not seem a contradiction to him. With his eleventh birthday barely past, Alan Scarborough had in a single shot gained a fundamental and lasting appreciation of direct participatory experience . . . as well as an insatiable yearning for it. He’d never since been content observing reality through windows of separation, framed within neatly bordered perspectives, but had always felt the urge to leap outside to where his feet touched the ground. Why else had he eagerly joined the Marines with an ROTC assignment out of college, and on retirement pursued a civilian gig in a land where the Ice Age had missed its final curtain by ten thousand years? Why else?

  Scarborough studied the deep V-shaped notch near the valley intersection with rapt fascination. Like the photos and descriptions in those boyhood references, his satellite readouts had offered detailed information about the area’s geographic features. He had come here prepared. But the sheer immensity of the cleft overwhelmed his senses. And stirred his imagination. He again envisioned gargantuan creatures dining on solid rock as they thundered through the ancient pass. What he knew of glacial migrations was momentarily forgotten. Science was Bradley’s and Payton’s game. His was to see their expedition through the valleys and return them to Cold Corners safe and sound, ideally with the salvaged Martian rover in their possession. He could allow himself a brief flight of fancy. And right now it was easy to believe that the notch in the side of the pass had been left by a prehistoric monster of indescribable scale. Not the same trudging forager that might have munched away at the slope behind him like a fat hippopotamus snacking on reeds and brush. This would have been something more akin to a tyrannosaur. A lunging beast of prey that took vicious bites out of the earth’s hide, gulping them down whole, its fangs leaving permanent gouges wherever they sank in.

  It looks like a wound, Scarborough thought. A wound that never healed shut.

  Bradley had strode up alongside him and was peering through her binoculars, but a glance in her direction revealed she hadn’t been focused on the notch. Instead she was scanning the ground. As Scarborough guessed he should have been doing.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “Get what?”

  She looked at him.

  “The rover’s tracks,” she said, and handed over the binocs. “Check them out for yourself.”

  Scarborough readily obliged, his gaze following the parallel bands of Scout’s wheel marks. They coursed across the open sand in a fairly straight line for what he estimated was a hundred yards, and then swung away toward the notch. That didn’t surprise him. Rather, it seemed to confirm that the probe had been operational when it reached the area, since one of its selective tasks was to explore, image, and collect geologic samples from the notch’s interior. Why had Bradley sounded so puzzled then?

  It took a minute before he understood.

  Just when the tracks got to the flat apron of the notch, they evaporated. And insofar as Scarborough could judge from his vantage, did not resume at any point beyond.

  “Crap,” he said. “Seems we’re about to lose the trail.”

  “Yes,” she said. “What do you make of it?”

  Scarborough was thoughtful. “I don’t know. Could be it was scrubbed clean by wind.”

  Bradley’s silence betrayed her skepticism. Scarborough couldn’t blame her. His explanation had been pretty feeble. There was a significant distance between the spot where Scout’s wheel marks stopped and the entrance to the notch, and the gusts in this section of the pass were blowing a trifle less vigorously than in the last stretch his party had covered. It seemed improbable that the trail wouldn’t continue further on. At the very least it should have left some partial remains. But from where he stood, the rover might as well have been swallowed up by the sand.

  Scarborough’s view through the glasses clouded from his breath, and he rubbed the steam off before it could freeze. Then he wiped his snow goggles. Not that he needed to bother. He knew what he had seen. Or hadn’t seen, to put it more aptly. Neither the wheel marks nor the rover would materialize at his command. That magic trick exceeded a Coke-bottle genie’s abilities.

  “What’s happening?” Payton demanded from over his shoulder. “Why are we standing here?”

  Scarborough turned to him. The guy was like a perverse talking doll with about four lines of nastiness recorded on its voice chip. Still, he was owed a straight answer. Scarborough would have preferred one that was simultaneously optimistic, but didn’t know how to pair his goals. He chose between them, braced for Payton’s reaction.

  “Scout’s trail wipes out short of the notch,” he said. “From what we can see, it doesn’t pick up again.”

  Payton looked at him.

  “Short of the notch,” Payton repeated. Absorbing the implications of Scarborough’s words at once. “Which would be approximately where the rover lost contact with base.”

  Scarborough nodded.

  “I don’t understand,” Payton said. “If that’s as far as Scout traveled, that is where it still ought to be.”

  Scarborough might have agreed that was the logical conclusion. Except the probe wasn’t there. And though a slew of possibilities had occurred to him, none convincingly accounted for its MIA status.

  “We’ll keep going. See what’s what,” he said. “I wish I had a better plan.”

  Payton thrust a hand at him, palm up. “Pass me the binoculars,” he said with derision. “I want to take a look. With my own eyes.”

  Scarborough was tempted to suggest that Payton might also want to use his own field glasses, which were hanging in their case over the front of his parka. Instead he handed them to him.

  “No problem,” Scarborough said. “Give ’em back to Shevaun when you’re done.”

  Bradley nodded to Scarborough in a way he interpreted as sympathetic. It made him feel appreciated. And glad he’d curbed his irritation.

  They waited as Payton studied the trail. A minute or two later he let the glasses sink to his chest.

  “This isn’t possible, it—” He suddenly interrupted himself. “Wait. Do either of you hear that noise?”

  Scarborough did. It was a kind of high metallic buzz that seemed to drill through the blanketing rush of the wind from an unresolved distance. He glanced at Bradley. The inquisitive tilt of her head revealed she was listening carefully to the sound, trying to pinpoint its source. While the reverberant acoustics of their surroundings made that hard, Scarborough thought it was issuing from the direction of the notch.

  Payton evidently thought the same. He brought the glasses back up, aimed them at the yawning, jagged scar in the wall of the pass.

  “What the hell is this?” he said. His voice was shaky. An instant later, his hands were too. “Scarborough, do your job. Will you do your goddamned job and answer me?”

  Scarborough stared at the notch. At first nothing caught his attention. Then an object darted out onto the sand. From a distance it seemed a mere speck. But it was coming on at an incredible speed, growing larger in his vision with a quickness that matched.

  Payton continued to stand beside him with his gloved hands trembling around the binoculars. Scarborough did not want to lose a beat getting his own set of glasses out of their case. The buzzing had grown louder and louder, filling his ears as it surged between the stone walls on either side of
him. To his unaided eyes, the thing from inside the notch appeared to be a dark cloud of ground smoke churning around a solid and even darker core. At its present rate of acceleration it would be upon them in less than a minute. And he didn’t have a clue what it might be.

  “I need the glasses,” he told Payton. “Hurry.”

  The techie didn’t answer. He seemed oblivious to Scarborough, paralyzed with shock.

  Scarborough reached out to take the binocs, but Payton’s grasp was unyielding. He pulled harder, snatched them from Payton’s petrified fingers, wiped the frost off them.

  A glance through the eyepieces immediately told him what had induced Payton’s mental disconnect.

  The cloud was not smoke but a storm of powdery reddish-brown sand. And the object kicking it up as it raced ever closer was something that should not have been in the pass, the valleys, nor anywhere on the continent. Not for any conceivable reason.

  A storm, that’s it. Scarborough’s thought burst through the door of his memory with haunting irony. The fear arrived an instant later. A desert storm.

  “Alan, talk to me.” Bradley had inched close, her arm brushing against him. “Tell me what you see out there.”

  Scarborough held up a hand.

  “Wait,” he said. “I need to be positive.”

  But that was a lie. Scarborough knew what he saw in spite of his initial disbelief. What he really needed was to pull himself together.

  When he’d served with the Corps in the Persian Gulf War, special forces units had used tricked-out dune buggies called Fast Attack Vehicles in advance recon and hit-and-run combat missions. Stripped down to their welded tubular frames and roll bars, their low-slung carriages left virtually no discernible signature for enemies to sniff and chase, which led to their reputation as the earthbound equivalents of Stealth bombers. Accommodating two riders in front and a third in an elevated rear gunner’s chair, they held various configurations of roof-mounted antitank tubes, forward and rear machine guns, grenade launchers, and side compartments for gear, small arms, and ammo storage. Back in the day, Scarborough and a buddy had taken an FAV for a workout in the desert and gone belting over dunes and trenches at an uninterrupted eighty-five miles per hour.