by Tom Clancy
Out front, Burkhart again coaxed the team to speed, his engine greedily pulling fuel from the tank. The wind bragged in the faces of his riders, pelted them with freezing precipitation. Spiral blooms of snow and hail exploded in the beams of their headlamps. Bullets of electrically charged graupel smacked their helmets, flattened out with little coughs of static that went rasping up and down their encrypted radio communications link.
If his task went off as Burkhart intended, the storm would be their only resistance. But in matters like this there could be sudden and unexpected turns, and he had done all he could to prepare his men for a change in plans.
Their firearms had been an easy choice. Lightweight, compact, field-tested after hours sheathed in ice at minus- 300°F cold-chamber temperatures, the Sig Sturmgewehr
552’s were optimally designed for extreme-weather commando action. Their hinged trigger guards could be moved to the left or right to facilitate firing with alpine-gloved hands. The variable-magnification optics were frost-resistant and reticulated with luminous tritium markings, their foresights hooded against glare and snow. Each of the transparent three-stack magazines under their barrels held thirty rounds of 5.56 × 45mm NATO ball ammunition. Attached side by side for rapid open-bolt reload, they effectively gave the guns a ninety-round capacity.
The riders carried these assault weapons on their backs in biathlon harnesses, as Burkhart had done on ski-patrol drills with the Swiss special forces, where he’d had to unclip his weapon from its straps and zero in on a line of numbered targets from both prone and standing positions, firing after rapid downhill runs, his performance measured to a rigorous standard of time and accuracy.
In his elite unit, Burkhart’s skills had leaped above the highest bar. It was as if he were born possessing them. But he’d accepted recognition from his superiors and comrades with indifference. His competitiveness came from old angers of the soul, and he’d worn his decorations as emblems of a secret spite. For the child of the moon, every medal pinned to his chest was a reminder of some beautiful shining face that had once looked scornfully at him under the sun, left further in the past as he flogged himself toward new levels of accomplishment.
At last, though, it was restlessness as much as anything else that had sent him along the path of the mercenary. His prowess had seemed wasted against cardboard soldiers. What pluck was there in mock combat against an enemy that bled red dye? Games had not demanded enough of him. And so he had moved on to find a profitable and satisfying alternative.
Since then Burkhart had only improved upon his innate abilities, refining his tactical know-how, his situational adaptability. He had actualized a vision of his own potential, made it hard as steel, and found a kind of chambered peace within it.
Now Burkhart took a sinuous curve around a glacial edge and urged his bike over a series of jarring bumps into the downhill channel he had reconnoitered before the storm. A final glissading run, his flaps threshing up a wake of powder, gravity squeezing the ribs around his heart, and then he was on a smooth flat field of ice, headed across the basin between the mountains and frozen shore.
Dimly visible through the snow, just a handful of miles seaward, lay the UpLink base.
Cold Corners Base
“Pete.”
Nimec turned his head from the window in the empty corridor. It was oval and not much larger than a porthole, its fixed pane reinforced with a shatter-resistant polymer coating. He had stood there alone staring at the thick pulsing snow outside, listening to the freight-train roar of the wind, once pressing his hand against the glass to feel its buffet. He could see neither land nor sky, only the close, incursive whiteness.
“Meg,” he said. He had not noticed her approaching. “Figured I’d take a look at the thousand-pound giant.”
“And maybe stare him down?”
“Maybe.”
She stood beside him awhile.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” she said. “Ron Waylon told me he’d taken you on the grand tour, then left you at your workstation after you two went poking around the utilidors.”
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t exactly. Just had a hunch you might be where everyone else wasn’t, and wandered around until I hit the spot.”
“It would’ve been faster and easier to have me paged.”
“But absent the intimate touch for which we strive at this lodge.”
Nimec looked at her another moment, then moved his somber eyes back to the window.
“I know what you’re thinking and feeling, Pete,” she said.
“Never occurred to me you didn’t.”
“One thing to keep in mind is that the storm won’t reach the Valleys. None of them do. The mountains form a barrier. And any snow that does get over them is dried by the katabatic effect before it hits the ground.”
He kept staring out the window.
“Our people have been missing eleven days,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Maybe no one’s been able to get to Bull Pass on foot since they were lost. Or obviously down in a chopper. But the boss told me MacTown sent out pilots in Twin Ospreys. And we’ve used Hawkeye III. State-of-the-art satellite recon that can practically image a mole on somebody’s chin.”
“Pete, you know air and orbital sat searches are hampered by the terrain no matter how sophisticated the tech. There are recesses, cliff overhangs . . . too many blind spots.”
Nimec turned to her again.
“Eleven days,” he said. “And counting. We have to be honest. Let’s believe they found food and water caches. Give them that. How long before they’d all succumb to the cold? When do we stop talking rescue, and admit anything we do is about recovering bodies?”
Another silence.
“I won’t offer false encouragement,” Megan said. “Not to you or myself. But neither will I stop hoping. You’d have to know Scar. He’d try to find places where they could shelter, and the same ground features that make hunting for his group difficult might very well provide it.”
Nimec didn’t reply. He was conscious of the wind barreling outside.
Megan studied his face.
“There’s more on your mind,” she said.
He waited a moment, then nodded.
“Working with Tom Ricci these past couple of years . . . I suppose the way he thinks outside the box has started to rub off on me. Something about the rover disappearing, and then those people who went looking for it, makes me suspicious. Or maybe that’s going too far, using too strong a word. It makes me wonder. I’m not sure about what. I figure the reason I’m not sure is there’s probably nothing to it. But I’ve been on my job so long, I can’t stop wondering. It’s instinct. Doesn’t matter where I am. Doesn’t matter that it’s pretty hard to imagine who’d want to make trouble for us here, interfere with what we’re doing. Or how they could. I’m looking for answers when I can’t even decide if there are any logical questions.” He paused, moved his shoulders. “I wish I could put it to you straighter.”
“You’ve been straight enough,” Megan said. “I never disregard your instincts, Pete. We need to talk more about this.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s late, and I want to sit on my thoughts a little longer, give them a chance to work themselves out.” He paused. “That’s why I waited to bring them up.”
Megan looked at him. The blowing wind and snow slammed aggressively against the window.
“I’m supposed to meet Annie for drinks,” she said. “You can join us if you like. It might make the waiting easier. For you and me.”
Nimec was quiet.
“Better not,” he said then. “Don’t think I’d be very good company.”
She stood looking at him a few seconds, nodded.
“We’ll be at the bar if you change your mind. You know where it is?”
“I can find it.”
She nodded again, and started away down the silent corridor.
“Meg?”<
br />
She paused, half turned toward Nimec.
“I almost forgot to mention you run one hell of a lodge,” he said.
Megan smiled warmly at him.
“Appreciated,” she said.
Burkhart heard a cannonade in the southern distance: long rolling rumbles, a bellowy roar, then a rending crash. Someone less familiar with Antarctica might have mistaken the din for thunder, but that was an infrequent occurrence on the continent. Instead he knew it to be a berg calving from the ice sheet, its great tortured mass breaking off into the sea, the stresses of its division accelerated by the storm.
As the sounds continued rocketing across the sky, he set his full attention on the dome some eighty or ninety feet up ahead. His men waited at his sides, snow whipping around them, their snowmobiles left a short distance back. The vehicles would have made this final stretch of ground easier to cross, and Burkhart was convinced the wind would have muted the buzzing of their engines even if they had ridden straight into the center of the compound. Still, he’d taken no chances and ordered his group to dismount.
Given a choice, Burkhart would have vastly preferred the storm’s assault had not coincided with their mission. But he had refused to be stopped by caprices of the weather, and decided what couldn’t be helped might be turned to his advantage. For one thing, it reduced the likelihood of his men encountering base personnel—almost certainly they would shelter in until conditions improved. It was also just as well he would not have to worry about the observation cameras mounted high on the desalinization plant’s dome. To his knowledge, no other Antarctic research base had any real perimeter surveillance, a measure believed pointless in an environment that gave natural safe haven from attack . . . and unworkable besides. Nor did the rest of the installations maintain defensive forces. While UpLink had broken with convention and done what it could on both accounts, the cameras were little more than token reminders. Scarecrows to frighten the birds away from the crop field. Having learned about them independently from Granger and the captive scientist, Burkhart had originally planned to steal past blind spots in their placement and motion patterns, and if necessary knock out those that presented the most serious threat of detection. He had been bothered by the thought that disabling them could trip an alarm and alert the facility’s security contingent to his team’s presence nonetheless, but that too had ceased to be a meaningful consideration.
Once he’d learned of the storm’s approach, Burkhart had become sure it would incapacitate the cameras, and what he saw now supported his confidence. Cataracted with snow, their lenses stared outward from the roof of the dome like blank, blind eyes.
There would be nothing to come in the way of his entry.
His submachine gun held at the ready, he led his men forward through the battering wind. He estimated its speed at close to forty knots, strong enough to rock him on his heels—and the worst of the storm was still many miles and hours to the south. When its brunt finally struck, Burkhart realized travel of any kind would be out of the question.
His team reached the dome, circled to its slatted roll-down door, and gathered before it. Ever cautious, Burkhart paused a moment to glance up at a security camera, noting its white-filmed lens with reassurance. Then he bent, unfastened the door’s wind locks with a gloved hand, grasped its handle, and raised it.
Recessed overhead lighting bathed the structure’s interior in a soft, even glow. Burkhart entered with a quick step, Langern and three of the other men following closely, lowering the door behind them, the rest of his team taking watch positions outside the dome. After all he had led them through, knowing the dangerous return journey they faced, it was odd to consider they would only need minutes to execute their job. But something would have to go very wrong for it to take longer.
He scanned the enclosure from behind his goggles, listening to the continuous hum of working machinery. On a large steel platform, an array of three water-distillation, treatment, and storage tanks—their respective functions stencil-painted on their exteriors—was connected to an intricate mesh of pumps, intake and outlet valves, hoses, PVC pressure lines, and electronic metering and control consoles. A pair of wide main pipelines curved downward from the distillation tank through the platform and then deep into the ice underneath. These, in turn, led outward to branching feed ducts, where seawater melted by recaptured exhaust heat from the base’s power generators was forced up through reverse-osmosis filters into the tanks.
It was a clean and energy efficient system, Burkhart mused. An impressive system. That he would have to cripple it gave him a strange twinge he’d experienced on occasion throughout his career as a soldier of fortune. Perceived but unidentified, the feeling would brush past him like a stray, vagabond brother who’d been missing since childhood, his existence nearly faded from memory.
And then, as always, it was gone. Burkhart stepped up onto the platform and called for one of the men to join him. An Austrian named Koenig, he approached briskly, well prepared for his role in the operation.
“Place the TH3 under here.” Burkhart moved to the distillation tank’s inflow pump, touched a hand to the metal plate over its motor. He thought a moment, then indicated the valve where the seawater pipeline connected to the pump. “And here. On these plastic lines as well. It will simply look as if the fire spread to them from the motor housing. “Du seist das?” He paused. “Be sure to give the charges a five-minute delay.”
Koenig nodded, waiting to see if there was more.
Burkhart thought again, but decided to leave his instructions at that. There were bound to be heat sensors, an alarm of some kind, and his band would have to be away from here before anyone responded. They also needed time to see that their tracks were scattered as they retraced them, though much of what had been underfoot as they approached was blue ice, and he believed the wind would take care of the light imprints they’d made. The trick was to be careful of overkill, balance his objectives against the risk of discovery, cause sufficient damage to take the plant out of commission while making it appear accidental. As it was, the fire’s rapid ignition and intensity would bring about considerable flooding beyond the initial destructive burst, even if automatic cutoff occurred when the pump went down—an interrupt mechanism Burkhart had no doubt would be in place.
Prompting Koenig to get to work, he watched him remove the pump motor’s cover plate, then slip off his outer glove and reach into a belt pouch for a laminate squeeze tube of the type that might contain toothpaste or pharmaceutical ointment.
Koenig unscrewed its cap, pulled off its airtight nozzle seal, then ran the nozzle slowly over the motor’s exposed wiring and components, pinching the tube between his thumb and forefinger to dispense a spare, smooth coating of its glutinous contents. Within seconds he’d moved on to the connector valve.
Although Gabriel Morgan had never said where he’d procured the incendiary material, Burkhart’s independent sources had rumored that it was engineered in a now-defunct Canadian laboratory operated by El Tio, the head of a transnational underworld combine who was alternately rumored to be dead or in hiding. Wherever it came from, Burkhart knew the pyrotechnic solgel nanocomposite was a product of far-boundary chemical technologies.
Standard military-grade thermate—or TH3—was a fine granular mixture of iron oxide, aluminum, and barium that generated temperatures of between 5,500° and 7000° Fahrenheit when ignited, sufficient heat to melt through a one-half-inch-thick steel sheet, its combustive reaction producing a molten iron slag that could do further, extensive damage to metal surfaces and equipment. There were, however, quantitative and qualitative limitations to its precision usage. It required slightly over twenty-five ounces of TH3 powder to generate a forty-second burn of significant destructive yield, and conventional mixing processes resulted in somewhat heterogeneous and volatile compounds that could have inconsistent results. Because the distribution of ordinary thermate’s constituents was uneven, a small amount was less reliable than a larger amount
—much as a pinch of mixed salt and pepper might be noticeably short one or the other ingredient, while chances were an entire shakerful would not.
The solgel process synthesized—in essence, grew—thermate’s molecular chemical components within a matrix of crystallized silica gel, encasing them in beadlike particles a thousandth of a meter in size. So uniform and energetic were the beads that each was like a microscopic incendiary grenade. For Burkhart’s purposes, they had been implanted within a pH-neutral material that resembled soft putty and contained an ethylene glycol additive to lower its freezing point to minus-30°F, allowing it to retain its malleable consistency in ECW conditions.
Burkhart wondered how many infinitesimal thermatic particles were contained in a single drop of the material. Thousands, by fast estimate. Perhaps tens of thousands. The desalinization plant was going down, and even returning it to partial functionality would be no small feat.
Now he stood quietly as Langern climbed onto the platform and got a spool of timed initiator cord and clippers from one of his packs. When he finished applying the thermate putty, Koening helped him set the lengths of cord, snapped the plate back over the pump’s motor, then looked over his shoulder at Burkhart.
“Fertig,” he said in German. “We’re ready to ignite the material.”
Burkhart looked at him, nodded.
“Do it,” he said.
Zurich, Switzerland
The woman was taller than Nessa had thought she would be, slightly younger, but unmistakably English. She crossed the breakfast room of the hotel with the air of someone who knew her place in the world—at its pinnacle.
Nessa waited for her to pick up the menu before going over to the table. The corners of the detective’s eyes scratched and her mouth was parched, but she knew those annoyances would vanish as soon as she opened her mouth.
