by John Ringo
He slid back in his sack but kept the top off his face. The lead and the point still weren't back. He wouldn't really settle in until they were.
A snowflake hit his face and he winced. They'd better fucking hurry.
* * *
Danes Devlich shook his head.
"They were right there," he said, pointing to the hillside which was rapidly disappearing in the snow. The snow was falling straight down, now, but he could tell by the taste of the air that it was soon going to be storming.
"There's a hot-spot," Jachin Ferani, the point leader, said shaking his head. "But... Oh, now I see it," he added.
The sun was already up and they knew they were supposed to be out of sight. But they also didn't want to lose their team. Not with a storm coming.
"Where?" Tomas Kulcyanov asked. All three of the team were down on their bellies, just below the crest of the ridge. Jachin was thermal imaging binoculars that could be switched for normal vision while Tomas and Dafyd were peering through standard range-finding binos.
"Right where Dafyd was pointing,' Jachin said, chuckling. "In bivvies with their nets over them."
"Damn," Dafyd said after a moment. "That is weird. I was looking right at them..."
"We can make it down in about five minutes," Tomas said.
"If we hurry," Jachin pointed out. "We're not going to hurry. We're going to do the same thing. Right here."
* * *
It had been nearly an hour since the team had bedded down when Adams heard a double click in his headphones. The point was, presumably, nearby but not coming in. Okay, he could live with that. They probably didn't want to move in the light. He clicked once in reply. As he did, the wind started to pick up and the bivvy started flapping, hard.
"Well, this is gonna totally suck," Adams whispered as the blizzard descended in earnest.
* * *
"Well, I think that Mr. Jenkins would say that this 'sucks'," Colonel Chechnik said, his jaw working as he read the report.
Russia's intelligence agency did not have the technology or funds of its American equivalents. It made up for both by being, in many cases, far better.
The fall of the Soviet Union had released flood of information related to the "spy war" between the US and the Soviets going back to the 1930s and the returns were pretty much in: The Soviets had hammered the US.
The Russians had moles in most of the major defense and intelligence agencies not only in the US but in all of the West. They had penetrated almost every communications department, most secure research and regularly had people with access to the White House. They'd managed so many disinformation operations that straightening out fact from fiction was taking careful work by historians.
After the Fall, they'd had a hard time maintaining those links. But they had managed to retain very good Humint in other areas.
Notably Chechnya.
While, as with the US, it wasn't really helping them win the war, they often knew of movements before the Chechen high command. And when the High Command knew...well...
Chechnik looked at the document and sighed. He had placed a mid-level request in place related to the general area of the Keldara mission. And this was the result.
He looked at the phone, then the document then the phone. Finally, grimacing, he picked it up.
"I need to speak to the President."
* * *
"You wanted to speak to me?" Nielson said, looking up.
Kacey and Tammie were in their new Keldara uniforms rather than flight suits since, given the hairy-ass missions of the last couple of days, they were taking a well-earned rest day.
"Colonel," Kacey said, shifting uncomfortably in her new digi-cam. "Missions went fine. Clean in and out. How're the teams?"
"Now we're in blackout," Nielson said, shrugging. "Hell of a storm on the way in. If they get into serious trouble they'll call. But that's likely to blow the mission. You know the orders the Keldara have on casualties?"
"No, sir," Tammie answered.
"In the event that the casualty is anything but life-threatening and savable by extraction, they are not to request evac. If the casualty is immovable, a broken leg for example, they and their partner will remain in place until after the mission and then be extracted if and when. We more or less anticipate Keldara being strung across the mountains until we can pull them out."
"Holy crap," Kacey breathed.
"That sucks," Tammie said. "I mean, really sucks. I can see the reason, but..."
"So I have no idea how the teams are doing," Nielson said, smiling thinly. "For all I know, they could have been wiped out in an avalanche. We won't know for..." He paused and checked his watch. "For four days and about twenty-one hours."
"Understood, sir," Kacey said. "And I notice most of the Rangers have moved out."
"Third Platoon is tasked with local security," Nielson said. "The other two platoons are up in the hills. I'd like you to coordinate with Captain Guerrin on any air support he might need. Doing at least one training mission with them would be wise to work out any bugs in methods or communication."
"Will do, sir," Kacey replied.
"And if that is all...?"
"Actually, sir, we really came about something else," Tammie said then nudged Kacey.
"Sir, we were looking at our budget..." Kacey said.
"Just say it, captain," Nielson replied with a smile. "I don't need a power point presentation."
"We'd like to do some...customization to our birds," Kacey said, walking over to his desk and sliding a sheet of paper onto it. "I think we can do it just by shuffling a few items in the budget around. We don't have two loadmasters and don't really need them. We used a couple of the Keldara girls, who are budgetable lighter, for the supply drops and that worked fine. At some point the Chief can probably train them in on more complex tasks. So we can shift that portion of the budget around. And the Chief has some assets for parts that can probably cut our anticipated costs there. Even with the mods we should be able to cut some out of the budget."
"I see," Nielson replied, looking at the calculations. "And these mods are...?"
"Well, that's pretty hard to explain," Tammie said, nervously. "Here's a sketch," she added, sliding a new sheet of paper onto the desk.
Nielson regarded it for a second and then grinned.
"Who came up with this?" Nielson asked, still grinning. "You gals or Chief D'Allaird?"
"We were talking about force multipliers," Kacey said. "And I don't know who said it first but we all thought of it at the same time."
"The only thing I can't figure out is why the Kildar didn't first," Nielson said. "Approved. And you might want to add express shipping on it," he added with a grin. "It would be interesting to have it for the next series of missions."
* * *
"How will this affect the mission?"
Getting to speak to the President of Russia, even when you have hot intel in your hand, was not easy. It was late in the day and Chechnik had been told he had only ten minutes.
Fortunately, the President was a former spook, so they could cover the ground fairly quickly.
"If Sadim sticks to this time table, it will make extraction very difficult," Chechnik said. "Especially if they do not know about it."
"If they know about it they are likely to cancel the mission entirely," the President said, looking at the report again with cold eyes. "If I understand the timing, this should not affect the basic mission. They should be able to capture the package and destroy it long before this affects them. As long as they are not detected on insertion."
"Correct, Mr. President," Chechnik said, his face closed.
"What is the means?" the president asked. That information was not on the basic document.
"Dassam," Chechnik replied, frowning.
"So the only data that we have is from our highest level source in the Chechen resistance," the President said, slipping the document back into its folder. "There are no intercepts, no lower level c
onfirmation?"
"No, Mr. President. Just this."
"The Keldara can complete the basic mission," the President said, handing back the document. "If they reacted on the basis of this it might reveal the source. They are not to be informed."
* * *
Mike paused, looking up at the front of the glacier and frowning.
The storm of the previous day had laid a blanket of snow that while deep wasn't particularly trying. But a night's full movement had brought them to the base of the glacier that was, from his point of view, their major obstacle. Just getting up on it was going to be a pain in the ass. The glacier had plowed out the valley it formed in, ripping away the hard rock walls and even if there had been "easy" ways up before it formed, thousands of years before, they were now gone.
However, he needed to get up onto the damned thing. The best route he'd been able to find crossed the glacier. While that had it's own issues, they were minor compared to the problems every other route presented. The Keldara were fine at walking in mountains, even very steep ones. They weren't, by and large, quite so up on going up vertical faces.
The best approach seemed, based on both the satellite photos and his own eyeball, to be the left. But even that was damned near vertical. He'd planned on just tackling the face, about seventy five feet and about a 3 face, maybe a 4. However, thinking about it there was an easier way.
The glacier was flanked on either side by ridges that stretched in a serpentine up to the two nearby summits. They were currently positioned on the shoulder of the left ridge and the ascent on that looked fairly smooth and the worst pitch was maybe 60-70 degrees. They could walk that. Once they were above the glacier they could just rappel down to the surface.
He signaled to the point to head up the ridge and started walking again.
They'd gotten down to "mountain speed", take a step, plant your ice axe, take a slow, deep breath, take another step. It was a slow way to move but the only way when the air got this thin. And the step-breath speed had several added benefits.
High mountains had dozens of ways to kill you.
The first and most obvious was just falling. The team was roped together so that if someone started to slip down on of the faces the rest of the team could stop their slide and recover them. But whole groups had slid off mountains before this. It was one of the things he was worried about with Yosif's team. The step-breath pace meant each member of the team had time to get sure footing before taking the next step.
More subtle was hypoxia. Air pressure fell off fast above ten thousand feet. They weren't in the super high, such as the Himalayas, but the air was definitely thin. At this level mild to extreme hypoxia was a real danger. Hypoxia occurred when the cells of the body exhausted all of their oxygen. Symptoms were headache, extreme exhaustion and nausea. At the extreme convulsions or even death were possible as the body's tissues wrestled oxygen away from the nerve cells, which required one hell of a lot of O2. By moving slowly and deliberately it gave the body time to move all the oxygen it could grab around to the spots that needed it. If they moved faster the big muscles of the thigh, the reason that runners had to breath so hard, would start hogging the stuff.
And water was an issue. With the body needing more oxygen, the blood started to produce more red blood cells, thickening it. You had to drink and drink a lot to keep the blood from getting thick as molasses.
Another danger was sweating. Even as cold as it was, and it was really fucking cold, well below zero Fahrenheit since they were moving at night, if you moved too fast you could break into a sweat. That was just fine under normal conditions. But up here if you sweated at some point you'd slow down and stop being so warm. Then the sweat would freeze onto your body, just like the frozen snot in his nose that tickled like mad and crinkled his nose hairs. If that happened, the only thing for it was for the whole team to stop and get whoever had broken a sweat into cover. They'd have to strip off their wet clothes, put on dry and cool down. If they didn't, when the sweat froze it would suck every bit of heat out of their body, fast. The term for that was "hypothermia." And just like hypoxia, it was deadly. Once the body dropped below a certain temperature it started to shut down.
To keep from sweating, despite the temperatures the team had their jackets partially unzipped and most were only wearing a balaclava over their face and head. Gear-wear ran a knife-edge as thin as they ridge they were walking up. If you wore too many clothes you got too hot and started sweating. By the same token, any exposed flesh was liable to frost-bite.
Keeping an eye out for hypothermia, frostbite and hypoxia was the job of the assistant team leaders. Heck, it was everybody's job. When a person became hypothermic or hypoxic their judgment dropped to nil. And frostbite only occurred after a portion of skin had become so numb from cold you couldn't tell it was frostbitten. The only way to tell was to look. And it was hard to look at your own face.
The problem was, what with the exertion, fatigue and general malaise caused by the low O2, everybody was thinking slower and so worn all they could do was concentrate on the next step. Mike found he had to flog his brain to get it to work. It was worse than being awake for a couple of days.
The team paused to rotate the point and he was willing to just stop and breathe for a bit. The guys breaking trail couldn't take the added exertion for long. Mike had set a hard time limit of twenty minutes on trail-breaking and everyone, including him, took turns.
Just climbing up the slopes, carrying one heavy ass ruck, with a quarter the amount of oxygen available in lower areas, was hard enough. But when you also had to stamp down snow on each step it became a nightmare. So they were rotating. Mike found himself only two back from the front as they shifted the safety rope back. The previous point was standing by the side of the trail, carefully balanced on the edge of the knife-ridge, just breathing deep. Mike wasn't sure, what with the helmet, goggles and face mask over the guy's face, but he was pretty sure it was Sawn.
"Sweat?" he asked as he passed the previous trail breaker. He checked to see there was no exposed flesh but as far as he could see Sawn was covered from head to toe.
"Good," Sawn said, gasping. "Tired. Fucking tired. No sweat."
"Good...man," Mike gasped back, taking another step. Even conversation was impossible.
Three more days.
* * *
Pavel slid the piton hammer into place and triggered it, slamming one of the spikes into the rock wall.
Pavel had never taken rock climbing training. He had only recently begun, through the internet connections the Kildar had installed, to realize there were others like him in the world. For among the Keldara Pavel had always been considered strange; he liked to climb.
The Keldara would sometimes, when grazing was bad, run their sheep, goats and cattle into the high valleys. And while sheep were stupid, goats were canny. They frequently did not want to come back to the corrals at night. And goats could climb. My, could they climb.
Since Pavel was very young, he had followed the herds into the mountains. And since he was a child it was often Pavel who went searching for the recalcitrant goats. Because anywhere a goat could go, and more, Pavel could, and would, go. With a grin on his face. The higher, the stranger, the more brutal the face, the more he enjoyed himself.
Currently he was in heaven. The Kildar had carefully pointed out the "difficult" portions of the mountain crossing to him, the places where it would be necessary to climb. And the device in his thigh pocket said that this face would be about fifty meters. Because of the angle of the shot, nearly vertical, it was hard to judge how difficult the climb would be. But the Kildar, although an excellent fighter, was clearly not an imagery analyst.
