Smith went on into the radio room. With her gloves off and her hood thrown back, Randi was sitting in the sidebands operator’s chair, a frown on her face. The radios were still switched on. Check lights glowed green, and the thin hiss of a carrier wave issued from the speakers. As Smith looked on she pressed the transmit key at the base of the desk mike. “CGAH Haley CGAH Haley, this is KGWI Wednesday Island. This is a check call. This is a check call. Do you copy? Over.”
The carrier hissed back emptily.
“What do you think, Randi?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “We’re on frequency, and the transmitter gain indicates we’re putting out.” She adjusted the receiver squelch and transmitter power and repeated the test call, to no effect. “Either they’re not hearing us or we’re not hearing them.”
There was a sat phone and data link at the far end of the console. Smith stepped around Randi and lifted the receiver, punching in the Haley’s address code. “No joy here, either,” he reported after a moment. “It’s not accessing the satellite.”
“Could it be the antennas?”
“Possibly. That’ll be something to check out later. Let’s go.”
The last hut in the row was the bunk room. The leading edge of the snow squall had enveloped the station, and visibility was graying out as the team approached the building.
Once more they repeated the entry drill. Flanking the snow lock door, Smith and Metrace listened as Randi pushed her way into the bunk room. After a moment, they heard her exclaim aloud, “Now, this is just too weird!”
Smith and the historian looked at each other and shouldered through the lock into the bunk room.
Inside, the overall layout was similar to the laboratory. There were two sets of bunk beds and a small coal heater against the north wall of the cabin. Kitchen equipment and a food preparation counter were on the south, with a communal mess table in its center. A set of women’s quarters had been partitioned in the far end of the hut, an accordion-style sliding door standing half open.
The bunk room had been heavily personalized with a variety of photographs, hard-copy downloads, and sketches, humorous and otherwise, tacked and taped to the walls.
Randi was standing beside the mess table, staring down at a plate holding a half-consumed corned beef sandwich and a half-empty glass of tea.
“I concur, Miss Russell,” Valentina Metrace said, joining in the stare at the sandwich. “That is indeed the limit.”
Randi set her submachine gun on the table. “I feel like I’ve just gone aboard the Mary Celeste.” She tugged off one of her leather inner gloves and touched a couple of fingers to the side of the glass. “Still warm,” she commented.
Looking up, she tapped the rim of the glass with a fingernail.
Jon Smith knew that he truly had a team working at that moment. None of the three in the bunk room had to say a word to understand her meaning.
The portable SINCGARS transceiver squalled and shrieked, with only the faintest fragmentary hint of human speech discernible through the clamor of the disintegrating Heaviside layer. Even with the extended-range eighteen-foot antenna strung in the rafters of the laboratory hut, it was futility.
Smith snapped off the radio. “I think the Haley might be receiving us and I think they might be trying to acknowledge our call, but I wouldn’t count on anything beyond that.”
“It’s the same with the set in the Ranger,” Randi added. “While we’re on the ground it doesn’t have enough power to punch through the solar interference. We might have more luck with the big station SSB, but I still can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.”
With their gear unloaded and the helicopter tarped and tied down against the weather, the landing party from the Haley had gathered in the laboratory hut, both to make a futile attempt to contact their mother ship and to develop a course of action.
“What do we do now, Colonel?” Smyslov inquired.
“We do what we came here to do: get a look at the crash site.” Smith glanced out of the lab window. The snow had slackened for the moment, but the wind still gusted uneasily. “We’ve got enough daylight left to reach the saddleback. Major, Val, you’re with me. Get your gear together and plan for a night on the ice. Doctor Trowbridge, as you’ve stated, this station is your responsibility. I think it’s best you stay here. Randi, if you could step outside with me for a moment. I need to talk with you.”
Garbing up, they pushed out through the snow lock, making the transition from the enclosed warmth of the hut to the piercing cold of the outdoors. Smith led Randi up the packed snow trail between the cabins until there was no chance of being overheard.
“All right,” he said, turning to her. “We have a problem.”
Randi produced a wry ChapSticked smile. “Another one?”
“You might think so,” Smith replied, the mist of his breath swirling around his face. “Here’s the situation. I’m going to have to do something I don’t want to do. I have to split my forces, such as they are, to cover both the station and the bomber. I’m going to need both Professor Metrace and Major Smyslov with me at the crash site. That means I’m going to have to leave you here on your own. I don’t like it, but I’m stuck with it.”
Randi’s face went dark. “Thanks so much for the vote of confidence, Colonel.”
Annoyance cut across Smith’s features. “Don’t cop an attitude with me, Randi. I don’t need it. I suspect the minimum you’ll be confronting down here is a mass murderer. Your only backup will be Professor Trowbridge, who, I also suspect, will be about as much use in a fight as an extra bucket of water on a sinking ship. If I didn’t think you were the most survivable member of this team, I wouldn’t even be considering this scenario. As it stands, I estimate you have the best chance of coming out of this job alive. Are we absolutely clear on this?”
The cold words and cold focus in those dark blue eyes jolted her back momentarily. This was a facet of Jon Smith Randi had not encountered before, either in his time with Sophia or in her chance encounters since then. This was the full-house soldier, the warrior.
“I’m sorry, Jon, I got off base. I’ll cover things here for you, no problem.”
The look on his face disengaged, and Smith smiled one of his rare full smiles, resting a hand momentarily on her shoulder. “I never doubted it, Randi. In a lot of ways this will be the tougher job. You’ve got to verify our suspicions about what’s happened here while watching your back to make sure it doesn’t happen to you. You’ve also got to find out how the word was passed off the island and who it was passed to. Trowbridge may be of help to you there. That’s one of the reasons I brought him along. Anything you can learn about the identities, resources, and intents of the hostiles could be critical.”
She nodded. “I have some ideas about that. I’ll try and get the big radio working, too.”
“Good enough.” Smith’s expression closed up again. “But while you’re about it, remember to stay alive, all right?”
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with the mission,” she replied. Then she tried to lighten the Zen of her statement. “And while you’re up there on that mountain I suggest you watch your own back with that scheming brunette. I think she has designs on you.”
Smith threw his head back and laughed, and for an instant Randi could see what had enraptured her sister. “An arctic glacier is hardly the environment for a romantic interlude, Randi.”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way, Jon Smith, and I have a hunch that lady has a lot of will.”
Standing outside the laboratory hut, Randi watched the three small figures trudge up the flag-marked trail, the one that led eastward along the shoreline toward the central peaks. The snow had stopped altogether, but the mist, the near-perpetual “sea smoke” of the poles, was closing in. The arctic camouflage her teammates wore blended them into the environment until, abruptly, they were gone.