Randi closed her eyes and rested her face in her hands.

It had to be the antennas! The receiver circuits were working, but they weren’t picking up the clamor of the solar storm. At this gain the static should be blasting the speakers off the walls.

When Kropodkin had disabled the set, it also must have been from outside. Again, the antennas. But it hadn’t been anything as simple as just cutting the leads. She had been meticulous in following and checking the cable between the laboratory hut and the radio mast, checking for breaks. She had run every inch of the cable through her hands, looking for the old saboteur’s trick of shorting the leads with a pin pushed through the insulation. She had made sure the all-weather connectors were screwed down tightly…

Randi sat up abruptly in the chair. The connectors.

A second later she was in the main room of the hut, hauling on her heavy outdoor shell clothing as rapidly as she could.

“What is it?” Trobridge demanded, rising from his seat by the coal stove.

“Maybe something positive for a change, Doctor,” Randi replied, zipping her parka and hauling on her gloves. “We’ll know in a few minutes. In the meantime keep an eye on Kropodkin while I go out.”

She glanced at the suddenly alert youth in the corner. “On second thought, just don’t go near him, for any reason, until I get back. I won’t be long.”

That expression of indignant truculence crossed Trowbridge’s face, and his mouth opened in the beginning of a knee-jerk protest.

“I said, don’t go near him!” she snapped.

Randi took a moment to make sure that the nylon disposacuffs binding Kropodkin’s wrists were still tight, and then, slinging the submachine gun, she was out through the snow lock.

She hastened up the knoll behind the camp. A half foot of fresh snow had fallen and been windblown during the early morning hours, clogging the trails and making the climb to the base of the radio mast a plowing struggle. Reaching her objective, she dropped to her knees at the foot of the mast. Shoveling aside the white overburden with her mittened hands, she exposed the antenna power booster box at the mast’s base. Exposed also were the weatherproof connectors that linked the cable from the radio shack to the booster box. There were two of them, the heavy main cable bifurcating into the separate leads for the satellite phone and the sideband transceiver.

Each connector was a heavy-duty screw-on piece of hardware, fully weatherproof, of a golden-tinted alloy. Randi struggled with them, and they resisted stubbornly. Swearing under her breath, she tore off her mittens and strained on the connectors with her thin undergloves. Abruptly the first connector yielded.

A shredded fragment of plastic film fluttered to the snow. Randi recognized the simple mechanism of the sabotage now. Kropodkin had unscrewed the connectors and had wrapped the thin plastic around the male end, carefully packing it in around the central prong. Screwing the female half down over the nonconductive plastic had created an insulating barrier that had broken the connection. With the excess plastic trimmed away, there was no outside hint of the tampering.

Randi swore again, both at Kropodkin and at herself. She opened the connector for the satellite phone and cleared that as well. She reassembled them both, then sat with her back against the radio mast, resting for a minute.

She’d done her job, or rather her jobs. She had learned the fate of the station crew and had secured the culprit responsible, and she had regained their contact with the outside. She could let the ship know what was going on here and expedite the arrival of their reinforcements.

Granted the weather would cooperate. Randi felt the chill grip her hands, and she drew her overmittens back on. It was growing colder, with ice crystals condensing out of the rapidly lowering overcast. Faintly, in the distance, she could hear a rising wind booming over the ridgeline.

Within a matter of minutes they were going to be socked in tight. If conditions continued to deteriorate, Jon and the others might not be able to make it down from the saddleback tonight, much less expect help showing up from Alaska.

But every cloud, even those of a polar storm, had a silver lining. If the good guys couldn’t make it in to Wednesday Island, then neither could the bad. Perhaps she could truss Kropodkin and Trowbridge up in their bunks tonight and get a little sleep.

Even the thought was soporific. The thin sift of snowflakes seemed to weigh her eyelashes down, and even here, on the ice sheathed hillside, her head began to sink down on her chest.

And then, dimly, beyond the faint rumble of the wind over the mountain, Randi became aware of something else. Her head snapped up. It wasn’t truly a sound at first, more of a heavy vibration in the air. It grew in gradual intensity until it became a thudding roar that echoed between the land and the overcast.

Randi scrambled to her feet, the island seeming to shudder around her. Like a scorpion instinctively lifting its tail, she slipped the MP-5 from her shoulder and into her hands.

A huge form condensed out of the sea smoke. Two mammoth Tumanski gas turbines howled atop a great, sleek glass-nosed fuselage fully the length of an airliner. Fifty-foot rotor blades whipped the air, creating the rhythmic rib-rattling thud Randi felt in her chest.

It came in low from the south, squeezing in beneath the cloud cover; the ferocious rotor blast whipped up a tornado of displaced snow, forcing Randi to cower and shield her face as the monster passed directly over her head at a meager hundred-foot altitude.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “It’s a Halo!”

The Mil Mi-26, dubbed the “Halo” by NATO, had been created during the 1980s under the Soviet military’s old “If it’s bigger then it must be better” design doctrine. It was the largest and most powerful helicopter ever built and that likely ever would be built.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the aircraft had passed into commercial service and now could be found working as a heavy industrial lifter in many nations around the world. This giant wore Canadian civil registration numbers on its Day-Glo red tail boom, and the winch control cab, projecting like a growth from its port side, marked it as a sky crane derivative.

Kropodkin’s sponsors had come for him and for the anthrax, and they had come in force.

As the huge flying machine began to settle into a touchdown beyond the camp, Randi broke the shock lock that had paralyzed her. She had only two options. To instantly go into escape-and-evade mode or to try for the repaired radios. She chose the radios. That was the mission. That was what she was here for, to collect intelligence and to report.

It was a nightmare’s run to the laboratory hut, the fresh snow dragging at each running step like wet concrete. As she ran she mentally composed the call she would make, compressing the maximum amount of information into the absolute minimum of words. She would send until she got an acknowledgment; then, if she had time, she would try to get out, taking Trowbridge with her. She must remember to grab the lab hut’s survival pack and the SINCGARS transceiver as they went out the door. She would also put a burst into Kropodkin, if for no other reason than sheer self-satisfaction.

If there wasn’t time, then she would put her back to the wall and take as many of them with her as she could. Maybe it would make a difference, for Jon and Valentina if for no one else.

She fell once cutting around the hut. Scrambling to her feet, her lungs burning, she charged through the snow lock doors, the first of her intended series of commands welling up in her throat. But her instincts recognized and reacted to the threat before her conscious mind did, and she was whipping the MP-5 to her shoulder before she realized exactly what she was aiming at.