Smith looked away from the crash site and toward the south, toward the threatened world, and in the distance he caught the faint repetitive flicker of rotors in the sunlight.
Chapter Fifty-one
Over the Arctic Ocean
“This is Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Black Horse Lead calling any Wednesday Island station. Do you copy?”
Major Saunders had repeated the call so often it had started to lose meaning for him. They had completed their final top-off from the tanker, and in the Osprey’s cargo bay the ranger strikers and the ABC men were tightening harness and running their final equipment checks. Soon they’d be coming in on their objective. For the first time in days the radio bands were clear of solar interference. But Saunders was beginning to suspect there was no one out there to answer.
“This is Black Horse Lead…”
“Black Horse Lead, this is Wednesday Island Point,” a crisp, businesslike voice crackled clearly into Saunders’s earphones. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith. I am coded Cipher Venger Five. Do you read me, Black Horse?”
Saunders’s thumb crushed the transmit button on his joystick. “We read you, Colonel, four by four. We are your Mike force. What is your situation?”
“We are off Wednesday and airborne at this time. Situation on the island is critical and unstable. What is your ETA, Black Horse, and do you have fighter assets attached?”
“We are approximately twenty-five minutes out from Wednesday. Negative on fighter assets; we are lift and tanker only.”
“That’s not going to do us any good then,” the voice replied. “Be advised Wednesday Island should be considered a potentially hot LZ. Hostiles may include Russian Spetsnaz elements. Also be advised the Primary Package is verified. I say again, the Primary Package is verified. Primary Package is also off the island and is being sling carried by a Mil 26, that is Mary…India…Lima…two…six, Halo heavy-lift helicopter, Canadian civil registry, Golf…Kilo…Tango…Alpha. Halo is now heading south-southeast from Wednesday Island at approximately ninety knots. We are in pursuit at this time. Require immediate interceptor launch. Engage and destroy Halo at all costs. I say again, engage and destroy at all costs!”
“Understood, Wednesday Point. We will relay intercept request, but it’s going to take a while. Even the jets will need a couple of hours to get out this far.”
“Roger that, Black Horse, understood.” There was a fatalism in the reply. “We’ll do what we can until they get here.”
Anton Kretek peered down from the crane operator’s cab on the port side of the Halo. Seventy feet below the huge helicopter, the lozenge-shaped containment vessel twisted slowly at the end of its heavy Kevlar cable. Torn wiring and ductwork trailed raggedly from either end of the silvery reservoir, and the lifting harness wasn’t as secure as it might have been, but the pearl had been stolen from the oyster.
It had been a tough, sloppy job, but what did it matter? It was the last. It had cost him a number of his best men, including his chief of staff, but that might have worked out for the best. Mikhail would have had to have been liquidated in due course anyway. The man simply knew too much. Now was as good a time as any to have done with it.
There was, of course, the chance he might be captured back on the island, along with his knowledge about the remainder of the anthrax retrieval operation, but Kretek had prepared for even that eventuality.
Then there was also the unavenged death of his sister’s son, but pish, be damned to the woman. The boy was dead. What profit was there in fussing about it now?
Kretek groped in the pocket of his parka for his Balkan-blend cigarettes and lighter, then recalled the big half-empty blivett of jet fuel filling the helicopter’s central cargo bay. Telling his nicotine-starved nerves to be patient for a few hours more, he went forward from the crane cab to the cockpit.
The demolitions men and the surviving members of the security force slouched on the cargo bay deck, their heads resting on their knees, or sprawled on the fuel blivet, using it as a waterbed. In the cockpit the Canadian pilot was on the controls while his Byelorussian copilot intermittently stuck his head into the observation bubble set in the cockpit side window, checking on the status of the sling load.
“There is a change in plans.” Kretek lifted his voice over the thrum of the rotors. “We won’t be returning to the trawler. We will turn directly south at the second refueling depot.”
“Whatever you say.” The pilot’s reply was laconic. “Where are we heading?”
“I will give you the GPS coordinates later.”
“However you want it.”
Kretek approved of the man. A true professional, he asked no questions. Were Kretek staying in the trade, he would have considered keeping the fellow around. Such men were useful. As it was, he, his crew, and his aircraft would end up at the bottom of an isolated Canadian lake instead of Hudson Bay.
As for the anthrax, it would be left well camouflaged near a logging road in the Canadian Northwest Territories. In a few months, after the heat was off and after he had negotiated a sale of the merchandise, it could be extracted by truck. This was the secondary plan that not even Mikhail Vlahovitch had known about. It meant sacrificing the men he’d left on the trawler as well, but so it went. He no longer needed them, either. A momentary smile tugged at Kretek’s mouth. What did they call it, “corporate downsizing”?
The arms merchant leaned against the side of the cockpit, bracing himself against the intermittent low-altitude turbulence, and again fought down the urge for a cigarette. He would rather miss the trade, but with the sale of the anthrax it would not be wise to continue. He would be too rich, too complacent. The wise man knew when to call enough.
The Halo’s copilot suddenly gave an explosive curse, staring out of the portside cockpit window. They were no longer alone in the sky. Another aircraft was paralleling their course, half a kilometer off. The small Day-Glo orange helicopter, the one they had left back on the island. The one he had been in too much of a rush to destroy.
Kretek echoed the copilot’s curse. Complacency was already biting him in the ass.
The arms merchant dove back into the cargo hold. Twisting the quick release handle on the escape hatch, port side, just aft of the cockpit, he took a grip on a grab bar and kicked the hatch out of its frame.
“Get two men with machine guns here!” he bellowed over the roar of the slipstream. “Then two others at each of the other hatches. Move, you bastards! Move!”
The Long Ranger held warily on the hip of the heavy lifter. Slowed by the ominous cylindrical shape dangling beneath its belly, the Halo hadn’t been difficult to overtake.
“It’s rather like a dog chasing an automobile,” Valentina mused as they studied the giant Russian-built helicopter. “Once you catch the damn thing what do you do with it?”
The larger aircraft stolidly continued its lumbering retreat away from Wednesday Island. To the southeast, the cloud-capped outlines of the next rank of arctic islands thrust above the horizon.
“This is not good, Jon,” she continued, kneeling on the deck beside the open side hatch. “If he drops down to fly nap-of-the-Earth inside of the archipelago, the DEW Line will never be able to pick him up amid that tangle of islands and channels. It’ll be blind luck if the interceptors can find him.”
“I know it. That’s why we’ve got to stay on him.”
Randi looked back over the pilot’s seat. “Just letting you know, Jon, we don’t have all that much of a fuel reserve.”
“I know that, too.” Again they were running out of assets, and every minute and mile was taking them deeper into the frozen wastes of the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago and farther from allies and aid.