Randi swung in behind the larger helicopter once more, climbing for position. When she called back, her voice was light. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had it with this. I’m just going to go up there and stick a pontoon in his rotors. We’ll land a little lopsided, but that’s okay.”

It was the casual declaration of a kamikaze run. Tapping the Halo’s rotor with one of the Ranger’s floats would indeed finish the job. But the odds of the Long Ranger surviving the resulting kinetic explosion and spray of disintegrating blade fragments were almost nonexistent.

Randi knew this full well. So did Smith and so did Valentina. The black-haired historian gave him an ironic smile and a faint throwaway shrug of her shoulders. It was the way of the trade. It must always be the job and getting the job done. Survival was not mandatory, especially with the lives of thousands in the balance.

There was no sense in prolonging matters. Randi had them positioned above and behind the lumbering Halo once more, poised to strike. Before giving the word, Smith took a final look around the Long Ranger’s interior, seeking for some asset, some option, that he might have overlooked.

There was simply nothing left. Only the big aluminum carryall of lab gear and his half-emptied backpack, a few loops of well-used climbing rope drooling out of it.

And then Jon Smith grinned, a tight, humorless, feral grin.

“What are they doing now?” It was growing harder to yell over the engines. Kretek could feel the weakness creeping upon him. The crude tourniquet on his shattered arm was only slowing the growth of the blood pool at his feet.

“How the fuck should I know?” the pilot raged back, casting a longing look at the release lever. “They’re hanging behind us again.”

“Hold your course.” Kretek stumbled back toward the crane cab amidships. From where they huddled near the open doorways he could feel his men’s eyes upon him. They were starting to fail; they were beginning to fear death more than they feared Anton Kretek. And Kretek felt the first shadow of that fear himself.

How could he be beaten by someone called Jon Smith?

Somehow the arms merchant knew it was the American team leader from Wednesday Island back there. The man the college professor had spoken of but whom he, Kretek, had never met face to face. Who was he? Who was this anonymous man with the bland name to end so many dreams and plans?

Painfully Kretek hauled himself into the glass-walled crane cab, looking astern.

There it was! The Long Ranger was almost on top of them again, diving in like a striking hawk. And this time there was something suspended beneath the smaller helicopter.

As if it were aping the Halo and its sling load of anthrax, a silver metal case dangled below one of the Long Ranger’s pontoons on a rope. And a man was braced in the side hatch of the Ranger, feeding the rope over the side. Kretek had an impression of dark hair flattened in the rotor wash, and hard, fine-planed features and narrowed, intent eyes that cut across the distance between them like a cold blue death ray. This, then, was Smith. This was his executioner. Kretek bellowed a wordless cry of denial and rage and horror.

The heavy equipment case dipped into the Halo’s rotor sweep. Smith felt the end of climbing rope smoke out from between his gloved hands as the case was smashed and hurled away by a blade tip.

Smith rolled back into the Long Ranger’s cargo compartment, Valentina helping to drag him through the side hatch. “Randi,” he yelled, “get us out of here!”

A savage, racketing vibration jackhammered through the Halo’s frame as Kretek staggered back toward the cockpit. The pilot was fighting with the blood-smeared controls, his dead copilot looking on, his near-severed head shaking sardonically.

“That’s it!” the pilot screamed. “We’ve got to jettison and land!”

“No,” Kretek fell back on the threat of his leveled automatic. “Keep going.”

“You stupid son of a bitch! We’ve taken a major blade strike! The fucking rotor assembly’s coming apart! If we don’t land now we are going to fucking die!”

The pilot grabbed for the sling release, and Kretek used the last of his strength to smash his gun butt down on the groping hand.

“No!”

Then all time for debate was past. The Halo’s tortured transmission exploded like a howitzer shell. Centrifugal force hurled fifty-foot rotors away like thrown sword blades, and the Halo pitched over into its death dive, the white ice and black water of the pack below filling the shattered windscreen as it rushed toward them.

Anton Kretek screamed like the trapped animal he was. Emptying his pistol into the pilot, he denied the Canadian an extra second or two of life.

They watched as smoke and sparks streamed back from the Halo’s engine bays; then the rotor assembly came apart and tore away, and the massive helicopter assumed the flight dynamics of a filing cabinet.

Pitching over onto its nose, it plummeted toward the sea ice. With gravity’s tension off the sling tether, the bioagent reservoir seemed to float beside the falling hulk of the heavy lifter, the maimed aircraft and its canister of death tangled in an entwining, dream-slow dance.

Then they hit, and a mushroom of black and scarlet flame sprouted and grew over the huge hole blasted through the ice.

“What about the anthrax, Jon?” Valentina inquired, watching the fireball.

“Flame and seawater,” Smith replied. “You couldn’t ask for two better spore destroyers.”

“That’s it, then?’

“That’s it.” Smith looked forward into the cockpit. His throat was raw from yelling and his lungs burned from the cold. As his adrenaline load burned out he was suddenly aware of the aching bruises from the previous night’s icefall. It was becoming harder to force the words out. “Randi, do you think you can find the Haley from here?”

“With the radios working, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

“Then take us back to the ship. Somebody else can pick up the pieces back on Wednesday.”

“I hear that!”

Smith slammed the side hatches shut and collapsed with his back to the pilot seats. Unbidden, his eyes closed, and he was only dimly aware of a warmth beside him: Valentina’s head resting lightly on his shoulder.

Chapter Fifty-two

Ascension Island

It was early spring in the South Atlantic, but a storm had rolled in with the sunset. The ghost blue runway lights of Wideawake Field glowed through a watery mist, and rain dripped from the wings of the two huge jet transports sitting side by side on the most isolated parking apron of the joint UK/US air facility. One, a Boeing 747 wearing the blue and white livery of the Presidential Squadron; the other, an Ilyushin 96, it’s opposite number from the Russian Federation.

The world at large did not know of the presence of the two aircraft here, nor of the meeting between the two national leaders they carried. As armed sentries circled the sodden parking apron, a confrontation without records or witnesses took place in a soundproof, electronically screened briefing room aboard Air Force One.

“I recognize it’s sometimes necessary for a President to lie to his constituency,” Samuel Castilla said coldly to the lean, aristocratic figure seated across the conference table from him, “but I damn well don’t like having to abuse the privilege. I especially don’t like having to lie to those people about how their family members died. It leaves a sick taste in my mouth.”

“What other choice do we have, Samuel?” President Potrenko replied patiently. “To rip open the healing wounds of the Cold War? To set the rapprochement between our nations back by decades? To play into the hands of the hardliners on both sides who say the United States and Russia are meant to be hereditary enemies?”