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Maddock’s internal alarm clock woke him after a few short hours. Nearby, he saw Bones stirring.
“Morning,” Bones grunted. It wasn’t exactly the wake-up call dreams were made of. Bones just wasn’t pretty enough for that.
Maddock mumbled a reply something short of rise-and-shine. He stretched inside the confines of the bivouac. It took a moment to gather his senses. He felt bone-tired. Sleeping on the hard ground hadn’t helped. But he was dry and warm and his blood hadn’t frozen in his veins overnight. That was a win. The drawstring pulled the opening of the bag tight around his face so that only the smallest part of him was exposed to the open air, and even that was partly covered by a scarf. He tugged at the string to release the fastening and started to wriggle free from the cocoon. Two minutes later he was ready to roll out.
Professor was awake. He said nothing; just gave them a nod from inside his bag and closed his eyes again without a word.
Bones pulled a heavy pack up onto his back. Maddock moved to do likewise, but the big man shook his head and made a ‘just the one’ gesture with his finger. They had all they needed in the one pack to make it through a day or so on the ice, no point making it more of a burden than it needed to be. Maddock nodded. Professor could handle distribution of the stuff he left behind. It didn’t look as though the Cherokee had slept. His sheer levels of endurance were staggering. He was like the Energizer Bunny: he could go on and on and on. Of course it helped that he hadn’t plunged into icy water and nearly frozen himself to death. It felt like days had passed since it had happened to him.
They walked in silence for more than a hundred yards before either of them said a word.
“You think she’s going to be pissed when she finds out what you’ve done?”
“Yep.” Maddock glanced back, relieved to see no movement in the camp.
He hoped that Professor had settled back to sleep for another hour or two. They would need as much rest as possible before they carried on. An hour snatched here, another hour snatched there, was no good, not really. The conditions were so much more demanding than a simple trek. “I’d expect nothing less.” But he wasn’t going to worry about her for a while. She’d get her chance to bitch and moan once they were back together, job done. It was much harder to complain about a decision when it had been proven to be the right one. Her orders didn’t matter. The mission objectives did. It was as simple as that. Her lords and masters were the ones who’d screwed her up by putting her in a situation she wasn’t equipped to handle.
The ground started to rise sharply as they climbed, the going becoming progressively more difficult with every few steps they took. The moon provided sufficient light for them to see the sparkle of the ice, a warning that a misplaced step could send them sliding down the mountainside. In an ideal world they would have had satellite images to guide them through this terrain. They had only an outdated map that Professor had given them. Still, it was better than nothing.
In places they fell beneath the shadows of crags and overhangs, and needed a flashlight to increase visibility. He kept a hand over the beam, hooding it. He didn’t want to broadcast their position.
It felt good to be moving though, good to be setting himself against nature and proving himself again. Mainly, though, it was good to prove to himself that yesterday’s accident had caused no lasting effect. It could have been a lot worse.
As they emerged from the shadows, he turned the flashlight off, relying once again on no more than the moonlight.
Catching them unaware, the land seemed to flatten out in front of them, stretching out for as far as the eye could see. All that lay ahead of them was the whiteness of the ice and the deep blue-black of the night sky. Maddock checked the GPS signal to make sure of their bearings, then struck out again, quickening their pace until their steps began to eat up the yards, the exertion keeping the cold at bay. By the time they reached the far edge of the ice sheet the sky had grown lighter. The others would be moving by now, but they were far enough ahead not to worry about being caught.
On and on the ice went.
What had been easy became hard as the wind picked up, swirling loose snow up into their faces, sucking the heat out of their lungs. What had been hard became impossible as the wind drove into their faces, cutting them down to size. They were insignificant specks. They were motes in the eye of the storm. They were struggling. Each step became more labored than the last. Maddock drove himself on. Bones trudged beside him, hating every minute of it.
At last, as they picked their way back down toward sea level, he knew that they must be getting close to the point Professor had picked out on the map. He’d hoped that there would be more glimpses of blue amongst the white, but the ice was packed tighter here than it had been where they’d left the ship. The GPS confirmed that they were getting close. Maddock pulled out his binoculars and adjusted the magnification, scanning the horizon, looking for a shape that was out of place. Even with the adjustment, the one thing he saw was too far away to be able to be absolutely sure of its nature, but if he’d had to bet his life on it, he’d have said that spur jutting up out of the ice was the conning tower of a submarine. He passed the binoculars to Bones and pointed to where he should be looking.
“Well, well, well, what have we got here then?” Bones scanned the white before focusing on the stark black streak of the sub piercing the surface, and the spill-back of ice that trapped it.
Maddock looked up at the sky. It was day now, but for how much longer in this strange land of night and more night? They had an hour, two, maybe three before full night settled in again, but how long before daylight too quickly began to fade? They needed to move, take advantage of the daylight. He ran the numbers in his head. The others should have broken camp and be on the trail behind them, but moving slower, so maybe three or four hours behind them. Time made all the difference now. Even minutes. He had no idea what they were likely to find when they reached the Echo II. The crew could all be dead, or too sick to help themselves, they could be ready to fire on anyone who approached keeping some sort of self-imposed quarantine, knowing that whatever was killing them had to die out here on the ice with them, or, worst of the four possibilities, the Spetsnaz team could have already beaten them to the punch.
“Someone following us.” Bones turned a hundred and eighty degrees. He swept the landscape with the binocular lenses. “I can’t see them, but they’re there, I’m sure of it.”
Maddock had had the same feeling for the last couple of klicks, but whenever he’d glanced back over his shoulder to check there’d been no sign of anyone back there. “A sabertooth tracking us?”
“Maybe,” Bones shrugged. “Stealthy enough, for sure. I can’t seem to get more than a glimpse of a shadow-shape in my peripheral vision, gone before I can focus on it. But it could be the Russian.”
“You think he’s still out there? I’d be amazed if he’s even alive. Those cats would have him, surely, easy pickings?”
“Stranger things happen, man,” said Bones. “He’s survived this long.”
“Let’s just hope that whoever it is keeps their distance until this is all over.”
They walked on, focused on the conning tower.
The ice grew more uneven as they ventured further out onto it. Initially, it was just ripples and ridges in the plate that made the ground uncertain, but the ridges grew into ice dunes the further they walked. The dunes were more challenging to cross as the surface around them revealed fissures where the impacted ice, forced up to form those dunes, stretched thin. Some of those dunes and ridges rose above head height on either side of them. As they walked, Maddock could feel the sheer relentless weight of the ice pressing in all around them. It was claustrophobic. The sheets of ice had compacted against each other, the pressure of more ice creeping out from the shore pushing hard behind it. The only way it could escape that relentless pressure was up. And something would have to give then. Gravity would not be placated for long, even as the ice formed huge glacial drips and frozen waterfalls all around them as they ventured off solid ground onto an ice platform suspended above the sea. It creaked and groaned under the shifting pressure.
Maddock wanted off the ice as quickly as possible, knowing better than anyone what lay beneath.
EIGHTEEN
The ice flattened out.
It was young, not yet pushed, cracked and splintered under the pressure of the next sheet forming behind it.
It also meant that the surface was thinner in patches and less secure.
Closer now, there was no mistaking the submarine’s conning tower. The sub had been pushed up in the ice, the prow protruding from the ice at an angle, the sail still clear of the surface. It was obvious that nothing the crew attempted would have liberated it from the ice, but equally there was nothing to stop them from climbing out and striking out across the frozen landscape in search of what passed for civilization on Wrangel Island. The Spetsnaz team couldn’t be far away, but there was no sign of them. He didn’t think they were too late, because the snow around the sub appeared undisturbed by anything apart from the wind.
“You know this thing could be the death of us, don’t you?” Bones asked as they quickened their pace. Neither one of them had to say they needed to push on.
“The ice? The radiation or whatever it is that has been released inside that sub?” Maddock asked. “Or do you just mean the Russians?”
“All three,” Bones replied. “But you knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you made the others stay behind. It’s never been about speed for you, has it? This was only ever going to take two of us if we actually made it this far. We both know that there’s a sickness on board and that the crew won’t be fighting back.”
“If there’s anyone still alive.” Maddock still harbored grim hopes there might be some survivors to help without compromising the mission, but the last shreds of that hope were slipping away. He didn’t expect to find anyone alive. Yes, the Russian had come from somewhere, but not the sub. He was either a native, or an escapee from the Gulag.
They covered the last klick in silence. Each step took them further out onto the frozen sea. The ice held the submarine in a vise-grip. They paused for a moment before they stepped into the shadow of the great vessel, dwarfed by the conning tower and the bulwark spearing out of the ice like a torpedo trapped mid-launch, frozen in time and ice. Maddock was lost in thought. It took a moment for the strangely familiar click, click, click to fight its way through his subconscious to the front of his mind. He turned to face Bones.
The big man had a Geiger counter in his hand.
“Radiation,” he said matter-of-factly. “We don’t want to be hanging around here longer than we absolutely need to. And even that’s going to be too long inside there. The level’s not dangerous out here, but it’s bad enough. If we’re going to do this, we’d better get it over with.”
Maddock nodded. No choice. The objective was clear. Retrieve Pandora’s Egg. Whatever the hell Pandora’s Egg was.
A sheen of ice coated the metal. There were enough ridges and rivets to provide hand and foot holds, but it wouldn’t make an easy climb. They had to move with care, knowing that every footfall would sound like a hammer within the sub, announcing their arrival to anyone not too dead to hear it. They climbed until they stood beside the periscope atop the conning tower, and looked back down at the ice below.
It was a long dizzying drop.
“Well at least one of them came out this way.” Bones pointed at the hatch. A metal bar had been wedged into the mechanism ensuring that no one on the inside would be able to get out.
He gave the bulges on either side of the submarine a cursory glance. He knew that was where the ICBMs were housed, already loaded into their launchers. The launchers were hidden behind hatches. There was no way in or out of the vessel that way.
Anyone still alive inside knew that visitors would have to come in through the front door.