Schaefer didn’t care whether the seats were comfortable or not; the only thing that had been bothering him had been Wilcox and Lassen bitching about it, so he couldn’t get some sleep.
Now that they had stopped, he had been enjoying the silence, up until Philips emerged from the forward hatch and said, “Well, that’s it we’ve crossed over into Russian airspace, and the pilot’s taking us down low and slow for the drop. ETA at the dropsite is three minutes.”
Schaefer stretched and stood up. “You sound pretty damn nonchalant about it,” he remarked. “I thought we spent all those billions on defense because we were worried about stuff like Russian radar.”
Philips snorted. “They can’t even make a good copying machine, and you think we can’t beat their radar net? This plane’s part of what we spent those billions on, and we got our money’s worth.”
”You think we got our money’s worth,” Schaefer corrected him. “We won’t know for sure until we see whether they shoot it down.”
Philips ignored him and gestured to Captain Lynch.
Lynch got to his feet. “All right, you crybabies,” he said to Wilcox and the others, “time to earn some of that exorbitant salary we’ve been paying you. Make your final equipment check and let’s boogie.” He tripped the switch and the hatch slid open.
Wind howled; nothing but gray darkness showed through the opening, though. Schaefer stepped up closer.
”Looks like a long drop,” Lynch said. “Getting nervous, cop?”
Schaefer smiled a tight little smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I forgot to set my VCR to record this week’s Melrose Place. Maybe you’ll let me watch yours when we get back.”
Lynch glared at him for a moment, then turned away in disgust. “All right, boys,” he said. “Do it!”
One by one, the seven men leapt from the plane-first the four enlisted men, then Schaefer, then Lynch, and finally Philips.
Frigid air screamed up around Schaefer; his goggles protected his eyes, and his high-tech snowsuit protected his body, but the rest of his face stung fiercely, then went numb as he plummeted through space. He jerked at the handle on his chest.
Schaefer’s chute opened just the way it was supposed to when he pulled the cord, blossoming into a big off-white rectangle above his head and jerking him suddenly upward, turning his downward plunge into a gentle glide-but the cold didn’t go away. He grimaced, then tugged experimentally on the lines, and discovered that yes, it steered exactly as it should. So far, so good.
He looked down, trying to pick out a good landing spot, but all he could see was blank grayness. At first he thought his goggles had fogged up, but he could still see the other men and their parachutes clearly; there wasn’t anything wrong with his vision, there just wasn’t anything to see in the frozen wasteland below.
Well, one patch of snow was as good as another, he thought. He adjusted his lines slightly to keep from drifting too far away from the rest of the team, then just waited for his feet to touch down.
As he descended, he looked around at the others: Philips had really come all this way with them, which surprised Schaefer; the general had to be in his sixties, which was pretty damn old to be jumping out of airplanes over enemy territory or hunting alien monsters.
Philips had guts, anyway.
Schaefer looked down again. The ground was coming up surprisingly fast. His feet were mere yards above the surface, and Schaefer concentrated on turning his controlled fall into a run, getting out from under his chute before it collapsed onto the ice.
Then he was down on one knee in a puff of powder, the chute spread out behind him. He stood up, dropped the harness, and began reeling the whole thing in. He could tell that the chute was scraping up several pounds of snow, but he didn’t worry about it.
The others were landing around him; because of his size, Schaefer had been the first to strike ground. Captain Lynch came down less than fifteen feet from where Schaefer stood.
Lynch threw Schaefer a glance, then looked around for the others.
He spotted one of them helping another up.
”Lassen!” he called. “What happened to Wilcox?”
”I think he landed on his head,” Lassen shouted back.
”Guess he didn’t want to injure something important,” Schaefer said.
Lassen whirled and charged toward the detective, fists clenched. “We’re through taking shit from you, Schaefer!”
Lynch grabbed Lassen, restraining him.
Schaefer didn’t move. He said, “That’s funny, I figured you were up for a lot more yet.”
”All right, that’s enough!” Philips shouted from atop a snowbank. “We’ve got a job to do here!”
Lassen calmed enough that Lynch released him; the whole party turned to face Philips.
”There’s an oil pipeline that runs just west of here, the Assyma Pipeline,” he said. “Whatever it was we spotted landed right near it, north of here. There’s a pumping station just two klicks from here, with a small garrison, some workmen, and maybe a couple of geologists stationed there-that’s the closest thing to civilization anywhere in the area. We’ll take a look there, see what the Russians have been up to-if they’ve been doing anything with our visitors, they’ll have been working out of that station, because it’s all they’ve got. Keep your mouths shut and your eyes open, and move it!”
Philips turned and began marching, leading them toward the pumping station. No one bothered to say anything as they followed.
For one thing, Schaefer thought, it was too damn cold to talk. The spiffy electric underwear really worked, and from the neck down he was as toasty warm as if he were home in bed, but the suit didn’t cover his hands or feet or head, and his gloves and boots were plain old heavy-duty winter wear, with nothing particularly fancy or high tech about them. He wore a thick woolen hood over his head, with a strapped-on helmet and his goggles on top of that, but most of his face was still bare, exposed to the Siberian wind, and it wasn’t much better down here than it had been a mile up.
It was like having his face stuck in a deep freeze. His body was warm, but his face was already just about frozen. His skin was dry and hard, the sweat and oil whipped away by the wind; when he opened his mouth it was like gulping dry ice, burning cold searing his tongue and throat. His eyebrows felt brittle; his nostrils felt scorched.
Odd, how intense cold burned like fire, he thought.
He wondered how the hell Philips could find his way through this frigid gloom. The night wasn’t totally dark; a faint gray glow seemed to pervade everything, reflecting back and forth between the clouds and the snow, though Schaefer had no idea where it came from. Still, everything Schaefer could see looked alike, an endless rolling expanse of ice and snow; how did Philips know exactly where they’d landed or which way the pipeline lay?
Schaefer supposed the general had his compass and some Boy Scout tricks. He seemed pretty confident.
And he had good reason to be confident, Schaefer saw a few minutes later when the radio tower of the pumping station came into view.
Without a word, the soldiers spread out into scouting formation, the men on either end watching for Russian patrols or sentries, all of them moving forward in a stealthy crouch. Schaefer didn’t bother-there wasn’t any place to hide out here. If they were spotted, they were spotted.
They weren’t spotted, though, so far as Schaefer could see. They crested the final ridge and got a good long look at the pumping station.
Gray blocky buildings stood half-buried in the drifting snow, arranged around the central line of the pipeline. All were dark; no lights shone anywhere. Nothing moved.
The place looked dead.
Of course, in the middle of a Siberian winter Schaefer didn’t exactly expect to see anyone playing volleyball or sunbathing on the roof, but this place had that indefinable something, that special air that marked abandoned, empty buildings.
”Check out the door, sir,” Lassen said, pointing.
Lynch and Philips both lifted pairs of binoculars and looked where Lassen indicated; Schaefer squinted.
He frowned and started marching down the slope, his M16 ready in his hands.
