'And perhaps take the heat off us,' the group captain went on. 'Right, let's look at this.'
The map didn't begin to show how hard it would be. The Skula River had carved a series of gorges over the centuries. The river was high, and the falls generated a cloud of spray from which a rainbow arched in the morning sun. It made Edwards angry. He'd always liked rainbows before, but this one meant the rocks they had to climb down were slick and wet. He figured it to be two hundred feet down to a floor of granite boulders. It looked a lot farther than that.
'You ever do any rock climbin', Lieutenant?' Smith asked.
'Nope, nothing like this. You?'
'Yeah, 'cept we mostly practice goin' up. This here oughta be easier. Don't worry too much about slipping. These boots hold pretty good. Just make sure you set your feet on something solid, okay? And you take it nice and slow. Let Garcia lead off. I already like this place, skipper. See that pool below the falls? There's fish in there, and I don't think anybody'll ever spot us down this hole.
'Okay, you watch the lady.'
'Right. Garcia, lead off. Rodgers, cover the rear.' Smith slung his rifle across his back as he walked to Vigdis.
'Ma'am, you think you can handle this?' Smith held out his hand.
'I have been here before.' She almost smiled until she remembered who had brought her here, and how many times. She didn't take his hand.
'That's good, Miss Vigdis. Maybe you can teach us a thing or two. You be careful, now.'
It would have been fairly easy except for their heavy packs. Each man carried a fifty-pound load. The added weight and their fatigue affected their balance, with the result that someone watching from a distance might have taken the Marines for old women crossing an icy street. It was a fifty-degree slope down, in some places almost vertical, with some paths worn into the slopes, perhaps by the wild deer that throve here. For the first time fatigue worked in their favor. Fresher, they might have tried to move more quickly; as it was, each man was near the end of his string, and feared his own weakness more than the rocks. It took over an hour, but they made it down with nothing worse than cuts on their hands and bruises somewhere else.
Garcia crossed the river to the east side, where the canyon wall was steeper, and they camped out on a rocky shelf ten feet above the water. Edwards checked his watch. They had been on the move continuously for more than two days. Fifty-six hours. Each found himself a place in the deep shadows.
First they ate. Edwards downed a can of something without troubling to see what it was. His burps tasted like fish. Smith let the two privates sleep first, and gave his own sleeping bag to Vigdis. The girl fell mercifully asleep almost as quickly as the Marines. The sergeant made a quick tour of the area while Edwards watched, amazed that he had any energy left at all.
'This is a good spot, skipper,' the sergeant pronounced finally, collapsing down next to his officer. 'Smoke?'
'I don't smoke. Thought you were out.'
'I was. The lady's dad did, though, and I got a few packs.' Smith lit an unfiltered cigarette with a Zippo lighter bearing the globe and anchor of the Marine Corps. He took a long pull. 'Jesus, ain't this wonderful!'
'I figure we can spend a day here to rest up.'
'Sounds good to me.' Smith leaned back. 'You held up pretty good, Lieutenant.'
'I ran track at the Air Force Academy. Ten-thousand-meter stuff, some marathons, that sort of thing.'
Smith gave him a baleful look. 'You mean I've been trying to walk a damned runner into the ground?'
'You have walked a marathoner into the friggin' ground.' Edwards massaged his shoulders. He wondered if the pain from his pack straps would ever go away. His legs felt as though someone had hammered on them with a baseball bat. He leaned back and commanded every muscle in his body to relax. The rocky ground didn't help, but he could not raise the energy even to look for a better spot. He remembered something. 'Shouldn't somebody stand guard?'
'I thought about that,' Smith said. He was lying back also, his helmet down over his eyes. 'I think just this once we can forget it. Only way anybody'll spot us is if a chopper hovers right overhead. Nearest road's ten miles from here. Screw it. What d'you think, skipper?'
Edwards didn't hear the question.
'Ivan Mikhailovich, are your bags packed?' Alekseyev asked.
'Yes, Comrade General.'
'Commander-in-Chief West is missing. He was en route from Third Shock Army to his forward headquarters and disappeared. It is thought he might have been killed by an air attack. We're taking over.'
'Just like that?'
'Not at all,' Alekseyev said angrily. 'They took thirty-six hours to decide that he was probably dead! The maniac had just relieved Third Shock's commander, then disappeared, and his deputy couldn't decide what to do. A scheduled attack never began, and the fucking Germans counterattacked while our men were waiting for orders!'' Alekseyev shook his head to clear it and went on more calmly. 'Well, now we will have soldiers running the campaign, not some politically reliable whoremonger.'
Sergetov again noted his superior's puritanical streak. It was one of the few traits that agreed exactly with Party policy.
'Our mission?' the captain asked.
'While the General takes charge at the command post, you and I will tour the forward divisions to ascertain the situation at the front. Sorry, Ivan Mikhailovich, I'm afraid this is not the safe posting I promised your father.'
'I speak good English in addition to Arabic,' the younger man sniffed. Alekseyev had checked that out before writing up the transfer orders. Captain Sergetov had been a good company officer before being lured out of uniform by the promise of a comfortable life of Party work. 'When do we leave?'
'We fly out in two hours.'
'In daylight?' The captain was surprised at that.
'It would appear that air travel by day is safer. NATO claims to dominate the night sky. Our people say otherwise, but they are flying us out in daylight. Draw your own conclusions, Comrade Captain.'
A C-5A transport aircraft sat outside its hangar, waiting. Within the cavernous structure a team of forty-half officers in naval dress, half civilians wearing General Dynamics coveralls-worked on Tomahawk missiles. While one group removed the massive antiship warheads and replaced them with something else, the other group's task was more difficult. They were replacing the missile guidance systems, the usual ship-hunting packages being removed in favor of terrain-matching systems that the men knew were used only for nuclear-tipped missiles intended for land targets. The guidance boxes were new, fresh from the factory. They had to be checked and calibrated. A delicate job. Though the systems had already been certified by the manufacturer, the usual peacetime routines were gone, replaced with an urgency that all of them felt but none of them knew the reason for. The mission was a complete secret.
Delicate electronic instruments fed pre-programmed information into the guidance packages, and other monitors examined the commands generated by the on-board computers. There were only enough men to check out three missiles at a time, and each check took just over an hour. Occasionally one would look up to see the massive Galaxy transport, still waiting, its crew pacing about between trips to the weather office. When each missile was certified, a grease pencil mark was made next to the 'F' code letter on the warhead, and the torpedo-shaped weapon was carefully loaded into its launch canister. Nearly a third of the guidance packages were discarded and replaced. Several had failed completely, but the problems with most were quite minor, though serious enough to warrant replacement instead of adjustment. The technicians and engineers from General Dynamics wondered about that. What sort of target demanded this sort of precision? All in all, the job took twenty-seven hours, six more than expected. About half of the men boarded the aircraft, which lifted off the concrete twenty minutes later, bound for Europe. They slept in the rear-facing seats, too tired to care about the dangers that might await them at their destination, wherever that was.
