“Waylon, you reading me?” he said into the voice-activated radio headset under his hood.
“Loud and clear.”
“How far to the dome?”
“Close,” he said. “Under a thousand yards.”
Nimec was taken by surprise. That was much
“Okay,” he said. “Listen up. Here’s how I want to do this… ”
Snow splayed around Burkhart’s bike as he brought it to a stop. The dome was just ten or fifteen yards to his left, its tetrahedral planes and angles smeary in his vision.
Straightening in his seat, he listened to his men move into position around the dome and then abruptly cut their engines. He thought he could see gray scribbles of smoke issue into the flying whiteness from the hair-thin spaces between the dome’s lowered door and doorframe.
Burkhart stared out toward the base. The low wave of light he’d spotted before had fragmented, but that did not mean it had ceased advancing. His eyes narrow behind his helmet shield, he looked over his right shoulder. Was that a faint, rippling trace of it out there?
He believed so. As Musashi had written in his
His Sturmgewehr across his chest, Burkhart watched, listened, waited. The mission had strayed far from his intentions. He had wanted to get in, deliver a clean blow, and get out. That he was now heading toward an engagement meant he’d very seriously stumbled. No good could come of it — but there was also no retreat.
Burkhart waited in the rampant storm. Then, suddenly, he once again became aware of the swelling, pulsing sound of engines under the wind’s louder clamor… this time coming from all around him.
The corners were closing in.
The dark smudges of smoke Burkhart noticed outside the dome were no trick of the eye.
Behind its roll-down door, his solgel incendiaries had ignited with brilliant, white-hot slashes of flame, instantly reducing the desalinization unit’s flow-pump motor to a tarry mire of fused steel and plastic. The pump quit with a shudder, chuffing out acrid, concentrated fumes that bleared the dials and alarm lights on its control panel as they floated past. Bristling vines of fire circled its butterfly inlet valve and coiled over the meshwork of low-pressure PVC pipes around the water tanks. They seared, sagged, and blistered, their melted plastic segments springing distorted fish-mouthed leaks, showering the dome’s instrumentation with jets of distilled water. Raw seawater began flushing from the main pipeline, pouring down onto the tank platform, running over its sides. The smoke rose, spread, seeking fresh air. It eddied against the door, slipping through its weather seals in thready wisps.
Out in the wind and snow, Burkhart continued his waiting game.
Further away, Pete Nimec and his men pushed their snowmobiles toward the dome as quickly as they could. Nimec did not think getting inside would be easy, but still he hoped they might have time to somehow prevent the machinery that produced Cold Corners’ entire usable water supply from becoming severely maimed.
He didn’t have a shot.
The moment Burkhart had put his combustive charges in place, time had run out.
“Sir — I’ve spotted some of them.”
“Where? I can’t see a thing.”
“A little ways ahead of us,” Ron Waylon said. “I’d guess maybe forty, fifty yards. At about ten o’clock.”
Nimec kept Waylon’s blaze-orange parka in his headlights as he whirred along behind him. He had mostly gotten the hang of the snow bike, but the bare ice patches that would come up on it without warning kept threatening to rob its skis of traction and wrench the handlebars out of his grasp.
He squinted through his goggles.
“You said
“Right—”
“How many? Still can’t see anything…”
“I’m not sure. There could’ve been three, four. They were on bikes. Moving. Wearing winter camouflage.” Waylon paused. “The bikes were white too,” he added.
Nimec thought a moment. His instincts had been right.
“We made
“Looks like,” Waylon said.
Nimec swooped on toward the dome, a guy named Mitchell pacing at his rear, the rest having split off at his direction.
“Okay, both of you reading me?”
He received two affirmatives in his earpiece.
“This is it,” he said, then let go of his right handgrip to reach for the weapon strapped over his shoulder.
The dome to his near left, Burkhart was still poised to throttle his snowmobile into action when one of his floating patrols hailed him over their radio link.
It was Langern, at the opposite side of the water-treatment facility.
Burkhart clicked his teeth. At least three men had been sighted. On red snowmobiles.
As he’d suspected, the enemy had broken up into harrier teams.
Burkhart tasted adrenaline at the back of his tongue. The machines Koenig had reported were approaching from fifty meters to the east.
His alertness notched to its utmost level, Burkhart looked over his right shoulder, glimpsed the noses of two more snowmobiles through the snow — these speeding toward him from a westerly direction.
It further confirmed his assessment of the enemy’s diversionary tactics. But he had no doubt their main thrust still would be reserved for the dome’s entrance.
Much about Antarctica was alien to Nimec, but he would have recognized the sound of automatic gunfire anyplace on earth.
The initial burst came from approximately where Waylon had seen the snow bikes, its distinctive crackle carrying across the distance even in the high, wild wind.
His opponents were throwing themselves into an outright confrontation, forfeiting stealth to delay his Sword ops from reaching the dome.
The nasty little cold war they’d initiated had just gotten very hot.
Nimec mentally bold-faced a decision that he’d known had to be. Sword was a civilian security outfit whose international presence was licensed through a clutter of separate arrangements with UpLink’s host governments, most of them skittish about having armed foreigners on their real estate. Nonlethal threat response was Sword’s option of first choice, and its techies had developed a collection of ingenious suppressive tools toward that end. Nimec’s operatives were not cowboys on horses riding the range in search of desperados. But he had never allowed them to be victims-in-waiting either. Their rules of engagement were right in line with those followed almost universally by police and military forces. Deadly fire was to be returned in kind.
It made things stickier in theory that Antarctica was a piece of real estate unlike any other,
