“Chinstrap One, you’re breaking up. Say again?”
“I’m losing you, Chinstrap One,” the UpLink chopper pilot said as Nimec listened from the passenger seat. “Repeat your status. Over.”
The pilot frowned, tried to reach the other MacTown bird. He was a wire-thin black man named Justin Smith who wore a sparse, tightly kinked chin beard and spoke with an occasionally strong peppering of a Caribbean accent. Nimec thought it sounded like Trinidad.
“Chinstrap Two, we’ve lost contact with Brother Penguin,” he said, pronouncing the word Brother as Brudda. “We need to confirm you’ve made your tick mark. Acknowledge.”
“
“Say again—”
“
Nimec turned to Smith. “Snap, crackle, pop,” Nimec snorted in disgust. “There any way to get a lock?”
Smith shook his head.
“Our radios are already hopping,” he said. “The disturbance cuts across all bands.”
“Try our own bird again,” Nimec said. The trail ship carrying Waylon’s team had peeled away toward its rendezvous moments earlier.
Smith radioed it, got more garbled noise, cursed under his breath.
Nimec wondered if Smith missed palm trees and white sand. “We’ll have to forget about any of them reporting for now,” Nimec said. “Keep our fingers crossed they’re in position.”
“They’ll be doing the same for us.”
“Yeah.”
Nimec looked out his windscreen at the coiling lights in the sky. What had started out as an isolated purplish stain near the sun had become a moving, living rope of color across the horizon, twined with a glowy spectrum of greens, reds, and blues.
“Damned freakish,” he said. “The weatherman says it’ll be a sunny day, you can count on having to leave your house with an umbrella and galoshes. But solar flares, radio interference…
Smith flew in silence, making unconscious, minute adjustments to his sticks as a highway driver would to his steering wheel.
“Sir,” he said after a while. “We’re reaching the notch.” His flight helmet dipped downward. “See it down there?”
Nimec’s eyes traced the pass seaming its way between jagged mountain slopes, saw the dark shark’s-tooth crosscut coming up fast.
He nodded. “The intercom working?”
Smith reached for a switch, and static burst loudly into the cabin.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, and flicked off the com.
Nimec started unstrapping himself from his seat.
“Keep her steady,” he said. “I’m going back to talk to Rice while my vocal cords can still transmit.”
Outside the tunnel entrance on the notch’s spiny eastern shoulder, Langern thumbed off his radio handset, and then stood pensive and silent under the ribboning polar lights. He had scarcely spotted the helo through his binoculars before attempting to contact Burkhart, but all he had gotten from the handset was a senseless bark of static.
It was the same signal breakup he had received when he’d hailed Koenig on the western side of the notch, and Reymann’s squad at the far end of the pass.
Meanwhile, the Bell helo was close enough now for its UpLink markings to be seen with the unaided eye.
To the Devil with them. With this whole accursed land.
He turned toward the other men waiting on the crest with him, ordered them to stand to arms.
From this point forward they would be on their own.
The Sikorsky helicopter designated Chinstrap One after the ubiquitous chinstrap penguins of the peninsula had lowered its own “strap” of ATVs at the intersection of Bull Pass and McKelvey Valley — or the point where the shank of the valley system anchor would be seen to meet its ring end on a map. The pass walls were at their widest distance apart here, and katabatics weren’t too bothersome a factor for the bird’s pilot.
This was only one of the reasons the site was chosen for the linkup with Ron Waylon and his group. The other was because of its coordination with the separate rendezvous Sam Cruz’s team was making elsewhere.
Dropped by the UpLink tail ship on its second hop, Waylon’s team was waiting to receive the sling-load as Chinstrap One came in over the ridge and bellied low above their heads.
They took less than five minutes to get it unhooked and derigged.
Waylon stared up at the S-76, waved to the men in the cockpit as it lifted away into a sky swirling with brilliant color.
“Don’t know if I’d want to be heading back up into
Waylon looked at him.
“Don’t know if he’d want to be going where we are either,” Waylon said.
Then he turned toward the ATVs and gestured for the others to mount up.
Within moments they were speeding south into the pass.
“Chinstrap Two…
Pulling pitch at the sticks of his Sikorsky, the MacTown pilot frowned as his UpLink counterpart’s transmission was munched by static, incidentally noting the Carribean island accent. He thought it sounded like Jamaica.
“I’m not getting you,” he answered into his headset. “Repeat.”
“Still can’t read you,” said the MacTown pilot, his consternation deepening. He paused, tried to guess what the radio call was about, and went for the obvious — UpLink’s lead bird would want a basic status report.
“External load successfully dropped and received,” he said, hoping his message would be intelligible at the receiving end.
On Burkhart’s orders, the Light Strike Vehicle had waited just around the eastward bend of Bull Pass, hidden in shadow behind a toppled granite colonnade opposite Mount Cerberus’s massif face, guarding its territory like the solitary feline hunter with which Shevaun Bradley had once associated it. A camouflaged leopard perhaps. Or a panther.
Now Ron Waylon’s incursion team came shooting past, paired up in their three all-terrain vehicles, rusty sand reeling off from the spin of their tires as they hooked into the narrow stretch that led toward the notch and Wright Valley.
The LSV’s crew continued to wait a short while longer, tending to their patience, allowing the little UpLink vehicles to gain some distance, get deeper into the trench. Liquid jewels of color rained down from the narrow band of sky overhead, sliding over Cerberus’s plated black flank in vivid, oily droplets.
Then he fisted the vehicle’s clutch and pounced from behind the weather-chewed slope to spring his
