was looking for a good vantage point overlooking the fast-developing riot below. Inside the bag, however, was not a minicam, but a high-powered rifle broken down into four pieces, a weapon originally designed for use by the Soviet Spetsnaz, the Russian equivalent of the American Special Forces. It was a matter of two minutes’ work to snap or screw the pieces together, chamber a round, and peer through the telescopic sight into the crowd on the GLA building’s promenade deck.
At a range of just under fifty meters, he could hardly miss.
He’d not fired the weapon, however… and didn’t plan to do so if he could possibly help it. Mallet, Berger, and Fischer, simpleton dupes, the lot of them, had done exactly as he’d coached them over long, patient hours during the past week, finding Spencer, rushing in as close as possible, and only then pulling out their weapons and opening fire. Braslov was ready with the sniper’s rifle if necessary, if none of the three succeeded in hitting anything, but at point-blank range, they were almost certain to hit someone.
That they appeared to have missed Spencer mattered not at all. They’d killed one, perhaps two of Spencer’s bodyguards.
It would be enough.
There was one final task Braslov had set for himself, however. None of the three, after his coaching, had expected the bodyguards to be armed, and, as a result, all three of the Greenworld attackers were now down. Two were almost certainly dead, but the third, the woman, was still moving, a puddle of blood spreading on the concrete beneath her and soaking through her T-shirt. He shifted his aim until the crosshair reticules in his scope centered on her head. A squeeze of the trigger and the only person on the GLA observation deck who knew exactly what had happened would be dead.
It was a difficult shot, however. The surviving bodyguards and several GLA security personnel were clustered around her, and she was partially blocked from his view by the back-slanting safety railing at the edge of the deck.
Fischer was done for, shot in the stomach and chest several times. Even if she survived, she didn’t know enough to be a threat to Braslov, or to the Organizatsiya.
Moments later, paramedics arrived, and they began strapping Fischer onto a gurney. The window of opportunity was past.
Thoughtful, Braslov disassembled the rifle and stowed the pieces back in the camera bag. Only then did he pull out a satellite phone and punch in a number, opening an encrypted line.
“Rodina,” he said. Motherland. Mother Russia.
“We’re watching BBC Two. Excellent work.”
“One of our agents still lives. I cannot get a clear shot, however.”
“She knows nothing. We don’t want to reveal your presence. That might tell the opposition too much.”
“That was my thought.” He hesitated. “Perhaps it is time to activate Cold War. The two… incidents should take place close together, for maximum effect.”
“We agree. A ticket and new identity papers are waiting for you at the embassy. You fly out tonight.”
“Good. Until tonight, then.”
Utter pandemonium reigned throughout the GLA building and in the surrounding parks and waterfront. It was simplicity itself to walk down the stairwell and let himself out onto Potter’s Field. Terror-stricken people continued to flee the area, spilling out of the GLA building and into the surrounding park. Police were arriving now, many in heavy combat gear, but no one took notice of the lone cameraman with a BBC ID badge clipped to his shirt.
He looked up at the enormous green banner for a moment, hanging ten stories above his head, smiled, then mingled with the fast-thinning crowd and disappeared.
8
Met Remote One Arctic Ice Cap 82° 30' N, 177° 53' E 1910 hours, GMT-12
KATHY MCMILLAN PULLED the edges of her hood closer to her face. The temperature was only just below freezing, but the wind was shrill and biting. The windchill, she thought, must be down around zero, Fahrenheit.
Forty years ago, an American astronaut had described the surface of the moon as a “magnificent desolation.” This, she thought, must have been what he’d felt. The landscape in every direction was utterly flat and almost featureless, save for occasional small upthrusts and pressure ridges, none more than a few feet high, and randomly scattered patches of ice melt. The sky was a searing, featureless blue, the sun a heatless white disk suspended above the southern horizon. In every direction there stretched a barren white icescape, pocked with shallow craters filled with icy water, broken here and there by darker leads.
Scarcely five hundred miles away, in
Met Remote One was an unmanned meteorological drift station established on the Arctic ice cap three weeks before. There wasn’t a lot there-a slender tower with an anemometer, a surface instrument package for measuring temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, ice thickness, and other data, and a GPS and a dish antenna for measuring ice drift and transmitting the information to Ice Station Bravo, some eighty miles away. The whole setup required minimal maintenance; the three American scientists were essentially employing the met station’s presence as a useful excuse… an alibi.
Somewhere off toward the north, about seven miles away and just barely over the horizon, was Objective Toy Shop, an amusing reference to their proximity to the North Pole and Santa Claus. While the NOAA expedition at Ice Station Bravo was out here on the ice to monitor changes in climate and ice thickness, Yeats and McMillan were here specifically-and secretly-to have an up-close look at the Toy Shop.
“Hey, Mac! Quit playing tourist and give me a hand, here,” Dennis Yeats said. He and Randy Haines were beside one of the sleds, wrestling with the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle.
“Sorry.” She tore her attention away from the barren panorama and crunched through soft ice to join the others. She carried an M-16 slung over her shoulder. All three of them were armed-a necessary precaution against the possibility of polar bears. Unslinging the weapon, she stowed it on the supply sled behind Haines’ snowmobile, then joined the others.
“Did you get through to Bear One?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Haines told her. “
Communications had been frustratingly intermittent lately. Maybe things were finally starting to break their way.
The three of them had driven out across the ice in three snowmobiles, each towing a sled with supplies and the special equipment. Yeats’ sled carried the Orca, eight feet long and weighing over a quarter of a ton, while hers carried the cable reel and support gear. The two men had just finished stripping the protective plastic sheet off the cradled Orca and were readying the sleek black and red device for launch.
McMillan was the Orca’s technician. Approaching her sled, she first double-checked to see that the ice brakes were solidly set. Then she took several minutes to hook up the guidance wire, stringing the thin length of fiber-optic cable from its spool on her sled across to the receiver on the Orca’s dorsal surface and attaching the other end to a small handheld control unit. The connections made, she switched on the power for a final pre-launch check.
The readouts on her control panel all showed green and ready.
“We’re set to go,” she told them. “I’ve got feedback and control. Ready to cut the hole?”
“We’re on it,” Haines told her.
One hundred yards from the met station, they’d found a patch of ice melt, a circular depression in the surface filled with milky green water, where the ice was thin enough to have nearly broken through to the ocean beneath. The ice here was about three meters thick; at the center of that depression, it might be as thin as a few centimeters.
Yeats now trudged toward the edge of the depression, carrying a small, tightly wrapped satchel. Reaching back, he flung the device far out over the water. It hit with a splash, sinking gently about three-quarters of the way
