as it saved his life. Finally, after almost forty feet of torture, he fell onto a larger branch. Scrabbling to hook his hands around it, he missed but managed to clutch the next one down, arresting his descent with only six feet to go before he dropped from the tree’s canopy and plummeted to the ground. He hung there, exhausted, one arm and a leg hooked over the bough, dangling like a gibbon, blood dripping from his face and hands.
Then he felt the JetRanger crash, the rotor blades chopping through the tops of nearby trees and then coming apart, spiraling outward like scythes, sending bits of wood and whole branches swirling in their destructive path. A bit of the rotor passed only a foot above Mercer’s position, and rather than chance another close call, he let go, falling the last few feet and landing in a tangled heap.
The helicopter struck the high canopy so violently that the weakened tall boom separated and fell independently, cutting a six-foot gouge in the earth. The rest of the aircraft became enmeshed in the thick branches of several closely packed trees, the fuselage never actually hitting the ground but hanging up nearly twenty feet in the air, swinging precariously as the trees resettled themselves.
Mercer lay on his back. The rainwater that struck him in the face was slightly acidic because of its contact with the spruce tree. It burned his eyes and forced him to turn over. It took a minute for him to gather enough strength to actually stand, moaning as his back and shoulders cracked and popped from the strain they’d just endured. When he heard a clear call for help, he moved quickly, gathering up the machine pistol that had landed next to him and taking off at a fast trot. Torn bits of metal and whole sections of newly cut trees littered the ground.
After only a couple dozen yards he came upon the crushed body of the sergeant. Mercer needed only a quick, gruesome glance to tell that the young soldier had not been the source of the distress call. Continuing on, he came upon the crash site, or more accurately, he stumbled underneath it. Looking up, he could see the main cabin of the JetRanger tangled over his head, the chopper secured by tightly entwined branches. Eddie shouted again and then coughed wetly.
“Eddie, what the hell are you doing up there?” Mercer forced levity into his voice. “Don’t you know when you crash you’re supposed to hit the ground?”
“Oh, man, did anyone get the license of that truck that just hit me?”
“How you doing?”
“Not bad, considering. A branch came into the cockpit and snapped off about ten of my teeth. I think my jaw’s broken too. Shit, I’m probably as ugly as you now.” Eddie paused, fighting off waves of blackness. “Collins didn’t make it. I can see his neck is broken.”
“The kid didn’t make it either. But two out of four is better than none. You did real good. Can you hold on up there until the cavalry arrives? I’ve got no way of getting you down.”
“Don’t worry about me, but if you’re in any shape to go on, kill those motherfuckers for me, will you?”
“Doesn’t matter what shape I’m in. They’re gonna pay.” There was a flinty edge to Mercer’s voice. The hidden spring of his endurance had just been tapped, and the doubts he’d felt before were gone. “Eddie, the sergeant had a combat harness in the cockpit with him. It was on the floor by his feet. Do you see it?”
“Hold on.” A second later Eddie called back down to the ground, “Yeah, I got it.”
“Throw it down; I’m gonna need it. But keep the pistol for yourself.” The heavy harness came crashing through the branches, almost hanging up a couple of times before landing a few feet from Mercer. He picked it up, looping the nylon suspenders over his shoulders and cinching the belt around his waist. Along with a knife, med kit, flashlight, and most important, a compass, he had four additional clips for the machine pistol.
“Eddie, it may take a while for the Air Force to send out a search and rescue team. I doubt we were on radar when the missiles hit. But when they do arrive, use the Beretta to signal to them. You know the distress call, three rapid shots. Just in case I fail at the pump station and Kerikov sends out a party to make certain none of us survive, be sure it’s the good guys before you call to them.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow over drinks at the Great Alaskan Bush Company,” quipped Mercer, mentioning Anchorage’s most famous strip joint.
“You’re buying,” Eddie laughed back, but Mercer had already taken bearings from the compass and moved off.
The heavy rain masked the sound of him moving through the trees, allowing him to break into an easy loping run. His eyes were very sensitive to even minimal light, so he could find a clear path, avoiding stumps and thick brambles and anything else that might slow him. He figured that Eddie had flown at least two miles from the area where the missiles had been fired, so he didn’t worry about stumbling into a recce patrol.
Ignoring the aches that cramped his body, he made it to the Dalton Highway in just thirty minutes, the last quarter mile being a ragged struggle up a steep defile. Calling it a highway was presumptuous — it was nothing more than a tightly packed gravel strip originally built as the haul road for the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Mercer was badly winded, and sweat mingled freely with the rain that soaked through his clothing. The temperature was hovering just over thirty-five degrees, and as wet as he was, he ran a real chance of becoming hypothermic, his skin leaching away his core body heat until he collapsed and died.
The pipeline was on the other side of the road, held off the ground by spindly supports, the VSMs. In the rainy darkness, the forty-eight-inch pipe had a silver, maggoty sheen as it stretched north and south into both murky horizons. The gravel of the highway had been heavily compacted by years of fully loaded semitrailers tracking to and from the oil-rich Prudhoe Bay fields. Along its verges, fireweed grew, the countless purple blossoms all but wasted by the summer so that the topmost parts of the stalks were barren, sticking in the air like arthritic fingers.
Somewhere to Mercer’s right was Pump Station Number 5, an unknown number of terrorists holding it, armed with rockets and God alone knew what else, while to his left was an open stretch of road leading back to civilization. He would find help only a few miles away, a warm ranger’s cabin, a cup of scalding coffee, a bed. He snicked off the safety of the H amp;K and turned to the right, continuing northward into the unknown, relying on his superior eyesight and instincts to keep him from falling into an ambush.
The second mile on the Dalton Highway merged with the third and into the fourth, Mercer’s mind all but shutting down, conserving his energy to keep his feet running. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been so utterly exhausted, both mentally and physically. His stamina was waning and, with it, his coordination. He found himself stumbling more, lurching forward and one time pitching to the ground, the gravel digging deeply into the already torn meat of his palms.
Lying on the slick road, his face pressed against the dirt, his eyes closed in pain and weariness, he heard the unmistakable sound of a truck engine starting, revving up and then settling as the transmission was engaged. He looked up and through the drizzle saw headlights retreating back into the night. Had he been five minutes quicker, he would have jogged right into Kerikov’s rear guard. The vehicle retreated northward toward Pump Station 5.
Mercer wasn’t certain if this meant Kerikov was about to pull out of his position, or that he no longer feared a land-based assault up the Dalton Highway and wanted his men in a tighter defensive position. A new sense of urgency gripped him. If Kerikov was about to leave the pump station, Mercer would never have his chance. There was nothing he could do with a single machine pistol against a convoy of trucks. A single vehicle, yes, but he was sure that Kerikov would have used at least four trucks to transport enough men and equipment to seize the station and be able to deploy troops armed with missile launchers. He had to get to the station before they evacuated if he was to get his chance to eliminate Kerikov before the Russian was whisked to safety once again.
His strides felt lighter, more sure as he began running again, his focus sharper. The rain intensified, turning the hardened gravel road into a thick morass, clay lodging into the heavy tread of his boots. Mercer edged closer to the verge where the road had a rougher aggregate and he could gain a stronger purchase. Clearing a blind corner around a jagged tor of rock that cut off his view northward, Mercer dove off the road, rolling down the low shoulder and landing in a small stream of rain runoff. Ahead of him was the pump station, lit by powerful truck-mounted halogen lamps, the squat building and its immediate surroundings bathed in a pool of white light. And suddenly Mercer understood why Kerikov had taken the risk of attacking the pipeline directly.
Six flatbed trucks were pulled up against the pipe, cranes mounted on two of them swinging long cylindrical collars into place over the oil conduit. Men and women scurried around the site, and even at this extreme range, Mercer could hear their cries and oaths and shouts. This was what Kerikov was doing with the liquid nitrogen. He was placing it around the pipeline, encapsulating strategic parts of its eight-hundred-mile length in supercooled gas in an attempt to stop the flow of oil. This must be the last of it, he surmised, the replacement for the cylinders that he’d discovered aboard the
