Zero Hour, стр. 54

Kurt kept the throttle at full, almost losing control as they skipped across bumpier terrain.

Another miragelike apparition ripped past them to the right.

“That was awfully close,” Hayley said.

They’d come to a narrow section now, almost like a catwalk on a ski slope. The glacier dropped down to the right as a rocky ridge climbed up to the left and around the edge of Big Ben like a mountain road.

Kurt chose the ridge, hugging the wall, as the terrain beside them fell away precipitously. He backed off the throttle just a bit.

“They’re closing in!” Hayley shouted.

As the ridge narrowed, Kurt hit the brake, turned the handlebars, and threw all his weight to the left side of the snowmobile. He leaned hard, like a motorcycle rider in a hairpin turn.

The snowmobile’s skis dug in hard. And Kurt caught sight of the hovercraft, whipping into the turn behind them. Then he saw a flash of light in his mind and felt a falling sensation. It seemed as if everything went dark.

His limp body flew off the snowmobile and slid fifty feet into a thick bank of snow. He came to rest, all but buried and completely unconscious. Hayley tumbled off the snowmobile as well, but a handlebar caught her parka, tearing it open and yanking her to a halt like an arresting wire on an aircraft carrier. She ended up only a few yards from the damaged sled.

Kurt never saw her, nor did he see how effective his plan had truly been.

Just as he’d hoped, the snowmobile’s sharp turn was beyond the hovercraft’s ability to match. It skidded out over the sheer face of the ridge, carried sideways by its speed and momentum. A small cliff would have been no problem, but the eighty-foot drop was too much.

The hovercraft had to stay in close contact with the ground to generate lift, and with that ground suddenly gone, the craft dropped and rolled to the side as it fell.

It hit hard, landing on its side and tumbling in summersaults down the slope. Pieces of fiberglass sailed in all directions. It came to a stop in a heap, and no one climbed out of it.

Farther down the slope, Joe and Gregorovich were in trouble. Another of Thero’s hovercraft had found them. It was driving them toward the towering wall of the glacier.

“He’s going to trap us against the ice,” Joe shouted.

“I can’t get around him,” Gregorovich said.

Joe looked over his shoulder. The hovercraft was hanging back, swerving from side to side. Any move Gregorovich made was easily countered. Joe knew he had to do something. He tried to pull the clip from his rifle, but by now his ungloved hand was completely numb. He pulled the other glove off, yanked the empty clip out, and jammed a new one in.

“This is my stop,” he shouted.

He pushed off Gregorovich and extended his legs, launching himself off the snowmobile, landing and tumbling through the snow for a second time.

Joe bounced and rolled and then slid face-first, cringing as the snow was shoveled through the gap in his collar. In seconds, he was up, shaking the snow from his face and getting his bearings.

Gregorovich was still heading toward the glacier. The hovercraft had ignored Joe and followed.

Joe raised the rifle and locked onto the hovercraft, calculating how much to lead it by. He was about to fire when a second high-pitched whine caught his attention.

He pulled the trigger, but the blur of Thero’s stun gun had already hit him. The flare of blinding light seen only in Joe’s mind encompassed him as it had in the outback and he collapsed in the snow, never knowing if he’d hit anything.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Thirty minutes later, with the white sky beginning to darken, the two remaining hovercraft made a cautious approach to the ridge where Kurt and Hayley had crashed. Using an infrared scope, Janko spied the wrecked vehicle at the bottom of the drop. Seconds later, he spotted the snowmobile.

He keyed the transmit switch on his radio. “Unit two, make your way back down the slope and check for survivors. We’re going up top.”

“Roger that,” the other driver replied.

As the two craft broke formation, Janko scanned the surrounding incline for heat sources. Only two signatures registered; the red-hot engine from the snowmobile and a figure lying ten feet away from it.

He pulled off his goggles and brought the hovercraft to a stop. As it settled, he threw open the hatch.

“Stay here,” he said to his gunner. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

With a short-barreled submachine gun at his side, Janko climbed from the hovercraft and edged his way toward the wrecked sled. He found it to be inoperable, engine off, battery drained.

“At least they hit something,” he said to himself.

He moved to the body in the snow and rolled it over. To his surprise, a mop of blond hair spilled out from under the white hood of the parka.

Janko pulled the goggles from the woman’s face. He recognized her. She was the woman he’d left tied up beside the explosives in the lab at the flooded mine.

“So you survived,” he muttered.

The radio crackled. “Janko, this is unit two.”

Janko lifted the portable radio to his mouth. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve made it to the bottom of the ridge. Unit three is demolished. The driver and the gunner are both dead. No way to get it back up. Want us to burn it?”

“No,” Janko said. “We don’t need to draw any more attention to ourselves. The blizzard will dump a foot of snow in the next twelve hours. That will keep it out of sight.”

“And the men?”

“Get them out,” he said. “I want all the bodies off this glacier. Ours and theirs.”

A double click told Janko his subordinate understood and would comply. Janko then switched channels and began a new transmission.

“Thero, this is Janko,” he said. “Do you read?”

“Go ahead,” Thero’s raspy voice replied.

“We’re done out here.”

“Did you get them all?”

“All the snowmobiles have been accounted for,” Janko said. “We lost two hovercraft in the process.”

“Who are they?” Thero asked tersely.

“Australians, I think,” Janko said. “I recognize one of the survivors. A blond woman who was at the station in the outback when the ASIO tried to raid it.”

Silence for a moment, and then: “Is she alive?”

“Affirmative. We have two male captives as well. The rest are dead.”

“Bring them in,” Thero said. “I want to interrogate them. We need to know if they’re alone or not.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Janko said.

He clipped the radio back onto his belt, scooped the woman up, and threw her over his shoulder.

Seconds later, he’d dumped her in the cargo bay of the hovercraft and was back in the cockpit, powering up the engines once again. As the sleek machine rose up off the ground, Janko eased it forward and then turned around only twenty yards from where Kurt lay.

The deep snow he’d become buried in masked Kurt’s infrared signature, while his white camouflage, the failing light, and the continuing blizzard made him all but invisible to the naked eye. As a result, neither Janko nor his gunner saw Kurt as they trundled off into the graying horizon.

THIRTY-EIGHT

After a twelve-hour shift of breaking rocks and loading the rubble onto the endlessly moving conveyor belt, Patrick Devlin felt as if he’d been beaten with a club, run over by a truck, and forced to breathe in smoke all day.

He was surprised by the grace of a hot shower, even if it was a communal one. The water at his feet was dark sludge from the dust covering his body. A hearty dinner of seal meat and some kind of wild bird surprised him further, but then those things were in abundance on the island, and starving workers slowed down the production line.