Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Mr. Mercer, I wouldn’t worry about us.” The ramrod in Knoff’s back got about two degrees straighter, if such a thing was possible. “General Kelly briefed us on what to expect. What bothers me is the presence of you and your slick in our convoy. My pilots don’t know your man, and the last thing we need is a civilian helicopter flying in the same area where we’re making a hot drop.”

Mercer had expected such a concern, and his reply was the reassurance that Knoff wanted. “I flew with this pilot during last year’s flap in Hawaii. Plus, he’s ex-navy and a Gulf War veteran. I plan to keep us a couple miles back from your landings and monitor from the radio. You guys are the ones who make the big bucks for getting shot at, not us. Have your lead pilot give instructions to my man, and he’ll follow them to the letter.”

“What about you, what’s your experience?” Knoff asked.

“Were you in Iraq?” Knoff nodded. “I’d already been in and out before the Abrams tanks broke through the berms. I was a specialist for Delta Force’s Operation Prospector, to make sure none of you boys faced nukes on the battlefield. I’ve probably seen more firefights than all of your troops combined, and we can sit here all night and compare scars, but I don’t have the time. Anything else?”

Knoff was slightly taken aback by Mercer’s response. The Special Forces community, though rife with interservice rivalries, was close-knit, and stories of black operations circled freely in watered-down versions to avoid compromising ongoing missions. It was obvious in his reaction that Knoff had heard of Operation Prospector and knew that a civilian had turned a debacle into a success while saving most of the team sent to protect him. “No, sir. That should do it. I’ve got the coordinates for the pump stations and the quick sketch map faxed to us by a guy named Lindstrom. I figured we’d hit both simultaneously.”

“Negative,” Mercer replied evenly. “If we split your forces, we’ll be outgunned and probably outmanned. By the time we get up there, I’ll have the intel on which station was taken.”

“All right.” Knoff didn’t have any more questions.

“Then let’s go,” Mercer said with more bravado than he felt.

Ivan Kerikov settled into a chair behind the pump control console, a Heckler and Koch MP-5 resting across his knees. The corpses of the few Alyeska employees who’d remained at the station had already been dumped outside. He removed his heavy overcoat and was thinking about taking off the bulky black sweater he wore beneath it. In the late 1970s, he’d been attached to a KGB commando team as an intelligence officer. As a training mission, they’d once had to retake a “terrorist-occupied” natural gas pumping station deep in the heart of Siberia. He’d never forgotten the loneliness of the station far out in the tundra or how drab and utilitarian and unbearably cold the facility had been. Expecting much the same in Alaska, he’d dressed several layers too thick for the assault on Pump Station Number 5.

So far, overdressing had been his only miscalculation.

Ever since he’d arrived in Alaska, he’d been plagued by set-backs, delays, and a thousand other problems. He’d handled them all in his typical manner. If the problem is mechanical, replace it; if it’s timing, stall it; and if it’s human, kill it. But now, all his groundwork was paying off. Thanks to the former captain of the Petromax Arctica and the PEAL workers, there were eighteen hundred tons of liquid nitrogen encasing strategic parts of the Alaska Pipeline. The specially built packs needed to keep the supercooled fluid from prematurely freezing the pipeline were disguised as the metal sleeving that encased the forty-eight-inch-high carbon steel pipe. The nitrogen packs had been so well built that even close inspection by Alyeska workers couldn’t differentiate them from the normal sleeves. Kerikov had gone so far as to have them weathered to duplicate the quarter century of wear the pipeline had withstood. To the inspectors, the slightly larger size of the packs never raised any suspicion, and some of them had been in place for months.

Using PEAL had been Kerikov’s greatest masterstroke. But as he sat in the control room, he allowed himself one more degree of conceit and admitted that creating PEAL had been the masterstroke. Hasaan bin-Rufti had been leery of Kerikov’s plan. He had wanted to use some of his own people to carry out the delicate operation of placing the nitrogen packs, but Kerikov had pointed out that fifty Arabs running all over Alaska would arouse too much suspicion. However, Kerikov said, a group of environmental activists, common all over the United States and especially in Alaska since the President’s announcement about the Arctic Refuge, wouldn’t raise even an eyebrow, let alone an alarm. Like the purloined letter, they could hide in plain sight, protesting at various sites and cities along the pipeline’s route while their companions booby-trapped the pipe.

The beauty of PEAL, too, was that they didn’t know that their actions had a darker motive. Jan Voerhoven and his sad band of codependent flotsam didn’t realize that their sabotage went so far beyond an environmental statement. They naively believed that when the nitrogen was released it would freeze the oil in the line and forever prevent the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from transporting crude. They believed this because it was what Kerikov had told them and was what they wanted to believe. Not one of them had ever considered that just freezing the line would present only a temporary setback to Alyeska and the opening of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

Voerhoven was the worst of them. He was intelligent, probably possessed a genius IQ for all Kerikov knew, but he was warped by his inflated ego. Ivan Kerikov had transformed him from a member of the lunatic fringe into a driving force in the war on industrialism, and Voerhoven thought that he’d done it all on his own. Twenty years with the KGB in various functions had taught Kerikov how to manipulate others. Sometimes it took money and sometimes fear; with Jan Voerhoven, all it took was a little ego stroking and the Dutchman was off and running. By the time PEAL began setting the packs around the pipeline, Voerhoven had convinced himself that the idea for the strike had been his all along.

“Sir.” One of Kerikov’s people entered the control room, a dusting of snow covering his wide shoulders. “It’ll take another two hours to secure the nitrogen packs.” He spoke in German-accented Russian and his voice was apologetic. “Our intelligence didn’t specify that the pipeline would be so high off the ground when it reaches this station. We only have two trucks equipped with cranes, so the work is slowed considerably.”

Kerikov’s feeling of self-satisfaction evaporated.

The final packs, the linchpin for the entire operation, had been lost when one of them had split during transfer from the Arctica to the fishing boat Jenny IV . Captain Albrecht had had one of his arms frozen off when it was doused in two-hundred-degrees-below-zero nitrogen. During the confusion following the accident, a fire had broken out on the Jenny IV . The crew of the boat had been unable to put it out before it boiled the cryogenic tanks already stowed aboard. The resulting explosion had all but destroyed the fishing boat. JoAnn Riggs had assured Kerikov that the hulk wouldn’t float for more than an hour after they cut her away from the tanker. Of course, the Jenny IV hadn’t sunk and was discovered the next day. Though Kerikov had been forced to act against the men who found the derelict, his more pressing demand was to find additional liquid nitrogen and get it in position. The original KGB blueprint for Charon’s Landing had called for eighty tons of liquid nitrogen to be placed in a remote area on the downward leg of the pipeline as it descended the Brooks Range, fifty miles north of his present location. Without that quantity of nitrogen to work with, Kerikov had had to modify the plan and place a much smaller amount directly at Pump Station 5.