Tom Cain - No survivors

Kady saw Jaworski give her a slight nod of the head, an acknowledgment that she'd passed his test.

"All right," said Horabin. "I get it."

He looked at the agency representatives around him. "I have to brief the President on this, and I don't want to walk into the Oval Office with nothing but bad news. We know there are bombs out there. Now we've got to get to them-all of them-before our enemies get there first. I need a strategy. What have you got for me?"

The agencies had all received preliminary briefings prior to the meeting. As a matter of institutional pride they had already drafted action plans. Five of the men reached for their cases and withdrew their documents. Only Jaworski remained motionless, indifferent to the activity around him.

"Don't you have anything, Ted?" asked Horabin.

"Yes, I have one very strong piece of advice."

"Great. Let's hear it."

"Do nothing."

There was a murmur of disapproval around the table.

Horabin glared at him: "Is that all you have to offer?"

The CIA man seemed unruffled. "It's all I recommend right now, in public, at least. The only thing we have going for us is that no one knows what we've found. If we start mounting search operations, people will want to know what we're looking for. And, believe me, they will find out. So then we'll have a major diplomatic incident with the Russians. We'll have the TV news telling folks there could be nukes in their backyards. And we'll have every terrorist leader in the world trying to figure out how he can get one of these things for himself.

"That means we've got to be discreet. I suggest a small, dedicated team, backed by the full resources of all our agencies. This team must be tasked to search for any clues to who's got these bombs, where they are, and who still knows how to make them explode. But they've got to do this quietly-and I mean really, really quietly."

The first morning, Carver stumbled over the finish line of his three-mile course like a newborn foal on an ice rink, unable to control the skis and poles on the end of his thrashing, twitching, uncoordinated limbs. He lay facedown in the snow, his chest heaving, his throat gagging until Thor Larsson reached down, grabbed the collar of his windproof jacket, and dragged him, coughing and wheezing, to his feet.

"Keep moving," growled Larsson. He hit Carver hard across the backside with a ski pole, just to underline the order.

"I said move," he repeated.

Carver raised his goggles onto his forehead and stared at Larsson with an expression that combined exhaustion and loathing in equal proportions.

"Thought this was the end," he finally croaked, dragging icy air into his lungs between each word.

Larsson shook his head.

"Move," he said for a third time, wielding his stick again. "Now!"

Carver spat emphatically into the snow, just inches from Larsson's skis. He yanked his goggles back down and set off again along the municipal trail that snaked through the countryside around Beisfjord, a small town near Narvik on the northwest coast of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. Spring might be blooming across the rest of Europe, but up here winter had yet to relax its deep-frozen grip.

They barely hit walking pace past stands of stunted, bedraggled birch trees. Carver struggled for rhythm as he lifted his heels and slid his metal-edged, military-specification Asnes mountain skis forward, all the while driving his poles into the hard-packed snow.

Larsson had been cross-country skiing since he was in kindergarten. He'd received winter training during his national service as an intelligence officer in the Norwegian Army. He effortlessly glided ahead, always ensuring that no matter how hard Carver tried to catch up, he was always tantalizingly out of his reach.

They'd gone about another half-mile when they came to a rifle range, located by the trail so that biathletes could practice their shooting and skiing in competition conditions. Carver followed Larsson into the range, pulled off the Anschutz Fortner target rifle strapped across his back, and flopped down on his belly by one of the firing positions.

"Five shots, quick-fire," said Larsson. "You have twenty-five seconds."

Carver tried to aim his gun at the target: five white discs set against a black background. His muscles were overloaded with lactic acid, making his aching arms shake in protest as they tried to hold the weapon still and straight. Sweat was pouring into his eyes. It took him forty seconds to get his shots away. By the last one, he barely had the strength to pull the bolt back to load the next round. And the only target he hit was next to the one he was aiming at.

"Not good enough," said Larsson. "Fire another clip."

There were three more five-shot magazines in a holder on the right-hand side of the gun, a few inches in front of the trigger. Carver reloaded, fumbling like a new recruit.

"Twenty seconds," said Larsson. "And this time, get your shots away inside the limit or you do another course."

Larsson's voice made it plain that he was utterly indifferent to the prospect of Carver's suffering if he had to go around again. It reminded Carver of other voices, at another time and place. He remembered the twenty-mile runs he'd endured at Lympstone Commando Training Centre, on the way to his marines beret, and the ferocious workouts amounting to institutional sadism that were handed out by the instructors who supervised his selection for the SBS.

They'd not broken him, and he wasn't going to let this overgrown computer geek make him look like a noddy now.

He got off the next five shots in a fraction over nineteen seconds. He hit two more targets.

Carver rolled over onto his back to take the weight off the elbows and biceps that had been supporting his upper body and the gun.

Larssson looked down at him with a contemptuous curl of the lip. "You have another twenty seconds to get back into position, reload, and hit the remaining two targets. Same deal. You fail, you ski."

Ten years earlier he could have done it in five seconds. Throughout the Cold War the Royal Marines had been the U.K. armed forces' Arctic-warfare specialists. As a young lieutenant, Carver had been up to Beisfjord for winter training with 45 Commando. Even now, he was wearing his old leather ski march boots, as unyielding as iron when they'd first been issued, but gradually worn in to fit the exact contours of his feet and ankles. Carver had even tried out for the marines' Olympic-standard biathlon squad before the SBS came calling. But now…

"Go!" shouted Larsson, looking at his watch.

Carver heaved himself back onto his front, grabbed the gun, ripped out the empty magazine, and groped for its replacement. Actions that had once been second nature now seemed entirely foreign. It all used to be automatic. Now he had to think everything through, one agonized motion at a time. His hands were quivering with cold as well as exhaustion. He could barely focus his aching, sweat-stung eyes on the target.

"Fifteen seconds left," Larsson intoned.

Not one shot fired.

Carver gathered himself and aimed at the first standing target. He fired as he was breathing out, to help steady his aim.

And missed.

"Come on!" he muttered to himself as he pulled back the bolt.

"Ten seconds."

Carver felt his stomach tense. That was good. Somewhere his body had found a last shot of adrenaline-fueled energy. There was no time left to think. He just had to go for it.

Pull… aim… breathe… fire.

A hit. One left.

"Five seconds."

He shot again. Another miss.

Shit!

Pull… aim… breathe…

"Two."

You bastard!

Fire.

Carver blinked, trying to clear his vision. He couldn't see what had happened. He rolled over again in despair.