James Cobb - The Arctic Event

It swiftly became apparent that the drifted snow was packed into an overhang in the black rock, a groove rasped into the side of the mountain by the incessant sawing drag of the glacier. And then Smith noticed the texture of the snow changing. It was growing more solid, and it was as if a pattern had been worked into it.

“These are snow blocks!” Valentina exclaimed.

It was true. Someone had used building blocks of compacted snow, igloolike, to build a wall within the overhang. Over the decades, the blocks had cold-welded together into a solid glassy mass that resisted the stabbing knife blades, but their resistance couldn’t prevent them from eventually yielding.

“Canvas! This is it! It’s a cave!”

The snow wall and the ancient canvas windscreen behind it collapsed into darkness. And the icy dankness of long unstirred air flowed out.

Smith retrieved the big electric lantern from his pack and played the beam into the mouth of the cavern. The tunnel was perhaps six feet wide and low enough so that even Valentina would be forced to stoop to enter. Small, jagged stalactites of black rock studded the cave roof.

“A lava tube,” Smith commented.

“To be expected on a volcanic island,” Valentina agreed. “Look, on the floor.”

The antenna wire and what looked like a hose extended from beneath the small avalanche of snow and ice they had created, to loop around a bend in the tunnel perhaps ten feet ahead.

“This must be it,” Valentina repeated. Hunching down, she started along the tunnel.

“Just a second.” Smith passed the historian her rifle, then caught up his own SR-25. “Let’s get the gear inside and out of sight, just in case.”

“I will take care of it, Colonel,” Smyslov spoke up.

“All right, we’ll wait for you if we find anything interesting.” Smith removed a couple of hand flares from his pack and moved into the cave after Valentina.

Smyslov lugged the packs inside the cave, then paused for a moment outside its mouth, taking a last long look around.

The others, the members of the Spetsnaz covering force, were here. He had seen no sign of their presence, but that wasn’t surprising. The men chosen for this task would be snow devils, invisible in this white world, leaving no hint of their presence or passage.

But they were present. He could feel them. They had been ordered to keep the crash site and its environs under strict observation. They would be watching him now, waiting for the one order Smyslov was authorized to give. The one command that would bring them in to kill.

If only the bloody political officer had done his bloody job!

Maybe then this all could be mended somehow. Maybe then he could regain control of the situation and stop any further escalation. But he must also be prepared to invoke the alternative. He must be ready to perform his duty.

Smyslov unzipped his parka and moved the stainless steel cigarette lighter to an outside pocket. Then he pulled the Velcro retaining tab on his belt holster and drew the model 92 Beretta he had been issued by the Americans. Ignoring the irony of readying a weapon for use against its owners, he checked the clip seating with a pop of his palm against the bottom of the handgrip. Drawing back the slide, he manually jacked a shell into the pistol’s chamber.

Snapping off the safety, he returned the Beretta to its holster. Soon he would know if he would need it.

“Quite the setup,” Valentina murmured.

Around the bend in the tunnel they had found the auxiliary power unit that had been taken from the bomber. The length of hose led from the mouth of the cave to the exhaust outlet of the engine. Just beyond the generator set and connected to it via a set of batteries and power leads was a patched-together but impressive-looking radio rig.

The ever-present frost covered its exposed banks of old-fashioned vacuum tubes and control dials. Tools and unused electronics components were stacked around the set, and a transmitter key lay on a scrap-wood table positioned in front of the set, along with a set of earphones removed by an operator half a century before.

“I knew it,” she went on in a whisper. “I knew it the minute I saw the stripped chassis in the bomber!”

The duralumin radio operator’s stool had been taken from the plane, and Valentina sank onto it. Her hands lifted, but she acted as if she were afraid to touch anything. “There’s a pencil here, Jon. There’s a pencil but no paper. This is a communications desk. There should be paper! A log, notes, something!”

Smith panned the wide beam of the lantern around the gut of the passage. “Wait a minute…” The light fell on a blackened bucket set against the rocky wall. “Here we go.”

He took up the bucket by its bail and set it beside the stool.

“What is it?” Valentina asked, looking down.

“It’s a fire can,” Smith replied, hunkering beside the bucket. “It’s been half-filled with crushed pumice. It acts like a wick, like sand. Slosh a little gasoline in there and light it, and you’d have a steady flame for heat and cooking.”

Valentina nodded. “And they would have a few thousand gallons of aviation fuel lying about.”

“But something else has been burned in this one.” Smith drew his knife and probed amid the charred rock. “See that? That’s paper ash, a lot of it. I’ll bet that’s your radio log and maybe a set of code books, too.”

“Somebody cleaned house.”

In the lantern light their eyes met, and they communicated without words for a moment. There was no reason that this radio set shouldn’t have worked. There was no reason for this castaway aircrew not to have communicated with the world. There was no reason they shouldn’t have summoned help.

Gregori Smyslov shuffled around the corner of the tunnel from the outside, snapping on his own flashlight. “All is secure, Colonel.”

Smith kept his face poker-neutral. “Okay, let’s keep going.”

He turned and continued down the tunnel. A few yards farther on, the lava tube they were in broke through into a second larger, lower chamber. Slabs of basalt had been crudely aligned to create a set of uneven steps down a jagged collapsed facing. The porous black volcanic rock simply drank up the flashlight beams, and the darkness continued to predominate. It was not until Smith and his team had made the cautious descent to the floor of the chamber that they realized they were not alone.

Smith heard Valentina gasp from close by at his side, and Smyslov swore under his breath in Russian. The lantern beam panned across scattered items of survival gear, the bits of random trash produced around a lived-in camp, and finally, against the rear cavern wall, a row of huddled unmoving forms in canvas-skinned sleeping bags.

Their search for the crew of the Misha 124 was over.

Smith took one of the flares from his parka pocket and struck the igniter. Brilliant red chemical flame spewed from it, pushing back the darkness. He shoved the base of the flare into a crack in the wall.

“I wonder what got them in the end?” Valentina spoke softly, almost to herself.

“I don’t think it was the cold,” Smith replied. “They seemed pretty well set up for that.”

The sleeping bags were heavy arctic issue, and they were well insulated from the cavern floor by heavy pads of seat cushioning, life raft fabric, and parachute silk, all the materials that had been stripped from the downed aircraft. There were also several fire buckets positioned around the floor of the house-sized cavern, and a couple of gasoline jerry cans had been cached in one corner. It was obvious the bomber’s crew had known their polar survival procedures.

“It wasn’t starvation, either.” Valentina stepped up beside the first of the bodies and pointed to an open tin of survival ration crackers and a half bar of chocolate balanced on a small ledge in the cavern wall.