James Cobb - The Arctic Event

The historian glanced at the body at her feet and frowned. “Jon, come here. Look at this.”

Smith stepped to her side and instantly spotted the point of concern.

Before going to sleep fifty-odd years before, the sleeping bag’s occupant had drawn a flap of parachute silk over his face as a frost shield. A small circular hole was punched neatly in the center of that fabric.

Smith leaned his rifle against the cave wall and sank to one knee, flipping back the ice-crinkly silk. Revealed was a pleasant-featured young man’s face, pale, sleep-peaceful, frozen in time. The eyes were closed, and in the center of the forehead was another small circular hole, smeared with a few drops of blood, made red once more by the flickering light of the flare.

“Well, now,” Smith murmured. “A handgun, medium caliber, low velocity. Fired at close range, but not point-blank. No powder burns.”

“7.65mm subsonic, I’ll wager,” Valentina agreed, bending down with her hands braced on her knees, “probably fired through a silencer.”

“Probably.” Smith rose and circled to the next body. “The same here. One shot, through the temple. Execution style.”

“Very much so,” Valentina agreed, walking slowly down the row of bedrolls. “They were asleep, and someone just walked down the line and took the crew out, one after another…but not all of them.”

“Why do you say that, Val?”

“There are only six men here, Jon. The minimum complement for an America bomber would be eight.” She played the beam of her flashlight back into the shadowed corners of the cavern, beyond the pool of flare light. “There will be at least two others…Ah, here we are.”

She stepped deeper into the cavern, making her way around several table-sized chunks of fallen basalt. Smith went after her. Neither of them noted Gregori Smyslov silently falling back toward the lava tube entrance.

A man clad in khaki-colored duffel pants and parka lay on the black rock floor of the lava tube. The front of his coat was black with blood and punctured by multiple bullet holes. Curled in a frozen death writhe, the dead man’s lips were drawn back from his teeth in a half-century-old snarl. A few inches from his outstretched hand lay a small automatic pistol with the long cylinder of a silencer screwed to its barrel.

Smith lifted the lantern beam beyond the seventh man and found the eighth.

There was a niche in the back wall of the cave. Within it were two bedrolls, one of which was empty. An older aviation officer lay on his back, half out of the second sleeping bag, a hand-sized patch of blood frozen in place in the middle of his chest. A Soviet-issue Tokarev service pistol was still clutched in his fist.

His killer had apparently learned too late that a man with a bullet through his heart can still have fourteen seconds of life and consciousness left to him.

Valentina made her way to the seventh man. Bending down, she undid the top button of his parka and examined the insignia on the flight suit collar underneath. “The bombardier and political officer.”

Straightening, she crossed to the eighth man and repeated her examination. “The aircraft commander.”

“Apparently there was a falling-out among the upper echelons.”

“Apparently.” She looked back at Smith. “It seems pretty straightforward. They’d turned in for the night, and the political officer either had the watch or he got up again after the others had fallen asleep. He walked down the line and methodically murdered his fellow crewmen. Then he came back here to kill the aircraft commander. The problem was that a silencer’s effectiveness degrades with every bullet you put through it, and that last round must have made a wee bit too much noise.”

“But, damn it, Val, why?”

“Orders, Jon. It had to be under orders, given to the one member of the crew fanatically dedicated enough to the will of the Communist Party to commit both mass murder and suicide.”

Smith’s brows shot up. “Suicide?”

“Um-hum,” the historian nodded. “I’m reasonably certain that his orders included using the last round in the clip on himself. I daresay he didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter, because it’s apparent nobody was coming after them. I suspect that another aspect of his program was to torch the wreck, and probably this material along with it.”

She extended the toe of her boot and tapped a canvas-covered aircraft log and a stack of heavy buckram envelopes that lay beside the bomber commander’s bedroll, some of them still bearing Soviet Air Force security seals over their flaps. “Oh, but I wish I could read Russian.”

“Randi can,” Smith replied, shaking his head. “But ordering one of your own aircrews slaughtered like this? That doesn’t make any sense!”

“It doesn’t make sense to you, Jon, and it doesn’t make sense to me, but it made sense to the Stalinists. Remember the KGB barrage battalions that would follow Soviet Army units into battle. Their mission tasking wasn’t to shoot at the enemy, but at any Soviet soldiers reluctant to die for the glory of the Workers’ Revolution. If it was a matter of state security they wouldn’t have even blinked.”

“But what the hell were they trying to hide?”

“Speaking frankly, I’ve been scared to think about it…Hello, what have we here?”

She knelt down and picked up something from beside the logbook. Smith saw that it was a man’s wallet. With her flashlight tucked awkwardly between her cheek and shoulder, Valentina started to leaf through it. Suddenly she stiffened, the flashlight slipping away to bounce on the cavern floor. “My dear God!”

Smith hastily stepped up beside her. “Val, what is it?”

Wordlessly she thrust the wallet into his hands. Balancing the lantern on a boulder top, Smith sank down on one knee and examined its contents.

Money, American money: half a dozen twenties, two fives, and a ten. Worn, well-used bills. A driver’s license, Michigan 1952, issued to an Oscar Olson. A Marquette city library card and a social security card both made out to the same name. A pair of ticket stubs to the AirView Drive-in Theater. A cash register slip for eighty-seven cents from Bromberg’s corner grocery.

“Val, what does this mean?…Val?”

The historian was standing beside him, a blank, totally stunned expression on her face. Suddenly, without speaking, she dropped to her knees beside the body of the aircraft commander, tearing at the front of the long-dead man’s flight suit. Buttons popped as she ripped it open, revealing a black and red checked lumberjack shirt. She clawed furiously at the collar, fighting the resistance of the stiffly frozen corpse. Cloth tore, and she produced the maker’s tag from the back of the neck.

“Montgomery Ward!” She almost threw the tag at Smith. Then she scrambled across the cavern floor and was at the body of the Misha’s political officer, forcing open his parka and flight suit, revealing a civilian suit jacket layered beneath it.

“Sears and Roebuck,” she whispered. “Sears…and…bloody…Roebuck!” Her voice rose to a strangled scream. “Smyslov, you son of a bitch! Where are you?”

“I am here, Professor.”

Smith stood up and turned at the quiet voice, and then he froze. Smyslov had come in behind them. He stood outlined in the glare of the flare Smith had left in the main part of the chamber, the ruddy light reflecting off the leveled Beretta automatic in his hand. “Put up your hands. Both of you. Please do not attempt anything. Other Russian troops will be here shortly.”

“What the hell is this, Major?” Smith demanded, slowly lifting his hands shoulder high.

“A very regrettable situation, Colonel. If you do not resist, you will not be harmed.”