James Cobb - The Arctic Event

She glanced at her wristwatch. It was on the hour, and the Haley ’s radio operators were calling Wednesday Island, trying to establish contact from their end according to the radio schedule. And if this was the best the ice cutter’s powerful transmitters could do in this anarchistic communication environment, there was no hope of the little SINCGARS set being heard.

Angrily she twisted the frequency knob to the tactical channel and lifted the mike once more. “Wednesday Island base to aircraft party. Wednesday Island base to aircraft party. Jon, are you receiving me? Over.”

She lifted her thumb, listening impatiently, wanting to scream back at the jagged static roar issuing from the speaker.

“Jon, damn it, this is Randi! Can you hear me? Over!”

Nothing discernable.

Solar storm or not, she should be hearing from the others. They should be on their way back by now and clear of the mountain. What in the hell was going on up there? Randi had the growing sensation that things were rapidly reaching some kind of a nexus, that the situation was collapsing in on her in a way she didn’t and couldn’t understand.

“What will happen when they don’t hear from us?” Dr. Trowbridge inquired.

Randi resumed awareness of the room around her. After a sleepless night spent keeping a vigil over Kropodkin, she had moved the station party across to the laboratory hut, where she had spent the morning fruitlessly rechecking the station’s big SSB radio and satellite phone and making equally futile calls on their backup transceiver.

“Don’t worry, Doctor. If we’re out of communication for a certain length of time, a contingency plan goes into effect.” Randi snapped off the transceiver and replaced the microphone on its clip. “We’ll get all the help up here that we can ever use.”

“Good, perhaps we will get someone in here other than the Gestapo.”

Randi ignored Kropodkin. With his hands bound behind his back, he sat perched on a stool in the far corner of the lab. He’d spoken intermittently and ingratiatingly with Dr. Trowbridge, mostly about inconsequential matters, but he’d been sullenly silent with her, barring the occasional barbed comment.

But he was listening, his eyes intently taking in everything. Randi could almost hear him thinking. She could sense expectancy in him. Kropodkin knew that something was going to happen.

Randi sank down on another of the stools and braced her elbows on the lab table. God, but she was tired. She hadn’t slept or even gone off alert for two nights. She had her little packet of go-pills in her kit, but she didn’t like the chemically enhanced overconfidence that came with them. She also knew that when she came down off the drug, she would crash into total worthlessness.

She rubbed her burning eyes and looked out of the frost-fogged windows of the hut. What she hoped to see was Jon coming into camp. She wanted to be able to let her guard down just for a little while. Just to close her eyes for a minute or two.

“Ms. Russell, are you all right?” Dr. Trowbridge asked warily.

Randi snapped erect. Her eyes had closed for a moment, and she had swayed on the stool.

“Yes, Doctor, I’m fine.” She got to her feet, mentally slapping herself back into wakefulness.

Over in the corner she caught Kropodkin smirking at her, sensing her growing vulnerability.

“All right,” she said, turning abruptly to face him. “It’s time somebody tells us how he sabotaged the big transceiver.”

“I did nothing to the radio! I did nothing to anything.” His words were mushy through his bruised and swollen lips. “Or anyone.” The malevolent glitter lingered in his eyes as he met Randi’s eyes, but his words were plaintive. “Dr. Trowbridge, can’t you keep this madwoman off me until I can be turned over to the proper police? I’m not eager for another beating.”

“Please, Ms. Russell,” Trowbridge began in a weary monotone, “if the authorities are on their way, can’t this be put off…”

Randi gave an impatient shake of her head. “All right, Doctor, I’ll drop it.”

All morning Trowbridge had been moving and speaking like a man trapped in a nightmare, with Randi as one of the premiere monsters. A modern, upscale urbanite, he lived in a world where violence and death were essentially abstracts, something to be clucked over in a television news bite or enjoyed vicariously in media entertainment. Now he was being confronted with the genuine article, up close and personal. And like the victim of a violent car crash or natural disaster, the academic was slipping steadily deeper into a state of emotional traumatic shock. Randi recognized the symptoms.

What was worse, she was the heavy in the scenario. So far, she had been the visible purveyor of the violence. In a popular culture caught up in the fad of elaborate conspiracy theories and X-File fears, she was the figurative “woman in black.”

Stefan Kropodkin represented normality. He was the honor student, the eager face in the front row of the classroom, the recognized and comfortable name on the test paper and expedition roster. Randi was the “agent working for the shadowy government agency,” the twenty-first-century incarnation of the boogeyman.

She could see the fear in Trowbridge’s eyes every time he looked at her. She could also see Kropodkin working that fear. Any denials of the scenario she might make would be an act of futility.

Lord, what a total mess!

Catching up the MP-5, she crossed into the radio shack. Settling down before the open console, she checked the components and settings of the big sideband set for the hundredth time, making the final futile gesture of switching it on to listen to the soft hiss issuing from the set.

Randi closed her eyes and rested her face in her hands.

It had to be the antennas! The receiver circuits were working, but they weren’t picking up the clamor of the solar storm. At this gain the static should be blasting the speakers off the walls.

When Kropodkin had disabled the set, it also must have been from outside. Again, the antennas. But it hadn’t been anything as simple as just cutting the leads. She had been meticulous in following and checking the cable between the laboratory hut and the radio mast, checking for breaks. She had run every inch of the cable through her hands, looking for the old saboteur’s trick of shorting the leads with a pin pushed through the insulation. She had made sure the all-weather connectors were screwed down tightly…

Randi sat up abruptly in the chair. The connectors.

A second later she was in the main room of the hut, hauling on her heavy outdoor shell clothing as rapidly as she could.

“What is it?” Trobridge demanded, rising from his seat by the coal stove.

“Maybe something positive for a change, Doctor,” Randi replied, zipping her parka and hauling on her gloves. “We’ll know in a few minutes. In the meantime keep an eye on Kropodkin while I go out.”

She glanced at the suddenly alert youth in the corner. “On second thought, just don’t go near him, for any reason, until I get back. I won’t be long.”

That expression of indignant truculence crossed Trowbridge’s face, and his mouth opened in the beginning of a knee-jerk protest.

“I said, don’t go near him!” she snapped.

Randi took a moment to make sure that the nylon disposacuffs binding Kropodkin’s wrists were still tight, and then, slinging the submachine gun, she was out through the snow lock.

She hastened up the knoll behind the camp. A half foot of fresh snow had fallen and been windblown during the early morning hours, clogging the trails and making the climb to the base of the radio mast a plowing struggle. Reaching her objective, she dropped to her knees at the foot of the mast. Shoveling aside the white overburden with her mittened hands, she exposed the antenna power booster box at the mast’s base. Exposed also were the weatherproof connectors that linked the cable from the radio shack to the booster box. There were two of them, the heavy main cable bifurcating into the separate leads for the satellite phone and the sideband transceiver.