James Cobb - The Arctic Event

“I’m going to marry Jon, Randi,” Sophie said again.

No!

“Jon is sorry for what he’s done to you, Randi. More sorry than you will ever know or be willing to understand.”

“I don’t want for him to be sorry! I want for him to have saved you!” Randi cried back, their argument flaring, as raw and as painful as ever.

“No one could have saved me, Randi. Not Jon, nor even you.”

“There must have been a way!”

Sophia’s eyes filled her universe now. “If there had been a way, Jon would have found it. Just as you would have found it.”

“No!”

“Say Jon’s name for me, Randi.”

“I won’t! I don’t want to!”

Sophie’s voice grew urgent. “Say his name, Randi!”

Randi couldn’t refuse her. “Jon,” she sobbed.

“Louder, Randi.” Sophie’s eyes were loving, frightened, demanding, “Say it louder!”

“Jon!”

Why was her sister doing this? Randi just wanted to sleep. To go away.

Sophia wouldn’t allow it. She was bending over her now, shaking her. “Again, Randi! Call to him! Scream it! Scream Jon’s name!”

“JON!”

Smith broke step and looked up, scanning the night. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Valentina inquired, coming up behind him. Smith had taken the point, breaking trail with Valentina and Smyslov trailing on the safety line. Following the icefall, fortune had turned in their favor, and the remaining descent to the north shore had gone easily and swiftly. They had been trudging steadily along the beach, making good time in the shelter of the pressure ice, when Smith had checked at the faintest alien sounds rising above the storm.

“I don’t know. It sounded like somebody calling my name.”

“Not likely.” Valentina shoved up her snow goggles. “Who could be out here to call you?”

“Randi! Who else?” Smith unlatched from the safely line and snapped on the lantern clipped to his belt. “Illuminate and fan out! Start looking! Move!”

They found her within five minutes.

“Jon! Over here! Hurry!”

Kneeling in a notch in the wall of pressure ice, Valentina was brushing the snow away from a huddled form. Smith was on his knees beside them in seconds, struggling out of the straps of his pack frame. Smyslov came in behind him a moment later.

“You were right!” Valentina exclaimed. “What in all hell is she doing out here rigged like this?”

“Escape and evasion,” Smith snapped back. “The Spetsnaz must have hit the science station.”

“That’s not possible,” Smyslov protested. “Only the one platoon was inserted on the island, the one that engaged you at the crash site.”

“Then somebody else is here.” Smith spread a survival blanket on the snow, gently lifting Randi onto it. He tore off mittens and gloves, sliding a hand under the mismatched and inadequate jumble of clothing she wore, seeking for a heartbeat.

“She’s out solid,” Valentina commented, leaning over Jon’s shoulder.

“She’s dying,” Smith replied curtly. “There are chemical heat pads in the packs. Two each. Get them out. All of them.”

Valentina and Smyslov obeyed with all the speed they could, flexing the heat pads to trigger the thermal reaction.

“Shove them down her sleeves and pant legs,” Smith ordered. “When we start to move her the chilled blood in her limbs will circulate into her body core, and the shock could kill her.”

“Jon. Look at this.” Valentina had worked Randi’s left arm out from under the oversized sweatshirt. A handcuff had been locked around it.

“Son of a bitch! That explains the abrasions on her other wrist. She was a prisoner.”

“But whose?”

“I don’t know, Val. If it’s not the Spetsnaz, then it must be the others. The ones who tried to shoot us down in Alaska.”

“How bad is she, Colonel?” Smyslov asked from behind his other shoulder.

“If we don’t get her to some shelter and warmth fast, she’s gone.” Smith wrapped the survival blanket tightly around Randi. They had done all they could do out here.

“I will carry her, Colonel,” Smyslov offered.

“All right. I’ll take your pack. Let’s go.”

The Russian lifted his new burden with care. “It is all right, devushka, ” he murmured. “You are with friends. Don’t leave us now.”

Valentina took up both the rifles. “We’ve got to assume the science station’s either been occupied or destroyed. Where can we go?”

“We either find another cave or build a snow shelter,” Smith replied, playing his lantern beam along the man-high stacks of pressure ice mounding along the shoreline. “Keep your eyes open for any place that looks good.”

“Right. We might as well run ourselves out of batteries along with everything else. God, she looks like she’s had a job of it.”

“I know.” His voice was as bleak as the night. “Maybe I’ve finally done it.”

She puzzled over Smith’s words, but she sensed this wasn’t the time to ask about them.

The probing sword of Smith’s lantern beam had started to cold-fade when it found the triangular gap in the ice wall. Hunkering down, he shined the light into it.

This was what he’d been seeking. A heavy slab of sea ice had been driven up onto the beach and lifted on edge by another, following shoulder of the pack, leaving a blue-white triangular cavern, twenty feet deep by six wide and high enough for a tall man to stand stooped in.

“This is it! We’ll fort up here! Major, take Randi to the back of the cave; then come up here and start walling off this entrance with snow and ice blocks. Val, you’re with me.”

Smith used the last of their light sticks to fill the little ice cave with a misty green chemical glow, and he took a moment to set up and light their tiny pellet stove. There wasn’t much fuel left for that, either, but if it couldn’t make their shelter warm, at least it could make it less freezing. As he worked with the stove he issued commands.

“Val, spread a couple of survival blankets on the cave floor; then zip your sleeping bag and mine together.”

“Right. Doing it.”

They eased the comatose Randi onto the combined sleeping bags.

“Okay Val, I’m putting you in with her. While I get Randi undressed, get out of your clothes. Everything has to come off.”

“Understood,” she replied, tugging down the zip of her parka. “But I was hoping to hear that request under decidedly different circumstances.”

As he stripped Randi he used a flashlight to run a lightning-swift white-light examination of her body, checking for the overt ravages of frostbite. Thank God she’d at least had the arctic boots. They’d protected her feet, the point of greatest vulnerability.

Valentina squirmed out of her heavy outer shell garments. Taking a deep, deliberate breath, she whipped her sweater and thermal top off over her head. Her bra and socks followed, as did the forearm sheaths. She positioned her knives within reach near the head of the bed, then pushed ski pants, thermal bottoms, and panties off in one wadded mass. Naked, she stretched out beside Randi, her head pillowed on a pack, the cold a flame against her skin.

“Ready,” she said, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering.

Smith supervised the nestling of the two nude ivory bodies together, Valentina shivering and Randi too deathly still.

He packed the thermal pads around the women, then zipped the sleeping bags closed. He spread Smyslov’s opened bag over them, along with their discarded clothing.

Valentina curled herself around the other woman’s unconscious form, cradling Randi’s head against the soft pillow of her breast and shoulder. Randi stirred, whimpered faintly, and tried to nuzzle closer to the source of warmth.