Clive Cussler - Fast Ice

“A real blizzard wasn’t enough for you?” Gamay said, admiring the ice crystals falling all around them. “You had to park under a snowmaking machine, too?”

“Maybe I just want to test my hat in extreme conditions.”

Gamay laughed. “Couldn’t get much more extreme than this.”

They climbed off the snowmobile and scanned the area for trouble. “No sign of guards,” Paul said, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. They could be hiding or underground.”

Paul grabbed a backpack and slung it over one shoulder. It held four of the explosive charges. Gamay grabbed a second pack, but Paul put out a hand. “I’ll take that.”

“This is no time for chivalry.”

“I’m not trying to be gallant,” he said. “Just being smart. One of us should be armed and you’re the better shot, the more agile person and the smaller target. I’ll be the pack mule. You keep me safe.”

Gamay hesitated for a second and then handed the pack over. “Paul Trout,” she said. “You never cease to amaze me.”

Without another word, she pulled a short-barreled MP5 machine pistol from the back of the snowmobile. Having seen what happened to Yvonne’s gunmen, she checked the action and cycled it twice to make sure it wouldn’t jam.

With the weapon in her hands and the safety off, she began a careful march toward the nearest exhaust stacks.

The first thing they came across was a huge machine. It was covered in frost and partially wrapped in tattered canvas from tarps that had been ripped free by the wind before getting caught in the machinery.

“Drilling rig,” Paul said. Beside it were stacks of pipe, all covered in snow.

“They don’t seem to be using it,” Gamay replied.

“They’d use this to drill through the rock and tap into the geothermal layer,” he said. “Then they use the hot water and high-pressure steam to bore a tunnel through the glacier. We did a similar thing in Greenland last year.”

As Paul finished speaking, a sound like thunder echoed across the valley. It was muffled and distorted by the storm, but it was unmistakable.

Both he and Gamay looked up and gazed into the distance. They saw nothing but a few dim lights on the ridge, half hidden by the storm. While the lights went out quickly, the thunder continued to roll.

“Avalanche,” Paul said. “Could be Kurt and Joe.”

“Could be anything,” Gamay said. “Let’s not dawdle.”

They moved past the drilling rig, arriving beside the nearest of the exhaust ports and ducking under the high-pressure blast of steam coming out of it. They found the port to be a steel tube four inches in diameter. It stuck out of the ground a couple feet and was surrounded by a pool of water and slush where the heat from the pipe continuously melted the snow and ice.

Paul dropped the packs and pulled out the first charge. He compared it to the pipe. “I’d like to dump these down the chimney and be done with it,” he said. “But we have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Four-inch pipe, six-inch explosive.”

“Even if we could drop them into the pipes,” Gamay said, “the pressure of that steam might just launch them into the sky like mortars. We’re going to have to go inside.”

“How? I don’t see any door or hatch.”

“There were lines on Rudi’s map,” she said. “The system labeled them as fissures because they were depressions, but when I zoomed in I could see that they were all dead straight. Short and geometrical. They’re either tunnels or trenches. One of them led directly here from what we suspected was the habitat. Something tells me that’s where we’ll find the front door.”

She pointed to a spot past the other exhaust pipes.

Paul stood up, took a couple steps and then fell as gunfire rang out and searing pain cut through his right thigh.

Gamay dove to the ground and returned fire, her shots cutting through the wind and hitting the edge of the very trench she and Paul had been looking for. A pair of men hidden there ducked down as the bullets from the MP5 blasted the snow and ice around them.

Wounded in the leg but not interested in standing anyway, Paul crawled on his stomach back to Gamay.

“You’re hit,” she said.

He nodded. “I’d like to say it’s only a scratch but I think it’s more than that.” He reached down to feel for the hole. He found an entry wound on the front of his thigh and an exit wound on the back. “Think it went through the muscle and out. That’s both good and bad. At least the bullet didn’t hit the bone and shatter it.”

As Gamay unleashed another barrage from the MP5, Paul dug down into the snow, scooping out handfuls and packing the wound. That would help the blood coagulate and would reduce the searing pain.

“How many gunmen do you see out there?” he asked.

“Two or three,” Gamay said. “But they’re down in that trench.”

That didn’t sound promising. “Please tell me those trenches don’t circumnavigate our current position?”

“Not that I saw,” she said. “And I can keep them pinned down, so they won’t be too much of a threat, but we’re not going to be able to get to them either.”

“Stalemate,” Paul said, “which means they win.”

“We can’t allow that,” she said.

Gamay triggered off another couple shots. “We could use the snowmobile as an assault craft,” she said. “Charge them at high speed while keeping our heads down.”

“That might work,” Paul said. “But even if we could cross the open ground between here and the trench, we still have to get into the trench and fight those men without getting shot. Considering I’m already limping, I don’t love our chances.”

“We could hurl the explosives at them.”

“What’s your best shot put distance?” Paul asked.

Gamay looked up. “Not seventy yards into the wind. We’ll have to get closer. Unless you have another plan?”

Paul thought almost anything sounded better than trying to charge armed men in a trench. “You said something about mortars earlier.”

She looked puzzled. “You can’t fit the explosives into the pipe.”

“Not that pipe,” Paul said. “The other ones will do just fine.”

Gamay was lying prone in the snow, looking through her sight at the trench. She scanned it back and forth to make sure she wasn’t focusing on only one spot. Every time she saw movement, she fired. “I have ten shots left and a spare magazine. I can pin them down while you do whatever it is you’re going to do.”

Paul crushed some more snow into his wound and began to crawl away. “Stay here,” he said, before switching into his best impersonation of the Terminator. “I’ll be baaack.”

With Gamay laying down sporadic shots of harassing fire, Paul made his way to the snow-covered stacked pipe. It was unused equipment meant for the original drilling rig. The long sections, called pipe string, were not going to help him. They were forty feet in length and too heavy for a person to move. Shorter sections, called couplers, designed to link lengths of pipe string together, would do the trick.

He dug the snow away from a stack of couplers and pulled a six-foot length free. Using another pipe to support it, he wedged it into the snow at a shallow angle, twisting and shoving and leaning all his weight against it until at least a foot of the pipe was buried in the snow.

Now came the tricky part—setting the elevation. This was pure guesswork, since he had no idea about the wind and the force that his homemade weapon would produce, but he kept it low, reasoning that a bouncing and rolling explosive would be more effective than a bomb that flew well past the trench.

With the pipe wedged in and roughly aimed, Paul slipped the backpack off his shoulders. He pulled out the first explosive, set a switch on the face of it to 1. He slid that charge into the end of the pipe. It fit, with an inch to spare on either side.