Clive Cussler - Fast Ice

With the first charge at the bottom of the pipe, he pulled out the other explosive charges, lined them up and set all their detonation selectors to 2.

If everything went as planned, the first explosive would act as the powder of a cannon, launching the other three charges as projectiles.

Now all he needed was some wadding, something to prevent the explosive force from bypassing the projectiles or ripping them apart. He emptied the backpack and stuffed it in the pipe, pushing it down as far as his long arm would allow.

Shining a light into the pipe, he could see he needed more. He looked around him, considered what he might find back on the snowmobile and then made a quick decision.

Pulling off his oversized Canadian hat, he reluctantly stuffed it into the tube. After packing it down, he slotted the other explosives into the barrel, one on top of the other.

In the distance he could hear Gamay trading fire with the men in the trench. He hoped he was about to give them a big surprise. With the detonator in hand, he crawled to a safe distance, dropped flat to the snow and selected 1 on the detonator.

Covering his head, he pressed the button. A hollow boom sounded, and the pipe itself blew apart, with fragments flying in all directions.

In the flash of light, Paul saw the charges being hurtled through the air. He watched with great pride as they flew toward their adversaries, landed and skidded through the snow in the general direction of the trench.

Seeing this, Paul switched the detonator to 2 and pressed the button again. Three explosions went off in rapid order. One in front of the trench, one behind the trench and the third from inside it.

Fire, snow and smoke blasted upward in a long, straight line. The walls of the trench were blasted outward before collapsing in. The detonation seemed to calm the wind for a second. By the time it returned, Gamay was up and running, charging toward the target like a soldier storming the beach.

Paul followed the best he could. When he arrived, Gamay had taken the trench without firing a shot.

There were three men in the trench. Two of them appeared dead. The third was bleeding and burned in places. He raised his hands before lapsing into shock and losing consciousness.

Gamay took their guns just in case.

“Well, we’ve secured the area,” Paul said. “Now what?”

Gamay shone a light toward the end of the trench. A heavy steel door stood there. It resembled a watertight hatch on a ship. “Now we find out if we have enough explosives left to get through that.”

52

When Joe had recovered enough from his time under the snow, he and Kurt backtracked to the snowmobile. They dug it out and righted it. The machine was damaged, but still operational, and the hardy electric motors sprang to life the instant Kurt twisted the accelerator on the bent handlebar.

While the motor was fine, the battery pack was not. It registered twenty percent and the icon on the dash was flashing yellow.

“Let’s go find Paul and Gamay,” Joe said. “Before we end up walking.”

“One stop first.”

Kurt eased the machine down the slope, conserving power and allowing gravity to do most of the work. They slid to a stop several feet from where the snowcat had come to rest. The last surviving light was growing dim, but it still cast an amber circle across a few feet of the snow.

Kurt got off and walked toward it. He found Yvonne stuck in the snow, buried up to her chin. Her face was frozen white, covered in frost.

Joe came up beside him. “She might still be alive. Should we dig her out?”

Kurt glanced at his watch. They’d lost too much time already. “Leave her,” he said, turning back toward the snowmobile.

“But Kurt . . .”

“She killed half a dozen crewmen on the Grishka ,” Kurt said. “Shot them in their sleep. This is a better end than she deserves.”

Joe didn’t argue the point. He climbed back on the snowmobile and grabbed the handholds as Kurt twisted the throttle. They drove around the buried snowcat and down toward the glacier.

—

Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

As Paul and Gamay crouched fifty yards away from the steel door, Paul pressed the button on the detonator. They’d decided the best plan was to use a pair of the charges on the door and save the second pair for the turbine once they got inside.

The detonation sent a column of fire upward and back, blasting a ten-foot crater in the snow around the door. When the smoke cleared, the door, blackened and dented but unbroken, still stood.

“Well, that didn’t work,” Paul said.

They examined the blast’s pattern and discovered the problem. While the door had been singed and bent in slightly, the force of the blast had merely rebounded, surged outward, making the V-shaped crater and sending a fireball down it.

“We’re going to need something heavy to direct the explosion into the door,” Paul said.

“If we use these last explosives, we might not be able to destroy the turbine once we get inside,” Gamay replied.

“We won’t be able to do anything if we don’t get in there,” Paul countered.

“Maybe we could knock the door down with our snowmobile,” she said. “This trench makes for a perfect alleyway.”

Paul nodded. “Worth a shot.”

Gamay climbed on the machine while Paul packed the snow down in front of the door and then limped out of the way. She backed the snowmobile down into the trench, using the slope created by the initial mortar explosion.

Once she was inside the trench, she lined the snowmobile up and started her run.

Moving slow at first, she opened the throttle wide and secured it in place with the thumb lock. As the machine sped up, Gamay slipped off the back and slid in the snow, covering her head until she came to a stop.

She looked up in time to see the snowmobile careening down the trench. It sideswiped one wall, bounced off the other side and straightened up just before slamming into the steel door.

The fiberglass nose of the snowmobile shattered. The door on the receiving end of the blow buckled and flew off its hinges. The machine came to a stop on its side with the tracks still spinning. The door lay on the ground a few feet away.

Standing up, Gamay stared proudly at the destruction. “That was oddly satisfying,” she said, rubbing her shoulder, which had taken the brunt of her landing.

“I’ll be sure to enter you in a demolition derby,” Paul replied.

As the two of them admired their work, they kept their eyes on the door, which was lit up brightly by the lights on the front of their jackets.

What they didn’t see was the injured member of Yvonne’s tactical team stirring. He’d been knocked out cold by the original explosion and felt like a rag doll when Paul and Gamay laid him in the snow beside his comrades. Burns on his face and blood oozing from several shrapnel wounds had made them think he’d been killed by the blast, but he wasn’t dead and had now regained consciousness.

He saw the door cave in. He heard the two of them talking. And despite the ringing in his ears and a general state of confusion, he knew what he had to do.

He stood awkwardly and began walking toward them. He pulled a hunting knife from the sheath in his boot, gripped it tightly, testing and retesting the strength of his hand as he got closer. With his anger fueling him, he charged forward.

Gamay heard the footsteps coming and turned to see the man racing toward them. “Paul.”

The man crashed into both of them, sending her tumbling into the trench and taking Paul to the ground.

Gamay watched in horror as the attacker straddled Paul, raising the knife above his head for the kill shot.

Just as the man’s arm reached its maximum extension, his back arched suddenly and the point of a spear burst from his chest. His mouth opened but no sound came forth, only blood. He toppled over onto his side, dropped the knife and lay in the snow not moving.