Red Storm Rising Part 40

"Nope, nothing like this. You?"

"Yeah, 'cept we mostly practice goin' up. This here oughta be easier. Don't worry too much about slipping. These boots hold pretty good. Just make sure you set your feet on something solid, okay? And you take it nice and slow. Let Garcia lead off. I already like this place, skipper. See that pool below the falls? There's fish in there, and I don't think anybody'll ever spot us down this hole."

"Okay, you watch the lady."

"Right. Garcia, lead off. Rodgers, cover the rear." Smith slung his rifle across his back as he walked to Vigdis.

"Ma'am, you think you can handle this?" Smith held out his hand.

"I have been here before." She almost smiled until she remembered who had brought her here, and how many times. She didn't take his hand.

"That's good, Miss Vigdis. Maybe you can teach us a thing or two. You be careful, now."

It would have been fairly easy except for their heavy packs. Each man carried a fifty-pound load. The added weight and their fatigue affected their balance, with the result that someone watching from a distance might have taken the Marines for old women crossing an icy street. It was a fifty-degree slope down, in some places almost vertical, with some paths worn into the slopes, perhaps by the wild deer that throve here. For the first time fatigue worked in their favor. Fresher, they might have tried to move more quickly; as it was, each man was near the end of his string, and feared his own weakness more than the rocks. It took over an hour, but they made it down with nothing worse than cuts on their hands and bruises somewhere else.

Garcia crossed the river to the east side, where the canyon wall was steeper, and they camped out on a rocky shelf ten feet above the water. Edwards checked his watch. They had been on the move continuously for more than two days. Fifty-six hours. Each found himself a place in the deep shadows.

First they ate. Edwards downed a can of something without troubling to see what it was. His burps tasted like fish. Smith let the two privates sleep first, and gave his own sleeping bag to Vigdis. The girl fell mercifully asleep almost as quickly as the Marines. The sergeant made a quick tour of the area while Edwards watched, amazed that he had any energy left at all.

"This is a good spot, skipper," the sergeant p.r.o.nounced finally, collapsing down next to his officer. "Smoke?"

"I don't smoke. Thought you were out."

"I was. The lady's dad did, though, and I got a few packs." Smith lit an unfiltered cigarette with a Zippo lighter bearing the globe and anchor of the Marine Corps. He took a long pull. "Jesus, ain't this wonderful!"

"I figure we can spend a day here to rest up."

"Sounds good to me." Smith leaned back. "You held up pretty good, Lieutenant."

"I ran track at the Air Force Academy. Ten-thousand-meter stuff, some marathons, that sort of thing."

Smith gave him a baleful look. "You mean I've been trying to walk a d.a.m.ned runner into the ground?"

"You have walked a marathoner into the friggin' ground." Edwards ma.s.saged his shoulders. He wondered if the pain from his pack straps would ever go away. His legs felt as though someone had hammered on them with a baseball bat. He leaned back and commanded every muscle in his body to relax. The rocky ground didn't help, but he could not raise the energy even to look for a better spot. He remembered something. "Shouldn't somebody stand guard?"

"I thought about that," Smith said. He was lying back also, his helmet down over his eyes. "I think just this once we can forget it. Only way anybody'll spot us is if a chopper hovers right overhead. Nearest road's ten miles from here. Screw it. What d'you think, skipper?"

Edwards didn't hear the question.

KIEV, THE UKRAINE.

"Ivan Mikhailovich, are your bags packed?" Alekseyev asked.

"Yes, Comrade General."

"Commander-in-Chief West is missing. He was en route from Third Shock Army to his forward headquarters and disappeared. It is thought he might have been killed by an air attack. We're taking over."

"Just like that?"

"Not at all," Alekseyev said angrily. "They took thirty-six hours to decide that he was probably dead! The maniac had just relieved Third Shock's commander, then disappeared, and his deputy couldn't decide what to do. A scheduled attack never began, and the f.u.c.king Germans counterattacked while our men were waiting for orders!" Alekseyev shook his head to clear it and went on more calmly. "Well, now we will have soldiers running the campaign, not some politically reliable wh.o.r.emonger."

Sergetov again noted his superior's puritanical streak. It was one of the few traits that agreed exactly with Party policy.

"Our mission?" the captain asked.

"While the General takes charge at the command post, you and I will tour the forward divisions to ascertain the situation at the front. Sorry, Ivan Mikhailovich, I'm afraid this is not the safe posting I promised your father."

"I speak good English in addition to Arabic," the younger man sniffed. Alekseyev had checked that out before writing up the transfer orders. Captain Sergetov had been a good company officer before being lured out of uniform by the promise of a comfortable life of Party work. "When do we leave?"

"We fly out in two hours."

"In daylight?" The captain was surprised at that.

"It would appear that air travel by day is safer. NATO claims to dominate the night sky. Our people say otherwise, but they are flying us out in daylight. Draw your own conclusions, Comrade Captain."

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, DELAWARE.

A C-5A transport aircraft sat outside its hangar, waiting. Within the cavernous structure a team of forty-half officers in naval dress, half civilians wearing General Dynamics coveralls-worked on Tomahawk missiles. While one group removed the ma.s.sive antis.h.i.+p warheads and replaced them with something else, the other group's task was more difficult. They were replacing the missile guidance systems, the usual s.h.i.+p-hunting packages being removed in favor of terrain-matching systems that the men knew were used only for nuclear-tipped missiles intended for land targets. The guidance boxes were new, fresh from the factory. They had to be checked and calibrated. A delicate job. Though the systems had already been certified by the manufacturer, the usual peacetime routines were gone, replaced with an urgency that all of them felt but none of them knew the reason for. The mission was a complete secret.

Delicate electronic instruments fed pre-programmed information into the guidance packages, and other monitors examined the commands generated by the on-board computers. There were only enough men to check out three missiles at a time, and each check took just over an hour. Occasionally one would look up to see the ma.s.sive Galaxy transport, still waiting, its crew pacing about between trips to the weather office. When each missile was certified, a grease pencil mark was made next to the "F" code letter on the warhead, and the torpedo-shaped weapon was carefully loaded into its launch canister. Nearly a third of the guidance packages were discarded and replaced. Several had failed completely, but the problems with most were quite minor, though serious enough to warrant replacement instead of adjustment. The technicians and engineers from General Dynamics wondered about that. What sort of target demanded this sort of precision? All in all, the job took twenty-seven hours, six more than expected. About half of the men boarded the aircraft, which lifted off the concrete twenty minutes later, bound for Europe. They slept in the rear-facing seats, too tired to care about the dangers that might await them at their destination, wherever that was.

THE SKULAFOSS, ICELAND.

Edwards was sitting up almost before he knew why. Smith and his Marines were even faster, already on their feet, weapons in their hands and racing to cover. Their eyes scanned the rocky rim of their small canyon as Vigdis continued to scream. Edwards left his rifle and went to her.

The automatic reaction of the Marines was to a.s.sume that she had seen some danger upon them. Instinctively, Edwards knew different. Her eyes looked blankly toward the bare rocks a few yards away, her hands gripped at the bedroll. By the time he reached her, she had stopped screaming. This time Edwards did not stop to think. He grabbed her around the shoulders and pulled her head toward his own.

"You're safe. Vigdis, you are safe."

"My family," she said, her chest heaving as she caught her breath. "They kill my family. Then-"

"Yes, but you are alive."

"The soldiers, they-" The girl had evidently loosened her clothes to sleep more comfortably. Now she drew back from Edwards, pulling them tight around her. The lieutenant kept his hands away from her clothes and wrapped the sleeping bag around her.

"They will not hurt you again. Remember all of what happened. They will not hurt you again."

She looked into his face. He didn't know what to make of her expression. The pain and grief were evident, but there were other things there, and Edwards didn't know this girl well enough to read what she was thinking.

"The one who kill my family. You kill-killed him."

Edwards nodded. "They are all dead. They cannot hurt you."

"Yes." Vigdis looked down at the ground.

"You all right?" Smith asked.

"Yeah," Edwards answered. "The lady had a-a bad dream."

"They come back," she said. "They come back again."

"Ma'am, they ain't never coming back to hurt you." Smith grasped her arm through the sleeping bag. "We'll protect you. n.o.body will hurt you while we are here. Okay?"

The girl nodded jerkily.

"Okay, Miss Vigdis, now why don't you try to get some sleep? Ain't n.o.body gonna hurt you while we're around. You need us, you can call us."

Smith walked away. Edwards started to rise, but the girl's hand came out of the bag and took his arm.

"Please, do not go away. I-fear, fear to be alone."

"Okay. I'll stay with you. You lie back and get some sleep."

Five minutes later her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular. Edwards tried not to look at her. Should she suddenly awake and see his eyes on her-what might she think? And she could be right, Edwards admitted to himself. Two weeks ago, had he encountered her at the Keflavik Officers Club . . . he was a young, unattached man, and she was evidently a young, unattached woman. His main thought after the second drink would have been to get her back to his quarters. A little soft music. How beautiful she would have looked there, slipping demurely from her fas.h.i.+onable clothes in the soft light coming through the shades. Instead he had met her stark naked, cuts and bruises on her exposed flesh. So strange it was now. Edwards knew without thinking that if another man tried to put hands on her, he'd kill him without hesitation, and he couldn't bring himself to think of what taking the girl himself might be like-his only likely thought if he had encountered her on the street. What if I hadn't decided to come to her house? he wondered. She'd be dead by now, along with her parents. Probably someone would have found them in a few days . . . like they'd discovered Sandy. And that, Edwards knew all along, was the reason he'd killed the Russian lieutenant and enjoyed the man's slow trip to h.e.l.l. A pity no one had seen fit to do that- Smith waved to him. Edwards rose quietly and walked over.

"I got Garcia on guard. I think we better go back to being Marines after all. If that'd been for real, we'd all be cold meat by now, Lieutenant."

"We're all too tired to move out just yet."

"Yes, sir. The lady okay?"

"She's had a tough time. When she wakes up-h.e.l.l, I don't know. I'm afraid she might just come apart on us."

"Maybe." Smith lit a cigarette. "She's young. She might bounce back if we give her a chance."

"Get her something to do?"

"Same as us, skipper. You're better off doin' than thinkin'."

Edwards checked his watch. He'd actually gotten six hours of sleep before all this had happened. Though his legs were stiff, otherwise he felt better than he would have imagined. It was an illusion, he knew. He needed at least another four hours, and a good meal, before he'd be ready to move.

"We won't move out until about eleven. I want everybody to get some more sleep and one decent meal before we head out of here."

"Makes sense. When you gonna radio in?"

"I should have done that a long time ago, I just don't want to climb those d.a.m.ned rocks."

"Lieutenant, I'm just a dumba.s.s grunt, but insteada doing that, why don't you just walk downstream about half a mile? You oughta be able to track in on your satellite that way, right?"

Edwards turned to look north. Walking about that far would lower the angle to the satellite as well as climbing . . . why didn't I think of that? Because like any good Air Force Academy graduate, you thought in terms of up-and-down instead of sideways. The lieutenant shook his head angrily, noting the sergeant's sly grin before he lifted the radio pack and heading down the canyon's rocky floor.

"You're very late, Beagle," Doghouse said at once. "Repeat your status."

"Doghouse, things are just terrible. We had a run-in with a Russian patrol." Edwards explained for another two minutes.

"Beagle, are you out of your G.o.dd.a.m.ned mind? Your orders are to avoid, repeat avoid, contact with the enemy. How do you know that somebody doesn't know you're there? Over!"

"They're all dead. We rolled their vehicle over a cliff and set fire to it. We made it look like an accident, just like on TV. It's all over, Doghouse. No sense worrying about it now. We are now ten klicks from where it happened. I'm resting my men for the rest of the day. We will continue our march north tonight. This may take longer than you expect. The terrain is rugged as h.e.l.l, but we'll do our best. Nothing more to report. We can't see much from where we are."

"Very well. Your orders are unchanged, and please don't play white knight again-acknowledge."

"Roger that. Out." Edwards smiled to himself as he repacked the radio. When he got back to the others, he saw that Vigdis was stirring in her sleep. He lay down beside her, careful to stay a few feet away.

SCOTLAND.

"b.l.o.o.d.y cowboy-John Wayne rescuing the settlers from the b.l.o.o.d.y red Indians!"

"We weren't there," said the man with the eye patch. He fingered it briefly. "It is a mistake to judge a man from a thousand miles away. He was there, he saw what was happening. The next thing is, what does this tell us about Ivan's troops?"

"The Sovs do not exactly have an exemplary record for dealing with civilians," the first man pointed out.

"The Soviet airborne troops are known for their stern discipline," the second replied. Formerly a major in the SAS, and invalided out, he was now a senior man with the Special Operations Executive, the SOE. "Conduct like this is not indicative of well-disciplined troops. That may be important later on. For the moment, as I told you earlier, this lad is turning out very nicely indeed." He said it without a trace of smugness.