Charon's Landing (48 page)

“Don’t worry about me, but if you’re in any shape to go on, kill those motherfuckers for me, will you?”

“Doesn’t matter what shape I’m in. They’re gonna pay.” There was a flinty edge to Mercer’s voice. The hidden spring of his endurance had just been tapped, and the doubts he’d felt before were gone. “Eddie, the sergeant had a combat harness in the cockpit with him. It was on the floor by his feet. Do you see it?”

“Hold on.” A second later Eddie called back down to the ground, “Yeah, I got it.”

“Throw it down; I’m gonna need it. But keep the pistol for yourself.” The heavy harness came crashing through the branches, almost hanging up a couple of times before landing a few feet from Mercer. He picked it up, looping the nylon suspenders over his shoulders and cinching the belt around his waist. Along with a knife, med kit, flashlight, and most important, a compass, he had four additional clips for the machine pistol.

“Eddie, it may take a while for the Air Force to send out a search and rescue team. I doubt we were on radar when the missiles hit. But when they do arrive, use the Beretta to signal to them. You know the distress call, three rapid shots. Just in case I fail at the pump station and Kerikov sends out a party to make certain none of us survive, be sure it’s the good guys before you call to them.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow over drinks at the Great Alaskan Bush Company,” quipped Mercer, mentioning Anchorage’s most famous strip joint.

“You’re buying,” Eddie laughed back, but Mercer had already taken bearings from the compass and moved off.

The heavy rain masked the sound of him moving through the trees, allowing him to break into an easy loping run. His eyes were very sensitive to even minimal light, so he could find a clear path, avoiding stumps and thick brambles and anything else that might slow him. He figured that Eddie had flown at least two miles from the area where the missiles had been fired, so he didn’t worry about stumbling into a recce patrol.

Ignoring the aches that cramped his body, he made it to the Dalton Highway in just thirty minutes, the last quarter mile being a ragged struggle up a steep defile. Calling it a highway was presumptuous — it was nothing more than a tightly packed gravel strip originally built as the haul road for the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Mercer was badly winded, and sweat mingled freely with the rain that soaked through his clothing. The temperature was hovering just over thirty-five degrees, and as wet as he was, he ran a real chance of becoming hypothermic, his skin leaching away his core body heat until he collapsed and died.

The pipeline was on the other side of the road, held off the ground by spindly supports, the VSMs. In the rainy darkness, the forty-eight-inch pipe had a silver, maggoty sheen as it stretched north and south into both murky horizons. The gravel of the highway had been heavily compacted by years of fully loaded semitrailers tracking to and from the oil-rich Prudhoe Bay fields. Along its verges, fireweed grew, the countless purple blossoms all but wasted by the summer so that the topmost parts of the stalks were barren, sticking in the air like arthritic fingers.

Somewhere to Mercer’s right was Pump Station Number 5, an unknown number of terrorists holding it, armed with rockets and God alone knew what else, while to his left was an open stretch of road leading back to civilization. He would find help only a few miles away, a warm ranger’s cabin, a cup of scalding coffee, a bed. He snicked off the safety of the H&K and turned to the right, continuing northward into the unknown, relying on his superior eyesight and instincts to keep him from falling into an ambush.

The second mile on the Dalton Highway merged with the third and into the fourth, Mercer’s mind all but shutting down, conserving his energy to keep his feet running. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been so utterly exhausted, both mentally and physically. His stamina was waning and, with it, his coordination. He found himself stumbling more, lurching forward and one time pitching to the ground, the gravel digging deeply into the already torn meat of his palms.

Lying on the slick road, his face pressed against the dirt, his eyes closed in pain and weariness, he heard the unmistakable sound of a truck engine starting, revving up and then settling as the transmission was engaged. He looked up and through the drizzle saw headlights retreating back into the night. Had he been five minutes quicker, he would have jogged right into Kerikov’s rear guard. The vehicle retreated northward toward Pump Station 5.

Mercer wasn’t certain if this meant Kerikov was about to pull out of his position, or that he no longer feared a land-based assault up the Dalton Highway and wanted his men in a tighter defensive position. A new sense of urgency gripped him. If Kerikov was about to leave the pump station, Mercer would never have his chance. There was nothing he could do with a single machine pistol against a convoy of trucks. A single vehicle, yes, but he was sure that Kerikov would have used at least four trucks to transport enough men and equipment to seize the station and be able to deploy troops armed with missile launchers. He had to get to the station before they evacuated if he was to get his chance to eliminate Kerikov before the Russian was whisked to safety once again.

His strides felt lighter, more sure as he began running again, his focus sharper. The rain intensified, turning the hardened gravel road into a thick morass, clay lodging into the heavy tread of his boots. Mercer edged closer to the verge where the road had a rougher aggregate and he could gain a stronger purchase. Clearing a blind corner around a jagged tor of rock that cut off his view northward, Mercer dove off the road, rolling down the low shoulder and landing in a small stream of rain runoff. Ahead of him was the pump station, lit by powerful truck-mounted halogen lamps, the squat building and its immediate surroundings bathed in a pool of white light. And suddenly Mercer understood why Kerikov had taken the risk of attacking the pipeline directly.

Six flatbed trucks were pulled up against the pipe, cranes mounted on two of them swinging long cylindrical collars into place over the oil conduit. Men and women scurried around the site, and even at this extreme range, Mercer could hear their cries and oaths and shouts. This was what Kerikov was doing with the liquid nitrogen. He was placing it around the pipeline, encapsulating strategic parts of its eight-hundred-mile length in supercooled gas in an attempt to stop the flow of oil. This must be the last of it, he surmised, the replacement for the cylinders that he’d discovered aboard the
Jenny IV
.

Watching closely as the protective sleeve surrounding the pipeline was cut loose with a torch and its virtual twin was set in place, Mercer realized how cleverly they had carried out the operation. Had he not seen it actually happen, he never would have believed that there was anything out of the ordinary to the doctored section of pipe. Who knew how much of the line they had laced with liquid nitrogen?

He moved forward, wriggling through the water and mud in the drainage ditch, shutting his mind off from the rain and the cold and his own pain. Even with their yellow rain jackets and water-darkened hats, Mercer was able to recognize a couple of the PEAL activists he had seen at the bar in Valdez. They moved with the competence of an experienced construction crew, hoisting the original sections of pipe sleeve onto a truck. When they released the nitrogen within their fake lining, it would take weeks or even months to discover the sabotage, and even then, who would believe such a bold and cunning plan?

Remembering what Andy Lindstrom said about freezing the oil in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, he could believe that PEAL would be satisfied with shutting down the pipeline for the months it would take to clear the solidified oil from it and replace any damaged sections, but Mercer had a hard time accepting that Ivan Kerikov would work on such a symbolic but otherwise worthless act of eco-terrorism. There was something else to this, something that Mercer couldn’t quite grasp. The steady whine of the pump station’s main turbine sounded like a muffled dentist’s drill, droning on and on despite everything happening around it.

The hard prod at the back of his neck was a concentric circle, its inner ring exactly nine millimeters in diameter. The barrel of an Uzi pressed into his flesh was held by one of Kerikov’s former East German assassins. Mercer hadn’t heard him approach — he’d been too rapt by the sight before him — and as he slowly locked his fingers behind his back, he cursed himself for his lack of caution.

“Up,” he was ordered, and as he stood, he was warned to do so slowly, the gun pulling back so that he couldn’t twist around and grab its barrel. The man who captured him knew precisely how to handle a prisoner.

Mercer dragged himself to his feet, turned, letting the H&K machine pistol dangle from its strap against his chest. Seeing the weapon for the first time, the German took an involuntary step back, tightening the grip on his own weapon. His left foot slid a fraction of an inch in the mud at the edge of the drainage ditch, his concentration switching from his prisoner to his own balance for just an instant. Mercer used it to his full advantage, predicting it so accurately he was already in motion when the man slipped.

He dove forward, pounding into the man, throwing up his arm so that the Uzi rose harmlessly, its stubby barrel pointed into the trees. The bullet wound from Burt Manning’s attack on his house screamed with newfound pain as the lips of the long gash split open again, fresh blood welling through the opening. Mercer’s momentum took both men down into the ditch, the German pinned in the wet mud by Mercer’s body. Mercer cocked his right arm, punching as hard as he could, one, two, three powerful shots to the jaw. The German was still conscious, but just barely. Without a second thought, Mercer held the assassin’s head under the babbling stream flowing at the bottom of the ditch until his body went completely still.

Only after the man was dead did Mercer become aware that his heart was racing with fear, his chest pumping as though he couldn’t get enough oxygen. His fingers twitched with adrenaline. Lying in the ditch, his back pressed into the greasy mud, he tilted his neck and opened his mouth, letting cold, sweet water seep to the back of his throat, easing the raging thirst the sudden adrenaline rush had given him. He rested a moment longer, then crawled out of the mire to see if the fight had caught the attention of the workers at the pump station.

Peeking over the rise, he saw that no one had noticed; they were still working at securing the final nitro pack to the pipeline. The sound of the big turbine within the building and the rumbling diesel engines of their trucks must have masked the noise Mercer made killing the picket.

Without warning, a fountain of dirt exploded in Mercer’s face, throwing wet grit into his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and filling his mouth. He ducked again, burrowing into the ground as the sound of machine gun fire reached him an instant later. Just to his left, another burst kicked mud from the embankment, so close he could feel the heat of the bullets as they hit the dirt. He was pinned down and very vulnerable. The next move belonged to whoever held the gun.

“The man you just killed had been a member of the East German Secret Police and had received the finest training possible under Soviet sponsorship. I must congratulate the competence of America’s Special Forces. You did very well indeed.” The voice that called out into the darkness was thick, gutturally accented, the words clipped so tightly that all emotion had been trimmed from them. “However, I don’t believe that you are bulletproof. You will throw your weapon away from your position, hold your hands over your head, and step out of the ditch.”

Twice caught in under two minutes, Mercer tossed the Heckler and Koch and stood. A flashlight snapped on from about forty feet up the road, just outside the perimeter of the pump station, rain slashing through the beam. The man who’d seen him had been able to watch the entire fight from his position though he had not interfered, even when he had a clear shot while Mercer was drowning the guard. Mercer had no explanation why his life was spared, but he knew that he wouldn’t like the reason.

“So tell me” — the flashlight bobbed and weaved as the man approached Mercer — “are you an Army ranger or Marine force recon? I know that your government hasn’t had the time to activate a SEAL or Delta unit and get them to Alaska this quickly.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but no one thought your threat was worth sending in real troops. I’m a Boy Scout leader. Dan Gerous is the name. Heck, I’m not even a soldier. I’m a geologist.”

Rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition chewed up the ground at Mercer’s feet, bullets zinging off stones and ricocheting back into the forest. He could do nothing but stand there as the earth around him was clawed with deadly ferocity.

“I came out here to investigate when my picket radioed he had spotted an intruder. I never imagined it would be you, Dr. Mercer. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hold your life in my hands. You are going to die a very horrible death, geologist. That I can assure you.” Mercer realized that he’d been captured by Ivan Kerikov himself.

Seconds later, two men flanked him, yanking his hands from over his head and wrapping his wrists with tape so tightly that blood drained from his hands and wrists. He was shoved toward the backlit figure of Kerikov with a well-placed rifle butt to his kidney. From this distance, it appeared that the Russian’s shoulders spanned the entire width of the Dalton Highway.

“I have been anticipating this day for a year now,” Kerikov said as the henchmen held Mercer before the former spymaster. “After I heard it was you who destroyed operation Vulcan’s Forge, I considered hiring an assassin to kill you in your Arlington town house, but I decided that I really wanted the opportunity personally.”

There was a cruel twist to Kerikov’s mouth as he spoke, and his eyes, washed-out and pale blue, glittered like flat chips of glass. Even in his moment of triumph, he showed little emotion. The juxtaposition of his words and his expression was unnatural, far more frightening than had he raved and gloated.