Three (20 page)

Maxine keyed the two-way
radio in order to alert the security detail, but the radio made a loud beep as
it was activated.  The advancing figures immediately turned toward the familiar
noise and opened fire with automatic weapons.  Maxine had fallen prone onto the
hangar floor as soon as her position was compromised.  The hail of bullets flew
above her as she returned fire with deadly accuracy.  She had hit both
intruders before the rush of security guards was able to reach their position. 
It was then that Maxine noticed groaning from Oliver and found him and Paul
Brown slumped beside their chairs.

Lights suddenly came on over
the entire air terminal.  Colonel Paul Brown, mortally wounded in the chest by
the attacker’s gunfire, slumped near to Oliver who was bleeding badly from his
upper left arm.  The attackers were still alive, but both had suffered critical
wounds.

As Oliver was being led to the
local field hospital holding a compress on his bleeding arm, Maxine followed
the stretcher carrying Paul Brown into the emergency section. She was there in
the room as his life slowly slipped away.

Anger pounded in Maxine’s
ears.  She found herself back in combat mode, reliving the entire trauma she
had worked so hard to overcome in the past year.  Unfortunately, the two
attackers never regained consciousness and had just been pronounced dead as
Maxine pushed past nurses and entered the operating room.  Now unable to
interrogate these attackers, she struggled to calm herself.  She looked at the
two young men’s faces as the nurse pulled sheets over them.  With hands
trembling, she examined their black clothing for some indication of their
identity but found no clues.  Even the tags on the clothing had been carefully
removed. 

As Maxine was leaving the
room, a nurse held out her hand to reveal a pin in the shape of an eagle. “One
of these young men had this pin clasped tightly in his hand.  It fell on the floor
as we were attempting to save his life.”

  Maxine carefully examined
the pin which had the form of an eagle with a spear and cycle behind its head. 
She remembered seeing this symbol when she first began researching the Haredi
sect, but could not immediately recall its significance.  Carrying the pin in
her hand as she walked down the hospital hall to where Oliver was being
attended, she was aware she was still trembling. 

As she approached his room
she heard his voice. “Yes I’m sure of it: Jerusalem, at the Foundation Stone.” 
Finishing his call he looked up at her and noticed she was trembling slightly. 
“Max, are you all right?”

“I just left the operating
room.  The surgeon was unable to save Paul or the two attackers.”

Oliver stood in stunned silence. 
First one death, followed by another, now three.
 

He saw the tears welling up
in Maxine’s eyes as she said, “I just couldn’t stop them in time.”

He reached for her hand.  “Max,
you protected Paul and me as well as anyone could.”

Max now began to cry and
Oliver put his right arm around her shoulder.  “But I killed two young men.  I’m
a trained marksman.  I could have disabled them.”

“Wounded, they would not have
stopped their attack.  They were combat soldiers.”

Maxine sucked in her breath
and tried to calm herself.  She extended her hand. “They were Haredi warriors. 
I was handed this pin, carried by one of them.  I think it’s the insignia of a
Haredi special-forces group that was disbanded some time back.  I ran across a
description of it while researching our Father Abraham conspiracy.” 

Examining the pin Oliver
said, “Let me send a photo of this to Clark and see if he can find out anything
about this Haredi group and who might be its leader.  He has to be the third
conspirator.  Based on some of the comments that the Smith brothers made as
they were being interrogated, I’m now convinced the planned nuclear detonation
will be in Jerusalem at the Foundation Stone.  Clark has dispatched a team of
agents to Jerusalem, led by our friend Robert Swift, to try to find the three.”

“What does he want us to do?”

“Clark has asked us to fly to
Jerusalem to advise Robert Swift, but not join in the arrest efforts.  I’ve
just talked to David Benjamin; he says he wishes to fly to the Pole with the
supplies, and will join the research team there for the long winter. Our G450
pilot indicated we could each take turns serving as copilot on the long trip,
much of which is on autopilot anyway.”

“I’m willing to keep going,
if I can help put a stop to this madness.”

“Max, you and I are fighting
a war on behalf of all of mankind. We will prevail, but right now we both need
time to rest.  This long flight will give us that chance.”

Meanwhile, David Benjamin was
boarding the LC-130 with his research notes and cold weather gear.  With no
cargo, and an extra load of fuel, this large, four engine, air transport would
be able to fly out over the Southern Pacific Ocean and across the Antarctic
Circle to McMurdo Station.  David was seated in the cockpit along with the
pilot and copilot and watched as the large transport taxied away from the
Antarctic Program hangar.

At the end of the runway he
held his breath as the engines were revved to maximum power prior to take off. 
With no indication of trouble, the brakes were released and the plane thundered
down the runway lifting off over the cold and choppy waters of the southern
Pacific.  The steady easterly caused the ride to be rough, but David had made
enough trips to McMurdo from Christchurch that he was not alarmed. 

He was alarmed, however, by
the amount of sea ice and large icebergs that were visible out his window on
this flight.  He had never made the winter run and realized why it was
considered so dangerous; the further south they went into the Antarctic winter
darkness, the lower the visibility became until it was impossible to see the
ocean surface or its increasing population of icebergs.

The pilot was communicating
with the ground controllers at McMurdo, and David was able to listen through
his headset to the exchanges.  He was comforted only slightly by the
matter-of-fact way the pilot replied to the ground controller’s indication that
McMurdo was experiencing fifty knot winds off the Victoria Ridge and the
visibility was down to a few hundred feet.

The choppy ride got worse as
the pilot began his descent through the lower cloud layers and into the low-level
ice fog.  In the darkness of the Antarctic winter the wind gusts tossed the big
aircraft around like it was a theme park ride.  The airfield was a snow pack,
now covered with fresh snow which ground crews had been working feverishly to
maintain level and free of drifts.

As the lumbering turbo-jet
flew lower and lower, David heard the growling sound of the snow skids being deployed
for landing but was unable to see anything but the white glare of the snow in
the beams of the landing lights.  He never saw the lights of McMurdo, or the
landscape, or runway.  He only started breathing again when he saw the runway
lights suddenly appear, lined up ahead of the aircraft, and felt the slight
jolt as the LC-130 met the runway and reversed thrust to stop its forward run
down the frictionless sheet of packed snow.

“Wow,” he exclaimed into his
lip mike, “that was scary!”

The pilot replied, “Wait ‘til
our landing at South Pole; they don’t have a ground controller.  We‘ll be on
our own to find the runway, such as it is, in complete darkness, praying our
GPS doesn’t get flaky at the South Pole like it sometimes does.”

David had made that run once
before, but in the summer months when continual sunlight softened the snow
covered landing strip beside the lab facility, and visibility was always good. 
He began to dread the next leg of this trip into the winter darkness.

The LC-130 turned at the end
of the runway and taxied to a large hangar where crews were bringing tracked
vehicles into position to move the proper food crates into the transport’s
cargo hold.  Once it had been reported from the Amundsen – Scott South Pole Station
that oil and hydraulic fluid crates had been mislabeled as food a search of the
McMurdo storage hangar was made.  In short order, the food crates were found.

The pilot now turned the
aircraft so that its tail pointed toward the open door of the hangar, and shut
down the four engines.  A ground crew team then attached a tractor to the front
landing skid and pushed the transport toward the hangar until its elevated tail
almost touched the top of the door.

While fuel trucks replenished
the fuel tanks the loading ramp at the tail of the aircraft was lowered and
one-by-one the food pallets were loaded and carefully secured within the cargo
bay.  All present knew the flight to the Pole would be rough, and wanted to
make sure no part of the cargo could work loose during the turbulent flight and
endanger the LC-130.

The loading took two hours,
allowing David to hurry across the frigid and windy tarmac and into the supply
facility in order to get a cup of hot chocolate.  He used the local ground line
to contact the research office of the South Pole Station.  Speaking to a fellow
researcher, David indicated the food supplies would be on their way soon and
that he had planned to stay with the small research team for the winter. 

His colleague at the radio
observatory was happy to hear his news and said, “As long as you bring food
you’re welcome, David.  Are you bringing that pepperoni pizza I ordered?”

“I thought you ordered
sausage and cheese,” replied David, belying his inner anxiety over the
up-coming flight into this dark sector.  “By the way how’s the wind there at
the Pole?”

“It comes and goes, but for
the last day it hasn’t gusted over fifty knots, and is sometimes pretty calm.”

“How badly drifted is the
runway?”

“It drifted up pretty bad
last week, but we’ve been busy laying out the red carpet for you, and it’s now
pretty smooth.  Hopefully the wind’ll stay down long enough for you to get
here.”

“We’re loading food and fuel
at present and should be on our way in the next hour,” said David as he looked
at his watch, fogged with inner ice crystals.

“We’ll be ready for you.  We’re
approaching the darkest days of the year so you are going to have to look for
the lights,” said his friend as he signed off.

What lights?
David thought to himself as he walked back out to the
aircraft.   The tail ramp was being raised and locked as he approached the
ladder into the front of the aircraft.  Climbing aboard and taking his seat
next to the copilot, he felt the movement of the tractor towing the LC-130 away
from the hangar door and around to face the runway, so that the turbo-prop wash
would not blow snow into the ground servicing area. 

David’s tension increased as
the loaded aircraft taxied toward the far end of the runway, faced into the
wind, and began to increase engine power.  The big aircraft lifted off well
before the end of the lighted runway but immediately flew up into the blowing
snow and clouds, causing the runway lights to disappear.

Meanwhile at the Amundsen –
Scott Station, the entire 47 members of the winter crew were bundled in their
cold weather gear and face masks, carrying five gallon cans of motor oil out of
the snow cat shed.  Like all of the buildings here at the South Pole, this
garage was heated to keep the equipment warm enough to operate.  Out in the
cold, an engine that was not running would become so cold its motor oil would
freeze solid. 

These cans of oil had been
found in their food crates in place of food and were of no use, except for what
David’s friend had cooked up.  The tops of these large cans of oil had been
carefully punctured and old rags and cleaning towels had been inserted into the
oil, so that just a few inches of oily rag was visible. 

Now a procession of polar
scientists made their way to pre-marked positions along each side of the
runway, placed their oil cans on the ice, and using flairs ignited the oily
wicks.  The light of the burning oil was not red like the flairs, but was a
bright yellow.  The two dozen smudge pots outlining the runway shone like yellow
fog lights through the snow haze and darkness.

The flight to the Pole was
somewhat more turbulent than the previous run to McMurdo, and David was again
aware the conditions outside were not only pitch black, but cloudy.  The
running lights on the wingtips often disappeared as they passed through thick snow
clouds.  There was no conversation in the headset until the pilot had begun his
descent.  Again lowering the landing skids, he punched some numbers into the
communication console and hailed the lab.  There was no tower at this air strip,
but someone immediately responded.

The voice said, “McMurdo flight
zero-zero-one, you are clear to land on strip number one; there is no other
traffic in the area.”

Although the pilot was tense,
he chuckled at this landing clearance and replied, “Permission to land this
grocery truck on runway one; but we can’t see anything in this low cloud
ceiling and blowing snow, how is it marked?”

“You can’t miss it,” came the
reply.

And on cue, a double row of
yellow lights became faintly visible through the wind screen, and the pilot
adjusted his glide toward the runway.  The wind here was approaching 20 knots,
and the landing was rough.  The pilot sat the big LC-130 down hard and
struggled to keep it running straight as he reversed the thrust of the four big
engines.  Snow billowed around the wings and fuselage as they drifted to a
stop.  Turning around, the food-laden LC 130 taxied up to a cluster of 47
dancing and waving scientists.