Skibird, page 13
The open end of the launch tube proved an insufficient release for the rapidly expanding firestorm.
When the first missile’s fuel exploded, the other two remaining missiles were struck with far more highly energetic shrapnel than three tiny squares of an F-1 fragmentation grenade.
Before the next two-tenths of a second had passed, the second and third missiles had exceeded the limits of restraint offered by their now punctured launch tubes.
The HE explosive warheads—primarily RDX, one of the best explosives in the world for shattering both casings and any structures it might encounter—had not yet become involved. It was inherently stable, but could be triggered by a sufficiently large shock. That was unnecessary in this case.
In seeking to escape the severe overpressure, a portion of the rocket fuel fired out the first missile’s rocket motor nozzle. It wasn’t sufficient to fly the missile effectively, but it was enough to drive it hard against the far end of the launch tube containers. The impact destroyed both the safety mechanism of the warhead and the radar element of the proximity fuse.
It did not destroy the contact fuse.
Slamming through the thin endcap, the missile struck a four-tonne pallet of rice in fifty-kilo bags. It might as well have hit the steel hull of a warship. As designed, the contact fuse sent its signal deep into the heart of the RDX, and five hundred kilos of high-energy explosive puffed four thousand kilos of rice in the next thirty-seven milliseconds.
The explosion had sufficient force to trigger the other two warheads—an additional thousand kilos of RDX—and the disaster expanded from there.
In turn, the hull suffered the same fate as the missile tubes—a blast of fire out the missing rear of the cargo bay insufficient to relieve the pressure of the building explosion—and the top of the hull was blown apart.
But the lower framing kept the plane held in the crevasse’s grip. Falling ice from the edges of the opening high above speared down, knocking the remains of the hull lower, but not quite dislodging it.
Not until the edge crumbled enough to undermine the weapons that had been so laboriously hauled to the surface.
The small, shoulder-mounted Willow surface-to-air missiles simply tumbled down into the depths.
The fourth SS-N-30 Kalibr cruise missile slid free from its tube as it fell. Nose first, it struck the block of frozen bananas—now as hard as steel—and exploded.
What was left of the Ilyushin-76 Candid fell into the dark depths of the crevasse. No pieces were big enough to catch on both walls as the plane’s fuselage had, until the gap was significantly narrower.
The missile had struck vertically, nose down. The engine and rocket fuel in the final missile stood nine meters—three full stories—above the airplane’s hull when it ignited. With no restraints around it except for the thin casing of the missile, that blast slammed outward, shattered the sidewalls of the ice crevasse with a massive hammer blow.
That was the blast that had thrown Nikolas Romanoff up and forward as Miranda watched.
For a brief moment he had the sensation of flying, driven by an oven-blast of wind.
As he fell back to earth, he could see the ice crumbling away beneath him.
He had managed to gain enough distance from the original crevasse that he didn’t plunge into its much-widened maw.
Instead, he fell into a field of shattered ice pinnacles that sliced through his body more easily than his mother’s tennis serve.
He was wholly unaware of the tube falling into the unblocked crevasse or of the uncut line that had been attached to it to haul it to the surface. However, he did manage to look upward as the Australian’s snowmobile was dragged backward into the ice field.
The last thing he ever saw was the undercarriage of the snowmobile that killed him.
25
Miranda’s phone rang.
It was the first sound to shatter the vast silence.
The explosion had not been followed by fire as there was nothing of substance below left to burn. A few stray wisps of smoke emerged from the crevasse, perhaps the Russian helicopter’s fuel, but no more.
The agony of the groaning ice—did a personification count as a metaphor?—had also subsided into silence.
One by one, each person sat up and looked around at each other but no one spoke. It was as if sound had ceased to exist on the high ice until—
Her phone rang again.
She answered but couldn’t think of what to say.
“Miranda? Is that you?” A male voice. “Are you okay?”
Was she? She hardly knew.
“Miranda?”
“We’re…” she managed, then looked toward the field of shattered ice. “We’re going to need a new Russian.” Did this negate her mistake of revealing to Romanoff that she spoke Russian? She hoped so, because an angry Holly was more than she could handle at the moment.
There was a strangely choked laugh on the other end of the line. “How about the others?” Drake. Drake’s voice.
“What others?”
“Who else is with you Miranda?”
She had to look around to remind herself. “Holly, Mike, and Andi.” Andi was crawling toward her across the ice. No one was standing. “Marla and Freddy.”
“Who?”
“They’re Australian. Antarctic Program.”
Freddy was holding a handful of red snow against his cheek. Marla reached into the Hagglund and pulled out a medical kit.
“And Wang Daiyu. She’s Chinese.”
There was a brief silence during which Miranda noticed that the tail and wing of the Il-76 were gone as well. She hadn’t seen those being swallowed by the disaster. And the crew’s bodies, too. Their final burial place would be in the ice, until the glacier eventually moved out to sea in the distant future.
“Wang Daiyu?” Drake had paused long enough that he must have looked her up. He made it sound important.
“Yes. Did you want to speak to her?”
“Um…no. Tell me what happened. I’m here with Lizzy.”
“Hi, Lizzy.”
“Hello, Miranda. That was quite a fire.”
“It was. Though as nothing is burning, I believe that explosion would be a more appropriate noun to select.”
Again one of those weird conversational pauses. “Did you want me to keep speaking?”
“Yes please. Can you tell us what happened?”
This was good. She pulled out her personal notebook and made a note that a pause could be a silent invitation to continue a communication. She left a question mark in the column that denoted whether this was a standard rule or simply an occasional usage methodology.
“Miranda? Are you there?”
“Yes. We were investigating a Russian Il-76 that crash landed at Whoop Whoop Skiway. It was a good landing under the circumstances, or it would have been if the hadn’t been for the final dah in NHA. The plane fell into a deep crevasse, jamming into place twenty meters below the surface.”
“The final…NHA…never mind. Did the crew survive?”
“One lived to the surface, but probably not much longer.”
“That was over thirty-hours ago, so—”
“Between thirty-five and thirty-nine hours.”
Drake sighed deeply before continuing, “—what caused the explosion now? It was so big that we picked it up with one of our satellites.”
“Seismographs should also pick it up, at least in Antarctica. I would estimate that between the rocket fuel and warheads it should register as at least a four-point-one magnitude ice quake on the Richter scale.”
“What, Miranda. What caused the explosion?”
Miranda turned to Holly and Andi. “He’s getting that tone.” That too was progress. She used to want to fold up and hide when someone used that tone with her. Now, she knew how to deal with it. She held out her phone.
Holly grabbed it before Andi could. “No, Wu, you’ll yell at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Won’t help a bit.”
Andi’s face was indeed a good match for the frowny emoji complete with flushed cheeks and grinding teeth. All that was missing was the steam coming out of her ears to make it anger/fury. Oh, another metaphor, emoji to human this time. Andi was indeed livid. Miranda was unclear as to why.
“Drake, mate, Holly here. Staff Sergeant Holly Harper of Oz’s Special Air Service Regiment, retired of course. You remember me, don’t ya, mate?” She was using that broad Strine accent that said she gearing up for a fight.
Miranda figured it was better if she removed Andi from the vicinity of that battle.
26
Miranda’s own balance remained unpredictable despite managing to stand. Andi rose as smoothly as the athlete she was.
Daiyu tipped her head in a way that Miranda didn’t understand, but Andi waved for the woman to join them. The three of them moved across the ice to join Marla and Freddy, who were untying the short ends of the lines that they had cut from the Hagglund as the falling missile was dragging it toward the crevasse.
Freddy had a large bandage on his cheek, but it wasn’t red with fresh blood. At least not much.
Mike hooked a good line from his waist to the Hagglund. He took a probing pole and began working his way toward the now much wider crevasse.
“Don’t any of you others go wandering off more than ten meters without being roped in,” Marla told them. “We’ve checked only that much around us. We’ll have to remap the whole area for new crevasses before it will be safe to move.”
“How long will that take?”
“Well—” Freddy started then quickly rested a hand on his cheek.
“Don’t speak, Freddy.” Marla patted his other arm. “You’re held together with bandages and glue until the base doc can stitch you up.”
He nodded carefully.
“We didn’t lose the ground penetrating radar, but it’s back at the huts. Freddy and I were about to rope up and work our way there. We could land the helo now. But a plane? Days, maybe weeks if we find a problem with the present skiway, before we dare bring one in here. With the ice shelf down at Davis melting out, that’s going to be a real problem.”
“That’s a pity, maties,” Holly strolled over and gave Miranda back her phone.
She was glad to see that the call was disconnected. She unzipped her parka long enough to tuck it into an inside pocket to keep the battery warm.
“Why? Because Freddy may have a pirate scar for the rest of his days?”
“Aw, and it was such a pretty face.” Holly’s teasing accent was far broader than Marla’s.
“I always—” Freddy clamped his mouth shut as his smile turned into a grimace.
“The worry is that McMurdo is scrambling a Skibird in our direction with all due haste.”
“No. They can’t. We don’t know if it’s safe to land,” Marla protested.
Holly waved toward Miranda’s pocket. “You’re welcome to call the Yanks’ Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s four stars on his shoulder. Not many folks dare to argue with him.”
“You argue with him all the time,” Mike returned from the crevasse edge, re-coiling his rope as he progressed. She assumed his headshake meant there was nothing left to see in the churned ice field beyond the edge.
Miranda decided that she wouldn’t miss Romanoff—he’d caused the explosion that had killed him, after all. That struck her as an exceedingly shortsighted action. But as she’d been taught to never speak ill of the dead, she kept her thoughts to herself.
“Sure,” Holly unhooked Mike’s line from the Hagglund. “But that’s me. I’m special.”
“And you’re always glad to tell us all about it,” Mike noted as he bound up the line and set it beside the other gear that had survived.
“Right-o, mate. I’m an obliging sort of gal thattaway. Comes from being a pure-blood denizen of the land of Oz.”
“Give it up, Mike,” Marla was smiling. “She incorrigible even by Oz standards. You need a rational gal like me. What’s a pretty man like you doing for the next couple decades?”
Mike smiled and opened his mouth.
“Aren’t we missing the point?” Miranda cut him off before he could speak. That wasn’t really interrupting, was it? She had the sneaking idea that they’d all be glad to banter until the sun went down, which was a month away. She didn’t have a month.
“The point is,” Andi spoke up, “that the New York Air National Guard is going to be landing a Hercules LC-130H Skibird here as soon as they can.”
Marla was shaking her head. “Reg, if they can land, do we have enough fuel to send them back where they came from?”
Freddy also shook his head, though very carefully.
“No worries, as Holly would say,” Miranda hoped she had that right. “The LC-130H has extended range tanks. It will probably fly from McMurdo to Scott-Amundsen Station at the South Pole. There it can top up its tanks enough for the entire return trip. It will be approximately a seven-hour-and-forty-four-minute flight, not including preparation or the refueling stop.”
Miranda stopped.
“Why does everyone look at me like that when I remark upon flight times?”
“Because,” Mike gave her a sideways hug, “not everyone memorizes the distance between every airport for the fun of it.”
“What do they do for fun? I’ve never understood pure recreation as a reasonable pastime.”
“Maybe we can come back to that one later, Miranda.”
“Okay, if you think that’s best. But why is Drake sending us a plane, and such a big one? There are only four of us. We could easily return the way we came. I don’t think we’re going to get more data and I do have samples I want to get back to DC.”
“I pointed that out to him but he wouldn’t say why.” Holly squinted at her. “What samples?”
“From the aft strike that hit the plane’s wing box and central fuel tank. It sent numerous splinters into the wing tank, creating hundreds of punctures.”
“That’s why you were wearing the wing as a hat. Very stylish by the way. I mean—”
“Exactly,” Miranda could see the flipped perspective, but Holly looked befuddled by her confirmation. It didn’t matter. “I was able to collect numerous samples that I deem to not be original equipment in the Ilyushin-76’s manufacture.” She pulled several baggies out of a sealable pocket she’d discovered over her left breast. She was coming to appreciate these parkas. The largest object was under half an inch. “More than enough for a spectroscopic analysis as well as a thin-slice microscopic inspection if necessary. And we have the flight recorder in the back of the Hagglund. We’ll know much more after we get back to the lab.”
“We can’t have the runway ready in time,” Freddy mumbled, barely moving his jaw. “And the iceway down at Davis is already marginal for the Basler. Never carry a Skibird.”
“Please allow me to offer a solution,” Daiyu had kept her silence throughout the conversation. “The skiway near Zhongshan Station is easily big enough for your Hercules Skibird to land. China would be glad to fly you there in our Snow Eagle 601 parked at Davis. Our station is a mere seventy kilometers away from Davis; simply reroute your Skibird to there. We will gladly extend every hospitality while you wait. We also have plenty of fuel if your aircraft needs it.”
The solution seemed sensible enough.
Holly was tipping her head one way and then the other, perhaps trying to look at it from various angles.
Miranda tried imitating the gesture, and only discovered that her neck was quite sore from the battering by the explosion.
27
Lieutenant Colonel Turgenev prayed that he had his rank at the end of this meeting. The Lubyanka Building unnerved him badly.
“What do you mean we need a new operative in Antarctica?”
Turgenev wished he hadn’t decided to make his report to General Murov in person but he deemed it too important to trust to any other channel. In today’s Russia, anyone might be listening in, vying for any advantage. Face-to-face was far safer.
“Per your instructions, I did not contact Colonel Nikolas Romanoff. Have you heard from him?”
Murov’s grim expression said that he had not.
“I have, however, been in contact with Progress Station Manager Viktor Petrov. He has reported that neither Nikolas Romanoff nor the Helix helicopter he had requisitioned have returned.”
“And why did you feel it necessary to track Colonel Romanoff?” Murov’s question held all of the edge of a death sentence.
Turgenev didn’t answer the question directly. “Instead, Petrov reported that a Chinese Snow Eagle 601 airplane, one that had departed the Progress Skiway shortly after Romanoff, had returned. It left with one passenger and came back with five, one Chinese and four Americans.”
Murov’s face flushed dark red and Turgenev wondered if he was about to die on the spot.
“Nothing on why?” he finally ground out.
“No, General.”
“Anything on the Americans themselves?”
“One had unzipped her parka. Beneath it she wore a vest labeled NTSB. The National Transportation Safety Board is the American team responsible for investigating air crashes.”
Murov eased infinitesimally. “That fact was confirmed by Romanoff. I ordered him to investigate the Chinese woman, a Colonel Wang sent by the Central Military Commission, and to dispose of the plane and any who had boarded it.”
Turgenev didn’t have to say anything aloud. They shared a look that said Romanoff had screwed up and perhaps died in his attempt to destroy the plane. Or was he their prisoner? No, he hadn’t come off the plane.
Murov sat in grim silence for several minutes.
Turgenev was careful not to move a single muscle to avoid disturbing his thoughts, or attracting any attention to himself.
“What else have you learned, Lieutenant Colonel?” Murov’s addressing him by rank said he might yet survive this.
“I was able to confirm the woman’s, Colonel Wang’s, arrival time at Zhongshan. It was a mere five minutes prior to the departure of the Snow Eagle en route to the Australian station at Davis. I traced flights back as well as I could. There is a high likelihood that she departed Beijing within the same hour Romanoff departed Moscow. I have been unable to prove any other connection than timing between the two.”
