“That high slope behind the building is a natural defensive wall.” Ricci indicated it from his chair with the beam of his pen-sized laser pointer, feeling queerly as if something of the wicked Megan Breen’s persona had rubbed off on him. “Our pals at Earthglow don’t have a
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guard post there, either on the peak or any of the ledges. And it isn’t hard to understand why. It looks like they’re unapproachable from that flank.”
“Be the reason it’s the best way for us to come at them,” Thibodeau said. His tone was grimly resigned. ‘Take advantage of their overconfidence, soil.”
Ricci nodded and moved the pointer’s red dot to the right, focusing it on a small, flat hollow between the northernmost rims of the Two Shoulders hills.
“We can land a chopper here. Off-load our equipment, and one of those radio-frequency-shielded tents that we can use as a command and communications center,” he said. “It’s a nice pocket of concealment. And as close to Earthglow as I want to set down.”
“The RF-secure tents are cold-weather white, and should blend right in with the snow on the ground and slopes,” Oskaboose added. “Guess we can hide the copter under some cammo pretty easy, too.”
“Sounds good.” Ricci’s laser dot jumped up and to the left onto the blacktop leading to the facility. “We’ll have an escape vehicle ready to roll around this area west of the bridge, not far from where the two-laner swings around the bottom of the hill toward the perimeter gate. My team’ll have to reach it on foot once we’re out of the building. Then it takes us across the bridge, the chopper picks us up on the other side, and we’re off.”
“You catch a break, make a clean getaway, sure,” Thibodeau said. “But we can’t depend on it. Got to figure there might be somebody on your tail wants to stop that from happenin’.”
Ricci looked at him. “So your team prepares something to stop them from stopping us.”
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Thibodeau scratched his beard.
“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I got me an idea or two.”
Ricci nodded again. Then he turned back to the photo image on the wall, slid the red dot down onto the icy stream spanned by the bridge, and tracked its course through the basin that divided Two Shoulders from the larger hill.
“Our approach is going to be what’s trickiest,” he said. “From where we strike camp at Two Shoulders, my insertion team needs to hike to the stream, ski across its banks, then climb the northeast side of the hill and go down the northwest. That’ll leave us behind the building. From there we move along its side to the guard station at the gate, take out the sentries, and carry on with the rest of the program.” He inclined his head toward Pokey Oskaboose. “I know it seems like you’d have to be a damn spider to make it up that big slab of rock, but Pokey mentioned a couple of things I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“You and whoever built Earthglow figuring the hill would guarantee protection from the rear,” Oskaboose said. “Anybody knows this country could see how it’s tough but not anything near the worst. You’ve got all kinds of plants clumped on its slopes: juniper, pines, spruce, cedar, berry bushes. That means root systems to keep the ground from slipping out from underfoot. Also means plenty of handholds and matted branches to break your fall in case you do take a slide.”
Thibodeau gave him a look. “An’ you intend on being’ there to point out them mats an’ handholds?” he said.
Oskaboose seemed unbothered by his dubious tone. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I usually prefer to get my high-altitude kicks in a pilot’s seat, but for spe-
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cial company like you boys, I’m thrilled to make an exception.”
That night, before his group set out on their crosscountry hike, Ricci emerged out of the metalized fabric igloo tent and stood surrounded by the humped granite rises of Niish Obekwun, their furrowed contours otherworldly in the darkness. The temperature had fallen well below freezing with sundown, and continued to drop at a precipitous rate. The wind had also picked up. Swirling into, over, and through the snow- and brush-covered crannies and ledges of the hillsides, it filled the cavity below with a toneless idiot chant, as if the landscape itself was astir widi some impersonally menacing ritual. Ricci stood there, alone, outfitted in a snow cammo shell jacket and pants, a polar liner, his Zylon vest, and thermal undergarments. He carried his baby VVRS on a shoulder sling and wore an ALICE pack on his back. His hands were covered with ultrathin-insulate gloves that wouldn’t get in the way of firing his weapon. On his feet were white rubber boots and tapered-tail aluminum alloy snowshoes. His sleekly molded full-head helmet was equipped with an integrated, handsfree wireless audio/video system, its dime-sized color digital camera lens invisible above his forehead, its microphone embedded in the chin guard. Ricci’s polycarbonate ballistic visor was pulled down over his eyes-only balaclava and shielded the exposed portion of his face from the fiercely cold air. But he could still feel its bite through his breathing vents, feel its tingle in his lungs with each inhalation. Never in the coldest, bleakest Maine winter had he experienced such inimical cold. No sane human being would expose himself to it without good reason.
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Ricci hadn’t had any desire to contemplate his own reason. He had simply wanted to be by himself before leaving: to be still, without thought, quiet inside. That was really all.
He turned around now, stepped back toward the tent, and then leaned his head through its entrance flap to signal his men to gear up and assemble. He’d had his moment of solitude and was ready to get under way.
The glazed surface of the stream gave out with occasional complaints as they tramped across its banks, making crumpled-cellophane noises under the glittering snow cover. They proceeded in single file, Oskaboose at the head of the column, followed by Ricci and his Cape Green graduates: Seybold, Beatty, Rosander, Grillo, Simmons, Barnes, Harpswell, and Nichols. Three additions had been made to boost the number of men in the insertion team, a seasoned hand from Kaliningrad named Neil Perry, and Dan Carlysle and Ron Newell, both veterans of the Brazilian affair and recommended by Thi- bodeau.
Oskaboose kept his eyes downward, wary of thin ice. He would test any suspect area by putting one leg carefully forward, shifting his weight onto it, and pressing in hard with the crampons of his snowshoe, alert for the slightest hint of cracking or buckling or a telltale flit of shadows around the snowshoe’s edges that would reveal the movement of water beneath a shallow, weakened crust. Although the group was on a networked communications link, he remained entirely silent, using hand gestures to wave the others forward when he was confident of the footing or to steer them clear of places where its soundness was questionable. Ricci didn’t need
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for him to explain why. It was the habit of someone who had spent a lifetime in this terrain, knew it inside out, and preferred to negotiate it without technological mediation. Who wanted his senses freed up to listen and feel for its hazards.
The cold had seemed to deepen after they left the Two Shoulders camp, but perhaps as a result they only encountered a few potential trouble spots during their crossing of the stream … although on a single instance, just yards from its west bank, me ice cracked under Os- kaboose’s foot with a sound that reverberated between the dark walls of the cleft like a rifle shot. The men started in their heavy packs, Ricci’s eyes briefly going to the slope, the buttstock of his VVRS gun raised against his shoulder. But then he heard a splash and turned to see Oskaboose pull his snowshoe out of the break, water gushing up around its frame, droplets of moisture wicking off the leg of his shell pants..
“Sorry, fellas,” Oskaboose said over their comlink. They were the first words he’d spoken since they’d trod onto the ice. “Bad step there.”
Ricci loosened his grip on his weapon and followed him the rest of the way across the stream without incident.
Ricci’s recollections of the climb would later streak together in his mind, staying with him as a mostly random shuffle of images and impressions.
He would remember his men pausing at the base of the hill to remove their snowshoes and sling them over their backs, and then their first adrenaline-charged push up the lower ledges, the group surrendering themselves entirely to forward motion. Remember seeking out
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Pokey Oskaboose’s ascending shadow, following his lead, trying not to fall too far behind. Remember the feel of coarse, cold stone against his flattened body. And the gusts tugging at him. Snow spilling around him in loose talc-white clouds. Icicles snapping apart under his fingers. His gloved hands twisting into notches, grabbing hold of needled juniper branches, clutching at bare tangles of scrub that grew precariously out of hairline fissures in the rock. And, once, a startled bird bearing aloft with a querulous shriek, its wings flaying the air. He would clearly recall the moment he heard the scuff of Seybold’s boots below him and turned to see that he had stumbled, lost traction, and was swaying backward off a ledge, chunks of ice and pebbly material fragmenting underfoot to skitter down the slope. Then reaching for him with one hand, catching his wrist, driving his own feet against the rock as he pulled upward and steadied him. And drawing a long inhalation, and moving on, and on, always with Oskaboose in sight, toiling upward in that fury of wind and billowing powder.