Far above Ryan, there was a burst of automatic fire that raked the far side of
the ravine, bullets ricocheting and whining into the darkness. Someone shouted
and Ryan ducked, huddling against the cold rock, wearing his hood so that his
face wouldn’t show white.
But the shooting wasn’t repeated, and the voices moved toward the south. The
earth finally ceased shaking, and all he could hear was the faint whistling of
the wind.
“Time to move,” he said.
BACK IN THE DEATHLANDS, winter had been a time of bitter hardship, with
blizzards and fiercely low temperatures. But here in Alaska the long nuclear
winter still had the land in its thrall. In places there were deep snowbanks
that had been piled up by the endless winds, and in other places, just bare
rock, scoured and shattered by permafrost. Gray and dull green lichens clung
precariously to the more sheltered places, but life was almost extinct, clinging
to the edges of an abyss.
Either a man found protection or he tried to keep moving. After an hour of
walking steadily west and then curving cautiously back toward the south, Ryan
was feeling exhausted. Much of the time he was battling against a shrieking gale
that plucked at his hood, blasting splinters of ice into his eye. Such a
buffeting soon cuts away at the senses of even the strongest man. It becomes
difficult to think rationally, and all a man wants is to lie down and rest a
little, just sleep for a few minutes.
A few long, long, long minutes.
Ryan tried to keep moving, without going too fast. He remembered that Finn had
urged care. To sweat was to lose body heat; to lose body heat was, eventually,
to die. He knew the signs of frostbite: small, gray-yellow patches on the skin,
accompanied by numbness, later leading to the blackening of gangrene and finally
to death. That was something he didn’t need to fear. Either he’d find the others
in the next day or so, or he’d be dead anyway.
To counter the cold on his face, Ryan exercised his muscles, alternately
scowling and smiling, so that his cheeks wouldn’t freeze and lose all sensation.
He checked the small chron on his wrist, finding that he’d been away from the
Russians for nearly three hours. Unless they scattered, he figured he was safe
from stumbling back into their arms. Once, he heard the distant sound of
gunfire. It lasted only a few seconds and wasn’t repeated.
With little light, it was hard going. He was constantly slipping and falling,
slogging on, pausing now and again to listen. Once there was the sound of
running water, but it seemed to come from his left, away from the direction he’d
taken. .
Ryan knew all the survival tricks of lighting a life-saving blaze using a lens,
or even by taking apart a couple of bullets to ignite tinder or paper. But in
that desert of ice and stone there was nothing he could burn. No wood at all.
“Shelter,” he said, panting hard. A pale sliver of moon danced above him,
occasionally visible through the shreds of high, gray clouds. It gave enough
light for him to see a big drift of snow banked against the overhanging lip of a
ridge of rough stones a hundred paces ahead of him.
With his panga, he began to carve the white bank, cutting eighteen-inch cubes,
stacking them to make a wall to break the wind. He worked steadily, creating a
tunnel, gradually expanding it until it was large enough for him to climb into.
The wall of snow bricks, which had grown higher and higher as he’d carved out
the tunnel, was arranged around the entrance. If he’d had better tools, he could
have tried to make a full house of snow, or “igloo,” as Finn had called it. But
he also remembered that there was a danger of such places melting and caving in,
trapping the occupants.
Ryan sat down, making sure his coat was tucked beneath him. Immediately he was
aware of the shelter that his snow cave provided against the weather. Out of the
gale, there was no longer the bitter numbness in his face. Every few minutes he