“Run run run!” Tanner yelled, and led the way, slipping and staggering across the ice with the wind blessedly at his back. Plath saw immediately what he was doing. The gun tower was opening, shutters rising mechanically, revealing a long black muzzle. Tanner was trying to close the distance and get below the place where the gun could be depressed to target them.
It took twenty seconds for the shutters to open fully. Another ten seconds for the gunners to ready their weapon, and at that moment the gamble had failed. The gaggle of freezing survivors were in pointblank range.
The machine gun fired. Two rounds, killing one man instantly and hitting another in the thigh.
And then, the gun jammed.
Training took over for the ex-soldiers. They quickly closed the distance to the tower’s base and began kicking at the door. One fired at the lock. The door opened and small-arms fire—a pop! pop! pop! sound—came from within.
Tanner, yelling obscenities, picked up a fallen body and threw it through the doorway to draw fire. He was in through the door in a flash. More gunfire as those with weapons rushed the doorway after him.
Silence descended. Tanner and his men had taken the tower.
“Come on,” Plath said to Vincent and Wilkes, “we’ll freeze out here!”
A second Sno-Cat was barreling toward them from the center of the compound, trailing a cloud of ice particles and steam.
The top third of the tower now rotated, bringing the machine gun to bear on the Sno-Cat, which made the fatal mistake of hesitating, slowing, and then blew apart as Tanner poured fire into it.
Plath, Wilkes, and Vincent found themselves in a bare room at the bottom of a steel spiral staircase leading up. “Wilkes, stay with Vincent.”
Plath ran up the stairs to find Tanner still cursing, but also bleeding into his parka, a growing stain.
“Goddammit, goddammit, they shot me,” he said as he tore off his jacket, then burrowed through layers of warmth to find a hole in his left side.
A soldier squatted to take a look. He grinned up at Tanner. “Through and through, Captain. You’ll live if you don’t bleed out.”
“Slap on a compress, Sergeant O’Dell.”
Tanner looked at Plath. “You look okay for your first firefight.”
“Not my first,” Plath said. “Not even my second. It’s been a hell of a week.” She peered out of the shooting hole as the machine gun traversed left and right. Nothing moved. The plane and the two Sno-cats burned.
“All those buildings—shuttered. Bulletproof, most likely.” O’Dell, the ex-soldier who had tended Tanner’s wound.
“Jesus H.,” Tanner said. “It’s a fortress. See what we have here. Inventory weapons and do a head count.”
The bad news was that there were just six battle-ready men, plus Tanner, Plath, Vincent, and Wilkes.
The good news was delivered by O’Dell. “We have all the small arms we could want, plenty of ammo, and a dozen of these.” The “these” in question were shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.
“I’m not familiar with those. Russian?”
“Chinese,” O’Dell said. “And to answer your next question, yes, they can be fused for impact.”
“Okay,” Tanner said. “That is not a professional outfit out there; otherwise, they wouldn’t have driven that Sno-Cat into range and then conveniently stopped. Amateurs with maybe a couple of veterans. Short-handed and poorly led, or we’d already be dead. Let’s not give them time to figure anything out. Sergeant, blow some holes in that first building. Ground level if you can. We need a door.”
The battle lasted two hours, by which time two more men had been killed. Plath and her friends had been given the job of ferrying wounded from the plane into the first tower while Tanner led the assault on the second.
When it was all over, they counted seven bodies of former Cathexis employees.
“A skeleton force,” Tanner said. “So this was just a warm-up.”
They had assembled in the dining hall and Wilkes had helpfully brewed a pot of coffee and popped open bags of chocolate chip cookies.
They were eight now, along with three wounded survivors from the plane wrapped in blankets and lying bandaged on empty steel tables. O’Dell and one other had taken a remaining Sno-Cat to what looked like a hangar that lay well outside of the main base.
“Whoever was here pulled out,” Tanner said. “This place was not built for the dozen men left behind.”
Vincent stood up and walked away.
“He’ll be okay,” Plath said, not believing it.
“He’s been through a lot,” Tanner said generously.
“You have no idea,” Wilkes muttered as she poured mugs of coffee.
“We don’t know if anyone got off a message to whoever, wherever … but let me just say that any skepticism about you, Ms. McLure, is officially dead and buried. We have to find wherever they went, chase them down, and stop this.”
“All we’ve got is a Sno-Cat,” a man observed. “Holds four passengers.”
Vincent came back and without pre-amble said, “They left their computers on. There’s another base. Farther south. A couple hundred miles.”
Someone whistled low, and slow, and said, “That’s a hell of a long ride in a Cat.”
Then O’Dell returned. He had two prisoners, held at gunpoint. “Meet Mademoiselle Bonnard and Mr. Babbington.”
“Dr. Babbington, actually.”