Ice War (12 page)

“I don’t know. Brogan didn’t recognise her.”

There was silence on the end of the phone, and Wilton wished he had more to offer.

“Thanks, Wilton,” Monster said.

“One more thing,” Wilton said.

“Yeah?”

“When you see Barnard, give her this number, tell her to call it as soon as possible,” Wilton said, and read out the number that Chisnall had given him.

“We are in middle of mission,” Monster said. “Can it wait?”

“No, it’s important,” Wilton said. “And it’s top secret. You can’t tell anyone. Except the Angels.”

“What is it?” Monster asked.

Wilton hesitated, unwilling to say the words out loud in case they turned out not to be true. “Chisnall’s alive.”

[MISSION DAY 2, FEBRUARY 17, 2033. 1140 HOURS LOCAL TIME]

[OFFICE FC7001, THIRD LEVEL, WEST QUARTER, THE PENTAGON, VIRGINIA]

“You’re sure it was Panyoczki?” Bilal asked. He was sitting opposite Wilton. The office door was shut.

“It was Monster,” Wilton said. “I’d know his voice anywhere.”

“Any chance he was under duress?” Bilal asked.

“I don’t think so, no,” Wilton said. “I know him really well.”

“And he’s going to call back with more information?”

Wilton nodded. “He’s going to try to rescue the other Angels.”

“That’s understandable,” Bilal said. “Bring up the coordinates.”

Wilton already had a satellite photograph of the area on his screen. He spun it around so they could both see it.

“South of the Diomede Islands,” Bilal said. “That’s either very clever, or very stupid. It’s the last way we’d expect them to come, but that’s for a very good reason. You’d be lucky to get a squadron of tanks through there.”

“This is a live view of the area,” Wilton said.

“It looks clear,” Bilal said. “Is Panyoczki saying that an entire army of enemy tanks is hiding down there somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Wilton said. “Check out this photo. It’s from a few days ago, the same area.” He brought up the photo then flicked back and forth between the two. One difference was immediately clear. On the older one the ice was perfectly flat, apart from long ridges and fissures. On the current photo there was a strange pattern to the ice, a kind of dimpling created by low rounded shadows.

“And that’s not just mounds of ice?” Bilal asked.

“That’s what I thought you’d ask,” Wilton said. “Here is the same area going back over the last month, whenever we could get a clear shot of it.”

No shadows were visible on any of the photographs.

“And here is the same area, this time last year,” Wilton said.

Again, no shadows.

“And Panyoczki confirms that these are tanks.”

“He said he was taken inside one,” Wilton said.

“Okay,” Bilal said. “That’s good enough for me. I’ll take this to ACOG. Good work, Wilton.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wilton said. “But there’s something else, sir.”

Bilal waited without speaking.

“I showed Brogan the photos of the operators on Little Dio,” Wilton said.

“And?”

“She recognised one of them. Able. She knew him from Uluru, sir.”

Bilal’s only reaction was to shut his eyes, a habit of his, Wilton had noticed, when he was considering the implications of things.

“From Uluru?” Bilal asked eventually.

“According to Brogan, Able is Fezerker. So is she,” Wilton said. “Fezerkers aren’t teams of Bzadian commandos, they are humans. That’s why we’ve never been able to catch a Fezerker team.”

Bilal considered that. “If what you’re saying is true, then we have some big problems,” he said. “Firstly, what is really going on out there on the ice? Secondly, what do we do about these Fezerkers? And thirdly …” He stopped, shutting his eyes again. “Thirdly, who put them there? Someone must have pulled strings to get a Fezerker agent onto the island.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure,” Wilton said. “Man, it’s like my brain explodes every time I try to think about it.”

Bilal smiled briefly. “I know the feeling. But the implications of this are staggering. Aliens have penetrated top levels of our command structure.”

Wilton pondered that for a moment. Brogan had said the Fezerker program started before the first ships. But what Bilal had just said implied that it started even further back.

“They only arrived twelve years ago,” Wilton said. “How’d they do that?”

“That’s not quite true,” Bilal said. “They’ve been visiting our planet since the 1950s, possibly even earlier. It is conceivable they were setting up moles, brainwashing humans to their cause and infiltrating the military, even back then.”

“So anyone could be a mole,” Wilton said.

“Trust no one,” Bilal said, echoing the words that Chisnall had said to him.

“No one?” Wilton asked.

“No one,” Bilal said.

“What about you, sir?” Wilton asked.

Bilal smiled. “I guess for now, we’ll have to trust each other. But no one else. I’m going to need someone to do some digging around. Someone I can trust. And for the time being that means you.”

“What kind of digging around?” Wilton asked.

He’d never thought of himself as being an investigator, but it sounded like fun. Like being a private detective. He imagined himself creeping through darkened corridors, sliding through air-conditioning ducts, bugging offices.

“Computer stuff,” Bilal said.

“Oh, okay,” Wilton said.

“I’ll arrange security clearance for you,” Bilal said. “The highest level. I want you to track the chain of command that put a Fezerker on that island. It won’t be obvious; they will have covered their tracks. But if you get the names of those directly involved, and the names of their associates, that will be a starting point.”

“Then what, sir?” Wilton asked.

“Crosscheck those names against other missions. Operation Magnum, for example. Did the Bzadians know we were coming?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Wilton said. “But that mission was top secret.” He stopped, thinking. “Even so, there was a patrol boat right at the entrance to the river. One we weren’t expecting.”

“That could be the clue you need,” Bilal said. “Assume our mole, or moles, did not have access to the truth about Magnum. But perhaps they issued some kind of general warning, just in case. That will eliminate anyone who knew the truth about the operation. Then look at other operations. See what matches up with the chain of command from Little Diomede. If you find anything, let me know.”

“Of course,” Wilton said.

“And this information stays between you and me,” Bilal said. “We don’t want the moles to know we’re on to them.” He rose and made to leave. He was halfway out of the door when he stopped.

“If we survive this winter,” he said, “we might just win this war.”

“Sir?” Wilton asked.

“The one thing that has always tipped battles in the Bzadian’s favour is their air superiority,” Bilal said. “We haven’t been able to compete in the air with their Type Ones and Type Twos. But Boeing are promising delivery of their new F/A XX fighters by June.”

“The scramjets? I thought that program was cancelled,” Wilton said.

“It was delayed,” Bilal said. “But it’s back on track, and they’ve been able to incorporate what we’ve learned from analysing Bzadian planes we’ve shot down. We should have scramjet missiles too. The implications of that are enormous. If we can achieve air superiority, or even air parity, we’d be able to put our carriers back out to sea, instead of skulking in port under heavy SAM cover. We’d be able to start influencing battles again, maybe start taking back some of this planet.”

“But first, we’ve got to survive this winter,” Wilton said.

“Exactly,” Bilal said. “I want you glued to my side from now on. If Panyoczki calls back, I want to know it immediately.”

[MISSION DAY 2, FEBRUARY 17, 2033. 0800 HOURS LOCAL TIME]

[BIG DIOMEDE ISLAND, BERING STRAIT]

They did not bury Emile. That was not possible on Big Diomede in winter. Instead, the women of the village washed his body and wrapped it in a blanket of caribou hide.

Monster stopped them before they sewed the hide closed over Emile’s face. He stood beside the corpse, looking at the face of a young man who had wanted nothing more than to do his bit. To join the Angels and fight Bzadians. He had never even fired his weapon on a battlefield. Yet he was still a hero. Giving his life in an attempt to save others.

There was a calmness to his face in death. A kind of serenity, although Monster couldn’t shake the feeling that any second that calm would be shattered and Emile would spring back to life with that frenetic, irrepressible energy.

Chisnall had come back to life. Monster accepted Wilton’s words without fully understanding them. He had seen his friend surely die. Yet Chisnall was alive. That was all he knew; there had not been time for details.

But it did not ease the pain in his heart. The desire for revenge.

He nodded to one of the women and stepped back while they completed their task.

Then he kneeled beside the body and said brief, inadequate goodbyes, before helping Nukilik carry the body out to a storage hut. It would remain there, frozen, until spring. When the ground thawed, the Inupiat would bury the body along with any of their own dead, if ACOG did not claim it first.

The Inupiat had words of their own, uttered by an old man wearing an ornate cloak. His face was weathered to the point of old leather, with deep crevices lining his cheeks and around his eyes. He wore a battered cowboy hat and his arms were covered with bracelets of bone and rawhide. Around his neck was a long rope necklace tied in intricate knots. Although Monster could not understand his words, there was a power to them that filled the small room.

As soon as the ceremony was finished, Monster took Nukilik by the arm.

“We must hurry,” he said. “Or there will be more young people dead on these icefloes.”

“Patience,” Nukilik said.

“Cannot be patient,” Monster said. “My friends face death or torture from enemy. Already, they may be in Bzadian prison cells.”

“They are not,” Nukilik said. “They are still on the ice.”

“How can you know this?” Monster asked.

“They cannot move on the icefloes in darkness,” Nukilik said. “It is not safe. Not even for demons.”

“You are sure?” Monster asked.

“Your friends are safe for the moment,” Nukilik said.

“Not if ACOG turns the place to mush,” Monster said.

“If that is the will of the gods, then there is nothing you can do about it,” Nukilik said. “But if you want our help, then you must do things our way. The
umialik
, the leader of our village, will not rush impetuously into something that might endanger our people.”

“Of course,” Monster said. “I understand.”

“As I understand your anxiety,” Nukilik said. “Go back to my home and wait. I will call for you soon.”

The Inupiat people called the home an
ivrulik
. Nukilik’s
ivrulik
, like all the others, was mostly underground. Monster crawled down through the tunnel, curved to keep the warmth from escaping, and up through the trapdoor into the main room of the home. There were more tunnels leading off this room to other rooms. A roof of log and sod, held up by whalebone girders, provided insulation and camouflage.

Corazon was waiting for him with a small wooden bowl, full of a gelatinous red substance.

He shook his head.

“It is called
mikigaq
,” Corazon said. “Try some.”

“I don’t have time for eat,” he said.

Not when Price was chained to the interior of a Bzadian tank and ACOG was about to blow the place sky-high. And the others too. He tried to think of the others, but the image that he couldn’t shake was of Price, her hands cuffed to her neck, a Bzadian gun in her face.

“You must eat,” Corazon said. “When your body shivers, it burns energy. The energy must be replaced.”

Monster considered that, then nodded. She was right. He would need his energy if he was to try to rescue the others.

The food was soft and sweet. “What is it?” Monster asked.

“Fermented whale meat,” Corazon said. “That does not put you off?”

“I eat anything.” Monster laughed.

She smiled. “Not quite a burger and fries, I know.”

“You have burgers and fries?” Monster asked, looking around at the bare walls.

Corazon shook her head. “No. Not here. But I grew up in Seattle.”

“Really?”

“I thought that might surprise you.”

“And Nukilik?” Monster asked.

“He grew up here,” she said. “He came to live with us as a teenager.”

“But now you live here,” Monster said.

“Yes. After we married, we returned. These are our ancestral homelands.”

“You must love him a lot to come back here,” Monster said.

“You have it backwards,” she said. “It was me who persuaded him to return home. I had always felt this place calling to me. My parents didn’t approve.”

“You chose to live here?” Monster asked, looking around again.

“As strange as that must seem to you, yes,” she said.

“You must find it cold here,” Monster said.

“At first,” she said. “But now it seems normal.”

“Normal?” Monster smiled. “When I first met you, you were shivering almost as badly as me.”

She looked away, a little embarrassed. Monster was not sure why.

“Soon you will meet the others,” she said. “Can I give you some words of advice?”

“Please,” Monster said.

“You will find the conversation a little … unusual,” she said.

“Unusual how?” Monster asked.

“We are a quiet people and much is said without words,” she said. “You must observe carefully. If I widen my eyes, or raise my eyebrows, I am agreeing with you. If I wrinkle my nose, that means no. If I am silent, it may be because my spirit is communicating with yours.”

The trapdoor opened and Nukilik entered.

“Come,” he said. “The others await.”

What appeared to be a small hill was the
qargi
, a communal meeting place. Monster followed Nukilik inside.