Tomahawk (36 page)

All this time, he had to whiz. Even the thought of hauling it out here made him shiver. But finally, he couldn't put it off. He bent over in the lee of some stunted bushes and stripped off his mitten shell. Get
this
over with

quick…. Shielding himself with his woollen inner glove,

he nursed out a hasty yellow stream. The urine snapped as it hit air, turning to ice before it reached the snow.

When he looked up, Sullivan was nowhere in sight. He buttoned hastily, pulled his parka down, and floundered around the bushes after him.

The rising wind drove frigid ice needles into his eyes. Dark coming on, too. Bent nearly double, he tried to discern the airman's tracks. It was no use; the surface was a boil of motion. Head down, he plodded ahead. The snow kept giving way under him, making him lurch and stagger beneath the plunging, crackling trees.

“Sullivan,” he yelled. Then cupped his gloves around his mouth. “Sullivan!”

A yell came back, faint against the wind. He thought it came from out ahead, and plowed toward it.

The wind roared in his ears and flung handfuls of snow into his eyes. His breath was labored under the mask; he was sucking in air far below freezing. One boot caught a branch or stone beneath the snow and he pitched forward, full length, and came to a gentle rest.

Rest… forget it! He levered himself upright again, but now he couldn't see at all. The whole world was white
around him, a milling maelstrom. He could tell only one direction: down, and that only because his feet were rooted beneath a surface half snow and half air.

Cupping his hands again, he howled as hard as he could into the unhearing wind.

When he finally accepted that Sullivan was gone, he went to his knees in the snow and tried to calm down. Tried to think. He wasn't lost. He had a back bearing to the Hummer. He remembered how the slope went. Even in the storm, he should be able to guide in on the headlights once he got close.

The wisest thing was probably to start back now. Forget the missile. Just head back.

On the other hand, he'd told Sullivan they'd look independently if they got separated. What if he'd already found it, was there waiting for him?

He was sure now the documentation on the recovery package had mentioned the color orange. The dorsal stripe was orange, so it made sense the chute would be the same high-vis color. He hadn't come all the way out here to turn back fifty meters short. If he could recover it, they could find out what had gone kerflooey—not just with this round but with a lot of others, too.

Or was he just being stubborn, maybe even fatally stubborn? Because cringing beneath a Canadian blizzard, alone, already half-frozen, he was beginning to suspect Thompson was right and he'd been far too casual about this. If he made the wrong decision, he could die out here. They could
both
die out here.

Finally, reminding himself he still had the radio, he chain-hoisted himself to his feet again. Corrected to the left—he had the feeling Sullivan had been leading them too far east—and floundered on. He wished he had snow-shoes. Then he could walk on top of this stuff instead of practically tunneling through it.

He could have been wading now through milk instead of air. “Whiteout,” they'd called it in the Arctic Sea. The trees were gray ghosts, invisible four feet away. He slogged grimly on, checking the compass every few steps. Any darker and he'd need the flashlight to read it. He
thought again about the radio, and suddenly realized he should be able to get Sullivan on it. He felt for it in his parka pocket.

Empty.

With a sick feeling, he remembered sprawling facedown in the snow, lying there, then getting up reluctantly. That was when it must have fallen out. And where was that? He turned slowly, looking back into an impenetrable white furnace.

He was trekking slowly along beneath dwarfed long-needle pines. They cut the snow, or maybe the storm had lifted its skirts again. But on and off for some time now, he'd heard something that didn't belong. A sound within, but not of, the forest. A
crack
…
rustle
…
crack
through the continuous heavy roar of the wind. It sounded like a slack jib flogging itself apart in a squall.

Crack
…
flap.
There it was again. Not far away, and somewhere above him. He oriented and waded a few more steps in the growing dark, then slammed his shin hard and fell over onto it, half-buried in the snow.

The missile lay nose-down, one stubby, crumpled wing sticking up, the other either sheared off or buried deep. He grinned under the mask. Shit, here it was, and a good thing he hadn't waited. Without the bright nylon that fought desperately in the trees, there would be no way to see it. And it wouldn't be there much longer. Already several chute cords danced madly among the branches, torn free from the canopy.

He'd told the bastards he'd find it, and he had.

Squatting, he bulldozed snow and broken needles off with his mittens, uncovering it to the nose. He plunged his arm in to the shoulder and felt underneath it, like a dairy farmer checking a cow's udder. The air scoop was deployed, locked down.

Interesting. He worked his way toward the tail, giving it a quick checkout before he headed back. His thumb slammed into the sharp edge of a fin. If his hand hadn't been numb, that might have hurt. Tail assembly, bent and

damaged…. He slid all the way aft and plunged his

gloves into the liquid made of snow and air and darkness.

Aha. No booster.

T207 had tried to transition to flight. Scoop out, wings out, tailfin deployed. Maybe she'd even tried to start her engine.

But she hadn't flown. Struggling against whatever had gone wrong, the dying missile—could a mechanism feel anguish, despair?—had glided down helplessly from the sky, until the guidance system resigned itself and popped the chute.

All that, he understood.

But then what was that pitch-back on takeoff? And why had the missile, obviously in the transition envelope—because otherwise it wouldn't have popped wings and scoop—failed at last to make that final metamorphosis from rocket to bird?

Were the two failure events separate? Sequential? Or were they related in some other, more subtle way?

Do the detective work later, he told himself. Get back now, before it's too dark to see. You know where it is close enough they can get the recovery guys out here two, three days from now, when this blows over.

He went back to the main fuselage, looking for a convenient part to detach. Nothing offered, so he grabbed the damaged wing. He put his weight on the torn section at the edge. It gave, and he bent it back and forth a few times till finally the stress-weakened, cold-weakened aluminum tip snapped off in his hand. He stuffed it into the pack. Just in case it occurred to somebody to doubt he'd really found it. Yeah, he could see that son of a bitch Decker sniggering now.

When he straightened, he noticed the sky had grown black above the stubby, wind-bent treetops. The elation of discovery flicked away. If he dicked up getting back, if he couldn't find the Hummer, he'd freeze out here.

The storm closed down again then, so hard he cowered against the missile. The wind slashed and gusted, tearing at his parka. The chute thundered above his head like a runaway mainsail during a Cape Horn passage.

And sometime in there, crouched against the hard length of inert metal, with the parachute ripping itself apart over his head, the trees bowing and creaking, and
the writhing sky close and lightless, he understood he wasn't going to get back to the flight tonight. He wasn't going to get back to the road. He wasn't even going to get back to the Hummer. Not in the dark, not in the storm that stood up now and lashed the cowering, ice-shrouded trees till they squeaked and cried like the timbers of a schooner in a storm. The wind screamed through their branches with a pitch he'd heard only once before, in the heart of a hurricane. He couldn't see anything now, couldn't see the compass or even—hell, he couldn't even see the
flashlight
when he held it out, the snow was that

thick. Shit, shit.What had happened to Sullivan? He both feared and hoped that the airman had done the smart thing, turned back when they lost each other, gone back to the vehicle before the storm and the night really clamped down.

Whatever he'd done, Dan couldn't help him now. Nor could Sullivan help him.

He was on his own.

He understood then, from the dead feeling in his feet, the wooden numbness of his hands and face, that what he was most likely to do out here tonight was die. Ahead of him stretched sixteen hours of darkness. Darkness and cold beyond anything he'd ever expected to face, alone and unprotected. A survival situation he wasn't trained for, equipped for, ready for at all.

He shook himself out of the drowsy contemplation of danger. Before all, he had to get out of this wind. Ducking, he dug clumsily beneath the long cylinder of the fuselage. He burrowed blindly, head turtle-tucked, smashing his way through the crust with his fists and scooping out the powder beneath with both hands. He panted as he dug, and the fear warmed him. But he knew it was a dangerous warmth, and one that would soon pass.

This could very well be the last night of his life.

He shook himself awake in the dark, realizing he'd nodded off. But he couldn't, not here. If he fell asleep, he'd never wake up.

He opened his eyes and strained them around, flicking
the flashlight on for just a moment to check the integrity of his defenses.

He lay curled like a dog, shuddering in a snow-walled hole no bigger than his folded body. Above him was the smooth polish of the missile's outer skin. A ragged scratch in the paint showed where it had hit one of the trees on the way down. Part of the dorsal stripe showed at the edge.

The rest of the hole was snow, just snow. Powdery and dry, it had collapsed around him even as he dug, so that now he lay less in shelter than at the bottom of a shallow grave. Above him he looked up and out into the merciless darkness of the storm.

Blizzard. Now he understood what it meant, listening to the ceaseless roar, the tormented creak and sway of the trees. The slap and crack of the chute had stopped hours ago. It was gone, ripped into shreds by the unimaginable fury of the wind. At sea, a storm like this would raise waves thirty feet high, put an unwary destroyer on her beam ends.

But at sea, he wouldn't be alone, abandoned, buried alive, without hope of heat or rescue. Digging had warmed him, for a little while. But he was losing what little heat he had. No matter how his muscles tensed and shuddered, it was seeping away, leaking away into the frigid emptiness above him.

Blinking sleepily, fighting the encroaching lassitude, he dug slowly into the pack and came up with a granola bar. He gnawed it slowly in the dark. It was frozen hard as concrete, and he had to suck on it for a long time before the crystalline ice released sweetness. It tasted strange. Like gasoline. When he checked his watch, the luminous hands told him it was only 1905.

Fourteen more hours till the light returned.

He'd thought at first he might make it through huddled in his hole, balled like a sleeping bear. Dry snow was supposed to be a good insulator. And he was shuddering, putting out heat. The trouble was that he couldn't keep the air his body warmed at such an exorbitant price. The dark wind, tearing past the open top of his hole, seized it
instantly, replacing it with more minus-forty air. The missile was a partial roof, but only partial.

He could feel himself freezing to death, and it wasn't as pleasant and comfortable as they said. It was painful and frightening, and as he lay wadded within his parka, he understood he couldn't stay like this much longer. If he did, if and when they found the missile at last, they'd find him curled beneath it, eyes glassy and frozen like two party cubes.

He should have started back even though it was dark. But hell, he might have gotten just as lost by now anyway. If he had to be lost, it was better to be lost with the missile. Wasn't it?

Or did it matter? What did he expect, a posthumous decoration? This was pure stupidity. And that's exactly what they'd think, whoever dug him out and lugged him, curled like a frozen shrimp, toward the helo or snowmobile or whatever they'd use to get him out of there.

Assuming they found him and the missile at all. They could be here till spring. By then, he'd be nothing but a mass of blackfly maggots…. Nice thought, Dan.

He had to get some wood, twigs, or he wasn't going to make it. There was a lighter in his pack. All he needed was something to burn.

He shook off the dreams and battered his fists against his face. It was like hammering wood with iron.

He lunged stiffly out of the hole and clawed his way up into the wind, into a roaring blackness that instantly knocked him down, smothered him, buried him. He strained with open mouth behind the mask, and finally, jackknifed into the snow, mittens crimped like icy copper around his lips, succeeded in inhaling a lungful of searing

air. His throat closed…. Couldn't breathe.He jerked the mask to one side and found that although his whole face was hard and numb now, he could get a little air from a pocket beneath the mask. If he breathed out into the pocket, the air he got back was warmed just enough not to freeze his throat.

He couldn't reach the trees. Couldn't get wood to burn. He couldn't even stand upright.

He crawled back toward where he thought the missile
lay, and when his groping hands found nothing but powder and air, he experienced a moment of as pure and complete a terror as he'd ever felt in his life. A sudden panic strength thrust him forward, boots kicking in the snow, and his head slammed into something hard. If he hadn't had the hood on, he'd have knocked himself out. But as he sank and scrabbled back beneath his inadequate shelter, he felt a drag on his right arm. He pushed the mask up as he regained his hole, and put his lips to it, about the only part of his body that retained any feeling at all.