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“Mark just started bleeding. Both of them have headaches.”
“Fuck.”
“Sergey’s… well, you can imagine.”
He couldn’t simply imagine. Heknew. He knew how it felt to lose the one person you loved more than anything else in the world. “What now?”
“We might have a plan to get them off that station. But weneedLazarus. We need to know what this virus is. We’re working in the dark. We can’t even begin to guess at its genetic code, and without that, no one can work on a treatment. Where are you?”
“Were tracking Zeytsev. He’s going north. He and Lazarus are connected, I know it. That satellite destroying our Milstar birds was just a ruse to get NASA up in orbit to collect the virus for him and bring it back to Earth. If we get Zeytsev, he can lead us to Lazarus.”
“If you can get him alive, we might have a chance at saving Sasha and Mark.” Jack had lowered his voice and spoken to Ethan quietly, so no one could overhear on his end. “I saw some files in Elizabeth’s office. Photos of the early human experiments they did at Uchami. Everyone was in full protective gear except for Lazarus. He only wore a mask and goggles. Why wouldn’t someone be overly concerned about catching the virus?”
“He’s immune.”
“I think so. And to have any chance of saving our people, we have to be able to cure that virus. We need Lazarus. Having some kind of treatment is the only way Elizabeth will let them come back to Earth.”
“I’ll bring him in.”
“Be careful, love.”
“You too. You’re in the vipers’ nest. The last time we were in Russia with Sergey, there was a coup.”
“Maybe I’m his bad-luck charm.”
Four hours later, as dawn spilled frigid, fractured light over the Arctic, Ethan and his team were soaring into the canyon carved down the center of Bolshevik Island. Wide enough for the chopper, it plunged beneath them, tens of thousands of years of glaciers and ice melt flowing south into Siberia. At the bottom of the ravine, turquoise ice reflected the sunlight, winking up at them in flashes of gold and emerald and sapphire. He’d never seen colors as pure as in the Arctic, from above or beneath the ice cap.
“There. Do you see?” Kilaqqi pointed across the dull brown earth and wind-eroded rock as they banked a hard right down the canyon.
An Antonov turboprop sat parked at the end of a stretch of barren earth, an improvised runway with ice creeping in at the edges.
Ethan checked the tail number. “It’s the one from Yamantau. This is the end of the Antonov’s range. It must have come in on fumes.”
Welby peered through his binoculars. “It’s empty. Where did the pilot go?”
Ethan spotted it first. “Ahead, where the canyon empties.”
The end of the canyon opened to a scattering of rocks and fragmented icebergs, as if a hammer had come down on the land. The black waters of the Laptev Sea and the Arctic Ocean lapped at the shore.
And, mired in the center of the maze, her hull twisted by the glacier embracing Bolshevik Island, was a decrepit Soviet Grisha-class corvette.
Visions of K-27 sparked in Ethan’s mind like flares. He reached for his neck. Sometimes he still felt the chain choking him, still heard Madigan’s voice crying out for Jack and gloating over how he was slowly killing Ethan.
“Ethan?” Welby leaned into him. He gazed at Ethan, brow furrowed, eyes dark with concern.
“I’m all right.” He shifted, kneeling at the edge of the cargo hold to survey the listing warship. A clear trail of footprints led from the Antonov to the finger of ice and the corvette. “Boot prints. Someone made their way from the plane. Just the one, it looks like.”
“Then this is where we go in,” Welby said.
They came down on the other side of an outcropping, out of sight. Ethan took point. They moved fast, ducking into the wind as they moved from scant cover to cover. On the flat plain of ice and rock, they were almost entirely exposed.
Ethan would have preferred to rappel onto the corvette, swing above the warship and subdue whoever was on board through shock and fear. But he couldn’t organize those kinds of operations on his own anymore, and he doubted Sergey would be able to drum up the Russian soldiers for that sort of mission. Not now.
He didn’t have overwhelming force, but he had four great men and the element of surprise.
Heads up, they wound their way down the ice pack to the rusted-out hull. Ethan flattened himself against the frozen metal. A sheen of ice formed and slid away with each wet slap of the ocean against the corvette’s hull. Steel creaked. Wind whistled through the hollow captain's bridge on the top deck. Every window was shattered, panes long gone. Ragged holes marred the foredeck as if rockets had slammed through her. Wispy fog swirled around them as if catching the mist and humidity of the ocean for a moment before the wind whipped it away.
He used hand signals, ordering Pete and Blake to swing wide and come up from the stern and Welby to climb up and cover the bow. He and Kilaqqi slid down to midship. “Why are you doing this?” Ethan whispered. “Why come with us? Is this about Lazarus? You guys trying to find him and bring him back to that cabin? Or hold him for the murder of your people?”
