Cold War - Jerome Preisler [116]
It wasn’t that he was muddled about the events that had brought him to this point. Although his wounds had left him slack and disoriented, he could have recounted what happened in something very close to a coherent, sequential order. There wasn’t that much to it . . . he’d sped toward the water-treatment dome with Rice’s squad, and the men who’d set fire to it had rushed to meet them, and the shooting had started, and he’d gotten in the way of a burst of bullets.
Easy to follow.
The problem for him was believing it was all real as opposed to being part of some grotesquely implausible nightmare.
He didn’t understand why this was so. At thirty-two years old, Corben had already taken his disproportionate share of hard knocks. In fact, adversity had fairly well cleaned up on him—his daughter Kim succumbing to childhood leukemia when she was just five years old, the breakup of his marriage afterward, and then, months before he’d retired from his U.S. Naval EOD command and hitched up for a civilian post with UpLink on the ice, losing three of his best friends and teammates to an accidental chopper crash as they were returning home from land-mine-disposal operations in Sierra Leone, a humanitarian United Nations effort that had been a trip to the beach until their MH-47 Chinook troop transport went down due to unexplained engine failure.
While experience had taught Corben the futility of seeking reasons for the calamities that far too often slammed people on their heads, he’d gone on looking for them just the same. Maybe because bad luck didn’t seem a good enough explanation for him, or mostly didn’t, and he’d needed something else—if not necessarily better—to carry him through his days and nights.
Sprawled deep in snow, choking on his own blood, blown from his bike like a shooting-gallery duck, Corben desperately wanted to know how any of what had happened could have happened. How he could be about to perish from an act of brutal aggression here in Antarctica. Here. The one place where he’d envisioned finding an outer calm and stillness that might somehow penetrate his troubled heart, and where he was instead leaking blood from a chestful of bullet holes.
Figuring there probably wasn’t a chance he’d get his reasons even with another hundred years tacked onto his life, Corben still wanted more damned time to hunt them out . . . and now suddenly wondered with a kind of dazed, stubborn truculence if he had the giddyup to keep his pursuit going maybe, maybe just a little while longer.
Blood slicking his trigger-finger mitten shells, Corben tried to raise himself on his elbows and forearms, pushed his chest up out of the snow a few inches, then sank into it again—but not before managing to turn over onto his back. He expelled thick clots of blood, snow, and snot from his nose and mouth, feeling glassy particles of flying snow drill into the weave of his balaclava as they cascaded relentlessly down from the cloud sheet. You gave and you got, he supposed.
He could hear bikes swerving around him, see sparkles of gunfire at the corners of his eyes, see smoke puffing up into the turbulent sky overhead, and knew the white-suited men who’d come out of the storm like mechanized ghosts were continuing to hold Rice and the others off from the dome. The longer they hindered the squad’s entry, succeeded in keeping their arson fire burning, the less of the plant’s equipment would be salvageable.
Corben rasped in a miserable breath of cold air and turned his head from side to side, trying to locate his fallen VVRS. The pressurized red cylinders of fire-extinguishant and oxygen he’d been lugging on his back rig were bedded together in snow over to his left. Fine and dandy. But what about the weapon? Unable to see it, he reached out his arms, began probing the snow around him with tremulous hands, thinking it might have gotten hidden somewhere under the surface.
It was then that Corben became aware of an engine sound in the gale—the unmistakable