Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [77]
Did it ever stop snowing in this godforsaken place?
He was heading back to the interior of the installation when his earpiece crackled and he recognized Baxter’s deep, gravelly voice asking for him.
“Jackson here,” he replied, walking more quickly toward the interior hatch.
“I’ve got a signal from Falco, sir,” the electrician’s mate reported. “It’s faint, but I’m picking it up on the installation’s radio set. It’s a lot more powerful than our portable units.”
“What’s he saying?” asked the LT.
“No verbal message, sir. Just a standard Mayday broadcast. Been going for at least ten minutes, it sounds like.”
Jackson felt a stab of dismay. His men were in trouble, and he wasn’t with them. “Location?” he asked tersely.
”About two klicks from here, back up that canyon we came down, sir. Shit! The signal just cut out.”
“Keep trying to raise him!” the SEALS CO barked. He turned around, looked at the looming gap of the blasted hatch and knew there was really only one option, whether or not Falco or his partner came back on the air.
“Now hear this, SEALS,” he declared over his comlink. “Our Teammates are out in that storm. We’re going to go bring them in from the cold.”
Sixteen: Assault from the Rear
The preparations for the rescue op took only a few minutes. Jackson would leave Sanders in charge of a small detachment holding the installation, including Baxter, who was to continue to mine whatever data he could from the Eluoi control room. Robinson and the still bruised and shaken Schroeder also would stay behind. All in all, the LT would take a party of eight men into the cold canyon of the ice moon.
The expedition was heading for the gaping hatch to the outside when Jackson was halted by another call from Baxter. “Sir, if you can come up here for a second, I can show you something that might speed you up some.”
Biting back a curse of frustration, the LT sprang up the steps to the command post, taking the stairs two or three at a time. He was glad that he had done so as soon as he saw the new schematic Baxter had raised on the screen.
“This is an access tunnel, about eight hundred meters long, sir,” the electrician’s mate reported. Jackson could see the passageway extending straight as an arrow toward the ridge where Falco and LaRue had been situated. “You should find it a lot faster going than if you have to wade through two meters of snow.”
“Right, good work,” Jackson said. “We reach it on the bottom level, it looks like.” He didn’t voice the other thought that immediately had popped into his head: The Eluoi could have used the tunnel to send a party that would have come out practically under the fire team’s noses. He took heart from the fact that Falco had broadcast an SOS: At least they hadn’t been taken out by the first counterattack. But there was no time to waste.
A minute later the lieutenant and the seven additional SEALS of the rescue party found the access hatch to the tunnel, which was not far from the reactor room where they first had burst into the installation. The corridor was wide and smooth, excavated directly from the bedrock of the ice moon, and they jogged along it in their pressure suits. In mere minutes they reached the end, where a ladder led up to an escape vent. The hatch there was still open, as proved by the drift of snow that had collected at the terminus of the tunnel. Wasting no time, the Team, with the two scouts in the lead, scrambled up the ladder and out into the frigid landscape of Arcton V’s ice moon.
Marannis immediately started for the ridge where the shooter pair had set up for their diversion. The scout was virtually invisible as his ghillie cloak matched the color of the snow to perfection, even swirling and shifting in its degree of whiteness as the flurries waxed and waned behind him. He made good time because a considerable trough remained in the snow from a previous sortie, confirming Jackson’s fear that the Eluoi had come up through