Chapter 43 - Extraction at Zero Kelvin
The descent down the north face of the Schwarzhorn was an exercise in controlled suicide.
The two snowmobiles tore across the frozen crust at sixty miles per hour, their tracks throwing roostertails of powdered ice thirty feet into the howling gale. Behind them, the searchlights of the lead Eurocopter slashed through the dark, illuminating the churning snow just yards behind Eli’s rear bumper.
A line of 20mm cannon fire walked across the ice shelf, erupting in geysers of frozen granite and shattered permafrost. The deafening thud of the rotary cannon tore through the valley, echoing off the vertical rock walls like thunder trapped in an iron box.
"They’re boxing us toward the crevasse!" Eli’s voice crackled through the short-range bone-conduction radio inside John’s ear.
"Keep your throttle pinned!" John commanded. He steered his machine one-handed, his left hand unhooking an M79 compact grenade launcher from the saddle scabbard.
Ahead, the terrain dropped away into a yawning abyss—a massive, ancient glacial crack spanning sixty feet of open air, dropping a thousand feet into the blue ice below. The marked trail skirted the edge, but the second attack helicopter was already banking around the western spur, setting up an intercept vector with its nose-mounted chain gun spinning up.
"John, we don't have the clearance for the switchback!" Eli shouted.
"We aren't taking the switchback," John replied, his voice terrifyingly calm. "On my mark, break hard right into the wind drift!"
"Are you insane? That's an avalanche chute!"
"Mark!"
Eli trusted the man who had pulled him out of the burning wreckage of a CH-47 in the Helmand valley without hesitation. He slammed his left ski into the crust and wrenched the handlebars, drifting his snowmobile laterally across the lip of the slope. John did the same, but as his machine skidded sideways, he stood on the running boards, elevated the compact launcher, and fired into the overhanging cornice of ice three hundred feet above the pursuing gunship.
The 40mm high-explosive round detonated with a sharp, concussive crack against the root of the hanging serac.
For half a second, there was silence. Then, with the groan of an awakening titan, ten thousand tons of blue-black glacial ice detached from the cliff face.
The downdraft of the helicopter’s rotors accelerated its own doom. The avalanche fell not as powder, but as a solid wall of fractured stone and compressed ice. The lead Eurocopter was instantly swallowed, its main rotor shattering on contact with a house-sized block of ice, the aircraft collapsing out of the sky in a blinding fireball that was instantly smothered by the roaring cascade.
The second helicopter banked violently away, its pilot fighting the violent turbulence of the falling mass, but the sheer volume of displaced air blew the tail rotor sideways into the vertical granite cliff. The tail boom sheared off with an ear-splitting shriek of tearing aluminum, and the gunship spiraled out of control, disappearing into the white abyss of the crevasse below.
John and Eli rode the shockwave out onto the lower flats, the snowmobiles skimming across the frozen crust until the roar of the mountain slowly died behind them, swallowed by the eternal silence of the Alpine winter.
At the edge of a snowbound logging road two miles down the valley, the darkened fuselage of a modified Pilatus PC-12 turboprop sat waiting, its engine whining on low idle, skis fitted to its landing gear.
The cargo door swung open. A weathered face framed by a flight helmet peered out. "You boys cutting it a little close for cross-country skiing?"
John drove his machine directly into the belly of the aircraft, killed the engine, and stepped off before the treads had even ceased spinning. He stripped off his frozen balaclava, revealing the hard, angular lines of his face, his jaw set like an anvil.
"Set course for Virginia," John ordered the pilot, heading straight for the weapons bench bolted to the aircraft's bulkhead. "We have eight hours before their domestic teams hit the county lines."
Eli climbed aboard, securing the rear door as the turboprop spooled up, its skis slicing through the virgin snow and lifting smoothly into the turbulent cloud cover.
"John," Eli said, setting his helmet on the jump seat, looking at the former team leader whose life had been violently pulled back from peace. "The domestic cell... Vance has local law enforcement and federal contractors in his pocket. If we hit that shipping hub, there’s no coming back from this. You won't be able to coach his middle school matches anymore. You won't be the quiet guy at the hardware store."
John looked at the rifle he was already field-stripping, his fingers moving with flawless, mechanical precision.
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"The moment that kid kicked my son in the ribs while he was pinned to the mat," John said quietly, "that life was already over. We finish it."
***
