‘Strength five,’ reported Captain Linnett. ‘We are twelve on skis down here; can you see us?’
‘Smile nicely and I’ll take your picture,’ said the infra-red operator four miles above them.
‘Comedy comes later,’ said Linnett. ‘About three miles due north of us is a fugitive. Single man, heading north on skis. Confirm?’
There was a pause, a long pause.
‘Negative. No such image,’ said the voice in the sky.
‘There must be,’ argued Linnett. ‘He is up ahead of us somewhere.’
The last of the maple and tamarack was well behind them. They emerged from the forest to a bare scree, always climbing north, and the snow fell straight on them without being filtered by branches. Way behind in the darkness stood Lake Mountain and Monument Peak. His men were looking like spectral figures, white zombies in a white landscape. If he was having trouble, so was the Afghan. There was only one explanation for the no-image scenario: the Afghan had taken shelter in a cave or snow hole. The overhang would mask the heat escape. So he was closing on the fugitive. The skis were running easily across the shoulder of the mountain and there was more forest up ahead.
The Spectre fixed Linnett’s position to the yard. Twelve miles to the Canadian border. Five hours to dawn or what passed for dawn in this land of snow, peaks, rocks and trees.
Linnett gave it another hour. The Spectre circled and watched but saw nothing to report.
‘Check again,’ asked Captain Linnett. He was beginning to think something had gone wrong. Had the Afghan died up here? Possible, and that would explain the absence of heat signature. Crouching in a cave? Possible too, but he would die in there or come out and run. And then . . .
Izmat Khan, urging the feisty but tired horse off the scree and into the forest, had actually lengthened his lead. The compass told him he was still going north, the angle of the horse beneath him that he was climbing.
‘I am scanning an arc subtending ninety degrees with you at the point,’ said the imager-operator. ‘Right up to the border. In that arc I can see eight animals. Four deer, two black bear that are very faint because they are hibernating in deep cover, what looks like a marauding mountain lion and a single moose ambling north. About four miles ahead of you.’
The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The horse was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onwards, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.
‘Sir,’ said one of the engineer sergeants, ‘I’m from Minnesota.’
‘Save your problems for the chaplain,’ snapped Linnett.
‘What I mean, sir,’ said the snow-caked face beside him, ‘is that moose do not move up into the mountains in weather like this. They come down to the valley to forage for lichen. It cannot be a moose.’
Linnett called a halt. It was welcome. He stared at the falling snow ahead. He had not the faintest idea how the man had done it. Another isolated cabin, maybe, with an over-wintering idiot with a stable. Somehow the Afghan had got himself a horse and was riding away from him.
Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The cougar was old, a bit slow for deer, but cunning and very hungry. It came down from a ledge between two trees, and the pony would have smelled it but for its own exhaustion.
The first the Afghan knew, something fast and tawny had hit the horse and it was going down sideways. The rider had time to grab Wilson’s rifle from the sleeve alongside the pommel and go backwards over the rump. He landed, turned, aimed and fired.
He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the horse and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped around the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. It was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The horse crumpled, lying half across the body of the cougar. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the cougar were under the horse.
He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards from him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it, but it masked his heat-source.
‘Take out the moose,’ said Captain Linnett. ‘I think it’s a horse with the fugitive on it.’
The operator studied his image again.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.’
The ‘destroy’ section of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the M102 105-mm howitzer which is so powerful that to use it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.
Next down comes the 40-mm Bofors cannon, derived, long ago, from the Swedish anti-aircraft weapon, a fast repeater with enough muscle to rip buildings or tanks to fragments. The Spectre crew, told their target was a man on a horse, chose the Gau-12/U Gatling gun. This horror fires 1,800 rounds per minute and each round is a 25-mm (one-inch diameter) slug, a single one of which will pull a human body apart. So intense is the fire of the rotating five-barrel gun that if used on a football pitch for thirty seconds nothing much bigger than a dormouse will be left alive. And the mouse will die of shock.
The maximum altitude for the gun is twelve thousand feet so in the circling turn the Spectre dropped to ten thousand, locked on and fired for ten seconds, loosing off three hundred rounds at the body of the horse in the forest.
‘There’s nothing left,’ remarked the imager-operator. ‘Man and beast, both gone.’
‘Thank you, Echo Foxtrot,’ said Linnett. ‘We’ll take over now.’ The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB.
The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the horse. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur.