Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

“At least they hit something,” he said to himself.

He moved to the body in the snow and rolled it over. To his surprise, a mop of blond hair spilled out from under the white hood of the parka.

Janko pulled the goggles from the woman’s face. He recognized her. She was the woman he’d left tied up beside the explosives in the lab at the flooded mine.

“So you survived,” he muttered.

The radio crackled. “Janko, this is unit two.”

Janko lifted the portable radio to his mouth. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve made it to the bottom of the ridge. Unit three is demolished. The driver and the gunner are both dead. No way to get it back up. Want us to burn it?”

“No,” Janko said. “We don’t need to draw any more attention to ourselves. The blizzard will dump a foot of snow in the next twelve hours. That will keep it out of sight.”

“And the men?”

“Get them out,” he said. “I want all the bodies off this glacier. Ours and theirs.”

A double click told Janko his subordinate understood and would comply. Janko then switched channels and began a new transmission.

“Thero, this is Janko,” he said. “Do you read?”

“Go ahead,” Thero’s raspy voice replied.

“We’re done out here.”

“Did you get them all?”

“All the snowmobiles have been accounted for,” Janko said. “We lost two hovercraft in the process.”

“Who are they?” Thero asked tersely.

“Australians, I think,” Janko said. “I recognize one of the survivors. A blond woman who was at the station in the outback when the ASIO tried to raid it.”

Silence for a moment, and then: “Is she alive?”

“Affirmative. We have two male captives as well. The rest are dead.”

“Bring them in,” Thero said. “I want to interrogate them. We need to know if they’re alone or not.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Janko said.

He clipped the radio back onto his belt, scooped the woman up, and threw her over his shoulder.

Seconds later, he’d dumped her in the cargo bay of the hovercraft and was back in the cockpit, powering up the engines once again. As the sleek machine rose up off the ground, Janko eased it forward and then turned around only twenty yards from where Kurt lay.

The deep snow he’d become buried in masked Kurt’s infrared signature, while his white camouflage, the failing light, and the continuing blizzard made him all but invisible to the naked eye. As a result, neither Janko nor his gunner saw Kurt as they trundled off into the graying horizon.

THIRTY-EIGHT

After a twelve-hour shift of breaking rocks and loading the rubble onto the endlessly moving conveyor belt, Patrick Devlin felt as if he’d been beaten with a club, run over by a truck, and forced to breathe in smoke all day.

He was surprised by the grace of a hot shower, even if it was a communal one. The water at his feet was dark sludge from the dust covering his body. A hearty dinner of seal meat and some kind of wild bird surprised him further, but then those things were in abundance on the island, and starving workers slowed down the production line.

After dinner, he was led to a room carved out of the rock. Bunks four high were spaced along two of the walls. Most of them were empty.

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