Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

The sea ice was shredded by the blasts in a continuing rush of mini-eruptions that turned the air into a whirling boil of snow. More rockets came in what seemed to be an unending assault. Juan felt the odd tugging as bits of shrapnel passed through his bulky snowsuit, and he had his head thrust to the side when one careened off his helmet’s tough plastic shell.

That same moment of impact, Yuri gave a choking, wet gasp and slumped heavily against Cabrillo’s back.

Juan knew his friend had been hit but had no idea how badly. The last of the missiles were exploding in their wake as they motored out of the Kill Box. He reached a hand behind him, feeling along Borodin’s side, and when he brought his hand back, the white nylon appeared black with blood. With the chopper down, he flicked on the Lynx’s headlight. In its glow, he looked more carefully at his hand. The blood was loaded with tiny bursting bubbles, like a thick cherry soda.

Borodin had been lung-shot.

They had a mile to go.

“Max, do you copy?”

“We’re right here. Tell me you weren’t anywhere near those rockets.”

“Smack-dab in the middle of them. Yuri’s hit in the lungs and is hemorrhaging badly. Get Julia down to the boat garage.” Julia Huxley, a Navy-trained physician, was the Oregon’s chief medical officer.

“You still want to transfer to the RHIB?” Max asked.

“No time. Move the ship as close as you can to the edge of the ice.”

“That’s gonna leave a gap of about two hundred feet.”

Juan didn’t hesitate in his reply, “No problem.” Secretly he thought, Big problem.

The wind had eroded the ice into a ridge that ran eastward in a long arcing curl, as if one of the rolling breakers off Waikiki had been flash-frozen. Juan took the Lynx into it, the throttle cranked until his wrist ached. He could feel Yuri’s weight shift down as the machine climbed the ice chute and then was straightened again by the centripetal force of their speed. They dropped out of the flume at its end. The ice became as rough as corrugated steel, forcing Juan to slow fractionally. Every bump and jostle wracked his body like he was being worked over by a prizefighter. He hoped that Borodin had lost consciousness if only to spare him further pain.

He shot the Lynx between two icy hummocks, around a third, and there before him, so tantalizingly close, lay the Oregon, every light ablaze so that she looked as cheerful and festive as a cruise ship. Wisps of sea smoke coiled up from the water trapped between the ship and the ice.

From this low vantage he couldn’t see that Max was using the ship’s bow and stern thrusters to edge the 550-foot vessel closer to the ice sheet, but he knew his old friend was doing everything he could to close the gap.

Terrain be damned, Juan pushed the snow machine until its motor screamed in protest and a rooster tail of ice particles burst from under the studded tread. It looked like they were roaring out of a fogbank of their own creation. He aimed amidships, where a large, garage-style door had been opened. This was the bay where they could launch any number of small watercraft, from eight-man RHIBs to sea kayaks. Light filled the space within, a beacon to Cabrillo and his gravely injured passenger.

“Hold on,” Juan said unnecessarily as they neared the end of the ice pack.

There wasn’t a sharp delineation from ice to ocean but instead a gradual fragmentation of the surface below the machine. What was once solid turned into bobbing chunks, and thinned further until the machine was supported by mush the consistency of a convenience store Ice-E. The tread’s metal studs found no purchase. It was only their momentum, and what little thrust the track got from skimming across the slurry, that kept them afloat.

And then they were over clear water that was as still as a millpond and hazed by vaporous fingers of fog. Still, the Lynx kept them going, its wake of icy mist turned into a proper tail of creaming water. Juan leaned back as far as he dared to keep the skis from plowing into the sea, a real possibility that would cartwheel the two of them like rag dolls. He saw they were drifting a point or two from their destination and compensated by shifting his body, mindful that Yuri’s weight would also factor into the maneuver. Cabrillo had been snowmobile skipping, as this move was called, a few times, but never with a passenger on the back of the sled and never with the stakes so high.

The Lynx’s Rotax engine performed flawlessly, and they skimmed across the water, not with the jerky hops of a flattened stone skipped by a child but with the even power of a craft seemingly built for the task. As they drew closer, the ship loomed larger and larger until it completely blocked Cabrillo’s view of the ocean beyond. He realized that speed had become a factor in another way. They were going much too fast to hit the Teflon-coated ramp into the garage. At their current velocity, they would fly up the ramp like a water-skier and crash into the far wall with so much force that the safety netting would tear them to shreds. Yet if he backed off too soon, the Lynx would drop off plane and sink like a brick.

He eased the throttle slightly to get a feel of how the machine would react and a panicked second later opened the taps to full again as the tips of the skis dipped sharply. There were no calculations he could perform. In truth, there were, but he’d need a supercomputer or Mark Murphy’s brain to do it. This was by gut alone.

To those on the Oregon, it looked as though the Lynx’s driver was hell-bent on suicide as the sled flew across the water at fifty miles per hour, shooting for the steel side of a freighter that towered over them like a castle over a pair of riders on a horse.

Juan felt he’d left it a moment too late and instinctively tensed his body for a crushing hit. In fact, his timing was perfect. Just yards shy of the ramp, he eased off the accelerator and let the Lynx slow until it was pushing a heavy bow wave that ate up even more momentum. The craft entered the hull as it began to founder, and then the skids hit the submerged ramp, and she crawled out of the sea with such perfect control that Cabrillo barely had to tap the brakes to bring them to a gentle stop.

There was a half-second pause, when everything seemed still in his mind, before a team began swarming from behind bulkheads and equipment, wading through churned-up water that sloshed across the ramp and still cascaded off the snowmobile like a gundog shedding water after a retrieve. A warning alarm went off, indicating the garage door was closing. Hands reached for Yuri Borodin to move him onto a waiting stretcher. No sooner was he disentangled from Juan’s snowsuit than Juan had flung his helmet aside to check on his friend.

Julia Huxley—Hux or Doc to most of the crew—was already standing over Borodin while an orderly kept the Russian from falling off the gurney. Dressed in scrubs, and mindless of the freezing water in which she stood, the Navy-trained physician first flipped up the visor of Yuri’s helmet.

As if held back by a dam, a wall of blood poured out of the visor opening and down the lower part of his helmet and splashed like a wave across his chest. The helmet had been so tight that whenever Borodin coughed up blood from his punctured lung, it pooled around his jaw and steadily rose with each violent paroxysm. She unstrapped his helmet, certain he had already drowned. Bu

t as soon as it came free, dripping more blood into the water still sluicing around her feet, he coughed, spattering her medical face shield and chest.

Juan gave them room as an orderly slapped a scalpel into Julia’s hand. She began cutting away the bulky white snowsuit while another aide prepped an IV, ready to refill Yuri’s nearly drained veins with Ringer’s lactate, as a stopgap until they could get him transfused from the ship’s blood bank.

The heavy-duty arctic gear fell away under Hux’s knife until Yuri’s painfully thin and pale chest was exposed and one arm was laid bare for the IV drip. Froth oozed from the hole in Yuri’s skin every time his chest fought to expel air from his body and seemed to suck back into the obscene little mouth on each inhalation. The rest of his exposed body was a sea of welts and mottled bruises from weeks of beatings.

From the red medical case on a nearby rolling tray Hux grabbed an occlusive patch and tore away the wrapper. This type of battle dressing allowed air to be expelled from the wound but would not let air back in, giving Yuri’s collapsed lung a chance to reinflate. She and her team gently rolled Borodin onto his injured side. This position made it easier for the uninjured lung to function. Only then did she whip the stethoscope from around her neck and check for Borodin’s heartbeat. She hunted across his bruised and whip-scarred chest like someone with a metal detector sweeping a beach. And like the beachcomber, it appeared she hadn’t found what she was looking for.