Ligacheva stared up at him calmly. “You said they would all die if they went to face the monsters unprepared,” she said. “I am trying to prevent that. Perhaps we can all work together and find some way to defeat these things.”
”The best thing we can do is just leave them alone and let them go,” Schaefer said. “They don’t want to be here, and either they’re going to leave as soon as they can, or the cold’s going to kill them.”
”And you want them to simply depart?”
Schaefer smiled a vicious, tight smile. “No, I want the bastards dead,” he answered. “I never liked them much in the first place, and I saw what they did to your people back there. Nobody should do that to good men and get away with it. I don’t give a shit about their technology, though, and I don’t think we’ve got what it takes to take them all down, and I don’t want to lose more good men trying. I’m hoping the cold will get them all.”
”And if it does?”
”Then you and Philips can fight about who gets to study the shipwreck.”
”I would prefer that we not fight at all-except, perhaps, against those creatures. Do you really think there is nothing we can do?”
”Oh, we can fight,” Schaefer said. “If they come after us I’ll fight them. But I’m not going to walk into any traps if I…” He paused, listening.
He could hear the rumble of engines over the wind.
”Yashin,” Ligacheva said. “Come on.” She turned and led the way up to the ridgetop.
Schaefer followed.
Lynch and the others had taken up defensive positions around the east door, he saw-they had learned from their earlier mistake not to be caught out in the open. Schaefer spotted Wilcox crouched behind a huge pipe; Dobbs had dug into a hollow in the ice beneath a vent, while Lassen stood at the southeast corner of the building, and Lynch himself crouched in the doorway. Gennaro was climbing a service ladder to a post on the station’s roof.
Philips was nowhere in sight.
”What do they think they’re doing?” Ligacheva asked. “Why are they trying to keep possession of the pumping station in the first place?”
”It’s their turf now,” Schaefer said in English. “They’re challenging Yashin to a pissing contest, that’s what they’re doing.”
”‘Pissing contest’?”
Schaefer could not remember a Russian equivalent. “Never mind,” he said. “Look.”
He pointed as a Russian APV ground into sight over a snowdrift and headed for the station, its headlights throwing spotlights on Lynch and Dobbs. A second vehicle followed close behind.
”That’s Sergeant Yashin,” Ligacheva said, pointing to a man climbing out of the first vehicle. “He had not gone as far as I thought.”
As she spoke, Schaefer heard a noise behind them; he turned to find a third, much smaller vehicle pulling into the shallow valley where Kazakov had been standing guard.
Ligacheva waved to the driver; he was, Schaefer saw, alone in the vehicle.
”I was sent to fetch you, Lieutenant,” the driver called. “You and Kazakov.”
”Thank you, Maslennikov,” Ligacheva replied. “I think we had best wait a moment, however.” She turned to look down at the confrontation below.
Just then a single shot sounded, clearly audible despite the wind.
They didn’t see who had fired first, but seconds later the air was full of the rattle of automatic weapons fire and the red lines of tracers.
”Shit,” Schaefer said as he dropped to his belly to make himself a smaller target.
Ligacheva was right beside him; Kazakov stumbled back off the ridgetop, into the darkness, while Maslennikov stayed in his vehicle.
”So much for international cooperation,” Schaefer said. “Looks like we’ll kill each other before those alien bastards get the chance.”
Ligacheva nodded. “Yashin has been ready for a fight since he arrived, eager to defend the Motherland; your men seem to be happy to oblige him.”
Schaefer watched for a few seconds, then squinted. “Do you have binoculars?” he asked Ligacheva.
She turned and called into the gloom, “Kazakov! Field glasses!”
The private scrambled back up the ridge and handed the lieutenant the glasses, which she passed to Schaefer. He peered through them.
It hadn’t been his imagination; where Wilcox had leaned against the pipe something yellow was dripping from his arm. A smear of the stuff was on the pipe, too.
It wasn’t blood; Wilcox might be an asshole, but he was human, and in the light from the Russian vehicles there could be no question that that seeping fluid was yellow, not red. Then what…
The suits. Schaefer looked down at his own arms in the brown plastic thermal suit. The suits were filled with circulating fluid, and that had to be what that yellow stuff was. Had Wilcox been hit?
He lifted the glasses and watched.
Gennaro, up on the roof, flung himself prone, and yellow goo sprayed up as if he’d belly flopped into custard. The seams along either side of the suit had burst.
Schaefer snatched off one of his gloves and prodded experimentally at his own suit with rapidly freezing bare fingers.
The plastic had gone brittle. The suit hadn’t been intended for weather this cold, for the strains of warming and cooling, for the stress of battle.
Siberia, Schaefer knew, was the second coldest place on Earth, behind only Antarctica-the North Pole itself, thanks to the Arctic Ocean, wasn’t as cold as Siberia in midwinter. Nothing in North America came close; the army could have tested the suits in the worst weather Alaska or Greenland could throw at them and never had any problem, but that didn’t mean they’d hold up here.
All the seams in Gennaro’s suit must have split open when he flopped down like that.
”Shit,” Schaefer said as he pulled the glove back on.
And then Gennaro’s gun exploded, spraying metal splinters that gouged into his face, barely missing his eyes.
More of the same, Schaefer thought, as he watched Gennaro roll onto his back, clapping his hands over his injured face. Steel goes brittle in extreme cold-that was what had done in the Titanic, he’d heard; the cold water of the North Atlantic had turned the metal brittle, so a mere brush with the iceberg had popped rivets in all directions, and the ship had snapped right in two as she went down.
Modern steel was a lot better than the crap they used for hull plates in 1912, and the M-16s were meant for cold weather, sure, but not for anything this cold.
”Minus sixty, Celsius,” Ligacheva said.
That would, Schaefer realized, be about seventy-five below zero, Fahrenheit. Lassen had said the equipment had been tested to minus fifty degrees.
Not good enough.
Dobbs’s gun blew next. After that it wasn’t more than five minutes before the Americans, disarmed by the same General Winter that had defeated Napoleon and any number of other would-be conquerors who had dared to invade Mother Russia, threw up their hands in surrender.
”If you keep the weapons warm whenever you aren’t actually firing, under your coat or in a vehicle, they’re less likely to malfunction,” Ligacheva remarked conversationally. “And you must keep them well oiled, of course-oil is a fine insulator.
When the gun feels dry to the touch it isn’t safe in weather like this.”
”The voice of experience,”- Schaefer muttered as he watched Yashin and his men round up Lynch and the others. “Too bad Philips spent so much time recruiting me, instead of someone who really knew cold weather.” He remarked aloud, “Looks like your sergeant has everything under control.”
”Yes,” Ligacheva agreed. “Yashin has wanted control all along. Let him have it.”
Schaefer looked at her. “Aren’t you going to go down there and take charge?”
”No,” she said quietly. She turned to Kazakov and called, “You and Maslennikov, go down there and tell Yashin he’s done well,” she said. “I’ll come presently. Leave the vehicle; I’ll drive it down.”