Behind its roll-down door, his solgel incendiaries had ignited with brilliant, white-hot slashes of flame, instantly reducing the desalinization unit’s flow-pump motor to a tarry mire of fused steel and plastic. The pump quit with a shudder, chuffing out acrid, concentrated fumes that bleared the dials and alarm lights on its control panel as they floated past. Bristling vines of fire circled its butterfly inlet valve and coiled over the meshwork of low-pressure PVC pipes around the water tanks. They seared, sagged, and blistered, their melted plastic segments springing distorted fish-mouthed leaks, showering the dome’s instrumentation with jets of distilled water. Raw seawater began flushing from the main pipeline, pouring down onto the tank platform, running over its sides. The smoke rose, spread, seeking fresh air. It eddied against the door, slipping through its weather seals in thready wisps.

Out in the wind and snow, Burkhart continued his waiting game.

Further away, Pete Nimec and his men pushed their snowmobiles toward the dome as quickly as they could. Nimec did not think getting inside would be easy, but still he hoped they might have time to somehow prevent the machinery that produced Cold Corners’ entire usable water supply from becoming severely maimed.

He didn’t have a shot.

The moment Burkhart had put his combustive charges in place, time had run out.

“Sir—I’ve spotted some of them.”

“Where? I can’t see a thing.”

“A little ways ahead of us,” Ron Waylon said. “I’d guess maybe forty, fifty yards. At about ten o’clock.”

Nimec kept Waylon’s blaze-orange parka in his headlights as he whirred along behind him. He had mostly gotten the hang of the snow bike, but the bare ice patches that would come up on it without warning kept threatening to rob its skis of traction and wrench the handlebars out of his grasp.

He squinted through his goggles.

“You said some?”

“Right—”

“How many? Still can’t see anything . . .”

“I’m not sure. There could’ve been three, four. They were on bikes. Moving. Wearing winter camouflage.” Waylon paused. “The bikes were white too,” he added.

Nimec thought a moment. His instincts had been right.

“We made more than three of them inside the dome,” he said over the com-link. “Looks like it’s how I figured. They’ve deployed around it.”

“Looks like,” Waylon said.

Nimec swooped on toward the dome, a guy named Mitchell pacing at his rear, the rest having split off at his direction.

“Okay, both of you reading me?”

He received two affirmatives in his earpiece.

“This is it,” he said, then let go of his right handgrip to reach for the weapon strapped over his shoulder.

The dome to his near left, Burkhart was still poised to throttle his snowmobile into action when one of his floating patrols hailed him over their radio link.

“Kommandant, ich sehe sie.”

It was Langern, at the opposite side of the water-treatment facility.

“Wie viele?” Burkhart replied.