Cabrillo cursed silently. He’d hoped for a half hour or more. The Mil must have been kept at ready status to have caught their bird so quickly. Now it would be doubling back, and a sharp-eyed pilot would see the snowmobile’s trail like a scar across the virgin crust of snow.

Juan slowed just enough for him to open his visor and crank his head around. He shouted over the wind, “They’re onto us.”

Yuri understood the danger and gave Cabrillo a double tap on the shoulder in acknowledgment.

It was a race not only against the chopper now searching for them but also against the setting sun. The Mil doubtlessly had running lights, so once it found their spore, they could keep it lit up as they ran the fleeing pair to ground. On the other hand, Juan couldn’t switch on the Lynx’s headlamp because it would be the only source of light in the otherwise desolate plane, and the pursuing chopper could cut a vector onto them if they spotted it. He dared not back off the throttle, and he cursed the decision to go with a tinted visor. He could just barely see the white snow through the darkness.

When it got too dark, he thought he could ride with the visor popped up. He tried an experiment. The wind stung like daggers thrust deep into his eye sockets, and he quickly lowered the protective shield. For several seconds he was completely blinded by the tears. So much for that.

They’d just have to trust his reflexes as they continued screaming across the open ground.

Out here it wasn’t that big of a deal, there was very little by way of obstacles, but they had to cover several more miles of frozen ocean to reach the Oregon.

On they drove, Borodin clinging to the straps while Juan hunched over the handlebars, and the sun sank below the horizon to the west. Somewhere to the east a chopper was hunting them as surely as a hawk searches for prey.

They rapidly approached the coastline and entered a jumbled mess of icy hummocks and crushed leads in a nightmare landscape that appeared impassable. Juan was forced to slow, and no matter how badly it stung, he also had to open his visor. It was just too dark to see through its tinting, and almost too dark to see anything period.

Despite the Lynx’s superb suspension, both men were tossed about as the machine lurched and rolled over the fractured ice. Yuri was forced to loop his arms up to the elbows through the straps and clutch at the seat with his thighs as though he were trying to break an untamed stallion. But still he maintained the presence of mind to scan the sky around them so that the Chairman could concentrate on the path ahead. A particularly bright star caught his attention, and he gazed at it in exhausted wonder.