Two miles ahead of them, and still hidden by the ice hillocks, the hatch covering one of the Oregon’s multiple 20mm Gatling guns snapped open and the already-spinning pack of six barrels poked from its redoubt. With the sound of some hellish industrial machine, the gun spit out a solid curtain of tungsten rounds. The ship’s weapons control systems were so accurate that there was no need to include tracers in the mix of munitions. The chopper and its pilot and crew never saw what was reaching out from the night for them.

The five-second burst filled the air with four hundred rounds, and nearly all of them hit the Mil dead-on or plowed into the flying debris as the aircraft came apart. Then the Mil bloomed as its volatile fuel erupted in a fireball that hung in the sky for many long seconds before gravity took hold and slammed it into the ice like a shooting star coming to earth.

Two rounds had managed to hit the small incoming rockets by pure chance, but still thirty more arced over the ground, fanning out and bracketing the Chairman and Yuri Borodin in a deadly box.

In those last frantic seconds, Cabrillo tried to steer them out of the deadly inbound swarm, but it was as though the ice was actively trying to thwart his efforts. To either side, ridges rose shoulder high and were too steep for even the Lynx to power over. They were trapped in a shallow canyon with no means of escape but through sheer speed.

In an ironic quirk of design, snowmobiles don’t do as well on ice as on snow. The tread tends to heat up and cause excessive wear, but at this moment Juan couldn’t care less if the track came apart just so long as it did so after they reached the ship.

The first explosions rang out behind them and were muted by the walls of ice, but almost immediately other rockets began landing all around the Lynx, each detonation a bright flower of fire and ice. And steel shrapnel.

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.