Benton Fraser brought an intensity to sneaking that would have made things pretty perfect if he weren't off balance and if I didn't have problems putting weight on my left leg. A bad limp makes it difficult to move fast and low to the ground. I figured if we were lucky Rob Patrick and the guy they called Keith were back hunting up fool's gold at their mining site.
I didn't have any pity to spare for them. They were greedy enough to be all kinds of violent about it, and stupid enough to think that what Rob Patrick's brother had, and maybe was keeping from Rob, was instant riches.
Gosset's involvement was even more trouble. On top of being involved with violent criminals, it looked like he'd given them the run of a secure military base. I couldn't figure out what made his judgement so bad. Rob Patrick I could guess at, though I might be wrong. Plenty of brothers have come to blows out of envy or greed or plain old sibling rivalry. Keith just seemed greedy. But I wanted to know what it took for Gosset to get in this deep.
Seemed like Benton was thinking along the same lines. He spoke up as we got back in closer to the elevated buildings.
"I hope that we will be able to make it clear into the buildings without detection, but if necessary, we may have to subdue Sergeant Gosset."
Fraser's voice was low but there was a troubled note to it.
"I cannot fathom how he could betray his country over something so petty," he said.
"Gotta figure he has money problems, they said they were paying him. Maybe they promised him a share of the mine."
"The illusory diamond mine. Such trouble over something they seem to understand so little!" Fraser said.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." And so is an armed Sergeant of the United States Air Force, MacGyver thought, but didn't say. He was pretty confident that even in their injured states the two of them were more than capable of overpowering Gosset.
MacGyver was aching with cold by the time they made it back under the shelter of the buildings. Fraser wasn't showing any consciousness of feeling the cold. He crept up the stairs to the nearest building, scouting carefully for signs of the opposition.
Mac followed behind him. They crept closer to the building nearest to the giant, curved antenna, moving along the catwalks that connected the buildings. The exterior door to the squat, elevated building was sturdy. Fraser tried the handle and looked back over his shoulder with a frustrated expression.
"I suppose we had better give Gosset credit for this much, he appears to have secured the communications facility. Would you try to open it?"
"Sure, I'll see what I can do."
MacGyver examined the locking mechanism on the door. It was keypad based, and he frowned at it.
"I'm not saying we couldn't get in there, but we'd either need to get hold of the code or make a racket blowing it open," he said.
Fraser bit his lip and looked at the lock thoughtfully.
"If we could dust for fingerprints on the keypad-" he said,
"We'd still have to run all the combinations of all the keys Gosset had touched and hope to hit on the right one fast," MacGyver said. "The system's probably set up to lock down or sound an alarm if we key in the wrong combination too many times."
"True," Fraser's brow creased, giving him an unhappy look. "We'll have to use an alternate means of communication. That old radio that we found in the bunk room, do you really think that we could make it work?"
"Needs some cleaning up, but I think so. I'm going to need my pack. Couple of things from the kitchen, too," MacGyver said. "We can get resupplied so we can move out off the base while we're at it."
"I think that's a sound plan," Fraser said. "As long as our luck holds and we don't run into the thieves."
Luck was with them all the way back to the mess hall. The back of MacGyver's neck was tingling the whole time he dug through the sparse supplies to find items he was looking for. He grabbed a few items and added them to his newly re-acquired pack.
Looking around, he saw the magazine from Gosset's rifle. He added it to his collection.
"You're not planning on acquiring a firearm?" Fraser asked.
"Nope," MacGyver said tersely. "The bullets might come in handy."
"That they might," Fraser said thoughtfully. There were many uses for gun powder and the other constituent elements of rifle cartridges for a creative person. Of course, putting them into a gun and firing it would be the easiest way to approach the problem.
"Are you ready to attempt an approach on the bunk room?" Fraser said as MacGyver finished sweeping the kitchen for useful elements.
"You wanna scout first?" MacGyver said.
"Indeed. Your knee isn't being helped by standing and moving around. Allow me."
MacGyver waited at the door to the mess hall, back against the wall and out of any sight lines.
"The coast is clear," Fraser whispered from outside the door, and MacGyver hobble to follow him, crossing the elevated walk way back to the residential block. Inside the corridors, MacGyver felt safer. Gosset was not likely to see them, though if he were around, he might potentially hear them moving. Fraser wasn't making any audible complaints, but there was a lot not quite right with him as a result of the two altercations with the would-be diamond thieves.
Entering the room in which they'd been held, Fraser quickly got down on the floor to pull out the radio. He unscrewed the loosely turned screws and took the case off quickly.
MacGyver got out his flashlight and some of the items from the kitchen.
"Are you thirsty?" Fraser enquired as MacGyver popped open a can of coke.
"Yeah, I am, but that's not what this is for," MacGyver said. "Figured it'd be the quickest-"
"-Way to clean corrosion off the battery connections!" Fraser said excitedly.
"Uh-huh," MacGyver said. "There wasn't any baking soda in the kitchen, guess they don't have much call for it. This was the next best thing. Lucky someone has a sweet tooth."
"Not a particularly nutritionally sound choice," Fraser tutted, as MacGyver used a soft undershirt from his pack and the coca-cola to clean off years of corrosion.
"What are you going to use to connect the batteries?" Fraser asked.
"Well, since I didn't find any fuse wire or anything like that, I figured I'd keep it simple," MacGyver said, pulling out a ration from his pack, and his knife. "And before you ask, yeah, I'm hungry, but no, that's not why I'm doing this."
Fraser watched, fascinated, as MacGyver cut two long strips and stripped plastic off a piece of the package that had been holding the MRE.
"Oh," he said. "Yes, that is quite simple."
"Should work. Not the greatest conductivity, but good enough." MacGyver said. "This is where gum would come in handy."
"I'm sorry, I don't chew gum," Fraser said.
"Never mind," MacGyver said. There was something that was supposed to be cake in the package, and he mushed it and rolled it between his fingers until it was sticky enough to adhere the strips of foil to the battery connection on the radio. He was careful to make sure that the foil touched the connection, using the paste over the top of it and hoping that it would stay squished down.
Fraser took the flashlight without prompting and lined the batteries up end to end. There were six.
"That should do it," he said. "If you can make the connection to the radio it should be able to pull nine volts from the batteries."
"No problem," MacGyver said. Once again he used the revolting cake as a sort of glue to attach one of each of the wire strips carefully to the ends of the first and last batteries.
"Be sure that you're-" Fraser began.
"Matching the positive and negative terminals?" MacGyver said, shooting a wry look at Fraser. "Yeah, I got that."
"Oh, well, good," Fraser said. "I hope that cake holds."
"I do too," MacGyver said. Gum would have been better, but the clammy substance was showing the properties of paste rather nicely.
"All right, shall we turn it on?" Fraser said, his face bright with excitement.
"Let's give it a go," Mac said, nodding his head for Fraser to flip the heavy switch to turn the home made unit on.
There was a crackle of static through the speaker and a green light showed on the top of the radio unit.
"There!" Fraser said. "Good as new."
"Let's see what kind of signal we get," MacGyver said more cautiously.
Fraser adjusted the tuning knob on the radio slowly. The men leaned over the unit, listening carefully for any traffic.
"There!" MacGyver said. Fraser stopped the dial. Over the sound of static hiss, faint but definite, could be heard the distinct short and long beeps of morse code.
"That sounds like a two-way conversation," Fraser said.
"You up on Q-codes?" MacGyver asked.
"Not as well as I'd like to be, but the operators should understand if just use Morse."
"It'd be easier to break in using the standard language," Mac said.
Fraser conceded control of the radio unit with the air of a child giving over the controls of a precious remote controlled plane.
Mac took the key device, a mouse-trap sized gadget, and started to tap out the letter codes that would act like a standard language for the operators who heard them. He started with the morse for 'BK', to break in, following with a series of "CQ"s, breaking into the morse conversation that was happening on the frequency they'd found to indicate that he was trying to start conversing. He followed this quickly with several repeats of "SOS", to be sure that they'd be heard as an emergency, not just as rude newbies blundering into an ongoing exchange instead of waiting to jump in at the end.
There was a pause, a crackling nothing, no reply, and Mac quickly tapped out the "SOS" again.
This time a response came through quickly, sending a response of "QRZ".
"They want to know who we are."
There was a peeling tape label with raised letters identifying the call-sign of the ham who had built the unit in the first place, so Mac keyed that in, for what it was worth. He followed it with another burst of code - "QTH" - indicating location, followed by "KOMAKUK USAF ARCTIC CIRCLE COPY?"
Fraser was staring into the middle distance listening to the codes and putting them together.
A reply came through in plain morse code spelling out "WHAT EMERGENCY?"
"Tell the operator that an RCMP officer needs backup," Fraser said.
Mac sent the message. He hadn't stopped for the nicety of finding out where the ham on the other end of the connection was radioing out of.
There was a pause again, and Mac could only imagine the operator puzzling over the conjunction of an arctic air force base and the RCMP.
"RPT AGN" came through next.
Mac repeated the previous message. "What's the nearest RCMP outpost I can ask for backup from?" he asked Fraser while they waited for a reply.
"Tuktoyaktuk," Fraser said. "But the closest that would have enough manpower would be Inuvik."
"Oh, good," Mac said. "That'll be easier to spell."
"WILL SEND HELP COPY?" came through.
"C SEND RCMP DE INUVIK COPY?" Mac sent back.
Fraser looked like his mind was going a thousand miles a minute, translating from the morse code bleeps and unfamiliar codes.
"'C' must mean 'yes', and 'DE' 'from.'" he said once Mac was done transmitting.
"Yup," Mac said tersely, waiting for an acknowledgement that help would be coming.
"COPY 73" came through.
Mac sent back "TKS 73".
"That's that," He said. "They said they got the message, and signed off with 'best regards', it's the best we can hope for."
"What now?" Fraser said.
"Keep our heads down and try not to get killed before help comes," MacGyver said. "If help comes."