Ice Hunt Read online

  “When the engine began to sputter, we tried to find a place to land, but by that time we were among these damn mountains. The pilot…he…he tried to radio for help, but even the radio seemed to be malfunctioning.”

  Matt understood. There had been storms of solar flares this past week. They messed with all sorts of communication in the northern regions. He glanced back to the wreckage. He could only imagine the terror of those last moments: the panic, the desperation, the disbelief.

  The man’s voice cracked slightly. He had to swallow to continue speaking. “We had no choice but to try to land here. And then…and then…”

  Matt reached over and patted the man’s shoulder. The rest of the story was plainly evident. “It’s okay. We’ll get you out of here. But I should see about that head wound of yours first.”

  He crossed over to Mariah and retrieved the first-aid kit. It was really a full med kit. Matt had assembled it himself, utilizing his experience in the Green Berets. Besides the usual gauze rolls, Band-Aids, and aspirin, he had a small pharmacy of antibiotics, antihistamines, antiprotozoals, and antidiarrhetics. The kit also contained suture material, local anesthetic, syringes, splinting material, even a stethoscope. He pulled out a bottle of peroxide and cleaned the man’s wound.

  Matt talked as he worked. “So, Craig, what was your business up in Prudhoe?” he asked, studying the other. The fellow certainly didn’t have the look of an oil rigger. Among such hard men, black oil and grease were indelibly tattooed into the creases and folds of their hands. Contrarily, this man’s palms were free of calluses, his nails unbroken and neatly trimmed. Matt supposed he was an engineer or geologist. In fact, the man had a studious look to his countenance, keenly assessing his surroundings, glancing to Matt’s horse, his dogs, the meadow, and the surrounding mountains. The only place he avoided looking was back to the wreckage.

  “Prudhoe Bay wasn’t my destination. We were to refuel there, then hop out to a research base on the ice cap. Omega Drift Station, a part of the SCICEX research group.”

  “SCICEX?” Matt smeared antibiotic cream on the wound, then covered it with a Teflon-coated gauze sponge, wrapping it in place.

  “ ‘Scientific Ice Expeditions,’ ” Craig explained, wincing as Matt secured the wrap. “It’s a five-year collaborative effort between the U.S. Navy and civilian scientists.”

  Matt nodded. “I think I remember hearing about that.” The group was using Navy subs to collect data from over a hundred thousand miles of ship track in the Arctic, delving into regions never before visited. Matt’s brow crinkled. “But I thought that ended back in 1999.”

  His words drew the man’s full attention, his eyes widening slightly in surprise as he turned to Matt.

  “Despite appearances,” Matt explained, “I’m Fish and Game. So I’m generally familiar with many of the larger Arctic research projects.”

  Craig studied him with cautious, calculating eyes, then bobbed his head. “Well, you’re right. Officially SCICEX ended, but one station—Omega—had drifted into the ice cap’s Zone of Comparative Inaccessibility.”

  No-man’s-land, Matt thought. The ZCI was the most remote part of the polar ice cap, hardest to reach and most isolated.

  “For a chance to study such an inaccessible region, funding was extended to this one SCICEX station.”

  “So you’re a scientist?” Matt said, fastening up his med kit.

  The man laughed, but there was no real humor behind it. “No, not a scientist. I was on assignment from my newspaper. The Seattle Times. I’m a political reporter.”

  “A political reporter?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Why would—” Matt was cut off by the buzzing sound of a plane’s engine. He craned his neck. The lowering sky was thick with heavy clouds. Off to the side, Bane growled deep in his throat as the noise grew in volume.

  Craig climbed to his feet. “Another plane. Maybe someone heard the pilot’s distress call.”

  From the clouds, a small plane appeared, dropping over the valley but still keeping high. Matt watched it pass. It was another Cessna, only a larger version than Brent’s. It appeared to be a 206 or 207 Skywagon, an eight-seater.

  Matt whistled Mariah closer to him, then plucked his binoculars from the saddlebag. Lifting the scopes, he searched a moment for the plane, then focused on it. It appeared brand-new…or freshly painted. Rare for these parts. The terrain was hard on aircraft.

  “Have they spotted us?” Craig asked.

  The plane tilted on a wing and began a slow circle over the valley. “With the trail of engine smoke, it’d be hard to miss us.”

  Still, Matt felt a tingle of unease. He had not spotted a single plane in the past week, and now two in one day. And this plane was too clean, too white. As he watched, the rear cargo door craned open. That was the nice thing about that size of Skywagon. Such planes were used around these parts to shuttle the injured to various outlying hospitals. The rear cargo hatch was perfect for loading and unloading stretchers, or, in worst cases, coffins. But there was another useful and common application for the Skywagon’s large rear hatch.

  From the cargo bay, a shape flew free, and a second quickly followed. Sky divers. Matt had a hard time following them with his binoculars. They were plummeting fast. Then chutes ballooned out, slowing them, making them easier to focus upon. Parawing airfoils, Matt recognized, used in precision parachuting for landing in tight places. The pair swung around in tandem, aiming for the meadow.

  Matt focused on the divers themselves. Like the plane and chutes, they were outfitted in white, no insignia. Rifles were strapped to their backs, but he was unable to discern make and type.

  As he spied on them, cold dread settled in the pit of his stomach. It was not the presence of the guns that trickled ice into Matt’s blood. Instead, it was what was under each sky diver. Each man was strapped into the seat of a motorcycle. The tires were studded with metal spikes. Snow choppers. They were muscular vehicles, capable of tearing up terrain, chasing anything down in these mountains.

  Matt lowered the binoculars. He stared over at the reporter, then cleared his throat. “I hope you’re good at riding a horse.”

  2

  Cat and Mouse

  APRIL 6, 5:36 P.M.

  ZCI REGION OF THE POLAR ICE CAP

  OMEGA DRIFT STATION

  Will I ever be warm again…?

  Captain Perry crunched across the ice and snow toward Omega Drift Station. The wind whistled around him, a haunted sound that spoke to the hollowness in his heart. Here, at the end of the world, the wind was a living creature, always blowing, scouring the surface like a starving beast. It was the ultimate predator: merciless, constant, inescapable. As an old Inuit proverb says, “It’s not the cold that kills, it’s the wind.”

  Perry marched steadily forward into the teeth of the blustery gale. Behind him, the Polar Sentinel floated inside a polynya, a large open lake within the ice. The Omega Drift Station was constructed on its shoreline, the site having been chosen for the stability of the nearby polynya, allowing easy ingress and egress of a Navy sub. The polynya owed its permanence to the ring of thick pressure ridges that surrounded the lake, climbing two stories high and delving four times as deep below the surface. These battlements of packed ice held the lake open against the constant crush of the surrounding floes. The research station was built on a relatively level ice plain a quarter mile away, a long hike in the subzero cold.

  He marched with a small party of his men, the first of four rotations to be allowed shore leave. The sailors chattered among themselves, but Perry remained hunched in his Navy parka, the edge of his fur-lined hood pulled tightly over his face. He stared off to the northeast, to where the Russian ice base had been discovered two months ago, only thirty miles from here. A shiver trembled through him, but it had nothing to do with the cold.

  So many dead…He pictured the Russian bodies, the old inhabitants of the ice base, stacked like cordwood after being chopped or thawed out o
f their icy tomb. Thirty-two men, twelve women. It had taken them two weeks to clear all the bodies. Some had looked starved to death, while others looked as if they had met more violent ends. They found one body hung in a room, the rope so frozen it shattered with their touch. But that wasn’t the worst…

  Perry pushed this thought away.

  As he climbed a ridge of ice, made easier by the steps chopped into it, the drift station came into view. It was a small hamlet of red Jamesway huts. The assembly of fifteen red buildings appeared like a bloody rash on the ice. Steam smoked from each hut, misting over the base, giving it a deceptively sultry appearance. The rumble of twenty-four generators seemed to vibrate the mists. The smell of diesel fuel and kerosene hung over the site. A single lone American flag hung from a pole, snapping in the occasional fiercer gusts.

  Scattered around the semipermanent settlement, a handful of Ski-Doos and two sealed Sno-Cats stood ready to service the scientists and personnel of the base. There was even an iceboat, a catamaran resting on stainless-steel runners.

  From the top of the ridge, Perry stared out toward the horizon. He saw the worn trail snaking across the ice, heading from Omega out to the old Russian base. Ever since the discovery, the personnel here had been shuttling back and forth across the ice cap, using whatever vehicles were on hand. Currently a quarter of the drift station’s manpower had shifted over to the buried Russian base and was encamped inside the inverted mountain of ice.

  Perry stared another long moment. The path to the Russian base was easy to see. This area of the ice cap was covered with a layer of scalloped snow, what was called sastrugi, little curled waves of frozen snow formed by winds and erosion. “Like the top of a lemon meringue,” his XO had commented. But the path made by the Sno-Cats and Ski-Doos had ground the lemon meringue sastrugi flat, leaving a worn track through the crisp waves.

  Perry understood the interest of the men and women here. They were scientists with an avid curiosity. But none of them had been the first to enter the base as he had been, crossing the thirty miles overland from Omega to the defunct station. None knew what he and a small group of his men had found in the heart of the station. He had immediately ordered his men silent and stationed a complement of armed guards to keep that one section of the base off-limits to the Omega personnel. Only one member of the drift station knew of Perry’s find: Dr. Amanda Reynolds. She had been with Perry when he had entered the base. For the first time, the strong and independent woman had been shaken to her core.

  Whatever had shown up on the DeepEye sonar—the flicker of movement seen on the recording—was never discovered. Maybe it had been just a sonar ghost, a mirage created by the sub’s own motion, or maybe it was some scavenger that had vacated the station, like a polar bear. Though this last was unlikely, not unless the beast had found an entrance that they had yet to discover. Two months ago, they had been forced to use thermite charges to melt a way down into the buried station. Since then, extra heat charges and C4 explosives had been used to open an artificial polynya nearby for the Polar Sentinel to service the newly reoccupied base.

  As Perry climbed down the ice ridge, he wished they had simply sunk the entire Russian station. No good would come of it. He was certain of that. But he had orders to follow. He shivered as the winds kicked up.

  A shout drew his attention back to the assembly of Jamesway huts. A figure dressed in a blue parka waved an arm in their direction, encouraging them forward. Perry crossed down the ridge toward the figure. The man hurried forward to meet him, hunched against the cold.

  “Captain.” The figure was Erik Gustof, the Canadian meteorologist. He was a strapping fellow of Norwegian descent, characterized by whitish-blond hair and tall build, though at the moment, all that could be discerned were the man’s two eyes, goggled against the snow’s glare, and a frosted white mustache. “There’s a satellite call holding for you.”

  “Who—?”

  “Admiral Reynolds.” The man glanced to the skies. “You’d best be quick. There’s a big storm headed our way, and that last bevy of solar flares is still wreaking havoc with the systems.”

  Perry nodded and turned to his junior officer. “Dismiss the men. They’re on their own until twenty hundred. Then the next team gets their turn ashore.”

  This was met with general whoops from the men. They scattered in various directions, some to the station’s mess hall, others to the recreation hut, and others still to the living quarters for more personal dalliances. Captain Perry followed Erik to an assembly of three joined huts, the main base of operations.

  “Dr. Reynolds sent me out to hurry you along,” Erik explained. “She’s speaking with her father right now. We don’t know how long communication will hold.”

  They reached the door to the operations hut, kicked off snow and ice from their boots, then ducked through the doorway. The heat of the interior was painful after the frigid cold. Perry shook off his gloves, then unzipped his parka and threw back his hood. He rubbed the tip of his nose to make sure it was still there.

  “Nippy out, eh?” Erik said, remaining in his parka.

  “It’s not the cold, it’s the humidity,” he grumbled sarcastically. Perry hung up his parka among the many others already there. He still wore his blue jumpsuit with his name stenciled on a pocket. He folded his cap and tucked it into his belt.

  Erik stepped back to the door. “You know the way to the NAVSAT station. I’m going to check on some instruments outside before the storm hits tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  Erik grinned and yanked the door open. Even in such a short time, the wind had kicked up outside. A gust whipped inside and struck Perry like a slap to the face. Erik hurried out, shoving the door shut.

  Perry shivered a moment, rubbing his hands. Who the hell would volunteer to stay in this godforsaken land for two years?

  He crossed the anteroom and went through another set of doors into the main operations room. It held all the various offices of the administration, along with several labs. The main purpose of the research in this building was to measure the seasonal rate of growth and erosion of the ice pack, measuring the heat budget of the Arctic. But other labs in other huts varied greatly, from a full mining operation that sampled cores of the ocean floor to a hydrolab that studied the health of the phyto-and zooplankton under the ice. The research was continuous, running around the clock as the station drifted along, floating with the polar current and traveling almost two miles every day.

  He nodded to various familiar faces behind desks or bent over computer screens. He crossed through a set of airlock-type doors that led into one of the adjoining huts.

  This hut was extra insulated and had two backup generators. It was Omega’s lifeline to the outside world. It contained all their radio and communication equipment: shortwave for maintaining contact with teams on the ice, VLF and ULF for communication with the subs assigned here, and NAVSAT, the military satellite communication system. The hut was empty, except for the lone figure of Amanda Reynolds.

  Perry crossed to her. She glanced up from where she leaned over a TTY, a text telephone unit. The portable keyboard device allowed her to communicate over the satellite. She could speak into the microphone and answers would come out on the LCD screen.

  Amanda nodded to him, but spoke to her father, Admiral Reynolds. “I know, Dad. I know you didn’t want me out here in the first place. But—”

  She was cut off and leaned closer to read the TTY. Her face reddened; obviously an argument had been under way. And it was an old argument from the looks of it. Her father hadn’t wanted Amanda to take this assignment in the first place, worried about her, about her disability. Amanda had defied him, coming anyway, asserting her independence.

  But Perry wondered how much of her fight was not so much to convince her father as herself. He had never met a woman so fiercely determined to prove herself in all things, in all ways.

  And it was taking its toll.

  Perry studied the worn look
in her eyes, the bruised shadows beneath them. She appeared to have aged a decade over the past two months. Secrets did that to you.

  She continued, speaking into the phone, heat entering her voice. “We’ll discuss this later. Captain Perry is here.”

  As she read her father’s response, she held her breath, biting her lower lip. “Fine!” she finally snapped, and ripped off the headset. She shoved it at him. “Here.”

  He took the headset, noting the tremble in her fingers. Fury, frustration, or both? He palmed the microphone to keep his next words private with her. “Is he still keeping the information under lock and key?”

  Amanda snorted and stood. “And electronic padlock and voiceprint recognition and retinal scan identification. Fort Knox couldn’t be more secure.”

  Perry smiled at her. “He’s doing his best. The bureaucratic machinery under him grinds slowly. With such sensitive matters, diplomatic channels have to be handled with delicacy.”

  “But I don’t know why. This goes back to World War Two. After so long, the world has a right to know.”

  “It’s waited for fifty years. It can wait another month or so. With the already strained relations between the U.S. and Russia, the way has to be greased before letting the information out.”

  Amanda sighed, stared into his eyes, then shook her head. “You sound just like my father.”

  Perry leaned in. “In that case, this would be very Freudian.” He kissed her.

  She smiled under his lips and mumbled, “You kiss like him, too.”

  He choked a laugh, pulling back.

  She pointed to the headset. “You’d best not keep the admiral waiting.”

  He slipped the headset in place and pulled up the microphone. “Captain Perry here.”

  “Captain, I trust you’re taking good care of my daughter.” His voice cut in and out a bit.