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 of 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.