Arctic Gold

Golytsin captured her jaw with one hand, silencing her, holding her head motionless. For a horrible moment, she was forced to look into his eyes. She was certain he was about to…

Then he released her. “But not yet,” he told her. “I’ll give you some time to think about your options, mm? But I suggest, Katharine, that you not test my patience.”

He turned, strode to the door, and was gone. She heard the lock click behind him.

She lay on the bunk, still breathing hard. She was terrified-there was no other way to describe it. She was convinced that the bastard would do whatever he needed to do to get information out of her… rape, beatings, torture…

When she’d joined the National Security Agency, she’d done so as a technician, a very skilled and highly trained technician. The idea of being sent out into the field had been ludicrous; hell, as far as she knew, the NSA didn’t even have field agents. And when she went over to the CIA, that had strictly been a temporary technical assignment.

How the hell had she let them talk her into fieldwork? This wasn’t supposed to happen!

She began reviewing her options. Not one of them, she found, was at all pleasant.

9

Ice Station Bear Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 0125 hours, GMT-12

EIGHTY-FIVE MILES FROM THE Lebedev and twelve time zones away from London, another storm was coming in. Dr. Chris Tomlinson could see it in the dark band of clouds just beginning to shroud the southwestern horizon in shadow, could feel it in the icy bite of the freshening wind. He finished wiping the rime ice from the anemometer high in the met tower and awkwardly clambered back down the narrow ladder. It was a thrice-daily chore shared by the odd mix of personnel here at the ice station. The anemometer and other weather instruments were mounted on the fifteen-foot tower to keep them clear of wind and spray at ice level, but they still tended to accumulate a thin layer of ice under the incessant spring wind.

The sun hung just above the southeastern horizon, wan and pale and as seemingly devoid of warmth as a silvery full moon.

In a more civilized clime, 0130 was the middle of the frigging night. Late in May at these latitudes, a month before the summer solstice, the sun never set but circled the horizon slowly clockwise with the turning of the Earth. With no real day or night, the actual time scarcely mattered, so the team ran on Eastern time. The National Climatic Data Center was in Asheville, North Carolina, and it was easier to coordinate work and communications schedules with everyone on the same clock.

Tomlinson carefully stepped off the ladder, his thick boots crunching lightly on the ice. Lieutenant Phil Segal was waiting for him at the bottom-his safety buddy, present just in case. Personnel were encouraged to go about in pairs or teams when they left the shelter of the Quonset hut that served as the small base’s living quarters. Tomlinson had seen for himself how fast the wind could kick up sometimes, and when it mixed with fog or blowing snow, whiteout conditions could set in so fast that someone outside could become hopelessly lost just a few short feet from safety.

“Looks like we’re fixing to have a blow,” Segal said, looking up at the anemometer, now wildly and freely spinning in the breeze.

Tomlinson looked up at the instrument. “Ah. Thirty knots. Hardly worth the notation in the log.”

“Tell you what, though,” the NOAA officer said with a nasty chuckle. “Next time we send the tree huggers out here, right? Let them enjoy some of this here global warming first hand!”

Tomlinson laughed, but without much feeling. Like the other official personnel stationed here, he had little patience with their… guests, the five kids from Greenworld. What the bloody hell did they think they were trying to prove up here?

Kids? He snorted. Hardly. The youngest was in her mid-twenties, the oldest thirty-something. But the ten regular station personnel, three NOAA officers and seven scientists with the National Climatic Data Center, were here with a genuine purpose. The Greenworld bunch was up here grandstanding, nothing more. They claimed to be filming a documentary for PBS, but during the past week they’d done more grousing and bellyaching than camera work.

The two men trudged across the ice toward Bear One, the main hut. All told, there were four main structures in the camp and several smaller sheds and supply buildings, all of them flown up here slung beneath the belly of CH-47 helicopters and assembled on the ice. The largest, dubbed Bear One, was the center of the tiny, isolated community’s life and warmth. Near the building’s door, an American flag, already ragged in the constant wind, fluttered from a piece of pipe raised as an impromptu flagpole.

Officially, the place was the NOAA Arctic Meteorological Station Bravo, but the men and women currently living here called it Ice Station Bear… a tribute, in part, to a pair of old Alistair MacLean thrillers with similar names, plus just a bit of gallows humor drawn from the latest spate of international one-upmanship with the Russians. Wrangel Island was just 760 miles distant, directly due south, and Mys Shmidta, the nearest Russian military base and staging area on the Siberian mainland, about 150 miles beyond that.

The Russian specter had been looming quite large in the tiny community’s thoughts lately. At least every other day, jet aircraft, military aircraft out of Mys Shmidta, had overflown the station, flying low enough to rattle the hut’s walls. Sometimes, the already-chancy radio communications with Asheville were blotted out by what Commander Greg Larson thought was Russian jamming.

And, of course, for the past week they’d been repeatedly warned that they were trespassing and must leave Russian territory at once.

What a crock, Tomlinson thought. The Russians were trying to intimidate them into leaving. He wondered what the hell it was they were hiding eighty-some miles over the northern horizon and if Yeats and his people had managed to get a good look.

Three members of the NOAA expedition had left yesterday, taking three of the snowmobiles east to Remote One, an unmanned weather station seventy miles across the ice. Theoretically, they were checking the instrumentation and taking some ice-thickness readings.

The thing was, everyone in the expedition knew that Yeats and McMillan were spooks for the CIA, though that particular tidbit had not been shared with the Greenworld visitors. They also knew that Yeats, McMillan, and Haines-a genuine climatologist but also an expert on traveling over the Arctic ice-had gone to Remote One more to snoop on the nearby Russian base than to check instrument packages.

Currently, the surest bets making the rounds among the scientists were that the Russians were prospecting for oil. Everyone knew they wanted to claim half the Arctic Ocean as their own in order to get at the oil and natural gas beneath the sea floor.

Yeats, McMillan, and Haines should have been back by now. There’d been a brief message five hours ago-and not a word since.

Tomlinson suppressed a shudder. Something was wrong. He could feel it. They were going to have to send another team out to learn what had happened to the first. He wished they could send the Greenworld kids.

We don’t need this shit, he thought, bitter. Missing people, hostile Russians… and we have to babysit, too.

He wondered if the ecology nuts had come here because the Russians wouldn’t let them go to their base instead.

Ecology nuts. Tomlinson had little respect for people who made sweeping and hyper-dramatic claims without solid scientific evidence backing them up. A number of high-profile organizations-organizations such as Greenpeace and Greenworld and the Sierra Club-wanted to keep this frozen wilderness pristine and the petroleum resources below the ice untapped. Tree huggers, as Tomlinson and his associates thought of the five unwanted visitors to the base, though there wasn’t a single tree for them to hug within the better part of a thousand miles. Their agenda didn’t have a chance, no matter how many polar bears they’d been able to film out on the ice. You couldn’t stop progress… or the power of the almighty dollar.

What did the Greenworlders think they could accomplish by finagling a visit to Ice Station Bear?