Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  “Did you bring it?” I said.

  She padded around from behind the counter, opened her briefcase, and handed me a palm-sized, plastic device. It was surprisingly light for what it would do—suck the data from a nearby cell phone in less than twenty seconds. You can buy a Universal Forensic Extraction Device online for two hundred dollars. But you won’t get one of these.

  “This is the new one?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And it can unscramble coded data?”

  “It can get past any security Lily has.”

  “Who said anything about Lily?”

  She shook her head and laughed. “C’mere, bruiser,” she said. She grabbed my hand and headed up the stairs.

  The broadloom continued on the second floor. I followed her through a large bedroom and out onto the balcony. Snow-covered peaks blazed in the clear sky. A pair of B-1B bombers sat gleaming in front of an enormous hangar. A C-130 transport had just landed on the main runway. The roar of its four powerful engines reverberated across the airfield.

  “After 9/11,” she said, “the military created a new Unified Command Plan. This base is the headquarters of Northern Command. In the event of an attack on the homeland, this is where we run the defense of the United States.”

  She leaned on the railing. A few strands of hair slipped loose in the light breeze and caressed her cheek.

  “That’s what I look at all day long—attack scenarios. Who’s got the latest weapons? Where are they putting them? Did they move missiles in the night? Are they retargeting? State actors. Non-state actors. Ships and submarines. It never stops. The nightmare is we’ll miss something. Some play will get past us. That’s what we’re afraid of now. The thing we’ll miss.”

  She went back inside and shrugged off her jacket. She dropped it on the carpet and sat on the bed.

  “And that’s what you’re afraid of too. You don’t trust Lily. Why would you?” She spoke the words matter-of-factly. “We don’t trust, Alex. They pay us not to.” She reached back and pulled the pin from her hair. It cascaded onto her shoulders. “You’ve got alarms on every one of her accounts, waiting to see if she’ll move money and where she’ll move it to.”

  She stood up, unzipped her skirt, and let it slip to the floor. She tugged off the silk T-shirt and dropped it on the skirt. She moved against me and took my face in her hands and kissed me softly on the mouth. “You know she’ll betray you,” she murmured.

  “But so will you.”

  She pulled the covers back and slid into bed and lay there with her hair spilling across the pillows. She unsnapped her bra and dropped it on the floor. “I’m not asking for anything, Alex.”

  I’d never seen her look so desolate.

  I still had the UFED in my hand. I dropped it in my pocket and went downstairs and walked to the passenger terminal.

  27

  I was alone in the cabin. The digital map on the bulkhead showed that we would soon be over Great Slave Lake when the cockpit door opened and the captain came back.

  “Just a heads-up,” he said. “Going to be a bumpy approach. There’s a big system that’s moved in. Turned into a full blizzard.”

  “And they didn’t close the airport?”

  “They did, but this is a NORAD flight. We don’t need civilian air-traffic control. Canadian military ATC will bring us in. Somebody wants you down there.”

  Instead of closing the cockpit door behind him, he latched it open. We’d already started our descent. The plane hit a downdraft, bounced hard, and climbed back to its approach path. The whine of the engines rose and fell as the pilots struggled to keep the plane on an orderly descent. I watched the approach on the bulkhead display. The plane shuddered and thumped as we crossed the lake and reached the far shore and flew up the bay toward the city. The snow streaming past the window obliterated the wingtip navigation lights. The big landing lights switched on and drilled a hole in the storm.

  I caught a brief glimpse of the city to the left before it was wiped from view again. We continued to descend. Then a powerful gust buffeted the plane. It slewed with a sickening lurch, then hit another downdraft. The gray water of the bay appeared through the snow. The gale lashed the waves into a froth. We were dropping fast. The pilots grasped the throttle, the co-pilot’s hand on top of the pilot’s. In a fluid movement they brought the engines to full power. We climbed back into the driving snow.

  I thought we were going to circle and make another approach. Instead, I found myself pressed against the window as the jet tilted sharply to the left in a tight turn. Patches of light flashed by below. The plane leveled and then came down fast. A road appeared with streetlights, the airport fence, then the broad slashes of white that marked the beginning of the runway. The wheels must have been almost on the ground when a savage crosswind punched us sideways. An alarm went whoop whoop in the cockpit, followed by a stern mechanical voice that said “Pull up.” We didn’t. I caught sight of a fire engine starting onto the field with its strobes flashing. The airframe moaned, and slowly, by inches, the nose came around to face down the runway and the pilot slammed the jet down hard. The cabin lights went out, and a coffee urn broke loose from the galley and shot across the plane, bursting against the main door and spraying the cabin with scalding drops.

  Outside, the fire engine appeared out of the snow and paralleled us on the runway. A fireman had a nozzle trained on the plane in case the landing had ruptured a fuel line. I saw the pilot give the fire crew a thumbs-up from the cockpit. Five minutes later we were parked on an apron beside a huge shape that loomed from the snowstorm like the phantom of a giant. The US Air Force Galaxy.

  * * *

  A young two-star in rumpled gray fatigues. The name Mackenzie stitched in black letters on the pocket. We’d met before, but if he wasn’t going to mention it, that was fine. We sat in his small office in the belly of the plane. Instead of the usual load of tanks and helicopters, the cargo deck held a mobile command center. Radar screens displayed the information collected by a pair of Boeing 707s fitted with airborne warning and control systems. The AWACS planes were circling high above the Arctic. The stream of data they supplied helped refine the information pouring in from satellites and from a pair of American hunter-killer submarines shadowing the Chinese boomers. A young lieutenant with a clump of red hair stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “It’s not a real alert,” Mackenzie said. “It’s just a shit-show with lots of expensive units in play so the Chinese will know we can afford the gas.” He lit a cigarette, dragged deeply, and blew the smoke into an induction fan that carried it outside. “The Canadians know bullshit when they see it. They think it’s a cat’s paw in the guise of a joint NORAD exercise so we can spy on them and interfere in their domestic affairs.”

  “After all we’ve done for them,” I said.

  The lieutenant with the red hair stifled a laugh. The general shot him a hard glance and stubbed out his cigarette. I heard an irritated snuffle from beneath his desk. He pushed back his chair and stepped over to a wall map. A dilapidated bulldog tottered to its feet and followed him. When it reached where he was standing, it slumped to the floor, gasping for breath. “Who’s a good boy,” Mackenzie said absently. He peered at a line that straggled northeast from Yellowknife through the wilderness.

  “That’s the winter road,” he said, stabbing a finger at the line. “It runs pretty close to this place here,” he indicated Clip Bay. “The place where they found the remains of the American prospector.”

  “Jimmy Angel,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  He studied the map and the photographs pinned to the map. They had that quality of hyperrealism that makes a satellite shot look like the surface of another planet. Time codes ran across the top and exact latitude and longitude. Surveillance targets were pinpointed with circles and crosshairs. One showed the landing strip at the Ekati mine. Another, Jimmy Angel’s campsite.

  “What I need to know is this,” he said. “Is
that Chinese guy going to build a mine there?”

  “The Xi twins,” the red-haired lieutenant interjected.

  Mackenzie shrugged. “Let’s stick with who’s calling the shots.”

  The lieutenant was going to say something else, but the general clenched his jaw, and he shut up.

  “Whether he greenlights a mine,” I said, “would depend on what he learns about the target. I don’t know the exact state of his knowledge. Normally, if he thinks it’s promising, the first thing he’d do is dig a big enough hole to take out what they call a bulk sample. Then he counts all the diamonds in it and extrapolates the richness of the deposit.”

  “That first hole, the one for the sample—would that involve a lot of machinery and steel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that would all have to come up the winter road?”

  I waited until he turned away from the map and looked at me.

  “Help me out,” I said. “I thought the army had engineers on the payroll who could answer questions like this.”

  His face and hands were crisscrossed with tiny scars. Something in his military past had torn him up, and the surgeons who’d repaired him had been in a hurry. A smooth strip on his forehead and another on his chin showed where they’d grafted on skin harvested from elsewhere on his body. The face that looked out from that past was without bitterness, but it had been emptied of illusion.

  “I remember you, Turner,” he said. “You killed that psycho colonel. You and I exchanged information.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, not this time. I guess your people tell you what they think you need to know. I’m not here to fill in the blanks. There’s a whole shitload of Chinese hardware milling around up here, and that’s my problem. This”—he slapped his hand against the map—“this is yours. I use the assets they give me. At the moment, you are one of those. So if you don’t mind.”

  Picking up on his master’s tone, the bulldog growled and struggled to his feet. He looked around with bleary eyes and snuffled through his mashed-up face. “For Christ’s sake, Carstairs,” the general snapped, “the dog needs a piss.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. He snapped a leash on the bulldog and led it outside.

  “The ice road is the cheapest way to move heavy equipment into the Barrens,” I said, “but they don’t have to wait for it. If they don’t care about the cost, they can fly in what they need.”

  “The big mines can,” Mackenzie said. “They’ve got landing strips.”

  “Fan could build his own.”

  “In the middle of what’s basically a slab of rock with no roads?”

  “Easier than you think. There’s a big supply of gravel out there. Dumped by melting glaciers in the last ice age. It sits all over the Barrens in neat piles called eskers. In fact”—I went to the map and pointed to the red circle that marked Jimmy’s camp—“there’s a big one right behind this site.”

  It didn’t take long for the general to understand what that meant.

  “They chopper in a couple of backhoes,” he said.

  I nodded. “I’d be surprised if it took them longer than two weeks.”

  “Well,” he said, staring at one of the drone shots, “now we know they weren’t just enjoying the view.”

  This one was time coded yesterday. Before the blizzard. Late in the day. Long shadows extended from the small group standing on the esker at Clip Bay. The satellite’s enhancing software had worked like a charm. In the crosshairs, Fan—hair shaved close at the sides with the shock of black hair on top combed straight back. Pale skin and coal-black eyes. Even the people outside the crosshairs were in sharp focus. Tinkerbell bulging placidly beside the boss. And on the other side, hands shoved into the pockets of her cargo pants and an unreadable expression on her crooked face, Mitzi Angel.

  28

  By the time I left the Galaxy, the blizzard had blown itself out. A biting north wind took its place. It howled around the aircraft and across the field. A black Chevy Tahoe with a two-star license plate waited on the tarmac with the engine running. Nobody offered me a lift.

  Carstairs stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of a parka. The bulldog shivered in the cold. It whimpered and pawed at Carstairs, who hunched more deeply into his parka. “This cold front’s supposed to pass through,” he said. He’d been waiting for me.

  “You wanted to make some point about the twins?”

  But he’d changed his mind. He shook his head. “Not a big deal.”

  I turned up my collar and set off into the wind.

  My eyes watered, and the tears turned to ice. A white gauze of snow slithered along the concrete. I passed a Canadian army Humvee bristling with antennas parked on a taxiway. A soldier in the front seat had a pair of binoculars trained on the Galaxy. The only other airplane in sight was a large business jet parked at the terminal. On its tail fin, the yellow iDragon spread its claws and spewed a tongue of flame.

  Luc was waiting for me when I came through the doors into the terminal. His face was twisted into the fiendish grin that no one would mistake for a smile.

  “I thought you were toast on that landing,” he said, not sounding as if it had bothered him much.

  The white SUV was waiting outside with Cedric at the wheel. Luc got into the back with me. A Plexiglas panel separated the front seat from the back. Luc slid it shut with a bang, and we drove out of the airport and along the highway into town. The back seat still smelled of vomit, but at least I wasn’t the only one who had to breathe it.

  Luc scrolled through his phone for a minute, but he wasn’t reading anything. He was mad and trying to control it.

  “You know,” he said, shoving the phone in his pocket and staring straight ahead, “you’re the most powerful nation in the history of the world, and the richest. Yet also—and here’s what the rest of us struggle with—the most paranoid. What’s it going to be today? That’s the question every country has to ask. Who’s showing up today, the paranoid asshole or the washout who screws his allies? We just never know.”

  He was wound up tight, clenching his fists until the knuckles were white. It was clear that the joint NORAD exercise was a long way from being as joint as the Canadians would have liked. But I wasn’t his therapist.

  “Tell you what, Luc. Next time somebody flies a couple of planeloads of your citizens into a building in Toronto, give me a shout and we’ll have a chat about paranoia. Until then, what do you want?”

  The window had frosted over. Luc didn’t answer. He rubbed a clear patch in the frost with his hand and stared out glumly. We drove through the small downtown and turned left at the bay. We crossed the causeway and drove up a hill to a restaurant at the top.

  Cedric went straight to the bar and ordered a coffee. Luc led the way to a table by the windows with a view of the bay. A waiter wearing Ugg boots and a fur hat with dangling ear flaps gave us each a menu. Then she bent down with her hands on her knees so she could gaze into our eyes. “You will never forgive yourself if you don’t try the northern buffalo poutine,” she said.

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  “It’s a variation on the classic Quebec poutine, but instead of just curds and gravy, it has buffalo meat too.” She flashed her white teeth. “We’re famous for it.”

  “Burger,” Luc said. “Medium. The works.”

  “Make that two,” I said, handing back the menu. There was a long list of things I’d never forgive myself for. One more wouldn’t matter.

  Luc waited until she’d left before he spoke. “Who’s fighting who here, Alex? A week ago I get a notice that you’re on your way to investigate a missing American. Your paperwork says something about protecting the interests of American shareholders. Fine. Turns out we’re interested in what’s going on too, so I think, let’s see what he finds out. OK so far?”

  Luc was making it sound like a collaboration. But the two times we’d sat down for a chat—when I first arrived, and later, after the attack in
the Barrens—Luc was the only one calling the shots.

  “Now there’s a two-star general parked in his plane at Yellowknife airport, AWACS in our airspace, and Canadian officers slamming doors in our face when we try to find out what’s going on.”

  “They’re not briefing you?”

  “They say it’s a joint NORAD exercise, but they don’t seem too happy.”

  We finished eating. The waiter with the Ugg boots cleared the table and brought us coffee. She pitched the Saskatoon berry pie.

  “Will I forgive myself if I take a pass?” I said.

  She winked. “I won’t forgive you.”

  “Two,” I told her, “plus one for the guy at the bar.”

  Luc stared out the window. A Canadian army helicopter clattered past in the direction of the airport. “It’s not just this wargames charade that’s hard to figure out, Alex. It’s Fan. You saw his plane out there. How does it make sense for him to fly to Yellowknife? He must know he’s a suspect for the attack on the Otter and for Jimmy Angel’s death. Why come here and rub our faces in it?”

  “Too big to take down. He’s got our countries at each other’s throats over his sister. He’s betting there’s no way you’ll detain him. And you won’t.”

  He shook his head. “I still have the same problem. It’s not like he’s taking over Apple. He could run this from his phone. It’s a diamond play. You drill the target. Find diamonds: dig a mine. Don’t find diamonds: go home.”

  “He’s not going home, Luc. He’s got eighteen tractor-trailer loads of some kind of mining equipment that he went to a lot of trouble to bring up here.”

  Luc nodded. “You were counting too.”

  The pie was great. We ate in silence, washed it down with coffee, and watched the F-18s make low passes over the airport.

  “Your girlfriend spent a lot of time with Mitzi Angel when you were away,” Luc said when we’d settled up with Ugg boots and were putting on our coats. “Why is that, do you think?”