by A P Bateman
“I’ll be okay,” he said a little lamely. “It’s not a tough job,” he lied. “Just room for one, by the sounds of it. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Kiss me,” she said quietly. She smiled as he made his way over and kissed her tenderly. She rubbed his shoulders and said, “Just bugger off and get it done. I’m not going to jinx it by wishing you good luck and nonsense like that. So, don’t trust anybody, give the other guy hell and get your retaliation in first.” She broke away first, leaning back in the leather chair. “And you were right, you were getting under my feet. Sorry I didn’t hide it well enough.” She paused, blinking a tear away. “Now, get out of here. Go and get the job done.”
Chapter Five
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen Island
Svalbard Archipelago
800 miles from the North Pole
King stepped out onto the runway, his boots crunching on the loose sand and salt chippings that had recently been spread, keeping the ice at bay. Except it was failing. The ground felt like a skate rink underfoot, with a layer of compacted frozen snow over what he guessed was once a tarmacked runway. He did a temperature test, sniffing hard through his nose, the moisture freezing and sticking his nostrils together. The air had felt sharp, and clean and salty. He figured it was – 16ºc and the digital sign near the airport terminal, which relayed temperature and time alternately, confirmed it as – 18ºc. In the bay, icebergs bobbed and dipped on the gentle swell. It was early April, just out of winter.
There was no passport control or customs check. That had been taken care of in Oslo. But he hadn’t been able to get by with just a carry-on because of all the bulky thermal clothes he would require, and so needed to collect his bags from the terminal. He also needed to change, the cold biting viciously at him, so he couldn’t simply make his way out of the unfenced airport. Besides, he had been warned about polar bears back in Oslo. Regularly scared off from town, it was a different matter outside the town limits where it was illegal to either travel without a weapon, or a person who was carrying one. Polar bears outnumbered the population of the island by three to one.
Inside the terminal, the warm air felt heavy and thick. King headed for the lone carousel. The flight had mainly consisted of Svalbard residents who had been shopping on the mainland, but among them had been people like King. Or at least the cover King had taken. He looked up from the carousel, nodded at the young Swedish marine biologist he had helped with her luggage back at Oslo. She had her diving equipment with her, including two tanks which had been emptied and the valves removed for inspection before the flight. She was young and keen and inexperienced. King also had diving equipment with him but knew enough to figure he’d get his tanks on location, and that he would prefer them freshly filled in his presence anyway, so couldn’t see the point of her travelling with them in the first place, but he at least needed the kit to back up his cover story. The young woman had introduced herself as Madeleine but must have become well-acquainted with a fellow passenger during the flight. He looked a decade younger than King and spent more on grooming products in a week than King would have in a year. He could already see from the dynamic that she thought she had struck up a genuine friendship, but the young man was on the hunt for more than friendship and looked to be going in for the kill. She had mentioned that she would be spending the night in a local hotel in Longyearbyen before boarding her ship – he suspected they all would be – but he already foresaw the young man upping his game further in the hotel bar.
He wondered how many of the passengers would be travelling with him. But he supposed he’d know soon enough. He tried to work out what marine engineers, oceanographers and marine biologists looked like. Madeleine was in her mid-twenties, sported a discreet nose piercing and had a few braids in her wavy shoulder-length blonde hair. She looked like a surfer to King. He looked around the carousel. A few of the men looked casual, a little unkempt. He realised he was stereotyping now and gave up. The carousel started and the first of the luggage came out. Everybody stepped forward, but King remained where he was, studying the passengers and assessing who, if anybody, he was up against. And then he found him from the other side of the luggage carousel. Staring back at him, relaxed and the only other passenger not to have moved when the luggage belt started. King wasn’t one to back away from a staring contest, and besides, it was too late now. The man was the physical image of King. Six foot - perhaps a shade under – and broad at the shoulders and narrow at the waist. King estimated him to be thirteen or fourteen stone and from the way the fabric of his sweater pulled at his arms, he knew he would be well-muscled. The man’s face was craggy, his dark eyes resembled a shark’s, and he wasn’t bothered about what could have been an awkward situation. Still King’s glacier blue eyes bored into him, cold and detached. Eventually, the man smirked and stepped forward to the carousel, breaking the stare and hoisting a large bag with an empty dive tank attached to it easily into the air. King could see from the way the straps strained that it was heavy, but the man had made light work of it. King saw his bags, but when he looked back, the man had gone.
Outside, taxis and guides took the passengers to their boarding houses or hotels, or back to their homes. King had hired a car from the desk in Oslo and collected the keys at the Arctic Autorent desk. He’d chosen a Toyota Hi-Lux pick-up truck, for no other reason than in every war-torn country he’d ever operated in, it was the one vehicle that seemed to keep going. He’d seen them fuelled on nothing more than cooking oil and a splash of white spirit in place of diesel and run for half a million miles without a service. Just fuel, oil and water, and air in the tyres.
King found the truck outside, parked nose in and close to the terminal. The locks had been de-iced and as he slung his bags onto the back seat and got inside, he saw that a can of de-icer had been left for him on the passenger seat.
Svalbard had been in Arctic winter until just six weeks ago, meaning that it had been in complete darkness for months. Now the archipelago was experiencing short days and long nights, but within a month it would switch around, and after another month it would be perpetual daylight until August. So, as he drove past the stretch of coast, then turned off towards Longyearbyen, he reflected with some bewilderment that it was close to summer, despite seeing floating ice the size of buses in his rear-view mirror. Despite the cold, and the snow-covered mountains that seemed to spring up from the edge of town, much of the road was clear with patches of green showing in the snow. King drove steadily, the truck gliding over the ice without drama or incident. He checked his phone as he drove, opened the Google Maps app, and followed the road to the heading he’d put in as they taxied on the runway in Oslo. He needn’t have bothered – there seemed to only be one road and it looped into cul-de-sacs of brightly painted wooden houses. Many of his fellow passengers were checking into the small number of hotels and boarding houses, taking their luggage from the taxis, and coping well with the ice underfoot. Most of the people on his flight had been Scandinavian, but there were a few adventurous tourists as well. He figured that the majority were Svalbard residents in need of some mainland sanity and comfort.
King pulled up outside the gun shop. With just three-thousand residents on the island a gun shop wouldn’t have seemed an ideal business model, but with eight-thousand polar bears at the last count and it being law not to leave town without a firearm or an armed guide, it made a little more sense. The small university even employed polar bear guards and ran courses on handling a rifle safely. King had been hastily issued with a UK firearms certificate, which negated the month-long pre-travel permission form process and firearms handling lesson. Of course, the gun shop was as much an outdoor pursuit store as the former, and King would stock up on a few things while he was here. He got out of the truck, the cold biting him and reminding him that he was well within the Arctic Circle. His coat was a thermal ski jacket, but his legs were already stinging from the cold air. His desert boots were tough and hardy, but his toes were already numb b
y the time he walked the short path and took the four steps to the shop.
Inside, King was blasted with heat and his face burned as the feeling slowly and painfully came back to his cheeks. He peeled off his thermal gloves and made his way to the counter, where a Viking who had clearly found himself in the wrong century was tending a till. He nodded a silent greeting as King fumbled with the two loose pages comprising his firearms certificate.
“Cold enough for you?” the man commented dryly, his English good, but his accent thick and rhythmic Nordic.
King smiled. “No doubt you’ll tell me it was colder in the winter…”
“You have been among Scandinavians before,” he replied knowingly. “I myself am Norwegian, but it wasn’t cold enough for me down there, so...”
“Only another eight hundred miles to go, then,” King commented flatly.
“No bars at the North Pole. Not many customers, either.”
“I need a rifle for my stay here,” said King, looking at the row of rifles on the shelf behind the man. “I understand you only need to see a firearms certificate for me to rent one.”
The man nodded as he scrutinised the pages. He folded it and handed it back to King. “We use point thirty-oh-six.” He turned around and unhooked a well-used one from the chain. “I need a three-hundred-euro deposit and it’s fifty euros a day for the gun. This is a Browning A-Bolt. Three shots, bolt action. Just a three-round magazine. But you cannot carry it around town with the magazine in the weapon, and you must carry it only with the bolt back and the breech open so people can see that it is not loaded.”
King took the rifle from him and felt it, the weight, the balance and feel of it. The stock was what was referred to as synthetic, just a black plastic composite that required no maintenance, like modern military assault rifles. He could see from the bolt and magazine lips that the rifle had barely been fired, although it had been carried plenty of times, the stock and fore end were scratched, as was the barrel. “No telescopic sight?”
“You’re not going hunting. This rifle is for protection only,” the man said somewhat curtly. “The open sights are good for two-hundred metres, but if you need to use this, then you will have eight-hundred kilos of bear running you down at sixty kilometres an hour. In that scenario you do not want to be trying to shoot it looking through a magnified lens as you will struggle to keep up with the target. Scopes are no good for moving targets. If it is looking aggressive and coming straight at you, then wait until it is thirty metres away and fire. Miss and it will be twenty metres from you by the time you work the bolt. Miss again, and part of you will be in the beast’s mouth and he’ll already be eating you…”
King shrugged. He didn’t exactly need a lesson on firearms, scopes or ballistics, but he’d never hired a gun for bear protection before, so he had listened and taken in what the man had said. “Can I have an assault rifle instead?” he joked.
“No,” the man replied humourlessly. “Five-point-five-six millimetre will just piss the bear off anyway. We don’t use anything that small up here.”
King nodded. “Why this calibre in particular?” he asked purely out of interest.
Modern military weapons had bypassed .30-06 since the Second World War. He knew the legendary BAR troop support weapon chambered in .30-06 had been flawed by its heavy ammunition. Modern times called for a soldier to carry more ammunition and for the bullet to merely put an enemy soldier out of action, which in turn tied up more personnel in a support role, than simply killing just another soldier. That was why smaller, more specialised calibres were used on the battlefield. But a polar bear was an entirely different entity. A .30-06 was going to do more than sting a polar bear, but there were plenty more capable calibres out there.
“It packs a hell of a punch, without the huge recoil of the larger African game calibres. The government tested it against other calibres, and it ticked the most boxes for our unique purposes. Some of it had something to do with tighter necked bullet cases being affected by the extreme cold.” He put a leaflet down on the counter. “That’s the do’s and don’ts. Remember, you’re not here to bag a polar bear. The rifle is for your protection only. And don’t relax just because you’re in town. That’s when we get the most attacks or encounters as people let their guard down and before they know it, they’ve wandered to the outskirts. That and down on the shoreline. And the police don’t take kindly to not knowing if the rifle is unloaded or not. And they carry Glocks.”
“And that’s it?” King asked, mentally tucking away the fact the .30-06 performed well in cold weather, he’d be sure to discuss this with Simon Mereweather and see if he could take it to the MOD. Sometimes the simplest things could be overlooked.
The man shrugged. “You rent the ammunition, too.” He put a box of twenty Hornaday red tips on the counter. “Soft-nosed, expanding ammunition. Fifty euros for the box, but it’s returnable. However, I charge twenty euros per bullet used. Tends to keep down the number of people heading out of town to shoot beer bottles…” He said, then added. “But if you really must shoot something, there is a target range near Mine Two. It’s easy to find.”
King nodded as he strolled around the store and picked out an Arctic jacket, trouser and bib set and some more thermal socks. He also chose a pair of soft thermal boots and another pair of gloves. As he placed it all on the counter and the man started to tally it up, he added four chemical handwarmers and a Leatherman. The Leatherman was like a Swiss Army knife on steroids, with pliers, a sharp serrated blade and an array of other tools that could come in handy. He paid with the company card Ramsay had issued him with and shouldered the rifle on the leather strap. He tucked the bullets into his inside jacket pocket and slipped the overall trousers over his cargoes, swapped to the new boots, then loaded up with the bags. Outside, the air seared his throat and lungs, and he felt his nostrils stick together again as he breathed. King slipped on a pair of sunglasses he had bought back at Gatwick Airport. They were black Oakley wraparounds and as soon as he put them on, his eyes relaxed from the glare of sun on snow. He tossed everything but the rifle onto the rear seats, and rested the rifle on the passenger seat, with the stock in the footwell. He loaded three bullets into the magazine and tucked the magazine into his pocket. King wasn’t overly concerned about polar bears. The only predator that concerned him was the man who had stared long and hard at him back at the airport terminal. He knew the look. And he knew that hostile forces would soon come into play. He felt happier with the rifle next to him.
Chapter Six
King checked his phone. The message just gave a time only. He had memorised the coordinates back in London, all that needed confirming was the time, and now he had that. He deleted the message and slipped the phone back into his pocket. Within less than a mile of driving, King knew he would have to abandon all thoughts of driving the pickup and find a snowmobile to complete his journey, so he turned around and headed back into town. The plan had been hastily put together, time being the overriding factor, and now he wondered what else he had overlooked, besides the near impossible task of boarding a submarine at a depth of over two thousand feet in Arctic waters and setting off charges before an international salvage team could attempt to bring it up to the surface. The more he thought about the mission, the more he felt he was doomed to fail. His motivation had been solely to discover what had happened after he had delivered a terrified woman to a submarine waiting for her underneath the ice of a fjord, and of course, keeping samples of the virus out of the hands of the Russians, and he had not given much thought to the environment he was operating in. The cold was savage, biting. Any exposed skin turned numb after less than a minute, and his clothing made movement both cumbersome and slow. He had bought the dry-suit and diving equipment he would need in case he could not get the submersible docked, but at that depth he would need trimix breathing gas of 10/70/20, that is 10% oxygen, 70% helium and 20% nitrogen. Naturally, the salvage divers would have the facility to mix their own gases dependent o
n the depth they were diving, but King was certainly no expert and deep diving required a team. The thought of piloting the mini sub was certainly more appealing, and in truth if he indeed had to dive, then he felt it was bordering on the very real prospect of becoming a suicide mission.
King pulled down his left glove at the wrist and checked his watch. The light was misleading. It was getting dark and still not yet three-thirty-pm. The locals had recently emerged from three months of darkness, so they would no doubt be in good spirits, but he had heard that the three months of daylight they would experience in the summer months was just as depressing as the months of darkness, with people working too many hours to get tasks done that would otherwise be difficult in darkness and colder temperatures and sleeping in perpetual light could take its toll as they suffered from insomnia. He pulled up at the hotel and saw the row of snowmobiles to the left beside a small convenience store. King parked up and got out, slinging the rifle over his shoulder on the leather sling strap. The cold air attacked his face and neck, and he pulled the collar up higher. He trudged up the steps, dusted with icy powder that looked like icing sugar. It was neither snow, nor ice and felt dry and grippy underfoot. It was like no snow he had seen before, and he realised why the Inuit people had a hundred different words for the various types of snow and ice.
There was a young woman of around twenty at the counter. King wondered what life held for a young person on the island. Whether they got out straight after university, of which he knew there to be a small campus, or if they remained and lived full and happy lives. Island living was one thing, but artic living was quite another. Put the two together with three months of daylight and three months of darkness, and an average summer temperature of just 5ºC with winters down to as low as -40ºC, then he saw it more as merely existing than living.