The Cold Edge
Page 4
Out on the sidewalk the rain had slowed to a light mist. He looked across the street at an alley no wider than three feet. Alleys like that were all over the old town area. They cut off distances, but had also been known for their underground activity across the centuries. McLean saw a dark figure slip down into the shadows, so he crossed the street and made his way to the alley.
By the time he got to the edge, he checked his watch and then slid around the corner, stepping lightly down the wet cobblestones. His only lighting came from a building around the corner ahead, giving him a distinct advantage. He could see better than anyone from that side.
A couple more steps, where the alley widened slightly, he stopped. A hand touched his arm.
“I thought you would come in,” McLean said. “Watch my back from there.”
“No, it works better this way,” came a soft woman’s voice. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing. . .yet.”
Her hand moved from his arm to his crotch. “You gave him the cards?”
McLean cleared his throat. “Listen. You work for me. What do you think? Of course he has them. And you can bet your ass he’ll drain the money from it as soon as he gets a chance.”
Her hand moved from his crotch to his buttocks. She squeezed down and said, “That driver’s license is brilliant. Are you sure the embedded GPS will work?”
“As advertised. State of the art.” What the hell was she up to this time? She was an attractive woman, but not quite his type, for she was an inch shorter than his contact Gary Dixon. She had been trying to seduce him for the past six months. Ever since she had been reassigned from Vauxhall.
Without further warning, her deft little hands unzipped his pants and one hand went inside. “Let’s let the Loch Ness Monster out for some Midnight air.”
He gasped but didn’t stop her. She was at the perfect level, and his mind had actually gone to that thought a few times. In seconds he was to his full glory and her warm mouth took it in. Now he couldn’t stop her if he wanted to. And he sure as hell didn’t want her to deviate from the task at hand.
Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Deep within the command center, more than one hundred feet below the surface of what had been the old Andrews Air Force Base bowling alley, Kurt Jenkins swiveled in his wide chair like a starship captain, his eyes flicking from one LCD screen to the next, observing ongoing operations worldwide. He was the newly appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been career CIA before congress had combined the CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ATF, and all of the military service intelligence functions into one organization years ago. He had been the first manager of external operations, a position that controlled all covert operations away from U.S. territories, and had ascended to the top job a month ago.
Jenkins checked the bank of clocks, which ran along the top of the wall above the LCD screens, each indicating a different time in various locations around the world. Zulu plus one to Svalbard Archipelago. Twenty-three hundred here. That would mean Zulu minus six, or zero five hundred there. Jake would call at any time now.
He needed to get home to sleep, but guessed he would spend the night again on the sofa in his office. He should have just had a bed brought in and forget about the pretext of his current situation. Sure he didn’t really want to go home, but he needed to help his old friend, Jake Adams. After Jake had called, Jenkins had researched the current situation in Svalbard. He glanced at a briefing paper. It was more than Jake understood, he was sure of that. Only time would tell for sure what Jake had gotten himself into this time, though. His men had tried to pick up Colonel Reed for questioning, but somehow he had disappeared from Oslo. Vanished.
Then Jenkins had wanted to contact his counterpart in Moscow to see what he knew; yet, he knew that would show his hand. No, he needed to give Jake everything he knew to date, and then keep digging. Even though relations with Norway were good, he didn’t want to talk with them directly either. This would have to be handled with great discretion. Jake would be on his own. He would give Jake technical assistance when needed. Nothing more. He looked at the brief once more before slipping it into the shredder at his side.
4
Jake had woken early as usual, around zero six hundred, but what was not normal for the past three months is that he did not have a huge headache hangover. At some point he had come to expect the stiff neck, the throbbing pain radiating from there to his temples and eyeballs, and the dry throat. Expected the feeling of weakness that he thought he could vanquish with the early hour and some push-ups and sit-ups. Yet, deep down he knew he was fooling himself. Still, it wasn’t like he had been falling down drunk for the past three months. He had simply taken things a bit to the extreme, finding whatever comfort he could with Anna’s absence without cheating. The numbness had prevented any possible intimacy with another woman, not that he had tried to find it, but had also bled over into those times when Anna had been home. He could see that now, with his mind clear and not clouded with the after-effects of alcohol.
In fact, he felt pretty damn good this morning. Felt like taking a run, which he did while Anna continued to sleep.
A dark fog wrapped the town of Longyearbyen in isolated obscurity as Jake jogged along the main drag of the capital. He made his way toward the airport, his lungs sucking in the cold, damp air and feeling as if they might explode with each struggle for air. When he got to within a few blocks of the airport, he slowed his pace to a walk, his hands on his hips.
He thought about Anna and why they were there in that isolated set of islands in the Arctic. What had Colonel Reed gotten him involved in this time? Was it just a simple case of him finding an old friend in the snowy glacier? Closure?
Stopping alongside the road, Jake swung his fanny pack from back to front and pulled out the SAT phone. He punched in the number for his old friend Kurt Jenkins. If anyone owed Jake a favor, it was the current Agency director. Jenkins had ridden some of Jake’s successes over the years right to the top.
Before the call went through, Jake checked the distance between himself and any possible parabolic microphone. He guessed he was beyond the range of most that would be within view. It’s why he had selected the site on the ride from the airport the day before.
“Well? What ya got for me?” Jake asked.
“Right to the point,” Jenkins said. “No weather report. No how’s she hanging.”
“I’m on a run,” Jake said. “If you must know, it’s dark, damp and foggy. And I’ve got a flight to catch in less than two hours, assuming the helo can fly in this soup. That better?”
“Much.” He hesitated and Jake thought he had lost the signal.
“You there?”
“Yeah. I had to dig deep for this one, Jake. I was just a field officer like yourself in nineteen eighty-six.”
“I was still an Air Force officer,” Jake corrected.
“Right. Anyway, your friend Captain Steve Olson, as you know, was assigned to the Oslo embassy as a military attaché.”
The wind swept across the open tundra and Jake shivered from the sweat he had worked up.
“No offense, Kurt, but could you cut to the chase. I’m standing out in the middle of nowhere, freezing my ass off.”
“Absolutely. Anyway, as far as we know, a Soviet MiG Twenty-five went down on Spitsbergen Island a couple of days before the Reykjavik Summit. At the time, we had no way of knowing its flight path. So, Captain Olson and John Korkala, the Oslo assistant station chief, were sent to investigate.”
“What made the CIA so interested?”
“One of our contacts in Finland said the Soviets were sending a team to recover something from Svalbard.”
“How many?” Jake asked.
“At least four.”
“That would have gotten our attention. Send one or two and it’s a search and destroy mission. Send four and it’s a sanitation mission. What was on the plane? A nuke?”
; “That’s what we thought at first. But there was no radiation release.”
“Chemical or biological?”
“Don’t know.”
“Hang on.”
A car came along the road toward him and slowed when the headlights hit Jake. He waved and the car continued toward the airport. A pretty woman, a blonde who could have been Anna’s twin, smiled at him and waved back.
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah, just a car with a hot blonde.”
“Some things never change. Christ, you have a beautiful girlfriend.”
“I know. And you don’t have to deify me.”
“Funny guy. Anyway, we never heard from our men and the Soviets never heard from their men. I have that on the best authority. Of course if it had happened today we would have a direct GPS position, SAT photos, you name it. But somehow the decision was made to forget about this whole affair. Reagan and Gorbachav had damn near French kissed and nobody wanted to make waves. Later, once the Soviet Union went tits up, the entire case was closed when the new Russia had admitted that one of their pilots had defected with the MiG and crashed in Norway in bad weather. That’s the last note we have in the official file.”
Jake let out a deep breath, the air escaping in a cloud of vapor. “There’s more to this. Always is.”
“I don’t know that for sure.”
“But you suspect I’m correct.”
Pause. “I don’t know.”
Context. Jake always knew that what was not said was usually as import as what was said. It was all context and juxtaposition. This would be no exception.
“Thanks, Kurt. Appreciate the effort.”
“Jake?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful.”
Those words hung in his brain like the fog on the muskeg of Spitsbergen.
He jogged back to the hotel and caught Anna in the shower, where he joined her. They had a quick breakfast, checked out, and took a van to the airport.
They were directed to a helo out on the pad, where the pilot was already behind the controls and a ground crewman was making final preparations for the flight. Piling all their gear in, Jake strapped Anna into a seat before heading to the cockpit.
He was surprised when the pilot turned out to be the pretty blonde who had passed him while he talked on the SAT phone that morning. She handed him a headset as she powered up the engines and clicked switches to get ready for flight.
“Kjersti Nilsen,” the pilot said, reaching out her gloved hand to Jake.
He shook and she squeezed down hard. It surprised him, since she had the build of a cross country skier like Anna. But then Anna’s strength had also surprised Jake on more than one occasion.
“How was your run?” she asked him through the headset.
“A little cold and moist,” Jake said.
“Welcome to Svalbard. It doesn’t get any better where we’re going.”
Moments later they were airborne, and Jake wondered how in the hell they could even lift off in that thick fog. He got his answer seconds later as the helo lifted out of the low clouds and an obscured sun appeared.
Jake pulled out his GPS handheld, waited for the satellites to get picked up, and then punched in their destination. He watched as their elevation fluctuated and the distance counted down. By air they were about 120 miles from Pyramiden, a Russian coal mining settlement that had once had a population of 1,000 before being abandoned in 1998. But the Russians had re-established mining operations in 2007, and Jake had heard the population had already gone back up to 500. Which is how someone had found the wreckage of the MiG-25 a week ago.
The scenery was surprising—high glacial mountains, mostly barren, with deep fjords that cut through rocky coasts. It was breathtaking and Jake guessed not many people had actually seen the place. Other than those hardy coal miners, Norwegian fishermen, or those stopping off on their way to explore the North Pole.
They stopped in Pyramiden to drop off mail and pick up another package of the same, topped off with fuel, and then quickly lifted off again. Total ground time about ten minutes.
Anna had not said a word since they left the capital. Jake knew she hated to fly by helo. She tried to sleep through the experience.
Jake pulled up their next destination on the GPS and saw they were only about 20 miles away. He gave the pilot the location. He had read in the briefing from Colonel Reed that Captain Olson and John Korkala had taken snowmobiles from Pyramiden back in 1986. Looking at the terrain below, he guessed it had been some pretty rough sledding.
“How would you get to our destination by snowmobile?” Jake asked the pilot. “It’s so rocky.”
She glanced to the ground. “Couldn’t do it this time of year. Well, not true. I hear last year you could have. This is an unusually warm summer. August is the warmest it gets up here, and the melt is at its peak. Global warming.”
“Looks like the glaciers are doing all right up here,” Jake said.
“I’m just saying the only reason anyone saw the plane was because the snow hasn’t melted this far down in more than twenty years. A pilot saw the tail from the air.”
Moments later Jake saw the plane for himself—what was left of it. The debris field stretched for dozens of yards. The pilot set down the helo right near the center, where the main fuselage was still partially covered in snow. In fact, there had been a couple of inches of new snow the night before.
The pilot shut down the engine, unstrapped, took off her headset, and then pulled a pistol from under her seat and strapped it to her hip.
“Forty-four magnum,” Jake said. “That’s a powerful gun.”
She opened the door and said, “Polar bears laugh at a nine mil or a forty cal.” She slapped her gun. “But this will take one down. We’ve got two more rifles in the back—a thirty-ought-six and a three hundred mag.”
“Great,” he said, slipped toward the back. “Let’s hope we don’t need them.”
“Need what?” Anna asked. She looked a little green.
“The rifles,” Jake said. “A lot of hungry polar bears up here.”
“This is crazy. You know my idea of roughing it is having no hot tub in the hotel room.”
The side door opened and Kjersti held out her hand to Anna, introducing herself and helping her out onto the frozen ground.
Jake got out and first went to the largest aircraft parts, the main fuselage, which had broken in two. The wings had sheared off and probably lay back fifty yards or so, but the cockpit was still attached to the main fuselage, just in front of the large engine intakes. He checked the cockpit first. The canopy was gone. No pilot. He didn’t know what he had expected. Bones perhaps. Maybe more, considering the glacier. But something wasn’t right.
“Jake.”
He turned to see Anna brushing snow from something. He walked to her and said, “What ya got.”
“A snowmobile.”
Jake looked a few feet away and saw a second one. “Make that two snowmobiles.”
Kjersti pulled a digital camera from inside her flight suit and started taking photos.
Immediately Jake saw that they were Russian sleds. Which made sense, since the CIA had rented a snowmobile from them in Pyramiden. He already knew that. But wait. They had rented one snowmobile and a sled for their gear. These had to be from the GRU or KGB.
“What’s going on?” Kjersti asked. “I thought this was supposed to be a plane crash.”
“As you can see,” Jake said, “it is. I have no idea how these snowmobiles got here.” Not a total lie.
His friend at the Agency, Kurt Jenkins, had said they had sent four Soviet officers. That would be at least two snowmobiles. Must be their sleds, he guessed.
“Anna, see what you can find here,” Jake said. “I need to check out the aircraft.”
Anna nodded and started to dig around.
“We have a metal detector in the helo, if that will help,” Kjersti said.
“Sure thing.”
“That’s what I’m looking for,” Anna said.
“Something is wrong here,” he said. “This isn’t a MiG-25. It’s a MiG-31. Very similar but not the same. In ‘86 it might have had more significance. Although both aircraft never really lived up to their hype. This one had a little more range, though. Perhaps two thousand miles at ferry distance. More importantly. This was a reconnaissance version. I doubt if it would have been carrying a weapon.”
But then that didn’t really explain why the Soviets had sent a crew to sanitize the place. The avionics were not that different from the MiG-25, which the U.S. had already taken apart at that time from defected aircraft. In the ‘70s the U.S. Air Force had gotten their hands on a MiG-25 when a Soviet pilot defected and landed in Japan. The Americans had taken it apart, studied it piece-by-piece, and then shipped it back to the Soviets in pieces. Talk about a slap in the face.
Kjersti came back with a metal detector. She and Anna combed the immediate area while Jake went back to the opened MiG-31 fuselage. The crash had not opened that panel. There were too many panel fasteners, and all of those were intact and had been opened with a screw driver.
Looking around in the compartment, Jake saw something that wasn’t normal. There had been a cube about one foot by one foot surrounded by spray foam, which had been mostly chipped away. Whatever the Soviets had come for, they had found it and pulled it from the wreckage.
“Jake.”
He turned and saw Anna and Kjersti standing and looking down at something. He hurried over there and saw what they saw. What was left of a man. Animals had chewed away most of the man’s face, ripped through his chest to get at his innards, and left only bones. They had not chewed through the rifle, the AK-47, at his side. Moreover, it was pretty easy to determine the cause of death for this men. He had a bullet hole in his forehead.