Peril at the Top of the World

by James Patterson

  “Tatiksarpok,” translated Storm.

  Yep. She speaks Inuit too. Memorized it on the boat ride north “just in case.” I told you we Kidds are always prepared!

  The old man in the fur parka motioned toward his sled. “Please. Join us.”

  “Whoa,” said Tommy. He gestured toward the pretty girl. “Does she speak English too?”

  The old man smiled. “Fortunately for you, no!”

  Laughing, we climbed into the dogsleds and took off!

  And you know what?

  Sled dogs poop on the run. Constantly.

  CHAPTER 39

  Our new friends took us to where they had erected a temporary shelter.

  An igloo!

  “Our village is farther south,” explained the elder once we were all snug inside the cozy dome of ice blocks. “But my good friend, your husband, Thomas Kidd, requested that we come north to keep an eye on ‘the most valuable treasures in the world.’ His family.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “You know our dad?”

  The elder nodded. “Many years ago, when he was taking cold-weather survival training in Greenland for his work at the Agency, I was his instructor. One day, I clumsily slipped and fell through a fishing hole in the ice. Your father dove in after me. Fortunately, he is a very excellent diver. He can hold his breath for a very long time.”

  “We all know how to do that,” said Beck. “Holding your breath for a really long time is a skill you need to hunt treasure on shipwrecks. And when you live with Bick, the human stink bomb.”

  The elder laughed. “Be that as it may, I owe my life to your father. So when he called, we came right away.”

  “Thanks,” said Tommy, who was winking at the pretty girl. “You know, you’re such a hottie, I’m surprised the walls aren’t melting.”

  “Forgive my son,” said Mom. “He falls in love at least twice a day.”

  “Nuh-uh,” said Tommy. “This is for reals.”

  The girl smiled at Tommy. Beck and I rolled our eyes at each other.

  “Her name is Nagojut,” said the elder. “She is my granddaughter.”

  “Her name is beautiful—just like the rest of her,” said Tommy. “What does Nagojut mean?”

  “‘Friendly one.’”

  “Ohhh,” said Tommy. “I like the sound of that!”

  Since we were all starving, we chowed down on akutaq and bannock. That’s berries mixed with blubber smeared on top of flatbread. Kind of the PB and J of the North Pole. It was pretty good, in an “I’m so hungry I’ll eat anything no matter how disgusting it looks, smells, or tastes” kind of way.

  After we ate, the elder, whose name we learned was Sata Adjuk, explained a little bit about how the Inuit build an igloo, or snow hut.

  “We cut the blocks of snow by hand with a knife. The warmth inside mixed with the cold wind outside will cement the snow blocks together firmly. The air pockets in the snow act like insulation…”

  While he told us all this, I noticed that Mom kept fidgeting with the Russian satellite telephone.

  “You okay, Mom?” asked Tommy, because he saw it too.

  She gave us a weak grin. “Just worried about your father. At least I have you guys and our new Inuit friends. He’s all alone, wherever he is.”

  “He’ll be fine,” I said, even though I was starting to worry too.

  “I’m not so sure about that, Bick,” said Storm. “If we’re on the wrong trail to find the stolen art, then Dad might be on the right one. He could be close to finding the Enlightened Ones’ secret hiding spot. If so, he’s probably in danger, big-time.”

  Storm. She always says whatever’s on her mind, even when you sort of wish she wouldn’t.

  “Your father has many friends,” said Sata, “in many corners of the world. If he is facing danger, he will not need to face it alone.”

  “You’re right,” said Mom. “But I wish I could share this new clue with him. He needs it more than we do.”

  “So text it to him,” said Tommy.

  “There’re no cell towers this far north, hon,” said Mom. “We’re too far from the ship for Wi-Fi. And I don’t think this igloo is wired for the Internet.”

  “So?” I said. “Use the satellite phone.”

  Mom hesitated. “The Russians will, most likely, intercept the message and read it.”

  “That’s okay,” said Beck. “They’re the ones who gave us the fourth clue. They want Dad working on finding their stolen art as much as we do.”

  Mom nodded.

  She powered up the satellite phone. The status indicator glowed green. She thumbed in a quick note to Dad:

  No longer actively searching for missing Russian masterpieces at the North Pole.

  Check out the fourth clue, received at Hermitage Museum.

  She attached a photo of the clue and hit send.

  “Now,” she said, “let’s just hope your father is someplace where it’s one hundred and three above even when you’re thirty-five below!”

  Yep. Whatever that means.

  CHAPTER 40

  We spent the night in the igloo.

  Sata, Nagojut, and their Inuit traveling companion, Bob, built themselves another ice hut (in like thirty minutes) so us Kidds could spread out inside our very own frozen dome.

  Exhausted, I fell asleep fast but had the worst nightmare ever!

  I dreamed that the icebreaker turned around and sailed back to Murmansk without us. Viktor Zolin’s oily minions told everybody that we’d slipped on the ice and fallen down a fishing hole.

  “And there was nobody around who could hold his breath long enough to save them,” said Nikita, who looked even scarier in my dream.

  I was tossing and turning when I heard a very loud, piercing beep that wouldn’t quit. In my dream, I thought it was an alarm for the nuclear reactor on my nightmare’s nuclear-powered icebreaker, which was about to go, well, nuclear and have a meltdown.

  Terrified, I woke up with a jolt.

  And bumped my head on the igloo roof, which was basically a giant ice cube.

  Everybody else in the igloo was also sitting up, wondering who set an alarm for so early in the morning.

  It was the satellite phone. A red light was flashing on it.

  Someone was calling.

  Mom looked to Storm. Nodded.

  Storm pushed the answer button. “Da?” she said. “Alyo?”

  And then she listened and said “Da” a few more times. Finally, she said, “Spasibo za etu informatsiyu. Do svidaniya,” and hit the off button.

  “Who was that?” asked Mom.

  “An undercover Russian military operative stationed on board the Fifty Years of Victory checking in with our departed paratrooper friends. He reports that our cruise ship has left the North Pole and that representatives of Zolin Oil told the crew that we had elected to stay at the pole so we could photograph walruses and polar bears.”

  So my nightmare had actually come true. The icebreaker was headed back to Russia without us.

  We were stranded at the top of the world.

  Mom and Tommy went next door and quickly roused our new Inuit friends in their igloo.

  “An interesting development,” said Sata, sounding surprisingly mellow, considering the news. Then again, being stuck in the Arctic Circle was no big deal for him. This was his home, after all!

  “It’s a bummer, for sure,” said Tommy, making goo-goo eyes at Nagojut. “But on the plus side, I wouldn’t mind spending more time familiarizing myself with your local customs. For instance, dating. How does that work? Do you guys really rub noses instead of kissing? If so, can someone show me how it’s done? Maybe Nagojut?”

  Mom cleared her throat.

  Tommy knocked it off.

  “Gather up your gear,” said Sata. “We will dogsled to the Barneo drifting-ice research station. It is like a small settlement with housing for explorers and special buildings for all kinds of scientific equipment. They will have communications gear as well.”

&nbs
p; “Wait a second,” said Storm. “Isn’t the Barneo drifting-ice station run by the Russians?”

  “Yes,” said Sata.

  “We definitely can’t go there,” I blurted out. “They’re the bad guys!”

  “Not all Russians are bad, Bick,” said Mom. “The Russians at the research station will be explorers and scientists. Just like us!”

  Tommy raised his hand. “Will your granddaughter be coming with us?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said Sata. “She is the best dogsledder in all of the Arctic.”

  “Then what are we waiting for, guys?” said Tommy. “Let’s hit the road!”

  “There are no roads,” said Storm. “Just ice.”

  “Whatever. Come on. We’re heading back to ninety degrees north to see if Nagojut and I can make it even hotter!”

  CHAPTER 41

  We climbed aboard the three dogsleds and, once again, slipped, slid, and bounced across the frozen tundra.

  As you know, we Kidds have been on some pretty awesome thrill rides in our adventures. But I don’t think any of them can compare to soaring across the ice behind a pack of happily yapping dogs while breathing in the crisp, clean Arctic air. (Except, you know, when one of the dogs had to do its business; then the air got a little polluted.)

  “When we come to a turn,” said Bob, our driver, “lean into it or we will all be eating snow. You will see.”

  So Beck and I leaned into every turn, and Bob did the same, standing up behind us with one foot hovering over the ice-brake bar.

  The other two dogsleds were ahead of us. But suddenly, I heard dogs barking—behind us!

  I whipped around.

  We were being chased! By two guys on dogsleds. They were dressed in speckled white Arctic camo, just like the elite Airborne soldiers we’d met the day before.

  The Russians’ sleds were extremely high-tech. They had sleek aluminum frames with way better aerodynamic design than our humble Inuit rides.

  Bob, our driver, shouted, “Mush! Hike!” at the dogs.

  Then he shouted at us!

  “Hang on, Kidds. We will move very, very fast now. You will see.” He started making kissing noises.

  Our dogs picked up speed. Soon, they were galloping.

  So were the dogs in front of the other two sleds in our pack.

  But the Russians yelled the same kind of stuff at their dogs and started cracking their whips.

  They were gaining on us.

  “Ice floe on the right!” shouted Mom. “Water!”

  Great. We were skirting the edge of another floating ice island.

  The swifter Russians moved so they were parallel with us on the left. Then they started angling in. They were trying to force us into the Arctic Ocean.

  Suddenly, up ahead, Nagojut shouted, “Come! Haw!”

  Her dog team executed an unbelievable 180-degree hairpin turn to the left and went racing straight at the two Russian sleds.

  The Russian drivers stomped down hard on their brakes.

  Their sleek sledges skidded to a halt so fast, the lead lines went slack. Their dogs ended up in a loose clump and started snarling. In a flash, they were on one another, yelping, snapping, and wrestling in a ferocious canine cage match.

  “Never let your towline go slack when dogsledding,” said Bob. “If you do, your dogs will attack one another. You will see.”

  “Um, I think we just did,” said Beck.

  We took off. Before long, the two Russian sleds and their snarling dogs became distant dots on the horizon.

  I kind of hoped the dogs would stop fighting and go after the drivers.

  Meanwhile, our way to the research station had just gotten totally clear!

  CHAPTER 42

  Hours later, we arrived safely at Barneo.

  The research station was amazing, especially after we’d spent the previous night in an igloo sleeping on hardpack snow. There were heated tents, a mess hall and kitchen, modules for storing scientific gear, and bio-toilets. All on a drifting ice floe that moved with the currents. There was also an airstrip—a floating runway for cargo planes to land on.

  And because the floating ice is so thin, it eventually melts away, and the whole thing—the camp and the runway—has to be rebuilt every year!

  North Pole drifting stations do all sorts of important stuff while they float around the Arctic Sea like slowly melting Popsicles. Scientists at Barneo monitor the ice pack, the temperature, the sea depth, the currents, the weather, and even the marine life. Best of all, this research station also had free Wi-Fi!

  “They weren’t soldiers,” said Mom, tapping her watch, which was back online. “My sources tell me that Viktor Zolin sent out another two-man team of goons to track us. He ordered them to wear Russian military camo to scare us into thinking they were here on official business. Apparently, the teenage billionaire learned through intercepts of Russian military communications that we had survived our snowmobile adventure.”

  “Why is Zolin after us?” I asked.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want our documentary to ever make it to the web.”

  “Why not?” said Beck. “Does he own the North Pole too? Did President Putin sell that to him also?”

  Mom just shook her head. “I sure hope not.”

  Later, we met up with some very cool explorers and researchers. Some, of course, were Russians and they were very nice. Very brainy too.

  “Zolin Oil is extremely sloppy and accident-prone,” said Dr. Dimitry Zagorean over a mug of cocoa in the mess hall. “A disgrace to the Russian nation. Not too long ago, they were using lasers to cut through the ice and they sliced a pump pipe. The oil spill was contained quickly, but, trust me, it won’t be the last accident. Zolin cuts corners the same way they cut their own pipes!”

  A researcher, a toxicologist named Dr. Andrew Pardue who had a very bushy beard with clumps of chunky peanut butter stuck in it, told us horror stories about the floating plastic we’d seen earlier.

  “Sadly, I have discovered toxins I had never seen before in bears and reindeer,” said Dr. Pardue. “They are coming from the nonbiodegradable plastic being dumped into the oceans. Worse are the microbeads—tiny plastic particles found in shower gels, face scrubs, and smile-whitening toothpastes.”

  Tommy got defensive. “Why’s everybody looking at me?”

  “Ten million tons of plastic are dumped into rivers, lakes, and seas every year,” said another scientist, Dr. Casie Bowman. “Much of it drifts north and ends up in the bellies of polar bears.”

  “So the bears are, like, eating face scrubs and toothpaste?” said Tommy.

  “No, hon,” said Mom. “They’re probably just eating fish who ate the plastic that floated up from America.”

  “And, of course,” said Dr. Bowman, “although many politicians and business tycoons will deny it, the polar ice cap is melting at an alarming rate. When ice melts, it turns into water. When water goes into the ocean, the sea level rises. When the sea level rises, the coastlines change.”

  “So,” joked Dr. Pardue, “if you don’t own beachfront property, don’t worry. Pretty soon you will!”

  After getting settled in our tents, Beck and I strolled outside to see what the sun looks like at midnight because, during the summer at the North Pole, it never really sets; it just sort of bounces off the horizon.

  In the distance, we saw the two guys in camo we thought we’d lost during the crazy dogsled chase.

  They were just standing there, not budging and not caring that it was a brisk 25 degrees out.

  Either that or they were frozen stiff.

  “You guys?” Mom called from her tent. “We just heard from Dad. The Enlightened Ones sent him another clue!”

  CHAPTER 43

  Okay, that last clue was just loopy.

  A hundred and sixty endangered species wiped out in a single night? Where could that happen? It made absolutely no sense at all to me.

  “We never really thought the Enlightened Ones had hidden their treasu
re trove here,” confided Mom when we huddled for a family meeting the next morning.

  That’s what I’ve been saying!

  “Then shouldn’t we be helping Dad find it?” Tommy asked.

  “There are important things we can do while we’re up here,” said Mom. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help save the true treasures of the earth. Everybody, grab your cameras. Interview the scientists. Shoot lots of footage. We need to document the truth of what’s happening in the Arctic Circle and share it with the world!”

  “Um,” I said, “can we eat breakfast first?”

  “Please?” said Beck. “They have real food here. And none of it is from the blubber food group.”

  “Fine,” said Mom. “We eat. Then we go shoot more video!”

  We left our tent (happy to see that Viktor Zolin’s two frozen goons in fake camo were no longer spying on us) and hit the busy mess hall. The food wasn’t fantastic, but, like Beck said, it sure tasted better than blubber berries on dry Inuit toast. I grabbed a few slices of cold cuts, sausage, and bacon and stuffed them in my pockets to snack on later.

  “Maybe we should split up,” said Tommy after breakfast. “We can grab more footage that way. We can have three teams—Beck and Bick, Storm and Mom, me and Nagojut.”

  “Nagojut went home, Tommy,” said Storm.

  “Fine. Then it’ll just be me and my memories.” He sighed and looked heartbroken until a very attractive Norwegian scientist strolled past our table, carrying a tray. “Unless, of course, she’s available for some fieldwork. Excuse me, guys. Catch you later.”

  Tommy chased after the Norse goddess.

  The rest of us bundled up and headed outdoors.

  “Storm and I will go east,” said Mom. “You guys go west. But, and this is super-important, don’t go too far!”

  “Mom?” said Beck. “We know how to take care of ourselves.”