His single year of programming courses at college had been enough to get him into a non-commissioned role at the cyber operations group in Trenton last year. He’d volunteered to come up to Alert, an assignment nobody else wanted.

  The “Frozen Chosen” was what they called the thirty-or-so military staff here, plus the forty-odd private contractors that kept them fed and the dozen buildings running. All for basically babysitting a bunch of computers.

  Fuzz stretched his neck and looked around the Secure Operations Centers. The SOC. Equivalent to the American SCIF—the Secure Compartmentalized Information Facilities. A secure room to guard against electronic surveillance and suppress data leakage of classified and military information and intelligence.

  That line was right from his study notes.

  The room was thirty-feet long and twenty wide, with metal walls connected together with rough welds and painted an uninspiring shade of blue-gray. Fabric panels hung every three feet. Reminiscent of a submarine more than anything else.

  And that smell—a dull, sweet stink like his grandfather’s house. Somehow greasy and gassy under the lingering odor of daily carpet freshener tonics.

  Chipped Formica tables and basic black plastic-and-metal chairs. Cables snaked across the desks. Boxy old-school computers attached to monitors older than the old one he used at home to play World of Warcraft.

  No windows.

  Not that it mattered.

  Six months of nighttime on his rotation made windows less than useless and more usually just depressing. He had a window in his eight-by-eight bunk room and kept the blinds closed at all times. He supposed it was better than an assignment in Afghanistan. That’s what his mother had said. Less chance of getting shot.

  The only thing you could die of out here was boredom.

  That said, there had been some excitement. The past weeks, the Americans had been conducting war game exercises over the Beaufort Sea, and the Russians responded with their own mobilization of bomber squadrons and fighter overflights deep into international territory, and sometimes into national territories of NATO members.

  And then that airliner went down right in the middle of it.

  Gone.

  Just like that.

  He shook his head. They’d seen an initial blip as it crossed the North Pole, but nothing more than that had appeared on the data sheets, nothing more than a few ghosts he hadn’t been able to verify. Some cryoseismic tremors—ice quakes—but then, that was normal as the glaciers calved and ice sheets buckled under the changing temperatures.

  The media whipped into a frenzy over the airliner story. It covered the news cycle from top to bottom the last two weeks.

  Another commercial jet that had vanished into thin air. No transponder data. No cries for help. They were searching over the Beaufort Sea right now. Dozens of ships and airplanes, but all of them waylaid by this huge string of low pressure systems. Polar hurricanes the media called them.

  The conspiracy theorists had run rampant, and not only in the fringes but straight into the mainstream: Roman Kolchak, the Russian billionaire and arch-nemesis of the Russian Politburo; hundreds of millions in diamonds aboard; five-hundred pounds of lithium batteries in the hold that the NTSB had ruled as dangerous but somehow got on anyway; even a report of an illegally smuggled biohazard container with smallpox virus in it.

  Terrorist attacks? Government cover-up? What had happened? That this was another unlikely accident was a story the public wouldn’t stomach.

  Already China and Russia and the Europeans and America were pointing fingers. The war exercises up here had taken on a more dramatic and deadly tone.

  This installation was the tip of the spear for the entire joint American-Canadian-NATO Alliance intel operation for detecting any incoming aircraft or missiles where they weren’t supposed to be in the Far North. It was part of the original DEW Line, the Distant Early Warning Line, or what they now called the North Warning System.

  Things were heating up in the Arctic, and not from climate change.

  The past month they had had a dozen alerts of Russian aircraft encroaching on Western airspace, and twice of perilously close flybys of American and Russian equipment. It was as if the Ruskies were testing the limits of what they could get away with.

  The Fuzz was ready.

  ▼▲▼

  Major Kumar went back to his command computer in the far corner while Fuzz waited for support staff to bring in the tea. Fuzz suspected the Major spent most of his time surfing Facebook, but he didn’t dare go near.

  Instead, he began his round of the monitoring equipment, verifying cables and connections for the millionth time, running the same diagnostics to make sure all the sensors pinged back.

  Fuzz mused aloud, “Do you think we’ll sustain any structural damage?” He glanced at the exterior weather monitor; hundred-thirty kph winds, minus seventy-eight—and that was Celsius.

  The Major replied, “This is a good test of our systems. We are somewhat blinded in a storm like this.”

  Already some of the VHF antennas were down.

  And this wasn’t only a listening post. The Defense Research group—together with the American DARPA—used Alert as the base for launching a fleet of covert submersible drones that spread out under the Arctic ice pack. A lot of stuff happened here that nobody else was supposed to know about, not even Fuzz.

  A lot of spy stuff.

  He checked a set of monitors looking at high altitude radar. Something blipped on it, a flagged anomaly from half an hour ago. He checked the false-positive analysis. Were the meteorological guys launching balloons from down at the runway in this? Not possible. Was it? Anything was possible in this crazy place.

  He frowned and took a closer look.

  The remoteness of it did weigh on your mind. Two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest other humans. Not just open water. Ice. Cold. Polar bears. Like being on the opposite side of the moon, and a constant nightmare to operate.

  The running joke was that if the Russians invaded, the Base Commander would be at the door waiting for them with the keys and say, “All yours. Hell to resupply. Good luck with it.”

  A high-pitched siren jolted Fuzz almost enough to knock him sideways.

  “Curtis, what is it?” The Major was on his feet.

  Fuzz scrambled around a set of tables to the local radar feed. A large red bloom moved fast and low. “It’s almost on top of the base.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s…” Fuzz tried to decipher what he saw. The bloom faded as it moved toward the base. A flock of birds? There weren’t any birds this far north. And in a hundred-thirty-plus gale? “I don’t know, sir.”

  Whatever it was had disappeared, or gone under the radar, but even Russians weren’t crazy enough to fly in this weather.

  Were they?

  ▼▲▼

  “Keep checking,” Major Kumar said.

  Fuzz worked on crunching data from eighteen other sensors and tried to cross-correlate in a big data tool called Splunk that he was sure the Major had no idea how to use. Growing up playing video games had finally reaped some rewards. Whatever that contact was, it was so low, he wasn’t even sure it was an aircraft.

  The Russians were the kings of the Arctic, there was no contest.

  They had huge tracked-transports, Arctic-modified hovercraft, and even the strange half-aircraft-half-ship vehicles like the massive ekranoplans. With heightening tensions, the neo-Soviets running Russia now had been rumored to be considering building a fleet of missile-armed Lun-class winged-ground-effect ekranoplans.

  That was the only thing Fuzz could imagine might be capable of withstanding the conditions outside. Those were terrifying pieces of equipment.

  Was this the first shot in an unraveling global conflict? Was that what was happening?

  The Major had just sent a “Code Red” to NATO command. That was one signal level down from the one used for the threat of imminent nuclear war.

  Were the Russians invading?

  One thing that wasn’t a joke about Alert, something they told you when you got here: there was no help coming to this place. You were on your own.

  Fuzz crunched more data, tried to get a track on the huge thing that swept close by for a few kilometers before going away. Maybe they were testing using a massive storm as cover for sending in attack ships?

  He was deep into a spreadsheet when another alarm went off.

  This one not from his bank of computers.

  It was the exterior alarm, the yellow light spinning and whining over the entrance. The Major ran for the door to make sure it was locked. They never locked stuff up here. Who the hell would try to break in? There was nobody out there for thousands of miles.

  But something was trying to get in.

  CHAPTER 42

  MAJOR KUMAR AND Fuzz gawked up at the grainy image on the six-by-six inch CRT monitor connected to the outside camera.

  “Is that a polar bear?”

  The big animals did sometimes set off the exterior alarms. Maybe they wanted a warm place to sleep, maybe curious, maybe attracted to the smell of Kumar’s curries. Or maybe they wanted to eat the nice juicy humans so thoughtfully packaged inside. Fuzz couldn’t blame them for dreaming beary dreams.

  “It is most certainly not,” the Major replied. “Go and unlock the sidearms cabinet. Bring me mine, and get yours as well.”

  Fuzz paused a beat.

  It was someone—some man by the size of him—in what looked like an orange survival suit, with something in his arms. A container? The motion-sensing exterior lights had come on and lit him in a cone of gritty light.

  Was there someone else behind him?

  Impossible to tell.

  Visibility was a few feet, but strange shadows seemed to lurk in the depths of the buffeting winds that thrummed even from inside the concrete-reinforced bunker.

  “Should we open the door?” Fuzz asked.

  “If we do not, whoever that is will die.”

  “This is a secure facility. We’re not supposed to—”

  “Are you in fact telling me my job, Corporal Curtis?”

  Fuzz straightened his back. “No, sir.” Except he had read that he should never let anyone unknown into a Secure Operations Center. Not without prior and verified orders.

  “Then get to the sidearm cabinet, and check again the doors and trackers.”

  “Coats?”

  “Use your God-given intelligence, young—”

  But Fuzz was already off at a run. He slammed open the interior set of metal double doors and scattered his study notes to one side and brought up a keyboard.

  “Log…exterior…doors…” he muttered to himself as he typed. He hit the enter key. A full string of negatives. “No exterior doors opened or closed in the past six hours.”

  So nobody had gone in or out.

  Except one sensor. One sensor was out. Didn’t mean it had been opened or not. Just no readings.

  “Log…chip…staff…” A graphical image popped up that graphically displayed the positioning of all the location chips of everyone on base. All accounted for. So whoever that was, they were not from here.

  Did this have something to do with the object that passed by outside?

  Had it crashed?

  His heart raced. He felt it skip a beat. That palpitation thing he hated that he’d inherited from his mother. At least you won’t get shot, her words echoed in his head.

  “Damn it.”

  He ran for the sidearm cabinet and shakily put the keys in from the lanyard around his neck. Swung it open. Grabbed two of the Browning 9mm in their holsters with belts.

  Another alarm rang.

  What the heck was that one? He scanned the monitors.

  “Do you guys want this tea or not?” came a voice over the intercom.

  Fuzz ran to the interior door and hit the buzzer. “Not now.”

  He ran back and slammed open the double doors. Handed one of the Brownings to Major Kumar and strapped the other around his waist. The Major already had his weapon out and nodded at Fuzz to do the same. He remembered he’d forgotten to get the coats. Too late now.

  “Shouldn’t we…ah…” Fuzz stuttered, his weapon now forward. Hands steady, he noticed.

  “No time, Corporal Curtis. Get ready.”

  Major Kumar keyed in the exterior emergency door’s code. It buzzed. The figure had slumped against the outside. Was pinned against it by the wind.

  With his left hand, the Major released the door handle. It opened inward so it could be opened when snow piled outside. The pressure of the wind behind it slammed it open.

  The man fell to the ground and the container spilled out of his grip.

  Both Kumar and Fuzz trained their weapons on him, their eyes wide. The object that fell from the man’s hands began to move. To writhe. To uncoil.

  Fuzz’s hands shook. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He glanced at Kumar to find out what to do.

  But the Major was on his knees, the wind roaring in and scattering snow and papers. His weapon down. He laid down face-first, flat against the ground as if he was praying.

  CHAPTER 43

  BRIGADIER-GENERAL JACQUES ALLARD bent his face away from the prop blast of the quad-engine Hercules. The aircraft rumbled down the runway, its engines whining high as they struggled to pull the squat gray slab of its body forward through the snow with enough speed for the airfoils to lift its massive bulk. It roared away past him and faded into the gloom, leaving behind wingtip-spilling vortices of snow.

  For a heart-jarring instant he didn’t think the beast would make it as it disappeared down the hill and slid toward the Arctic Ocean, but just when he feared the worst, it lumbered into the night sky. Its warning lights blinked over the icepack and faded.

  “Goddamn ancient piece of…” the General muttered under his breath, not loud enough for anyone to hear.

  The Hercules that dropped him here was almost fifty years in service. A jack-of-all-trades for the Far North and tough as hell, but fifty years was fifty years. About the same age as he was, and he was beat up as hell.

  A few years back, a Herc like that one had crashed on a routine re-supply mission to Alert. Everyone survived the initial accident, but four people froze to death before the rescuers managed to get to them two days later.

  The General hadn’t wanted to make the four-thousand-kilometer trek from Trenton CFB to this frozen wasteland. He had to literally risk his life to get here, but these were his men.

  His command.

  “Was that the last of the survivors?” the General asked his PA, a young kid from Medicine Hat who had been terrified to find out he had to come up here.

  For two days they hadn’t been able to make it up. The massive storm had made it impossible. This was the first Herc. The General liked to be the first one in, no matter what.

  The kid looked longingly at the part of the sky where the aircraft had receded into the blackness. “General, that’s what I was told.”

  “Let’s get on with it, then.”

  “Can I interview everyone?” asked Richard Marks.

  The NTSB investigator had disembarked from the Hercules with him. He didn’t have to be here. He’d volunteered when he heard. Right away. These NTSB guys were dedicated.

  “You can talk to anyone you like,” the General replied. “As long as I get a report.”

  “You got my word on that, sir.”

  The General trudged across the calf-deep snow, crunching through the crystallized top layer. He’d been told snowfall was unusual for this area. A polar desert they called it. A polar vortex was what they called the storm. Once-in-a-century events now seemed to happen once a year.

  The rescue team had set up floodlights in the lower section of the Alert base near the runway, around the buildings—if these could be called that anymore. The structures were completely flattened as if they’d been hit by a bomb. All of them, razed right down to the foundation, what was left of them scraped away as if by a giant’s hand. It was hard to even see what remained.

  The darkness up here seemed to eat the light.

  “General, Mr. Marks, I think we’ve got something.”

  A young Lieutenant—the General could tell by the shoulder patches on the parka—motioned to him from a low rise in the icy snow. The General tightened the cinch on the hood of his parka, reducing his vision to a tight circle straight in front. Already the cold seeped in and he’d only been onsite for ten minutes.

  His breath came out in billowing white clouds of vapor.

  He walked over, one careful step at a time. The Lieutenant grabbed a powerful handheld light and shone it on the discovery while he wiped away the snow with his other hand.

  It was a man. Frozen into hard pack beside a part of a foundation.

  His head down, but skin exposed. The flesh yellow and glassy. He was hunched over something. Was he one of theirs? Couldn’t be. Everyone had been accounted for.

  So who was this?

  The Lieutenant dug into the snow around the hapless man. After a second he pulled something out. He peered at it. Held it close. Opened it and leafed through it.

  “Looks like a journal, sir,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Any names?”

  The young officer took a second and squinted. “Mitch Matthews, sir.”

  “Mitch Matthews?”

  “That’s right, sir.” He handed over the ice-encrusted book.

  “Can I take that?” Richard Marks asked.

  The General nodded yes, and the Lieutenant handed the notebook to the NTSB investigator.

  Richard took the journal, and the General looked over his shoulder, back at the spot where the Hercules had vanished. “Dig out whatever is under him,” he said.

  He walked away, stepped through more of the scoured wreckage before he stopped and looked at the pinpoints of stars in the dark vault above.

  “What in the hell happened in this godforsaken place?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32