Matt followed the line to what yellow team’s next stop would have been. Lougheed Island. By the schedule, the scouts should have arrived there two days ago, right around the time they stopped reporting in. So could that be where Bluebird was?
It just didn’t feel right. It was too…easy.
“Josh?” Rachel called out. “Can you play the yellow team’s last message for me again?”
Josh was one of the people manning the communication terminals. “Sure,” he said.
Matt glanced at his sister. He could tell something was bugging her and she was trying to work it out. He refrained from asking her what she was thinking, though, knowing from experience it was better to just let her go.
The room was wired so that communications could either be heard over headphones worn by the people at the terminals, or on a speaker system that broadcasted the voices to the whole room.
After a few seconds, a voice fighting through static said over the speakers, “Yellow calling Bravo Four. Yellow calling Bravo Four.” Bravo Four was the code name for the Ranch.
“Bravo Four. Go, Yellow.” The new voice was crisp and clear. Matt recognized it as belonging to Gary Atkins, a member of the communications team.
“Lake hunter. Repeat, lake hunter.”
There was a pause as Gary no doubt was checking the list of codes to make sure yellow team had used the correct one. Each was used only once, and in a specific order.
“Roger, Yellow. Quiet night.” That would be the return code.
“Status, Y6 clear. Proceeding to Y7.” Ellef Ringnes clear. Proceeding to Lougheed Island.
“Roger, Yellow. Y6 clear. Proceeding to Y7. Good luck.”
“Thanks, Bravo Four. Yellow out.”
The recording cut off.
“Play it again,” Rachel said.
The message once more filled the room, but whatever Rachel had noticed, Matt had yet to pick up.
When it was through, she said, “Play the reports from the last four stops.”
They listened as the yellow team reported in from two different locations on Amund Ringnes Island, one on Yanok Island, and one on Axel Heiberg Island. Each report was basically the same: target checked and cleared, moving on.
When they finished, Matt couldn’t help but ask, “What is it?”
Rachel frowned and shook her head. “I…I don’t know. I thought I had something, but…”
“What?”
Again, she shook her head. “Nothing, I guess.”
He knew that was a lie. Whatever it was, she was still mulling it over. But that was her way. Once she had it figured out, if she ever did, she’d share it with him.
He looked back at the map. “We can’t ignore the fact that they might have found Bluebird. We’re going to have to divert one of the other teams to check this out. Leon, correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like brown team is almost done with its route.”
Leon nodded. “They’re due to report in this evening. Once they’ve done that, they’re freed up.”
“Good. Send them to Lougheed. Let’s find out what happened to our people.”
“Will do.”
Leon and the others returned to their desks, leaving Matt and Pax standing at the map.
“And if it is Bluebird?” Pax said.
Matt knew exactly what his old friend was asking. It was something he’d also been giving a lot of thought to. “It’ll be time to bring him in.”
5
I.D. MINUS 14 DAYS
Brown team leader Gagnon looked out the window from his seat behind the controls of the seaplane at the circle of light on the choppy ocean below. Wright, his partner, sat in the seat behind him, operating the wireless remote that controlled the spotlight attached to the bottom of the plane.
Since the previous afternoon, they’d been searching for any sign of yellow team. They would have started sooner, but a severe storm had passed through the area, grounding them for over forty-eight hours.
The real miracle, if one wanted to call it that, was that the sea hadn’t completely iced over yet. That was global warming for you, Gagnon thought. Even this close to winter, there were still ice-free parts of the Arctic Ocean that had never been that way at this time of year in the past.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Just water.”
It was all that Gagnon had seen, too. “Let’s move on to the next sector.”
He straightened out the plane, and headed for the next grid coordinates.
They were both acutely aware that it could have been the middle of summer with twenty-four-hour daylight, and they might still not spot any wreckage if something had happened to the yellow team’s boat. A rogue wave could have swamped the vessel and taken the whole thing down, or the rough seas could have broken everything into tiny bits and spread it far and wide so that there’d be nothing to draw attention. The fact that it was less than two weeks shy of winter, and the only light they had to cover the hundreds of square miles below them was a small spotlight, made the task seem impossible.
Two more hours, Gagnon decided. If nothing turned up, they’d call it a night and radio the Ranch to see if they should continue the search tomorrow or pack it in.
The island was small, found on only the most detailed of maps. At its widest, it was only a quarter-mile across. It was, in the most generous terms, a rocky, ice-covered piece of nothing.
Five hours earlier, two men, a camouflage shelter, and the equipment they would need for their assignment had been flown in. At the time of their drop-off, they’d been unsure how long they were going to have to stay, but at most, it would be no more than two nights, and it was quite possible they’d be sleeping in their own beds back at Bluebird that very evening.
Ten miles away, a Project boat, looking very much like a fishing vessel slowly making its way back to port somewhere to the south, was scanning the skies with a compact yet powerful radar system. The information it collected was transmitted real-time via satellite to a handheld device that was part of the equipment the two men had brought with them.
For nearly an hour, they had been watching a blip weave back and forth across the screen, slowly growing closer to the island. It was getting late, though, so at some point the plane would undoubtedly break off and head back to the small village several hundred miles away that its occupants had been using as a base. If that happened, the men would definitely be spending the night.
“We could try it now,” the junior of the two suggested.
Without looking away from the screen, the other man shook his head. “Not yet.” It was important that this worked so he didn’t want to risk any mistakes.
Over the next thirty minutes, the plane continued to move closer. Finally, when it was within two miles, the man in charge looked up.
“Now,” he said.
The younger man picked up a second device, a tablet computer synced in to a localized network they’d set up when they first arrived. The man brought up the appropriate screen, and pressed the appropriate button.
Ten seconds later, on the other side of the island, a radio beacon went live.
Bowop-bowop .
The signal came in bursts of two, each set separated by a second of silence. It was so faint at first that it didn’t even register with Gagnon or Wright. When it finally did, the pilot looked over at the radio, surprised.
The receiver had been tuned to the frequency that would be utilized by the yellow team’s emergency beacons, but since the searchers had started the day before, they’d picked up only silence. They assumed any beacons were either at the bottom of the sea or no longer working.