Trevor Scott
The Cold Edge
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the people of Norway and Sweden for your hospitality. Although I didn’t make it as far north as Svalbard, I hope I captured the essence of the area after growing up in the frozen tundra of Northern Minnesota. A special thanks to one pretty, young waitress at Blomonn Restaurant & Bar in Lillehammer, Norway, for convincing me to try the whale. After doing so, I finally understood Melville’s Ahab.
PROLOGUE
Swirling lights of blue and orange and green and red marked the Northern sky above the thick glacier, as if aliens or some unearthly force was about to invade this remote island halfway between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole.
One man sat on a snowmobile in Arctic clothes, the wind biting into any exposed skin around the edges of his goggles, while a second man adjusted a small satellite dish hitched up by wire to a cumbersome SAT phone the size of a small briefcase.
“Any time now,” Korkala said from the snowmobile, as he adjusted the volume on the phone. John Korkala was the CIA’s assistant station chief in Oslo, and his colleague, Steve Olson, the military attaché, an Air Force captain and communications officer.
“Just about there.” He made a final adjustment and the phone went hot with a squawk.
“Got it.”
Captain Olson stood and gazed at the strange swirling of the Aurora Borealis. He had seen them in his youth in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but nothing like this. They appeared to be encased in a lava lamp. “Check out this crazy sky.”
Korkala didn’t even raise his eyes away from the phone. “Seen them a hundred times. Let’s focus here.”
It was early evening, but the sun had not come out all day. And at this time of year, it was so low on the horizon the entire island would be lucky to see an hour or two of fog-obscured glowing. Two days ago they had flown five hours from Oslo on a commercial flight to Longyearbyen, the capital and largest city of some twenty-five hundred people, mostly Norwegians, stayed one night in a hotel, and then flown by a charter helicopter to the even more remote Pyramiden, a Soviet mining settlement. From there they had rented the snowmobile from a rather skeptical Russian, who wondered why two Americans would want to venture out onto a barren ice field as winter approached. Their cover story? They were preparing for an expedition to the North Pole next summer. The story was as good as any, since many explorers had used the remote islands as a staging point before heading to the Pole.
“Damn it,” Korkala said, shaking the SAT phone.
Olson stepped closer, the snow squeaking beneath his Sorrel pack boots. “What’s up?”
Korkala tried to adjust the phone to grab a signal again. Nothing. “We lost it.” He jumped from the snowmobile, pulled the binoculars from his chest and crawled to the top of the snow drift that hid them from activity nearly a mile down a glacial valley. There were two snowmobiles and four men, as far as they could tell, working around the wreckage of a plane that was scattered for a hundred yards, much of the parts already covered by the treacherous blowing snow. A few days, Korkala knew, and the entire wreckage could be lost in the glacier, swallowed up by the ever-changing environment.
Olson crawled up next to the CIA man. “What you suppose is so important?”
That was the problem. They had no way of knowing. The Oslo station had gotten word from the Helsinki office that a Soviet plane had gone down on Spitsbergen. Details were sketchy, but when known KGB officers had passed through Oslo days ago, Washington had insisted on an escort. Something wasn’t right. They could have been simply recovering codes and destroying communications equipment on the aircraft, but Korkala and Olson would have to get closer to even determine the aircraft type. The Why would have to follow the What.
Korkala ignored the Air Force captain. “Let’s find out. Make a direct approach.” He backed away from the edge and scurried toward the snowmobile. He unhooked the trailer skid and took a seat on the snowmobile.
“What about the SAT dish?” Olson asked.
“Get on. We’ll come back for it.” He turned the key and then pulled the starter cord. Nothing. It had been giving them problems since they rented it from the Russian earlier in the day. He pulled again. Still nothing. Finally it cranked over on the third try, the lights coming on immediately.
“Should we turn the lights off?” Olson yelled above the whining engine.
“No,” Korkala yelled back. “That would be more suspicious. Get on. We’ll say we’re lost.”
The Air Force captain straddled the seat behind Korkala and held onto the side handles. He barely sat down when the assistant station chief thumbed the throttle and the snowmobile surged off.
It took them only a few minutes to round the outcropping drifts, angle down the hill toward the glacial plain, and then slow down as they approached the men working at the debris field. All were wearing pure white suits, just like them.
Korkala stopped near the other two snowmobiles and shut down the engine.
One of the men approached, his flashlight shining into both of their eyes.
Glancing through goggles at the debris, Captain Olson saw the tail of the aircraft, which had settled against a snowy outcropping. He whispered into Korkala’s ear, “MiG twenty-five. What the hell is that doing here?”
“Be ready,” Korkala said, swinging his legs off the seat and moving toward the Soviet KGB officer. “Thank God we saw you,” he said in Russian to the man, who stopped a few feet away, hands in bulky mittens at his side.
Confusion on the Russian’s face, his eyes shifted behind large goggles.
The other three men started to approach and the captain saw the hunting rifle for the first time at the side of one man’s leg.
“What are you doing here?” the Russian asked Korkala.
“We’re lost and running low on fuel.”
The three other Soviet officers stopped ten feet away, hands in pockets, except for the man with the rifle, whose naked finger was pressed against the trigger guard.
Something was wrong. The Soviet officer wasn’t buying the story.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion. First, the rifle started to rise. Then hands started coming out of pockets.
But Korkala was the first to pull his 9mm handgun, his first shot entering the closest Soviet in the neck, bringing instant blood spurting outward. The next few shots struck the man with the rifle, first in the chest and then in the forehead.
By now the captain had rolled off the snowmobile and retrieved his gun from inside his coat, also a 9mm handgun.
The next few seconds lingered. Bullets flew in each direction. The cold air filled with clouds of gunpowder.
When silence finally came, Olson looked down at his gun — it was out of rounds, the slide back and steam rising from the exposed barrel. He dropped an empty magazine and fumbled in his jacket, found another full magazine, and slammed it into the handle. Then he released the slide, sending a round into the chamber, the hammer cocked, and rose up from behind the snowmobile.
Slowly he stepped through the squeaky snow, his gun pointed toward the Soviets. But they were all down, their bodies merely white lumps in the snowy glacier, spots of red seeping through the white. His eyes reluctantly went down and saw Korkala lying face down.
Olson knelt down and touched the side of Korkala’s neck. No pulse. He rolled him over and saw that most of his face was gone, having taken a bullet in the mouth. Damn it.
The captain went slowly to the Soviets, checking each man. They were all dead. He felt light-headed. Then the pain came. As he returned his gun to the holster under his left arm, he felt the moisture. He had been hit in the left shoulder. But he was breathing all right. It had not struck his lungs.