Anna had not found the flight particularly comforting, and had almost not made it out of the side before throwing up with great ferocity. Jake wondered how she even had that much in her, since they had only eaten power bars, smoked salmon and water over the past twenty-four hours.
While Anna lay in the helo and Kjersti fixed the fuel line, Jake had wandered off and made the SAT phone call to Colonel Reed. He was disturbed now with the revelation that the box likely contained a deadly flu virus, modified even more to kill with greater efficiency. How the hell could the Soviets do such a thing? And did the Russians still maintain a program and the virus somewhere in that country? Worse yet, perhaps, was the possibility that the American government wanted the virus for more than just defensive purposes. He didn’t know who to trust. Colonel Reed had always been a straight shooter in the past, but he had sent him on this wild goose chase. Why hadn’t he just told him the truth from the beginning? Why use the ruse of finding an old friend to entice Jake into going here? That was easy. If Jake had known he was going to Spitsbergen to find a deadly weaponized virus, would he have been so eager to go? Hell no.
So the good colonel had played him. But what about his other good friend, Kurt Jenkins, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had to know there was more to this box of biohazard than he was saying. At least Colonel Reed final came clean. Christ, he should just dump the damn thing in the ocean. But then it would eventually decay and do who knows what to the marine life. Maybe they’d end up with a fish flu that would kill off the entire salmon population. Damn, he liked salmon.
“What’s up?”
Jake turned and saw Kjersti standing ten feet away, her hands on her thin hips. “I called in and said we’d be late for dinner. Get her fixed?”
She swept some hair away from her face with the back of her hand and said, “Yeah. Good enough to get back to Longyear.”
“Great. What about our friends?” Jake gazed out onto the misty ocean for a second. When he looked back, he was staring at a .44 magnum revolver.
Neither said a word.
“Let me guess,” Jake said. “You work for them.” That wasn’t right or they wouldn’t have shot at her. What the hell was going on?
“Who are you?” Kjersti asked him.
“We told you. We’re just here looking for our old friend. We found him. Now we’re heading back. Fun in the Arctic.”
“You were CIA,” she said, “and have worked with the Agency many times over the past decade.”
“You seem to know me better than I know me,” Jake said, a cold edge to his words.
She continued. “And your girl friend works for Interpol.”
He strained to keep his eyes on her. “So. We have day jobs. What’s your point?”
“I want to know what you found back there,” she demanded.
“You’re just my taxi driver,” he said. “I give you my locations and, if you don’t piss me off too much, throw a tip your way. Now, with the gun pointed at me, you might kiss that goodbye.”
“You’re incredible.”
“Anna seems to think so.”
With her name mentioned, there was a soft whistle from behind Kjersti, who swiveled her head and saw Anna pointing one of the rifles at her back.
Jake stepped over and took the pistol from Kjersti’s hand. “If you plan on pulling a gun on someone, make sure you have your back to the sun and nobody can sneak up on you. Since there’s no sun to be seen, you only had one thing to remember. Didn’t the Norwegian Intelligence Service teach you that?”
“How did you know?” Kjersti asked, her tone dejected.
“You just told me.”
“You were bluffing?”
“Kind of. But we were tailed from our hotel to the Oslo airport. That was one of your NIS men. Then our hotel room, which I changed at the last minute, was bugged while we ate dinner. A man watched us while we ate, but I’m guessing he wasn’t NIS. Nor was the bug. It was not the type your government purchased.”
“How do you know?” Kjersti asked him.
“Because I consulted with NIS, the Swedish Security Police, SAPO, and the Danish Security Intelligence Service on covert communications a few years ago. I told them what to buy. This bug was good, but it was former East Bloc. About a decade old.”
“They told me to watch out for you. That you were good.”
“Why were you sent with me?”
“For that reason. We heard something was going down at Svalbard. When we found out the Agency was sending you, we assumed something big was happening here. Since I had flown tourists here during my summers in college, I was the natural choice. We knew you’d need a ride.”
“The Agency didn’t hire me,” Jake protested.
Anna lowered her gun, took a few steps forward, and said, “So then your government has been tracking us by GPS the entire time.”
“We’ve been trying,” Kjersti said. “But, as you know, the Borealis that screwed up our SAT Comm has also messed with our GPS tracking.”
“I noticed,” Jake said. “Had to wait until this morning to get a good location on Steve’s body.”
“Can you tell me what the hell is going on?” Kjersti asked. “Why are these people trying to kill us?”
“I have a better question,” Anna said to Jake. “Tell me about the box in your backpack. The one with the biohazard symbols and the Russian letters. What’s up with that?”
Kjersti’s eyes widened as her gaze shifted from Anna to Jake.
He didn’t want to get either of them involved with this. Just wanted to get back to Longyearbyen, fly to Oslo, fly separate from Anna back to Austria while he took care of the rest of this case, but now that she knew about the box, there would be no denying her into this game. After all, this was her area of expertise at Interpol.
Jake explained what he knew about the biohazard box. When he was done, the three of them stood around like high school kids, kicking snow and wondering what to do.
Kjersti was the first to speak. “This is crazy. Why would the Soviets just leave it here? Why not come back? Especially after losing four KGB officers and a fighter pilot.”
That was the burning problem stuck deep in Jake’s gut. There had to be a reason to leave it there, but he still had no clue why.
Anna looked to Jake for answers.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “The cover story is that the pilot tried to defect. We know that’s probably bogus. But what if it was actually true? What if the pilot was part of some conspiracy to ship the virus out of the Soviet Union? Maybe the authorities were not entirely sure about his actions or what he was planning. When he crashed, they sent a sanitation crew to make sure he was dead.” Jesus he wasn’t sure he believed that scenario.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “The old Soviets would have sent a second crew once the first crew didn’t return.”
“I agree,” Kjersti said.
“Afraid I do too,” Jake conceded. Then it came to him. “Unless someone with enough power cancelled the operation and destroyed all evidence of the event.”
Kjersti shrugged and Anna nodded her head in agreement.
Jake continued, “Then the cover-up was on. If they sent another crew, that would have forced us to send another crew to counter them. But you forget about it, and like my friends at the Agency told me, say it was simply a defection gone bad, then both sides can write it off as a horseshit op and move on. Besides, as far as we know, the actual location of the downed plane was never relayed back to Washington or Moscow. They would have had to start over from scratch. And, according to the weather reports from that time, it didn’t stop snowing for nearly two months, completely encasing the MiG into the landscape. In fact, as you saw, the crash site appeared to have been undisturbed in more than twenty years.”