He put pressure on his wound and then turned on his headlamp and shuffled toward the MiG debris. The first thing he noticed was that the pilot had gone down with the plane. He was still strapped into the cockpit, which had rammed into a snow bank and was nearly covered already with new snow.
The Soviets had been gathered near the main fuselage, the captain remembered. Had this aircraft been carrying a nuke? Maybe they had been about to destroy it.
No. Captain Olson had worked on nukes and he didn’t see any sign of a large weapon. In fact, the wings had sheared off and blown quite extensively. Probably external fuel tanks. This MiG was on a long mission. But what kind of mission?
Moving to the main fuselage, Olson found where the Soviets had been working. They had removed a panel and exposed a compartment. Inside was a silver container of some sort, encased in foam rubber, which had been partially cut open by the Soviets.
The captain tried to grasp the container with his free hand, but it was starting to go numb. He’d need both hands. With a great deal of pain, he was able to pull the container from the spray-foam padding. It was a one-foot cube, perfectly intact. He swirled it around and found no way to open it. What the hell was it?
As he turned to go, his mind seemed to swirl as his eyes centered on the Aurora Borealis, which nearly filled the sky now. With great determination, he shuffled back toward the snowmobile. He thought about his friend, John Korkala, and realized he was in no condition to drag him anywhere. They would have to come back for him.
Looking up for stars in the sky, all he saw was the morphing, shifting clouds, a distorted distraction of his current reality. He had to move. He was getting weaker and had more than twenty miles to travel across the rough, desolate terrain to reach the nearest village. And he wasn’t sure he should even go there, since it was the Soviet mining settlement. How could he explain a bullet wound? Or the absence of his partner?
Somehow he got onto the snowmobile, the square box on the seat at his crotch, turned the key and pulled the cord. Nothing. Damn it. He pulled and pulled until it finally turned over and sputtered to life.
He rode slowly back toward the location where they had left the SAT phone equipment and the trailer sled. By the time he had hooked up the trailer and strapped the small satellite dish onto the back, he was feeling weak and cold. He was sure the actual temperature had dropped, but also knew he had lost a lot of blood. It had soaked down his shirt and gotten into his pants. He could feel it down to his knees.
He would never make it twenty miles on this snowmobile. Sure he had grown up driving snowmobiles in Michigan, and could drive as fast as the machine would go in these conditions. But the wind had picked up now, blowing snow obscuring his view beyond a dozen feet. He could be swallowed up in a glacial crevasse without him knowing what had happened. No, he had to go somewhere to get out of this weather. At least until morning. Needed to get the bleeding to stop.
Then it came to him. Just before they had found the crash site, they had seen a rock overhang that could have been the entrance to a cave or at least a protected area from the blowing snow.
It took the captain fifteen minutes to find the rock overhang. He had gone right past it a few times, since the snow had drifted against the front. Eventually he was able to pull the snowmobile and the trailer entirely under the rock. With some clarity of thought, he decided to bury the cube in the back of the crevasse. He had no idea what it was, but if the Soviets had sent four officers to pick it up, it must have been important.
Satisfied that he would be safe there until morning, he pulled out his sleeping bag and crawled inside boots and all. Wrapped up and curled into a ball, he was chilled for a moment but eventually started to warm. His thoughts drifted like the snow to his wife and two small children. He would have to endure. Have to make it through the night. Have to. For them.
Then he went to sleep for the last time.
1
The hotel door slammed with a resounding thud, startling Jake Adams from his nap. He looked around and found himself on the floor in the center of the room, an empty bottle of Schnapps a foot from his head. His mind drifted back, remembering vaguely how he had checked into the posh Grand Hotel on Oslo’s most favorite Karl Johans Gate, the pedestrian enclave between the country’s Parliament and The Royal Palace, across from the national theatre.
The room was mostly dark, with only a sliver of light at the edges of the curtains. His eyes tried to adjust to the movement — legs and feet. He knew those nice black leather pumps. Had purchased them for his girlfriend Anna at a shop in Vienna, his current place of residence.
The shoes stopped a yard away and the right foot started tapping on the low-pile gray carpet.
Jake rolled to his side and finally caught the expression on Anna’s face. Disturbed? Concerned? No, definitely pissed off.
“What?” Jake said, scratching the hair on his bare chest. Coming to a sitting position, head spinning, he realized he had no clothes on at all. “What?” he repeated.
Her foot stopped tapping, but she crossed her arms over her chest. Okay, now she was mad as hell.
“I thought we were on vacation,” Jake protested. He knew he should have just kept his mouth shut at this point. Take the ass chewing like a man. Usually he knew precisely when he screwed up, but now he was baffled beyond the norm.
“Vacation assumes you have worked,” Anna finally said in German.
Damn. She spoke English during normal conversation, mostly to learn the idioms and idiosyncrasies of the language, muttered perfect, sensual French during sex, and her native Austrian German when she was either working or royally pissed off at him for some reason or other. Her German could travel anywhere from kinder-kind to Hitleresque. Now he thought he saw a small mustache forming above tight lips.
“That’s cold,” he said, sticking with English. “Listen, I made a hundred thousand Euro on that last case.”
“Three months ago,” she said, still in German.
Okay, so it wasn’t about the money. He should have known that much anyway. As an officer in the Interpol stationed in Vienna, Anna made less per year than he had hauled in for one-month of work. Maybe that did piss her off. Maybe it was the fact that he had done nothing in the last three months but drink beer, wine and schnapps, when he wasn’t out at the range shooting his guns, walking to stay in shape, and lifting weights. All right, most of the walking was from the apartment the two of them had shared over the past two years to the bar six blocks away, the trip always faster on the way there than the way back.
“You look like hell, Jake,” she said. “Take a shower and get dressed.” A tear streaked her alabaster face, rolling off the high cheek bone until she caught it with her fingers and briskly wiped it away.
Jake got to his feet, unsure what to do, and even more unsure if he could stay standing. He had not neglected her. Had not taken her for granted in any way. If anything, the reverse was true. She had traveled so much in the past year, they had spent more time away from each other than together. Yet he knew when it was time to fold the cards and shut up. He shook his head and made his way to the bathroom. Hadn’t he just taken a shower that morning? What time was it now? He caught a look at the clock radio on the nightstand just as he entered the bathroom. Crap. No wonder she was pissed. He was supposed to meet her at 1800 at the restaurant downstairs. It was 1830 now.