Jenkins checked the bank of clocks, which ran along the top of the wall above the LCD screens, each indicating a different time in various locations around the world. Zulu plus one to Svalbard Archipelago. Twenty-three hundred here. That would mean Zulu minus six, or zero five hundred there. Jake would call at any time now.
He needed to get home to sleep, but guessed he would spend the night again on the sofa in his office. He should have just had a bed brought in and forget about the pretext of his current situation. Sure he didn’t really want to go home, but he needed to help his old friend, Jake Adams. After Jake had called, Jenkins had researched the current situation in Svalbard. He glanced at a briefing paper. It was more than Jake understood, he was sure of that. Only time would tell for sure what Jake had gotten himself into this time, though. His men had tried to pick up Colonel Reed for questioning, but somehow he had disappeared from Oslo. Vanished.
Then Jenkins had wanted to contact his counterpart in Moscow to see what he knew; yet, he knew that would show his hand. No, he needed to give Jake everything he knew to date, and then keep digging. Even though relations with Norway were good, he didn’t want to talk with them directly either. This would have to be handled with great discretion. Jake would be on his own. He would give Jake technical assistance when needed. Nothing more. He looked at the brief once more before slipping it into the shredder at his side.
4
Jake had woken early as usual, around zero six hundred, but what was not normal for the past three months is that he did not have a huge headache hangover. At some point he had come to expect the stiff neck, the throbbing pain radiating from there to his temples and eyeballs, and the dry throat. Expected the feeling of weakness that he thought he could vanquish with the early hour and some push-ups and sit-ups. Yet, deep down he knew he was fooling himself. Still, it wasn’t like he had been falling down drunk for the past three months. He had simply taken things a bit to the extreme, finding whatever comfort he could with Anna’s absence without cheating. The numbness had prevented any possible intimacy with another woman, not that he had tried to find it, but had also bled over into those times when Anna had been home. He could see that now, with his mind clear and not clouded with the after-effects of alcohol.
In fact, he felt pretty damn good this morning. Felt like taking a run, which he did while Anna continued to sleep.
A dark fog wrapped the town of Longyearbyen in isolated obscurity as Jake jogged along the main drag of the capital. He made his way toward the airport, his lungs sucking in the cold, damp air and feeling as if they might explode with each struggle for air. When he got to within a few blocks of the airport, he slowed his pace to a walk, his hands on his hips.
He thought about Anna and why they were there in that isolated set of islands in the Arctic. What had Colonel Reed gotten him involved in this time? Was it just a simple case of him finding an old friend in the snowy glacier? Closure?
Stopping alongside the road, Jake swung his fanny pack from back to front and pulled out the SAT phone. He punched in the number for his old friend Kurt Jenkins. If anyone owed Jake a favor, it was the current Agency director. Jenkins had ridden some of Jake’s successes over the years right to the top.
Before the call went through, Jake checked the distance between himself and any possible parabolic microphone. He guessed he was beyond the range of most that would be within view. It’s why he had selected the site on the ride from the airport the day before.
“Well? What ya got for me?” Jake asked.
“Right to the point,” Jenkins said. “No weather report. No how’s she hanging.”
“I’m on a run,” Jake said. “If you must know, it’s dark, damp and foggy. And I’ve got a flight to catch in less than two hours, assuming the helo can fly in this soup. That better?”
“Much.” He hesitated and Jake thought he had lost the signal.
“You there?”
“Yeah. I had to dig deep for this one, Jake. I was just a field officer like yourself in nineteen eighty-six.”
“I was still an Air Force officer,” Jake corrected.
“Right. Anyway, your friend Captain Steve Olson, as you know, was assigned to the Oslo embassy as a military attaché.”
The wind swept across the open tundra and Jake shivered from the sweat he had worked up.
“No offense, Kurt, but could you cut to the chase. I’m standing out in the middle of nowhere, freezing my ass off.”
“Absolutely. Anyway, as far as we know, a Soviet MiG Twenty-five went down on Spitsbergen Island a couple of days before the Reykjavik Summit. At the time, we had no way of knowing its flight path. So, Captain Olson and John Korkala, the Oslo assistant station chief, were sent to investigate.”
“What made the CIA so interested?”
“One of our contacts in Finland said the Soviets were sending a team to recover something from Svalbard.”
“How many?” Jake asked.
“At least four.”
“That would have gotten our attention. Send one or two and it’s a search and destroy mission. Send four and it’s a sanitation mission. What was on the plane? A nuke?”
“That’s what we thought at first. But there was no radiation release.”
“Chemical or biological?”
“Don’t know.”
“Hang on.”
A car came along the road toward him and slowed when the headlights hit Jake. He waved and the car continued toward the airport. A pretty woman, a blonde who could have been Anna’s twin, smiled at him and waved back.
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah, just a car with a hot blonde.”
“Some things never change. Christ, you have a beautiful girlfriend.”
“I know. And you don’t have to deify me.”
“Funny guy. Anyway, we never heard from our men and the Soviets never heard from their men. I have that on the best authority. Of course if it had happened today we would have a direct GPS position, SAT photos, you name it. But somehow the decision was made to forget about this whole affair. Reagan and Gorbachav had damn near French kissed and nobody wanted to make waves. Later, once the Soviet Union went tits up, the entire case was closed when the new Russia had admitted that one of their pilots had defected with the MiG and crashed in Norway in bad weather. That’s the last note we have in the official file.”
Jake let out a deep breath, the air escaping in a cloud of vapor. “There’s more to this. Always is.”
“I don’t know that for sure.”
“But you suspect I’m correct.”
Pause. “I don’t know.”
Context. Jake always knew that what was not said was usually as import as what was said. It was all context and juxtaposition. This would be no exception.
“Thanks, Kurt. Appreciate the effort.”
“Jake?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful.”
Those words hung in his brain like the fog on the muskeg of Spitsbergen.
He jogged back to the hotel and caught Anna in the shower, where he joined her. They had a quick breakfast, checked out, and took a van to the airport.
They were directed to a helo out on the pad, where the pilot was already behind the controls and a ground crewman was making final preparations for the flight. Piling all their gear in, Jake strapped Anna into a seat before heading to the cockpit.