He was surprised when the pilot turned out to be the pretty blonde who had passed him while he talked on the SAT phone that morning. She handed him a headset as she powered up the engines and clicked switches to get ready for flight.
“Kjersti Nilsen,” the pilot said, reaching out her gloved hand to Jake.
He shook and she squeezed down hard. It surprised him, since she had the build of a cross country skier like Anna. But then Anna’s strength had also surprised Jake on more than one occasion.
“How was your run?” she asked him through the headset.
“A little cold and moist,” Jake said.
“Welcome to Svalbard. It doesn’t get any better where we’re going.”
Moments later they were airborne, and Jake wondered how in the hell they could even lift off in that thick fog. He got his answer seconds later as the helo lifted out of the low clouds and an obscured sun appeared.
Jake pulled out his GPS handheld, waited for the satellites to get picked up, and then punched in their destination. He watched as their elevation fluctuated and the distance counted down. By air they were about 120 miles from Pyramiden, a Russian coal mining settlement that had once had a population of 1,000 before being abandoned in 1998. But the Russians had re-established mining operations in 2007, and Jake had heard the population had already gone back up to 500. Which is how someone had found the wreckage of the MiG-25 a week ago.
The scenery was surprising — high glacial mountains, mostly barren, with deep fjords that cut through rocky coasts. It was breathtaking and Jake guessed not many people had actually seen the place. Other than those hardy coal miners, Norwegian fishermen, or those stopping off on their way to explore the North Pole.
They stopped in Pyramiden to drop off mail and pick up another package of the same, topped off with fuel, and then quickly lifted off again. Total ground time about ten minutes.
Anna had not said a word since they left the capital. Jake knew she hated to fly by helo. She tried to sleep through the experience.
Jake pulled up their next destination on the GPS and saw they were only about 20 miles away. He gave the pilot the location. He had read in the briefing from Colonel Reed that Captain Olson and John Korkala had taken snowmobiles from Pyramiden back in 1986. Looking at the terrain below, he guessed it had been some pretty rough sledding.
“How would you get to our destination by snowmobile?” Jake asked the pilot. “It’s so rocky.”
She glanced to the ground. “Couldn’t do it this time of year. Well, not true. I hear last year you could have. This is an unusually warm summer. August is the warmest it gets up here, and the melt is at its peak. Global warming.”
“Looks like the glaciers are doing all right up here,” Jake said.
“I’m just saying the only reason anyone saw the plane was because the snow hasn’t melted this far down in more than twenty years. A pilot saw the tail from the air.”
Moments later Jake saw the plane for himself — what was left of it. The debris field stretched for dozens of yards. The pilot set down the helo right near the center, where the main fuselage was still partially covered in snow. In fact, there had been a couple of inches of new snow the night before.
The pilot shut down the engine, unstrapped, took off her headset, and then pulled a pistol from under her seat and strapped it to her hip.
“Forty-four magnum,” Jake said. “That’s a powerful gun.”
She opened the door and said, “Polar bears laugh at a nine mil or a forty cal.” She slapped her gun. “But this will take one down. We’ve got two more rifles in the back — a thirty-ought-six and a three hundred mag.”
“Great,” he said, slipped toward the back. “Let’s hope we don’t need them.”
“Need what?” Anna asked. She looked a little green.
“The rifles,” Jake said. “A lot of hungry polar bears up here.”
“This is crazy. You know my idea of roughing it is having no hot tub in the hotel room.”
The side door opened and Kjersti held out her hand to Anna, introducing herself and helping her out onto the frozen ground.
Jake got out and first went to the largest aircraft parts, the main fuselage, which had broken in two. The wings had sheared off and probably lay back fifty yards or so, but the cockpit was still attached to the main fuselage, just in front of the large engine intakes. He checked the cockpit first. The canopy was gone. No pilot. He didn’t know what he had expected. Bones perhaps. Maybe more, considering the glacier. But something wasn’t right.
“Jake.”
He turned to see Anna brushing snow from something. He walked to her and said, “What ya got.”
“A snowmobile.”
Jake looked a few feet away and saw a second one. “Make that two snowmobiles.”
Kjersti pulled a digital camera from inside her flight suit and started taking photos.
Immediately Jake saw that they were Russian sleds. Which made sense, since the CIA had rented a snowmobile from them in Pyramiden. He already knew that. But wait. They had rented one snowmobile and a sled for their gear. These had to be from the GRU or KGB.
“What’s going on?” Kjersti asked. “I thought this was supposed to be a plane crash.”
“As you can see,” Jake said, “it is. I have no idea how these snowmobiles got here.” Not a total lie.
His friend at the Agency, Kurt Jenkins, had said they had sent four Soviet officers. That would be at least two snowmobiles. Must be their sleds, he guessed.
“Anna, see what you can find here,” Jake said. “I need to check out the aircraft.”
Anna nodded and started to dig around.
“We have a metal detector in the helo, if that will help,” Kjersti said.
“Sure thing.”
Once Kjersti went back to the helo, Jake came closer to Anna and said, “These have to be the KGB or GRU snowmobiles. You keep digging and you might find their bodies.”
“That’s what I’m looking for,” Anna said.
“Something is wrong here,” he said. “This isn’t a MiG-25. It’s a MiG-31. Very similar but not the same. In ‘86 it might have had more significance. Although both aircraft never really lived up to their hype. This one had a little more range, though. Perhaps two thousand miles at ferry distance. More importantly. This was a reconnaissance version. I doubt if it would have been carrying a weapon.”
But then that didn’t really explain why the Soviets had sent a crew to sanitize the place. The avionics were not that different from the MiG-25, which the U.S. had already taken apart at that time from defected aircraft. In the ‘70s the U.S. Air Force had gotten their hands on a MiG-25 when a Soviet pilot defected and landed in Japan. The Americans had taken it apart, studied it piece-by-piece, and then shipped it back to the Soviets in pieces. Talk about a slap in the face.
Kjersti came back with a metal detector. She and Anna combed the immediate area while Jake went back to the opened MiG-31 fuselage. The crash had not opened that panel. There were too many panel fasteners, and all of those were intact and had been opened with a screw driver.
Looking around in the compartment, Jake saw something that wasn’t normal. There had been a cube about one foot by one foot surrounded by spray foam, which had been mostly chipped away. Whatever the Soviets had come for, they had found it and pulled it from the wreckage.
“Jake.”
He turned and saw Anna and Kjersti standing and looking down at something. He hurried over there and saw what they saw. What was left of a man. Animals had chewed away most of the man’s face, ripped through his chest to get at his innards, and left only bones. They had not chewed through the rifle, the AK-47, at his side. Moreover, it was pretty easy to determine the cause of death for this men. He had a bullet hole in his forehead.