Ice Hunt

Arms tightened.

She continued to cry while her father drew her back to a bed and pulled her down beside him. He didn’t try to console her with words. Words would come later. Right now she simply needed someone to hold and someone to hold her.

Her father gently rocked her.

After a period of time, she became aware of her surroundings again, emptied and numb. She slowly lifted her face. At some point, Craig had joined them. He was seated with Amanda, Commander Sewell, and a man in a storm suit.

This last fellow carried a helmet under one arm. His hair was black, short, slicked back. He appeared to be in his midthirties, but a hard midthirties. His skin was ruddy with a wicked scar that trailed under his ear to the his neckline. He fingered the scar as he leaned beside Craig, studying something on a table that had been dragged over. “I don’t see that any of this matters,” the soldier said. “We should strike now before the Russians can entrench any further.”

Jenny extracted herself, concerned about what they were discussing. She patted her father’s hand.

“Jen…?”

“I’m better.” At least for the moment, she added silently. She stood and walked over toward the group. Her father followed.

Craig glanced up at her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“As well as can be expected.”

He turned back to his discussion with the others. “These are the journals I was assigned to acquire. But they’re coded. I can’t make any headway deciphering them.”

Amanda glanced over to Jenny. “He can’t be sure he has the right ones.”

“What does it matter?” the storm-suited newcomer asked. “My team can take the station in under two hours. Then you can send in as many encryption experts as you’d like.”

Jenny eyed him. He must be the head of the Delta Force team.

Craig answered, “The Russian admiral is no fool. He’ll blow the station before letting us commandeer it. Before we go in shooting blindly, we need more intelligence.”

Jenny agreed. Intelligence was definitely in short supply here. She stared down at the open book resting atop two others. The stolen journals. She glanced to line after line of symbolic markings, her eyes settling on the title line:

She leaned over and picked up the book. Craig frowned at her. She ran a finger over the lines. “This last word is Grendel.”

Craig swung around in his seat. “You can read the code?”

Jenny shook her head. “No. It makes no sense to me.” She turned and showed it to her father.

He shook his head. “I can’t read it.”

Craig stared between them. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” Jenny said, flipping through the book. “This is all written in Inuktitut—or rather the Inuit script, but it’s not the Inuit language. This last word, Grendel, I can read because it’s a proper name, spelled phonetically in Inuit symbols.”

Craig stood up next to her. “Phonetically?”

She nodded.

“Can you read the opening line? How it would sound spoken aloud?”

Jenny shrugged. “I’ll try.” She pointed to the title line and read it, slowly and haltingly. “ ‘Ee—stor—eeya—led—yan—noy—stan—zee Grendel.’ ”

Craig jerked straighter, listening with a bent ear. “That’s Russian! You’re speaking Russian.” He repeated her words more clearly. “Istoriya ledyanoi stantsii Grendel. It translates ‘History of the Ice Station Grendel.’ ”

Jenny stared up at him, her eyes widening.

Craig hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course, the doctor who ran the station would know Inuit. They were his test subjects. He would need to communicate with them. So he used their symbolic code to record his own Russian notes.” He turned to Jenny. “I need you to translate the books for me.”

“All of them?” she asked, daunted.

“Just some key sections. I must know if we have the right books.”

Amanda had been following their discussion intently. “To ensure the research data is secure.”

Craig nodded, barely hearing her, glancing down at the book in Jenny’s hands.

Edgy from all that had happened, Jenny risked a glance toward Amanda, unsure she understood all that was going on here. Over Craig’s shoulder, she mouthed words at Amanda. Not speaking, merely moving her lips: Do you trust him?

Amanda remained still, then gave the tiniest shake of her head.

No.

6:35 P.M.

ICE STATION GRENDEL

Viktor Petkov enjoyed the look of surprise on the prisoner’s face. He was so sick of Americans blithely ignoring their own histories, their own atrocities, while vilifying the same actions among other governments. The hypocrisy sickened him.

“Bullshit. There’s no way this is an American base,” the man insisted. “I’ve crawled all through here. Everything’s written in Russian.”

“That’s because, Mr. Pike, the discovery here in the Arctic was our own. The Russian government refused to allow you Americans to steal what we found. To claim all the glory.” He waved a hand. “But we did allow the United States to fund and oversee the research.”

“This was a joint project?”

A nod.

“We put up the dough, and you spent it.”

“Your government supplied more than just money.” Viktor pulled the small boy onto his knee. The boy leaned into him, sleepy, seeking the solace of the familiar. Viktor stared over to the American. “You supplied the research subjects.”

A horrified expression widened the man’s eyes as understanding dawned. His gaze took in the boy in his lap. “Impossible. We would never take part in such actions. It goes against everything the United States stands for.”

Viktor educated him. “In 1936, a crack unit of the United States Army was dropped near Lake Anjikuni. They emptied a remote village. Every man, woman, and child.” He stroked the boy’s hair. “They even collected dead bodies, preserved in frozen graves, as comparative research material for the project. Who would miss a few isolated Eskimos?”

“I don’t believe it. We wouldn’t participate in human experiments.”

“And you truly believe this?”

Pike glared, defiant.

“Your government has a long history of using those citizens it considers less desirable as research subjects. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Two hundred black men with syphilis are used as unwitting research subjects. They are not told of their disease and treatment is withheld from them so that your American researchers could study how painfully and horribly these men would die.”