The two men trudged across the ice toward Bear One, the main hut. All told, there were four main structures in the camp and several smaller sheds and supply buildings, all of them flown up here slung beneath the belly of CH-47 helicopters and assembled on the ice. The largest, dubbed Bear One, was the center of the tiny, isolated community’s life and warmth. Near the building’s door, an American flag, already ragged in the constant wind, fluttered from a piece of pipe raised as an impromptu flagpole.

Officially, the place was the NOAA Arctic Meteorological Station Bravo, but the men and women currently living here called it Ice Station Bear… a tribute, in part, to a pair of old Alistair MacLean thrillers with similar names, plus just a bit of gallows humor drawn from the latest spate of international one-upmanship with the Russians. Wrangel Island was just 760 miles distant, directly due south, and Mys Shmidta, the nearest Russian military base and staging area on the Siberian mainland, about 150 miles beyond that.

The Russian specter had been looming quite large in the tiny community’s thoughts lately. At least every other day, jet aircraft, military aircraft out of Mys Shmidta, had overflown the station, flying low enough to rattle the hut’s walls. Sometimes, the already-chancy radio communications with Asheville were blotted out by what Commander Greg Larson thought was Russian jamming.

And, of course, for the past week they’d been repeatedly warned that they were trespassing and must leave Russian territory at once.

What a crock, Tomlinson thought. The Russians were trying to intimidate them into leaving. He wondered what the hell it was they were hiding eighty-some miles over the northern horizon and if Yeats and his people had managed to get a good look.

Three members of the NOAA expedition had left yesterday, taking three of the snowmobiles east to Remote One, an unmanned weather station seventy miles across the ice. Theoretically, they were checking the instrumentation and taking some ice-thickness readings.

The thing was, everyone in the expedition knew that Yeats and McMillan were spooks for the CIA, though that particular tidbit had not been shared with the Greenworld visitors. They also knew that Yeats, McMillan, and Haines-a genuine climatologist but also an expert on traveling over the Arctic ice-had gone to Remote One more to snoop on the nearby Russian base than to check instrument packages.

Currently, the surest bets making the rounds among the scientists were that the Russians were prospecting for oil. Everyone knew they wanted to claim half the Arctic Ocean as their own in order to get at the oil and natural gas beneath the sea floor.

Yeats, McMillan, and Haines should have been back by now. There’d been a brief message five hours ago-and not a word since.

Tomlinson suppressed a shudder. Something was wrong. He could feel it. They were going to have to send another team out to learn what had happened to the first. He wished they could send the Greenworld kids.

We don’t need this shit, he thought, bitter. Missing people, hostile Russians… and we have to babysit, too.

He wondered if the ecology nuts had come here because the Russians wouldn’t let them go to their base instead.

Ecology nuts. Tomlinson had little respect for people who made sweeping and hyper-dramatic claims without solid scientific evidence backing them up. A number of high-profile organizations-organizations such as Greenpeace and Greenworld and the Sierra Club-wanted to keep this frozen wilderness pristine and the petroleum resources below the ice untapped. Tree huggers, as Tomlinson and his associates thought of the five unwanted visitors to the base, though there wasn’t a single tree for them to hug within the better part of a thousand miles. Their agenda didn’t have a chance, no matter how many polar bears they’d been able to film out on the ice. You couldn’t stop progress… or the power of the almighty dollar.

What did the Greenworlders think they could accomplish by finagling a visit to Ice Station Bear?

He knew one thing. They wouldn’t have been here at all if one of them hadn’t been the daughter of a New England congressman. Raymond C. Cabot had been pulling strings at NOAA and the Department of Commerce for a month, getting permission for Lynnley Cabot and her four friends to take this little junket into the frozen north. Tomlinson wondered if Cabot was just a doting father who couldn’t say no, or if he saw a way of making political capital. Cabot was a Democrat and liked thumping the environmentalist bible loudly and often. Maybe he thought a docudrama of his darling daughter in a parka would help him with his next campaign.

Tomlinson followed Segal through the door into the hut, letting the wind bang it hard behind him. The Quonset hut’s interior was surprisingly cramped, given the exterior size of the thing. Half was partitioned off into sleeping quarters, with the women’s area sequestered off behind a curtain at the back. Another curtain hid the chemical toilet and the tiny portable shower stall; most of the walls and available free space was occupied by boxes-food and scientific instruments. The opposite end was devoted to the radio set, two computer workstations, and the meteorology instrumentation. Clothing hung drying from various overhead hooks and hangers, creating a cluttered, humid forest of textiles. Social life inside the community was defined by the space around the stove and heater. Most of the people were there, at the moment, looking up at the sudden explosion of cold and wind from outside.

“Hey, we thought you were the Russians,” Tom McCauley said. He was a heavyset North Dakotan with a twisted sense of humor, who’d first used his degree in meteorology to get a job as a TV weatherman, but who later moved to Asheville to take a job with the National Climatic Data Center.

“Nyet, tovarisch,” Segal said, grinning as he threw back the hood of his parka. “Ya nyeh Ruskii.”

“Too bad,” Fred Masters said. He was playing cards with two other climatologists and slapped a card down on the table. “We were hoping you would save us from our Greenpeace friends, here.”

“That’s Greenworld,” Lynnley Cabot said, sounding disgusted. “Jackass.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” Masters replied, picking up another card. “From here I can’t tell the difference.”

“Ah, it’s easy, Fred,” Susan Fritcherson said, picking up the discarded card. “Greenpeace wants to save the whales. Greenworld wants the whales to inherit the Earth.”

“They’d do a better job running the world than we have,” Ken Richardson, the ostensible leader of the Greenworld group, put in.

“Pipe down, all of you,” Commander Greg Larson said. He was the senior NOAA officer and the expedition team leader. “I’ve told you yahoos before… we don’t have the room for that kind of nonsense. Or the patience.”

The bickering subsided, as it had to. The Greenworlders had been told in no uncertain terms that this base was under NOAA’s jurisdiction and therefore under military jurisdiction. They would obey the regulations and the orders given by the NOAA officers… or they could start walking the 650 miles across ice and open water to Point Barrow.

NOAA was a scientific agency under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Most of its employees were civilian scientists and administrators, but about four hundred of its personnel made up the NOAA Corps, one of America’s seven uniformed services. All were commissioned officers, wearing uniforms similar to those of the U.S. Navy.

Tomlinson stripped off his parka, boots, and snow pants, hung them on a wall hook, then squeezed into the tiny galley area to pour himself a cup of coffee. That was one good thing about this place; there was always a large pot more or less fresh brewed, and if your standards weren’t too high, it was pretty good. He’d only been outside for ten minutes, but there was ice laced through his mustache and beard.