“You get through to the Center yet, Bill?” he asked the man currently at the radio. Lieutenant Bill Walters was the third NOAA officer on the team, a communications specialist.

“Nah,” Walters said, pulling the headset off his head and tossing it on the desk. “Our Russki friends are being too noisy right now. And the solar interference is worse than yesterday, too.”

“Cold out there, Chris?” Masters asked.

“Not too bad. About minus two Celsius. But it’s going to get colder. Another squall’s coming in.”

“Is it going to be… bad?” Jenny Cicero, another member of the Greenworld delegation, asked. She sounded scared. When a full gale was blowing outside, the Quonset hut walls shook and pounded as though giants were plying it with jackhammers. Such a storm had hit a few hours after the Greenworlders had arrived last week, and Tomlinson had thought they were going to have to ship Cicero back to Point Barrow in a straightjacket.

Welcome to the Arctic, kids, he thought.

“Nah,” Fritcherson told her. “Twenty below… wind at fifty knots. Heavy snow and icing. Piece of cake.”

“Is Yeats going to get his people back here before it hits?” Larson asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Don’t know, sir,” Walters said. “They have a satcom with them, but…”

“Maybe we should take a couple of snowmobiles out to look for them,” Tomlinson suggested.

“Not yet,” Larson replied. “I don’t want more people running around out there and maybe getting lost in a whiteout.” He sounded worried.

“They have GPS,” Fritcherson pointed out. “Even if they can’t get through the radio interference, they can navigate by satellite.”

“Keep trying to raise them on the satcom,” Larson told Walters.

“Yes, sir. But our regular frequencies are full of garbage.” He listened for a moment. “I think the Russians may be holding some kind of military maneuvers out there.”

“Nothing to do with us,” Larson said. “Keep at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Larson looked around the crowded room. “Where’s Benford?”

“Sacked out, Skipper,” McCauley told him, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward the curtained-off bunks. “Said he was wiped.”

Larson scowled but said nothing. Tomlinson could guess what was going through his mind, however. The five Greenworlders were very unwelcome guests. They ate the expedition’s food, put a strain on the sanitary facilities, took up valuable space both with their bodies and with their baggage, and brought a nasty air of politics and confrontation into the tiny and tight-knit world of the NOAA climate research expedition, all without bringing a single useful skill to the camp. Oh, there was make-work enough-cleaning, cooking, stowing or unpacking gear, even taking turns cleaning the ice off the outside sensors-but it simply wasn’t enough compared with what they took. In Arctic exploration, no less than if this had been a scientific expedition to Mars, every person had to pull his or her weight. There was no room for freeloaders.

Tomlinson wondered what the Connecticut congressman had paid in the way of a contribution to the Climatic Data Center to get them to foist these five on the expedition. They were supposed to be filming some sort of documentary, and for the first few days they’d done nothing but get in the way with their cameras and sound equipment and inane questions. Lately, though, they’d pretty much kept to themselves.

The trouble was, space was at such a premium in Bear One that they still got in the way.

Benford in particular was a monumental pain in the ass. The guy started arguments with the team personnel, had to be chivvied to perform even minimal chores, and maintained an all-round sour and unpleasant attitude that already had affected the station’s morale.

Well, it wouldn’t last forever. The freeloaders had been here a week and were scheduled to be here for another two weeks more, until the next scheduled supply flight up from Barrow. When the tree huggers were gone, the ice station was going to feel a lot roomier.

Tomlinson had to squeeze past three of them, Cabot, Cicero, and Steven Moore, to reach an empty chair by the heater.

Yeah, he couldn’t wait for them to be gone.

Harry Benford lay in his narrow bunk, face to the wall and his privacy curtain pulled across the open side, but he wasn’t sleeping. He’d heard the bickering a moment ago. Good. Keep up the pressure…

In his hand, pressed up against his ear, was what looked like a transistor radio, the size of a pack of cigarettes. It tuned to only a single channel, however, one reserved for military transmissions.

The static was terrible, reception lousy, and atmospherics squealed and wailed as he listened, but twice a day at the same times he always sought the privacy of his bunk, the toilet, or outside in order to listen for five minutes.

And today, finally, the signal he’d been listening for came through.

He’d been wondering if it would ever come. There wasn’t much to it, a man’s voice repeating the same word over and over: “Rodina… Rodina… Rodina…”

Quietly Benford turned off the receiver and slipped it under his mattress.

It was time for the sleeper to awake and carry out his mission.

Offices of the National Security Council The White House, Washington, D.C. 1638 hours EDT

“The President,” George Francis Wehrum said in a cautiously neutral tone, “is furious. I should tell you that Dr. Bing is recommending a complete restructuring of the intelligence hierarchy.”

Rubens kept his face impassive. It was, actually, no worse than he’d been expecting, especially after he’d been kept waiting for over an hour before being ushered into the Presence. “With respect, Mr. Wehrum,” Rubens said carefully, “this is scarcely the time for recriminations, for petty politics, or for… personal vendettas. The situation is serious.”

“We know that. That’s why Dr. Bing considers it necessary to take certain steps.”

“By refusing to let me do my job?”

“There is some question at this point if you are the best man for the job. It may be time to restructure your agency to some extent.” He shrugged and almost managed to look embarrassed. “You must know that this has been coming for some time.”

Rubens took a deep breath. “Mr. Wehrum, this is not about turf wars between the NSA and the CIA. One of my best field agents is dead. We believe the Russian mob had a hand in it, though we don’t yet know why. I intend to find out.”

Wehrum dismissively waved a hand. “I’m not talking about that. When you conduct covert operations of the sort your Desk Three so enjoys, you will suffer casualties. You know that. I am referring to the loss of a three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-million-dollar aircraft and its highly trained Air Force pilot. That F-22 was over Russian territorial waters, where you sent it. Dr. Bing intends to conduct a full investigation into the reasons you made that decision, and its consequences.”

Rubens sighed. This was getting him nowhere. “May I see Dr. Bing?”

“Dr. Bing is in a closed session with the President and with the DNI and the D/CIA.”

That stung. “I should be there.”

“You should not. The DNI will inform you when-if-it is necessary for your department to have administrative access to POTUS.”

DNI-the Director of National Intelligence. Nominally the head of all U.S. intelligence agencies, James Fenton was known to favor a sharp streamlining and redefining of American intelligence. “D/CIA” referred to the Director of Central Intelligence, the head of the CIA, Roger Smallbourn. Smallbourn was a political hack, but one with aspirations identical to Fenton’s; his Deputy Director of Operations, Debra Collins, had been trying to take Desk Three out of the NSA’s organizational chart and fold it into the CIA since its inception. Within the tangled world of the inside-the-Beltway jungle of D.C., wars were won or lost, careers saved or lost, over direct access to POTUS, government slang for the President of the United States.