Matt talked as he worked. “So, Craig, what was your business up in Prudhoe?” he asked, studying the other. The fellow certainly didn’t have the look of an oil rigger. Among such hard men, black oil and grease were indelibly tattooed into the creases and folds of their hands. Contrarily, this man’s palms were free of calluses, his nails unbroken and neatly trimmed. Matt supposed he was an engineer or geologist. In fact, the man had a studious look to his countenance, keenly assessing his surroundings, glancing to Matt’s horse, his dogs, the meadow, and the surrounding mountains. The only place he avoided looking was back to the wreckage.

“Prudhoe Bay wasn’t my destination. We were to refuel there, then hop out to a research base on the ice cap. Omega Drift Station, a part of the SCICEX research group.”

“SCICEX?” Matt smeared antibiotic cream on the wound, then covered it with a Teflon-coated gauze sponge, wrapping it in place.

“ ‘Scientific Ice Expeditions,’ ” Craig explained, wincing as Matt secured the wrap. “It’s a five-year collaborative effort between the U.S. Navy and civilian scientists.”

Matt nodded. “I think I remember hearing about that.” The group was using Navy subs to collect data from over a hundred thousand miles of ship track in the Arctic, delving into regions never before visited. Matt’s brow crinkled. “But I thought that ended back in 1999.”

His words drew the man’s full attention, his eyes widening slightly in surprise as he turned to Matt.

“Despite appearances,” Matt explained, “I’m Fish and Game. So I’m generally familiar with many of the larger Arctic research projects.”

Craig studied him with cautious, calculating eyes, then bobbed his head. “Well, you’re right. Officially SCICEX ended, but one station — Omega — had drifted into the ice cap’s Zone of Comparative Inaccessibility.”

No-man’s-land, Matt thought. The ZCI was the most remote part of the polar ice cap, hardest to reach and most isolated.

“For a chance to study such an inaccessible region, funding was extended to this one SCICEX station.”

“So you’re a scientist?” Matt said, fastening up his med kit.

The man laughed, but there was no real humor behind it. “No, not a scientist. I was on assignment from my newspaper. The Seattle Times. I’m a political reporter.”

“A political reporter?”

The man shrugged.

“Why would—” Matt was cut off by the buzzing sound of a plane’s engine. He craned his neck. The lowering sky was thick with heavy clouds. Off to the side, Bane growled deep in his throat as the noise grew in volume.

Craig climbed to his feet. “Another plane. Maybe someone heard the pilot’s distress call.”

From the clouds, a small plane appeared, dropping over the valley but still keeping high. Matt watched it pass. It was another Cessna, only a larger version than Brent’s. It appeared to be a 206 or 207 Skywagon, an eight-seater.

Matt whistled Mariah closer to him, then plucked his binoculars from the saddlebag. Lifting the scopes, he searched a moment for the plane, then focused on it. It appeared brand-new…or freshly painted. Rare for these parts. The terrain was hard on aircraft.

“Have they spotted us?” Craig asked.

The plane tilted on a wing and began a slow circle over the valley. “With the trail of engine smoke, it’d be hard to miss us.”

Still, Matt felt a tingle of unease. He had not spotted a single plane in the past week, and now two in one day. And this plane was too clean, too white. As he watched, the rear cargo door craned open. That was the nice thing about that size of Skywagon. Such planes were used around these parts to shuttle the injured to various outlying hospitals. The rear cargo hatch was perfect for loading and unloading stretchers, or, in worst cases, coffins. But there was another useful and common application for the Skywagon’s large rear hatch.

From the cargo bay, a shape flew free, and a second quickly followed. Sky divers. Matt had a hard time following them with his binoculars. They were plummeting fast. Then chutes ballooned out, slowing them, making them easier to focus upon. Parawing airfoils, Matt recognized, used in precision parachuting for landing in tight places. The pair swung around in tandem, aiming for the meadow.

Matt focused on the divers themselves. Like the plane and chutes, they were outfitted in white, no insignia. Rifles were strapped to their backs, but he was unable to discern make and type.

As he spied on them, cold dread settled in the pit of his stomach. It was not the presence of the guns that trickled ice into Matt’s blood. Instead, it was what was under each sky diver. Each man was strapped into the seat of a motorcycle. The tires were studded with metal spikes. Snow choppers. They were muscular vehicles, capable of tearing up terrain, chasing anything down in these mountains.

Matt lowered the binoculars. He stared over at the reporter, then cleared his throat. “I hope you’re good at riding a horse.”

Will I ever be warm again…?

Captain Perry crunched across the ice and snow toward Omega Drift Station. The wind whistled around him, a haunted sound that spoke to the hollowness in his heart. Here, at the end of the world, the wind was a living creature, always blowing, scouring the surface like a starving beast. It was the ultimate predator: merciless, constant, inescapable. As an old Inuit proverb says, “It’s not the cold that kills, it’s the wind.”

Perry marched steadily forward into the teeth of the blustery gale. Behind him, the Polar Sentinel floated inside a polynya, a large open lake within the ice. The Omega Drift Station was constructed on its shoreline, the site having been chosen for the stability of the nearby polynya, allowing easy ingress and egress of a Navy sub. The polynya owed its permanence to the ring of thick pressure ridges that surrounded the lake, climbing two stories high and delving four times as deep below the surface. These battlements of packed ice held the lake open against the constant crush of the surrounding floes. The research station was built on a relatively level ice plain a quarter mile away, a long hike in the subzero cold.

He marched with a small party of his men, the first of four rotations to be allowed shore leave. The sailors chattered among themselves, but Perry remained hunched in his Navy parka, the edge of his fur-lined hood pulled tightly over his face. He stared off to the northeast, to where the Russian ice base had been discovered two months ago, only thirty miles from here. A shiver trembled through him, but it had nothing to do with the cold.

So many dead…He pictured the Russian bodies, the old inhabitants of the ice base, stacked like cordwood after being chopped or thawed out of their icy tomb. Thirty-two men, twelve women. It had taken them two weeks to clear all the bodies. Some had looked starved to death, while others looked as if they had met more violent ends. They found one body hung in a room, the rope so frozen it shattered with their touch. But that wasn’t the worst…

Perry pushed this thought away.

As he climbed a ridge of ice, made easier by the steps chopped into it, the drift station came into view. It was a small hamlet of red Jamesway huts. The assembly of fifteen red buildings appeared like a bloody rash on the ice. Steam smoked from each hut, misting over the base, giving it a deceptively sultry appearance. The rumble of twenty-four generators seemed to vibrate the mists. The smell of diesel fuel and kerosene hung over the site. A single lone American flag hung from a pole, snapping in the occasional fiercer gusts.