Arctic Wargame - Страница 13

“Because women call you a pig all the time,” Justin replied with a smirk.

Kiawak leaned back on his chair, holding both hands over his chest. “Oh, my heart. That hurt, Justin. I can’t believe you would say such hurtful words…”

“It’s because Nuqatlak called Carrie a pig after they shot him to death,” Alisha said with a deep frown and a stern headshake. “Which was very polite of him given the circumstances, if I may add.”

“Yes, yes, we know.” Kiawak dismissed Alisha’s comments by waving his hand in her direction. He tapped his forehead with his palm, as if wanting to push his brain into action and spark up the missing idea.

“Yes,” he shouted a few seconds later, slamming his fist hard on the table. “Pig Fiord. Sverdrup, the Norwegian guy, the explorer who discovered this area more than a hundred years ago and later sold it to Canada.” Kiawak was reeling off his words like a verbal Let Støttevåben machine gun. “Sverdrup named this place Grise Fiord, which translates as ‘pig fiord’ in his native language. Walruses used to live here at the time and their grunts reminded Sverdrup of pigs. So if Nuqatlak said ‘pig’ and ‘northeast’ when Carrie asked him where he found the weapons, he meant northeast of Grise Fiord. That’s where Nuqatlak found the weapons cache. Some of the locals still call Grise Fiord by its old name, Pig Fiord.”

Kiawak jumped to his feet as soon as he finished his rattling, a big smile glowing on his face.

“You sure about this?” Alisha raised an eyebrow and pointed at Justin. “You don’t believe this nonsense, do you?”

“Well, there’s only one way to know for sure. We’ll fly northeast of Grise Fiord until we find the depot,” Justin replied.

* * *

“The Sirius Patrol stocks over fifty depots, small huts they build during the summers,” Justin said, taking brief pauses between his words. He was skimming through a few documents on his laptop. “Matthew from the office e-mailed me these documents a few minutes ago. These depots are all over the place, but they’re supposed to be only on the Danish, I mean the Greenland, part of the Arctic. The troopers usually rest in tents, but they use these huts during extreme conditions when they need to repair their dogsleds or replenish their food supplies. According to Matthew’s reports, some of these huts have hot showers, warm beds, and somewhat decent toilets.”

“The Sirius Patrol still uses dogsleds?” Anna asked.

“Yeah, don’t be surprised,” Kiawak replied. “Dogs are more reliable than snowmobiles, you never run out of fuel and, if you’re stranded without food—”

“Yuck,” Anna interrupted Kiawak, her face squirming in disgust. “Yuck. Don’t finish that thought.”

“Well, you can’t eat a snowmobile…” Kiawak mumbled. “Hey, check out the view at three o’clock.” He pointed to his right. “Blue ice.”

They looked out the large windows of the Eurocopter. Details of the layers of ice and snow were very crisp from their current altitude of three hundred feet. The area Kiawak brought to their attention shined with a baby blue color. It looked as if a careful mother had wrapped the ice slopes, cliffs, and crevasses in a warm blanket to shelter them from the cold.

“Cool, very cool.” Anna dug into her backpack and pulled out a digital camera.

After a quick, curious glance, Alisha returned her gaze to the pilot. Carrie maintained a straight line, almost parallel to the Grise Fiord coast, which hacked deep into the southern region of Ellesmere Island. Two snowmobile or dogsled trails indicated someone had recently been travelling in this area, going north. Carrie flipped a few switches on the helicopter’s control panel, and the aircraft swerved to the right.

“What are you doing?” Alisha asked.

“The fiord turns right about ten miles ahead. I’m going to take us over the ridges, so we can explore both sides at the same time,” Carrie replied. “I don’t think the Danes would dare to venture this far inland and come this close to Grise Fiord.”

“Oh, now you’re having doubts too?” Alisha said with self-satisfaction obvious in her tone.

“No,” Carrie replied, “I’m just being realistic. If it’s true that they built their depots in our land, they would set them along our coastline. That way, they have easy access to them and keep them far away from our communities.”

“Yes, but don’t you think they know the coastline is the first place we would check? It’s the easiest place to reach,” Anna said.

“That’s true,” Carrie said. “And that’s why we’re searching these inland regions as well. But I still think if we’re to find something, it’ll be along the shores, probably in a secluded bay.”

“That’s where I would hide my boats if we were out hunting, which, in a sense, we are,” Kiawak said, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“The CSE report indicated these icebreakers came very close to Cape Combermere, which is exactly northeast of Grise Fiord.” Justin pointed to a map on his laptop’s screen. “If we put together the findings of the report and Nuqatlak’s confession, something’s definitely going on around that cape.”

Alisha shrugged in a defiant silence.

They continued their flight over the next fiord and the one after it, maintaining their eastbound direction. At times, Carrie would study the blue map on the navigating screen to the left of the flight controls. The screen projected a detailed topographical map of the area underneath, the southeast part of Ellesmere Island, which resembled the flattened nose of a hammerhead shark. A red dot on the screen, just above the mouths of the fiords, indicated their helicopter’s position.

Two other screens to her right, by the radar monitor, were the object of Carrie’s occasional glance. The first one streamed enhanced real-time images from two powerful cameras mounted at the nose of the cockpit. These images were the most useful during summer flights because of the bright and sharp contrast between ridges and valleys, cliffs and plateaus. At this time of year, the staleness of the glittering snow and ice was blinding and mind numbing.

The second screen displayed photographs taken by two infrared cameras installed on both sides of the helicopter’s fuselage. The infrared system enabled the detection of thermal energy emitted by all objects with a temperature above freezing. These waves were then converted into colored photographs. The higher the temperature of the target, the brighter the red dots in the pictures. A few miles past, the system displayed a few red dots, probably caribous or muskoxen, given their constant and rapid movement. A building, Danish or not, would emit a low and static amount of thermal energy.

* * *

Over the next sixty minutes, insignificant dots blipped occasionally on the infrared screen, but nothing worthy of a second glance appeared. The Arctic Cordillera mountain range gradually rose along the eastern shore of Ellesmere Island. Carrie was careful to keep a reasonable distance from the majestic mountain peaks. A few of their summits stabbed at the skyline with their steep cliffs, some of them over three thousand feet high. The helicopter crew admired glacial lakes, frozen rivers and rocky mountainsides. Everything was buried under snow blankets and ice caps. Baffin Bay was not yet in sight, but it was only a matter of minutes before they would marvel at the spectacular vistas of Ellesmere Island broken coastline.

“Where are we?” Anna asked, peering through the window. Her forehead pressed against the cold glass, and the vibration of the engines sent a jolt through her body.

“We’re flying over the Manson Ice Cap, heading east, toward Baffin Bay,” Carrie replied.

“How can you tell?” Anna continued. “All I see is white powder, with the occasional black mountain top poking from underneath.”

Carrie smiled. “I’ve got the map in front of me. Plus, the chopper knows his way around these mountains.”

They all giggled, except Alisha, who kept staring at her laptop.

“Once we’re over the ocean, I’m gonna take us north, so we can search the coast. If we don’t find anything, we’ll turn around for another swipe of the inland valleys before—”

A few electronic beeps from the flight control dashboard interrupted Carrie. She glanced at the infrared screen, fumbled with a few switches, and zoomed in the right side camera.

“What is it?” Justin asked.

“I… I don’t know. Let me check something.”

The helicopter lost some altitude, and Carrie steadied the aircraft in order to focus the camera for a clear image. From their distance of six hundred feet above the coastal cliffs, she could not pick the details of a large mass of white-yellowish debris at the center of the small screen. At first, she thought it was a colony of seals, but the infrared screen remained relatively calm. Could it just be ridges of exposed cliffs, after a windstorm scrapped the ice off their slopes?

“We’re dropping in for a closer look, at that point, right there.” Carrie tapped one of the screens so Justin could follow her words. “There seems to be something tucked in at that little bay. Maybe, just maybe that’s what we’ve been looking for.”

Justin glanced at the helicopter’s navigational screen, then at the topographical map of the island on his laptop, apparently comparing the curves. He took a quick look outside the window at the bay growing larger by the second underneath them.

“That’s Cape Combermere, right?” he asked Carrie.