of light and outside, zipping up his jacket as he did so. The air outside seemed frozen solid in the darkness, the glittering stars across the heaves above even brighter now without the station’s external lamps on.
Jake walked across to the parked snowmobiles and then turned to face Cody.
‘Have you done this?’
Cody stared at Jake in surprise. ‘Come again?’
‘Have you shut the station down, sabotaged it in some way?’
Cody gaped in disbelief. ‘Why the hell would I do that?’
Jake yanked a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Cody. Printed upon it was a screen grab taken from the computer in the communications room, the cover of the newspaper and the hunt for a killer.
‘I went through the search history last night,’ Jake said, ‘after that phone call I got from Boston.’
Cody shook his head. ‘I looked at the Boston Globe’s main page when I called home yesterday. What’s this got to do with me?’
‘Nothing,’ Jake replied, ‘except that the call I got was from a police detective in Boston.’
The air around Cody seemed to get suddenly colder as he stood and stared at Jake. ‘What did they want?’
Jake took a pace closer. ‘You tell me?’
Cody struggled to keep his features even as he spoke. ‘You think I’m responsible for all of this? Jesus, the Canadians cleared out Jake. What the hell could I have to do with that?’
‘Any of the others know about this, Cody?’ Jake asked, then pointed at the print out.
‘Not that I know of,’ Cody replied. He took a deep breath as he looked at the image in his gloved hand.
Jake watched him for a moment. ‘Somebody here is wanted for something serious in Boston, and I can only assume that means either large scale fraud or homicide.’
Cody was about to reply when the door beside them banged open and Bradley Trent stormed down the metal steps, pulling his hood up against the frigid air.
‘Maybe we should send a message ahead of some kind, to warn anybody who might still be at the base?’ Charlotte said as she followed Bradley out into the darkness.
‘They didn’t inform us of why they cleared out,’ Jake replied for the soldier. ‘Why the hell should we inform them that we’re going in?’
‘Maybe they left guards behind?’ Charlotte suggested.
‘Doubt it,’ Jake said, gesturing to Bradley Trent. ‘They wouldn’t have bothered to come looking for this loser if they were leaving people behind.’
‘Up yours,’ Bradley muttered. ‘I’ve got the lead out there. You don’t pass me unless I tell you to, understood?’
‘Fine by me,’ Jake replied. ‘If there are any guards remaining, they’ll probably shoot you first.’
Jake shot Cody a concerned look as he turned for his snowmobile. Bradley mounted his and tried to start it. Nothing happened.
‘Damn, battery’s gone,’ he uttered.
Cody tried his key, turned it in the ignition, but nothing happened.
‘Christ, even the snowmobiles are dead!’ Jake said in disbelief.
‘We’ll have to walk,’ Bradley said. ‘If I’m right, we can use the snowmobiles from Alert instead.’
‘It’s five kilometres,’ Cody pointed out.
‘Then the exercise will do you good,’ Bradley snapped. ‘Got a problem with that?’
‘Start packing up some of our gear,’ Jake called back to Charlotte. ‘We might need to move into the base.’
Cody followed Bradley out into the bitter darkness, the soldier leading the way along the twisting road that led to the airbase. The darkness seemed to close around him as though he himself was being pursued. He tried to shrug off the sense that thousands of miles away his life was falling apart and there was nothing that he could do to prevent it.
The walk across the lonely ice road took over an hour, the only sound the crunching of their boots on the ice. Nobody spoke, and Cody guessed that was because nobody really knew what to say.
The first thing that Cody noticed as they approached was that the runway lights were
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