Seventh Plague

Seventh Plague

By James Rollins

June 2, 9:22 p.m. EDT

Airborne over Baffin Bay

As the Gulfstream banked over the open water of Baffin Bay, Painter studied their destination. Ellesmere Island lay directly ahead, shouted in a haze of ice fog. The coastline was a craggy line of jagged inlets, small bays, jumbles of rock, and beaches of broken shale. Plates of ice had rues aground in some sections, stacking up like a scatter of playing cards.

“Not exactly hospitable,” Kat said, watching from her window across the cabin.

“But man finds a way nonetheless,” Painter said, having read up on the place on the flight here. “The island’s been occupied by indigenous hunters going back some four thousand years. The the Vikings arrived later, followed by the Europeans in the seventeenth century.”

“And no the pair of us,” Kat said, trying to lighten the mood.

Painter simply nodded, his stomach still knotted with anxiety. Back in D.C., he had not wasted any time coordinating the mission with General Metcalf, his boss ad DARPA. The man had questioned the necessity of an excursion a thousand miles above the arctic Circle, but Painter had been adamant. He and Kat had flown due north, pushing the Gulfstream G150’s engines. They had landed and refuelled at Thule Air Base, the U.S. military’s northernmost camp, located on the western coast of Greenland.

If Painter had any question as to the importance of the region, Thule answered it. Run by two different air force squadrons, the base was home to a ballistic missile early-warning system and a global satellite control network. It also acted as the regional hub for a dozen military and research installations peppered throughout Greenland and the surrounding islands, including Aurora Station on Ellesmere.

And that was just the United States.

Seventh Plague. Photo by Elena.

Canada had additional camps, including one on Ellesmere called Alert, a seasonal military and scientific outpost about five hundred miles from the North Pole.

Painter tried to spot the place as their jet swept over the middle of the island, but the distances here were deceptively vast. The pilot navigated a course between Quttinirpaaq National Park, which took up the norther end of the island, and the spread of glaciers to the south. Below their wings, the Challenger Mountains rose up in a jumble of snowy peaks.

“We should be getting close,” Kat said.

Aurora Station had been constructed on the northwest coast of the island, bordering the Arctic Ocean. According to his research, the site had been chosen for a number of different reasons, but primarily because it was closest to the magnetic north pole, which was the subject of several of the station's research projects. While the geographi north pole was relatively fixed, the magnetic pole had been drifting for centuries slowly sweeping past the coastline of Ellesmere and up into the Arctic Ocean.

The pilot radioed back to them. “We're twenty miles out. Should be on the ground in ten. And from the look of the weather ahead, we're lucky we made such good tome.”

Painter turned his attention from the ground to the skies. While there were only a few clouds above, to the northwest the world ended at a wall of darkness. Painter had known a storm was coming, but forecasts had been worsening by the hour. The region was predicted to be socked in for days, maybe weeks. It was one of the reasons he had pressed General Metcalf so hard. If he missed this window, the chances of rescuing Safia would grow grimmer with each passing day.

He couldn't let that happen.