At dawn, the sun made only a brief, anemic gesture above the eastern headland—a lemon-colored smudge against bruised violet clouds that never truly cleared the horizon.
David stepped through the exterior airlock, his parka zipped to the chin. The cold hit like a physical blow, seizing the moisture inside his nostrils.
He carried a handheld induction detector and a pair of field binoculars. The perimeter wire ran for four kilometers along the spine of the ridge, marking the boundary of the military concession.
Halfway to Tower Three, where the cliffs plunged four hundred meters into the black water of the fiord, the wire hung slack.
David knelt in the crusted snow. The four strands of galvanized steel had not snapped under the wind; they had been cut cleanly with hydraulic bolt cutters. The metal ends were bright and unoxidized.
Beside the breach, clear in the blue morning light, were footprints.
They came up from the cliff face—an impossible ascent over sheer, ice-sheathed granite where even gulls refused to nest. They crossed the wire, paused for several paces beside the surveyor’s cairn, and then turned toward Station Nine's diesel exhaust vents.
David raised the binoculars. On the observation catwalk three hundred meters above him, silhouette against the pale sky, stood a figure.
It was not Keller. Keller had boarded the helicopter twelve hours ago.
The figure was holding a hand-wound transit compass, aiming it directly down at where David knelt in the snow.