The actual truth was far more horrific than any of the wildest speculations.

As she reached the end of the hall, the double set of doors swung open ahead of her. A figure in a heavy yellow parka shambled through. Amanda felt the cold exhalation flowing through the open door, a breath from the heart of the ice island.

The figure shook back his hood and revealed his frosted features. Dr. Henry Ogden, the fifty-year-old Harvard biologist, looked surprised to find her there. “Dr. Reynolds!”

“Henry.” She nodded to him.

“Dear God.” He pulled a glove off with his teeth and checked his watch. He then ran a hand over his bald pate. Besides his eyebrows, the only hair on the man’s head was a thin brown mustache and a tiny soul patch under his lower lip. He absentmindedly tugged at this little tuft of hair. “I’m sorry. I hoped to meet you upstairs.”

“What’s this all about?”

He glanced back to the door. “I…I found something…something amazing. You should—” As he turned away, she could no longer read his lips.

“Dr. Ogden?”

He turned back, his eyebrows raised quizzically.

She touched her lips with her fingers.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” He now spoke in an unnaturally slow manner, as if speaking to someone with a mental defect. Amanda bit back her anger.

“You need to see this for yourself,” he continued. “That’s why I had you come.” He stared a moment at the Navy guards down the hall. “I couldn’t count on them keeping the rock hounds away for very long. The specimens…” His voice trailed off, distracted. He shook his head. “Let’s get you a parka, and I’ll take you.”

“I’ll stay warm enough in this,” she said impatiently, running a hand over her thermal suit. “Show me what you found.”

The biologist’s eyes were still on the guards, his brows crinkled. Amanda wagered he was speculating like all the others. His gaze eventually swung back to her. “What I found…I think it’s the reason the station was built here.”

It took a moment for his words to register. “What? What do you mean?”

“Come see.” He turned and headed back through the double doors.

Amanda followed, but she peered back to the guarded doorway. It’s the reason the station was built here.

She prayed the biologist was wrong.

Staring out the windshield of the Twin Otter, Matt tried to focus on the beauty of one of the great natural wonders of the world. This section of the Gates of the Arctic National Park was the goal of thousands of hikers, climbers, and adventurers each year.

Ahead rose the Arrigetch Peaks. The name — Arrigetch — came from the Nunamiut, meaning “upstretched fingers of the hand.” An apt description. The entire region was jammed with pinnacles and sheer spires of granite. It was a land of thousand-foot vertical walls, precarious overhangs, and glacial amphitheaters. Such terrain was a natural playground for climbers, while hikers enjoyed its verdant alpine meadows and ice-blue tarns.

But flying through Arrigetch was plain madness. And it wasn’t just the rocks. The winds were a hazard, too. The air currents flowed from the glacial heights like a swollen river through cataracts, carving the winds into a raging mix of sudden gusts, shears, and crosswinds.

“Get ready!” Jenny warned.

The plane climbed toward the jumbled landscape. To either side, mountains towered, their slopes bright with snow and ice floes. Between them rose Arrigetch. There appeared no way to pass through the area.

Matt craned around. Their pursuers had almost caught up with them again. The Cessna buzzed about a quarter mile back. Would they dare follow into this maze?

Below, a stream drained from the broken heights above. A sparse taiga-spruce forest finally succumbed to the altitude and faded away. They were now above the continent’s tree line.

Matt turned to Jenny, ready to try one last time to dissuade her from what she was about to attempt. But he saw the determined glint in her eye, the way her brows pinched together. There would be no talking her out of it.

Her father spoke from behind them. John had finished cinching Bane’s dog collar to one of the seat harnesses. “Ready back here.”

Beside the elder Inuit, Craig sat straight-backed in his seat. The reporter’s eyes were locked ahead. He had paled since coming in sight of Arrigetch. On the ground, the view was humbling, but from the air, it was sheer terror.

The Otter raced over the last of the rocky slopes, impossibly high and impassable.

“Here we go,” Jenny said.

“And here they come,” Matt echoed.

The chatter of gunfire cut through the whine of their motors. Loose shale on the slope danced with the impact of the slugs. But the line of fire was well to the side. The other plane was still too far off for an accurate shot. It was a desperate act before they lost their quarry to Arrigetch.

As Matt watched the Cessna, a puff of fire rolled from one of the side windows. Though he heard nothing, he imagined the whistle of the incoming grenade. A trail of smoke marked its rocketed path, arcing to within two yards of their wingtip, then vanishing ahead. The explosion erupted against one of the pinnacles, casting out a rain of stone. A section of cliff face broke free and slid earthward.

Jenny banked from the assaulted pillar and turned up on one wing. Matt had a momentary view of the ground below as the Otter shot between the two spires.

“Ohmygod, ohmygod,” Craig intoned behind him.

Once past the spires, Jenny leveled out. Surrounded on all sides by columns and towers, peaks and pinnacles, cliffs and walls. The heights were such that the tops could not be seen out the windows.

Winds buffeted the small plane, jostling it.

Matt clenched his armrests.

Jenny banked hard, tilting up on the other wing. Matt’s eyes stretched wide. He wanted to close them, but for some reason, he couldn’t. Instead, he cursed this firsthand view of Jenny’s flying. Economy seating suddenly did have its appeal.

The Otter shot between a cliff face and a tilted column. To his side, Jenny began to hum under her breath. Matt knew she did this whenever she was fully concentrating on something, but usually it was just the New York Times crossword puzzle.

The plane skirted the pinnacle and leveled again — but only for a breath.

“Hang on,” Jenny muttered.

Matt simply glared. His forearms were already cramped from clutching his seat. What more did she want?

She rolled the Otter over on a wing and spun tight around a spire. For the next five minutes, she zigzagged and barnstormed through the rock maze. Back and forth, up on one wing, then the other.

His stomach lurching, Matt sought any sign of the Cessna in the skies, but it was like searching through a stone forest. He had lost sight of the plane as soon as they entered Arrigetch — which had been Jenny’s plan all along. There were a thousand exits from this region: passes, chutes, moraines, valleys, glacial flows. And with the lowering cloud cover, if the Cessna wanted to know where they were headed, it would have to follow, if it dared.

The plane entered a wide glacial cirque, a natural amphitheater carved from the side of one of the mountains. Jenny swung the Otter in a gentle glide along the edge of the steep-sided bowl. The lip of a glacier hung over the mountain’s edge in an icy cornice. Below, the floor was covered with boulders and glacial till, powdery rock and gravel that had been left behind as the ice retreated.

But in the center lay a perfectly still mountain lake. The blue surface of the tarn was a mirror, reflecting the Otter as it circled around the bowl. The walls of the cirque were too steep for a direct flight out. Jenny began a slow spiral, heading up, trying to clear the mountain cliffs.