The Cold Edge

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Thank you to the people of Norway and Sweden for your hospitality. Although I didn’t make it as far north as Svalbard, I hope I captured the essence of the area after growing up in the frozen tundra of Northern Minnesota. A special thanks to one pretty, young waitress at Blomonn Restaurant & Bar in Lillehammer, Norway, for convincing me to try the whale. After doing so, I finally understood Melville’s Ahab.

Swirling lights of blue and orange and green and red marked the Northern sky above the thick glacier, as if aliens or some unearthly force was about to invade this remote island halfway between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole.

One man sat on a snowmobile in Arctic clothes, the wind biting into any exposed skin around the edges of his goggles, while a second man adjusted a small satellite dish hitched up by wire to a cumbersome SAT phone the size of a small briefcase.

“Any time now,” Korkala said from the snowmobile, as he adjusted the volume on the phone. John Korkala was the CIA’s assistant station chief in Oslo, and his colleague, Steve Olson, the military attaché, an Air Force captain and communications officer.

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