Chapter 63: Sophia Arrives
Chapter 63: Sophia Arrives
At 3 PM, Sophia's private jet landed at Tromsø Military Airport.
She was wearing a black polar combat suit, her hair peeking out from the collar and whipping in the sea wind.
Fifty Rockefeller security personnel followed behind her.
Cole was waiting on the tarmac.
When their eyes met, Sophia reached out and wiped the dust from his face with her thumb. "You've lost weight."
Cole took her hand. "You're here."
Sophia smiled. "Everything in New York is taken care of! I've also beefed up the air support — we now have sixteen helicopters, five transport planes, and eleven gunships. The Norwegian Air Force has granted temporary clearance for two F-35s to enter Svalbard airspace, on the condition that all military presence is withdrawn within forty-eight hours after the battle ends. I agreed."
She looked at Cole. "That's everything I could get. The rest is up to you."
By the time Sophia followed Cole into the command tent, Heinrich had already been waiting for nearly half an hour.
The projection screen showed a satellite map stretching from Greenland to the Svalbard archipelago. Six red dots blinked across the ice, scattered but all within two hundred nautical miles of the Raven's Nest perimeter.
Heinrich stood in front of the screen, his laser pointer tracing the blinking coordinates. "These are the supply depots — data Elena pulled from the Greenland base. Six hidden relay stations, all built beneath the ice sheet. The surface cover is abandoned Danish naval observation posts, but the real warehouses are underground. Ammunition, neural chips, nutrient solution, clone maintenance equipment... Odin uses submarines to supply the Raven's Nest — every three days, fixed routes, fixed schedules. If we don't destroy these depots, we'll be facing a constant stream of clone reinforcements when we hit the Raven's Nest."
Cole leaned over the map. The red circles were scattered across the frozen sea between Greenland and Svalbard. He pressed his index finger on the northernmost dot — less than eighty nautical miles from the Raven's Nest.
"This one's the biggest threat," Cole said.
"Exactly." Heinrich pushed up his glasses. "That depot feeds directly into the armory on the fourth underground level of the Raven's Nest. If we blow it, the clones won't be able to resupply their ammunition during the frontal assault. We could cut the turret firepower density by at least thirty percent."
Cole turned around. Every squad leader in the tent was already looking at him.
Gunnar leaned against a tent pole with his arms crossed, waiting.
"Three strike teams, ten men each. Deploy this afternoon, destroy all supply depots before dawn tomorrow. No survivors — blow them and pull out." Cole looked at Gunnar. "First team is yours. You take the northern one."
Gunnar nodded and pushed off from the pole. "I'll lead the first team. Give me two jammers — there'll be clone guards in that depot." He paused. "I'll blow it and come back. But if I don't make it back... tell my son to forget about being a Wolf Clan warrior. Send him to university in Oslo. He's good at math."
---
The camp was buzzing by mid-afternoon.
Warriors loaded crates onto trucks. Armored vehicles carved two deep black tracks into the main road through camp, their diesel fumes mixing with the salt-heavy wind blowing in from the port.
Cole stood at the entrance of the command tent watching Marcus check off the third supply manifest when a sharp electronic screech cut through from the direction of the port.
Then his own name.
"Cole! Save me!"
The voice poured out of every radio, every earpiece in camp.
It was Kyle's voice.
"It hurts so much! They drain my blood every day! Cole, I'm waiting for you at the altar! Come save me!"
Cole was already pressing his earpiece, switching to the camp-wide broadcast channel. "Shut down all open comms. Now."
Cole walked out of the tent and stood in the open ground at the center of camp, surrounded by faces all turned toward him.
"That is not my father. That's Odin using a clone to mimic his voice. He can't break into Tromsø Harbor, so he's changed tactics — psychological warfare, the method he knows best. Don't believe anything you hear."
The warriors gradually settled.
Then Heinrich burst out of the command tent. "Cole! I found it — a new function in the necklace!"
He caught his breath and flipped his tablet around for Cole to see.
"While I was analyzing the necklace's energy spectrum, I found a hidden frequency band. It doesn't just jam chips — it can detect subtle differences in gene sequences. No matter how precise the cloning process, there are always a few base-pair deviations during transcription. But Kyle himself? Zero deviation. Only one genetic sequence produces a zero-deviation resonance when the Night Kin runes activate — and that's Kyle's own."
He pointed to the waveform on the screen. Two curves: a red one with high-frequency oscillations and irregular shifts between peaks and troughs, and a green one as flat and steady as a taut wire.
"The difference between a clone's gene sequence and Kyle's real one is amplified by at least a thousand times. Add an identification module to the jammer, and within its range, red dots are fake Kyles — the one green dot is the real Kyle."
Heinrich said, "I've already pushed this feature to all the jammer firmware. When we get to the Raven's Nest, just turn on the jammer — the one green dot in a sea of red is Kyle."
After hearing Heinrich out, Cole reached into his pocket and pulled out the silver necklace. The pendant cast a faint blue glow in his palm.
He unclasped Old Eric's wolf-fang amulet from around his neck, then slipped Hel's necklace from his wrist, and laid them both in his palm.
A wolf fang. A silver chain. One to stabilize the crystal core. One to tell real from false.
Kyle had hunted his first ice wolf thirty years ago. Old Eric had worn that fang for thirty years. Now it was on Cole — left by his father to Old Eric, and returned by Old Eric to him.
The necklace had been left by Hel's mother to Hel, carried out at the cost of her life, and now it rested with him too.
Beside him, Sophia — who had heard everything — reached over and picked them both up, then fastened them around Cole's neck herself.
She pressed the pendant gently against his chest.
"When you go to the Arctic," Sophia said, "I want to hear your voice on the command channel — alive — when you report back."
"Coming back alive is all that matters."
Cole gave a single nod and looked north.
The Svalbard archipelago was swallowed completely by the gray-blue horizon, no outline visible — but he knew exactly which direction it was.
The crystal core pulsed quietly beneath the wolf-fang amulet. The pendant of Hel's necklace pressed flat against the inside of his chest pocket.
By evening, every warrior had gathered at the port.
Three icebreakers and a submarine that had slipped into the harbor to join the formation were running their final mechanical checks in sync.
The engine roar shook loose a sheet of ice from the edge of the dock. The broken pieces dropped into the black water of the Norwegian Sea and caught the floodlights, scattering into points of silver.
On every deck, the rotors of the armed helicopters began to turn slowly. Ground crew crouched beside the landing gear for one last round of hydraulic checks, flashlight beams sweeping back and forth beneath the fuselages.