Chapter 67: Icefield Minefield of Thunder

The fleet reached the outer ice floe zone around the Svalbard archipelago.

Cole stood on the bridge of the icebreaker, hands braced on the chart table.

Outside the window stretched a white wasteland without end. Glaciers glowed cold blue under a lead-gray sky.

Raven’s Nest lay 120 nautical miles straight ahead—a steel fortress built inside a dead volcano crater. Its outer shell was covered by hundreds of feet of ice. Anti-air guns and missile silos poked out from the ice in dense rows.

Heinrich threw the satellite scan onto the main screen. Thermal imaging showed over ten thousand heat signatures inside the fortress, most clustered between the third and fifth underground levels.

Heinrich circled the screen with his finger. “Odin hollowed out the whole volcano. There are also heavy metal contacts across the thirty-nautical-mile ice field around it. Looks like anti-personnel mines and EMP mines, packed tight. Clearing them would take at least twelve hours. We don’t have twelve hours.”

Gunnar’s message came in. “All the supply depots are gone. Six underground warehouses destroyed. Clone reinforcements are cut off, but my first team took heavy losses. Shrapnel tore through my left leg, but I can still walk, damn it. We’re moving toward Raven’s Nest now. ETA four hours.”

“Don’t push it,” Cole said. “Just get here alive.”

“I’ll make it.”

Cole cut the link and shoved the chart aside. “Cancel the big landing. The minefield is too dense. We can’t clear it in time. Switch to a small elite infiltration. Marcus takes a hundred men and hits from the front—make it loud. Pull every anti-air gun to the east side. I’ll take fifty and slip in through the western ice cracks to avoid the mines.”

Marcus stood in the doorway, short blade already in hand. “Front is mine. I won’t let a single gun swing west until you’re inside.”

Sophia rose from the corner. “I’m going with you. If your crystal core cracks again, Odin won’t even need to lift a finger—you’ll drop on your own.”

She was supposed to stay behind.

Sophia pulled the phoenix core from her coat—a gold-red orb sealed inside a Rockefeller family amulet. She slipped the amulet into the inner pocket of Cole’s tactical vest. “Keep this. It might come in handy.”

Cole glanced at her, shook his head, and didn’t argue. “Fine.”

At 4 a.m., the diversion began.

Marcus led a hundred wolf warriors straight across the eastern ice. Heavy machine guns and grenade launchers opened up together, red tracers ripping through the polar night.

Every anti-air gun on Raven’s Nest swung east. Explosions tore craters across the ice, flinging shards skyward.

Cole’s fifty-man infiltration team moved in through the western ice cracks. The ice underfoot kept cracking. The fissures were barely two meters wide, walls rising a hundred feet on either side, black water at the bottom.

The team edged forward along the crack. The scout’s night-vision goggles swept the dark.

The lead scout suddenly stepped into empty air. He didn’t even get a sound out before the ice gave way and he dropped.

Cole crouched at the edge and looked down. The bottom wasn’t water. It was packed with humanoid shapes—hundreds of clone Kyles crammed together, skin pale, limbs twisted like discarded dolls. They were waking, slowly opening glowing red eyes.

“Open fire!” Cole ordered.

Wolf warriors’ muzzles flashed at once. Bullets poured into the crack. Clones that hadn’t fully woken had their heads blown apart, bodies piling up.

More clones surged upward from deeper ice, claws digging into the walls as they climbed.

The first wave reached the edge in under twenty seconds.

Cole drew his blade and met them head-on. One thrust through the throat of the nearest, then a backhand cut through the second’s neck. No hesitation.

The clones dropped, twitched, and went still.

A larger clone lunged at him from the side. Cole sidestepped, drove his left wolf claw into its gut, then another clone wrapped around his neck from behind. He slammed his head into its face and drove his blade up under its jaw.

Both clones fell.

Cole wiped blood from his face and looked back at Sophia. She stood in the middle of the group, hands crossed, golden-red phoenix fire forming a curved wall that burned several flanking clones to ash.

Elena lay on a distant ice mound, her anti-materiel rifle smoking. She’d already dropped three climbers with headshots. “Cole! Eleven o’clock—three elites!”

Three clones in black combat gear leapt from the depths. Bigger and more muscular than the others, their eyes a dark molten orange.

Elite clones—Odin’s gene-optimized versions of Kyle.

One reached the line in a blur and tore the lead wolf warrior apart. The man’s vest shredded; the chest wound was fatal on the spot.

The elite locked onto its next target.

Cole charged and intercepted it. His half-wolf form flared, dark-gold light flooding his limbs. Claw met claw in a shower of sparks. The elite’s strength was at least twice that of a normal clone, its speed and reflexes near those of a fully awakened wolf warrior. Cole traded three or four blows and couldn’t gain the upper hand.

Another elite slipped past while Cole was tied up and rushed Sophia.

Elena’s rifle cracked. The round punched through the elite’s left eye and out the back of its skull. The body kept its forward momentum for a moment, then crashed to the ice at Sophia’s feet and slid several meters.

Cole used the distraction. He knocked the first elite’s claws aside and drove his blade between its ribs into the heart, twisting once. It spasmed and dropped.

The third elite was riddled by concentrated fire from the wolf warriors. It wasn’t dead yet, but its movements were slowed. Cole finished it with one cut.

The fight lasted nearly twenty minutes.

Bodies of clones lay piled along the crack edge, dark blood staining the ice. Twelve wolf warriors dead, eight wounded. The survivors regrouped. Cole collected the fallen’s dog tags and tucked them into his vest’s waterproof pocket.

Heinrich found the entrance to an outer drainage pipe at the end of the crack. After a few minutes on his portable terminal, the alloy grate lifted. “This is the only way in that avoids the minefield and anti-air guns. The designers didn’t bother with heavy outer defenses. Looks like Odin bet everything on the clones.”

“Let him,” Cole said.

The pipe was narrow—only room for two abreast. Scratches and dried black blood covered the walls. The air smelled sharply of industrial disinfectant.

They moved through the dark for about forty minutes. The water underfoot grew deeper, ice-cold.

The pipe ended in a huge circular collection well, over 150 feet across, dome roughly 30 feet high.

Heinrich pulled up the schematic. “Cross the well, then one main corridor, and we reach the entrance to the first underground level. The fortress core sits inside the volcano. Levels one through five run vertically. The clone vats are on three; the altar core is at the bottom of five.”

Cole was about to order them forward when heavy footsteps echoed from deeper in the pipe. The sound grew louder, each step sending a low vibration through the floor.

Out of the dark came a giant clone, twice the height of the others. Alloy armor plates covered its skin. Its right arm held a massive alloy axe, the blade scraping sparks along the concrete.

It stopped at the pipe exit, red eyes fixed on Cole, and let out a low growl before swinging the axe down toward the pipe.