Free The Cold Edge by Trevor Scott

some cover for both. And until recently, Jake guessed, the entire cave-like structure would have been covered in heavy snow. It was only because of the warm trend that summer that any of these things—the MiG and the snowmobiles—had been exposed.
    Jake set down the rifle and moved to the deepest point under the overhang, got to his knees, and started digging with his hands. Moments later he hit something solid. Not rock solid, but something out of place.
    It was a body.
    Exhausted, he rolled to his side and something sharp stabbed him in the back. Damn it.
    He dug to see what it was. His headlamp soon started shining back at him. Metal of some kind. He dug faster now and quickly uncovered a one foot cube metal box.
    There was no doubt that the box had been a perfect fit to the foam hole inside the MiG. So his old friend had actually gotten the box, whatever it was, away from the Soviets. And he had somehow survived the shoot-out, escaping to this place. Jake imagined his old friend’s face and tried to understand what had gotten him to this location. On top of the trailer, the item that had reflected the Northern Lights had been one of the old collapsible satellite dishes the military and the CIA had used back then for remote communications. Maybe Steve had also gone to high ground to call in their location, call in for extraction. But maybe he had been injured. Or maybe the weather had been severe. It had been October, an unforgiving time up here. Regardless, Steve had gotten the item from the MiG and now Jake had it.
    He wiped snow from the metal box and saw the Russian symbols on the side. Although he couldn’t read the words, he had seen the symbols before many times.
    Biohazard.
    Crap.

7
    Stockholm, Sweden
    Colonel Reed had gone back to his hotel after being shot at during his meeting with Oberon at the café. He had sat for a while eating and drinking from the mini-bar, wondering what had happened and why. His mind flicked back and forth considering if the shots had been aimed at him or the Russian. But one thought stuck with him—the little Russian, the former KGB officer, had warned him just in time to save his life. Sure it could have been self preservation coupled with a natural inclination to help a fellow human being. Yet, Reed guessed it had been more than that. For some reason Oberon, or Victor Petrova, had wanted him to live. The why was the difficult conundrum. After all, they had been adversaries at one time. A time when spy versus spy had rules of civility—if that were even possible. You didn’t kill your adversary just for the hell of it. You tried to use your opponent to gain some intelligence advantage, some piece of information you could exploit for your side. And maybe that had been the motive of his little friend.
    Later in the evening, the colonel had gone to a section of Stockholm where he knew he could satisfy himself to make him feel alive. For he had survived the shooting, and that type of close-death activity had always led him to the arms of a woman. At first it had been his wife, who had come to almost enjoy those close calls just so she could benefit from a rough encounter afterwards. But they had been divorced for nearly fifteen years now, so his pleasure quests had to come elsewhere.
    Although he didn’t like to do so, paying for sex was the most efficient form of un-subdued intimacy, if he could call it that. With a hooker he didn’t have to screw around pretending he was something or someone he wasn’t, spending hundreds of dollars taking a woman out to dinner, to the movies, or some other expensive activities. And then when all that worked and he finally got to sleep with a woman, it was usually underwhelming. A flat on the back hair twirler, while he pumped away. No, a call girl was much more efficient. He got an experienced woman who would do damn near anything, within reason, and they could cut all the damn games and pretense. A business