Free The Explorer's Code by Kitty Pilgrim Page B

The oblong shapes of the town buildings, made of concrete and tin, soon blended with the landscape and faded into the distance. This was certainly desolate country. He drove for several miles without any sign of human contact on the lunar terrain.
    Then suddenly, farther ahead, he could see the Arctic Coal Mining site and the remnants of the workers’ housing. The group of buildings stood abandoned but resilient, a testimony to the courage of the few dozen men who had eked out their livelihood here in 1918, when the pandemic hit.
    He drove through the ghost town. The graveyard was not hard to find. The small chapel, identifiable by its steeple, was padlocked and boarded up, but the wrought-iron fence around the cemetery stood, gate open, unhinged and hanging by one rivet. Inside, the tombstones listed terribly, and many were down flat on the earth. The stones had shifted during the past century of thaw and frost.
    Miles put his vehicle in Park, deciding to keep the engine running in case he needed to get out quickly. Especially in late summer and spring, polar bears were all too prevalent, and he didn’t want to take any chances.
    He walked among the stones, looking for the names of the nine miners who had been stricken in 1918. He knew their names by heart, so often had he fantasized about doing just this. It was a long shot, but he wanted to get permission from the magistrate in Longyearbyen to take more samples. Paul Oakley had exhumed three of these graves last year, but there were six others. Why not take a few more days to see what other possibilities might turn up? The samples Oakley had taken a year ago were of mixed quality because some of the graves had repeatedly thawed over the decades. But some of the other six graves might have more intact samples. Tomorrow he would petition the local officials in person.
    As Miles walked, he bent over each grave to decipher the worn stone, completely absorbed in his quest. Three rows down, he saw one of the graves had been disturbed. The tombstone read PERCIVAL SPENCE 1918. He looked at the earth; it bore the rough surface of recent digging. This grave had been exhumed. Very recently. The dirt was barely tamped down and still stood in a slight mound over the site. Percival Spence had died in the 1918 contagion. Who would have dug up the grave? He bent down to look at the plot, his knees protesting as he held the squatting position.
    “You’re getting old, my boy,” he said to himself.
    Those were his last words. He never heard the rifle shot. His cranium was blown away and his brains were splattered all over the headstone in a bloody mass.
    His assailant lowered his rifle and walked over to the Land Rover, turning the ignition off with a gloved hand. Then he approached the inert body. Extracting the cell phone and the wallet from the parka pocket, he left as silently as he had come. The gunman drove away in his own vehicle, past the churchyard, and checked to make sure the body of the scientist was not visible from the road. Much was hidden by the filigree of the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the tombstones. Only the small iron gate tilted open on its broken hinges.
    The bear was a big one, a male weighing more than nine hundred pounds. It sniffed the air as it came down the mountainside, and made tracks in the earth. The searchers found the tracks later and measured them at thirteen inches long, nine inches wide, and estimated the bear would have stood about ten feet tall. Its fur had the cream color of a mature male, and when it opened its mouth the gray tongue was a stark contrast to the yellow-white teeth. The bear had smelled the kill.
    It didn’t take long to find the body. The scent of blood called across the hard ground. After a long winter the animal needed food to satiate its cravings for flesh. And the human had been so freshly killed, the polar bear found it acceptable for feeding. The little iron gate was open. The parka offered as much resistance as a