Hunter Killer - Alex King Series 12 (2021)

him from the other side of the luggage carousel. Staring back at him, relaxed and the only other passenger not to have moved when the luggage belt started. King wasn’t one to back away from a staring contest, and besides, it was too late now. The man was the physical image of King. Six foot - perhaps a shade under – and broad at the shoulders and narrow at the waist. King estimated him to be thirteen or fourteen stone and from the way the fabric of his sweater pulled at his arms, he knew he would be well-muscled. The man’s face was craggy, his dark eyes resembled a shark’s, and he wasn’t bothered about what could have been an awkward situation. Still King’s glacier blue eyes bored into him, cold and detached. Eventually, the man smirked and stepped forward to the carousel, breaking the stare and hoisting a large bag with an empty dive tank attached to it easily into the air. King could see from the way the straps strained that it was heavy, but the man had made light work of it. King saw his bags, but when he looked back, the man had gone.
Outside, taxis and guides took the passengers to their boarding houses or hotels, or back to their homes. King had hired a car from the desk in Oslo and collected the keys at the Arctic Autorent desk. He’d chosen a Toyota Hi-Lux pick-up truck, for no other reason than in every war-torn country he’d ever operated in, it was the one vehicle that seemed to keep going. He’d seen them fuelled on nothing more than cooking oil and a splash of white spirit in place of diesel and run for half a million miles without a service. Just fuel, oil and water, and air in the tyres.
King found the truck outside, parked nose in and close to the terminal. The locks had been de-iced and as he slung his bags onto the back seat and got inside, he saw that a can of de-icer had been left for him on the passenger seat.
Svalbard had been in Arctic winter until just six weeks ago, meaning that it had been in complete darkness for months. Now the archipelago was experiencing short days and long nights, but within a month it would switch around, and after another month it would be perpetual daylight until August. So, as he drove past the stretch of coast, then turned off towards Longyearbyen, he reflected with some bewilderment that it was close to summer, despite seeing floating ice the size of buses in his rear-view mirror. Despite the cold, and the snow-covered mountains that seemed to spring up from the edge of town, much of the road was clear with patches of green showing in the snow. King drove steadily, the truck gliding over the ice without drama or incident. He checked his phone as he drove, opened the Google Maps app, and followed the road to the heading he’d put in as they taxied on the runway in Oslo. He needn’t have bothered – there seemed to only be one road and it looped into cul-de-sacs of brightly painted wooden houses. Many of his fellow passengers were checking into the small number of hotels and boarding houses, taking their luggage from the taxis, and coping well with the ice underfoot. Most of the people on his flight had been Scandinavian, but there were a few adventurous tourists as well. He figured that the majority were Svalbard residents in need of some mainland sanity and comfort.
King pulled up outside the gun shop. With just three-thousand residents on the island a gun shop wouldn’t have seemed an ideal business model, but with eight-thousand polar bears at the last count and it being law not to leave town without a firearm or an armed guide, it made a little more sense. The small university even employed polar bear guards and ran courses on handling a rifle safely. King had been hastily issued with a UK firearms certificate, which negated the month-long pre-travel permission form process and firearms handling lesson. Of course, the gun shop was as much an outdoor pursuit store as the former, and King would stock up on a few things while he was here. He got out of the truck, the cold biting him and reminding him that he was well within the Arctic Circle. His coat was a thermal ski jacket, but his legs were already stinging from the cold air. His desert boots were tough and hardy, but his toes were already numb by the time he walked the short path and took the four steps to the shop.
Inside, King was blasted with heat and his face burned as the feeling slowly and painfully came back to his cheeks. He peeled off his thermal gloves and made his way to the counter, where a Viking who had clearly found himself in the wrong century was tending a till. He nodded a silent greeting as King fumbled with the two loose pages comprising his firearms certificate.
“Cold enough for you?” the man commented dryly, his English good, but his accent thick and rhythmic Nordic.
King smiled. “No doubt you’ll tell me it was colder in the winter…”
“You have been among Scandinavians before,” he replied knowingly. “I myself am Norwegian, but it wasn’t cold enough for me down there, so...”
“Only another eight hundred miles to go, then,” King commented flatly.
“No bars at the North Pole. Not many customers, either.”
“I need a rifle for my stay here,” said King, looking at the row of rifles on the shelf behind the man. “I understand you only need to see a firearms certificate for me to rent one.”
The man nodded as he scrutinised the pages. He folded it and handed it back to King. “We use point thirty-oh-six.” He turned around and unhooked a well-used one from the chain. “I need a