Chapter 1: Relocation

1 RELOCATION
Spy School Satellite Facility

Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska

July 17

1000 hours

Erica Hale dangled from her climbing rope on the cliff face, five hundred feet above the ground, and asked, “What do you smell?”

I paused in the midst of rappelling beside her, quite sure that I hadn’t heard the question correctly. “Did you just say, ‘What do you smell?’?”

“Yes.”

I glanced at the ground fifty stories below us and instantly regretted doing so. From that height, even the tallest trees looked as puny as bonsai. Alarmed, I clutched the rock wall so tightly that my knuckles turned white.

Meanwhile, Erica had the calm demeanor of someone sitting on a nice, comfy couch in a room full of throw pillows. “You don’t need to hold on to the cliff like that. The friction of your rope in your belay device is strong enough to keep you from falling.”

“I know that. But I still feel safer holding on.”

“You’re not safer. All you’re going to do is tire yourself out. So let go and relax.” Erica kicked off the rock wall and swung out over the void, grinning like a toddler on a playground swing. Her rope groaned under her weight, as though it were thinking about snapping. Erica didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned. She pendulumed back to the wall beside me, her boots thudding against the rock.

A few pieces of stone flaked off and dropped down into oblivion below us.

Despite what Erica had just told me, I clutched the wall even tighter. “Could we please head down?”

“Answer the question first.”

“What’s the holdup down there?” a voice yelled. Forty feet above us, Zoe Zibbell peered over the top of the cliff.

The grinning face of Mike Brezinski appeared beside her. “Is Ben freaking out?”

“No!” I shouted back defensively.

Mike and Zoe shared a knowing look. “He’s definitely freaking out,” Zoe said.

“Of course I’m freaking out!” I exclaimed. ‘We’re dangling off a cliff—and instead of rappelling down like normal people, Erica wants to know if I smell anything!”

“The point is to be aware of your surroundings at all times,” Erica explained. “Which requires using all of your senses. Right now, you’re hyper-focused on the rock in front of you and nothing else.”

“The rock is important,” I explained. “If I fall off of it, I die.”

At the top of the cliff, Zoe sniffed the air. “I smell fear.”

“That’d be Ben,” Erica said.

Which was true. Even though it was summer, it was only fifty degrees in Alaska, plus the windchill. And yet, I was still sweating buckets. I reeked so badly, it was possible that people a mile away could have smelled me.

Mike inhaled deeply. “I smell pine trees,” he announced, “with a hint of seawater.”

“And a touch of fresh grass,” Zoe added. “The fragrance is really delightful.”

“It is,” Mike agreed. “This whole place is what air freshener is trying to smell like.”

Although they were perched at the top of an extremely tall cliff, neither of them seemed remotely worried or uneasy. I was the only one of the four of us with the common sense to be properly terrified about falling to my death. But it was evident that Erica wasn’t going to let me descend until I answered her question, which meant that the longer I took, the longer I would spend hanging above the abyss.

Despite my fear, I tentatively sniffed the air. Beyond my own body odor, I picked up on the pine, seawater, and fresh grass that Mike and Zoe had mentioned. And other things as well: the gritty, mineral aroma of the cliff; the hearty, mulch scent of the forest floor… and a musty, earthy odor I couldn’t quite place. Although something about it seemed important.

So I used my other senses to figure out what it was.

I pulled my gaze from the rock wall and realized that the view from my spot on the cliff was spectacular. It was a rare, cloudless day on the southern coast of Alaska, and I could see for miles in every direction. The mountain I was dangling from was a knob of rock that jutted out of a verdant forest surrounded by a shimmering blue fjord on one side and a jagged range of mountains on the other. The mountains were capped by the colossal Harding Icefield, which was over seven hundred square miles in size and often a mile thick. Numerous glaciers extended from it, snaking down through dark-rock valleys to the water. It was an area so remote and inaccessible that few humans had ever seen it; the mountain my friends and I were on didn’t even have a name.

We were completely off the grid. The closest town had only one thousand people and was four hours away by boat—assuming the weather was good. If the weather wasn’t good (which was often the case), then the closest town wasn’t accessible at all. We were staying in a few rustic cabins tucked into the woods on the edge of a glacial lake at the base of the mountain. I could see them below me, although from my height, they looked as small as Monopoly houses. (They were also the same green color as Monopoly houses, so as to blend into the forest.) All our power was solar. Instead of indoor plumbing, we had a latrine. We had brought some dried goods with us to eat, like giant sacks of beans and rice, but for the most part we had been living off plants we foraged and fish that we caught. It was as though we had gone back in time.

Until only a few weeks before, all of us had lived in a very different place: the gothic campus of the CIA’s Academy of Espionage in the heart of Washington, DC. For most of its history, the existence of spy school had been a secret. The campus even had an alias: St. Smithen’s Science Academy for Boys and Girls. But the school’s cover had been blown by a former student turned enemy agent named Murray Hill. Murray was my nemesis. I had thwarted several of his evil plans; in retaliation, he had put a price on my head and leaked the location of the academy to hundreds of assassins. As a result, the CIA had decided the entire training program was compromised, shut it down, and sent all the students back to their normal lives….

With four exceptions.

Erica’s grandfather, Cyrus Hale, was a highly respected spy who had proposed a solution to keep at least a fraction of the program going: take a select group of students and spirit us away to an isolated location to continue our training, which Cyrus would oversee personally. The operation was so top secret that only a handful of people at the CIA knew about it. Even our old principal didn’t know, although truth be told, our old principal had rarely known anything.

The reason that Erica, Zoe, Mike, and I had been chosen, rather than anyone else, was that each of us had been accidentally field-tested. Normally, students weren’t supposed to go on missions until they graduated the academy after seven years of rigorous training—but circumstances had conspired against us. I had only ended up on my first mission through a series of mishaps, when the CIA selected me as bait to catch a mole and Erica had intervened to save me. After that, unusual events had led to Erica and me being on another nine missions together, in which the fate of the world had often hung in the balance. Luckily, we had prevailed.

And so, even though I had only completed a year and a half of spy school—and had just turned fourteen a month earlier—I was one of the chosen few. Zoe and Mike had been selected because they had ended up on several of my later missions. Zoe was also in my year, while Mike was technically a year below us, even though he was our age. (He had been my friend at regular middle school and had only been recruited to spy school after cleverly deducing that it existed.)

Erica was easily the most qualified of all of us. She had completed four years of official training at the academy, but as a member of the Hale family, she had also received unofficial spy training since birth. The Hales had been spying for the United States since before the United States had even existed, and her mother’s family had an equally long history of spying for England. So espionage was the family business. (Erica’s first sentence had been “You’re under arrest for treason.”) Because of this, Erica had better spy skills than anyone else at school—as well as most of the adults in the CIA. Which was why she was currently teaching the rest of us, even though she was less than two years older than me.

Erica also happened to be my girlfriend. I had fallen for her hard on my first day of spy school—both literally and metaphorically. She had tackled me in the midst of my first training exercise—and I had been smitten with her ever since. She hadn’t been the slightest bit interested in me for quite some time, but over the course of our missions, I had proven to her that I was actually a pretty good spy—and had even helped her become a better spy as well.

Still, I was nowhere near as skilled as Erica was—and probably never would be. Erica had an exceptionally impressive array of talents. To name only a few: She could battle multiple enemy agents in hand-to-hand combat at once, defuse bombs, speak sixteen different languages, drive a car at high speed—and had learned how to fly a helicopter in just the past three weeks. She also had virtually no fear of anything, as evidenced by her relaxed manner as she hung from the cliff face, and her senses were incredibly well tuned. I had seen her detect an enemy by merely catching a whiff of his cologne from a quarter mile away. She had always claimed that such talents were the result of practice, and so, Zoe, Mike, and I had been trying to improve ours over the last few weeks.

It was working. We had been training seven days a week for up to eighteen hours a day, honing espionage skills such as self-defense, decryption, orienteering, and building explosives from standard household items. We had also been doing a great deal of physical conditioning, hauling forty-pound backpacks for miles through the wilderness, swimming across lakes, and ice-climbing glaciers. I could already see a marked difference in all of us. Mike and Zoe had been good athletes when they’d arrived, but now they were like junior Olympians. And even I was in tremendous shape.

I still hadn’t become proficient at everything, though. Despite plenty of practice, my weaponry skills remained pathetic. Earlier that day, I had accidentally misfired a crossbow and nearly shishkebabed Cyrus, which he was very displeased about. But in most other areas, I had improved.

Even my senses had gotten better.

As I dangled from the climbing rope, I managed to concentrate and find a sense of calm. I focused on listening to my surroundings and detected—in addition to the rustle of the wind in the trees and the distant lap of the water against the rocky shoreline of the fjord—a faint munching noise well below me. With that, I suddenly grasped what the musky odor I had smelled was.

“There’s a bear at the base of this cliff,” I informed Erica.

“Yes.” She grinned, pleased by my progress. “And what color is it?”

A few weeks earlier, I might have been thrown by this question, wondering how on earth I was possibly expected to tell a bear’s color by smelling or hearing it. But now, despite my precarious position on the rock face, I realized I already had all the information I needed.

“It’s black,” I replied.

We were in one of the few areas of Alaska in which there were no brown bears, like grizzlies, because they had never bothered to migrate across the ice field—and we were too far south to encounter polar bears. Black bears were significantly smaller and less aggressive than grizzlies or polar bears, but you still didn’t want to rappel down onto one’s head.

Thanks in part to the lack of larger bears in the area, there were lots of black bears around our camp. We hadn’t done a census, but there were certainly more of them than there were of us, which made late-night trips to the latrine somewhat harrowing. So far, none of us had ever had a bad encounter with one of them. For the most part, they didn’t seem to care that we were there, but we still carried bear spray at all times, just in case.

“Correct again,” Erica said, in response to my deduction. “So how do we deal with it?”

“We descend slowly, so the bear doesn’t think we’re a threat. And we ought to make noise, so it knows we’re coming and isn’t startled.”

“Excellent. Luckily for us, it’s busy eating a salmon, so it will probably be much more focused on that than you and me, but still, it always makes sense to be cautious.”

I gave her a look of surprise. “You can tell what it’s eating?”

“I can discern a distinct aroma of dead salmon. Plus, it’s a good guess anyhow. Salmon’s pretty much all the bears are eating right now.”

I nodded, understanding. The salmon had begun returning to the glacial lakes to spawn. Some of the local streams were so thick with them that you could practically walk across their backs. It was like Halloween for bears; their favorite food was everywhere and easy to come by, and they were gorging themselves on it every chance they got.

“Does that mean we can continue down now?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.”

During our training, we had experimented with many ways to alert bears that we were nearby. The standard was to simply yell out “Hey, bear!” although that got monotonous on long treks through the wilderness. So we generally had conversations at a much louder tone than usual—or we sang. Erica had turned out to have a gorgeous singing voice and, to my astonishment, an encyclopedic knowledge of Broadway show tunes. She had taught me many over the past few weeks, and I was just about to launch into “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” as I rappelled down when Erica suddenly tensed beside me.

It was very subtle. Until recently, I might not have even noticed the change in her demeanor. But now I did. “What’s wrong?”

“Shhh,” she said, then cocked her head slightly, listening.

I listened too. Once again, I heard the happy munching of the bear, but there was something else, even fainter and more distant. It was at the very edge of what I could detect, and yet, when I concentrated, I recognized it as the sound of hand-to-hand combat.

Erica had heard it too. Her eyes went wide in concern. “Grandpa!” she exclaimed, and then began rappelling as fast as she could.

Normally, when you rappelled, you walked slowly down the cliff face in reverse; as the rope passed through the belay device attached to your climbing harness, the resulting friction would prevent you from falling. At first, I had found it unsettling to back down a steep vertical surface, but eventually I had realized it was quite safe as long as you proceeded with care. However, in her haste to get to her grandfather, Erica had thrown caution to the wind. She wasn’t rappelling so much as sprinting backward toward the earth; her rope was passing through her belay device so fast that it was smoking.

“What about the bear?” I yelled to her. “Aren’t we supposed to be descending slowly so it doesn’t think we’re a threat?”

“We’ve got bigger problems than the bear!” Erica yelled back. “Get down here now! All of you!”

“On our way!” Mike shouted from the top of the cliff, and then he and Zoe disappeared from sight. With Erica and me on the climbing ropes, it was faster for them to run down the mountain than to wait for us to reach the bottom and then rappel after us. I could hear their footsteps fading as they sprinted away along the trail by which we had reached the peak.

I warily glanced at the precipitous drop below me. Hurtling down it under normal circumstances would have been scary enough; doing that with a hungry bear at the bottom was absolutely petrifying.

Despite this, Erica was already well over halfway down.

So I gathered my nerve and raced after her.

I didn’t descend nearly as swiftly as she did, but I still went much faster than I felt was prudent. I let go of the rope and let it slide through my belay device while I backpedaled down the sheer cliff face. It was sort of like being in an express elevator—without the elevator car. The wind whistled past my ears while the rope sizzled and the forest came rushing up to meet me. It was all rather unsettling—although still much better than a full-on plummet would have been. Before I knew it, I was lowering through the treetops. The landscape grew dimmer as the foliage blocked the sunlight, and I was immediately overwhelmed by the smells of pine, damp moss—and bear.

The black bear I had sensed before was, in fact, not far from where I was about to touch ground, devouring a massive salmon it had hauled out of a nearby stream. It was large for a black bear, at least five hundred pounds by my guess, with claws like meat hooks. Normally, I would have been in no hurry to go anywhere near it. But this was an emergency. Thankfully, the bear was extremely intent on gorging itself, like a cruise ship passenger at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and it was evident that Erica had made it past without any trouble; I could spot her darting through the forest in the distance, heading back to camp, well ahead of me.

I fought every instinct I had about avoiding large, ravenous carnivores and set down on the spongy earth. Despite the bear’s presence, I felt a massive surge of relief to be on the ground again. I quickly unclipped my belay device from the rope and did the last thing any survival expert would recommend: I ran full speed toward the bear.

It didn’t even look at me. I was sure it knew I was there, though: The hair on its hump stood on end, and it emitted a low, guttural warning growl that I could feel in my bones. And yet, I still wasn’t enough of a threat to warrant a break in eating. If I had come much closer, or foolishly tried to take the fish away, the bear would have likely eviscerated me with its claws, but it remained focused on its food as I sprinted past.

I had successfully rappelled down the cliff face and avoided a bear. So I only had whoever had attacked Cyrus to worry about.

Which, now that I thought of it, was certainly the biggest threat of all.

The bad guys, unlike black bears, were obviously looking to cause trouble. It was hard to hear anything over the pounding of my feet and the hammering of my heart, but it seemed to me that the sounds of fighting had stopped. That could have been good news: Cyrus might have defeated whoever had attacked him. Then again, he might have lost, which would be very bad indeed.

It was a quarter mile back to our camp, along a meandering trail that we had hacked through the woods. Thanks to my physical training, I covered the distance quickly. Only a minute after passing the bear, I caught sight of the first cabin.

The camp had originally been built by the US Army during World War II, before Alaska was even a state, back when all the combatants were scrambling to establish military bases around the Pacific. (The Russians and the Japanese had also set up a few outposts in the Alaskan wilderness at that time.) It didn’t matter how large each base was; the objective was merely to get footholds on the ground. This particular camp appeared to have been used only rarely since then, and it had possibly been forgotten by everyone in the government except for Cyrus. When we had arrived at the site four weeks earlier, the cabins had been in terrible shape, with leaky roofs, rotting walls, and plenty of uninvited inhabitants. Erica and Zoe had found dozens of voles in theirs, while the one Mike and I shared had a family of wolverines living in it. But we had come with tools, plywood, and wolverine repellent—and some of the original army equipment, like the cast-iron wood-burning stoves, was sturdy enough to withstand a nuclear blast and therefore still operational. So it hadn’t been too long before we had everything up and running. Within a few days, the cabins were repaired and downright cozy.

There were eight cabins in total, but we had only refurbished four: one for the girls, one for the boys, one for Cyrus, and one for Erica’s parents, Alexander and Catherine Hale, who were currently away on a resupply mission. There was also the latrine and a mess hall (which were thankfully located at opposite ends of the camp from each other), a few equipment sheds, and a drying room for our clothes, which were often sodden, given the generally inclement weather in Alaska. Cyrus had the cabin at the farthest end of camp, closest to the boat dock. He claimed he’d chosen it so he could protect the rest of us from enemy attacks, as those would most likely come from the water—although Erica had told me his real reason was that the cabin was closest to the latrine. (Cyrus’s aging bladder wasn’t working as well as it used to, and he usually had to get up two or three times a night to relieve himself.)

I slowed as I came through camp, alert for any sign of what had happened in the fight. I didn’t see any unconscious enemy agents sprawled on the ground—but I didn’t see any sign of Cyrus, either. I cautiously made my way past the mess hall and the other cabins until I arrived at Cyrus’s.

Someone had knocked his door off its hinges to gain entry, most likely the enemy. I paused a few feet away, worried that a few bad guys might still be lurking inside.

I heard footsteps coming toward the doorway. And then Erica raced out, looking as distraught as I’d ever seen her.

“He’s gone!” she said. “They took him.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but they couldn’t have gone far.”

Behind Erica, I caught a glimpse through the open doorway of Cyrus’s cabin. A serious fight had obviously taken place there. None of us had much furniture—as we’d had to build it all by hand—but what little there had been was smashed to pieces.

Erica held a rag in her hand that reeked of chloroform, indicating that Cyrus had been overwhelmed and then knocked out.

An outboard motor suddenly roared to life close by, in the direction of the boat dock: The enemy, getting away.

Erica bolted toward the dock.

And before I could even think twice about the sanity of what I was doing, I ran after her.