Luke had barely had the chance to exchange more than a few brief words with the two Norwegian Special Forces trackers before they all took off from Tromsø. After that, well, the back of a C130 transport plane was just too damned noisy for any attempt at conversation. But now they were out on the runway, moving clear of the gaping cargo door with all the gear being unloaded. They were splitting into two teams: the main body of medics would deploy by helicopter to the hut, the site of the original infection, then evacuate Coppinger and Mackenzie – the suspected casualties – under quarantine conditions. Luke and the trackers would focus on one thing alone: hunting down and isolating the man who had gone rogue, the missing ice-core engineer, Victor Skeet, before he could infect anyone.

Stian, the lead tracker, who held a captain’s rank in the FSK, was motioning for Luke to follow him into a snow-blasted pre-fab cabin on the edge of the airstrip. The moment they went through the door, Luke felt the full blast of the fan heaters inside and he spotted a Thermos of coffee and a stack of white styrofoam cups on a table. A long cardboard box stood open beside it, revealing its blue contents.

‘Medical facemasks,’ announced a woman, who introduced herself as a police officer from the tiny local contingent in Longyearbyen. ‘Please help yourselves. We have plenty to go around.’ There was a medic from the hospital too, a young man with a wispy blond moustache on his upper lip. He confessed straight away that, other than Coronavirus, he knew very little about infectious diseases. Someone – the police officer, Luke assumed – had already pinned up a large-scale map of Svalbard on the wall. It was overlaid with a sheet of transparent acetate, marked up with a blue chinagraph pen to indicate distances and timings.

‘We start with what we know,’ said Stian, when they had all dumped their kit in a corner, peeled off a layer of clothing and filled up on caffeine. He was tapping the map and speaking in English for Luke’s benefit. He looked, to Luke, typically Scandinavian. Blond hair, blond eyebrows, pale, piercing ice-blue eyes. Not massively built, like some US Delta Force operator, but still exuding a quiet confidence, giving Luke the impression that he probably knew exactly what he was doing in this sub-polar environment. Almost the only thing that he and Luke had managed to establish in their brief acquaintance so far was that they had both seen operational service in Afghanistan. Stian had done some interesting work in the precipitous, pine-clad gorges of Kunar province, trying to find, fix and eliminate the elusive Al-Qaida cells. With limited success.