This was typical weather for the isolated U.S. Air Force base this time of year. It was located just a few hundred miles from the North Pole, and anything above fifty below and below fifty knots windspeed was considered downright balmy. That didn't mean the weather was enjoyable, though. Just about everyone who wasn't on duty at the frigid base was either asleep or at the Exchange Club, a combination PX, restaurant, barbershop, and bar. In the past, at any given time as many as two thousand Air Force personnel could have been found at Thule. But a lessening of Cold War jitters had reduced the base's profile to little more than a pinprick in the snow. It was once a stopping-off point for massive B-52 bombers on nuclear-alert exercises, interceptors keeping an eye on Soviet recon planes, or perhaps something more exotic like the occasional U-2 spy plane dropping in for some gas. Now Thule was a place only the unluckiest of pilots found themselves diverted to. Among the reduced number of inhabitants these days, the talk always concerned the weather, the snow, the cold.
