Zodiac Station Read online

  Could it be the man from yesterday? Why would he have gone back, got a snowmobile, changed his clothes? But who else would come here at this time of morning?

  He lifted off his helmet and put it on the seat. He had his back to me, and his balaclava hid his hair. I waited for him to turn around.

  ‘Can you see who it is?’ Eastman reached for the glasses, but I kept hold of them. I had to know.

  And then the man disappeared. One moment he was a bright red blot against the snowfield. The next, he’d vanished.

  Even with the naked eye, Eastman could see he’d gone.

  ‘Did he see us?’

  I shrugged. ‘He must have gone behind a rock. Or down a gully.’ I scanned the hillside with the binoculars. All I saw was snow, and the abandoned snowmobile.

  ‘If we can’t see him …’ Eastman climbed over the snow bank and started galloping across the hillside. After a moment, and checking I had the flare gun in my pocket, I followed.

  At that altitude, the wind had scoured most of the snow off the rocks, but the slope made it heavy going. After a hundred yards, I was puffing; after two hundred, the cold air rasping my lungs made me want to vomit. In the clear air, I could see the snowmobile pin sharp, but it never seemed to get any closer.

  Eastman got there first. I caught him up a minute or so later. He pointed to the Zodiac number stencilled on the snowmobile’s cowling.

  ‘Definitely one of ours.’

  Footprints led away towards a rocky overhang. Orange-brown marks discoloured the snow like a rash. It could have been lichen – there are types that grow in snow and spread like stains – but these weren’t like that. They looked like blood.

  Under the overhang, a dark hole opened in the mountainside. Sunk in a hollow, angled away from Vitangelsk, invisible until you were virtually in it. Snow had collected by the entrance, and I could see footsteps leading in, as well as the corrugations of an old snowmobile track. And more of the stains, thicker and bloodier than before.

  Eastman aimed the rifle at the cave. I cocked the flare gun.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Eastman shouted. I hoped he was as confident as he sounded.

  Silence. Then a shuffling noise from inside the cave, the clatter of stones. I had a vision of some primal monster woken from sleep, Yeats’s rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. Or maybe nothing so fanciful. Bears live in caves, after all.

  A figure appeared in the blue light around the entrance. He looked shorter than the man who’d chased me up the pylon. I couldn’t see a gun, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I gripped the flare pistol tighter.

  He pulled off his balaclava and rubbed his eyes. He stepped into daylight, arms half-raised in a bemused way, as if he couldn’t believe there was really a gun pointing at him. With his red suit, black boots, white beard and pot belly, he looked like nothing so much as Father Christmas.

  The pistol shook in my hand.

  ‘Ash?’

  Twenty-one

  Kennedy

  Ash sat on a rock and rubbed snow out of his beard. If it surprised him to have two colleagues pointing guns at him at four in the morning, here on the upper edge of nowhere, he kept it to himself. Perhaps he expected it.

  ‘How did you guess?’ he said. No pretending.

  ‘Jensen told us he dropped you off here. We worked the rest out ourselves.’

  ‘I thought he might. I could see he wasn’t happy, not after what happened to Hagger.’

  A pause.

  ‘You killed him,’ said Eastman.

  Ash closed his eyes and nodded silently.

  ‘Why?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘I had no choice. He came at me, I had to protect myself.’

  ‘Why?’ I repeated. Eastman cut me off.

  ‘What about DAR-X? They were there too?’

  ‘They’d been around. I saw their Sno-Cat. I don’t think they saw me.’

  ‘And then you went back and pretended nothing had happened.’

  He shrugged. ‘What else could I do? It would have been the end of my career if I’d confessed I shot him.’

  That gave me a jolt – like a spelling mistake that jars you out of a book.

  ‘What are we talking about?’ I said.

  Ash looked puzzled ‘What are we talking about?’

  ‘Martin Hagger,’ said Eastman. ‘And why you killed him.’

  Ash blinked. He looked slowly between me and Eastman, started to say something, then shook his head. Strange to say, he was smiling.

  ‘You think I killed Hagger?’

  ‘You just admitted it,’ said Eastman.

  Ash stood and turned towards the cave. Eastman’s rifle twitched, but it didn’t seem to bother him any more.

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  Eastman and I followed Ash in with our head torches. The cave was just high enough to stand in, if you stooped. Perhaps it had been an attempt at a mineshaft; if so, they hadn’t got very far. A few metres in I could see a corrugated-iron wall blocking off the passage, with a heap of snow blown against its base.

  Except the wall wasn’t corrugated iron. As my torch caught it, I saw colours, writing. Pictures of broccoli and tomatoes, spaghetti letters and smiling beans.

  It was cans. Tin cans, all stacked up as you might find them at Aldi. Soups, vegetables, baked beans, spaghetti hoops – the whole fifty-seven varieties. So many, they walled off the back of the cave.

  ‘You been stealing from the kitchen?’ Eastman asked.

  Ash looked as if he was about to cry. He shook his head and pointed to the floor. Then I understood.

  The wall wasn’t corrugated iron – and the wind-blown snow at its base wasn’t snow.

  Too soft; more yellow than white. As I shone the torch beam down, I made out two legs, the crease of a floppy tail. Further forward, I could see an outflung paw and a black nose resting on it. Much smaller than the bear that had chased me the day before. Just a cub.

  Eastman got it a second before me. ‘Jesus Christ, Ash. You shot a baby polar bear?’

  ‘When did it happen?’ I asked.

  ‘The day Hagger died.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I’m a zoologist. What do you think would happen to my career if it came out I’d shot a polar bear cub. I might as well take up whaling.’

  ‘But you said it was in self-defence.’

  ‘As if they’d care about the details.’

  Eastman wiped his face. Out of the sun, the sweat he’d built up running had started to freeze. He was shivering.

  ‘I think some detail here would be good.’

  Our torches were fading, the batteries sapped by the cold. In the failing light, the bear carcass seemed to swell up before my eyes.

  ‘Let’s get out.’

  We went back to the snowmobile and shared a cup of hot water from Ash’s Thermos. Eastman hammered a chocolate bar until it snapped.

  ‘I don’t know what Jensen told you,’ Ash said. His eyes kept darting back towards the cave. ‘We’d flown around all morning looking for bears, no luck. Then Zodiac called – they wanted him back for something. I couldn’t afford a wasted day, so I had him drop me off here. I’d heard a rumour there might be a bear near Vitangelsk.’

  He scratched the back of his head. ‘It’s like all these things – the wood for the trees. I was so busy looking for a bear, I didn’t see the one that was there. But he saw me. He must have been watching for a while: they’re used to being patient.

  ‘I found the cave. I thought there might be a bear denning inside, so I took a peek. No bear, but I saw those strange tins at the back. I went in, looked around. Couldn’t understand what so much food was doing there.

  ‘I went back out. That was when I saw the bear. Juvenile, probably a year old, but with my eyes not used to the daylight, rearing up, he looked like death incarnate. No time to think. I just fired.’

  He wiped his mitten across his cheek, where a tear had fallen.

  ‘I shot him right in the he
art, just the way they teach you. Greta would have been so proud.’

  Another tear appeared. He jerked his head angrily, trying to shake it away. There’s not many sights as pathetic as seeing an old man cry.

  ‘It was him or you. We’d all have done the same,’ I said.

  ‘Would you?’ He stared at me. ‘Maybe I could have done it differently. He wasn’t charging, just making a display. Trying it on. Maybe a warning shot would have scared him off.’

  ‘A polar bear that had you trapped with your back to the cave?’

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s not what might have happened; it’s what I did. One of those moments when you don’t have time to think, to intellectualise it or worry what other people will say. That’s when you find out who you really are.’

  ‘What you are is alive,’ said Eastman, impatiently. Ash gave him a cold look.

  ‘There are more important things.’

  ‘Not in my world.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  Ash shrugged. ‘It’s better now. The secret was murdering me. Now I know what to do.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Eastman.

  ‘I’ll tell Quam I’m quitting. I won’t tell him why – unless either of you gentlemen feels the need to disclose it. I shan’t blame you.’

  ‘I can give you a medical note,’ I offered. Ten minutes ago, I’d been ready to shoot him. Now I had nothing but pity.

  Eastman looked back across the valley to Vitangelsk. ‘Did you come here yesterday?’ he asked.

  ‘I was at Zodiac all day. Then Anderson mentioned you’d radioed in, that you’d found a bear here. I thought …’ His gaze drifted back to the cave. ‘That’s why I came.’

  ‘We did see a bear,’ I told him. ‘Very much alive – and all grown up.’

  ‘Maybe your little dead guy’s momma,’ suggested Eastman.

  Ash winced. So did I. There was still a bear out there – quite possibly an angry bear nursing a grudge. And worse. If Ash wasn’t the man who’d shot at me on the tower – and you couldn’t possibly think so, looking at that poor broken man – then he was still out there too. I looked around the desolate valley, the black cliffs too steep for snow. Plenty of places for someone to hide, to watch us. I listened so hard, the silence sang in my ears.

  I exchanged a look with Eastman. After a cold, sleepless night, and then this bizarre episode, I just wanted to go home.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  It was only when we were in the helicopter, safely on the way back, that I wondered what all those cans of food had been doing there.

  USCGC Terra Nova

  The door opened. A sailor poked his head around the door.

  ‘Ops said you wanted to know when the other guy woke up?’

  Franklin stood. His legs had started to go to sleep from sitting listening so long. On the bed, he could see Kennedy’s one good eye watching from behind the mummy mask.

  ‘Eastman?’

  ‘He’s ready to talk.’

  Twenty-two

  USCGC Terra Nova

  No one had imagined a scenario like this. The Terra Nova had four body bags aboard – the same ones that had been issued when she was first outfitted. The bodies coming out of the helicopter now were wrapped in black trash bags, laid out on the deck like so much garbage. The crew handling them looked like they wanted to puke.

  Santiago met Franklin by the flight-deck door.

  ‘Helo just made her second run. Everyone’s accounted for – except two.’ He showed Franklin the printout. The pages were heavily creased and damp with melted snow; most of the photos had red X’s scored through them.

  ‘This one, Fridtjof Torell, and her, Greta Nystrom. Both missing.’

  ‘She was the base mechanic,’ said Franklin. Again, it felt strange to confront a photograph of someone he’d already imagined. The woman in the picture looked like a ski instructor, or one of those round-the-world solo yachtswomen: hair in braids, tanned skin, and a natural glow that said she spent a lot of time outdoors. Her tight-lipped expression only made her look like she was pissed off with the photographer.

  ‘When are the Brits going to arrive?’

  ‘Gonna be a while. They launched a plane from Longyearbyen, a Dornier 228, the only thing they could find. But they had to abort the landing. They said the runway at Zodiac had gotten too chewed up.’

  ‘That makes sense.’

  Santiago followed the captain down the stairs towards the sickbay. ‘There’s one other thing, sir. Flying back, the pilot says he got a signal on the emergency channel. A locator beacon.’

  Franklin stopped on the stairs. ‘A beacon?’

  ‘He couldn’t be sure. Reception’s shitty, and he said it was faint. I figure it was probably sunspots.’

  ‘You seen any sun around, Ops?’

  Santiago acknowledged the point.

  ‘There’s no way Anderson walked to where we found him alone. He must have had help.’

  ‘You’ve got a suspicious mind, Captain.’

  ‘Everything about this situation gets weirder and weirder.

  ‘Maybe the new guy can explain some stuff.’

  Bob Eastman lay in the sickbay, on the bed where Anderson had been the night before. His shaved skull looked too big for his shoulders; his beard had grown wild. His hands were wrapped, like a boxer ready for a bout. An oxygen tube snaked into his nostrils, and two more tubes plugged into his arm. He looked helpless – except for his eyes, which never stopped moving. Franklin wondered if he was suffering from some kind of post-traumatic syndrome. Who could blame him?

  The eyes locked on to Franklin as he approached.

  ‘Do you have secure communications? I need to talk to Washington.’

  Franklin held up his hands in a ‘Stop’ gesture. ‘Before you make any calls, let’s get a few things straightened out.’

  ‘I have to—’

  ‘My ship, Dr Eastman. My rules. You want to tell me what this is about?’

  Eastman leaned over as far as the tubes and bandages would allow.

  ‘Hagger used to say, everyone who comes to Zodiac has a secret. He called it Fort Zinderneuf – like in that old movie about the French Foreign Legion. You want to guess my secret, Captain?’

  Franklin considered it. He hadn’t made captain by taking half-assed guesses. As the man who’d won most of the late-night poker games at the Coast Guard Academy, he hated to show his cards. But the nature of command, and of gambling, was that sometimes you had to make a leap.

  ‘You work for the CIA?’

  The eyes opened wider. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Kennedy.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Colour was coming back into Eastman’s voice. ‘I spent five days locked in a caboose with Kennedy. He doesn’t know jack.’

  ‘Am I wrong?’

  Eastman sank back. ‘I’m an atmospheric scientist. But …’ He paused. ‘You know, you’re trained so hard to keep the secret, I don’t even know the right way to say it. Let’s say I work two jobs. One full-time, one part-time.’

  The cook had it right. ‘Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about the CIA?’

  ‘NSA. They’ve had a bug in their ass about Utgard since the Cold War. When they found out I got a place at Zodiac, they asked me to feed back anything interesting. The Russians have been developing – this is classified, by the way, but what the hell – they’ve been developing a new radar. SAR – synthetic aperture radar. It can spot a boat the size of a Honda Civic from space.’

  ‘Not a lot of boats around here,’ Franklin said. ‘Anyhow, I thought they could read golf balls from space twenty years ago.’

  ‘You can see what the hell you like – if you know where to point the camera. What this does is tell you where everything is. All over the world, anywhere and everywhere. Now, that creates a shitload of data, and that data’s no use stored up on a satellite. You need a base station on earth to download it to. The reason everybody loves Utg
ard is that it’s in a sweet spot. Any orbit, any time, you can download data there.’

  ‘And you thought they were using Zodiac for that?’

  ‘Nuh-uh. Zodiac’s clean. But there was another outfit on the island.’

  ‘DAR-X. The oil exploration company.’

  ‘You’re up with the news, Captain.’

  ‘I’ve been speaking with Dr Kennedy.’

  ‘Kennedy’s an ass. He didn’t have a clue what was going on right in front of him. You know, the only reason he rocked up at Zodiac was because he was about to be sued for medical malpractice. Drinking on the job. You know how drunk you have to be before the Irish kick you out?’

  ‘He seemed sober to me.’

  ‘He cleaned himself up. To be fair to the guy, I never saw him touch a drop at Zodiac. Anyhow, DAR-X are a front. They’re just doing the exploration. The actual contract goes to a company registered in the Bahamas, which is owned by a shell outfit in Liechtenstein, which is controlled by an outfit in Cyprus – which gets its cash and its orders from the Russian national oil company.’

  ‘Is that common knowledge?’

  ‘They go out of their way to make sure people don’t know. Way out of their way, if you catch my drift. I don’t know how long it took our guys to pin them down.’

  ‘I thought the Cold War was over.’

  ‘Do they teach reality at the Coast Guard Academy? Russia these days, it’s like one of those stores where they’ve changed the name tags and the shelf stackers are now called Customer Fulfilment Associates. They’re still the same, and you know exactly what they are really. Instead of our nukes against their nukes, we play Amoco v. Rosneft. We don’t want truth, justice and the American way; and they don’t care about the brotherhood of the proletariat. It’s proven reserves and barrels per day.’

  ‘You said this was about satellites and radars.’

  ‘It’s all the same play. A few years back, people who said the Arctic would be ice-free by the end of the century were called crazies. Then serious folks thought it might be 2050. Then 2030. Now best guess is the end of this decade, and some people think that’s too conservative. It’s coming, faster than we think, and when there’s no ice left then everything’s up for grabs. The land, the oil, and the sea routes. As long as Walmart wants cheap crap stamped “Made in China”, they’ll need ships to bring it to us, and the shortest way to get cheap crap from Shenzhen to New York is across the Arctic Ocean. And the fuel they save, steaming across the melted Arctic? They’ll count that towards their CSR greenwash, and brag how they’re cutting down CO2 emissions.’