Zodiac Station Read online

  ‘Anderson.’ His mouth could barely make the word.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Anderson.’ He sipped from the cup. Blood from his cracked lips clouded the water. ‘My name is Thomas Anderson.’

  ‘Your coat – we assumed …’

  ‘The zip on mine broke.’

  ‘Whoever Torell is, I hope he has a spare,’ said Santiago.

  The man called Thomas Anderson looked up over the rim of the cup. ‘He’s dead.’

  Santiago exchanged a look with Parsons. ‘You want to tell us …?’

  ‘They all are.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Everyone at Zodiac.’ He slumped back down into the bath so that the water covered his chin. Santiago reached for the phone.

  ‘I think you need to speak to the Captain.’

  Franklin met Parsons in the corridor. They’d moved the patient out of the sickbay, into one of the empty staterooms reserved for scientists.

  ‘How’s he doing, Doc?’

  ‘Stable, sir. Temperature’s back up to ninety-eight, fluids good. As long as he keeps warm, he’ll be fine. He’s a survivor.’

  ‘Yes he is.’ Franklin reached for the door handle, but didn’t open it. ‘Is there something else, Lieutenant?’

  ‘His psychological condition, sir. I’m not qualified to assess it, but he seems pretty locked down. Experiences like what he’s had, sir, it’s got to screw with your mind.’

  ‘No argument with that.’

  ‘Chief Bondurant has CISM training, sir.’ Critical Incident Stress Management. ‘I could ask him to speak to the patient.’

  Franklin turned the handle. ‘When I’m done.’

  Anderson lay on the bed under a small mountain of pink blankets. They’d dried him off and dressed him in regulation-issue pants and sweater; Franklin was surprised they’d found any big enough. He sat propped up on a couple of pillows, eyes open, staring unblinking at the mirror over the washstand opposite.

  Franklin rapped on the open door. The gaze switched on to him like a light coming on.

  As captain, he was used to commanding nearly a hundred men for months at a time, in some of the toughest waters on the planet. He didn’t get many situations that made him feel uncomfortable on his own ship. But the intensity of those dark eyes, clear as a child’s, was hard to take. As if the ice had distilled them down to their coldest core.

  He pulled a chair from under the desk and set it next to the bed. He looked over the report that Santiago had typed up.

  ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Fine.’ A soft voice, hard to match with the physique. Almost shy.

  ‘Your name’s Thomas Anderson.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you a US citizen?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘You’re a long way from home.’

  ‘We’re both a long way from anywhere.’

  Franklin accepted that. ‘You want to tell me how you got here?’

  ‘I was a research assistant. At Zodiac Station. It’s a scientific base on the island of Utgard.’

  ‘I know where it is. What happened?’

  ‘An explosion. I don’t know why. I was out checking instruments – there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘What day is it today?’

  ‘Wednesday, ninth April.’

  ‘It happened on Saturday. Four days ago.’

  ‘You skied a hundred miles over the ice in four days? By yourself?’

  ‘I came to get help.’

  Franklin looked at Santiago’s report again. ‘You stated to the operations officer that all other Zodiac Station personnel are dead.’

  Anderson’s eyes locked on Franklin’s – and, again, Franklin found he had to look away. He glanced out the porthole, but there were no answers in the grey world out there.

  ‘You’re British. You want a cup of tea?’

  Anderson’s face thawed into a smile. ‘Love one.’

  Franklin went out into the corridor. Santiago was waiting for him.

  ‘We can’t raise Zodiac Station, sir. Iridium, UHF, they’re not answering.’

  ‘Who owns that place? Did you try them?’

  ‘The Brits run it out of some place called Norwich. As in Connecticut, but in England. We put in a call – they haven’t heard from Zodiac since Saturday. They said Zodiac reported comms problems a few days ago and were taking their satellite link offline for maintenance.’

  ‘Page the XO. Rig the flight deck, and get the helo out to Zodiac ASAP to take a look around.’

  Santiago hesitated. ‘That’s right on the edge of its range.’

  ‘I know how far it is.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It doesn’t add up. This guy Anderson skis out of the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes he’s wearing. He says he’s been out there four days, nearly died, but did you notice his beard?’

  ‘Can’t say I did.’

  ‘Doesn’t have one. You think he found a bucket of hot water to shave out there?’

  ‘Maybe he wanted to leave a good-looking corpse.’

  ‘Then there’s this explosion at Zodiac. We need to get eyes on the ground.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Santiago headed for the wheelhouse. Franklin went to the galley and fetched a cup of tea and a mug of black coffee. Back in the cabin, Anderson was sitting up in bed, exactly where Franklin had left him, eyes fixed on the door like a dog waiting for its owner.

  Franklin switched his pager to vibrate and sat down in the chair.

  ‘Why don’t you start from the beginning.’

  Three

  Anderson

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of the north. I suppose a lot of people do. That feeling you get with the first snowfall of winter, something like a cross between Christmas morning and the start of the holidays. The world’s new, the rules are suspended.

  I was always a solitary child. Back then, those white deserts at the top of the globe fired my sense of adventure. I read Willard Price, Jack London, Alistair MacLean. Other boys could reel off every player who ever scored for Liverpool; I could tell you about Peary and Cook, Nansen and Amundsen. I grew up, a lot of things changed but my dreams didn’t. If anything, they were more urgent. The Arctic wasn’t a place to prove myself, but to lose myself. Somewhere to escape to.

  You know what the two most seductive words in the English language are, Captain? New beginning. The north’s a blank page, tabula rasa, white space on our own private maps we can fill in all over again. Snow gives us hope that the world can be different. A glimpse of perfection.

  I’d applied for a post at Zodiac twice before, but I didn’t make it past the selection boards. I thought I’d missed my chance. I was working as a technician in the Sanger lab at Cambridge – not high-status work, but I was glad to have it. I have an eight-year-old son, Luke; my wife died and I look after him alone. Between him and the job I kept busy enough. But every time it snowed, I felt that familiar tug, my internal compass swinging north again.

  Then I got the email from Martin Hagger. You’ve heard of him? Ask some of your scientists – the biologists. He’s a big gun. Everyone thinks life began in the so-called primordial soup, a warm broth slopping around the tropics. Hagger’s theory was that it actually evolved at the poles: that the freezing and melting of the sea ice every year acted like a giant chemistry set to turbocharge the evolution of DNA. He found some pretty convincing evidence, made the papers and everything.

  I’d studied with Hagger for my master’s, and the first year of my doctorate, before we parted ways. Since then, I’d kept up with his research, but we hadn’t spoken in eight years. Then, one day, there it was: an email from Hagger, inviting me to come to Zodiac as his research assistant. His previous assistant had had a wisdom tooth go wrong and needed to be evacuated. His loss, my gain. I had no idea why he’d chosen me of all people, after all that time, but I didn’t care. There aren’t many thirt
y-year-old lab technicians with a PhD. This was my shot. Tabula rasa.

  The bureaucrats who run Zodiac fought it – hated it – but Hagger forced it through. No boards, no assessment. Forty-eight hours later, I was at Heathrow.

  My sister was late. Ironically, it had snowed – only a centimetre, but the roads had jammed solid. Who expects snow at the end of March? Luke and I waited in the departure hall at Terminal 3, probably the most depressing place on earth, while the crowds tramped slush through the doors and the tannoy ran non-stop with delays and cancellations. Fog steamed off the passengers; the whole place stank of damp.

  Just when I thought I might miss my flight, Lorna staggered in. There wasn’t much time for goodbyes. I gave Luke a long, tight hug and we both tried not to cry. When I let go, he gave me the envelope he’d been clutching. I smiled when I saw the address.

  ‘You can take it to the North Pole,’ he explained.

  I tucked it in my pocket and kissed him goodbye.

  ‘Don’t get eaten by the polar bears,’ said Lorna.

  I flew to Oslo, then to Tromsø, where I had a ham and cheese sandwich and transferred on to a small Twin Otter for the last leg to Utgard. There was no one else on the flight, just me and the pilot and a couple of tons of supplies.

  I suppose you know about Utgard. It’s the last place in the world, the most northerly scrap of land on the planet. Easy to miss – so easy, in fact, that no one realised it was there until the twentieth century. Most of it’s covered in ice, so much that the weight has actually pushed the land below sea level. Not that there’s much sea, either: for ten months of the year it’s frozen solid. The only notable population is polar bears, and a couple of dozen scientists at Zodiac Station. I wouldn’t like to say who’s hairier.

  Even from Tromsø, it took another six hours’ flying. We refuelled at the base at Ny-Ålesund, where the mechanics fitted skis to the plane and the pilot changed into his cold-weather gear. He gave me a dubious look, in my jeans and the jacket I use for walking the Broads with Luke.

  ‘They said they’ll issue me clothing when I get there,’ I explained.

  ‘Then hopefully we get there,’ he said. I took it as Norwegian humour.

  We carried on north. I stared out the cockpit window, keen for my first sight of Utgard. Behind the clouds, dark patches swam in and out of view, like bruises forming under skin.

  ‘Will we be able to land?’ I asked. The pilot shrugged. Was that another joke?

  My first view of Utgard was a swelling on the horizon, white peaks almost impossible to tell apart from the clouds. As we got closer, they resolved themselves into mountaintops. The clouds parted on a dramatic landscape, a Toblerone rampart guarding the western approach. The island was such a small dot on the map, it was hard to believe so many mountains could fit on it. They seemed to go on for ever.

  We descended between the mountains and skimmed over a white fjord. The pilot banked, turned, and suddenly I saw two rows of red flags staking out the runway like drops of blood. The plane thumped down, bounced slightly, and skied to a stop. Considering we’d landed on solid ice, it was pretty controlled. Outside, I saw a limp windsock, a clutch of oil drums and an orange Sno-Cat. Otherwise, just mountains and snow.

  ‘Welcome to Zodiac,’ said the pilot.

  The cold sank its teeth into me the moment I stepped off the plane. At the foot of the ladder, I saw a woman rolling an oil drum towards me. The first thing that struck me was that she wasn’t wearing a coat: just a thick knitted jumper, ski trousers, and a woolly hat with tasselled flaps covering her ears. A long blonde plait hung down her back. Her cheeks were flushed red with the cold, and the eyes that looked up at me were a cool ice-blue.

  ‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself.

  ‘You’re in the way,’ she shouted, though I could barely hear her. The pilot had left one of the engines running, and the propeller almost drowned her out. So much for the silence of the Arctic. I scrambled out of her way and stood on the sidelines while she and the pilot ran a hose from the fuel drum to the plane. When that was secure, the pilot climbed in the cabin while the woman reversed the Sno-Cat up to the door. The pilot began sliding out the boxes of supplies we’d brought, which she loaded into the back. They seemed to have forgotten I existed.

  I wanted to savour my first sight of the Arctic, but it was hard to concentrate. The cold squeezed my skull; my ears hurt as if they’d been slapped, and the icy wind made my eyes water. The propeller racket beat against me, and every breath I took was heavy with aviation fuel. I had gloves on, but they might as well have been tissue paper.

  ‘If you freeze to death before you sign the paperwork, the insurance doesn’t pay out,’ said the woman. I hadn’t noticed her come over. She grabbed my arm and dragged me towards the Sno-Cat. I couldn’t believe how useless I’d got so quickly: I couldn’t even lift myself into the cab without a shove from behind. But the engine was on, and the heater made the cab decently warm. I didn’t like to think what all those engines running non-stop must be doing to the atmosphere. At that moment, I didn’t care.

  The woman climbed in and circled the Sno-Cat round, while the Twin Otter executed a quick turn back down the runway. In an impossibly short distance, it lifted off and disappeared behind the mountains.

  ‘I hope you didn’t change your mind,’ said the woman. I still hadn’t caught her name.

  ‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself again.

  She nodded, and kept on driving.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Greta.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Two years.’

  ‘Must be tough,’ I sympathised.

  ‘I like the silence.’

  I took the hint. The Sno-Cat ground and bounced its way over the snow. Round the base of an outcropping mountain, into a low valley – and suddenly there was Zodiac.

  It looked like a spaceship landed on an alien planet. The main building was a low, green oblong jacked up on spindly steel legs. A white geodesic dome bulged out of the roof; the rest of it was covered with a mess of masts, aerials, satellite dishes and solar panels. Subsidiary buildings clustered around it: a mix of faded wooden huts in assorted sizes, curved-roofed Nissen huts, and bulbous orange spheres with round portholes, like deep-sea submersibles left behind by a sinking ocean. Flags fluttered from a line of red poles that staked the perimeter, a shallow semicircle down to the frozen edge of the fjord.

  We pulled up outside the main building – the Platform. It was bigger than it had looked from the top of the hill, almost a hundred metres long, with a jumble of crates and boxes stored underneath. A flight of steel steps led up to the front door.

  A low bang rolled down the valley as I stepped out. I glanced over my shoulder.

  ‘Is that thunder?’

  ‘Seismic work,’ said Greta. ‘They’re blasting on the glacier.’

  We climbed the steps. On the wall by the door, a scratched and faded plaque said Zodiac Station; under it, a much brighter sign added, British South Polar Agency. It looked like the newest thing on the base.

  ‘Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?’ I looked around, half expecting to see penguins.

  ‘New management.’

  Greta kicked a bar on the base of the door and it swung in. All the doors at Zodiac opened inwards – to stop drift snow trapping you. Inside was a small, dark boot room, and a second door opening further in.

  ‘No shoes in the Platform,’ said Greta. She turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ I called. ‘Should I introduce myself somewhere?’

  The door slammed behind her.

  I left my boots and coat in the vestibule and ventured through the next door. The first thing I saw on the other side was a gun rack bolted to the wall: half a dozen rifles standing upright, more spaces where others were missing. Beyond, a straight corridor ran for what seemed an eternity, dozens of doors but no windows. It reminded me, unpleasantly, of the set of the Overlook Hotel. You know, from the
film The Shining. Stanley Kubrick directed it.

  I padded down the carpeted corridor in my socks. I read the signs on the doors I passed, little squares of card that seemed to have been typed on an honest-to-goodness typewriter. Laundry Room; Dark Room; Radio Room; laboratories, numbered in no particular order I could work out. One said Pool Room, and under it someone had taped a holiday-brochure photo of an azure-blue swimming pool. I opened it, out of curiosity, but there was only a half-size pool table crammed in a windowless cupboard.

  Further along, I found the door for Hagger’s lab. On a sheet of A4, a red skull and crossbones warned HIGH INFECTION RISK OF UNKNOWN DNA. Undeterred, I knocked and when no one answered I went in. None of the doors at Zodiac have locks except the toilet (and that had broken).

  Hagger’s big reputation hadn’t won him any favours in the room ballot. His lab was tiny, though at least there was some daylight. Two small windows looked back to the mountains behind the base, a vision of clarity against the clutter inside. Wires and tubes were draped everywhere: you had to step carefully to avoid bringing down the whole show. Somehow, he’d managed to cram a complete laboratory on to the workbenches: a mass balance, a shiny electron microscope fresh out of the box, sample bottles, Erlenmeyer flasks, and a set of green notebooks lined up against the wall. A length of yellow pipe sat in a tray of water in the fumes cupboard. A small refrigerator humming under the bench made me think of the old joke about selling fridges to Eskimos.

  A hard-topped table made an island in the centre of the chaos, though you could hardly see the surface for all the stuff piled up on it. Inevitably, I knocked something off when I walked past. A stapled sheaf of paper. I bent down to pick it up, and as I glanced at it – as you do – saw my own name staring back at me.

  Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh. ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and its Applications for Synthetic Genomics’.

  It was my Molecular Biology article: the first scientific paper I ever published. It was strange to be reminded of it on Utgard. Hagger must have wanted to remind himself I’d once been a decent scientist.

  ‘Ha. The new intruder.’