Zodiac Station Read online

A man stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him approach – you never did at Zodiac. He was short and, unusually for that place, clean-shaven. He had a round head with not quite enough hair to cover it, and wore one of those drab army-issue jumpers with patches on the elbows and shoulders.

  ‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself. ‘Martin Hagger’s new assistant.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come to sell us double glazing. Ha.’ He shook my hand. ‘Quam. Base commander.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘I hear you rather put the cat among the pigeons in Norwich, coming up like this. Very irregular.’ He squinted at me. ‘Still, you’re here now.’

  ‘I am.’ I meant to add something like ‘Thrilled to be here’ or ‘Glad you could have me’, but somehow the phrases jammed in my head so nothing came out except a sort of hiccup. Quam looked me up and down.

  ‘I suppose I’d better show you around.’

  ‘It seems very quiet,’ I said, as he led me on down the corridor.

  ‘Normal, this time of year. October to February we almost shut down; just a skeleton staff. I only got here myself four weeks ago.’

  I tried to imagine overwintering there: the endless darkness; the stale jokes and stale food; the long, mournful corridor and the empty rooms. You’d go insane.

  ‘The advance party come in March to set up. The rest get here in May. After that, it’s a madhouse.’ He opened a door numbered 19. ‘This is where you’ll be sleeping.’

  I peered in, though I couldn’t see much because someone had decided to put the wardrobe in front of the window. Four bunks squeezed between four walls, with a leopard-print Claudia Schiffer looking down from a poster.

  ‘Nice to have some female company.’

  ‘That’s to hide the escape tunnel.’ Quam closed the door again. ‘Only you for now, but you’ll have to share when the barbarian hordes invade. You won’t spend much time there, anyway. Hagger will work you pretty hard, I imagine.’

  A dull detonation from up on the glacier made the Platform rock slightly under my feet.

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘Hagger’s up at Gemini. That’s our camp on the ice dome. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, when the helicopter gets in. Saturday night is movie night,’ he added, moving on down the corridor. ‘The lab, you’ve seen. Toilets, surgery.’ Doors opened, doors closed. ‘My office, if you ever need me. Radio room.’ Another cubbyhole, packed with dials, gauges and cables. Static hissed from a speaker, and an American-accented voice was saying something I couldn’t make out.

  ‘Is that for us?’

  Quam shook his head. ‘The Americans have a ship up north. Coast Guard ice-breaker, crew of scientists. Two hundred miles away, but it’s the nearest thing to civilisation from here. Every so often we pick up their transmissions.’

  He turned a knob and the sound went away. ‘Did you bring a mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can leave it in your suitcase. No reception here. If you go out in the field, we’ll issue you a satellite phone.’

  ‘Internet?’ I looked at the antiquated computer taking up half the space in the radio room. ‘If there’s somewhere to connect my laptop … I promised my son we could Skype.’

  ‘We’ve no wireless because it interferes with the instruments. You can connect to the LAN with a cable, but you’ll need an account. You can use this machine with a guest account until we set you up. I’ll give you a form.’

  I looked doubtfully at the machine. ‘Do I have to know Morse code?’

  The front door banged; footsteps thudded down the corridor. A stocky man strode towards us. I’d been reading Greek myths to Luke that week: in the dim corridor, something about him made me think of a charging Minotaur.

  He stopped in front of us, under one of the fluorescent lights. He had a wide face and blue eyes and a beard he must have been working on for months. On top, his fair hair was cut straight and short, sticking up in a couple of places from his hat. The slogan on the sweatshirt said, ZODIAC STATION – HELL DOES FREEZE OVER.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on with the supplies?’ His English was Scandinavian-perfect. A Viking, not a Minotaur. He flapped a pink sheet of paper at us. ‘Huh?’

  Quam’s chest seemed to grow slightly. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I ordered nitrogen. For cooling my instruments.’

  I laughed. Well, it seemed funny, having to cool instruments in the high Arctic. A black look said there was nothing humorous about it. I started to stammer an explanation, something about Eskimos and fridges, but gave it up. Not a good first impression.

  ‘And?’ said Quam.

  ‘Instead of nitrogen, they sent me two hundred litres of this TE buffer solution. Two hundred litres,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t even know what this shit is.’

  ‘You use it for sequencing DNA,’ I said, trying to be helpful. All I got was a dirty look. ‘Do they think I’m running Jurassic Park here?’

  ‘Whose name was on the docket?’ Quam asked.

  The Viking screwed the flimsy pink paper in his fist. ‘Mine. But I didn’t order it.’

  ‘You must have made a mistake.’

  He threw the paper away. It bounced down the corridor. ‘Last flight, Annabel ordered some glacier drill and got a thermal cycler instead. You need to sort this shit out, Quam, or what the hell are we all doing here?’

  He would have left it at that, but Quam blocked his way. He gestured to me.

  ‘This is Hagger’s new arrival.’

  ‘Right.’ The big man gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. I was starting to get a feel for how the crew at Zodiac welcomed newcomers.

  ‘This is Fridtjof Torell. Known as Fridge.’

  I offered a handshake. Torell-known-as-Fridge ignored me.

  ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘No,’ said Quam.

  He disappeared into one of the labs.

  ‘Atmospheric scientist,’ said Quam. He opened the door at the end of the corridor. A handmade poster pinned to it said, Your Daily Horrorscope, decorated with grinning death’s heads and a clear plastic envelope where a slip of paper could drop in.

  You are about to make some bad life choices, I read.

  ‘And this is the mess room.’

  The mess reminded me of an old working men’s club: brown carpet and grey walls, long tables with plastic chairs. A few sofas and armchairs, leaking their stuffing, made a sitting area in one corner around an oversized television. Faded photographs hung crookedly around the room, a few of wildlife but most of stiff-backed men with hollow eyes and frost-rimmed beards. No one could have smoked in there for years, but you could still sense the stale nicotine. The only redeeming feature was the windows, which lined three full sides of the room and gave spectacular views of the fjord and the mountains. They made me want to go outside. Perhaps that was the point.

  Through a serving hatch in the interior wall, I saw a small stainless-steel kitchen. A fat man with tattooed biceps and a too-tight T-shirt gave me a wave through the hatch and turned back to the pot on the hob.

  ‘Danny, the cook. Danny knows all the gossip.’

  Quam stopped in front of two huge maps hung on the wall either side of the door. One was a topographic map of Utgard, mostly white, with Zodiac marked in the lower left-hand corner. The other showed the earth, not as you usually look at it with the equator in the middle, but as you’d see it from a spaceship hovering over the North Pole. The Arctic Ocean filled the centre, hemmed in almost continuously by the countries that bordered it. Nothing south of Shetland made it on to the map; even the southernmost tip of Greenland needed an extension.

  ‘The Antarctic is a continent surrounded by oceans. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents,’ Quam said. Passable imitation of a fourth-form geography teacher.

  I found Utgard, between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land and further north than either.

  ‘What’s that?’ I pointed to a grey shadow shaded on the map,
a thousand-kilometre barb pointing down towards Finland. It covered Utgard like a bespoke rain cloud.

  ‘That’s the Grey Zone – the old disputed border between Norway and Russia. That’s why Utgard’s unique. In the seventies, when they agreed to disagree, both sides committed not to press their claims to the island until they’d finalised the border. When they did, a few years ago, they found the easiest compromise was to leave it as an international scientific wilderness, administered by us. Technically, we’re beyond all laws and governments here.’

  ‘Good place to commit a murder,’ I said facetiously.

  ‘Or to make a killing. The 2010 treaty also opened up the area to hydrocarbon exploration. There’s a company here now prospecting for oil and gas. They can’t touch the land, but anything under the seabed is fair game.’ He tapped the Utgard map, halfway up the west coast at a spot labelled Echo Bay. ‘You might see them around.’

  I stared at the tiny blot on the map – and the vast space around it. Most of the world, and almost all its population, might as well not exist.

  The tour finished back at the front door. Next to the gun rack, Quam showed me two plastic boxes nailed to the wall and labelled In and Out. The outbox bulged with paper; the in was almost empty. A vinyl-bound notebook sat on a shelf below.

  ‘This is where you check out. Whenever you leave the base, even if it’s just for a wee, you sign in and out in the field book. If you’re doing fieldwork, you fill in a risk-assessment form and put it in the outbox. When you come back, you transfer it back to the in-box. Understood?’

  I nodded. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘You’ll receive a safety briefing.’ I had the sense of a recorded message being switched on. ‘Pay attention, learn the procedures and follow them. Up here, procedure will save your life.’

  ‘What about clothes?’

  ‘Greta will issue your ECW gear when she does the induction.’

  ‘The woman who brought me here?’

  ‘Our base mechanic, field guide, vehicle engineer …’ He looked as though he wanted to add something else to the description. In the end, he settled for, ‘She’ll find you.’

  I lay on my bunk and tried to trick myself into going to sleep. Twenty-four hours of airports and aeroplanes had wrecked my body clock, even before I got to the land of the endless day. Light leached around the wardrobe. I reached behind it and felt a roller blind; I fumbled with it, but the mechanism was jammed. When I tugged, it collapsed off its bracket and rolled under the wardrobe with a puff of dust. I gave up.

  My eyes drifted. In the half-light, I noticed some graffiti on the wall, white letters scarred into the wood panelling at knifepoint. I sat up and squinted.

  You’ve got it in the neck. Stick it – stick it.

  I rolled over on my side, back to the wall. The words chased round my head like a song I couldn’t shake. I tried to get my journal up to date, and found I could hardly remember a thing.

  The door opened. Greta stood silhouetted in the corridor.

  ‘Come and learn how to kill polar bears.’

  She issued me my gear from the ECW store – a cupboard overflowing with winter clothes. ECW, it turned out, stood for Extreme Cold Weather. Insulated trousers; a thick coat with a fur-lined hood; a balaclava and face mask; Black Diamond mittens; felt-lined boots; a helmet; a heavy all-in-one suit with zips up the legs.

  ‘Your snowmobile suit,’ she explained.

  She grabbed two rifles from the rack on the way out, slung one over her shoulder and gave the other to me. The moment we went outside, I was glad of all the layers. I pulled the balaclava up over my nose as she led me to a row of parked snowmobiles. As we were walking, she pointed out the different buildings with cryptic explanations. The shop; the summer house; optics caboose; the bang store. Some looked as if they hadn’t been opened in years.

  ‘What’s that one?’ I pointed to a small wooden hut, well away from the other buildings. It stood outside the main perimeter, in the centre of its own circle of flags.

  ‘Magnetometer.’

  ‘How come it gets its own little patch?’

  ‘It’s sensitive. Don’t take any metal inside the circle.’

  I scanned the perimeter. At the far end, where piles of rocks and rubble broke the snow, the poles had been crossed against each other to make five X’s standing up out of the ground.

  ‘The Gulch,’ said Greta. ‘Big hole, where the glacier comes down. Don’t fall in.’

  ‘Let me guess: the insurance doesn’t cover it.’

  ‘No, it does. But you won’t be there to get the money.’

  We’d reached the snowmobiles. ‘Do you know how to drive?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. She showed me a little plastic paddle on the right handlebar. ‘The accelerator.’ On the other handlebar, a curved metal lever stuck out like a bicycle brake. ‘The brake.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘If you tip over, don’t put your leg down. The snowmobile will crush it.’

  She pulled the starter cord. If she had any more advice, the engine drowned it. I moved to get on, but she waved me away. Standing behind the snowmobile, she put her hands under the back and hoisted the rear end off the ground. She held it there a few moments, then put it down.

  ‘The tracks freeze to the ground when it’s parked,’ she shouted in my ear. ‘If you don’t get them loose, you burn out the engine.’

  She got on; I climbed on behind her. I moved to put my arms around her, like riding pillion on a motorbike, but she shrugged me off.

  ‘You’ve got handles at the side.’

  I hardly had time to grab them before she gunned the throttle. The snowmobile bounded forward with a pop – slowly, then quickly up to full speed once we’d left the perimeter. The wind chewed my face; belatedly, I realised I’d forgotten to put down the visor on my helmet. I let go with one hand to lower it, and nearly got pitched off my seat as the snowmobile hit a bump in the snow.

  The rifle range was on a low ridge to the north of the base. There wasn’t much to define it, except for the inevitable flags staking out the corners. At one end, a paper target shaped like a penguin had been stuck on to an ice wall.

  Greta showed me the gun. ‘This is a Ruger thirty-oh-six. You ever fire a rifle before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked sceptical. ‘Show me.’

  I took off my mittens, chambered a round and sighted the gun on the grinning penguin. My hands were already beginning to shake in their thin gloves; I tried to imagine how much more they’d be trembling if there was a polar bear right in front of me. Not a lot of time to get off the shot.

  I pulled the trigger. Twenty metres away, a white hole appeared between the penguin’s eyes.

  I cleared the round and gave Greta a smug look.

  ‘Can you do it again?’

  I could and I did, half an inch to the right.

  ‘Most British scientists hate guns,’ she said.

  ‘There was a time in my life when shooting rabbits was the only way I could afford meat.’

  Most people laugh when I tell them that, as if it’s a joke they haven’t quite worked out. They cringe when I explain it’s true. They don’t like to be reminded how close we all are to the survival line.

  Greta acted as if it was perfectly normal. I liked her better for that.

  ‘But you always aim for the body on a bear,’ she told me. ‘Too many bones in the head. And if you have to shoot it, make sure you kill it.’

  I took out the magazine, made it safe and shouldered the weapon.

  ‘If a bear comes too close, fire a warning shot. If he keeps coming, fire more – but count your shots. You don’t want to be out of bullets. Also, the regulation is that you can’t shoot to kill unless he’s closer than ten metres.’

  ‘Do bears know the metric system?’

  I thought it was pretty funny. She just shrugged it off.

  ‘How fast can a bear move?’ I said.
<
br />   ‘Eleven metres per second.’

  ‘So I’ve got a bit less than a second to load, aim and fire the gun at a charging polar bear.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s the regulation.’

  ‘Has anyone at Zodiac ever been killed?’

  ‘Someone has to be the first.’

  A throbbing noise rose behind her. A red-and-white helicopter swooped over our heads, almost low enough to touch. I watched it descend to Zodiac while Greta collected the target. A handful of people scrambled out and hurried towards the Platform. From that distance, all in their standard-issue cold-weather gear, I couldn’t tell which one was Hagger.

  ‘Movie night,’ said Greta brightly.

  Four

  Anderson

  By the time I’d struggled out of my layers, the others had already sat down for dinner. The new intruder, Quam had called me, and I certainly felt like it when I opened the mess door. Conversations stopped; a couple of dozen faces looked up from their food. One or two looked friendly.

  There were two tables to choose from, and no free seats at either. I looked for Hagger, but didn’t see him. I opted for the table where Quam and Greta were sitting.

  ‘Room for one more?’ I asked brightly.

  No one moved. Fridge, the Viking I’d met in the corridor earlier, gave me a bullish look.

  ‘Staff and PhDs only on this table. Grads and techs are over there.’

  I should have accepted it. I didn’t want to make enemies my first night there. But when you’re as low down the pecking order as I am, you cling to what you’ve got.

  ‘I’ve got a PhD.’

  ‘I heard you were Hagger’s lab rat.’

  I stood my ground. Fridge tried to stare me down. The others mostly looked at their plates.

  Except one. ‘Let’s show the fella a little hospitality.’ An Irishman, older than the rest, stood up and ushered me into his place. ‘There must be space if Martin’s not here.’

  Chairs squeaked on the floor as everyone shunted along to make room. Quam, at the head of the table, made the introductions. I gave a plastic smile, forgetting the names almost as quickly as he said them.

  ‘And Greta you know,’ Quam concluded.