Forecast (37 page)

Whorls and spirals of ghostlike mist formed around the forthcoming shapes. There were three in total, they were human form and they were disappearing away from Sutcliffe and Hennessey’s temporary camp. Stunned and unsure what to do, what to think, and trembling with exaltation, Sutcliffe put his fingers to his lips and whistled. He whistled again and again but they did not return.

“The flares!” Hennessey said. “Fire the flares.”

Unfastening the locks on the case, Sutcliffe pulled out two flares and gave one to Hennessey. In unison, they removed the caps at both ends, held them by the base and struck the bottom of the flares on the hard shell of the case. They held them away from their faces as hot, sparking ash oozed from the flares and a bright red light accompanied a large volume of smoke. After a few frantic minutes of waving and shouting, the flares faded and they stared into the mist where they had seen the human figures.

They waited.

And waited.

Nobody came.

“No more flares?”

“I only brought two. There wasn’t enough room in the case for any more.”

Hennessey began shouting for help, her voice frail and hoarse. Sutcliffe joined in. After several minutes, they stopped shouting.

“We should go looking for them,” Hennessey suggested.

“Who do you think they were?”

“I don’t know. Survivors?”

“If they were survivors, what was that horn sound we heard?”

“Maybe they found a horn and they are using it to locate other survivors,” she said. “Whatever the noise…”

Sutcliffe wondered why she had stopped speaking. When he followed her gaze, he saw two men and a woman running towards them and he almost stopped breathing. They were wearing the same uniform – a navy blue jacket covered in shiny buttons and badges with trousers to match and a concealed white shirt. In the next instant, his bewilderment turned to enormous relief.

“My name is Clive Barker,” one of them said. “I’m Chaplain in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. This is Terry McPherson and Annabel Davis. They are medical officers.”

Sutcliffe and Hennessey froze. It took a while for the news to sink in and they turned to hug each other in tears.

The officers gave them a moment. Barker looked over at their temporary camp and spotted four insulation blankets spread by a smoking mound of ash. “Are there any more of you?”

Sutcliffe wiped his eyes. “No, just us.”

“What are you doing here?” asked Hennessey.

“Long story,” said Barker. “I’ll explain on the way. We have to leave at once. I’m afraid there’s nothing left for you here. Are you both alright to walk?”

“Absolutely.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Leaving their bags, blankets and their smoking fire, Hennessey and Sutcliffe followed the officers off into the mist.

“A few months after the war,” Barker began, “we carried out coastal searches from our submarines around Europe to look for survivors, but we had little luck. About three weeks ago, we picked up a weak signal coming from the southwest of Britain. We assumed that survivors had figured out a way to communicate and so we travelled here, but found the signal was coming from the beacon of a large gondola. I don’t know if you remember the day the bombs went off, but a balloon team went high up into the sky to perform weather experi–”

“I remember it well,” Sutcliffe cut in with a straight face. “That was us.”

Barker saw it now, recognising the strangers all of a sudden. The pair looked so different. They were both skinny and fragile with dark, sunken eyes. The man had a scraggily beard and dishevelled hair. The woman was dangerously malnourished.

“Brad Sutcliffe?”

“Just about.”

“And you must be the American, Jen Hennessey?”

“Yes.”

He laughed, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he put his hand on his heart. “I’m honoured to meet you both. When we saw the state of the gondola, we assumed you had fallen out of the sky after the explosions.”

“That’s a pretty close assumption.”

Barker gazed at his colleagues walking closely behind. “Can you believe it?” he said to them.

They both shook their heads, smiling.

Barker glimpsed at his watch. “We have a long journey ahead of us.”

“Where are we going?” asked Hennessey.

“Greenland.”

They arrived at a cove where the mist had weakened somewhat. On the shore was an inflatable dinghy with an officer stationed beside it, waving at them. A good mile out to sea they could just make out the top section of a submarine sitting in the water like a sea monster. A horn sounded.

Down at the beach, Barker and his colleagues dragged the red dinghy into the water. “Jump in.”

Sutcliffe assisted Hennessey onboard and then followed her on. Barker cast them off, skipping into the dinghy as the officers rowed them out to sea. It bobbed towards the submarine carving its way through the clearing mist. The submarine began to take on a more distinctive shape the closer they got and more officers congregated on the top deck, cheering and applauding the survivors. The dinghy drew up alongside the submarine and a rope ladder rolled down the wall. Hennessey went first followed by Sutcliffe, and they ascended the ladder. An officer at the top pulled them up onto the watchtower where a small gathering of seamen clapped and offered their hands to be shaken, congratulating their remarkable survival.

Standing on the observation deck, staring back at his country, Sutcliffe turned to Barker. “How did you all survive?”

“I’m not sure if you know, but North Korea started the war. On that day, there were hundreds of submarines sailing deep beneath the ocean which survived the bombs. I don’t know if you’re aware, but every major power was directly hit with nuclear bombs. It’s all a little hazy, even now. Intelligence sources believe that North Korean satellites were fooled into thinking reflected sunlight had been the inferno from a group of ICBMs.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“It means that their Missile Early Warning System would have detected a false nuclear strike on their country. The North Koreans believed they were retaliating when really they were instigating the war and therefore were retaliated against. Whatever the story, the fact remains the world has suffered irreparable ecological damage. Temperatures around the world dropped dramatically because the sun’s rays couldn’t get through all the smoke and crap in the sky and, consequently, freshwater lakes froze over in less than a month. The reduction in sunlight affected photosynthesis. Hydrographic, meteorological and oceanographic specialists aboard our submarine have spent months monitoring and analysing the weather and ocean conditions. According to their analysis, massive firestorms polluted the air so severely for several months after the explosions that they believe the ozone layer has depleted enormously. And I’m not lying when I tell you that we travelled around Europe for almost a year and not once did we see the sun. We’ve been communicating with other submarines in the world doing similar searches in the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Baltic, Arctic, South China Sea and the Southern Ocean and the feedback we’re getting is always the same. They believe that more people have died and are dying because of famine and the decline in global temperatures than those people who perished initially when the nuclear bombs went off. Some of our weather experts believe that this could last as long as a decade, maybe longer. You could say the world is pretty screwed up right now.”

The four
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hundred
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and
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ninety
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foot submarine was a Vanguard
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class SSBN and notorious for its American
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made Trident II submarine
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launched ballistic missiles, shared by both the United States and Great Britain. Weighing approximately sixteen thousand tons, the Vanguard
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class SSBN was one of the most advanced submarines in the world, specialising in strikes against surface and underwater targets. Hennessey and Sutcliffe were given a tour of the submarine. The messes in the Vanguard submarine were well-appointed and boasted a comfortable lounge, dining room, lecture hall, games area, library for seamen to study for a degree and even a venue for church services. Able to accommodate over two hundred people, a search party of forty five officers had been despatched from the north coast of Greenland.

The submarine lurched forward and smoothly dipped into the Atlantic waters. With fuel so scarce and being strictly conserved, the submarine ran at a lethargic five knots per hour on battery
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operated electric motors. Sutcliffe and Hennessey were taken to the Mission Control Centre where they met more naval officers and they were both treated with the greatest respect. The officers had hundreds of questions for the balloonists, many on their daring flight into space, most about their survival and how they had coped. In fragments, they shared their stories, telling their side, fitting the pieces together. Hearing their own words, they struggled to comprehend how they had come through it alive. Being around people, seeing a multitude of faces and personalities, hearing more than one conversation at a time, overwhelmed them.

Half an hour later, the Chaplain brought them to a room where Terry McPherson and Annabel Davis took samples of their blood and urine, checked their temperatures and blood pressure. The results would be given to them later before they reached Greenland, though their initial conclusion was narrowed down to extreme fatigue and malnutrition. Following the examination, the Chaplain led them to the lounge area and presented them with comfortable sofas arranged in front of a television screen. Food and water would be brought out to them, they were told. On the table were some board games and a few word puzzles. Games and puzzles would have helped pass the time in the White Room, Sutcliffe thought. As they waited, the muffled voices of the officers communicating, the patter of busy feet running around the narrow corridors and the clunking of metal on metal resonated through the submarine. One of the stewards brought them out on a tray a jug of fresh water with two glasses and a small platter of seafood and boiled potatoes. Having managed to exist on very little food and fluid, the sight of fresh fish, potatoes and water caught them by surprise. Manners and gracefulness aside, they stuffed the food into their hungry mouths.

The steward lingered by the door. “I watched your flight into space. Can I just say, it’s an absolute honour to meet you both and if there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

“Actually,” Sutcliffe coughed to clear his throat. “Do you think you might be able to find some batteries for this video camera?” he said, pulling out the JVC from his inside jacket pocket. “And a lead that will plug from the camera into the television?”

“I’ll see what I can find.”

“Thank you.”

Ten minutes later, the steward returned with both batteries and a lead. Sutcliffe fitted the batteries and the steward connected the lead from the camera to the plugs at the back of the television. They thanked the young man for his help and when he left the room, Sutcliffe rewound the tape and pressed play. They proudly watched five balloonists in immaculate spacesuits preparing for their launch into space like international heroes. Many people in the world had been able to witness it and for many of them it would have been the last thing they saw. The moment before the launch, Sutcliffe put it on freeze
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frame and they studied the balloon before selecting the slow
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motion function, watching the remarkable moment unfold in brief bursts. Although he couldn’t see it through their helmets, he knew each of his crew had a look on their faces that spoke of fear and of excitement. His son had done him proud with the quality of the recording and when the space flight ended he stopped the video, having seen enough.

“And six hours later, there was a nuclear war,” Sutcliffe said, speculatively.

“I still can’t believe it,” said Hennessey. “I have to admit, I had almost lost hope altogether.”

He nodded. “Just imagine if we hadn’t left the White Room when we did…”

The Commanding Officer entered the lounge and introduced himself. He was a large man with a bushy silver moustache and he told Sutcliffe and Hennessey just how impressed he was with their mission into space and how it was such evolutionary people that changed the way the world worked. He also apologised for the way military forces around the world had handled the nuclear crisis.

“Where exactly are we heading?” Sutcliffe asked.

“Greenland, as you may know, is eighty percent ice. Before the nuclear war, fifty seven thousand people lived in Greenland. We estimate that a third of the population living in the south died from the radiation. Other Arctic countries such as Siberia and some of the upper
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most northern regions of Canada and Alaska also harbour survivors.”

He took a deep breath. “Anyway, to answer your question, we are heading to a town called Qasigiannguit in the southeast part of Disko Bay. It has a very small population of about three thousand inhabitants. It’s a very beautiful place, I’m sure you’ll agree. In 1984, the town celebrated their two hundred and fifty years anniversary. And there’ll be many more to come.”

“Have you picked up many survivors since the war?”