Zodiac Station (13 page)

‘You really don’t get it, do you? We’re operating on a scale people like you and Quam can’t imagine. People talk about how the dinosaurs got toasted by a meteorite. But two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the dinosaurs, ninety per cent of all life on earth was wiped out because an undersea volcano warmed up the sea floor and released several billion tons of methane into the atmosphere. The biggest extinction event of all time.

‘Or, if you want something more recent, take what happened at Storegga, eight thousand years ago. Thirty-three hundred cubic kilometres of seabed collapsed because temperature changes destabilised the clathrates. You know what happens when that much material starts moving underwater? A tsunami that makes what happened to Japan and Indonesia look like a kid in a bathtub.’

He shut the notebook and tossed it back to me.

‘I didn’t kill Hagger. First, because I didn’t; second, because I wouldn’t; and third, even if I would have, I didn’t have to. We’re fucking with this planet so bad, pretty soon we’ll all be history.’

Kennedy

I wanted to get to DAR-X. As luck would have it, my chance came the next morning. Danny had baked them a cake as a thank-you for rescuing Greta and Tom Anderson from the ice cap. Jensen was going to fly it down; I volunteered to go too.

I can see the look on your face. You think we were mad to fly a cake a hundred kilometres, a cake made with liquid eggs and powdered milk at that. But Utgard’s frontier country; it’s the little courtesies that make life bearable. People put a lot of effort into them. Sometimes they might even save your life.

‘Make sure you’re back by seventeen hundred,’ Quam told me. ‘The plane’s coming. We’ll need you to load up Anderson.’

I didn’t like the thought of Anderson flying, and I told him so.

‘Anderson should be in a hospital,’ he lectured me. ‘We don’t have the facilities to treat him here.’

I didn’t agree. Whatever benefit he’d get from a hospital, it didn’t balance out the risk of putting him on a plane. Anderson was stable, and his signs were encouraging. I’d started to hope there’d be no lasting damage. But I wasn’t the base commander.

So I climbed in the helicopter with a big Tupperware container full of cake. Bob Eastman came too He’s an astrophysicist; he’d been getting electrical interference with his instruments and wanted to see if it could have come from the DAR-X equipment.

‘What’s your theory?’ he asked, as soon as we were airborne.

‘My theory?’

‘Hagger – Anderson. You don’t think it’s a coincidence?’

‘What else?’

‘Well for one, Danny’s pretty sure it was the Freemasons. He’s just trying to figure out if they did it off their own bat, or if it was for their alien overlords.’

Danny, the cook, is the nicest man in the world. But he has the most extraordinary world view, and he isn’t backward about sharing it.

‘I asked him once why he stays at Zodiac if it’s so full of Illuminati types,’ Eastman said. ‘You know what he said? “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” You think he really believes that shit?’

‘Sometimes it’s comforting to believe you’re helpless before a higher power.’

Eastman chuckled. ‘Maybe it’s the frickin’ aliens messing with my instruments.’

I said Utgard is frontier country. If so, Echo Bay was the pioneer camp, deep in Indian territory. The only permanent structure was the drill rig, a ten-storey steel gantry erected on the ice in the bay. Thick hawsers tied it down like a ship’s rigging; yellow plastic pipes snaked out of a hole in the ice. Beside it, steam rose from three enormous black silos clustered behind a chain-link fence. Everything else was strictly temporary: canvas tents, a few shipping containers and some corrugated-iron huts. Even those looked like they were being dismantled.

The man in charge was a big Texan called Bill Malick. I half imagined he’d be wearing a ten-gallon hat, but of course it was too cold for that. I presented him with the cake and said a few nice words about how grateful we were. Jensen took photographs for the blog as Eastman and Malick posed with a knife and cut it on top of an oil drum, out in the snow. It’s the sort of thing the comms people in Norwich love.

‘No one’s gonna realise the fucking cake’s frozen,’ said Malick. He took me inside their mess quarters, a wooden Portakabin that was the most solid building there, and gave me coffee. Eastman disappeared to talk to their radio engineer.

I pointed out the window to the huge drill rig in the bay. ‘Hit the gusher yet?’

‘That’s commercially sensitive information.’ He smiled. ‘Not that I don’t trust you, you understand.’

I thought about what Fridge had told me. ‘You really think there’s oil under Utgard?’

‘That’s what they pay me to find out.’

‘Or is it natural gas you hope to find?’

He never stopped smiling – but the smile was a hard one. ‘You looking to buy shares?’

I made an imaginary money-rubbing gesture with my fingers. ‘They don’t pay me enough.’

He saluted me with his cup of coffee. ‘Amen. I guess they didn’t pay your guy Hagger enough, either.’

‘They surely didn’t,’ I agreed.

‘You ever figure out the whole story with that?’

I gave him a sharp look. But all Texans are poker players, and his face gave nothing away.

‘We’re hoping it was just an accident,’ I said carefully.

‘But …?’

‘You were up on the Helbreen that day.’

He put his cup down with a bang. ‘Are you …?’

‘I wondered if you’d seen anything,’ I said. Innocence itself. ‘Hagger was an experienced fellow. We’re trying to learn lessons.’

That was plausible. With someone like Quam in charge, lessons must always be learned. Measures taken, safeguards put in place. Even if the lesson is:
Don’t step into a feckin’ great crevasse.

Malick leaned back. ‘Even the most experienced guys, it only takes one bad move. We had a crew chief, Earl, he’d worked twenty years at Prudhoe Bay. He was up north last September, poking around the old Soviet harbour. Took off his coat because I guess he was sweating, piece of debris fell on his head and that was it. Must’ve only been out five minutes, but the coat blew away and he froze to death. We never even found the coat.’ He swirled his coffee. ‘It’s easy, dying in a place like this.’

In his Texas drawl, it sounded like a line from a country and western song.

‘What took you up that end of the island on Saturday?’

‘R & R. Project’s nearly done, we’re going home this weekend. Figured we’d get some skiing done before we leave.’

‘On the Helbreen?’

‘Further down – in the Adventhal. On the way back, we stopped by Vitangelsk, the Commie ghost town. One of our guys was near there a couple of weeks ago, said he saw lights at night.’

He saw my expression. ‘I know, right? One too many beers.’

‘Did you find any nasties?’

‘Stalin’s ghost singing the Internationale.’ He laughed. ‘Just snow and crap. Same as everyplace else on this island.’

Eastman still hadn’t come back. Malick upended his mug and drained the last of his coffee, then put it down with a conclusive thud. He looked ready to go.

‘I heard Martin Hagger did some work for you,’ I said, as casually as I could.

Malick nodded. ‘Water quality. It wasn’t a big deal. Something under the ice was corroding our pipes. We asked if there was anyone at Zodiac who could take a look at it, and your boss sent Hagger.’

‘Did he find anything out?’

‘He ran some samples. Apparently it was a bug, some kind of plankton or something. Waters are getting warmer here, sea-ice cover’s thinning. He said it makes sense something new would evolve to take advantage.’

I glanced out the window again at the drill rig. If Fridge had told the truth, it wasn’t oil flowing through those yellow pipes.
Commercially sensitive information.
But would you kill for that?

Malick followed my gaze. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘Really?’

‘Melting icebergs and baby seals and all the rest of that Sierra Club shit. You think this job’s easy? Tell someone you work in oil exploration, it’s like you’re telling them you got rabies. Tell them you’re prospecting in the Arctic, and they want to put a bullet in you. They act like we’re up here drowning polar bear cubs in barrels of oil.’

‘You don’t deny the planet’s changing.’

Malick wiped a smear of cake icing off his beard. ‘Have you been up in the mountains? Seen any of the old mines?’ I nodded. ‘You know what they used to dig there?’

‘I heard it was coal?’

‘And you know what coal is, right? It’s dead trees. Same way, if we find oil here it’ll be dead plants from two hundred million years ago. You see any swamps and forests here now?’

‘Of course not.’

‘This planet’s always changing. I’ve been in a cave a hundred feet under a glacier, and seen a leaf fossil printed on a rock. There were trees here before the glaciers, and when it’s gone maybe they’ll grow back. You think at the end of the last ice age, when those hairy-assed Neanderthals looked out their cave one day and saw the ice had gone, they blamed each other for making the glaciers melt, or started a Save the Mammoth campaign? Hell no. They got off their cold butts and started to hunt.’

We’d stayed so long they felt obliged to give us lunch. Eastman and Malick talked about something called March Madness, which I gathered was to do with basketball. Some team called the Huskies had been doing well, which gave rise to some obvious topical jokes. I smiled along, and considered what I knew.

Hagger had obviously had plenty of opportunity to give information to DAR-X. From what I knew of his work, it involved plenty of chemistry, so he surely could have understood the data. And then DAR-X had been near the Helbreen glacier, probably the only people at that end of the island, when he died.

That still didn’t explain how they could have got to Anderson. But all I had for what happened to him was Annabel’s word. Annabel and Hagger had been close – that was common knowledge. And she should have been his partner the day he died. Could they both have been in on it?

I worked on the theory. Annabel and Hagger had been passing secrets to DAR-X – but then he got cold feet and wanted to stop. That was why she’d been so cross with him when she came back this season. The two of them went to the Helbreen to rendezvous with DAR-X, he threatened to expose them, and she pushed him into the crevasse. Then took out Anderson for good measure.

I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to think the worst of them. But that’s the problem with Zodiac. All the thoughts that anchor you in real life, the routines and the friendships, go out the window. Nature abhors a vacuum: something has to evolve to fill the gap. And often it isn’t very nice.

We had one stop to make on the way home. There’s an old hut at Seal Point, about sixty kilometres up the coast from Zodiac on the east side. They built it in 1953 for the International Polar Year; four unlucky scientists spent thirteen months there recording the weather. Legend has it when the relief party came, three of them were living in an igloo eating seal meat, and one was holed up in the cabin with his rifle.

After that, the hut was abandoned. But a few years ago, the base commander of the day decided to refurbish it as a holiday cottage for scientists who wanted a break. I’ve sent one or two people there myself, when I thought they needed to get off the Platform. It’s a picture-postcard place: little red cabin nestled in a hollow, tin chimney poking out of the roof and snow-capped mountains behind. All that spoils the scene is the barbed wire strung around the windows. You need it to keep out the bears.

We’d come to drop off emergency supplies. Jensen and Eastman left a couple of fuel drums in the cache, while I went inside to check the first-aid box for anything that had expired. It’s a strange feeling, being the first person in a place that hasn’t been touched in months. All the windows were shuttered, though sunlight wormed around the cracks creating a sort of amber twilight. Just the one room. Two bunks on each wall – the lower ones doubled as benches for the table that folded down between them. A tall cast-iron stove, vintage 1953, stood in the corner like one of those Victorian grave markers, next to a cupboard. On the wall, a woman crouched in her bra and knickers and made come-hither eyes at me. She must have been cold, wearing so little. She’d been torn from a magazine, though she still looked good. I think it was Cat Deeley.

A tin of corned beef lay open on the table, spoon lolling inside it, as if someone had been here moments ago and just popped out. I could smell smoke in the air.

I stepped over the threshold – and almost fell on my arse. A thin slick of ice covered the floor. I suppose snow must have blown in, melted when they lit the stove, and then froze again.

I found the medicine box in the cupboard and went through it, checking the contents against the list, filtering the out-of-date stuff. A couple of the morphine bottles were missing, which worried me. Probably an oversight, but I made a note to tell Quam. You don’t want people shooting up out there.

I finished, but the smoke smell still bothered me. The biggest risk at Zodiac is fire. You wouldn’t think it, surrounded by ice and snow, but it’s so dry that once fire takes hold it doesn’t let go. Well, we found that out, as you know.

I opened the stove, just in case. You’re supposed to sweep it out before you go, but this was full of ash. Fine, white and spindly: they’d been burning paper, not coal or wood. They must have left in a hurry. A few fragments hadn’t burned properly.

I reached in. The feathery ashes crumbled under my touch. My hand came out grey with soot, clutching a charred corner of green cardboard. It looked like the cover of the notebook Anderson found up on the glacier.

Kennedy

‘You all set?’

I spun round as if I’d been caught stealing from the church box. It was only Eastman.

‘We’re done with the fuel dump.’ He saw my hand covered in ash. ‘Did you start a fire?’

‘Just checking for safety.’ I clanged the stove door shut. ‘We’d better get back. The plane’ll be coming soon.’