Beneath the Ice (15 page)

It lasted twelve minutes. Then the pipe caught again and the gearing faltered, causing the generator to rev high for several seconds before it automatically cut out.

‘Shit!’ Andy screamed, clambering down from the tower, but Luca stepped in front of him.

‘This isn’t going to work,’ he said, grabbing on to the other man’s forearm. Andy seemed to hesitate, the certain knowledge that Luca was correct contrary to everything he felt inside.

‘We can’t leave the pipe down there!’ This time it was Katz. He had moved out to join them by the tower, with Joel standing just by his shoulder. ‘We leave it now and the pipe will freeze inside.’

‘What do you not understand?’ Luca bellowed. ‘It’s us or the lake now!’

‘But we have to seal the borehole!’ Katz thundered. He turned towards Andy for support, but there was no response. Above his neck gaiter, Luca could see Andy’s teeth chattering convulsively.

Luca stared from one man to the next. ‘We have the samples. Your job is done. Now get on to the Ski-Doos.’

Andy gave a hesitant nod, followed by Joel. Luca quickly bustled the two of them on to the nearest vehicle, pushing their rucksacks down into the luggage tray at the back.

‘You stay right behind me. And keep close,’ he ordered.

He then clambered on to the remaining snow machine and started it up. The engine turned over several times before he felt the steady rumble through the padded seat. As he turned to collect Katz, only his silhouette was visible through the storm.

‘Get on!’ Luca screamed.

Katz didn’t respond, staring back towards the drill tower. Luca waited a moment longer before he swung his leg off the saddle and, reaching across, grabbed hold of Katz’s thick down jacket and manhandled him back towards the machine. ‘Wait!’ Katz screamed, his big frame twisting against Luca’s grip. ‘We can’t leave it open!’

Luca didn’t answer, instead shoving him with both palms so hard that Katz’s head snapped back against the rear seat.

‘Shut up,’ Luca shouted. ‘Your job’s done.’

The borehole was the least of their problems. Now it was only a matter of survival.

TWO DAYS AFTER
her conversation with Kieran Bates, Bear found herself standing at Cape Town International Airport, staring into the face of an overweight immigration officer. The man dragged his tired gaze away from the grimy counter before him, slowly surveying the length of her body. He paused, for no other reason than to suggest he could keep her waiting there as long as he chose, before his gaze finally came to rest on her face. He then seemed to register the fleck of white in Bear’s left eye. She had always had it – a sharp streak of pure white running across the otherwise deep brown of her pupils. It made it appear as though some unseen light was constantly reflecting in her eyes.

The man sniffed loudly, dredging the phlegm into the back of his throat as Bear tried to expedite the process by flashing him a smile. He ignored it, his expression unchanged as if observing her from behind the tint of a two-way mirror. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he waved her through.

Stalking across the main foyer, Bear bypassed the multitude of taxi drivers idling around, waiting to prey on the new arrivals. As she went by they gawked at her suggestively, part business, part pleasure, but Bear kept up her stride. She knew the airport well, having been a private pilot for the last twelve years and often taking off in her little bush plane, a Cessna 206, from Cape Town International. But despite being well used to the jolts and bumps of turbulence, their descent earlier that morning had made her feel horrendously sick. Now, all she could think about was getting some fresh air.

It was six-thirty in the morning. Already smokers had grouped together outside the terminal building, clutching oversized cups of coffee and talking loudly. Over the last few days her sense of smell had heightened to such a degree that it was as if she could distinguish every one of the rancid cigarette butts in the overflowing ashtrays. She pushed past, holding her breath through the smoke and desperately trying not to be sick. A hundred yards farther on she spotted a bench and stopped to sit down, feeling too light-headed to continue.

Bear sat for several minutes, letting her eyes drift towards the view of Table Mountain. Cloud was pouring over the summit like a ceaseless waterfall, but only a few hundred feet lower down it dissolved into thin air, leaving the most expensive properties in the city basking in the morning sun. Here the whites had grouped together, their estates rimmed by electric fences and razor wire, while only a couple of miles further out from the mountain, life had an entirely different meaning.

Bear’s focus pulled back to an expanse of land called the Cape Flats. The area was hazy from the smoke of burning tyres, and the morning light glinted off thousands of corrugated-iron rooftops. The shantytowns sprawled for miles in every direction, bloated to bursting by the daily arrival of foreigners searching for a better life. But there was none to be found, only the varying shades of violence and poverty that typified each community. From the immigrants in Nyanga to the coloured gangs of Mitchell’s Plain, each district was fenced off behind broken concrete walls, as if the city itself were desperate to conceal its wounds.

Bear had travelled her entire life, and even now was amazed by Cape Town’s fusion of natural beauty and raw, unchecked violence. But it was a combination that was all too familiar to her. It was the very hallmark of her native Congo.

Feeling her phone vibrating in her handbag, Bear covered her ear against the distant sound of a plane landing before connecting through to her researcher, Louis, back in the Paris office. Since her conversation with Bates, she and Louis had worked for two days straight, delving into the background of the Antarctic science base, GARI.

For all that time, Bear had sat in her office in Paris, reading file after file dug up by Louis and his team. It was as if all the passion and decisiveness that had been so lacking in her choice of du Val’s assignments had been poured into this new venture. The old Bear was back and the whole research team had seemed renewed by her energy.

Unable to voice the real reason for the enquiry, Bear had given the researchers a wide remit. As they trawled through the background of the science base and the drilling project in general, a single name kept recurring: Richard Pearl. He had personally invested over fourteen million dollars towards the drilling project and seemed integral to almost every facet of life at the base.

Bear had heard his name before in connection with the submarine incident, but knew little more than that. Louis worked to fill in the gaps, compiling a huge dossier on the man, covering everything from his political career to recent aspects of his private life.

Aside from his position as a US senator, Pearl also owned a consortium of companies, and through one of these, called Global Change, had invested the fourteen million dollars for the Antarctic drilling project. At first glance Global Change’s mission statement seemed highly worthy, with their stated aim being ‘to restore eco-systems and reverse the process of climate change’, but as Bear and Louis delved deeper into each project, they soon realised that nearly all were only at a nascent stage or, worse, had already been decommissioned.

Every scrap of marketing information about Global Change featured photographs of Pearl. An athletic man in his early-fifties, he had light reddish hair, now greying and combed back from his tanned, but freckled face. His square jaw and perfect smile adorned nearly every page of the company brochures, with a raft of politicians and celebrities crowbarred in, just in case there was any doubt as to his social standing.

The official biography listed Pearl as an ex-naval officer and father of four children, all girls. There were personal quotations in his own handwriting, citing the cure-all of ‘positivity’ and how the ‘power of now’ had been the backbone to his success. But as interesting as Pearl was, none of the information seemed to substantiate the feeling of unease Bear had had while on the phone with Kieran Bates. The Antarctic base seemed innocuous enough and Pearl himself, although a little delusional in the scope of his ambition, appeared to be investing in projects that were at least
trying
to do some good.

Midway through the second day of research, Bear was about to call a halt to the whole investigation. She had been replaying the call with Bates in her mind and had come to the conclusion that she must have misjudged his tone, or simply read too much into the situation. Luca was probably just fine and had overcome his aversion to the mountains for the sake of a healthy paycheck. She’d intended to call a halt to the whole line of enquiry when Louis had suddenly burst into her office.

He had discovered that two of Global Change’s leading microbiologists had suffered untimely deaths. The first drowned while on holiday in the Maldives; the second was killed in a car crash eight months later. These two incidents could have been explained by the vagaries of fate, but not when combined with the fact that the company’s latest head microbiologist, a woman called Charlotte Bukovsky, had disappeared only two months ago. A missing persons report was still officially open with San Diego’s police department, but after some desultory enquiries the case officer there had evidently filed the report with the singular intent of letting it gather dust.

Bear had given Louis free rein in trying to track down Bukovsky, and he in turn had called in some favours with the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. The DGSE had some new and highly impressive phone-tracking software and his contact had agreed to sift through the phone records of all of Bukovsky’s immediate family. A day passed before the contact came back with an anomaly – two calls had been made to Bukovsky’s younger sister from Nairobi, Kenya. After some more digging, Louis was convinced he had a lead. As Bear had flown to Cape Town that night, he had continued trying to get through and, on the sixth attempt, actually connected to a hotel room in downtown Nairobi and Charlotte Bukovsky herself.

Now he was calling to relay the basics of that conversation. Bear remained silent while he made his report. Finally she stood up.

‘I want to meet this woman.’

‘I knew you’d say that,’ Louis replied. ‘That’s why she’s booked on a flight via Joburg and arriving in Cape Town tonight.’

‘Tonight? She’s been off the grid for two months. How the hell did you persuade her to get on a plane?’

‘I told her you’re a journalist for Reuters. And, believe me, this woman has got a serious axe to grind.’

Bear nodded to herself. They had used the same cover several times before, but it still seemed incredible that Bukovsky would come out of hiding so readily, even to meet a journalist.

‘What’s the flight number?’ Bear grabbed the Biro pinning up her hair and scrawled the number on a ticket stub. ‘And email me anything new you’ve found.’

‘What about du Val? He was asking how your visit to Cape Town is in any way connected to the new assignments.’

‘You let me worry about him,’ Bear replied. ‘Just don’t advertise what you’re doing.’

There was a pause while Louis weighed up the trouble he would be getting into by covering her tracks, but Bear already knew what he was going to say next.

‘Leave it with me,’ came the response, and for the first time in days a smile crept across Bear’s lips.

‘Thank you, Louis. I owe you.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ And with that, he hung up.

Bear returned the phone to her handbag then made for the taxi rank. Now that she had time to think about it, she still couldn’t quite believe what she had done. Just walking out of the Paris office and on to the flight last night had been audacious, even for her. Already she was wondering how she would justify it when she got back, but fortunately last-minute travel was part of her job description and, for the moment, du Val shouldn’t be asking too many questions.

Ever since her call with Bates, she had been thinking about Cape Town almost constantly and been fighting the desperate urge to be there. Seeing her son, Nathan, plus the chance to inform Luca of her pregnancy constituted two fundamentals in her life, if not the
only
two fundamentals right now. And the more she had thought about this, the more she had realised that she just had to leave, no matter how unprofessional it seemed or what the cost to her future career.

As the taxi driver followed the N2 towards the City Bowl, Bear went back over the files Louis had prepared on the Antarctic base, GARI. The drilling project itself had been going for nearly three years when it looked set to stall. The Russians had been going over budget almost continually and, by the third year, the Japanese were already proposing a ‘review’ period when, suddenly, Richard Pearl stepped in.

To the delight of the scientific community, he had simply written an open-ended cheque. No matter what the cost, he declared, they must break through to the lake in the name of science. The British government had been the first to accept the donation, quickly followed by the other countries involved in the project.

In return for his contribution Pearl had already received certain ‘dispensations’. His Bombardier Global Express private jet had landed four times on the ice runway of Droning Maud Land, the only private plane to be granted permission to do so, and one scientist had even posted online a photo of the Robinson 44 helicopter that Pearl was being allowed to garage inside one of the GARI’s hangar units.

Like the politician he was, Pearl toured the Antarctic base with fanfare. He would shake everyone’s hand, from the base commander to the lowliest cook, as though he were canvassing for votes. And the tactic seemed to be working. The latest edition of
Scientific Weekly
had practically described him as a twenty-first-century Messiah.

But with Louis’s discovery of the microbiologists’ deaths, Bear was certain that there was a great deal more to Richard Pearl than met the eye. Whatever it was, Bukovsky would certainly have a take on it, and she was scheduled to arrive in Cape Town in under six hours’ time.