Beneath the Ice (24 page)

‘How long will the storm last?’ Luca shouted.

‘Storm dying. Expect drop in wind speed in next four to six hours. We have notified . . .’

But then the line went dead once more. Luca stared at the dull glow of the screen. Despite the brevity of the contact, he felt a sudden sense of reassurance. The sound of another human voice seemed to dispel the claustrophobia of the freezing room; it was a relief that somewhere beyond the swirling maelstrom, someone else now knew where they were.

From behind him Luca could feel a draft circulating up through the crooked wooden planks of the floor. The stove could only do so much. Despite having it on full blast, it was still biting cold inside the little room. Perhaps there was somewhere more protected further inside the base?

The internal door was just to the left of Joel. After trying the handle several times, Luca stepped back to kick it open. His heavy climbing boots thudded against the old wood only a few inches from where Joel slept, but it was not enough to rouse him. Both he and Katz were too exhausted. Another kick and the dilapidated door splintered open, revealing a much larger room beyond.

Luca stepped cautiously inside, turning his eyes up to where a murky half-light filtered down from a single bank of skylights. The room was huge, far bigger than he would ever have supposed from the outside. Looking closer, he saw heavy steel girders interspersed at regular intervals to reinforce the main walls. Someone had taken great pains to seal this room away from the worst of the Antarctic weather.

Luca ventured further inside, passing hundreds of sections of metal piping, each about eight inches in diameter and all meticulously stacked. A pathway snaked in between, leading him towards the centre of the room. There were more piles, again perfectly assembled, but this time containing climbing equipment and an odd assortment of polar clothing.

‘What the hell?’ Luca whispered, brushing his hand over a row of dehydrated food packets at his feet. He picked one up at random, tilting the label to catch the light. It was written in a language he didn’t recognise at first. The o’s were struck through diagonally, and there were small circular marks above the a’s. It looked Dutch maybe, or on closer reflection, one of the Scandinavian languages. Below the text was a picture of mashed potato, photographed in a perfect imitation of a fresh meal, just served.

Luca pulled out another. It was exactly the same. There were hundreds and hundreds of the same meal. It just didn’t make any sense. Why on earth would the Russians have left all this equipment after abandoning the base?

Turning the glossy plastic over in his hands, he read the sell-by-date. It was last year. Luca frowned, recalling that Dedov had told him they had abandoned the base nearly ten years ago and that no one had returned to it since. Yet this food had been bought just before the last winter had set in, and, by the quantity of it, someone had been planning on staying a long time.

There was a low metallic snap, like the sound of a padlock unlocking, and Luca swivelled round. He waited for several seconds, peering through the gloom and wondering where the noise had come from. It had sounded close by. He continued waiting, just listening in the silence, before supposing that it must have come from one of the loose cables outside, flapping in the wind.

A gust whistled over the top of the skylights and Luca looked up, suddenly realising that the bank of windows would mean a better satellite reception. Twisting round the antenna on the phone, he was about to ring GARI once more when he stopped. What was the point? Sergei knew where they were and there was nothing more to do but wait until the storm had passed.

Standing alone in the half-light, an image came to him. It was of Andy and that final flicker of recognition when presented with the image of his wife and child. In that single moment he had connected to something outside the storm, to something he loved. Now, Luca felt an overriding urge to do the same. He exhaled heavily, leaning back against a nearby shelf for support.

His thoughts turned to Bear. God, how he missed her. It was like a physical ache, a loss that seemed to resurface in every quiet moment of his life. Looking back over the last few months, he just couldn’t understand how he had spent so much time running from her, arguing with her, doing everything except being with her. What had he been thinking? His own deliverance from the storm suddenly made every argument they had ever had seem trivial and petty. They had cut so deep at the time but now they paled into insignificance, leaving him to question how things had got so bent out of shape in the first place.

For the first time in his life, he suddenly realised that Bear was the
only
person he wanted to see. That she was all that mattered.

Dialling her number, he waited impatiently for the line to connect, his mind brimming with a confused mix of apologies and assurances of love.

‘
Allo? C’est qui
?’ came Bear’s voice. Her tone was quiet and suspicious.

‘Bear! It’s Luca! Damn, it’s good to hear your voice!’

‘
Mon Dieu
!’ she whispered. ‘I was about to give up on you. Are you all right? Where are you?’

A huge grin spread across Luca’s face. He felt heady with the relief of just being able to speak to her. He pictured her smouldering brown eyes and the curve of her lips as she spoke. The image was such a welcome relief after everything he had been through in Antarctica. ‘I’m OK. We’re holed up in this broken-down base waiting out a storm. But, Bear, listen . . .’

‘Are you safe?’ she interrupted.

‘Yes. I am safe,’ Luca confirmed, the words suddenly consigning to the past everything that he had been through in the last few days. He was safe and that was all there was to it. The future was now something to be considered, and Luca felt an overwhelming need to tell her how he really felt. He wanted to peel it all back. To start again. ‘Can we talk? About us, I mean . . .’

‘Wait,
mon chéri
,’ Bear urged. ‘Please, wait. I have so much I need to tell you, but I want to do it face to face. You need to get back here as soon as you can.’

‘Believe me, Bear, that’s all I want to do. But why not tell me now? Over the phone.’

There was a moment’s pause as she deliberated. When her voice eventually came back on the line, it was filled with a sense of urgency that Luca had rarely heard in it before. ‘Before that, I need to tell you what’s happening. I spoke to Kieran Bates and things are
not
what they seem.’ She paused again, wondering how to articulate all that she had learnt. ‘It’s to do with the lake, Luca, and a man named Richard Pearl.’

‘Pearl?’ Luca repeated. ‘I’ve heard his name from one of the scientists. What’s he got to do with anything?’

‘Richard Pearl is some kind of deluded vigilante. He’s developed this compound, this “seed”, which he’s planning on dumping in the oceans. But it’s the lake, Luca. He’s using the lake to test it on first.’

‘Slow down, Bear. I don’t understand. If Pearl had been at GARI when I arrived then one of the scientists would have told me. And anyway, no one has mentioned anything about any seed.’

‘No, it’s nothing to do with the scientists. They all think that Pearl invested in the project to get the water samples, but he doesn’t give a damn about any of that. The lake’s encased in ice, so he wants to drop the seed down the drill pipe and use it as a testing ground before releasing it . . .’

Her voice trailed off.

‘Bear? Are you there?’

There was silence.

‘Come on, talk to me, Bear!’ Luca replied, his voice rising in concern. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m all right,’ she whispered, her voice so low that he could only just hear her.

‘Are you hurt? Please, Bear, I can tell something is wrong.’

‘Luca, I’m OK. I just have to talk quietly. I’ll explain everything later. I promise,
chéri
.’

The word ‘
chéri
’ seemed to cut right through him. Old emotions that had been buried deep suddenly resurfaced. Luca felt his shoulders sag, realising that it had been so long a time since either of them had spoken to each other with any degree of tenderness. Without even realising it he found himself pressing the handset hard against his ear, feeling every one of the thousands of kilometres that stretched between them. ‘Are you still at your office in Paris?’ he asked. ‘You’re safe, right?’

Bear ignored the question. ‘Richard Pearl is trying to get to Antarctica and he’ll be bringing the seed with him. It could be carried in something as small as a suitcase or rucksack.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Let’s just say that I kind of ran into the man this morning.’

Luca raised his hand to his forehead, eyes passing blankly over the contents of the room as he tried to gasp what Bear was saying.

‘Well, Pearl isn’t getting back into the lake any time soon. We’ve just returned from the drill site and we couldn’t get the pipes out in time before the storm hit. The borehole will be frozen solid by now, so no one’s getting into the lake without re-drilling.’

‘So you’re telling me there is no way he can get back into it?’

‘Not that . . .’ Luca began then paused. The base, the equipment, the food – somebody had taken great pains to be concealed from the rest of Antarctica and they had positioned themselves in a location that gave ideal access to the lake.

‘Hold on,’ he whispered, picking his way across the room. On the way in, he hadn’t paid any attention to the piping he had passed, but already he felt sure it was the same kind as the ones he’d seen at the drill site, only bigger. ‘I mentioned we were at this broken-down base. Well, the Russians told me it was deserted, but from all the equipment I’m seeing, it’s anything but.’

He dragged his fingers across the first line of stacked piping. It was drill casing for sure.

‘And someone’s definitely been drilling another hole,’ he said.

‘Shit,’ Bear hissed, remembering Lotta’s warning. ‘You need to get the hell out of that base, and I mean now. There’s a man that Pearl sent . . .’

Luca pulled the handset from his ear mid-sentence, cutting the sound of her voice. He was suddenly aware of his own heart beating faster in his chest. The muscles of his shoulders were locked tight, tensed in reflex, as a single realisation filtered through to his conscious mind.

Someone was standing just behind him.

He turned, mouth opening to speak, to see a man only a foot away. He must have moved with absolute stealth to have got so close and now, his broad shoulders seemed to block out what remained of the natural light. Luca’s eyes ran up the side of his bulging neck and into his white-blond hair, but the face itself was lost to the shadows.

‘Who . . .’ Luca began, but then the man stepped even closer and into the light. The skin of his face was charred black, burnt by horrific exposure to the sun, while a long, weeping sore extended from below his chin to past his right cheekbone. Despite all this, Luca still found his gaze drawn upward to the man’s grey, lifeless eyes. They were bleached of colour, devoid of any natural sense of animation or empathy. They were just blank. Without a word, the man raised his hands and smashed the butt of a hunting rifle into the side of Luca’s head, sending him spinning across the floor.

Blackness fanned out across Luca’s vision. On the floor beside him he could see the satellite phone that had fallen from his grasp. It was close, only a few inches away. He was dimly aware of Bear’s voice continuing as she tried to tell him something, then the blackness merged, becoming one, until finally unconsciousness took him.

KIERAN BATES LEFT
his office on Whitehall, turning right along the busy street before cutting back through a small alley into St James’s Park. His pace was brisk. Swinging his tan leather briefcase purposefully in his left hand and pulling up the collar of his suit jacket against the cold morning air, he approached the edge of the manicured parkland and stopped.

The temperature had been dipping below zero for the last week, causing ice to collect on the outer rim of the lake. Swans kept their dizzying vigil, turning in unending circles across the deeper waters in an effort to keep the lake from freezing altogether. They swam with necks arched, feathers plumped against the cold.

The park was empty, a weak morning haze hanging in the air. It faded the natural colours of the trees and grass, giving the whole scene a rare sense of calm. Normally Bates would have relished such a morning, but the black S600 Mercedes parked at the edge of Horse Guards Parade had dispelled any chance of that. Despite the dark tint of its windows, he knew exactly who was seated within. Eleanor Page was waiting for him.

Bates came to a halt by the exit to the alley. Undetected by the car’s occupants, he studied the vehicle for a moment, watching as the monoxide cloud from the exhaust slowly sank to the tarmac. Despite her playful manner, Bates was starting to suspect that Eleanor Page was every bit as noxious as the car fumes. In the last few days, he had begun to feel a needle of doubt, which was becoming stronger and stronger with each new piece of information he acquired. Something wasn’t right about the whole operation. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he was being set up.

On a practical level, he was the
only
operative in MI6 to be involved. That alone was cause for concern. He reported directly to Parker, and only him, while everything else was handled by the Americans. Bates understood the need for secrecy well enough, but this smacked of something else. By being removed from any team or department he was effectively being isolated, which would make him the obvious scapegoat should anything go wrong.

As he stood watching the car, Bates’ hand moved to the breast pocket of his suit jacket, feeling for his passport. He had been specifically requested to bring it, but without any further information as to where they were going. God, he hated the Yanks and their overblown sense of ‘need to know’ bullshit.

He could feel the situation slipping from his grasp. Every day there seemed to be some new snippet of information that only served to obscure the big picture rather than reveal it. The last time he had met Eleanor, he had posed a simple question – why now? Why were the Americans doing everything in their power to dismantle the Antarctic Treaty after nearly sixty years of inertia? It didn’t make any sense. What had shifted that could be so fundamental as to precipitate one of the greatest land grabs the world had ever seen?