Beneath the Ice (3 page)

The canteen was nothing more than five rows of tables with coffee cups grouped in their centre. The movement of countless workers could be mapped by the grimy footprints zig-zagging across the linoleum floor, while heavy gas piping ran around the canteen’s circumference. The room’s sole redeeming feature came from the row of heavy-rimmed windows that faced out to sea, each accompanied by an old armchair, battered by age and neglect.

Bates stepped further into the room, passing a serving hatch surrounded by notices and official reminders. At the centre, as if enshrined by them all, was the front page of an old
FHM
magazine featuring a provocative, bikini-clad girl airbrushed to perfection. Bates’ eyes lingered on her for a second, before the image was lost to a waft of steam curling up from a dented urn standing directly beneath. The smell of old, boiled tea rose up to meet him.

Bates smiled. It was exactly as he had imagined, only grubbier. The entire oil rig was like a repository for lost souls, isolated by hundreds of miles of seawater. Here, the workers existed in a kind of stasis – no past, no future, just each day blurring into the next while the machines sucked the oil from the ground with unending thirst. People came here to escape the outside world. They were cut off and far removed from any semblance of a normal, functioning society. His old school friend, Luca Matthews, must have sunk low indeed to have ended up in such a place.

In the farthest armchair, half turned from him, he could see the crooked knees of someone staring out to sea. He moved closer, surer with each step that the legs belonged to the man he had travelled so far to see.

‘I thought you always hated the water,’ Bates began, hovering just beside the chair.

Luca Matthews looked up, eyes hazy from staring out of the window for so long. He looked distant and unfriendly; with unwashed hair that had matted into strands and now clung to the sides of his face. His cheeks had hollowed since they had last met, the skin tighter and creased at the outer corners of his eyes. He clung to a tin mug brimming with tea, his long, supple fingers bandaged in a vain effort to heal the deep cracks running over his knuckles.

A few seconds passed before Luca’s expression softened. Then, slowly, the beginnings of a smile appeared.

‘I hate the water because you nearly drowned us once in your father’s boat.’

‘You know, he never forgave me for losing that boat.’

After carefully putting down the mug, Luca got to his feet. Bates could see his long, muscular limbs through the threadbare T-shirt he was wearing. His abdomen was utterly devoid of fat, uncurling like the body of a snake. As he reached forward to hug Bates, the smell of dirt and turpentine wafted from him. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Norm?’

Bates smiled at the mention of his old nickname. On their very first day at school together, one of the older kids had taunted him that he must be related to the lead character in
Psycho
and the name had stuck. He hadn’t heard it in almost three years – the last time he and Luca had met.

‘That’s a question I could very easily ask you. Real shithole you’ve found yourself here.’

Luca made no effort to refute this. Instead, he stared at his visitor for several seconds before suddenly seeming to check himself and raising his mug up to offer some tea. Bates winced, genuinely appalled by the idea.

‘Guess there’s no need to ask how the flight was,’ Luca said.

‘Weird, isn’t it?’ his friend replied, with a thin smile. ‘I get motion sickness from just about every form of transport and there I go, choosing a job in the bloody Foreign Office. You’d have thought I might have opted for something with a bit less travel as part of the job description.’

Luca didn’t respond, his mind still preoccupied by Bates’ unannounced visit. In all the time they had known each other, Bates had only ever come to see him for a reason, and already Luca was trying to guess what it might be. But as he stared into his old school friend’s face, he was struck by how much Bates had changed. He looked softer, paunchier.

When they had first met, Kieran Bates had been obsessive about martial arts and his body had borne the hallmarks of strict training. He had been supple and lean, with explosively fast reactions. Now, he looked every ounce the drab office worker, beaten down by life and the daily commute. But as Luca studied him more closely, he wondered if there wasn’t perhaps something more deliberate about this change in his friend. Anonymity was an attribute highly prized in Bates’ line of work.

‘You’re looking well,’ Luca lied.

‘I look fat. But at least I’ve seen the inside of a shower room in the last month. You, my old friend, smell like the arse end of a donkey,’ Bates replied while idly scratching his thinning hair. ‘Still, I guess there aren’t too many ladies to impress around here – aside from Miss November over there.’

Luca’s eyes flicked to the
FHM
poster on the wall. He had passed it hundreds of times, but would never have been able to say what edition it was. Bates had always been like that. He had a photographic memory and could remember even the most spurious details of their childhood years.

‘So how have you been keeping?’ Bates offered, his smile widening.

Luca shrugged. ‘Come on, Norm, we’ve known each other for far too long. You didn’t come all this way to check up on me.’

‘Fair enough. Same old Luca – straight to the point.’

Dragging the neighbouring armchair a little closer, Bates hitched up his suit trousers and perched on the edge.

‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘there’s been an incident. A couple of scientists out in Antarctica got themselves trapped in a crevasse last week. Messy business. They had to cut them out with a damn blowtorch. The closest one to a guide in the whole group was a man named Sommers. They found him with all the skin stripped off his fingers from where he’d tried to claw his way out.’

He looked to Luca for a reaction, but his expression remained blank.

‘You see, the scientists were drilling into this lake – a very special lake. Nearly two miles under the surface of the ice, they’ve found
unfrozen
seawater. It’s been there for nearly twenty million years, with all sorts of lost enzymes and bacteria locked within.’ Bates crunched his fists together as if trying to trap the water in his own hands. ‘Imagine it, Luca! Bacteria that was around when the world just began.’

‘Bacteria?’ Luca repeated. ‘Since when did you give a shit about bacteria?’

‘Don’t knock the little stuff. Life’s in the detail. Aside from finding unknown microbes, drilling down that low tells you exactly what the atmosphere was like all those years ago. Kind of important if you want to prove whether climate change is man-made or not.’

Luca’s eyes passed over the ceiling of the canteen as if encompassing the entire oil rig.

‘You need to drill into an Antarctic lake to tell you that?’

Bates ignored him, leaning forward in his seat.

‘Four different nations have pooled their resources and come together on this project. We’ve been at it for three years now. And this January, the Russian team finally succeeded in drilling into the lake.’ Bates shook his head in disbelief. ‘Drunken sods actually made it on schedule. Then it was supposed to be the British team’s turn and our boys were tasked with extracting the first samples. Only now, we can’t get back to the damn drill site.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The route goes over this narrow pass and that’s exactly where the tractor was swallowed. Those idiots had been driving over a crevasse field for years and not even realised.’

Luca blew the steam off his tea, already guessing what was coming.

‘We need someone to get our boys back to the drill site before Antarctica closes down for winter in just over a week’s time. The seasons are about to change. Soon, it’ll be twenty-four-hour darkness down there and as soon as that happens,
nothing
moves in or out for the next ten months. So, if we don’t get back to the drill site before then . . .’

‘. . . the hole will re-seal,’ Luca interjected.

‘Yeah, the hole will re-seal. And three years of Russian drilling will be up in smoke.’

‘So just plot another route.’

‘Believe me, we’ve tried. The only way back to the lake is over a mountain. The lake sits right in the middle of a semi-circular range of them. They bar the drill site to one side, while the other is locked in by the sea.’

‘Why not just use a boat then?’

‘You ever heard of the barrier?’ Bates asked, but his short pause suggested that the question was purely rhetorical. ‘It’s a two-hundred-foot-high ice sheet that surrounds most of Antarctica. There are only a few places where you can actually dock a ship down there, and this lake isn’t one of them.’ He gave a smile that faded as quickly as it had appeared. ‘There’s a good reason why ye olde sailors used to stamp
Here be Dragons
and have done with it. Bottom line, Luca – we need a climber.’

He had barely finished the sentence before Luca started shaking his head. ‘Come on, Norm, choose someone current. I can name five guys who could do the job for you.’

‘It’s a walk, Luca. Barely any climbing involved,’ Bates countered, ignoring his protests. ‘All you have to do is babysit a few scientists across to a lake. That’s it.’

Before Luca could interject, Bates continued, ‘Job starts in Cape Town. From there, it’s a five-hour flight due south to the ice runway in Droning Maud Land.’

‘Cape Town?’ Luca asked, having been to the city many times before. All that time spent on the southern tip of Africa and he had never known that it was a gateway to Antarctica.

‘That’s right. And we’ll pay you twelve grand a week. Starting tomorrow, with a minimum of four weeks guaranteed.’

‘Twelve grand? That’s a bit more than the going rate, isn’t it?’ Luca stared hard at his friend. ‘You little shit. There’s a catch, isn’t there?’

Bates didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and, taking Luca’s mug, walked back to the tea urn by the counter. He refilled it, careful not to get any of the noxious fluid on his suit trousers, before handing it back and sitting down next to his friend.

‘I mentioned the Russians. Well, the head of this international base is a man called Vladimir Dedov. Everyone calls him ‘‘The Poet’’ because he’s published one or two works. I read some of his stuff and it’s actually not bad. Lacks the self-pity that most Russians love prattling on about. Anyway, he’s been on our radar for a while now as he’s been using the science bases to smuggle contraband.’

Luca sipped his tea, wincing slightly as the scalding liquid touched his lips. He pictured the scene in Antarctica; a web of isolated science bases, all operated by different nations and shipping hundreds of tons of cargo each year in machinery and supplies. If you wanted to move contraband from Russia to almost any other continent, it would be easy enough just to deliver it to their science base. There were no border controls or customs; there were barely any people. The package would then be forward shipped using the base’s own logistics to get it where it needed to be. Who would even suspect that anything illegal would be coming out of a place like Antarctica anyway?

‘So what’s he smuggling?’

The tip of Bates’ tongue wetted his lips.

‘We’ve got a lot of history, Luca, so I’ll tell you. But just so we are clear, this wasn’t part of the brief.’

Luca’s expression hardened. ‘You came to see me. Don’t forget that.’

Bates nodded. He sniffed the air before lowering his voice. ‘He’s smuggling weapons-grade uranium from the old Soviet bloc.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Luca hissed, instinctively looking towards the door.

‘His brother-in-law is the military contact,’ Bates continued, now speaking faster. ‘They ship it via Antarctica as it’s the only place on earth no one has eyes on. No spy satellites look that far south, which makes it impossible to track remotely. We just need you . . .’

Luca raised his hands, finally silencing him. ‘Enough! Let me spell it out for you, Norm. I’m not going within a hundred miles of some Russian lunatic who smuggles nuclear fucking bombs!’

Bates glowered at him, willing him to lower his voice. He had already grabbed Luca’s wrist, the strength of his grip whitening the skin around his fingertips.

‘Stop being so damn melodramatic. This is a sixty-year-old scientist who writes bloody poetry. He makes a bit on the side smuggling a few grams of very nasty stuff. All I am asking you to do is insert some spyware into the International Base’s main computer.’

‘Spyware? What the hell do I know about spyware?’

‘You don’t need to know anything. All you have to do is insert a memory stick and run the programme. It’s that easy.’ There was a pause before Bates continued, his voice steadying. ‘Listen, Luca, this is the perfect chance for us to intercept Dedov’s transmissions. Trust me, opportunities like this don’t come around too often. Down in the science base, every email, phone call and text message has to flow through the same satellite connection. It’s like it’s all going through one pipe. Dedov is sending encrypted messages to his military contact and we’ve only been able to intercept a few of them. The reality is that if we’re going to understand what’s going on, we need to get the intel from source.’

Luca stared at him, his jaw clenching with hostility. ‘Seriously?’ he asked. ‘You are seriously coming to me and laying this on my doorstep?’

Bates didn’t respond, just waiting for him to calm down. A moment passed before he eased himself up from the chair, sighing heavily.

‘I guess you’re right. I shouldn’t have come,’ he said, seemingly more to himself than Luca. ‘I just thought it wouldn’t be a big deal for you to plug something into a computer. That you would have done it for an old friend.’

Taking a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he dabbed at the top of his perspiring hairline.

‘But I suppose this is a lot to ask. And this has all kind of happened out of the blue.’

After a moment he turned back to look at Luca, his expression softer. ‘It’s been a long time, huh? Since we climbed together.’

‘A lifetime.’