Beneath the Ice (34 page)

Bear froze, a trail of dots suddenly connecting in her mind. The Americans couldn’t have the flashcard out in the open because it implicated Pearl, who in turn was an American citizen. They must have known that the seed could cause one of the biggest environmental disasters the world had ever seen and yet were still content for it to be launched. So why would they deliberately try to trigger such an event?

The American boats . . . She had seen them lined up in dry dock in Cape Town harbour. There had been the tow cables on the stern with the coils of hydrophones attached. Bear had presumed they were heading up to the Niger Delta, but now she realised the boats weren’t heading north at all. They were at the southernmost tip of Africa because it was the closest refuelling point to Antarctica.

This was all about America, all about oil.

If the US triggered a massive environmental disaster in the international waters of Antarctica and somehow managed to shift the blame on to another nation, that would put the entire Antarctic Treaty in jeopardy. The Americans could claim that the tenets of the treaty had been violated and that it was no longer binding. The entire continent would then be opened up for the taking, and the first nations on the scene would plant their flags and stake their claims.

Bear’s expression went blank as she considered the ramifications. It would be the biggest land grab of the century, and if Bates was involved, then it followed the British government was too.

‘
Putain
,’ she breathed, as she wondered how many others were complicit.

Bates looked on, confusing her introspection with fear. He watched as she blinked several times before focusing on him once more.

‘Now you listen to me,’ she said. ‘This
is
going to leak to the press, and you bastards are not getting away with it. So why don’t you run away and hide? Go cover your tracks. And if governments fall, then so be it.’

Bates shook his head. ‘You’re wounded, weak, and taking on this whole thing like it’s a personal vendetta. Do what’s right for little Nathan, Bear, hand over the flashcard. It’s the only play you have left.’

She glowered at him, the mention of her son’s name making her eyes flash venomously.

‘Don’t you ever fucking talk about my son again!’ she hissed.

‘Give me the card,’ Bates continued, ‘or there is nothing more I can do to save you.’

‘I don’t have it. I mailed it to myself.’

‘No, I don’t think you did. There was no time to do anything else apart from run when you left Interjet.’

As he spoke, his grip tightened on her forearm. There was an urgency to the way he spoke that couldn’t be faked.

‘Once you’re out of my hands,’ he told her, ‘there’s no going back. It’s the system, Bear. Even I can’t change that. Please, do what’s right for everybody.’

From the other side of the hangar they heard the sound of military boots. A team of eight men, dressed in black with M4 assault rifles at the ready, had rushed though the opening and was rapidly covering the distance between them. They fanned out in quick order, blocking the only other exit from the hangar.

‘Back away, sir,’ the lead soldier shouted, but instead of moving Bates stared into Bear’s eyes. There was a sadness in his that suddenly made him look incredibly tired.

‘I need you to back away, sir,’ came the soldier’s voice once more. ‘Now!’

‘You’re on your own,’ Bates whispered, before slowly moving to one side.

Bear stared from one face to the next as the soldiers advanced towards her.

‘Don’t you fucking touch me!’ she shouted, retreating a pace. ‘I am a French citizen. I have rights . . .’

The two leading soldiers rushed towards her. Bear lashed out with her arms, flailing them towards the closest man’s face, but they bounced off his forearms as he easily defended himself. In a single movement he pivoted her whole body round, while the second soldier darted forward and jabbed a syringe pen into her neck. Almost immediately, Bear’s legs gave way. Without another word, she went limp in his arms.

‘You’re early,’ Bates said to the soldier in command.

The man only shrugged in response as Bear’s body was dragged across the hangar floor and hauled in to the side of a waiting truck.

KIERAN BATES PULLED
open the iron door and stumbled out into the centre of the old farmyard. He felt sick and needed some fresh air, but it was already past midday and outside the searing hot sun of the Karoo Desert beat down upon the tin roofs and mud-stained, breezeblock walls with stifling intensity.

Pulling open the pack of cigarettes he had swiped off the counter, he jammed one into the corner of his mouth and lit up. He sucked back the thick, oaky taste of the American tobacco – his first cigarette in over eight years. He knew that he had a highly addictive personality and it had cost him a lot to quit. But today he just didn’t give a shit.

He let his eyes survey one building and the next, feeling more tired than he could ever remember. The farm was one of the CIA’s main interrogation centres for Southern Africa and comprised six outbuildings set about a central farmhouse, long-since defunct. The site was intentionally remote, with no phone lines or landing strips within a fifty-mile radius.

A dirt track was the single route into the whole complex, as dusty as it was interminable. It cut through the Karoo’s boundless landscape with nothing but a solitary fence running to its left-hand side. Beyond there were no other signs of human inhabitation, only an occasional cluster of sheep chewing on dry cud.

Bates raised the cigarette to his mouth, then coughed violently. It was a vile habit and was only making him feel worse, but there was something self-destructive about the whole process. In some small way he felt it help ease the burden of what he had just seen.

Eleanor Page’s contact out on the ice had informed her that Pearl had launched the seed. Over the ensuing twenty-four hours, Bates had watched events unfold with a mounting sense of disquiet.

At first everyone had waited, wondering if the seed would indeed chain react as it was supposed to do. From the Americans’ point of view, another vital element was that it should penetrate the ice surrounding the lake and, in so doing, leach out into the open ocean. Although Pearl had discounted the possibility in his haste to succeed, the Americans had the original report that Lotta Bukovsky had sent to the FBI, and like her knew the ice to be much thinner than anyone had at first supposed.

But nothing about this was predictable. Throughout the entire waiting period, Eleanor Page had thrown herself into almost every other aspect of the operation, demanding updates when there weren’t any, and insisting on progress when little or none could be made.

Already, she had positioned a boat called the
Sea Shepherd
off the coast of Droning Maud Land, having surreptitiously persuaded the famous environmentalist skipper, Dougie Hayward, that the Japanese were whaling in the area. The
Sea Shepherd
had charged off at once, her crew chosen specifically for their love of direct action and their incorruptible consciences. But they had been chasing phantom radar bleeps, with Eleanor keeping them close to the coastline so that they would be the first to see the fallout from Pearl’s experiment.

Time passed, the uncertainty of it all making her second-guess every part of the operation. But then, the first effects of the seed had registered on the satellite imagery. It was out past the lake ice, spreading into the black waters of the Southern Ocean.

At first it looked innocent enough, with barely anything to report, but all that changed with time. From the lake’s epicentre it spread out for one mile, then for two. On it went, the reaction defusing quicker and quicker, until it passed the edge of the floating icebergs and into the ocean proper.

Bates had stared at the satellite imagery, refreshing the page every few minutes as he watched Pearl’s original dream of vast phytoplankton blooms become a holocaust of spiking nitrous oxide. The de-oxygenation of the water was complete, killing every living organism in its path. In less than a day, an immense desert had been created in one of the richest marine environments on earth.

Then came the emergency reports from Hayward and the crew of the
Sea Shepherd
. Right on cue, the non-governmental charity had begun beaming back imagery via satellite to the news agencies, who were barely bothering to check its authenticity before splurging it on every channel and broadsheet.

And Hayward’s imagery wasn’t the dry abstract of a satellite photograph. It was stark and graphic. It showed the grim reality of millions of dead fish and krill floating on the surface of the water. They littered the ocean as far as the eye could see, just bobbing to and fro in the icy current, the only break in the apocalyptic scene coming in the form of the icebergs jutting up through the surface of the water.

But the headline grabber came in the form of a pod of orca whales that had been swimming near the port side of the vessel. Hayward had photographed their perfect white bellies as they lay upended, their hulking frames lapping up against the steel hull of the boat. Amongst the family unit was the smaller dorsal fin of a young adolescent. The tip was framed to the right of the picture, as it seemed to reach out, grasping for its dead mother. The composition was flawless, a Pulitzer by anyone’s reckoning.

Bates had sifted through the imagery being fed back, his stomach turning at the sheer scale of the destruction. Eleanor Page had told him that the damage would be ‘modest’ and ‘confined to the coastline’, and he had gone along with the whole project believing that to be true. Instead, the despoliation was cataclysmic. What he was witnessing was nothing less than the death of an ocean.

Already calls had been made for the entire assembly of Antarctic nations to meet in emergency session. Amongst the murky details and panicked reports, the question of who was to blame was starting to be asked and Eleanor was playing her contacts to the full. The culprit would be sought out, official channels stated, and punitive action taken, but behind each admonishment came a secondary message – if others had so blatantly violated the treaty, then why should any nation be forced to abide by its terms?

Bates shook his head in disgust and was about to throw what remained of the cigarette to the ground when there was a noise from the building just in front. He turned as a figure emerged, followed by a trail of thrash metal music. The sudden explosion of angry, screeching sound echoed around the farmyard before the figure mercifully slammed shut the sound-proof doors. Bates knew the interrogators often used loud music to keep subjects awake in the final hours of sleep deprivation.

The figure paced across the yard towards the main building, then spotted Bates and his cigarette. He paused, patting the breast pocket of his shirt looking for his own pack, before switching direction and approaching.

‘Mind if I steal one of those?’ he asked, stretching out his hand.

‘Sure.’

Bates offered up the pack as the man tilted his head. One eye scrunched up as he peered closer at the security tag hanging around Bates’ neck from a beaded chain. He seemed to relax after reading it and hoisted his white shirtsleeves a little higher, revealing pale, wiry arms. Bates guessed him to be about forty years old, but it was hard to tell given that the skin around his eyes was dark and mottled from lack of exposure to the sun.

‘Name’s Devin,’ he said, his voice thick with an American drawl. ‘You part of the programme? Because I haven’t seen you around.’

‘Just a drop off.’

‘Right,’ said the other man, stretching the word out. ‘You’re that English fella. I heard about it from some of the other guys. Got real nasty down in that township. Nanya or some shit.’

‘Nyanga,’ Bates corrected.

‘Right.’

The man’s squint narrowed as he sucked on the cigarette. He shifted round so that his back was to the sun, his face now masked by shadow.

‘Well, I’ll tell you something. I’m looking forward to getting the hell out of this place. Been cooking my ass off here for an age and thought I was about to be rotated out.’ He took another deep suck on the cigarette, with the paper crackling slightly. ‘No such luck. Fucking whole world’s on fire right now, and I guess we gotta get to it.’ He nodded. ‘Thanks for the cigarette, though. Appreciate it.’

‘Any time.’

Bates watched the man work his way back across the yard before scanning his pass through the side of the metal security door. The automatic lock buzzed open and he disappeared from view.

Devin must be one of the interrogators. His slow, affable manner ran contrary to everything Bates would have anticipated from a man employed by the American rendition programme. He shook his head at the thought. He had seen the apparatus evolve from one or two exceptions that were surreptitiously granted post 9/11, to a monstrous machine that swallowed people whole. Rendition meant no lawyers and no appeal, just hundreds of detainees lost to the ‘system’. For them, the days would blur one into the next, in a process with only one stated aim – to break them.

First, new arrivals would strip for a medical and to be photographed. Then they would be dressed in hospital gowns and tied to the back wall of the cell. Sometimes just that was enough to make them talk. Having to suffer the indignity of shitting and pissing where you stood was a powerful motivator.

Others, however, took more persuasion, and dehumanising the subject and depriving them of any sense of time or routine was the next step. Interrogations would be sporadic and vary in length. The subjects would be moved from one cell to the next in a ceaseless and seemingly pointless rotation. It gave them nothing to cling on to, no sense of order or control. Combined with continual sleep deprivation, few of the detainees lasted more than a week.

The concept of rendition was something that didn’t sit well with Bates. He liked things to have an end, closure even, and while he had no issue with taking down the enemy, he did have one with a rapidly expanding population of detainees languishing indefinitely. Instead of a viable solution, rendition offered only a grey halfway house, where the CIA put people that it couldn’t quite convict in a trial. Invariably, the detainees ended up staying on a permanent basis.