Beneath the Ice (42 page)

She kept the pistol trained on him as she swung the vehicle round and headed back towards the centre of town.

Long Street was its usual bustle of tourists and half-price bars. The entire stretch had evolved to accommodate the endless migration of backpackers, with everything conveniently crammed into one place. From adverts for shark diving to happy hours that lasted well into the night, it was a magnet for transitory partygoers or the African traveller trying to see the sights on a shoestring.

Bear pulled off the main drag and turned left into one of the smaller side streets. Right at the end of Keerom Street, she parked in front of some heavy iron security gates and, leaving the keys in the ignition, walked back the hundred yards to the nearest in a long line of internet cafés. It was almost empty, with only a couple of teenagers busily tapping away in the far corner.

The manager was a skinny nineteen-year-old with tattoos covering both arms and a hat angled jauntily to one side. As Bear approached, he looked up and smiled. ‘How can I help?’

‘I’ve got some holiday snaps on here,’ she said, raising the flashcard in her hand, ‘but my camera’s bust and I can’t download them. You don’t have one of those card reader things, do you?’

He smiled, giving her an ‘I really shouldn’t’ look that he hoped would gain him a few points when Bear had finished whatever it was she needed to do. Rummaging behind the counter, he reappeared with the device in his hands.

Moving over to the far corner of the room, she plugged it in and watched as a single red dot flashed on the side of the card reader. After everything she had been through, she suddenly had a premonition that the flashcard would be empty or broken, but then a folder appeared on the screen in front of her. Clicking through, she started scanning the files, marvelling at how fastidious Lotta had been. Everything was there, from the initial research phase of the project, to several images of Pearl at the laboratory, congratulating the staff.

Quickly checking over her shoulder and seeing only the hopeful smile of the manager, Bear went online and opened the WikiLeaks website. The not-for-profit media organisation had blown almost every major story on the West’s covert operations since its inception in 2007. They were also no friend to the USA. As news was breaking of the catastrophic situation in the South Ocean, Bear was sure that WikiLeaks would be able to get the story out to the world’s press without being bought or silenced. The only way forward was to go public with the information, and fast.

Dragging the files into their electronic dropbox account, Bear watched as the upload icon spun round and round. Minutes passed while she waited for the data to channel through the ether, expecting that at any moment the door of the internet café would suddenly swing back and the place would fill with shouting soldiers. But none came. There was only the sound of the café’s background music and the occasional burst of laughter from the teenagers in the far corner of the room.

Thirty minutes later, Bear slid her chair back under the desk and, ignoring the attempt at conversation by the manager, walked out. She had one more visit to make.

Her son lived only six streets away. If she was going into hiding, he was coming with her.

LUCA STOOD ON
top of a single tabular iceberg staring out to sea. Amongst the miles and miles of flat sea ice, the iceberg stood like a fortress held captive by the last winter freeze. Its sides were sheer, with crumbling slabs of snow that threatened to splinter off at any moment, forcing him to circle it twice on the Ski-Doo to find a way up. Eventually he had seen a sloping ridge on the southern flank, built up from wind-hardened snow. After ten minutes of climbing, he had reached the top.

Forty feet below he could see Katz and Joel slumped across the saddle of their Ski-Doo with the black Pelican case of lake water jammed into the luggage tray behind. They were staring up at him, desperate to hear some good news after so much time spent driving in the continuous cold. The sun was now up, gradually pulling along the horizon in a low arc, but it did little to warm them. All it left was an orange glow filtering across the clouds, the rays so weak they barely had the strength to touch the ground.

‘Can you see the boat?’ Katz shouted, raising his hand to his mouth to funnel his voice.

Luca didn’t respond. They saw him check his footing, then move over to the far side of the iceberg and out of sight.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Katz swore, slamming his fist down on the handlebars in front of him. His head turned back in the direction they had come, following the long trail of their Ski-Doos. They all knew that unless something miraculous had happened, Stang would be coming for them, and soon. In such a landscape, there was no way to hide their tracks and, with each passing minute, they expected to see his outline suddenly appear on the horizon.

‘We’re wasting too much time,’ Katz growled. ‘Too much time.’

‘Give Luca a chance. He’s doing all he can.’

Joel was seated beside him, still bundled up in the protective down jacket and pants they had taken from GARI. The thick padding engulfed his whole body, leaving only the narrow point of his nose visible, along with the shadowed outline of his eyes. He had said almost nothing on the entire drive out, as the scenery swept past in a continuous blur. Without his glasses, he could barely distinguish the outline of the massive icebergs, let alone help find the ship that was supposed to have docked somewhere nearby.

‘We need to keep moving,’ Katz continued, ignoring him. ‘That bastard will be on our tracks before we know it.’

‘And go where? This is the barrier. There’s nowhere left to run.’

Katz’s gaze snapped back to him, brimming with scorn.

‘Just think of something! What the hell else have you got to do while I do all the driving?’

Joel bristled, but resisted the temptation to respond. All that would do was waste more time. Instead he remained silent, clamping his arms tight around his body for warmth. With a shake of his head, Katz went back to staring up the sheer-sided wall of the iceberg, willing Luca to reappear.

High above the two scientists, he had moved to the very northern edge of the iceberg and was staring out across the water. Open leads ran in between the snow-covered ice, snaking out in all directions like veins around a body. His gaze scanned the horizon, searching for the slightest trace of the ship, while his lips moved in silent prayer. There had been no radio contact with the crew and all Dedov had given him was the GPS coordinates of the ship’s intended docking site. What if the captain had decided to unload somewhere else or had even arrived early and already turned for home?

As endless doubts passed across his mind, Luca suddenly spotted a dark smudge against the otherwise pristine sky. It was like a thumbprint blotched across his vision and he squinted, wondering what it could be. Then, he realised. It was the exhaust plume from the ship’s engines. As he moved a little to one side he could see the tip of the vessel’s prow nestled behind one of the icebergs, slowly bobbing up and down in the sea. The red paint of the hull was there, a streak of colour against the otherwise monochrome landscape.

‘Yes!’ Luca cried, throwing his hands into the air. For a fleeting moment he felt the same sense of release as he had done when climbing out of the old base. The end was so tantalisingly close. Here, right before them, was the way out.

‘I see it!’ he bellowed, despite guessing that the others wouldn’t be able to hear him from such a distance. Turning back, he starting striding across the top of the iceberg, his gaze switching to the sweep of their Ski-Doo tracks in the distance.

He stopped. Something was moving towards them, but so tiny as to be nothing more than a dot on the landscape. The dot blurred, caught between the horizontal line of the ground and the grey sky above, and for a moment he lost sight of it altogether. He trained his eyes a little higher, unsure if it was just a figment of his imagination.

But then he saw it again. Stang was on their trail, and at that distance no more than an hour behind.

Running towards the far edge of the iceberg, Luca saw the others and skidded to a halt. For the briefest moment his mind refused to function, caught between joy at the ship’s sighting and the certainty of Stang’s pursuit.

‘The boat!’ he shouted, stabbing his hand towards a far iceberg.

There was a roar of excitement from Katz, and Joel jerked his head round in the massive hood of his down jacket. But before they could reply, Luca swung round and motioned towards their tracks. The meaning was only too clear – Stang was upon them. Without another word he disappeared from view, retracing his steps along the ridge and eventually reaching ground level.

By the time he arrived at the parked Ski-Doos, his cheeks were flushed from running and his breath came out as great clouds in the freezing air. Katz started to say something but Luca brushed past him, immediately jumping on top of his Ski-Doo.

‘Come on, move!’ he shouted, slamming his thumb into the throttle. In a spray of snow from the rear tracks, he swung the machine round, powering across to the distant promise of the Russian ship that, against all odds, was right on schedule.

The
Akademia Federov
was a vessel of icebreaking class, constructed deep in the Soviet era when economic viability came a distant second to function. Its immense aft deck could fit two helicopters simultaneously, while its prow had a flattened, hammerhead design used to force the ship up on to the top of the ice floes and so break them under its weight. A collection of steel turrets and navigation equipment crowded the deck two-thirds of the way along the main hull, nestled directly below the piloting bridge.

Behind the panels of reinforced glass sat Nikolai Serov, the ship’s captain for over eight years. He leant back in his usual chair with a cup of stale black coffee in his right hand, his hawk eyes following every inch of the unloading process that had been going on all morning.

His naturally weathered face had been locked in a continuous scowl for the last two days as their ship had passed along the coastline of Droning Maud Land and through a genocidal mass of dead fish and marine life. Nikolai was not a man to be shocked easily, but he was a man of the sea, and the sheer level of destruction had shaken him to his core. He had immediately phoned back reports to the main office in Saint Petersburg and even emailed some of the more ghastly images, but all that they had received in response was a note informing them that the Polar Academy was ‘aware of the situation’.

Nicolai could barely believe that any of the bureaucrats back home were really aware of the cataclysmic scale of the destruction. It looked as if the whole ocean had been emptied of fish. Already the stench of the rotting carcasses was overpowering and, despite the recent spell of clement weather, all the crew had preferred to stay inside with the storm doors closed against it.

But Nicolai had been mesmerised by the carnage and unable to pull himself away. For hours he had leant over the bow rail, just watching the dead fish lap against the hull, unable to comprehend what might have triggered such a disaster. As they trawled along the edge of the world, surrounded by only ice and death, it felt as though some kind of biblical apocalypse were finally upon them.

He had stayed up most of last night, drinking viscous black coffee and staring out across the endless miles of broken pack ice. After much deliberation, he had decided to continue with their mission and reach the docking site. His reasoning was simple: what could be gained by turning back? The fish were already dead.

For the last three hours the main crane had been working ceaselessly, raising the containers off the deck before swinging them across to the land-fast ice of Antarctica on their port side. The ship was docked parallel to the cliff and although the sea was calm, it was a complicated procedure and the ship’s pilot was constantly throttling backward or forward in an effort to keep them steady.

Worse still was the fact that only two days ago he had been forced to repair the crane’s main hydraulic system and had personally rewired almost the entire system. Now a mess of black pipes lay exposed on the deck and Nicolai was convinced that it would only last so long. As if to aggravate matters, the new crane driver, Andrey, was swinging the containers around like a child with a toy.

Nicolai watched as a twenty-foot shipping container swung in front of him, ends pivoting so high as almost to twist the steel cables. Jumping up from his seat, he jammed his thumb down on the radio switch.

‘Andrey!’ he thundered. ‘Take it easy on the unloading or you’ll be repairing that winch by yourself.’

A voice crackled in response.
‘Da,
Captain. But it’s Muller’s fault. There’s too much tension on the line.’

Nikolai rolled his eyes at his men’s petty squabbles. There was nothing else for it. He was going to have to transfer Andrey off crane duty, but right now he couldn’t think of a single other task the lad could do adequately.

As his brow furrowed even further, he suddenly saw someone moving on the edge of the ice cliff. He peered closer, knowing full well that nobody should be out there at this time of year and wondering if one of his own crew had somehow made it across.

The ship rolled in the current, causing the figure to disappear from view. Nicolai waited, half wondering if he might be seeing things. With all the goings on over the last few days, he barely trusted himself any longer. Then, as the boat righted itself, he caught sight of the figure once more, but this time it wasn’t just one man. There were three of them.

Grabbing the radio, he raised the mic to his unshaven chin.

‘Muller and Balakin, get on to the aft deck. There’s someone on the barrier.’

There was a puzzled pause. ‘But what are they doing there, Captain?’

Nikolai gritted his teeth. ‘Just get down there, Muller! And I do mean
now
.’

A few minutes later, the three Russians were standing on the deck of the mighty vessel. They stood right up against the freezing metal rail, trying to listen over the gentle roll and splash of the ocean. They could hear the voices of the men on the barrier, but were just too far away to be able to understand what was being said.