Double Deal

by John M. Green

  ‘Without his walking cane?’

  ‘I’ll check on that. Says he even left his chess buddy, guy next door, in the lurch. No call, no apology, an’ they been playin’ each other every week since his wife and kid died, same time, same place.’ He looked up at the camera, ‘Ma’am, our folks are doin’ what they can to track Buckingham down.’

  Best of luck, thought Isabel. A doddery nonagenarian drops a bombshell on the country he’d served his whole life with distinction then runs off without his walking cane?

  She didn’t think so.

  12

  President Diaz opened the memo from State. ‘Here,’ she shared the first page on the screen so Spencer, Hirsty and Linden could view what she was reading. ‘See that second paragraph: We have not yet found any record of a Project Gusher in Greenland in the 1960s. But the United States did conduct a Project Ice Worm there in the same period, and Willard Buckingham did work on that.’

  She read on. ‘Oh, great, terrific, this is just what we need,’ she grimaced as she leant towards her screen.

  ‘Surely this can’t be,’ she said. ‘With Ice Worm we were tunnelling … I don’t believe the insanity of this … we were tunnelling under the Greenland glacier to construct … hell on earth … we were digging a network of nuclear silos … And if that isn’t bad enough, it says we hid the whole damn thing for thirty years from the Danes and the Greenlanders, the very people on whose sovereign territory we were doing this. Thirty years. Hell.’

  ‘Even worse, if that’s possible,’ said Prentice, ‘we only fessed up in 1995 because we had no choice. The Danes called us out on it.’

  ‘So if we come out now and claim Project Gusher never existed,’ said Secretary Linden, ‘the world will say Here goes America again … that we’re just doing a repeat of what we did with Project Ice Worm. Damn!’

  All four of them were speed reading the memo. Project Ice Worm was a highly classified US Army project sanctioned by the Kennedy administration. The aim was to give America the capacity to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviets from their near north, from Greenland. If geology had not stopped the project, the US would have installed a network of six hundred nuclear missile silos beneath the ice sheet, in complete contravention of international law.

  ‘What was JFK thinking? The Cold War indeed,’ said Isabel, her voice bitter, angry.

  ‘Ice Worm was not America’s finest hour for sure, ma’am,’ said Hirsty. ‘But the thing is, we didn’t go through with it.’

  ‘We didn’t pull out because we got a sudden shot of morality,’ said Prentice. ‘We pulled out simply because our experts got the glacial science wrong.’

  According to the memo, the US Army engineers were six long, secret years into tunnelling when their ‘perfectly’ designed shafts started to buckle and twist. Even back then the experts knew glaciers weren’t static, that they flowed, but what these whizzes hadn’t counted on was that the particular glacier they were burrowing into was moving a lot faster than their models predicted.

  ‘If we’d actually got around to installing any nukes there,’ said Spencer, ‘the shifting ice would have crushed them, which in turn would have caused a nuclear holocaust. Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’

  ‘It was of a different time, sir,’ said Hirsty. ‘Ice science was in its infancy.’

  To Isabel, this defence of what was plainly an outrage was more than misplaced patriotism. ‘Of a different time?’ She almost spat the phrase. ‘The issue isn’t the ice science. The issue here is our country’s criminal misconduct and our naked hubris in doing whatever we liked on another nation’s sovereign soil without their permission or even their knowledge. That is the issue. Morality is not relative, Mr Hirsty.’

  Isabel was fuming. As she saw it, Ice Worm was yet one more disgraceful example of powerful men taking for granted that they and their enablers could escape censure for their corrupt behaviour by keeping it out of the spotlight.

  ‘It was of a different time, you say? Well, this president will not stand for that as an excuse for behaviour that is, and always was, completely reprehensible.’

  As Hirsty’s mouth dropped open, a smiling Davey, his arms stretched out, flew into Isabel’s office pretending to be an airplane. The boy was wearing blue, she noticed. The colour looked better on him than on her, probably because it brought out his gorgeous eyes, the ones she loved waking up to those mornings when she’d find him patiently standing by her bedside in the Residence, his head peeking just over the top of her mattress, his little hands cuddling his fluffy toy penguin, Pip.

  After several fast but imaginary loop-the-loops of her office Davey handed her a mint and started signing to her, again asking about the eulogy.

  She pointed to the video screen and signed back, ‘Darling, I’m tied up and will be a while. Say hello to Mr Prentice, Mr Linden and Mr Hirsty before you scoot off.’

  The boy saluted, then banked, turned and jetted out of the room. She popped the candy into her mouth but it was so strong her eyes immediately started to water.

  Just after Davey flew out of the room, one of her assistants brought in a sheet of paper and placed it before her. It was a hard copy of a new Endz of the Earth media release, the second of the day.

  She sucked on the mint and held the sheet up to the screen. ‘It didn’t take long. The Endz people are doing exactly what we were worried about. Here … Earlier today we exposed Project Gusher in Greenland, a sordid American crime against humanity, which successive administrations have conspired to conceal for 70 years. When the US inevitably denies Project Gusher, remember that they have form on this … And there they spell out, in all its elaborate finery, what happened with Ice Worm.’

  She was about to put down the page when another paragraph caught her eye. ‘These two projects, Gusher and Ice Worm, were but two corrupt elements in a 160-year US strategy to dominate and violate the Arctic. Over that period, America has repeatedly tried to buy Greenland outright but each time Denmark has said no. Refusing to see their naked imperialist ambitions stymied, America simply trampled on another nation’s sovereignty. They did that with the Ice Worm nuclear program, which Denmark forced them to admit in 1995 and—’

  ‘Ma’am, that is utter bull dust,’ said Hirsty. ‘Anyone with a wit of knowledge about federal politics knows that kind of long-term thinkin’ simply don’t exist.’

  Irony from Hirsty? That was new, thought Isabel, and ironic itself.

  13

  Endz of the Earth were claiming that the two projects were sturdy rungs in a tottering American ladder built over the past 160 years to attain Arctic supremacy. Four other rungs were the US’s historic but futile attempts to actually buy Greenland – in 1867, 1910, 1947 and 2019. Each one was set out in a background note the State Department had sent Isabel before her own ineffectual intervention in the Greenland–China negotiations.

  Owning Greenland was not a long-term strategy, it was merely a seductive idea that popped its head up every few decades.

  The 1867 attempt came straight after then Secretary of State William Seward successfully negotiated the Alaska Purchase from Russia. Having bought control of Canada’s western flank, he was keen to do the same to its north as part of a broader plan to prise Canada out of the despised British Empire. Buying Greenland would ‘greatly increase [Canada’s] inducements, peacefully and cheerfully, to become part of the American Union’. But his brilliant plan and the seventy-two-page report supporting it got leaked and Congress laughed it out of the Capitol, literally.

  It took forty or so more years before America tried again, in 1910 during William Taft’s presidency, and the rationale that time was to protect America’s southern states via a tortuously complicated territory swap.

  The first step was the US offering Denmark the Philippine island of Mindanao in exchange for two Danish territories – the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean and Greenland. Denmark, in turn, would swap Mindanao with Germany in return for territory Prussia had seized from Denmark in 18
64.

  But the combination of World War I and the deal’s complexity killed off the idea. By 1917, the US was gripped by the fear that Germany would invade Denmark, which would mean the Kaiser would get control of the Virgin Islands and endanger America to its near south. So the US dropped its interest in Greenland and instead threatened to invade the Virgin Islands, thereby ‘persuading’ Denmark to sell them the islands for $25 million in gold.

  The years marched on and three decades later, soon after the victory in World War II and with the new Cold War under way, President Truman’s secretary of state James Byrnes got up a new head of Arctic steam and tossed down a bid for Greenland, offering $100 million in gold. America’s objective that time was to flank Russia to its near north. Despite the Danes’ gratitude for the Allied efforts in defeating the Nazis, they turned the offer down.

  Then came President Donald Trump in 2019. Owning Greenland, he said, statesmanlike, ‘would be nice. It’s essentially a large real estate deal.’

  His approach generated world-wide derision, especially from Denmark and Greenland. But, as Isabel now knew, that was the catalyst for China to quietly start working up its own plan to control Greenland.

  While Isabel had been briefed on these attempts to buy Greenland, and now on Project Ice Worm, the only information she had on Project Gusher was from Endz of the Earth’s two media releases.

  According to them, JFK’s covert effort to drill for oil under the Greenland ice sheet was not motivated by the Cold War. Instead, it was ‘peak oil’, a genuine alarm back in the 1960s. ‘Peak oil’ was fear that the world’s oil supply would peak during the seventies and then rapidly start running out. For America’s rapidly expanding industries, the search for new sources of oil became a desperate national imperative.

  That her presidency was being tarnished with a sullied 1960s brush was burning a fire inside her. Isabel was politically committed to a different kind of ‘peak oil’ – not the mid-twentieth-century fear that the supply of oil would peak, but the current century’s imperative for the demand for fossil fuels to decline.

  According to Endz of the Earth and the professor who’d gone AWOL without his walking cane, Project Gusher was hatched when fossil fuel specialists pinpointed a vast sea of hydrocarbons hidden under Greenland’s glaciers.

  President Kennedy himself authorised funding for the CIA to mount a covert oil exploration and drilling program inside Greenland to run side-by-side with the nuclear missile project. Project Gusher was so secret, said Endz of the Earth, that not even Project Ice Worm’s top leadership knew about it.

  The unexpected glacial instability that terminated Ice Worm was one of the reasons for stopping Gusher. The other was that Gusher’s blasting and drilling program had critically destabilised the glacial floor.

  Over the ensuing decades, claimed Endz of the Earth, what began as mere cracks became fissures which turned into caverns which grew into the gigantic underground lake that was melting the ice above it and accelerating the planet’s rising sea levels.

  The quote from Professor Buckingham in the Endz media release was blunt: ‘I did it. I saw it. And I helped cover it up. But at ninety-three years old, I can no longer stomach the notion that our nation’s dirtiest secret will die with me.’

  If this was a hoax, as Hirsty kept assuring her, then who was behind it?

  China, Isabel calculated, was the obvious culprit. Hou else could it be? She almost laughed at her own pun. Instead she picked up her water glass and took a sip.

  But what if it wasn’t China?

  Tushkin. Yes, it could be Russia. Easily. She put it to the men on the call.

  ‘That’d be kind of perverse, ma’am. Endz of the Earth have been raisin’ millions to hit back at Tushkin for takin’ out their leadership so I can’t see them doin’ him no favours.’

  Maybe. Maybe not. In Isabel’s mind, Tushkin was as unpredictable as a drunk uncle at a barbecue but far more unpleasant and dangerous. For him, screwing with the US was as routine as downing a bottle of vodka. ‘If Tushkin cruels our chances of outbidding China, he forces our bases out of there and stops us muscling in on his polar patch. Robert, do we have people checking out the clubs in Moscow?’ she asked.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Perhaps they’ll find Professor Buckingham is having a drink with Edward Snowden. You know, two traitors toasting to America’s bad health.’

  14

  Barcelona

  The grotesque mask dangled off the side of the dead man’s face. Contorted and freakish as his expression was, he was unmistakeably Rao Songtian. His eyes were so bugged out that Tori could have been looking at the agonised figure in Munch’s painting The Scream, his mouth locked so far open that she could almost hear the bloodcurdling shrieks as the gore spilled out of him.

  Shrieks that Tori hadn’t heard despite being in the same room. Or was too drugged to remember hearing.

  A string of blood oozing off the side of the bed glooped onto her foot, creeping her out even more. As she scrubbed her toes against the carpet she noticed a dip in the bloody sheet that covered Rao from the chest down, a sopping red U-shape at his abdomen.

  With the pen she’d used to pick up the watch, she gingerly pulled the sheet back.

  Rao Songtian was sawn in half.

  15

  Tori desperately wanted to strip off her skin, to stop being the woman who’d woken up beside these two mutilated bodies.

  She scanned every surface to see if she could find any evidence of what she’d been drugged with – a syringe, pills, baggies. Nothing, until she noticed the room service menu on the desk was slanted up. When she lifted it she found a syringe and a small bag of clear crystals that looked like glass. Crystal meth, ice? Probably.

  She stepped back in shock, her foot accidentally kicking the pile of clothes on the floor, knocking aside her own dress so that the dead woman’s clothes stared back at her for the first time. Tori knew that outfit, the traditional Inuit skirt, the belt she’d seen every day holding Nivikka Petersen’s ulu, a blade exactly like the one sticking out of the woman’s skull.

  She went back to the bed and pushed the pillow away from the woman’s face.

  16

  Nivikka Petersen was dead, in bed with Rao Songtian, both hacked to pieces. Tori’s mind was racing, not just struggling with the why, the how and the who but with the way the world would view it, and her. Sex for sovereignty scandal … Ice kills Arctic deal … China and Greenland in Spanish sex triangle … And worst of all, Tori Swyft main suspect in drug-fuelled double murder.

  That was how it looked, how it was set up to look, except she knew – didn’t she? – that none of it was remotely the truth.

  Think, Tori. Find an explanation.

  Except she couldn’t. The room, the bodies, the blood and the stink were overwhelming, suffocating her, pushing her backwards until she felt her spine pressing up against a blank space on the wall.

  Her arm brushed against something metallic that stuck out of a side-slot in the TV, something warm.

  A flash drive.

  Her arm must have activated it because she heard the TV click itself on and, unable to stop herself, she craned her head forwards to see a naked brunette appear on the screen.

  Porn.

  Just seeing it seemed to thicken the stench, like a square of sandpaper scraping the insides of Tori’s nose. She went back into the bathroom, ripped a couple of pieces off a tissue and stuffed them into her nostrils, and re-entered the room as the porn star turned her face to the camera.

  Not a porn star.

  Nivikka Petersen.

  The image pulled back and Tori saw Nivikka was completely naked, astride a masked and also naked man, who Tori now knew was Rao Songtian.

  ‘No way,’ she called out involuntarily. ‘Nivi would never …’ She slammed her fist so hard against the wall that a remote control bounced off its bracket onto the floor. She left it there and forced herself to watch, trying but failing to understand. Nivikk
a was riding Rao, goading him with a riding crop, slapping his sides and his arms, stretching herself back and flicking at his legs.

  The Nivikka Tori knew, and liked, would never betray her country like this. She would never do that.

  Except there she was.

  Tori squeezed her eyes shut, wishing the video away. For a time, because it was on mute – or there was no audio, she didn’t know which – she had a brief respite until she cracked one eye open and saw a second woman step into the picture, her head out of the frame. This woman wasn’t naked. She was wearing a dress, black polka dots on white. Tori’s dress.

  The camera, shooting from behind, tilted upwards as the woman drew the dress over her head, mussing up her hair.

  Flaming red hair.

  Tori’s hair.

  17

  Tori bent down, scrabbled for the remote and, as quickly as her trembling fingers could, she pressed pause. This was not her.

  Or was it the influence of the drugs, the ice?

  She had no recollection of the three of them coming back to her room last night. Nothing. No memory of the drugs. But having never done hard drugs before, she had no idea what they might do to her, what she might do under their influence. Could they possibly force her to do this?

  Desperate to work out what this video was, she stepped so close to the screen she felt her hair catch the static, a finger wavering over the play button. Hesitantly, she pressed it and the footage restarted, the camera zooming in on Nivikka as she glided up and down on his … on Rao.