Anthrax Island

by D. L. Marshall

  ‘Make sure another body doesn’t go missing? You’re planning on there being more?’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t be surprised if you got yourself killed. You’re dismissed.’

  I hesitated in the doorway; there was something else, something he wasn’t saying. I considered bringing up the incinerator, but decided to keep quiet as something had just flashed into my head. Instead, I closed the door, then jogged all the way back to the dining room.

  Hadn’t Ingrid told me that she specialised in identifying and isolating new strains?

  The room was empty. I ran back to the kitchen, nearly colliding with Alice. She shielded a bowl of cereal, sidestepping out of my way.

  ‘John,’ she said, concern in her face. She reached out to touch my arm. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Where’s Ingrid?’ I asked.

  ‘Just left. But come on, I need to talk to you.’ She put the bowl down.

  ‘Not here.’ I nodded at the door. ‘Too many ears. Outside the main entrance in half an hour?’

  Alice nodded but looked annoyed.

  ‘And get hold of some binoculars.’

  Alice’s annoyance changed to confusion but I didn’t elaborate. Instead I turned and slid a tin mug out from behind the toaster. It hadn’t all been destroyed; I’d spooned the leaf tea straight into it an hour or so ago, then shoved it away when Greenbow had interrupted me. Had he inadvertently saved my life? I grabbed a plastic sandwich bag from a drawer, tipped the contents in, tied it shut.

  ‘Taking a packed lunch?’ she asked. ‘It’ll go nicely with the Scotch.’ The derision in her tone was dulled through the spoonful of cornflakes.

  I flashed her a look and left the kitchen before she could say anything else, just as Gambetta entered. I swerved, looking back to see him staring after me intently.

  Chapter Nineteen

  My mood had rubbed off on the weather. Thankfully I’d quickly changed into more suitable clothes; warmer trackie bottoms and a thick green army jumper that Greenbow would be proud of. ‘Jersey, Heavy Wool’, it’s imaginatively known as in his profession. My brother had taught me a neat trick he’d used in the Army, looping a bootlace through the neck seam so it could be drawn in nice and snug. I thought about him again, about what he’d have done in my position. He wouldn’t be in my position. I pulled the bootlace tight round my neck, zipped up the protective overalls, felt the comforting pistol holstered at my side, stumbled down the steps.

  The change of clothes didn’t keep me as warm as I’d hoped, I’d underestimated the latitude. Wind screamed relentlessly across the heather, no cover to prevent it pushing the grass and weeds flat into the mud. The path was slippery, rain saturating the ground until it had refused to absorb any more. Ingrid had left deep plodding prints. I took off after her at a pace. She had a head start and I tried to work out how far she’d got, deciding she’d be on the downslope over the hill.

  I pushed on, but the faster I ran the more I slipped. The world was a blur of brown and sickly yellow through the streaked gas-mask visor. Occasionally a rock loomed into view, reminding me of what Marie had said earlier about slipping and smashing my face – a decent way to contract anthrax and a swift trip to the military hospital.

  I met Dash coming the other way as I marched up the centre of the island but the wind was too strong for conversation. Near the top I used the elevation to look back at the ship. She was rolling now, the huge blocky radar mast that dominated her silhouette swaying noticeably. White tips danced on waves that surged, rather than the gentle swell of the morning. Way below me, Dash was struggling towards the generator shed in the middle of the base. A solid sheet of rain swept in, swallowing the ship, the island’s coastline, X-Base, then me. If I were a superstitious man I’d have considered the weather an omen, an augury of impending doom. I’m not, but I patted my pistol through the suit just the same, shivered, and ploughed on.

  Finally I cleared the top of the hill to see Camp Vollum. For all the joking it was a good job the huts were painted bright orange – the driving rain and gas mask had conspired to reduce visibility to vague shapes and colours. I estimated the base was a good few hundred metres away but about halfway to it a pale yellow shape bobbed like an untethered buoy on the waves. I shouted but Ingrid couldn’t hear, so I started jogging again. I caught up just as she reached the steps, calling her name.

  She turned, shocked when she saw it was me, and stepped down. I pulled the plastic bag from my pocket, walking closer but still needing to shout over the wind and rain.

  ‘I need a favour.’

  She nodded but looked unsure.

  ‘Your speciality is identifying different strains of anthrax, yeah?’

  ‘Yes?’ Confusion showed through the visor.

  ‘Can you test this, see if it’s contaminated?’

  Her eyes narrowed as she peered in the bag. ‘Soil? Where from?’

  I hesitated. ‘I just want to know if it contains anthrax. How lethal it is.’

  She looked from the bag to me, wondering why an engineer would request analysis of a sample. ‘Is this to do with—’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  She nodded. ‘I don’t see why not, I mean, it is what we’re here for. Should have an answer in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ I started to walk away. ‘Oh, Ingrid?’

  She paused at the top of the steps.

  ‘Keep it between us, okay?’

  She punched in the code, disappearing inside.

  I set off back to base, careful of my footing in the mud. So carefully focused on my boots that I only caught the movement in the corner of my eye. I turned to the hillside but whatever it was dipped below the horizon, just a flash of movement. Had someone been watching us? Gambetta? I briefly contemplated giving chase, confronting him, but there was no way I’d catch up. Plus, it could have been anyone.

  But thinking about Gambetta and his cigs had flashed another thought into my head that needed further examination.

  Anything you took outside couldn’t come back in unless it was already sealed inside your suit with you. So with decontamination closely monitored – how had Gambetta got that Zippo in and out?

  Chapter Twenty

  I needed to speak to Alice but she’d be out soon, no point going in and changing, so I headed round the corner in the direction I’d seen Dash take. I found him sheltering in the shed from the worsening wind.

  He turned as I pushed through the door. ‘Hey, wanna lend a hand with the generator?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Sorry, Alice has roped me into helping her.’

  He looked at the open doorway, the driving rain. ‘Rather you than me.’

  ‘Tell me about it, day like this I might even prefer to be sealed in that base.’

  ‘You and me both, buddy.’

  ‘You serious about what you said earlier, though, about not getting claustrophobic?’ I asked. ‘I’m already feeling trapped.’

  He dropped a screwdriver into a toolbox and leaned on the shelves. ‘It don’t bother me none. I’ve worked in polar bases, you don’t wanna crack open a window there, I tell ya.’

  ‘What about here? If I just need a quick breather?’

  ‘You mad? You know why we’re here, right?’

  ‘Well, the anthrax spores are in the soil. It can’t be a big risk opening a window?’

  He went on a mini rant about protocol and security but then explained that the modular construction of the base wasn’t just there to make transportation and deployment easy, it was there to combat the biggest danger in polar regions. Fire.

  You might think it’s the cold; that’s a danger, but fire in an Antarctic base is a death sentence. There’s no water to put a fire out, it’s all frozen. You can’t count on fire extinguishers, they don’t work in extreme cold, and you’d need a roomful of them to put out anything more than a chip-pan. The best you can do is stand back, grab the marshmallows, watch it burn itself out. That’s when
you realise that if your base burns you’re left with a very long walk home. A base in the Antarctic is a lifeboat, without its shelter you’d be an ice-pop within hours. And if you left the base quickly, in the middle of the night without your cold-weather gear, good luck…

  X-Base – or ‘US Outpost 32’, to give it its correct American designation – would replace ‘US Outpost 31’, which had burned to the ground (should that be burned to the ice?) a while ago in mysterious circumstances. The theory with the modular construction of this replacement base was that the compartment on fire burns itself out, the plastic bridge burns, and hopefully the fire doesn’t jump to the next compartment – which means you’re still left with shelter until help arrives. In order to allow occupants to escape a burning compartment, all windows on the base slid open sideways – wide enough for a person to climb through. Crime isn’t a consideration in the Antarctic, safety outweighs it a million times over, so the windows opened from both the inside and outside using the same key.

  ‘But here we don’t have to worry about fire,’ he said. ‘I’ve got pumps and hoses ready to rock, no freezing here. So the windows stay locked and sealed.’

  ‘What if there’s an emergency?’

  ‘Take it up with Greenbow, he’s got the keys, security is his business.’

  Presumably he didn’t have all the keys, or not at all times. If briefly opening a window was minimal risk, and if Gambetta had got hold of a key, he could easily be using it for a smoke. More worryingly, it was likely how the tin of tea had been dropped out of my bedroom window.

  Dash was closing up his toolbox and preparing to head back into the gale.

  ‘You a superstitious man?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  I looked out the doorway at the clouds rolling overhead. ‘So far three people have told me the island’s haunted.’

  He laughed. ‘Ghosts ain’t my thing. Weird place, though. Islands usually are, don’tcha think?’

  ‘Ever feel like you’re being watched?’

  ‘It’s the respirators and this weather. Bad combo. Nothing like stealing your senses away to make you paranoid.’

  Paranoia hadn’t slammed that lid shut and tried to BBQ me alive.

  ‘Like why people are afraid of the dark,’ he continued. ‘Dull the senses, you’ll start seeing things that aren’t there. You sure you can’t lend a hand with the generator?’

  ‘Maybe later.’ I tried one last go. ‘Kyle reckoned he was being followed.’ I didn’t tell him I thought the same. I stepped aside as he pushed past, and as he did I could tell his eyebrows were raised under the mask.

  ‘Demeter’s the worst for that crap, guy’s a fruit loop.’ He gestured outside. ‘I really gotta make moves. Want in on the poker later?’

  I nodded and followed him into the gale, which made further conversation difficult, so I slapped him on the shoulder. He waved, heading for the generator shed as I set off round to the entrance.

  Alice was already outside, carrying a toolbox.

  ‘Where can we go?’ I asked.

  ‘Follow me.’ She didn’t wait for a response, marching away in the direction of the beach.

  After a few minutes the toolbox’s weight was showing. I offered to carry it but she scowled and soldiered on – a mixture of stubbornness and pride, I guessed. She reached the top of the hill when suddenly her feet flicked out from under her. She’d slipped on a patch of mud and lurched backwards, dropping the toolbox, arms flailing.

  I dived forward, catching her about the waist, fighting to avoid slipping myself.

  ‘I’m-quite-capable,’ she spluttered, grabbing my arms anyway.

  We stared at the beach below. The tide was fully in now, waves sloshing over the pebbles and pummelling the black rocks. As I’d suspected, the water came nowhere near the overhang where I’d left Andy Kyle’s body. Alice pushed away from me.

  ‘You were right to flag it. Kyle was murdered,’ I said.

  ‘Of course he fucking was,’ she replied.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  We stood there silently, Alice and I, staring out across the waves whilst the rain belted and the wind howled. She handed me the small pair of binoculars I’d asked for and I tested them on the cottages on the mainland, scanning the treeline and the graveyard. They’d do. Finally I asked the obvious question.

  ‘Why the hell are Clay and Greenbow ignoring Kyle’s murder?’

  She looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Tax year end, funding-bid time. The government don’t fund departments scandalised by murder.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Even the Tories?’

  ‘Okay, so it’d make things difficult. An accident – especially a private contractor rather than someone from Porton Down – is more convenient. No one wants anyone throwing spanners.’

  ‘Hence why you couldn’t use the radio, with all comms monitored.’

  ‘If Greenbow learns I’m an MI5 informant I’ll be booted off the team faster than you.’

  I looked at the driving rain, the thrashing waves, the endless mud. ‘Would that be so bad?’

  ‘Some of us actually like our careers.’

  ‘So you pulled the fuse instead. You took a risk, you know. If anyone had checked, it would have been obvious it was sabotage.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have bothered. You managed to lose the body, the only proof Andy was murdered.’

  ‘Nearly lost me, too.’

  She cocked her head, eyes narrowed behind the mask, but I didn’t expand on the statement. Finally she threw her hands up. ‘Look, Clay clocked you swigging the moment you arrived, though I’m not surprised you drink so much. I don’t want to end up the same, you can tell your masters I’m through with the cloak-and-dagger shit.’

  I put the binoculars back to my mask and scanned the distant beach, sweeping in and out of view in the downpour. ‘If you want out, I need information.’

  ‘I don’t have any – Andy wasn’t important.’

  ‘Nice, I’ll make sure his mum knows that. Obviously someone thought so or he wouldn’t be dead.’

  ‘None of us had met him before last week.’

  I lowered the binoculars and gave her a hard look. ‘If you say he kept to himself I’ll throw you in the sea.’

  ‘Look, he didn’t really have anything to do – he was only here to maintain the HADUs.’

  I resumed my inspection of the coastline. ‘Greenbow’s military intelligence – you sure he doesn’t know why I’m really here?’

  ‘Intelligence in name only, he’s too absorbed in his own little empire. He’s convinced Andy’s death was an accident. When I told him we needed another technician he refused.’

  ‘And pulling the fuse was the only way to force his hand, to get someone sent to the island?’

  ‘Like I said, I shouldn’t have bothered.’

  I put the binoculars in my pocket and looked at the jagged rocks. Our suits flapped in the wind like the luffing sails of a yacht, the waves crashing below reinforcing the image. The wind had upped its game to a gale. The rain let up long enough for me to see the distant pines on the mainland bending. Just as quickly, it rolled back in to envelop the island.

  ‘I’d put Demeter at the top of your suspect list,’ Alice said.

  ‘Really? He’s odd, but not a killer.’

  ‘Obviously you know best,’ she snapped.

  ‘Specialised in weaponising bacteria, didn’t he?’

  She detected my tone. ‘You do know what we do at Porton Down? And you say he’s not a killer… Captain!’

  We both spun – Greenbow was standing not ten feet behind me, flapping green suit almost camouflaging him against the drab vegetation. The wind had masked his approach. In this weather, with everyone squinting in the fading afternoon light through blurry rain-lashed glass, it was probably easy for him to wander the island unseen, keeping an eye on people.

  ‘What brings you two up here?’ he asked – conversationally, but there was an implicati
on somewhere behind it. Had he heard us talking?

  ‘Giving Tyler a crash course in grid sampling,’ Alice said, turning back to me. ‘Like I said, we need this section mapped before dark.’

  Greenbow surveyed the spit of land jutting out to sea. ‘Dauntless says a storm’s coming in. Don’t get swept away, eh, Tyler? We’ve had enough accidents.’

  I ignored him, addressing Alice, catching up with her diversion. ‘So you want me to start here?’

  ‘Like this.’ She set the toolbox down and opened it up, producing a long ball of garden string and some metal tent pegs. She tied the end of the string around one of the pegs and pushed it into the ground.

  ‘Follow me.’

  She walked in a straight line, unravelling the string. To my dismay Greenbow walked alongside us. After a while the string ran out, she tied the end round another peg and stuck it in the ground.

  ‘The string’s twenty metres long,’ she said, gesturing at the line running parallel to the beach, back to the cliff edge. She produced a tiny clear tube from her pocket – the kind you’d piss in for a doctor – and a tape measure. ‘Like I said, we’ve done this across the whole island, so just this section left.’ She unscrewed the lid, which had a slim spoon-like tool attached to the inside. She used it to pick up some mud next to the peg, dropping it in the tube. It left a trail as it slid down the inside of the glass. ‘Take a sample every five metres and label the tube like this.’ She screwed the cap on tightly and pulled out a marker pen. ‘Line one, sample one – got it?’

  ‘High-tech.’

  ‘I’m sure even he can manage this,’ said Greenbow, turning to Alice. ‘I’m heading to Camp Vollum, I came to tell you you’re needed there too. Gambetta wants to re-run the soil composition data.’

  Alice continued the instructions. ‘When you’ve done this line, move each peg three metres down the hill and start again, line two. And so on until you hit the beach. There are more vials in the shed.’

  ‘Should keep you out of trouble,’ added Greenbow.

  She started to walk away, which was irritating – thanks to Greenbow we’d have to wait until later to finish our conversation. I could feel his eyes on me as I bent to root around in the toolbox.