If there was something to be learnt, say the plans to an icebreaker, then he would read them… and then he would read them again… and then again… and again… tirelessly, as many times as it took to commit them to memory. That was why he had given a seamless rendition of Hamlet in the school play, and that was why he now knew the layout of the Albanov as if he’d built it himself from scratch.
He yawned and turned over onto his side in preparation for another night of broken sleep. Yessir, he had to hand it to himself: sleep-deprived or not, he was all over this project like a rash.
Tomorrow he would pick up the explosive and then… zero hour.
* * *
The red and white pills dropped into Finback’s palm. With a deft flick of his thumb he resealed the chrome-plated dispenser and slipped it back into his top drawer. The headaches were the result of a blow to the head that had left him fighting for his life as a young man. They weren’t migraines. There were no hallucinations, no sickness or disorientation to accompany the head pain, only intense flashes of blinding agony, as if somebody was slamming an ice pick repeatedly into the front of his skull. They had all the usual triggers, primarily stress and fatigue, and tonight Finback was feeling both.
He tipped the pills back onto his tongue and felt the bitter sting as they began to dissolve.
In front of the flat-screen monitor on the desk before him were three evenly spaced items. On the left was a large hexahedral bottle half-filled with Rodnik Gold, the most delectable and expensive vodka money could buy. Beside this, in the centre of the desk, was the print-out of an email, adorned at the bottom with the official footer of the Russian Government. To the right, resting with ironic delicacy on the polished wooden surface, was a combat knife.
Finback reached out and took hold of the bottle. He unscrewed the top and drank, throwing his head back to force the pills down. It pained him to be so uncouth as to not use one of his crystal tumblers, but the warning twinges were already beginning to pique and every second counted if he was going to avoid an episode of debilitating head pain.
He placed the bottle back down and reached for the email. There was no greeting, no sign-off and no text. There was just a simple table:
Team I
Team II
2020
3.64
0.32
2021
6.94
0.95
2022
8.59
1.31
2023
4.31
0.16
2024
2.49
0.03
Albanov
-
3.2
Total
25.97
5.97
Finback ran his eye down each column, carefully adding and re-adding the numbers. Then he took a pen from his top pocket, scribbled ‘20,000,000,000 rubles’ beneath the table and slowly underlined it. He did a quick mental calculation. That was nearly three hundred million US dollars, 200 million British pounds; two billion Chinese yuan. He pursed his lips. The figures were not unpleasant reading, but in truth he had hoped for an even larger differential.
He glanced down at his wristwatch just as the platinum minute-hand nudged onto the hour. It was time. He creaked back into his leather armchair, took out his phone and dialled.
“Good evening, gentlemen… Yes, I have seen them. I thought it might be more, but there will, of course, be further reductions as a result… You are happy to continue…? Of course. Everything is in place. Tomorrow he will pick up the explosive… because it needs to seem as real as possible. He is no fool… No, he suspects nothing… Of course. Good evening.”
He dropped the handset back into his pocket and slid the document back onto his desk.
His gaze moved to the knife. The handle was made of solid black birch with a gold-plated metal butt, and a gold-plated, S-shaped hand guard. The admittedly brutal-looking six-inch blade was also black, with serrations along the lower part and a narrow clip point. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and gently lifted it off the lacquered surface. After thirty years, it was like a fifth limb; the feel of the weapon – the grip, the weight, the balance, even the difference in temperature between the wood and the steel – was as familiar to him as the sound of his own voice.
He jumped suddenly to his feet, simultaneously tossing the knife a short distance into the air. He caught it with practised ease, spun it across the back of his hand and then flipped it several times on end as he reached out with his other hand and reclaimed the email. With a fluent sweep of the blade, he sliced the paper in two and let the two halves drift back down onto his desk. Then he flipped the knife one last time, caught it by the back of the blade, turned and propelled it into the wall behind him.
The knife slammed into the cork throwing board with a loud thunk that shook the adjacent lamp housing and drew a satisfying rattle from the glass. He walked over and eased the blade free. As he did so, the photograph that had been pinned to the centre came unstuck and spiralled to the floor.
Finback watched its progress as it fluttered downwards and settled onto the carpet.
Staring up at him was Ptarmigan, his dumb, unsuspecting face precisely cloven.
Chapter 3
Ice Mummy
1
Harmsworth Island, Russian Arctic
Nothing could have prepared Callum for the sense of isolation he felt on Harmsworth. If it hadn’t been for the slow, steady trudging of Lungkaju day after day, and occasional distant glimpses of the Albanov, he could easily have imagined himself the only man on earth. He struggled to understand it. He was no stranger to remoteness. Bleak Hebridean landscapes had been on his doorstep his entire life, and his job had taken him to the frozen tundras of Scandinavia and mainland Russia many times. But this was different. It was the deep stillness here. The intense quiet. Inland, away from the lapping of the waves and the groaning of the remnant icebergs, there was no movement. No sound. Not even time intruded on the vast, desolate sweeps of tormented rock. A place for ghosts, Callum thought. If ever there was one.
He checked the mapping on his GPS tablet. After two weeks, he and Lungkaju were still in the south of the island. On paper it had looked so simple. But in practice the terrain was slowing progress to a crawl. Beyond the shingle-strewn beaches, scoured into gentle inclines by the timeless clawing of the surf, the inland valleys were wide, steep and unforgiving. The rock appeared solid, but in reality it comprised overlying crusts of loose, pitted stone, always brittle, often slick with ice or moisture, which shifted unpredictably with the weight of every pace. The successive valleys rose and fell like rippling dunes, from light grey eructations to banks of pewter and charcoal scree. Angular upright and recumbent boulders huddled on the valley sides, barring the way ahead, their faces weathered flat and dimly glowing in the unrelenting radiance of the midnight sun.
It had started as a curiosity. On his first night aboard the Albanov, Callum hadn’t minded being woken by the laser beam of sunlight that had somehow penetrated a chink in his cabin blind. As the clock turned 01:16, he had thrown the blind up and looked with wonder out across the deck and the ice-flecked ocean beyond, still bathed in the same intense, white light as when his head had first hit the pillow. But after a few days, as the sun persisted, circling and circling the sky overhead without ever setting, the relentless light had become an issue. It was surreal to the point of disorientation. It was constant to the point of distraction. The medics
had warned the entire team to expect two things: sunburn and mood swings, and within days they had all been struck down with both.
By the end of the first week, they had also each come face to face with the mist.
“This is very common at this time of year,” Lungkaju had said, as it descended rapidly and unexpectedly for the first time. “Do not panic, please, Doctor Ross.”
Don’t panic, Callum had thought. It was an inconvenience, for sure, but why would he panic over a bit of mist? He had then watched with a mixture of awe and deepening unease as the rocks around him thinned, fractured and finally disappeared behind a suffocating pall of grey. He’d expected tough terrain. But the severity and regularity of the mists on Harmsworth had taken him entirely by surprise. The reduced visibility was one thing, but the freezing sea smoke, as Lungkaju called it, was something more, a far cry from the fingers of atmospheric haar that rolled in off the North Sea from time to time and hugged the lowland coast of Aberdeenshire.
This mist, the sea smoke, carried a strange scent, a bitterness that clung to his nostrils, stung his eyes and left him with a dry mouth. It didn’t hug, drift or drape. It billowed and pulsated. There was nothing picturesque about it. Nothing redeeming. At times the proximity and constant motion of the vapour induced a sense of suffocation, and a queasiness that Callum could only liken to the travel sickness he’d suffered with as a child. At other times sound was amplified and distorted into distant wails and shrieks; the world would come alive with echoes, and dark shadows would flicker in and out of being like spectres in the haze.
“The sea smoke is very thick,” Lungkaju had informed him, his knowing grin barely visible through the murk. “Sometimes it will not clear for many hours, sometimes days.”
When the sky was clear, the two men walked in single file, pitching snippets of conversation at each other, lost in their respective tasks. Lungkaju kept to the rear, rifle cradled in his arms, scanning for tell-tale bear tracks and scat. Callum recorded the predicted lack of archaeology in his field journal, stopping every so often to take photographs and to try to puzzle out their precise location with the help of his increasingly temperamental GPS tablet. It was tough going, physically and mentally. Only Fenris seemed free to enjoy the island, disappearing for hours at a time, reappearing with gifts of mouth-sized boulder for Lungkaju before vanishing back among the outcrops.
By midday they had picked their way down into a valley. Where the ice had relaxed its grip, moss flourished; it carpeted the valley bottom, toupees of spongy green fibre stitched to the head of every boulder. Tufts of buttercup sprouted in between, as did other red and purple blooms that would have looked more at home in the meadows of the Scottish Lowlands. It was just as Darya had insisted that first evening at dinner. The abundance of life in such an extreme environment was extraordinary. While Callum needed insulated clothing, sun cream and shades, the daintiest of flowers simply shook their heads at him and thrived.
Lungkaju drew to a stop and lowered the rucksack from his shoulders. “Let us eat.”
Callum gladly shed his pack and sat down next to him. As he reached for his water bottle he felt his emergency locator slip down his wrist. He shook his head and fumbled through his jacket sleeve to tighten the strap. Only two weeks in, and the island had already taken half a stone from him, not to mention his foot blisters, which had made him a regular in the infirmary.
Lungkaju leant his rifle down and hollered out for Fenris.
“Don’t you worry about him getting lost?” Callum asked.
“It is us that I am more worried about,” Lungkaju answered, “me and you, not Fenris.” He took a swig from his flask. “Do you have any pets, Doctor Ross?”
“Does an ex-wife count?”
Lungkaju laughed. “You were married?”
Callum poured himself some soup. “I was. We were together for ten years.”
“And then you did not love her anymore?”
“Oh, I loved her alright. I loved her more than anything. Only thing was, she didn’t love me. I mean, she stopped loving me.”
“That is very sad.”
“My fault,” Callum said. “I could see it coming. My career was taking off. I was spending more and more time in the department. Less and less at home. She kept telling me that she was unhappy.”
Lungkaju took another swig from his flask and offered it over. “Why did you not listen?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question a thousand times,” Callum answered, accepting the flask. “Just young and foolish, I guess. Didn’t know what I had until I didn’t have it anymore.”
Lungkaju smiled, understanding.
“So, what about you? Are you married?”
“I was,” Lungkaju replied. “My wife died giving birth to our daughter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We were married for sixteen years.”
“Happy years?”
“Happy years.”
They ate in silence for a while, Lungkaju picking the raisins from the tattered bits of malt loaf that seemed to be all that he ingested besides vodka.
“My daughter looks like her mother,” he said at last.
“My son’s got his mother’s temper,” Callum replied. “Otherwise he’s like a little version of me.”
Lungkaju stared at him as if trying to imagine such a thing. “What is his name?”
“Jamie. He’ll be nine in November.”
“My daughter will be fifteen next March.”
“You must miss her, working so far away.”
Lungkaju nodded. “I miss her very much. But I write her a letter every month. When I first came away I wrote every week, and emailed. But she told me to stop. She said that one week left me nothing to say.” He grinned. “She said that I was boring after just one week.”
“I don’t see Jamie very often,” Callum said. “We talk online a lot, using webcams, but he’s right, it’s not the same. We were on holiday a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time I’d seen him properly for ages and he was so excited. I taught him how to skim stones.” He paused. “Then I had to leave him to come here.”
“He will forgive you, Doctor Ross. You have a good heart; I can tell because Fenris likes you and he does not like bad people.”
“I hope so.”
Lungkaju retrieved another slice of malt loaf from his rucksack. “Now, will you tell me something? What is to skim stones?”
There was a sudden scuffling sound beyond where they were sitting and in an instant Lungkaju was on his feet, rifle in hand.
Fenris trotted into the clearing.
“Where have you been?” Lungkaju said, relaxing his grip. “You have worried Doctor Ross.”
With a snort, the dog paced over, slumped down between the two of them and commenced chewing. Callum watched as he grasped one end of an off-white stick between his paws and gnawed at the other. With a loud snap, he crunched the tip off his new toy and dropped the broken end to the floor.
Callum’s eyes widened at the sight. Handing the flask back to Lungkaju, he got to his knees and leant slowly towards the dog. Fenris stopped his chewing and growled, his top lip quivering back to expose the first warning flashes of tooth.
“He thinks you want his stick,” Lungkaju said.
Without moving his gaze, Callum replied, “He’s right.”
There was a confused silence, before Lungkaju gave Fenris an order in Nganasan. The dog barked in protest. Then he sat back up, dropping the object from his massive jaws with a snort.
No sooner had the object hit the ground, than Callum had reached forward and grabbed it. His heart picked up as he wiped away the film of saliva and turned it again and again in his fingers.
“What is it?” Lungkaju asked. “It is driftwood?”
Callum shook his head. “No, it’s bone.” He turned it again, exploring the splint
ered end. Then, slowly, he turned his head to face Lungkaju. “It’s old bone.”
2
The object was no longer than twenty centimetres, half that wide and a couple of centimetres thick. The intact end curled upwards into a lip, while the other end had been snapped off into a point and splintered by the best efforts of Fenris.
Callum ran his fingers over the pattern etched into the face of the shaft. The mesh of intertwining strands had been chiselled with such finesse that even a modern-day sculptor would have struggled to replicate it. The harder he looked, the less he could believe that the item in his hand was ancient, and yet the more certain he became.
As he inspected the bone more closely, he could make out traces of paintwork. The recesses had once been blacked out and the ridges painted gold. There was also a strange brownish hue to the broken end.
Lungkaju was peering intently at the item.
“I don’t suppose you’ve lost this, have you?” Callum asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know what is this thing.”
“Can Fenris take us to where he found it?”
Lungkaju took the item, flipped it over in his palm and nodded affirmatively. “This is archaeology?”
“It just might be.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure,” Callum answered, noticing the traces of resin on the bottom surface. “But it looks like the tip of a ski.”
Steam trailing from his back, Fenris bounded in between the fallen pillars of rock. Collapsed with age and moss-encrusted, they littered the valley floor beside a wide stream channel.
“Water flowed here once,” Lungkaju said, jogging to keep up.
“Yes, it did, but not for many years by the look of it,” Callum replied. “It’s what archaeologists call a palaeochannel. An ancient riverbed.”
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