‘All of it?’ I’m talking James Olsen’s diatribe.
‘Maybe one or two things got mislaid in the initial days.’
‘Nothing to worry the family about, though?’ Get rid of it, if you haven’t already.
‘The point surely is to cause the bereaved families as little distress as possible?’
‘That’s what I want to avoid. See it doesn’t happen, Paul. OK?’
‘Of course, Mr President. I understand,’ said Spencer, who did. My fingerprints on the smoking gun, if there’s a copy I don’t destroy.
‘Let’s have another drink!’ declared Partington. ‘I think there’s every reason to celebrate tonight.’
‘So do I,’ said Morgan, getting up quickly to pour.
It was another hour before Spencer could get away to cross Pennsylvania Avenue to Blair House and his personal safe.
‘It was an excellent meal,’ thanked William Dempsey.
‘Shot the grouse myself,’ said Ranleigh. ‘Good season this year.’
There were only two of them at the South Audley Street townhouse and the servants had long been dismissed. The cigars were almost finished and the port decanter between them had dwindled to half.
‘Peter sounded magnificent,’ embarked Dempsey, knowing the opening had to come from him.
‘Showed the calibre of the man,’ encouraged Ranleigh, contentedly acknowledging it was the party chairman’s place to make the running. Every television and radio news channel had been cleared for the telephone interview with Reynell, his photograph mostly dominating the screens apart from some library footage of a three-year-old natural world documentary on Lake Baikal. Channel 4 had replaced a scheduled hour-long slot on the Christmas Island giant carvings with a compilation of the Lake Baikal film, another on the imagined origins and appearance of prehistoric man with Reynell’s description of the cave dwellers as a voice-over and a studio discussion by a selected group of anthropologists and epidemiologists.
‘Buxton wants to go with dignity,’ announced Dempsey. From his sources in the parliamentary lobby he knew that virtually every newspaper the following morning was naming Reynell as the successor to the leadership.
‘He doesn’t deserve it.’ Ranleigh’s uncompromising philosophy was that no prisoners should be taken or allowed in political victory.
Dempsey said: ‘Peter’s a hero now. And will be built up into an even bigger one. He doesn’t need blood. He’ll be judged by the public at large as well as by the party in general by how magnanimous he is.’
Ranleigh nodded, finally extinguishing the cigar, an instinctive manipulator recognizing the benefit of the argument. ‘You imagining a life peerage?’
‘I think a knighthood would be sufficient.’
‘No attempted spoiling, last minute opposition?’ bargained Ranleigh.
‘I can guarantee there won’t be.’
Ranleigh offered the decanter, which Dempsey accepted, both men knowing the negotiation wasn’t over. Ranleigh said: ‘You’ve served as a good party chairman, William.’
Dempsey smiled, gratefully. ‘It’s to the party, not individuals, to which I’ve always committed my loyalty.’
‘That’s well recognized,’ said Ranleigh, honest himself. Dempsey ran an efficient machine and under his stewardship the finances were stronger than they’d been for a decade: with two years still to go there was already a war chest sufficient for the next general election.
‘That’s good to hear,’ encouraged Dempsey.
‘I know, from conversations with Peter, that he’d like you to continue if you’d see fit to do so.’
‘That’s even better to hear,’ accepted the satisfied other man.
They did make love, in the early morning half light, and afterwards held each other. Stoddart said: ‘The way I felt last night I never thought I was going to be able to do that again.’
Geraldine replied: ‘I’m glad you made such a quick recovery.’
‘So am I,’ he agreed.
Geraldine snuggled comfortably into the crook of his arm. ‘Do you think Dupuy ran?’
Stoddart shrugged. ‘Something we’re never going to know.’
‘It’ll be interesting if he comes back inside today.’
‘I’m coming in with you this time,’ announced Stoddart.
‘I want you to.’ She decided not to tell him how close she’d been to the sort of disaster that appeared to have befallen Vadim Ivanovich.
‘Raisa seemed very different yesterday to how she has been,’ he said.
‘Long may it last,’ said Geraldine, sincerely.
Stoddart went back to his own room to bathe and change. Her bathwater was hot and Geraldine soaked herself, immediately spoiling the effort to get clean and stop smelling by smearing herself with repellent. She put on her second, clean body stocking next to her skin, but remembering the bone-chilling cold struggled into her dirty one as well for double insulation before getting back into the same jeans, shirt and ski-jacket of the previous day.
Directly outside her bedroom door she hesitated on her way to Stoddart’s room, remembering his remark about Raisa’s changed demeanour. Perhaps it would be helped by offering her a ride with them back to the caves. Raisa opened her door almost immediately to Geraldine’s knock.
‘I don’t know if—’ Geraldine started but stopped at the sight further into the tousled bedroom of a smiling Lyudmilla Vlaslov, as proudly naked as she had been the previous day, her body shining from the unguent very obviously on Raisa’s hands. ‘I was going to suggest we go out to the caves together,’ Geraldine finished.
‘Lyudmilla and I are going to share a car,’ said Raisa.
How much she’d misunderstood all that closeness in the caves, thought Geraldine, on her own way down in the elevator with Stoddart. Now she knew for whose benefit the two women had posed the previous day. She hoped it ensured Raisa’s continued good mood.
The speed of the organization was remarkable.
The military security against intrusion began with tyrebursting spike pads and an already erected prefabricated control post at the end of the snaking road to Shara-Togot and there were two more checkpoints up the rock-hammered road to the abandoned gulag. A lot of the rusting, flower-filled memorials had been bulldozed away to provide parking for canvassed and hard-topped supply trucks. Where they had the previous day had to force their own way through insect and tick infested trees and undergrowth, was now a cleared route with metal-matted strips sufficient for the heavy vehicles that would have been necessary to transport the gale-flapping tented encampment already in place where yesterday they’d simply dropped their hand-hauled equipment. There was a command post in which the officers from the earlier conference were already ensconced, a field kitchen alongside a trestle-tabled canteen and rest area and beyond that a separately tented latrine block. Some way from the main compound was another canvas-covered lean-to beneath which a battery of heavy duty generators throbbed noisily, their supply lines snaking further up the mountain towards the identifying bluff at which there was another prefabricated control position manned by guards completely encompassed in helmeted protective suits.
There were even separate tents for them to change, which Raisa and Lyudmilla did to each other’s undisguised admiration and to Geraldine’s unconcerned acceptance. The two Moscow arrivals appeared troubled by modesty, both undressing with their backs turned. Geraldine saw that both wore thermal underwear, which they’d need. She guessed both to be in their late fifties and hoped they had the stamina for what was to come. It wasn’t until they were suiting up that Geraldine realized that Raisa and Lyudmilla, who today also wore thermals, were getting into Russian protective gear which looked far thicker and heavier than the American outfits. The Russian oxygen supply looked far bigger, too, and was harnessed on the outside of the tunics.
There was a two-man unit at the bluff, filming them as they approached, and when they rounded it Geraldine saw a boardwalk had been laid along the edge of the shif
ting scree, leading up to steps into the initially exposed gallery. The entire, visible length of the open cave passage was brightly strung with lights and there were more inside the only cave that could be partially seen from the outside. Geraldine’s immediate impression was of a fairy-lighted Christmas scene and it became even stronger inside where, despite the cowling, the lights struck a sparkling dazzle off the ice-clad walls.
The newcomers had unconsciously deferred to those who’d been into the complex the previous day. Bobin and Lyalin led, with Stoddart and Geraldine immediately behind. Turning once, Geraldine saw Reynell and Amanda had bustled their way into the forefront, where they could be most clearly and consistently filmed making their first penetration into the mountain. The posing became less obvious when the sound link began to break up and disappeared at the entry into the boreholed cavern.
Under lighting rigged to reveal every part of the chamber, the sight was far more sensational than Geraldine had remembered from the previous day. Concentrating as they had been upon finding the missing entomologist, she’d thought this room to be bare and unremarkable, apart from the holed floor. It wasn’t. Encircling the whole chamber and reaching so high up that it would have required some type of scaffolding to achieve, was a wall-painted frieze that at once reminded Geraldine of the Bayeux Tapestry. Just as quickly she wondered whether this depiction would be judged more important globally than the woven recreation of the Norman invasion of England. Actually turning to follow the inscriptions around the wall, Geraldine decided they portrayed the entire existence and lifestyle of the Neolithic colony. They were hunting scenes with stick figures herding upended woolly mammoths into depressions or launching at animals, bear-like in body with elongated necks, spears and throwing sticks. There were more recognizable bears and bison and a lot more of the long-necked, beaked fish with rear legs and huge-billed birds with wings grossly out of proportion to their bodies. There were also what appeared to be battle scenes, stick figures intertwined and grappling, interspersed with the neatly lying dead.
And there were the solidly frozen bodies of the ageing illness victims – probably, thought Geraldine, the very artists themselves – just as neatly arranged in what was most likely three separate family groups, a total of ten afflicted adults and three starved children upon a ledge that also ran most of the way around the wall. The ledge was also too high to have been reached without steps or a climbing frame but there was no obvious way they could have got there.
Lyalin had to repeat himself several times, in both languages, to tell them to make way for the search party and as they filed out, turning right to go deeper into the system, the mountain rescue group approached from the left burdened with equipment.
The Christmas fairy tale imagery grew the deeper they penetrated, the lights throwing up the milky – or snowy – whiteness of the stalgmites and stalactites against their frozen backgrounds, the ice itself appearing to form a glassed frame for wall painting after wall painting.
There were also more bodies than they’d counted the previous day, and with better lighting Geraldine began to find not just grass and fauna storage but food as well: berries and fruit – what looked like crab apples and apricots and grapes – and at the entrance to the huge, communal cavern on a ledge by three carefully laid out dead bodies, there was the leg of an animal still covered with fur and with some meat still adhering. On the same ledge Geraldine found the first carcase of a rat-like creature, with elongated incisor teeth. Very quickly she found a lot more, as well as bats, in the cathedral-like chamber. She stopped counting weapons and fish bones and hooks.
The party was no longer in any order, split up and divided, and Geraldine was grateful that Stoddart remained close by her, although the improved illumination greatly lessened the dangers it still chilled her to think about.
Stoddart held up the watch strapped to the outside of his suit and said, brokenly: ‘Let’s give ourselves more time to replace our oxygen than yesterday.’
Geraldine started to follow him back the way they had come, passing the sort of wall painting that by now was so familiar she scarcely glanced at it but then she did and stopped, abruptly. ‘No!’
‘What!’ demanded Stoddart, stopping just as abruptly.
‘We’ve got time!’
‘What?’ he repeated but she didn’t answer.
Instead, Stoddart following, Geraldine studied each wall painting they passed, every time jabbing out a finger and then going back to check the families where they’d found food stores. Because they had to pass the holed cavern she went in there, too, although remaining at the edge to avoid the rescue teams lowering audio-sensor and harnessed men attached to metal, length-extendable hawsers. She ignored what was happening on the ground, again urgently pointing to the frieze. She said: ‘I’m right! It’s the same every time.’
‘Out! Now!’ ordered Stoddart and obediently Geraldine finally followed, light headed from excitement rather than her depleting oxygen, although she still hadn’t gone on to her emergency supply when they reached the tents.
Helmets thrown back Stoddart said: ‘You going to tell me now?’
‘They’re not battle scenes! They’ve got weapons: spears and bows and arrows, but they’re not using them. They’re trying to help each other, when they’re dying. And look how they’re laid out in there, when they die. In the family groups as they’re displayed in the paintings. That’s what they’re telling us, in those paintings. That to die as they did was a recognized, accepted thing …’
Stoddart looked at her doubtfully. ‘Helping each other … laying each other out … you’re suggesting a structured society, of sorts …?’
‘It was structured!’ insisted Geraldine. ‘They lived together, as a tribal group. That’s structured. And each family had its own space. That’s structured. And what about the food we found? Food that those youngsters who weren’t ill could have eaten, to stay alive. Come outside, to pick more berries and fruit even!’
‘So why didn’t they?’
‘Because in a communal society … a society without walls or separation … the worst crime is to steal. Any child obedient enough not to steal when it’s starving wouldn’t disobey its parents by going outside where there were animals like the sort we’ve seen painted in there.’
‘What’s the significance?’
‘For me, just one. If I’m right about premature ageing being endemic here, however many millions of years ago, it’ll be in their genes. And I can find it.’
Geraldine and Stoddart went into the colony twice more that day and by the last time Stoddart allowed himself to be persuaded. Neither Raisa nor Lyudmilla were, although Geraldine was aware of the locally-based anthropologist delaying her assessment until after Raisa expressed an opinion before offering the same one herself.
The repeated question to the Moscow group when they assembled at the end of the day in one of the larger tents, was greeted with shrugs of dismissal and Lyalin’s translation of a short burst of Russian from one of the Moscow women that such an assumption would take years to reach, if at all.
‘It might not, if Geraldine were allowed to take back everything she wants,’ said Stoddart.
‘She can,’ announced Lyalin, gesturing towards the canvassed radio tent. ‘I’ve spoken to Moscow. You can take every sort of specimen you consider necessary, including bodies, on condition that they are returned outwardly intact.’
‘Which I’m giving you here and now,’ said a relieved Geraldine.
‘And which I’m officially guaranteeing on behalf of the United Kingdom,’ said Reynell.
‘And which I’m further endorsing on behalf of America,’ said Amanda, as aware as Reynell of the media sound bite for that evening’s already planned telephone link-up with Washington.
Raisa’s translation of the science minister’s agreement created fresh protests from the Moscow scientists, from which Stoddart eased Geraldine away. ‘You know what you want from inside there?’
‘To the ve
ry last specimen,’ assured Geraldine, who’d occupied the second and third entries, apart from trying to convince people of her theories, isolating everything she believed she needed.
‘How long to collect it all, once the cartography and filming is finished?’
‘Three hours, maximum. All I need is to bag it.’
‘Recording and mapping everything will be finished by late tonight, according to Lyalin,’ said Reynell, who’d also moved away from the quarrelling group.
‘We could be away from here by tomorrow if you can arrange the transport,’ promised Geraldine.
‘We can arrange the transport,’ promised Amanda, in return. The sound bites were getting better by the minute.
They all turned at the entry into the tent of the shouldersagged mountain rescue team. The voice of the major in command was as weak as the man looked. For the westerners’ benefit Bobin said: ‘They got to the bottom of every hole. In five there were just a lot of dead bats and rats. The other four dropped straight into a river running into the lake. That means the body’s been in Baikal for twenty hours now. There won’t be anything left.’
Twenty-Nine
Stoddart remarked later to Geraldine that he supposed they should have expected it because they’d each spent more than an hour the previous evening performing in officially staged media circuses – and there was the in-flight warning going over the Bering Sea – but none of it prepared them for what awaited in Anchorage.
Their first indication came through the window of the Aeroflot plane taxiing to its meticulously designated place that symbolically put it in the same frame as Air Force One in every film, television and camera shot.
Geraldine said: ‘Oh my God!’
Stoddart said: ‘God’s probably the only one not here.’
Henry Partington was centre stage on the podium, with Robin Turner and Gerard Buchemin and the ambassadors of France, Britain and Russia sufficiently in the background not to divert any attention. The first pen to the president’s left held 150 squabbling cameramen; twenty TV stations alone – including all three American majors – were running live satellite coverage. The second was occupied by 200 print and sound journalists. Paul Spencer and Carson Boddington scurried up the ramp practically before it was properly in place. With them was an ear-pieced, lapel-miked Secret Service officer.
Ice Age Page 36