Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  I showed him the notebook. ‘Anderson found this. It belonged to Hagger.’

  He shouldered the rifle he’d left leaning against the base of the tower. ‘Can’t Anderson help you?’

  ‘Anderson’s in a coma.’

  ‘Shit. How did that happen?’

  I told him. ‘The last thing he did was find this notebook. I thought there might be something in it that could explain why Hagger died.’

  I could tell the kind of look Fridge was giving me from behind his sunglasses. ‘Quam said it was a polar bear.’

  ‘There are different theories about that,’ I said, non-committally.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’

  ‘Can we go somewhere private?’

  He thought a minute, then nodded to a hut near the flag line. ‘How about Star Command?’

  Star Command was one of those prefab red pods that we used all over the place at Zodiac. This one was fitted with a sliding roof, and a Buzz Lightyear figure nailed above the door. Someone had stretched out his arms so that he approximated a crucifix. In winter, the caboose housed telescopes and aurora cameras – hence the name. With summer coming on, the telescopes had been packed away and the caboose was empty. Or should have been.

  Fridge kicked open the door and stuck his head in. ‘Who put these here?’

  Three machines sat on a table against the far wall. From a distance, they looked like fancy photocopiers. I went over and wiped a layer of frost off the front of one.

  ‘“Life Technologies”,’ I read.

  Fridge examined them. ‘I think they’re some kind of DNA machines.’

  ‘Who could they have belonged to?’

  ‘Hagger was the only guy who could have used this. Unless Quam thought he could sequence penguin DNA.’

  We both laughed. I laid the notebook flat on the table.

  ‘I’m not a biologist,’ Fridge warned. ‘I don’t know how much I can help.’

  ‘It’s not the science.’ My heartbeat quickened as I turned the pages. Suddenly, I was very conscious that I was at the very edge of the station, and that Fridge had a hunting rifle slung on his back. My cold fingers fumbled the pages as I found the one I wanted.

  It was near the front. Echo Bay – CH4 concentrations, said the heading. There were some numbers underneath, and a simple graph. And under that, one brief sentence in the margin.

  Fridge will kill me.

  Thirteen

  Kennedy

  ‘Care to explain that, Fridge?’

  I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. Fridge stepped back, lifted his hand. I watched him like a hawk. I wished I’d brought a flare pistol, even one of those little flash-bang pens we use for scaring the bears.

  He lifted his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘CH4 is methane.’

  ‘That’s not the bit that wants explaining.’

  He sat down on a steel box. Without the sunglasses, he looked more wrung out than I did. He hunched over, staring at the page in the book.

  ‘A little while ago, we started getting big spikes in the methane readings. Not in the upper atmosphere – right down here on the ground.’ He showed me a hand-drawn graph in the notebook, swooping up like a ski jump. ‘You see? Atmospheric methane concentrations have been rising for a hundred years, but on a gradual slope. This is off the scale.’

  He saw the look on my face. ‘How well do you remember high-school chemistry?’

  I shook my head. ‘Bad teacher.’

  ‘Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, like you probably use for cooking back home. Governments want you to believe it’s a clean fuel – which it is, next to coal or oil. Burning methane produces carbon dioxide – CO2, climate enemy number one – but not as much as the other fuels.’

  ‘Is this relevant?’

  ‘But methane is a greenhouse gas in its own right also. It traps heat sixty times more efficiently than CO2. Now, there’s not so much methane in the atmosphere as CO2, and it doesn’t last so long, so it doesn’t get the bad headlines. But if we emit too much of it, we’ll all fry.’

  ‘And Martin found the level is going up?’

  ‘I found the level is going up,’ he corrected me. ‘I showed the results to Martin to get his opinion. If I was going to publish data that far off the curve, I needed to be sure it was right. And I also needed to make a guess where it was coming from.’

  I nodded, to show that I followed.

  ‘Normally, methane is created by bacteria working in warm dark places. Swamps and intestines are two of the better-known culprits.’ He gestured out the window. ‘Not a lot of swamps on Utgard. And even if the Platform stinks when Danny cooks beans, we don’t fart that much. So what was making the readings go crazy?’

  ‘Am I supposed to guess?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of methane clathrate? It’s methane that’s trapped in a lattice of ice crystals – so much that if you get a piece, you can literally set the ice on fire. It needs to be kept cold and under pressure, so the bottom of the Arctic Ocean suits it fine. There’s probably more methane in clathrates in the seabed than all the other fossil fuels on earth put together. And if the sea warms up, then the ice melts and all that methane trapped inside squirts up into the atmosphere.’

  ‘So that’s what was happening?’

  ‘That was my hypothesis. Well, the ocean is warming, and some of the gas is coming up. There are known methane plumes off the west coast of Svalbard, not so far from here. But Svalbard’s atypical – it’s warmed by the Gulf Stream. If I could show it was happening this far north, that would be big news.’

  We seemed to have drifted a long way from the point of discussion. ‘What did Martin say?’

  The look on Fridge’s face said I’d hit the mark. ‘He told me a secret. He said DAR-X had asked him to examine some water samples. I didn’t know. Some bug was corroding their equipment, they thought a microbiologist could help – and somewhere in the process he found out what’s really going on at Echo Bay.’

  ‘Aren’t they drilling for oil?’

  ‘That’s what they tell people. In reality, they’re trying to mine methane clathrate. The methane I detected was coming from their well.’

  ‘And Hagger told you that?’

  ‘I wrote it all up. Some of the best work I ever did. If DAR-X pull this off, every oil and gas company in the world is going to come here. They’ve spent twenty years in Alaska trying to get into the ANWR wildlife reserve – here, there’s twice as much gas and nothing to stop them. But if one well can leak enough methane to skew the data, think what a thousand of them will do. I had to tell the world.

  ‘Then Quam brought me into his office. He’d found out what I was doing; he forbade me from publishing.’

  ‘Forbade you?’

  ‘What Hagger had told me was commercially sensitive information. When DAR-X brought Hagger in, they insisted on a non-disclosure agreement. Except they didn’t get it from Hagger: Quam signed it on behalf of the whole of Zodiac. If I published, DAR-X could sue and have everything shut down. Not only that, the contract said we’d be personally liable. Maybe that wouldn’t have held up in court – but you can be damn sure it would cost a lot to find out. You think an oil company’s going to run out of money before a bunch of scientists do?’

  From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a movement outside the window. Probably someone going to check a reading – but just then I was ready to suspect anything.

  ‘You know what “clathrate” means? “Cage” – from the Latin. The ice structure forms a cage around the methane molecules. Well, Hagger had me caged up good. I withdrew the paper and I sat on the data.’

  ‘You must have been pretty furious with Hagger.’

  Fridge laughed – a bleak, cold sound in that bleak, cold room.

  ‘You really don’t get it, do you? We’re operating on a scale people like you and Quam can’t imagine. People talk about how the dinosaurs got toasted by a meteorite. But two hundred and fifty million years ago, be
fore the dinosaurs, ninety per cent of all life on earth was wiped out because an undersea volcano warmed up the sea floor and released several billion tons of methane into the atmosphere. The biggest extinction event of all time.

  ‘Or, if you want something more recent, take what happened at Storegga, eight thousand years ago. Thirty-three hundred cubic kilometres of seabed collapsed because temperature changes destabilised the clathrates. You know what happens when that much material starts moving underwater? A tsunami that makes what happened to Japan and Indonesia look like a kid in a bathtub.’

  He shut the notebook and tossed it back to me.

  ‘I didn’t kill Hagger. First, because I didn’t; second, because I wouldn’t; and third, even if I would have, I didn’t have to. We’re fucking with this planet so bad, pretty soon we’ll all be history.’

  Fourteen

  Kennedy

  I wanted to get to DAR-X. As luck would have it, my chance came the next morning. Danny had baked them a cake as a thank-you for rescuing Greta and Tom Anderson from the ice cap. Jensen was going to fly it down; I volunteered to go too.

  I can see the look on your face. You think we were mad to fly a cake a hundred kilometres, a cake made with liquid eggs and powdered milk at that. But Utgard’s frontier country; it’s the little courtesies that make life bearable. People put a lot of effort into them. Sometimes they might even save your life.

  ‘Make sure you’re back by seventeen hundred,’ Quam told me. ‘The plane’s coming. We’ll need you to load up Anderson.’

  I didn’t like the thought of Anderson flying, and I told him so.

  ‘Anderson should be in a hospital,’ he lectured me. ‘We don’t have the facilities to treat him here.’

  I didn’t agree. Whatever benefit he’d get from a hospital, it didn’t balance out the risk of putting him on a plane. Anderson was stable, and his signs were encouraging. I’d started to hope there’d be no lasting damage. But I wasn’t the base commander.

  So I climbed in the helicopter with a big Tupperware container full of cake. Bob Eastman came too He’s an astrophysicist; he’d been getting electrical interference with his instruments and wanted to see if it could have come from the DAR-X equipment.

  ‘What’s your theory?’ he asked, as soon as we were airborne.

  ‘My theory?’

  ‘Hagger – Anderson. You don’t think it’s a coincidence?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well for one, Danny’s pretty sure it was the Freemasons. He’s just trying to figure out if they did it off their own bat, or if it was for their alien overlords.’

  Danny, the cook, is the nicest man in the world. But he has the most extraordinary world view, and he isn’t backward about sharing it.

  ‘I asked him once why he stays at Zodiac if it’s so full of Illuminati types,’ Eastman said. ‘You know what he said? “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” You think he really believes that shit?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s comforting to believe you’re helpless before a higher power.’

  Eastman chuckled. ‘Maybe it’s the frickin’ aliens messing with my instruments.’

  I said Utgard is frontier country. If so, Echo Bay was the pioneer camp, deep in Indian territory. The only permanent structure was the drill rig, a ten-storey steel gantry erected on the ice in the bay. Thick hawsers tied it down like a ship’s rigging; yellow plastic pipes snaked out of a hole in the ice. Beside it, steam rose from three enormous black silos clustered behind a chain-link fence. Everything else was strictly temporary: canvas tents, a few shipping containers and some corrugated-iron huts. Even those looked like they were being dismantled.

  The man in charge was a big Texan called Bill Malick. I half imagined he’d be wearing a ten-gallon hat, but of course it was too cold for that. I presented him with the cake and said a few nice words about how grateful we were. Jensen took photographs for the blog as Eastman and Malick posed with a knife and cut it on top of an oil drum, out in the snow. It’s the sort of thing the comms people in Norwich love.

  ‘No one’s gonna realise the fucking cake’s frozen,’ said Malick. He took me inside their mess quarters, a wooden Portakabin that was the most solid building there, and gave me coffee. Eastman disappeared to talk to their radio engineer.

  I pointed out the window to the huge drill rig in the bay. ‘Hit the gusher yet?’

  ‘That’s commercially sensitive information.’ He smiled. ‘Not that I don’t trust you, you understand.’

  I thought about what Fridge had told me. ‘You really think there’s oil under Utgard?’

  ‘That’s what they pay me to find out.’

  ‘Or is it natural gas you hope to find?’

  He never stopped smiling – but the smile was a hard one. ‘You looking to buy shares?’

  I made an imaginary money-rubbing gesture with my fingers. ‘They don’t pay me enough.’

  He saluted me with his cup of coffee. ‘Amen. I guess they didn’t pay your guy Hagger enough, either.’

  ‘They surely didn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘You ever figure out the whole story with that?’

  I gave him a sharp look. But all Texans are poker players, and his face gave nothing away.

  ‘We’re hoping it was just an accident,’ I said carefully.

  ‘But …?’

  ‘You were up on the Helbreen that day.’

  He put his cup down with a bang. ‘Are you …?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d seen anything,’ I said. Innocence itself. ‘Hagger was an experienced fellow. We’re trying to learn lessons.’

  That was plausible. With someone like Quam in charge, lessons must always be learned. Measures taken, safeguards put in place. Even if the lesson is: Don’t step into a feckin’ great crevasse.

  Malick leaned back. ‘Even the most experienced guys, it only takes one bad move. We had a crew chief, Earl, he’d worked twenty years at Prudhoe Bay. He was up north last September, poking around the old Soviet harbour. Took off his coat because I guess he was sweating, piece of debris fell on his head and that was it. Must’ve only been out five minutes, but the coat blew away and he froze to death. We never even found the coat.’ He swirled his coffee. ‘It’s easy, dying in a place like this.’

  In his Texas drawl, it sounded like a line from a country and western song.

  ‘What took you up that end of the island on Saturday?’

  ‘R & R. Project’s nearly done, we’re going home this weekend. Figured we’d get some skiing done before we leave.’

  ‘On the Helbreen?’

  ‘Further down – in the Adventhal. On the way back, we stopped by Vitangelsk, the Commie ghost town. One of our guys was near there a couple of weeks ago, said he saw lights at night.’

  He saw my expression. ‘I know, right? One too many beers.’

  ‘Did you find any nasties?’

  ‘Stalin’s ghost singing the Internationale.’ He laughed. ‘Just snow and crap. Same as everyplace else on this island.’

  Eastman still hadn’t come back. Malick upended his mug and drained the last of his coffee, then put it down with a conclusive thud. He looked ready to go.

  ‘I heard Martin Hagger did some work for you,’ I said, as casually as I could.

  Malick nodded. ‘Water quality. It wasn’t a big deal. Something under the ice was corroding our pipes. We asked if there was anyone at Zodiac who could take a look at it, and your boss sent Hagger.’

  ‘Did he find anything out?’

  ‘He ran some samples. Apparently it was a bug, some kind of plankton or something. Waters are getting warmer here, sea-ice cover’s thinning. He said it makes sense something new would evolve to take advantage.’

  I glanced out the window again at the drill rig. If Fridge had told the truth, it wasn’t oil flowing through those yellow pipes. Commercially sensitive information. But would you kill for that?

  Malick followed my gaze. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Really
?’

  ‘Melting icebergs and baby seals and all the rest of that Sierra Club shit. You think this job’s easy? Tell someone you work in oil exploration, it’s like you’re telling them you got rabies. Tell them you’re prospecting in the Arctic, and they want to put a bullet in you. They act like we’re up here drowning polar bear cubs in barrels of oil.’

  ‘You don’t deny the planet’s changing.’

  Malick wiped a smear of cake icing off his beard. ‘Have you been up in the mountains? Seen any of the old mines?’ I nodded. ‘You know what they used to dig there?’

  ‘I heard it was coal?’

  ‘And you know what coal is, right? It’s dead trees. Same way, if we find oil here it’ll be dead plants from two hundred million years ago. You see any swamps and forests here now?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘This planet’s always changing. I’ve been in a cave a hundred feet under a glacier, and seen a leaf fossil printed on a rock. There were trees here before the glaciers, and when it’s gone maybe they’ll grow back. You think at the end of the last ice age, when those hairy-assed Neanderthals looked out their cave one day and saw the ice had gone, they blamed each other for making the glaciers melt, or started a Save the Mammoth campaign? Hell no. They got off their cold butts and started to hunt.’

  We’d stayed so long they felt obliged to give us lunch. Eastman and Malick talked about something called March Madness, which I gathered was to do with basketball. Some team called the Huskies had been doing well, which gave rise to some obvious topical jokes. I smiled along, and considered what I knew.

  Hagger had obviously had plenty of opportunity to give information to DAR-X. From what I knew of his work, it involved plenty of chemistry, so he surely could have understood the data. And then DAR-X had been near the Helbreen glacier, probably the only people at that end of the island, when he died.

  That still didn’t explain how they could have got to Anderson. But all I had for what happened to him was Annabel’s word. Annabel and Hagger had been close – that was common knowledge. And she should have been his partner the day he died. Could they both have been in on it?