by Tom Harper
‘What are those?’ he said, pointing to the machines.
I couldn’t tell if this was just a prelude to an act of violence. I mean, I’ve seen enough films where the psychopath makes conversation about cheeseburgers or parking wardens and then suddenly smashes his victim’s face in. I played along, and tried to edge around towards the rifle.
‘Do they work?’ he said.
‘Perfectly.’ I could almost reach the rifle, now. Eastman must have noticed. His arm suddenly shot out to block my way, thrusting a sheet of paper into my hands.
‘I got another reading on that interference.’ The paper was covered with noughts, ones and twos, the same as the one from Hagger’s notebook. ‘Looks like it’s coming from near Vitangelsk. Up by Mine Eight.’
He leaned very close to me as he said it, as if I was a pretty girl at a party. Like the girl, I couldn’t do anything except shrink against the wall, and wish I had my gun.
‘If only we could unlock it.’ Heavy emphasis; in case I missed it, he mimed turning a key with his hand. ‘You know, with a key.’
It wasn’t subtle. So I’d been right, the key must have been his – dropped where Hagger died. I tried not to show that I’d guessed. He’d kill me right there.
The sequencer beeped and broke the moment. The printer chattered, and a spool of paper came out. I tore it off and jammed it in my pocket before Eastman could get a look.
‘Have you ever been to New York?’ I asked, thinking of the bear on the key ring.
Thankfully, at that moment Kennedy came in and announced that Quam had gone to check one of the bear cameras. It must have meant something to Eastman. He left so quickly he forgot to take his paper.
As soon as he was out the door, I barricaded it with as many boxes as I could find. Which meant that when Greta arrived, five minutes later, I had to move them all over again. No waffles this time; she didn’t even ask about the elaborate barricade. Her face was red, almost as if she’d been crying.
She fell against me. I just caught her, holding her to my chest like a hurt child. Her body convulsed with silent, tearless sobs. I didn’t know what to do, except pat her on the back. Then, without thinking, I started to stroke her hair.
She pulled back from me as if I’d burned her.
‘Don’t—’
I held up my hands. ‘I’m not … I wasn’t …’ Took a step back. Asked, ludicrously, ‘Are you OK?’
She stalked across the room, head held so stiff you could have cracked bricks on it. Glanced at the readouts on the machines. She still looked as if she might burst into tears – or bite someone.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Really?’
‘I had a bad experience.’
It’s the sort of statement that ties me in knots. I want to help, but I’m petrified of being thought intrusive. A very English problem. I’ve always envied the people who can just throw their arms around complete strangers without analysing it from twenty different angles.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I tried.
‘No.’ She flexed her fingers, as if imagining closing them around someone’s throat. ‘You know why I came here? To Utgard?’ I shook my head. ‘To get away from all the assholes.’
Something on the workbench caught her eye. She picked up one of the plastic bottles lying there, spun it in her fingers, then threw it against the wall like a fielder shying at the stumps. ‘Asshole.’
I looked at the empty bottle. I’d thought they were solutes for the machines, but now I read the label I saw it was something else. Rhodamine B hydrological dye. Caution: Stains.
There was only one person at Zodiac I knew who used that in her research – and Hagger was supposed to have broken it off with her months ago. No wonder Greta was furious.
Forty-four
Anderson’s Journal – Saturday
You’d think, with two dozen people confined to a few hundred square metres of ice, it would be easy to find anyone you wanted at Zodiac. It took me the best part of an hour to track Annabel down; eventually, I found her on a pair of skis gliding around the perimeter. I wondered if we’d been chasing each other round in circles all morning, like Pooh and Piglet.
‘I’ve been in the bang shop.’ She waved her pole at one of the older, wooden huts, where they keep the explosives. ‘Have you seen anyone go in there? Twenty kilos of det cord’s gone missing.’
‘Don’t look at me.’
‘No,’ she agreed, in a way that seemed to imply I wouldn’t be up to it. ‘Probably one of the American students who doesn’t understand the metric system.’
She pushed off and began to ski away. I followed.
‘I want to ask you about Martin.’
She didn’t slow down. I took the Rhodamine-B bottle out of my pocket and threw it in front of her. ‘What was he doing with that?’
‘You’ve just violated article nine of the Utgard Treaty,’ she told me. ‘Littering.’ She stopped, bent down and picked it up.
‘I found it in his lab. Half a dozen of them. I just want to know what you were doing there.’
‘He must have taken them from my store. I haven’t been in his lab in six months.’
‘Greta thinks you have.’
Wrong thing to say. She started skiing again; I had to run to keep up.
‘What was Martin doing with that dye? Did he come to you for help?’ I was starting to sweat. Lithe and long-legged, Annabel seemed to glide effortlessly over the snow. ‘You use Rhodamine to trace water in the ice, right? Was Hagger interested in something coming off the glacier in meltwater?’
She stopped and looked back. She wasn’t even breathing hard. ‘Be careful. Last time you and I went running around the ice together, you fell down a hole.’
‘Did Martin ask you about the glacier? Please,’ I added. A cramp was spreading through my side. I knelt down in the snow and pressed my hand on my knee. I probably looked ridiculous.
Annabel surveyed me, the Ice Queen looking down on her subject.
‘Hagger asked me about the ionic profile of some water samples. That’s all.’
‘What did you find?’
‘High sulphite levels.’
I struggled. Sulphite’s a mineral, nothing to do with enzymes and proteins. Nothing really to do with biology at all.
But Annabel was holding something back. Waiting for me, behind her mirrored glasses.
‘What do high sulphite levels mean?’
‘Glaciers don’t just push ice down to the sea. They’re complex hydrological systems with their own chemistry. Ice is an insulator; it sits on top of the rock like a heavy blanket. Now, the rock has heat in it from the earth’s core, and that heat can’t escape, so it melts the bottom of the glacier. The whole thing’s sitting on a water slide. As water flows through the channels, or over the rock, it gathers its own chemical signature. Chloride means it’s come from melted snow; calcite means it’s travelled under the glacier, in contact with the rock.’
‘And sulphite?’
‘Sulphite doesn’t show up in meltwater much.’
‘But you said—’
‘There are only a few places in the world where it happens, so we don’t have much data. But where there are mine workings that go underneath a glacier – and, as I said, that’s not common – we’ve seen evidence that the mines can become part of the glacier’s drainage system. Meltwater seeps into the tunnels, and then joins the glacier again and flows out at the bottom.’
‘And sulphite ions are evidence of that.’
She nodded. ‘Digging tunnels exposes the rock to air. The air oxidises the metals in the rock, which produces sulphite. Then water flows through and washes it out.’
I’ve got enough chemistry that I could follow that. ‘So Martin showed you some of his samples.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the sample bags – do you remember if they had coloured dots on them? Red or green?’
‘All the ones that tested positive for sulphite had red dots—
’
‘You’re sure?’
In my eagerness, I’d jumped in too quickly and cut her off. She shot me a dirty look.
‘I asked him about the dots. I thought he might be playing a joke on me. But he said all the red ones came from the Helbreensfjord, which makes sense. All the mines around Vitangelsk – the tunnels go on for kilometres. Some must go right through the mountain and under the Helbreen.’
‘So Hagger’s samples from the Helbreensfjord – the red ones – contained water that had gone through these mine tunnels under the glacier and come out at the bottom.’
‘The data’s consistent with that hypothesis.’
‘And Rhodamine B would prove it. I mean, if you poured some of that dye in at the top of the Helbreen, and found it coming out at the bottom full of sulphites, that would be the proof.’
‘I’ve never put dye around there.’
‘But Hagger asked you to.’
‘It’s not in my project. And unlike some people, I do what my funding body are paying me to do. That’s why they keep funding me.’
I waved the dye bottle. ‘So he tried it himself.’
She sniffed. ‘Even if he did, he couldn’t have interpreted the data. Finding Rhodamine in the outlet water, after it’s travelled ten kilometres underground in who knows which direction, isn’t an easy thing. Hagger couldn’t even pour it straight. He had the dye all over his hands when he died.’
She pushed back a slender leg, then shot it forward to begin skiing away.
‘Still does, unless anyone’s cleaned him up.’
The cold store at Zodiac feels like a morgue at the best of times. Long racks filled with ice cores, steel boxes spiked with frost. The body at the end, wrapped in plastic sheeting, almost seemed natural. Almost.
I unwrapped the plastic and examined Hagger’s body. It didn’t bother me as much as I’d thought: the flesh was frozen so hard, I couldn’t think of it as ever having been alive. As Annabel had said, a pinkish dye stained the hands, like a child who’d been overenthusiastic with the felt tips.
Was Hagger really so inept he spilled it all over himself?
I thought I heard a noise behind me and looked round. Nothing there, except the endless rows of ice cores.
The cores sample every snowfall that’s ever happened on this glacier, one on top of the other. You can read them like tree rings.
Hagger had an ice core in his freezer, I remembered. I’d wondered, when I saw it, why a man who studied sea ice would care about the lifeless heart of a glacier. I’d also wondered how he came by it.
The whole thing’s sitting on a water slide.
What if it wasn’t what’s in the ice that interested him?
I ran back to the Platform. Ignoring the party in the mess, I dived into Hagger’s lab and opened the fridge. I’d forgotten the freezer compartment when I’d cleared out the samples, but it was still there: a stubby cylinder of ice that looked as if it had been chopped with an axe.
I took it back to the caboose and put it on the hot plate. Usually, you use the hot plate to break down DNA, but it worked pretty well as a stove. In a few minutes, the core was sinking into a puddle of its own meltwater. I poured it off into a beaker, prepared a solution and ran it through the mass spectrometer.
The graph matched the others perfectly. A bit weaker, but that was understandable: the contaminated water wasn’t part of the glacier, but had flowed under it. The trace must be from residue that had stuck to the bottom.
The enzymes aren’t in the glacier – they’re under it.
I’m lying on my bed catching up my diary. So much work, but I’ve got almost all of it now. Time to lay it out for myself.
Meltwater → under the Helbreen → mine tunnels → Helbreensfjord → ocean current → Echo Bay
Contains Pfu-87 enzyme, turbocharging food chain along coast
Algae → plankton→ fish → seals → bears
Accelerated evolution of Gelidibacter incognita bugs
Contamination of Hagger’s original samples
WHERE IS Pfu-87 COMING FROM?
→ not from snow/ice accumulation – glacier samples negative
MUST BE PICKED UP IN THE MINE TUNNELS
Eastman must know. All those loaded comments this morning about Vitangelsk, Mine 8. He was testing me to see how far I’ve got.
If he reads this, he’ll kill me.
Still not clear why he gave me the paper with those numbers on it. Some sort of test? Connected with Pfu-87 enzymes?
If there were four numbers, it would make sense. Could be DNA sequence, 0 = G, 1 = C, etc. Be interesting to compare with DNA coded by enzymes.
Unless …
Pharaoh String! Is that why Hagger brought me here? Impossible.
Noise outside – someone coming.
I have to get to the Helbreen right now.
Forty-five
USCGC Terra Nova
Franklin put down the journal as Santiago came in to his cabin. Kennedy was with him, leaning on a crutch. His bandages had come off.
‘We took a look at the guys from the tent,’ Santiago said. He looked angry about something. ‘Tell the Captain what you told me.’
Kennedy licked his lips. ‘The man you found out there – it’s Tom Anderson.’
‘I told him it can’t be. Tom Anderson’s got six inches and about eighty pounds on this guy.’
Kennedy looked irritated. ‘I think you can trust me to recognise him.’
Franklin closed the book. ‘Is he going to wake up so he can tell us himself?’
‘Doc says fifty-fifty. He was out there a few days. The woman, Greta, she’s in better shape. Doc thinks she arrived later, probably came to rescue him but ran out of gas. She must have let off the emergency beacon. Had it tucked up with her in the sleeping bag, to keep the batteries warm.’
A wistful look came over him. ‘Be nice to have a chick to curl up in a sleeping bag with me out here.’
‘Mrs Santiago would hate to hear you say that, Ops.’
‘Mrs Santiago hates the cold.’
Franklin reopened the book. Santiago didn’t take the hint.
‘Something on your mind, Ops?’
‘Just wondering, sir. If we do have Anderson, who the hell did we have before?’
Anderson’s Journal – Tuesday (?)
I don’t know where to start. Don’t even know what day it is. After what’s happened … If I can’t make sense of it, how can I write it down?
At least I’ve got the rest of my life to think about it.
But that isn’t long. In this cold, life expectancy’s measured in hours. All that stands between me and the Arctic is a canvas wall. All that’s heating the tent is my own body. I can already feel it failing.
I read a story, before I came, how a nineteenth-century ship sank near the Bering Strait. Months later, wreckage arrived off the coast of Greenland, carried thousands of miles by the ice. Maybe one day this journal will land in Canada or Alaska, and a cruise-ship tourist will pick it up off the beach. They’ll wonder who I was, if this could possibly be true.
More likely, this flimsy piece of ice will spin off into open water and melt, until the ice gives and drowns the journal. Then all that’ll be left of me is a few drops of DNA in the ocean.
I miss Luke. Dying doesn’t frighten me on my own account – I’m not religious – but the thought of leaving him alone, and being without him, is making these last few hours a living hell. The best I can hope for, now, is that the ice holds long enough; that someone finds my body; that Luke can know the truth.
This is what happened.
I was on my bunk, staring at the sheet of paper with those noughts and ones and twos that I finally understood, when Greta came in.
‘Thing Night,’ she said. ‘You’re missing it.’
I swung myself off the bunk. ‘I have to get up to the Helbreen. Right now.’
She tilted her head five degrees to one side. That was about as surprised as she ever gets
.
‘I know what Martin found up there.’
‘OK.’
‘We’ll need climbing harnesses and head torches.’
‘OK.’
We dressed for the cold. I could hear film music coming through the mess door, laughter and toasts, but they might as well have been on another planet. Greta fetched the climbing gear while I grabbed Hagger’s lab book and the journal with my notes. Luke’s Father Christmas letter peeked out of it, still undelivered.
I stood in the lab for the last time, and looked around. I had that feeling you get leaving for the airport, convinced there’s some vital thing you’ve forgotten to pack. But I didn’t dare wait any longer.
We left the Platform and headed for the snowmobile park. Just as we got there, a figure rose up from where he’d been crouching behind one of the machines. I was so keyed up, I almost shot him.
It was only Quam. He looked distracted; his hands were sticky, and he stank of petrol. Why he had chosen that moment for a spot of maintenance, I couldn’t think.
‘You’re missing Thing Night.’ He looked down, fiddling with his hands as if he’d spilled something on his glove. He sounded almost drunk.
‘So are you.’
‘Checking the fuel lines,’ he muttered. Greta gave him a sharp look.
‘Is something wrong?’
Quam shook his head. ‘Just checking.’
I could tell she didn’t believe him. I thought it was strange, too, but I had to be away. I grabbed her arm and tugged her towards the mag hut. ‘The reading,’ I said loudly.
Greta gave the snowmobiles one more unhappy look. She pointed to the flare pistol holstered on Quam’s hip. ‘Be careful with that thing.’
Quam covered it with his hand. ‘Be careful,’ he repeated.
He sounded dazed, like a zombie. If I’d only taken a moment to think about it, I might have put a few things together: the flare gun, the smell of petrol, the unlikely preoccupation with snowmobile maintenance. But the only exact science is hindsight.
‘What now?’ I asked, as soon as Quam was behind us.
‘The Sno-Cat.’
‘Won’t Quam stop us?’ Officially, we were still confined to base.