Fitzgerald was the only one who didn’t participate in the festivities. He sat at the bar all evening, downing one can of Guinness after another and making little attempt to converse with anyone else, or even to acknowledge their existence.
‘Don’t you think it would be better for everyone if you joined in?’ Lauren challenged him.
‘Not really,’ the explorer replied, not bothering to look her in the face.
‘And while you’re about it,’ Murdo chipped in, ‘don’t forget those Guinnesses you’re drinking come from my allocation. Every one of those you down comes out of my stash for the winter.’
Fitzgerald reached behind the bar and pulled out another can. He clicked back the ring pull and began to pour the black liquid into his glass.
‘That’s it, you bastard,’ Murdo screamed. ‘I’m going to teach you some fucking manners.’
The chef launched himself towards Fitzgerald, fists raised to strike as Lauren and Sean piled in to restrain him. The scuffle went on for a few seconds before they had Murdo under control.
‘Forget it, Murdo,’ Sean shouted at him. ‘He’s not worth it.’
Fitzgerald took his beer and retired to his room.
47
‘I’ve prepared the press release,’ Lauren told Frank as she entered the radio room. ‘It’s time to tell the world what we’ve found.’
Frank was consulting a technical manual at the bench, a puzzled expression creasing his face. ‘Not right now you won’t. The satellite unit’s down.’
‘What’s new?’ Lauren wasn’t initially concerned. Radio telephone links from Antarctica rely on connections with satellites which lie barely above the northern horizon, and a medium-sized storm can disrupt signals for days. There had been many occasions that winter when the base had been unable to reach the outside world for twenty-four hours or more. Privately, Lauren had quite welcomed these brief interludes of peace—at least it kept her troublesome sponsor off her back.
‘I don’t mean a weather problem,’ Frank told her. ‘I mean the whole system is dead. I can’t even get it to power up.’
‘Antarctic gremlin?’
Frank switched the unit on and off. ‘Listen to the speakers: there’s not even any static. It’s most peculiar. I’ve had the fuse board out of the front panel, but they all seem intact.’
Lauren checked the five fuses and agreed they were fine.
‘I’ve got the manufacturer’s fault-finding guide here,’ Frank tossed the pamphlet on the workbench, ‘but it’s as good as useless. It’s limited to the basic stuff and pretty much says, if it’s anything more than a fuse or a switch falling off, return it to the manufacturer under warranty.’
‘Great. Have you had a go with the voltmeter?’
‘Sure. I’ve been checking the circuitry through as far as I can, but my electronics only goes so far. If it was a standard radio, or even if I could recognise a transistor or two, I’d be in with a fighting chance, but we’re talking rows and rows of chips, and to be honest I’m not at all confident I know what I’m doing in there.’
‘So what can we tell?’
‘OK … there’s power going into it. But there’s nothing coming out. Something’s gone wrong with the circuitry. I guess one of the components failed.’
‘You’re sure it’s not the satellite dish? Maybe it got dislodged or iced up?’
‘The dish is fine. First thing I did was to check it.’
‘How’s the back-up radio if we have an emergency?’ she asked him.
‘Well, it’s there if we need it.’ Frank gestured to the ancient longwave transmitter they had brought as a standby for just this eventuality. ‘But you know how fickle it can be.’
‘Let’s have a look at the guts of this thing.’
Frank pulled back the front fascia of the satellite transmitter and they peered without much hope at the many circuit boards which were stacked within the instrument panel.
‘See what I mean?’ Frank said. ‘We’re talking chip city.’
Lauren sighed as she contemplated the workings; like Frank, her electronics was good—but not this good. ‘We’ll just have to test the power output of each chip,’ she said. ‘Put the fine probe on the voltmeter, and we’ll see if one of these babies has died on us. Do we have any spares?’
‘I checked in the electronics reserve kit. We’ve got duplicates for most of these chips, thank God, so if we do find a dead one we can probably replace it.’
‘While you’re doing that, I’ll get on the back-up and see if I can raise a ground station while the weather’s still good enough to get one. We should let our sponsors know we have a comms problem or they might start to worry about us if we go completely dead.’
Lauren left Frank to his task and played with the radio transmitter for ten minutes or so before she managed to raise a ground station through the waves of static. The receiving operator was sitting in a New Zealand base at the edge of the continent almost twelve hundred miles away, and the connection was so distorted and faint that Lauren had to shout to make herself heard. Finally, she got the message through, along with Alexander De Pierman’s office number in London and the e-mail address of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.
‘Tell them we’re working on a problem with our satellite comms. We’ve only got the standard radio operational right now,’ she yelled, ‘so not to worry if they don’t hear from us for a while. It might take us a week or more to get this sorted.’
‘Roger that,’ came the response. Then the connection faded completely.
Lauren returned to the workbench and assisted Frank with his task. They attached the voltmeter to the chips on the motherboard one by one, registering positive output for them all.
‘These all seem to be powered up,’ Lauren observed. ‘Do we have a circuit diagram to try and work out what their functions are supposed to be?’
‘I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that,’ Frank said, ‘but we do have one, yes.’
While Lauren continued with the voltmeter, Frank began to consult the circuit diagram, patiently ticking off the components as listed against the circuit boards installed and trying to make some sense of the design.
For the length of the afternoon they worked side by side, getting more and more frustrated by the task.
Finally, Frank exclaimed: ‘Look at this connector—it’s empty.’
Lauren looked at the space he was pointing to, not noticing anything odd about it.
‘So? There’s always empty connectors in a complicated circuit system like this one. Look, there’s empty gaps on the other boards too.’
‘I know,’ Frank said patiently, ‘but I’ve checked them all off against the circuit diagram, and there’s definitely a chip missing from this one.’
‘No way.’ Lauren looked at him in amazement.
‘Believe me.’
‘Which means what, exactly?’
‘Someone removed it. To disable the comms.’
‘My God,’ Lauren whispered. ‘Someone in the base opened this thing up and stole one of the chips?’
‘Seems bloody hard to believe, but, yes, that’s about the sum of it.’
Lauren shook her head. ‘Who in their right mind would do that? You must have made a mistake. Check the circuit diagram again.’
Frank consulted the pamphlet once more.
‘One hundred per cent sure,’ he said emphatically. ‘There should be a chip sitting right there. And now there’s not.’
‘Which chip is it?’
‘A D47K887.’
‘Do we have a spare?’
Frank checked the spares kit, his expression of gloom deepening as he compared the contents against an inventory.
‘There should be one,’ he said, perplexed, ‘but it’s vanished.’
‘Whoever did this was being pretty damn sly,’ Lauren observed. ‘If we hadn’t had the circuit manual, we would never have spotted it.’
‘That’s what’s so frightening.’
&nbs
p; Lauren crossed to the window and looked out into the night. ‘Who asked for access today? Was there anything special happening?’
‘Sean had a couple of e-mails to send, so did Mel. Oh, and Carl was going to send a chunk of his book to a publisher he’s got interested. He brought me the disk last night, but the satellite connection was playing up with some bad weather. I was planning to do it this morning.’
Lauren picked up the floppy disk. It had ‘First draft synopsis and 50,000 words’ written in pen on the label.
‘Did you leave this disk on the desk like this?’
Frank looked a little guilty. ‘Well, Carl did ask me to keep it hidden, but I may have left it out overnight by mistake.’
‘So Fitzgerald could have seen it, could have known that you were about to send it. Has he been in here?’
‘Not that I’ve seen.’ Frank shrugged.
‘Could he have been in here during the night?’
‘Well, this door’s never locked; why should it be?’ Frank paused, then: ‘You think he sabotaged the unit?’
Lauren closed the door and dropped her voice. ‘Listen. I don’t want anyone else on this base to know that we discovered the missing chip. As far as we’re concerned, the satellite’s got some electrical gremlin in the works, and you’re in the process of identifying it. If anyone asks, tell them it’ll be up and running in a couple of days. OK?’
‘OK.’
Lauren opened the door to leave.
‘Hey,’ he called after her, ‘what are you going to do about this?’
‘I’ll sort it,’ Lauren told him. ‘Just give me a bit of time.’
‘Well, be careful. For God’s sake.’
48
Lauren waited until Fitzgerald was well into his nocturnal weight-training session before making her move, her bare feet making no sound on the carpeted floor. She passed Mel’s room, then Murdo’s, the muffled sound of the chef’s distinctive snore just audible through the insulated door.
Fitzgerald’s room was at the end of the accommodation block, and, as she had expected, it was locked. Lauren took the replacement key from her pocket and quietly opened the door. She entered the room, leaving the door open a crack in case she needed a fast exit.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she began to pick out the details of the room. Like all the others on the base, it was a three-metre-square construction with a sink in the corner and a low chest of drawers for clothes and personal belongings. Some of Fitzgerald’s personal survival gear was heaped in the corner, and the laptop sat on the desk.
Lauren thought about turning on the light, then decided against it. There was always the chance that Fitzgerald might leave the weights room for some reason, and the last thing she wanted was to alert him to her presence in his room.
Now. Where to search? Lauren thought about the options and decided to check the most obvious places first. As far as she knew, Fitzgerald would be assuming that no one had discovered his secret piece of sabotage, so there was always the chance he had not taken too much trouble to hide the chip.
She took two stealthy steps over to the drawers and slid open the bottom one with infinite care. Taking out her small penlight torch, she shone the beam into the interior, shielding the light from the rest of the room with her body and running her hand beneath the assortment of clothes which had been placed there.
There was no sign of the missing chip.
She checked the other drawers one by one, and then slid each one right out so she could run her hand around the base to see if anything had been taped underneath. Nothing; the chest of drawers was clean.
Lauren crossed to the basin and checked behind the ceramic plinth, where a useful-sized cavity could easily have held something small, then she went through the items in the mirrored cabinet sitting above the sink, removing the caps of shaving foam and shampoo to check that nothing had been secreted inside.
Then to the bed, running her fingers along every inch of the metal frame, and sliding her hands underneath the sheets to see if there were any incisions in the fabric.
A sudden noise made her jump, her heart racing with adrenaline as she froze to the spot. But it was only Murdo, coughing fit to bust in the room next door.
Lauren continued the search, now focusing on the clothes and equipment which had been dumped in a pile on the floor. She worked her way through the assorted thermal gear, running her fingers along the seams, and then went through the boots and skis, again finding nothing suspicious.
She slid the chair across to the window and stood on it while she searched the curtain rail, then turned her attention to the small circular plastic fire alarm which was bolted high on the wall. Each of the rooms had these alarms, and, shining her torch on it, Lauren realised that there might be enough spare space inside to hide something away. She clenched the penlight between her teeth as she clicked the plastic cover off its mounts.
She shone the torch onto the workings of the alarm, finding that there was indeed something hidden inside the alarm case, but not what she’d been expecting. Lauren reached up and pulled the 35mm canister of film from where it had been jammed.
‘Now what the hell is that doing here?’ she murmured, replacing the cover of the alarm and stepping to the floor. She looked the canister over, then put it in her top pocket. She had just slid the chair back into place when there was a slight noise behind her, a quiet footfall which turned her blood instantly cold. Before she had time to turn, Lauren felt the blow on the side of her head. It was powerful, feeling more like the impact of an iron bar than a fist, then Fitzgerald was on her, slamming Lauren’s face into the top edge of the cupboard and locking a muscular arm around her neck.
‘You’ve made a big mistake,’ Fitzgerald hissed, his grip tightening with terrifying force. ‘Intruders in the night get what they deserve.’
Lauren tried to struggle, but Fitzgerald had her arms pinned, her hands unable to strike a blow. The explorer increased the pressure, quickly reaching the point where Lauren could feel her windpipe beginning to be crushed. She tried to force her throat into a scream for help but could manage nothing more than a croak. No one was likely to hear them, she realised; the triple-insulated walls of Capricorn made for good sound-proofing, and Murdo, the nearest room occupant, slept like a corpse.
I’m dead, Lauren thought. I’m dead if I don’t fight.
Lauren tried to twist her body, attempting to wrest herself free, Fitzgerald turning with her to hold the grip. She tried to kick back at the explorer’s legs, to knock him off balance, but Fitzgerald was too fast to be caught out.
Lauren could feel her vision beginning to deteriorate as oxygen starvation cut in. She was being strangled to death and for long seconds it felt like there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Then she began to kick against the cupboard, smashing her foot against the panel so hard she splintered the plywood in her desperation to make some noise.
An age seemed to pass, Fitzgerald gradually increasing the intensity of his grip as Lauren began to black out.
Suddenly the room filled with a brilliant intensity of light. Lauren heard a brief flurry of footsteps and then felt Fitzgerald’s weight slump against her as the meaty sound of metal against flesh resonated close to her ear.
Lauren, gasping horribly, forced herself upright, shrugging off the weight of the explorer from her back so that the unconscious body fell to the floor.
In front of her was Sean, trembling, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, a fire extinguisher in his hand. He helped Lauren to the bed, where she sat, her face bright purple, hyperventilating as her winded lungs gradually got some air and allowed her to breathe.
‘I thought he was going to kill me,’ Lauren told him, looking down with loathing at the motionless figure at her feet.
‘But what were you doing in his room?’ Sean asked.
‘I was looking for something. Something Frank and I thought he might have stolen.’
‘Did you find it?’
Laure
n pulled the canister from her pocket.
‘No. But I did find this, hidden in the fire alarm.’
Sean took the film and turned it in his hands, immediately spotting the tiny scratched cross on the base of the metal roll.
‘Son of a bitch. That motherfucker stole my film.’
Then the realisation hit him.
‘God, I am so dumb … the pictures of the food and the drugs … I took a couple of photos inside the wreck. That’s why Fitzgerald stole my film.’
49
‘What the hell’s this God-almighty row?’ A sleepy-looking Murdo was at the door in his pyjamas, staring in astonishment at the body of Fitzgerald where it lay on the floor.
Mel and Frank were not far behind him, followed by Richard.
‘What happened to you?’ Richard asked as he saw the livid red bruising on Lauren’s neck. ‘Has he gone crazy?’
‘He tried to kill Lauren,’ Sean told him. ‘We have to immobilise him while he’s still unconscious. If he comes round, we’ll never hold him.’
The Capricorn team bent to the task, lifting the comatose explorer onto the bed. Fitzgerald let out a deep moan as they shifted him.
‘His arms,’ Lauren managed to croak through her damaged throat, ‘we have to tie them, fast.’
Sean scanned the room. ‘What can we use? Frank? You got any ideas?’
Frank thought for a few moments and then disappeared to the store room. He returned with a handful of black plastic ties, the type electricians use to bind cables together.
‘I reckon these will do the trick,’ he said, sliding one of the sturdy ties into its port until it clicked in place in a ring. ‘Try and break that.’
Murdo took the bracelet of plastic and tried to pull it apart with both hands. ‘You’re right,’ he said, red with the exertion of the failed attempt. ‘These are as good as handcuffs.’
‘Put three on each wrist,’ Lauren ordered. ‘I don’t want to take any chances.’
They placed the still-unconscious Fitzgerald in a sitting position against the headboard of the bed and spreadeagled his arms until each wrist was against a bed post. Then they clicked the plastic ties into position, taking care not to pinch the flesh.
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