Elizabeth Island had been England’s second-ever land claim in the New World, five years older than Virginia or Newfoundland. The only older claim was Frobisher Bay, where Morgan’s plane had taken off that morning. Frobisher Bay had been lost for three hundred years before Charles Hall rediscovered it. Whereas Elizabeth Island, after Drake left it, had never been seen again at all. It had vanished in the storms of the great southern ocean, evading all attempts to relocate it. Maybe, thought Morgan, it’s been hiding up here.
Elizabeth. You shouldn’t get married during a war, when everything is about to be nothing and it seems almost stupid not to pretend that a stranger could be anything you want them to be. And you shouldn’t bring a child into your delusions. Alice was not like either of her parents. She was fierce and hot. She didn’t belong in a cold place like this. So not Alice Island either.
He keyed his microphone. ‘It doesn’t matter what you call them. As discoverers, you only get to pick a temporary name. The government has a committee that will decide on the permanent one.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair,’ said Tomkinson’s voice. ‘Why would they change the old rules?’
To assert sovereignty and control. To stop the Americans – who we happen to know are running secret photographic flights over the Canadian high-Arctic – from claiming anything new that they might find up here. Which is also the real reason why Ottawa is now so keen on getting you lot to map the whole Arctic. But he couldn’t tell them that. ‘There’s a committee for everything now,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m putting my goddam name on the map,’ said Tomkinson. ‘Where it belongs.’
‘Not me,’ said Barnett. ‘If it’s only a provisional name, I’m calling mine “Shitty Island”. I’d like to see them print that in the Ottawa Citizen.’
‘Go ahead,’ said Morgan. ‘Call them anything you like.’
Maybe the next time someone came looking for these islands they too would be gone, like Frobisher Strait and Elizabeth Island. Or like Jan Mayen Island: how many different peoples had found and then lost that frozen volcano between Iceland and Spitsbergen? Irish monks, Viking explorers, the lost Inuit tribe of north-eastern Greenland, who were encountered only once by Europeans and then never seen again . . . Henry Hudson, blown far off the course that would eventually take him to Hudson Bay and the Hudson River, was said to have seen Jan Mayen in eruption, but his name had not stuck. It took those most scientific of sailors, the whaling captains of Holland and England, to fix it to the map.
After that, it was thought, Jan Mayen Island would never have secrets again. But Gennady Olonkin had spent more time on Jan Mayen than any person alive, and when Morgan had visited him there, two summers before, he had a different opinion.
‘They say that this island is dead,’ Olonkin had told him. ‘But I don’t believe them. I feel it moving under my boots.’
Olonkin had waited for him on the black sand of the beach, smoking a cardboard Russian cigarette and watching Morgan paddle his dinghy ashore. In case of bears, Olonkin carried a rifle. It had been a rare gentle day for Jan Mayen Island and the wavelets were vivid with emerald seaweed. Olonkin helped Morgan to drag his dinghy up the beach then waved to the Catalina flying boat riding at anchor on the glassy water just offshore.
‘One hour,’ Olonkin had shouted to the RAF pilot. ‘I don’t need any more.’ When he spoke English he still sounded Russian, not Norwegian. Yet it was almost thirty years since he’d signed up with Amundsen.
He took Morgan to the cluster of deserted shacks and huts which the homesick American signallers had called Atlantic City. They sat on office chairs outside an old Quonset hut and looked north to the Beerenberg, its crater hidden by the clouds. It had once been the world’s most northerly active volcano, the antipode of Mount Erebus, but now it was deemed to be extinct.
Olonkin poured whisky into two tin mugs. It had been years since they’d last seen each other, back before the war. Morgan clinked his mug against Olonkin’s. ‘How long have you been alone here?’
‘Five months. The Americans pulled out of this listening post in February. Then Norway took it over. I’m Norway. The other Norwegians are still on the other side of the island, running the weather station. Eventually they’ll move over here too. But I’m not doing anything to hurry them. I like it here by myself.’
‘What do you do all alone here?’
‘I listen.’
Olonkin had taken him a little way up the bare lava slope above the camp. A thirty-foot mast was braced by steel wires. ‘Huff-duff,’ said Olonkin. ‘How we detected those Nazis on Greenland. The Americans stripped out the other antennae when they left. But they didn’t take this one.’
‘They do tend to leave a lot of stuff behind.’
Olonkin laid his rifle on the scree, opened his rucksack and took out a curious gadget. It was a small Bakelite box in a home-made metal frame, soldered at the corners. At one end of the box a wire attached to what looked like a microphone taken from a telephone. The other end was wired to a bundle of batteries taped together like sticks of dynamite. Olonkin used some more tape to fix the microphone to the antenna, then plugged a headset into the Bakelite box. He offered the headphones to Morgan.
‘Listen.’
Inuvik, North West Territories
Someone had slid a letter under the door of Bert’s apartment. It was waiting for them when they got back from Eagle Plains. On the back was a handwritten note: ‘Sorry Bert. I just found this in my mailbox. Mailman must have made a mistake. Hope it wasn’t urgent – I just got back from a month in the south. Dougie in number 14.’
It was long past midnight. Nelson’s eyes were tired from the long drive back from Eagle Plains. He dumped their bags inside the door and handed the letter to Fay.
Ottawa, December 13th
Sandrine Levieux
Toponymy Specialist
Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation
Natural Resources Canada
Dear Bert
It was such a pleasant surprise to receive your last e-mail – we all thought you had retired for good when you moved up to Inuvik. I guess it’s true what they say around here – old geodesists never die, they just refine themselves out of existence.
To answer your questions I had to dig pretty deep in the files of the Geographical Names Board. Please find enclosed copies of all the relevant documents and maps which I was able to find: pdf attachments would not have done them justice, hence the snail-mail reply.
From what I can see it is true, as you suggest, that Prince Charles Island, Air Force Island and Foley Island up in Foxe Basin really were the last large land masses to be added to the map of our planet – Prince Charles Island is about half the size of Wales. The map stops here, so to speak. And so recently at that – 1948!
The names of the three newly discovered islands were determined by the Geographical Names Board in accordance with protocol. The largest island was named for Prince Charles, the first son of then Princess Elizabeth, who was born that year. The second largest, Air Force Island, was given that name to recognize the work done by 413, 414 and 408 Squadrons RCAF, which mapped two million square miles of northern Canada after the war. The smallest of the three, Foley Island, was named after an officer of 413 Squadron who died in a plane crash a few months after its discovery.
It turns out you were onto something when you queried whether these were the first names given to these islands. According to a preliminary sketch map I found in the old annexe, which was drawn by the air crew right after their discovery flight in July 1948, the two biggest islands were originally marked as Tomkinson Island and Barnett Island – the names of the navigator and pilot of Lancaster FM-214, which discovered them by accident.
The smallest island (now Foley Island) was marked as Morgan Island – why they called it that we have have no idea. There was nobody of that name on the manifest of that
flight or on the ration strength of 413 Squadron. It might have been some private joke between the men on the airplane. They’re all dead now, so I guess we’ll never know.
Next time you’re back in Ottawa please drop by and see us.
Best wishes,
Sandrine
PS I thought I’d better not mention it in office email, but some guy who said he was from the Ministry of Defence in London has been asking about you on the phone. He wants to know why you still have a top-security clearance despite being retired. I said that I assumed that you had handed in all your passes when you left and that it was none of our business if you hadn’t: you were seconded to us from National Defence, so he should take it up with them. I don’t know what the exact problem is: the guy wouldn’t even give his name. But if you’re nosing around where you shouldn’t, please take care. x S
‘Morgan Island,’ said Nelson.
‘It says in the letter that he wasn’t on that plane.’
‘Seems to me he had a trick of not being places. He wasn’t on the manifest of Wop May’s plane when it flew up to hunt for Albert Johnson. Neither was Meares. They’re not mentioned anywhere in the lists of men on the posse. But we know they were there . . . Did you ever try to see his service record?’
‘Of course I did. But they said it was missing. Most of it.’
‘So what did the rest of it tell you?’
‘It told me when he joined up. It mentioned some medals. And it told me where he was last seen alive.’
Tuktoyaktuk, October 1957
The emergency room of the Distant Early Warning radar base was located at the furthest end of the module train, beyond the sleeping quarters and recreation area. No more than a repurposed bedroom, it contained a short-wave transceiver on which the crew could call for help in case of a fire or enemy attack which took out all their other systems. Now that the Tuktoyaktuk site was operational, along with the rest of the Distant Early Warning Line, people seldom went into that room any more. So Group Captain Morgan made it his temporary home. The station chief – a civilian contractor, like most of the men on the base – thought of objecting but then decided against it. All he really knew about Morgan was that he had arrived completely unannounced, ferried in a small boat from Arctic Red River by a native special constable. He had a vague but impressive set of orders from the high command at NORAD. He was a friend of Colonel Milner, the US Air Force controller for that sector of the DEW Line. Most importantly of all, he had said that he wouldn’t stay long. So Morgan was left alone in the emergency room to sit up late and drink whisky and listen.
The short-wave was crowded now, thirty years after he first tuned in on his home-made radio. Moscow. BBC World Service. Voice of America. Peking. Prague. Tirana. CBC International. Pyongyang. RFI. Everywhere you tuned they jumped out and accosted you, lying and boasting and begging with menaces. The first snow fell outside, and as the daylight declined – and with it the atmosphere’s ionization – the voices grew louder, clearer, increasingly inhuman. They seemed to want to silence each other, to oppose their amplitudes until they cancelled each other out.
Well. If it came to that. Morgan could walk down the 400-foot corridor which ran the full length of the module train – the twenty-four prefabricated huts joined on stilts above the tundra – until he reached the surveillance room at the far end. There, the duty radicians sat alone in the darkness, tracking their screens and attending the radios, observing the airliners on great circle routes, the supply flights coming up from the south, the transiting nuclear bombers, or perhaps even one of the occasional bogies, never explained by the military controllers, that might or might not be top-secret new spy planes.
Apart from watching the radar, the radicians’ other main job was to wait for a routine signal that would be relayed at least once a day along the Distant Early Warning Line – 63 radar sites, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, spanning 4,000 miles from the Aleutians to Greenland. This routine signal ordered each station in turn to consult its code book and then broadcast its own routine, bored announcement, coded to correspond only to that particular station and that precise minute in Zulu Time, the time set by Greenwich: a routine announcement to the B-52 bombers circling even further north, over Lancaster Sound and Ellesmere Island, and which consisted of only two letters in NATO phonetics, two letters that instructed those nuclear bombers, at least once a day, not to peel out of their orbits, not to turn out across the polar basin towards their pre-set Russian targets, not to silence for ever all radio chatter. Or at least, not yet.
Skyking, Skyking. This is Red Flush, this is Red Flush. Do not answer. Do not answer. Break, break. Silver Cup Charlie. Time is 190723 Zulu. Authentication is Whiskey Tango. Whiskey Tango.
‘Go/no go’. That’s what they called it. That was what it was meant to boil down to up here. Black or white. Living or dead. And the switches were getting finer and finer. The Distant Early Warning Line had only been operational for three months and already they were preparing to swap some of the gear out, replacing glass tubes with these new things, transistors. On or off, said the transistors. Who would miss us?
But when Morgan listened to the short-wave band, late at night, alone in the Emergency Room, he still conceived of the universe as he had done as a boy, not as on or off but as waves on distant beaches. If any of it came from somewhere other than himself he would never be alone, would never have truly been lonely. Any signal at all, if it could only be confirmed – if it could only be authenticated – would contain in itself the whole of creation.
He was fifty years old and not in good health and he had to come to places like this to comprehend his baffled love for his wife and his daughter, for his dead step-parents, for Meares, for all the strangers he had glimpsed and then lost sight of in the war. It was so cold outside, yet in here it was warm. And the people here left him alone.
The first big snows of October had fallen and the low spit of land on which the base stood turned from grey to white. The sea itself hadn’t frozen yet but it would soon be white too, indistinguishable from land. The Distant Early Warning base would then be the only landmark for dozens of miles in any direction, except when it was swallowed by the blizzards and the fogs. You should not go outside in these white-out conditions: it would be easy to wander out onto the tundra or the sea ice and freeze to death there, or be taken by the bears that could scent you in the fog.
Whenever the weather was clear, in what little daylight was left to him, Morgan would go outside and perform a slow tour of the base’s antennae, floundering through the fresh snow, sucking razor-blades into his lungs. Sometimes he’d be interrupted by the roar of supply planes from the south, or by the helicopters which flew crew and supplies along the DEW Line. Morgan had to stamp his feet and clap his mittened hands together and wait until the aircraft had killed their engines or flown away. Then he could listen again, using the home-made pick-up gear that Olonkin had first shown him.
Each type of aerial had its own voice. The two giant antennae for the White Alice communication link, thirty-foot dishes of welded steel plates, made a low, hollow hum counterpointed by a whistle, like someone blowing across the mouth of a jug. When the wind dropped completely and the great cold descended, dropping to minus forty or lower, White Alice would click her tongue in disapproval, tsk, tsk, tsk, fainter and slower, until she too was cowed by the silence.
The VHF aerials were used to communicate with nearby aircraft, with those few people who went outside the module train in winter, and with the handful of workers still in the construction camp down by the airstrip. They were terrible gossips, buzzing and crackling and fizzing with mischief. Once Morgan was sure he heard voices in the static and, whipping off his headphones, pressed his ear against the cold steel. He paid for that with a large piece of skin. The voices, he discovered, had come from the cord which connected his earphones to the pick-up on the aerial: it had become its own wireless set, receiving l
ocal interference.
The wooden telephone poles, which carried phone lines to the airstrip and construction camp and to the RCMP post in the nearby Inuvialuit settlement, groaned and tutted like old men and women enjoying their own slow decay.
Loudest of all was the big Doppler tower, an open steel gantry bisecting the sky for three hundred feet over the base. When he placed the pick-up on its girders he heard moans and sighs, the creaking noise of feeding beluga whales, the sound of metal giants turning over in their sleep.
None of this made sense yet to Morgan. He wasn’t sure that it ever would. When Olonkin claimed that his aerials talked to him, Morgan had argued against: it’s only the wind in the stay wires, the warping of wood and contraction of steel. Loose rivets popping, the hum of imperfectly soldered connections. Cross-modulation. Ground loops. Capture errors. Meteor scatter – that effect caused by vaporized shooting stars, which allows radar beams and VHF signals to transcend, for a moment or two, the limits set for them by the curve of the world. There’s noise in your headset and your wires and your microphones. There’s noise in your ears and inside your head. What if you could correct for all that and you were left with only silence? Do you think you could stand it? That’s why you think you hear words in the noise.
I hear words in Russian, Olonkin had insisted that day on Jan Mayen Island. Why would the voices speak only in Russian if they aren’t talking to me? Who else on this fucking volcano speaks Russian?
Apophenia. Loneliness. The vertigo you get from living too many years. Who wouldn’t want to turn and go back again, if only you could? But Morgan didn’t say this to Olonkin. The Russia that Olonkin had fled as a boy no longer existed. Let it speak to him now however it could.
As for himself, Morgan didn’t think that the universe would or could use words if it wanted to talk to us. He would listen for its message in the silences between, in the contraction of cold metal, the warping of wood, the wind singing in the stay wires. He would never be able to read these as words, no more than he could read the coded messages of the Cold War numbers stations, those strings of numbers read at night by unidentified voices on the short-wave. But this didn’t mean they weren’t talking to him.
Minds of Winter Page 40