Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  The doctor was succeeded by Hoyle, who seemed to have no rank. He seemed to be part scientist, part ice-expert. Hoyle had helped the supremely fit Major Schwartz, universally known as Bernie, don the experimental suit. Hoyle himself was involved with the design team for the suit and usually helped Bernie into and out of it. He had not checked it since Bernie’s recovery this afternoon. Bernie had elected to take the suit out today for an unscheduled test because of — not despite — the weather. In theory the suit should have been in secure storage until well into the new year, but the prospect of the squall was too much for Bernie to resist. For the first time this season they were promised conditions which would test the suit to its limits and Bernie wanted to make full use of it. Hoyle’s evidence became a little vague after that and Richard realised that once again the scientist was up against the limits of secrets. Were these secrets industrial, military, or political? Richard wondered.

  Hoyle’s evidence was put on hold while the second — and last — communications expert gave evidence about the manner in which Armstrong base had expected to keep contact with Major Schwartz but had failed to do so. Then Hoyle returned to the stand and gave evidence of the initial search attempts, the brief loss of the snow-team, the call for help and of the later phase when help arrived. Then at last Richard and Colin added their evidence. No one else was called. No one from Kalinin — understandably, as they had not helped in the search, though they had expedited the recovery after Thomas S. Maddrell’s embarrassing mistake.

  The video link was broken at 18.30 local time to allow the great and the good at NASA HQ to deliberate undisturbed. As they waited, the room was rearranged and the little group of witnesses milled around a little aimlessly, not yet permitted to return to their duties or their vessels, not having anything else in particular to do. Richard watched as hard copy of their testimony spooled out of one of the computers. He realised that the same would be happening in Washington in case the decision-makers wanted to refer to any detail there. He crossed to the window again and looked out at the ships in the bay. Colin and Kate were there, also silently looking outward. ‘No chance of Faraday now,’ said Richard quietly.

  Colin shook his head.

  The communications laptop buzzed urgently and Colonel Jaeger crossed to it. All eyes remained on him for the few minutes he spent exchanging terse words with his masters. Then he drew himself up. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Washington will be sending one inspector down from the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. This officer will be here within forty-eight hours, in spite of the season, and will need to speak to us all, including those kind friends who answered our distress call. We therefore extend to you the hospitality of Armstrong base at this festive time and apologise if your charitable actions have resulted in disruption to your plans and schedules.’

  As soon as he finished speaking the main door of the Jamesway opened and several people entered. Among these was Robin carrying, of all things, a tray. She came over to Richard at once and thrust her tray under the noses of the little group by the window. Richard looked a little suspiciously at the glasses of steaming yellowish liquid. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Eggnog,’ said Robin, grimly cheerful. ‘The one nearest you has no alcohol in it. Merry Christmas.’

  Chapter Three

  The next twenty-four hours went by in a whirl of activity whose momentum gathered pace like an avalanche. The process began with the initial inquiry, then continued with various visits and explorations. By the time the parties got seriously under way, things were already slipping. Perhaps it was the Big White. Certainly on Erebus and in Armstrong there was more than a little cabin fever, though everyone contrived to conceal it well enough at first. Then there was the genuine shock of Bernie’s death, and a surprisingly large number of them were involved in that, or felt as though they were.

  At first, to Richard’s wise eyes it seemed that much of it arose from the volatile mix of nationalities, cultures, attitudes and genders all trapped here in these extreme conditions with the threat of the inspector’s arrival looming. But then he began to suspect that there was something more complex, and more sinister, at work. That was later, however. Now he stood with his eggnog, watching Billy Hoyle approach. As soon as the American scientist joined them, Richard introduced Robin.

  ‘How do you do,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about the circumstances. Is “Merry Christmas” out of order?’

  ‘I guess not,’ said Billy. ‘Though we’d say Season’s Greetings I guess. Bernie was a nice guy but he’d know how much the rest of us need to let off steam right now. He wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘You could look on it as a bit of a wake,’ said Colin, sipping the thick yellow liquid with some trepidation.

  ‘A wake would be Bernie’s style,’ agreed Hoyle. ‘Though I don’t think it’s a legitimately Jewish concept. Still, he wasn’t too deeply into the faith. He’d have been here for midnight Mass tonight. Drunk or sober he’d have been here.’

  Colin surveyed the room. Several people were onto their second drink and the mood was lightening. ‘Have you been saving up for this?’ he asked quietly. ‘I guess even NASA must put liquor very low on their list of supply priorities when they’re flying stuff in. Same as our supplies from the British Antarctic Survey. Fuel first. Liquor last. A dram of oil’s worth a damn sight more than a dram of single malt down here.’

  ‘Saving up like you wouldn’t believe, and we’ve had a moonshine still going for months — in spite of the obvious difficulties with the heat for distillation. And a lot of the guys who’ve gone home for New Year’s have left their allowances for the rest of us as well. We’ve been looking forward to this, I can tell you. And nobody more than poor old Bernie.’

  ‘Well,’ said Robin so quietly it managed to rob the observation of offence, ‘all of you except Bernie seem to have fallen on your feet. You’ve not only got your own supplies, you have for the time being got two ships to call on too. Erebus is as well stocked as you could wish, especially in the booze department. I speak with some authority in the matter because I have seen her Port Stanley lading manifest. And I can’t even begin to guess what you’ll find aboard the good ship Kalinin. But I’ll bet my life there’ll be lots and lots of it.’

  Four sets of eyes looked through the clear plastic window to where the two ships swung at anchor almost side by side, their lines clean and striking in the early evening glimmer, etched against the black wall of the southern basalt cliff. The westerly squall had dropped but the seas were still high and Colin’s forehead folded into a frown as he registered the amount of brash ice washing in through the mouth of the bay. ‘If it freezes hard again tonight the ships could well be trapped for a while in any case,’ he growled.

  ‘Not Kalinin,’ observed a new voice. ‘That old girl could smash her way through a sizeable berg if Captain Ogre ordered it.’

  They all swung round to face the breezy new arrival. It was Thomas S. Maddrell, apparently unabashed by his faux pas with Bernie’s frozen corpse. As the realisation of his arrival spread through the room, so the animation went out of much of the conversation, in spite of the eggnog. If he noticed he gave no sign, but continued to smile sunnily at his little audience.

  ‘Captain Ogre?’ asked Robin.

  Thomas S. Maddrell removed his Ray-Bans to reveal deep-set brown eyes surrounded by pale-floored laugh lines under thick corn-coloured brows a shade or two darker than the riot of his hair. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I asked too. Her folks come from a little town just south of Riga. What can I say? Lucky they didn’t come from Brest. Or Smela.’ He turned, languidly, to survey the room, meeting all the gazes aimed at him. ‘Or Astrakhan …’

  ‘Or Titicaca, come to that,’ interjected Robin drily. ‘Eggnog, Mr Maddrell?’

  ‘Call me T-Shirt. Everyone does. What’s in it?’

  ‘Reconstituted egg powder, homemade alcohol, Advocaat — so I’m reliably informed. Why T-Shirt?’

  ‘Sounds irresistible. Partly
the initials Thomas S.’ He took a yellow glass. Sipped as though it contained Krug. ‘But mostly because I always seem to have —’

  ‘Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt,’ Richard completed, remembering one of William’s favourite sayings a couple of years ago.

  Robbed of his punch line, T-Shirt grinned. ‘Got it in one, sir,’ he said cheerfully.

  Richard winced. The way the young American said ‘sir’ made him feel ready for his Zimmer frame.

  ‘Are there many like you on Kalinin?’ asked Robin.

  ‘Twenty-five boys, same number of girls. Not one of us even faintly sane. Though I’m the first to snowboard the Big White. Got my reputation to consider. I am sorry about your friend, though,’ he said, turning to Billy Hoyle. ‘Sad way to go. Sad mistake on my part.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said the scientist. ‘Bernie was a joker. That was the sort of thing he loved. If he hadn’t been dead already he’d likely have died laughing.’

  ‘Nice of you to see it that way. I guess some of the others’ll take a little more convincing.’

  ‘They’ll come round. They just need someone to blame. Other than Bernie himself, or me, or the boss.’

  ‘Outsiders are pretty useful to closed societies, huh?’

  ‘If it hadn’t been you it would probably have been us,’ said Robin soothingly. ‘They need time to adjust, that’s all.’

  Richard thought how accurate Robin’s observation was. They were all outsiders here at the moment, even though they were here by invitation. ‘I think it’s time we reported back to Erebus,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I guess the guys on Kalinin can’t last much longer without me either,’ said T-Shirt. ‘But I tell you what, if these guys at Armstrong keep on with the cold shoulder, why don’t we all get together sometime? I’ll put it to Captain Ogre.’

  ‘And I’ll ask Captain Pitcairn,’ promised Robin.

  ‘I’ll add a little extra weight if need be,’ promised Kate with an uncharacteristic sparkle. ‘Twenty-five more like you I simply have to meet.’

  ‘And Captain Ogre,’ added Richard, riding a sudden wave of suppressed hilarity. ‘We couldn’t miss Captain Ogre.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ observed Colin at his most Calvinist, ‘that you’ll all fit right in.’

  *

  Andrew Pitcairn was in anything but a hilarious mood. ‘Everyone at the HQ in Cambridge has knocked off,’ he said to Richard an hour later. ‘I can try and track the director down on his personal phone but since he agreed we should answer the distress call no matter what, he’ll order us to stay and co-operate with the inquiry when the S&M investigator gets here.’

  ‘S&MA Investigator,’ corrected Richard thoughtlessly. ‘S&M is something else entirely.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ answered Pitcairn a little huffily. ‘We’re still stuck here for the foreseeable future, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’ll have to make the best of it,’ said Richard bracingly. ‘Are you telling me it won’t be more fun here, especially with Kalinin in port, than it would have been at Faraday?’

  ‘More fun for us, maybe,’ said Pitcairn. ‘But those poor sods at Faraday were gearing up for something special.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we’ll get a chance to make it up to them before New Year. In the meantime …’

  ‘Point taken. I’ll contact Colonel Jaeger ashore and the captain of Kalinin. See what we can arrange. The captain’s a woman, I understand. Any idea of her name?’

  ‘Ogre.’

  ‘Really? Are you serious? Ogre? Oh well …’

  *

  The three commanders and their various advisers met in the central Jamesway at Armstrong after their separate dinners. Richard and Colin accompanied Andrew Pitcairn as well as his first officer Hugo Knowles, leaving the second officer in command while the third assumed the first night watch, it having just turned 20.00. As the chopper pilot was still out cold in the ship’s surgery, Robin once again took the Westland’s controls while Kate filled the co-pilot seat beside her. The redoubtable Leading Seaman Thompson, relieved of all other duties, was engaged in convincing two defiant rising-nines that it was bedtime in spite of the fact that the sun was still up. And that even down here Santa was bound to call on children tonight. On good children. If they were in bed. Asleep.

  ‘You were right, I think, to keep sea watches going,’ Richard was saying, as quietly as the clatter of the engine would allow. ‘You may find it difficult to maintain discipline and we don’t want any incidents either aboard or ashore while we’re held here with nowhere else to go.’

  Andrew Pitcairn was young and a little arrogant. The openly offered advice galled him. But he was no fool. He could learn a lot from these four people. The Rosses, both PhDs in various glacial studies, knew more about ice and how to deal with it than all the beards put together. In the young captain’s other — more important — world, Richard and Robin Mariner commanded equally awesome heights. As captains they had sailed almost every type of commercial craft across nearly every chartered sea under every conceivable circumstance and situation. From tiny experimental multihulls to massive supertankers; from state-of-the-art toxic waste transporters to clapped-out old tramps, they had commanded the lot. They were legendary on the Gulf oil runs; across the dour Northern Ocean, in the mystic South China Sea. There was nothing they did not know about shipboard life, its problems and their solutions. And although they had gained their reputations in commercial fleets, they were both the offspring of Navy men, and therefore knew something of the Navy way in which Erebus was run.

  And, Pitcairn admitted to himself, Richard Mariner’s finger was precisely on the spot which was worrying him most. His command were volunteers. Shore leave had been offered to those with families. The rest all knew what they had signed up for on this particular cruise. But their plans were coming apart now. The strict discipline which had actually seemed quite lax against the regimes at Faraday and Rothera would look very different compared with the lifestyle on Armstrong, let alone on Kalinin. Men whose greatest hope for the season was high jinks off watch and a chance to get legless at Faraday were suddenly presented with a very different set of prospects indeed. The presence of women simply added to the brew. Robin and Kate were bad enough — each already had their fan club aboard. What would happen if and when young, available, willing women appeared, Andrew Pitcairn could scarcely imagine. And yet Erebus could not stand aloof from anything planned. At the very least there must be a reception aboard for senior officers and their consorts. And if any cross-command entertainments were mooted, the men would have to join in that too.

  It was with a chill feeling of foreboding, therefore, that the captain snapped his seat belt open and rose, Hugo Knowles at his shoulder, to exit the Westland at Armstrong’s helipad.

  Richard was a little slower to unfold himself from the seat — his long shanks were held to his great thighs largely by steel pins at the knee — and the pause gave him opportunity to catch Colin Ross’s eye. ‘Young Andrew’s worried,’ he said quietly.

  ‘He’s every reason to be. Let’s see what the women think of the situation.’

  So the four most experienced experts there followed the two Navy men at an increasing distance. And the two of them were well behind the brightly parka’d, strapping figures which had climbed out of the Kalinin’s Sikorsky and followed the animated Hoyle towards the distant Jamesway through the strange, salmon-coloured opalescent brightness of a high overcast crossing a midnight sun.

  ‘He’s right to be concerned,’ said Kate thoughtfully. ‘Things aboard Erebus are not quite shipshape. Or Bristol fashion. I’ve taken to rinsing my own smalls and frilly bits, for example.’

  ‘But you’ve always done that,’ blurted the surprised Colin, his memory filled with washing facilities in numberless basic encampments festooned with such things.

  ‘Only when the going gets tough, my love. Not on shipboard with perfectly good laundry facilities.’

  ‘Then why now?’ pursued Colin, w
ho had lost the plot here. ‘Why bother aboard Erebus?’

  ‘Because bits and pieces don’t always come back from the ship’s laundry, my darling. There may even, I understand, be a market in items that didn’t get there in the first place. The crew is exclusively male, remember. At least it is at the moment.’

  ‘My God.’ Colin stopped, thunderstruck. Genuinely outraged. ‘Do you mean to say someone’s been stealing and selling your underwear? Someone aboard Erebus? You tell me who’s been doing this and I’ll —’

  ‘You see Pitcairn’s problem?’ said Kate quietly. ‘This is a mature, sensible man, well versed in the problems of closed societies under extreme conditions. And the first answer he can come up with involves grievous bodily harm. What chance have the others got? It’s all right, darling. I’ve retrieved everything important and I wash it all myself now, as I’ve said. I suggest you do the same, Robin. And for Mary too.’

  ‘What?’ bellowed Richard. ‘If I catch one man —’

  ‘Here we go again,’ said Kate.

  The main area of the Jamesway was now illuminated with a couple of Tilley lamps to augment the columns of thick pink light from the windows. Inside the hut it was warm enough for Jaeger to be in his shirtsleeves and somehow he had managed to get the shirt starched and creased to a thoroughly military neatness, in spite of the fact that it bore no badges or insignia. Richard’s party joined Pitcairn and Knowles, as they stripped off the parkas, pullovers and cold-weather suits they had worn for the journey hither. As is often the case, the groups turned their backs on each other as though the removal of coats and boots was something too intimate to be observed by strangers. Thus it was that, turning all at once, they received their first impressions of Captain Ogre and her senior advisers at the same time.