Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  And when Dai shouted, ‘Go,’ she tensed to run with the rest of them.

  But something held her, setting her thighs like marble, and she walked forward sensibly, with caution and control.

  From here at the very top it was possible to see that the Razor’s edge had been weathered by westerly winds into great hollows so the top where they stood overhung the middle sections five hundred metres down. On either side, shrinking figures flew downwards and outwards. Beneath them, Jolene had a flashing impression of black rock and white ice. Nothing more, no real sense of scale or distance. Then Jilly’s bungee lines snapped taut as the elastic soaked up body weight and gravity force. In lingering slow motion, Jilly’s jerking body swung inward towards the cliff. Out on the upper air on the opposite side, Max and T-Shirt were planing, arms and legs spread, falling in formation, their little throw-away chutes in their right hands ready to jerk their wing-shaped canopies free. The last two Base jumpers were sprinting for the edge.

  Jilly’s body swung gently against the rock face, her bungee beginning to pull her up again and, just as this happened, Dai let go of his throw-away, releasing his chute, and a flock of big brown skuas that had been nesting on the sheer black slope exploded outwards, disturbed by Jilly’s arrival. Not a flock. Skuas do not flock. Six pairs nesting in unusual proximity on the cliff wall. They swung outwards, away to the right, before turning, as was their nature, into the attack. But the interloper that they set upon with all the vicious power they could muster was Dai. As his canopy came out, the big birds like black-backed gulls turned into hawks, tore into it and into the man below it.

  The balletic grace of Dai’s descent faltered as he was forced to fight back. The line of his drop wavered, fell away, slipping with dangerous speed downward and outward, over the black rock, towards the sea-stirred jumble of white.

  Frozen with horror, rooted to the spot, Jolene saw T-Shirt and Max vary the angle of their own flight, following their stricken friend outwards, away from the cliff, the black rock beach and the shore. In perfect unison, the pair of them let go of the tiny mushrooms of their releases and their canopies blossomed, side by side, the space between them filled by the more distant image of Dai’s ’chute, torn and flapping.

  The sound of a little two-stroke engine coughing into life jolted Jolene from her horrified stillness. The Kalinin people had looped Jilly’s bungee round a small winch and were pulling her back. Without thinking, Jolene ran towards them calling, ‘Get the chopper back. Quickly.’

  One of them caught her eye and nodded. He was already talking into a little radio.

  Jolene turned back to look for T-Shirt and the others and gasped. How far they had fallen and how distant they had become. She fought to keep an eye on the three of them as they skidded away seawards, leaving behind them a trail of birds returning, victorious, to their nests.

  Jilly arrived a little before the chopper. Wordless with shock and rage, she watched the distant parachutes settle onto the coastal ice.

  ‘Well, they’re down all together,’ called Jolene over the abrupt rattle of the chopper’s rotors. ‘Coming?’

  ‘Too bloody right I am,’ spat Jilly.

  *

  Ice was really amazing stuff, mused Richard. From Kalinin, this belt of coastal white looked as solid as a chalk rock shelf. But as the Zodiac’s bulbous bow neared it, the apparent uniformity proved to be entirely illusory. What they were approaching — entering — was a maze of floating brash. The ice seemed mostly ancient; weathered into fantastic shapes, varying from glassy clearness to milky impenetrability, stippled, bubbled, veined and striated, undercut, icicle bearded, it all bobbed sluggishly around them, sometimes as high as shoulder height. The great blue-hued maze of it slid sluggishly back as the coxswain controlling the outboard wove them effortlessly through, in an almost direct line to the black-pebbled beach.

  Richard would have loved to have discussed the beauty of their surroundings with Robin or the twins who were beside him, but the cacophony around them made conversation out of the question. It was not just the grinding, rumbling ice, on the larger sections — nowhere near large enough to be called floes — adelie and chinstrap penguins added their screeches to the racket. The thin, icy blade of the breeze, mostly headwind, was full of wild odours, ranging from the timeless scent of the sea through the familiar almost cucumber smell of icebergs to the occasional sickening richness of weed and fish-based guano. Amid all the palaver, a Weddell seal sunned itself fatly on a piece of brash just big enough to support it then rolled with lazy grace and slid soundlessly into the water. A few seconds later it bobbed up inquisitively just beside the Zodiac, wide eyes liquid black, its nose twitching and its whiskers glittering with drops of water, its panting breath a fog of fish smells. Even over all the other sounds, the twins’ squeals of delight were clearly audible.

  As was a sudden thumping crash. Richard looked up just in time to see Dai Gwyllim’s parachute fold into the floes perhaps fifty metres ahead. He turned to the coxswain shouting and gesturing, but the sailor had seen. Abruptly the seal fell far behind and the rubber sides of the Zodiac bounced off the taller floes, pushing them roughly aside. Richard, alerted to the sky now, looked up again to see a pair of ’chutes like gulls’ wings settle into the lower blue, the figures beneath them tugging hard at control ropes, obviously using all the skill at their command to bring them down beside the first man.

  Along the floor of the solid little craft lay oars and a gaff. Richard picked up the lengthy wooden pole and with an ability he had forgotten he possessed began to fend the ice away as the Zodiac came to full speed. The pair of parachutists eased themselves into the gentlest landing the uneven, unsteady ice would allow, both abandoning their canopies the instant they landed. Controlled or not, their landing took them through the treacherous skin of brash and into the freezing water.

  As they landed, the Zodiac broke through into a little kind of bay on whose far shore the two, now identifiable as T-Shirt and Max, were hanging unsteadily onto the slopes of a bobbing ice floe, half awash, desperately pulling at the lines of a parachute, trying to drag the unconscious Dai Gwyllim to the surface of the thick, sub-zero water. Dai would be dead within two minutes unless they got him up and out. And the bits of themselves that were immersed in the water were going to start freezing irreparably within two or three minutes after that. Richard bellowed at the top of his lungs but the two rescuers did not seem to hear him, each one totally focused on keeping his left hand wedged in bobbing ice and his right hand tugging the sluggish ice-bound parachute lines.

  As the Zodiac arrived on the scene, so did the chopper, pouncing down out of the hard blue sky just above them. Even the well-wrapped, absolutely dry people in the Zodiac were rendered breathless by the freezing downdraught. What it must be doing to the soaking skydivers half on the ice went far beyond anything Richard could imagine. But he and Robin saw what had to be done and turned to the coxswain together. ‘Is there a knife?’ bellowed Richard and Robin must have called something similar for when the man gestured to a big box by his feet she came up with two good, long, sharp ones. At once, the Zodiac was beside the three parachutists and Richard and Robin pulled Dai up through the thin crust of surface ice and half into the boat, chopping away the lines of his parachute as they did so. The instant he was free of the tangle, they pulled him right in onto the wooden floor. T-Shirt and then Max hurled their upper bodies off the floe and over the inflated rubber side. With Robin holding one pair of stone-cold hands and the twins’ minder the other uneasily beside her, the Zodiac was off, pulling the young Base jumpers through the water. Richard knelt astride the rubberised bow, repeating his performance with the gaff. And he needed to do so. Some of the ice was as sharp as knife blades, some of it rough as tarmac; and over all of it T-Shirt and Max’s cold-numbed legs were being dragged.

  The shore was a long, fairly level pebble beach. One end of it was a penguin rookery but the other, for some reason, was clear and the Zodiac headed there with
the shadow of the helicopter following it.

  The Sikorsky had settled onto the sloping shore before the Zodiac beached, and the two women were out of it to greet the little crowd which carried Dai up the beach. They took him and laid him in the Sikorsky, wrapping him in anything warm they could find while Richard, Robin and the Zodiac crew supported the shuddering rescuers up to the chopper as well. Then Richard and Robin staggered back to the Zodiac and the twins as the chopper lifted off and headed for Kalinin.

  *

  While Dr Glazov examined the three half-frozen men, Jolene was fully occupied in comforting Jilly while worrying about T-Shirt and how well he had survived yet another heroic act. So it was that the evening was quite well advanced before she found herself free. On the doctor’s eventual assurance that Jilly could see Dai — asleep — and that no lasting harm seemed to have come to his two young rescuers, Jolene rushed up to the radio shack before seeing T-Shirt, getting something to eat or even checking Major Schwartz’s coffin, so quickly packed away on their arrival last night.

  Jolene’s mission was to contact Special Agent Jones at Armstrong, but before she could get Radio Officer Kyril to tune his radio to Armstrong’s wavelength, she received an incoming signal from Erebus.

  ‘Jolene DaCosta here. Who is this? Do I say “Over”? Over.’

  ‘Dr DaCosta, it’s Hugo Knowles here. I don’t know whether or not it’s important, but I’ve been trying to remember more about the explosion of the Skiddoos and I’m much clearer about what happened now.’

  ‘I’m sure it is important, Lieutenant Knowles. I’m just not sure I’m the right person to be telling it to any more. Still, never mind. You go ahead. I’ll pass it on if need be. Hello? Lieutenant … Oh. Over.’

  ‘Thompson and I were attracted away from the hut we were building by a noise. I don’t know what exactly. Thompson heard it and called me. I remember I was a bit stressed at having to go out so near checkin time —’

  ‘Check-in time? What is that? Over.’

  ‘I was checking in every so often with Erebus on the radio. It was time to check in and I wanted to make my report, not go wandering around in the snow. But Thompson said he heard something so could I come and look. And sure enough, there was some kind of motor. And Thompson said there had been another engine earlier too, like one of the Skiddoos being moved. The one I heard was deeper. Like a truck pulling away in the distance behind the big moraine. There was a line of Skiddoos. We could see where they had been left, but one of them had been moved. It was strange. Thompson thought it was strange too. He went over for a closer look and I didn’t stop him. I suppose it was because I was thinking of checking with Erebus anyway, but I thought I’d check with Kalinin before kicking up a fuss or anything …’

  ‘Yes. I can understand that. So?’

  Radio protocol was well out of the window now. Jolene was using the contact like a telephone. But it didn’t seem to worry Hugo Knowles.

  ‘So while I was keying in the correct frequency for Kalinin, Thompson took a closer look and came running back, calling “I say, there’s something odd over here …” Or something like that.’

  ‘I see. And then?’

  ‘And he’d just taken three or four steps when I made contact with Kalinin. That’s when the whole lot went up.’

  Jolene remembered the square bruise on Hugo Knowles’s face, the shape of the radio, imprinted by the blast. ‘So let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You think Thompson must have seen something — the bomb. And he was coming to tell you about it when it went off. Could he have disturbed it? Set it off himself? Over.’

  ‘Could have, yes. Over.’

  ‘Was he calling loudly enough to set it off? Over.’

  ‘Possibly. Yes. I hadn’t thought of that. Over.’

  ‘Anything else? Over!’

  ‘You’ll know as soon as I think of anything. Out.’

  *

  With this conversation still whirling like snowflakes in her head, Jolene made contact with Special Agent Jones. His voice was unexpectedly deep, resonant, redolent of Mississippi. She didn’t know whether to imagine him as a character out of Men in Black or Huckleberry Finn.

  Like Jolene herself, Special Agent Jones made scant use of the traditional proprieties of radio traffic.

  ‘Inspector DaCosta?’

  ‘Special Agent Jones?’

  ‘Happy to talk to you, Inspector. At last.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Agent Jones?’

  ‘We have several things we need to get straight, Inspector, not the least of which is what you propose to do with the body whose demise we are here to investigate and which is now once again under Federal jurisdiction, I understand.’

  ‘Major Schwartz is safely here with me, yes. And this ship is technically American soil for the purposes of the investigation, I assume. You might need to take that up with the owners, though. If this turns out to be Russian soil we’re all screwed, I should think.’

  ‘We have made certain, Inspector. I understand that the American owners hold fifty-one per cent of the stock in her, so she is legally American soil, and therefore within your remit as well as mine. So I hope, Inspector, that you are pursuing all lines of inquiry and preparing to hand over facts, testimony and evidence to us in due course.’

  ‘There’s a grey area there, Agent Jones.’

  ‘I see that, Inspector. We prefer things black and white at the Bureau. But in a case like this that is not always feasible. We can bend with the breeze if we have to.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We give and take. Co-operate. Sort out the niceties Stateside whenever we can.’

  ‘Suits me, Agent Jones. Feel free to ask for information or to suggest lines of inquiry and I will do my best to oblige.’

  ‘It all seems to turn on the space suit. You have the suit because Major Schwartz is still wearing it. It is the only suit because the others went up in the explosion here at Armstrong the night you left. First question. Have you examined the suit?’

  ‘A cursory once-over. Why?’

  ‘So this is the spirit of give and take?’

  ‘It is, Agent Jones. All cards on the table. Face up.’

  ‘On an open line, Dr DaCosta?’

  ‘You think we’re being tapped? Bugged?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s possible, Inspector, and should therefore be factored in. Consider the ease with which you have communicated with head office in the past yourself. Every word we are saying could be going anywhere in the world. In the universe, actually. And beyond. That might be important, given who you work for …’

  In Jolene’s mind, Agent Jones moved a step or two from Tom Sawyer towards The X Files. She began to rather like him.

  ‘I take your point, Agent Jones. Even so, we need to get to the nitty-gritty here. I have enough information to check on the current status of the major’s suit with regard to obvious damage, completeness, condition and so forth. I do not have a lab capable of discriminating between programmable carbon multilayer and Bacofoil. I do not have the facilities to check whether the superconductor elements are working worth a damn, particularly given that it’s all supposed to be powered by the heat differential between the astronaut’s body and the ambient air temperature. There currently is no difference between the astronaut’s body temperature and the ambient —’

  ‘Understood, Inspector DaCosta, and I particularly appreciate the manner in which you have concealed the sensitive elements of the situation from inquisitive ears. It is the integrity of the suit that concerns us at the moment.’

  ‘Integrity. Why, Agent Jones, I’m sure it could even run for President —’

  ‘Inspector, we think we may have found traces of a section of it here where it has no business to be.’

  Jolene stopped playing with Jones. ‘Can you tell me what you have found and where?’

  ‘Certainly, Inspector. We were doing a routine examination of one of the John Deeres and we found traces of programmeable carbon an
d superconductor on the driver’s seat.’

  ‘But that could only come from a Power Strip. Could you have a piece of one of the back-up suits, blown up in the explosion?’

  ‘Unlikely, given its condition and location. Especially as no one was ever allowed to drive when suited-up. Presidential candidate or not, please check whether that suit is all there and zipped up tight.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Richard looked down at his battered old steel-cased Rolex. Midnight. Midnight here at sixty degrees west, at any rate. Away round the world, the hour varied every fifteen degrees of longitude. And that consideration would be important on this brand new day, for it was 31 December 1999, the last day of the old millennium.

  Even the most die-hard of the passengers were asleep. For them the carefully planned party would begin soon after breakfast when midnight and the new millennium came westwards across the international dateline and swung into New Zealand in eight hours’ time. For the crew also, a good night’s sleep was a basic necessity. The cooks, waiters, stewards and entertainers under Vivien Agran’s aegis would have the busiest day of their lives today. The deck officers, engineers and seamen under the control of Irene and Varnek would also have a busy day, for the storm Richard had seen coming half a world away was due to arrive at sixty west longitude, sixty south latitude with the new millennium — and with even more devastating effect.

  The squeak of the mortuary drawer pulled Richard’s attention back to the matter in hand.

  Jolene would have preferred to have had T-Shirt Maddrell helping her inspect Major Schwartz, but Dr Glasov had given all three Base jumpers a heavy sedative so T-Shirt was hors de combat at the moment. After T-Shirt, Richard was the next best option for a range of reasons. He was strong enough to lift and turn the body, an important consideration, for she herself was not. Also he and T-Shirt had been there during the major’s removal from the site of his death and so could give an authoritative view as to whether there had been any tampering since. And then there was the hour and the nature of the task — and the fact that they had just walked in here without a by-your-leave and someone would probably have to face up to the captain, the first officer or the dreaded doctor any minute now. Jolene was not superstitious, scared of corpses or easily brow-beaten, but everyone could use a friend in need.