EDEN

by Dean Crawford

  Sauri looked at the boxes of biscuits. ‘How many tins?’

  Bradley glanced down at the pallet of five cardboard boxes.

  ‘Twenty five,’ he uttered.

  ‘Between eight people,’ Sauri replied. ‘Three boxes each. We can have raffle for last one.’

  Bradley shook his head and began chuckling to himself. Sauri said nothing. Bradley’s chuckle faded away as he looked at the biscuits.

  ‘We’ll keep the biscuits.’ He looked across at Sauri. ‘Just you and me.’

  ‘But the others will need… ’

  ‘They’re not our responsibility,’ Bradley snapped, his head down as he rummaged through the rest of the boxes. ‘We’ll stash these out back somewhere.’

  A long silence as Sauri digested what he had heard. ‘We are here to protect Jake and his team.’

  ‘We were,’ Bradley corrected him as he hefted a stack of tins across the building toward a distant rack. ‘That was before everything went to hell.’

  ‘It is our duty.’

  ‘It’s our damned duty to get home,’ Bradley shot back as he slid the tins out of sight behind boxes of Arctic clothing. ‘Where are you from, Sauri?’

  ‘Inuvik.’

  ‘Great. I’m from Yellowknife. You think that Jake and his little crew will want to head our way if we get out of here? You heard them.’

  ‘They need us. We have the weapons.’

  ‘We’ll give them a rifle and wish them the best of luck,’ Bradley retorted.

  ‘If there’s no power, everybody in Yellowknife will have left or died,’ Sauri pointed out. ‘Too cold without power.’

  ‘That’s up to us to find out, right?’ Bradley challenged. ‘You’re either with me or you’re with them. Decide.’

  Sauri looked at Bradley for a long time, and then shouldered his rifle and began carrying the tins across the building.

  *

  It took several hours to shuttle their belongings across the rutted and rolling ice valleys of the plain, the headlights of the snowmobiles flickering in the eternal night like lonely stars wandering an empty universe.

  Cody drove back and forth between the two camps, one eye always cast toward the faintly glowing horizon as he worked, unable to break his thoughts away from his wife and daughter. They could see that same glow, brighter where they were. The pain of separation was a dull ache that infected his chest, throbbing with each beat of his heart as though he were already bleeding out.

  The base at Alert was shrouded in darkness but for a pair of lights that illuminated the accommodation block on the south west corner. Cody guided his snowmobile through the snow blustering across the beams of his headlights and turned in alongside the main block.

  Bethany and Charlotte appeared at the door to the block and began hefting boxes and crates from the sledge behind him as Cody watched Jake’s heavily laden snowmobile follow him in. Jake killed the engine on his snowmobile and joined Cody as they walked up into the block.

  ‘You guys done yet?’ Jake demanded as he yanked his hood back.

  Charlotte hauled the block door shut as Bethany joined them and dumped a crate on top of a pile near the window.

  ‘We’ll get this lot logged,’ Bethany said, ‘but it’s not looking good.’

  ‘What isn’t?’ Cody asked.

  Charlotte jabbed a thumb out toward the main buildings. ‘Brad’s just gone through the stores and there’s no food. Looks like the soldiers took everything with them.’

  Cody felt a new fear twist his stomach as he realised the depth of their situation.

  ‘They cleared out everything?’ Jake uttered in disbelief.

  ‘The whole damned lot,’ Bobby Leary confirmed. ‘All we’ve got is supplies for maybe a month at most.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Cody asked. ‘There’s no way we can stretch that out until the spring.’

  Jake dragged his hand down across his beard. ‘Jesus Christ, did they want us all to die out here?’

  Reece Cain walked into the block from the rest room and gave a bleak laugh.

  ‘May as well have done,’ he muttered. ‘Ration packs, water bottles, sterilisation packs — you name it, it’s gone.’

  Cody’s mind raced as he tried to hold back thoughts of his daughter and think for a moment.

  ‘Survival,’ he said. ‘They were thinking about their own survival.’

  Jake nodded as he sank back against a tower of boxes. ‘They knew what was coming. Maybe their listening devices picked up the coming storm?’

  ‘But then who sent the airplanes?’ Bethany asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jake said. ‘They cut us loose and now we’re on our own. We either live or die, understood? There’s nothing to gain by us hating whoever decided to leave us out here.’

  ‘Got to be worse for Brad and Sauri,’ Charlotte said. ‘Their own comrades abandoned them. Their own countrymen.’

  Cody thought for a moment and then made a decision. ‘I’m heading back out.’

  ‘Back out where?’ Bethany asked. ‘It’s late and there’s a storm building up.’

  Cody fastened his jacket. ‘We’ve got to assume that they didn’t abandon us out of spite — there are only eight of us. We were five clicks away across the ice, an hour’s snowmobile trip for them to fetch us. My guess is that there just wasn’t time for them to come and get us and clear out before the storm stranded them too. They had to cut and run, or die out here themselves.’

  ‘So?’ Charlotte demanded.

  ‘So there’s a chance they had a plan and may have ridden out the solar storm,’ Jake guessed Cody’s train of thought, ‘and may come back.’

  ‘Hell of a long shot,’ Cody admitted. ‘But if there’s a chance that they’ve survived this, we’ve got to try to let them know we’re alive.’

  ‘How?’ Bethany asked.

  ‘I’ll set up a distress beacon at Alert Five,’ Cody explained, ‘and start using Alert’s radios to search for signals from the outside world. If somebody hears us, especially our absent military friends, it may be reason enough for them to come back and get us.’

  Charlotte frowned.

  ‘If satellites are down surely there’s no way for people to hear the beacon at a ground station? They might not hear us.’

  Cody smiled grimly as he pulled his hood up. ‘What if we don’t bother to send a signal at all?’

  ‘We should do it all from here,’ Jake cautioned him. ‘No sense in risking an accident out at the observatory.’

  ‘It’s just a few clicks to Alert Five,’ Cody said. ‘But that might be the difference between a signal being picked up and being missed. It’s not a chance I want to take.’

  He yanked open the block door and strode down the gantry onto the solid ice. Jake’s hand rested heavily on his shoulder as he climbed onto his snowmobile.

  ‘I’ll back you up.’

  Cody shook his head. ‘We need to conserve fuel. If I get caught out by the weather, I can still overnight at Alert Five.’

  ‘That’s not good procedure, Cody,’ Jake replied.

  ‘I know it’s not good goddamned procedure,’ Cody shot back, and then reigned himself in. ‘I just need some time to myself, okay?’

  Jake’s gloved hand remained on Cody’s shoulder for what felt like an age, then it slipped away.

  Cody gunned the snowmobile’s engine and the headlights blazed strips of white fire through the falling snow.

  ‘If I don’t see you back here within twenty-four hours, we’ll all be coming out to find you, understood?’ Jake shouted.

  Cody turned away and accelerated out of the compound. He took the road at full throttle with his hands gripping the throttle as tightly as he could, his teeth grinding in his jaw as he rode at a pace that he would once have never dared to attempt.

  The blizzard swept across the ice plains, obscuring everything but the reflective markers placed every ten feet to guide him toward Alert Five. Thick snow caked his jacket and hood and tumbled endlessly a
round him, encrusting his goggles in delicate geometric patterns as he rode until he could no longer feel his hands or feet.

  Alert Five loomed almost without warning ahead of him, its radio masts quivering in the tremendous winds as Cody slowed the snowmobile down and turned it to park in the shelter of the station’s leeward wall. He left the engine running as he got out of the saddle and looked out toward the south. The temptation to keep going was almost unbearable, but somehow his rational mind prevented him from racing hell for leather toward the sun that he knew was out there somewhere beyond the blinding veils of snow and endless night.

  Cody turned to the observatory and struggled up the steps. He unlocked the door and hurried inside. Already the walls were dusted with sparkling ice crystals and the windows thick with frost.

  Cody grabbed a box from a wall cabinet and cracked it open. A yellow Personal Locator Beacon lay inside, designed to transmit on the 406Mhz global satellite signal and on a 121.5Mhz homing signal. It was able to operate in temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius, but only for around forty-eight hours. He would have to replace it regularly to maintain a permanent signal. Although Alert was too far north for its transmission dishes to detect communications satellites, a six station repeater chain between Alert and Eureka provided a terrestrial link to the satellite receivers in Ottawa. Even at Eureka, to detect a geosynchronous satellite to the south would require dishes to be set horizontally, so far north was the station. A satellite not directly due south would be invisible beneath the horizon.

  Cody hurried to his bedroom. Ice glittered on the walls as he stepped inside and reached down for the heavy steel storage box. He dragged it backwards through the station and burst out of the accommodation block and back onto the ice. He left the storage box for a moment and fought against the blizzard as he clambered his way up the radio tower steps and onto the multi-tiered roof platform. His gloved hands made work difficult, but he was able to attach the beacon to the main aerial extending up into the inky black sky above.

  Cody fastened the beacon in place and then activated it.

  A bright red light flashed at him, making the falling snow speeding past look like glowing globules of blood. A smaller green light confirmed that the beacon was transmitting.

  Cody clambered back down the steps and turned. He hefted the storage box toward a deep snow drift a few dozen yards away from the station, the kind that stayed throughout most of the year, rising up against shallow north-facing hills near the station and sheltered from what little sunlight reached this far north.

  Cody spent several minutes excavating a deep hole in the drift. Then he opened the lid of the box and dumped the contents deep inside the hole before filling it in again. He then hurried back to his quarters and placed the box back where he had stored it.

  Exhausted, he trudged back to the snowmobile and looked toward the south as he got into the saddle. Through the blizzard and the blackness he could see nothing, his only tenuous link with home obliterated by the uncaring storms.

  He sat for several long minutes, immobile with indecision, before finally turning the snowmobile north and accelerating away into the bleak darkness.

  ***

  9

  ‘You think he’s coming back?’

  Jake McDermott did not look up from the large map he was scrutinizing, a creased image of the North West Territories and Greenland unfolded across a table top.

  His breath still clouded on the air, but with the station’s generators running blessed warmth was evaporating the ice on the walls of the accommodation block. Compared to the frigid night outside, it felt almost tropical.

  ‘He’s coming back,’ Jake replied as he drew a finger down the east coast of Ellesmere Island toward Baffin Bay, almost a thousand kilometres south.

  ‘No chance,’ Bradley Trent uttered from nearby as he sipped from a flask of coffee.

  ‘Cody Ryan isn’t dumb enough to try to make it home alone,’ Charlotte Dennis snapped at him.

  ‘Wasn’t talking about him,’ Bradley shot back as he gestured at the map. ‘The Lincoln Sea is frozen all year round but its surface is pack ice, like a glacier. You try to move down south on that it’ll take you a year.’

  Jake glanced up at Bradley. ‘You got a point?’

  The soldier shrugged over his flask. ‘Just sayin’.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Bethany sighed. ‘The winter ice extends only about as far as the abandoned Etah station in Greenland anyway. We’d need a boat after that.’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping,’ Jake murmured as he pored over the map.

  ‘You want to trek five hundred clicks south and then jump on a boat?’ Bradley chortled and shook his head. ‘You don’t think that anybody with a working boat hasn’t already high-tailed it south?’

  Jake did not reply to Bradley and instead look over at Charlotte.

  ‘What’s the chances of us running the current south of Etah?’

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows in surprise as she moved closer to Jake and looked down at the map.

  ‘The current is strong beneath the ice in the Nares Strait, pretty much a steady southerly flow once it breaks free. If we could make Baffin Bay then we’d be clear all the way down to the Davis Strait and into the Labrador Sea. Full of icebergs obviously so treacherous all the way, but it’s a possibility.’

  Bethany joined them at the map. ‘Then what? Overland?’

  Jake shook his head.

  ‘Too slow. If we can ride the natural currents we could cover distance ten times faster than staying on land, and without using fuel. We’d have to stay out of Hudson Bay, hug the coast as much as possible, get to Newfoundland.’

  Bethany brightened. ‘A lot of native communities all the way down through there, people used to living off the land who might be able to get by without electricity.’

  Jake’s eyes were fixed on the map, but he watched from the periphery of his vision as Bradley Trent and Sauri exchanged a long glance. Jake rapped his knuckles down on Labrador.

  ‘From there, we can go wherever we want to.’ He drew a short breath. ‘If there’s anything left to see.’

  Bradley screwed the lid back on his flask and smiled at Jake.

  ‘Easy as that, huh? Two thousand miles across freezing terrain in the middle of winter with no fuel for warmth and unable to carry enough food. Sure, we could shoot stuff along the way but then how the hell do you cook it?’

  ‘You ever do anything but complain, Brad?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘I keep it real,’ Bradley snapped back. ‘Sauri and I have had Arctic warfare training. We’re used to operating up here and I can tell you that your little plan won’t work. You already said it yourself: we can’t carry the resources we need to move that far.’

  ‘Staying here’s not an option,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘We said that, too.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Bradley flashed her a grin, ‘but setting out in the hopes that we’ll find a boat that’s just right, that the owner decided to leave up here instead of taking it south, is tantamount to suicide.’

  ‘So is staying here,’ Bethany retorted. ‘Jesus, Brad, the moment the ice clears enough for me to see the ground I want to be out of here.’

  ‘How far could we make it per day using the snowmobiles?’ Charlotte asked Bradley.

  ‘Not far enough,’ the soldier replied. ‘Nowhere near.’

  ‘And the BV’s were taken away when the military left?’ Bethany asked.

  ‘We saw them loaded up,’ Jake replied for Bradley.

  Charlotte stared into space for a few moments and then her eyes met Bradley’s.

  ‘There were only four airplanes that came in,’ she said.

  ‘And the BV’s are too big to get more than one aboard each plane,’ Bradley replied.

  Bradley turned and grabbed his jacket. As one, the entire team tumbled out into the bitter darkness and marched across the solid ice to one of the big warehouses. It took Bradley a few moments to find the right key and get it into th
e lock of a side door.

  Bradley turned the lock and tried the door. Nothing. He stood back and slammed hit boot against the door and it cracked open with a spray of ice chips. The team followed him inside, and as his flashlight sliced into the deep darkness it reflected off the yellow metal bodies of two large Bandvagns parked inside the building.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Jake said as they all stared at the tracked vehicles.

  ‘Could we get one of them to Eureka?’ Charlotte asked. ‘How far could they travel in a day?’

  Bradley looked at her for a moment. Any retort on his lips evaporated as he sighed and thought for a moment. ‘In good weather, maybe fifty miles.’

  ‘That would make it a couple of weeks to get to Eureka,’ Jake mused out loud.

  ‘Which is empty in the winter,’ Bradley pointed out.

  ‘But which probably has fuel and maybe even food,’ Bethany countered. ‘We use it as a staging post, head south east from there down to Grise Ford.’

  Jake glanced across at Sauri. ‘You know anything about the population down there?’

  ‘Inuit,’ Sauri replied. ‘No more than a hundred permanent residents, but there’s a harbour.’

  ‘A thousand kilometres,’ Charlotte Dennis murmured. ‘Best we could hope for out of the BVs is about a hundred fifty kilometres across the ice per tank.’

  ‘If we used them both,’ Jake said, ‘one for carrying the fuel with us in the other, it would be tight but we could make it.’

  Bradley shook his head. ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘Didn’t know you cared,’ Charlotte uttered.

  ‘You’re assuming a free run with no setbacks,’ Bradley explained. ‘Engines could freeze overnight or blow gaskets, we could lose our way, be forced to backtrack. Anything could happen that could run us out of gas.’

  ‘If we stay here we’ll run out of fuel eventually,’ Charlotte replied. ‘So it’s either certain death or a slim chance of survival. Which do you want, Brad?’

  Jake looked at her for a moment and then across at Bradley. This time, the soldier shrugged.

  ‘It’s probably our best shot,’ he agreed.