Charlotte stared at Cody for a moment and he feared that he had uttered something ridiculous.
‘My father,’ she said, ‘was a senator…, is a senator. I never heard a word from him about what was happening out there. There was no warning call, nothing to let me know what was going on. Nothing.’
‘You said that it would have happened fast,’ Cody replied. ‘And the storm came during the night for the folks back home. Maybe he was asleep, didn’t have chance to do anything before the lights went out and it was all over.’
She smiled faintly but Cody could see that he had not convinced her.
‘There would have been some warning,’ she said, ‘even if only a few hours. NASA would have known about the coming storm. They had a satellite called SOHO that did nothing but observe the sun’s activity. The loss of power across the country, perhaps across the world, would have had immense defence significance. The military and the government would all have been informed.’ She shook her head. ‘Yet, he said nothing to me.’
Cody watched her for a few moments.
‘You think that they knew this was going to happen and they didn’t tell anybody?’
Charlotte shrugged. He had never before realised how small she looked, her shoulders narrow and her frame light. Maybe it was the near starvation rations that they were being forced to endure since the wildlife had fled the area when Bradley and Sauri had started hunting in earnest.
‘Maybe,’ she said finally. ‘Sure would have solved a lot of problems, I guess.’
Cody looked at Bobby, aware of the sudden metaphor their conversation had created. Bobby was holding them back. Without him, they could escape Alert and make a break for Grise Fjord. They could be down there in as little as….
Cody struck the thought from his mind. To do so would be barbaric, cruel.
‘We’re not animals,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘How long do you think he’ll last?’
Charlotte looked again at Bobby and sighed. ‘Bethany would know better, but he’s been getting steadily worse. A few days, maybe?’
They had already used up half of their meagre supply of antibiotics on Bobby, trying to fight the infection that was raging through his body to no avail. Now, the kid had no choice but to fight it on his own.
Charlotte’s eyes flicked up past Cody’s, and he turned to see Reece watching them from the doorway, his face stricken and his eyes big and black in the dim light.
‘I did this,’ he uttered. ‘I should have been there.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Cody said. ‘Don’t put this on yourself, okay?’
Reece stared at Bobby and then turned and rushed away down the corridor outside.
‘Cody?’
Jake McDermott’s voice carried down the corridor as Reece vanished, laden with urgency. Cody turned and hurried down the end of the corridor where Jake stood holding the door ajar.
‘What’s up?’
‘All sorts of things,’ Jake murmured. He kept his voice low as he spoke, to avoid alerting Charlotte to their conversation. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I found a dead body in the ice near the observatory.’
‘A body?’
‘The human kind,’ Jake whispered, ‘the sort that hasn’t been long dead.’
Cody swallowed thickly. ‘Have you told anybody else about this?’
‘No,’ Jake whispered. ‘I figured that I’d keep it to myself, but now it looks like Bobby isn’t going to make it and I can’t help but think that we shouldn’t care if he does or not.’
Cody felt a tremor of unease ripple through him. ‘You think that he killed the man you found?’
Jake stared at Cody. ‘I didn’t say it was a man.’
Cody winced. ‘For Christ’s sake, there are far more men than women up here, Jake.’
Jake shrugged. ‘I guess.’
Cody rubbed his temples. ‘Jesus, it never rains.’
‘That police detective who called from Boston, before the storm,’ Jake said, ‘they must have suspected somebody here of murder. All of you guys came from Boston, right? And that news report you were viewing, about the homicide? Maybe that was the crime.’
Cody looked Jake straight in the eye. ‘You still think I had something to do with this?’
Jake held his gaze for a long beat and then sighed. ‘No. If I was looking for a murderer in our group I wouldn’t look at the only family man here, and I wouldn’t really pick Bobby either. I’d pick a recluse, somebody who looked like they wanted to get away from a crime.’
Cody felt a chill ripple down his spine. ‘Reece?’
‘He’s the odd man out,’ Jake whispered, ‘the odd ball. If he buried somebody’s remains out here, he’d have been indirectly responsible for the attack on Bobby. The bear must have sniffed out the body.’
Cody’s vision blurred as he glanced back toward Bobby’s room. ‘Christ, I hadn’t even thought of that.’
‘And Reece was the one who had the meltdown,’ Jake pointed out. ‘What if he wasn’t just cracking up from isolation and fear? What if he really did kill somebody?’
‘What do you want to do about it?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ Jake uttered. ‘Maybe we should tell Bradley about this, get him on side?’
Cody shook his head. ‘Bradley could just as easily be a killer, Jake, we just don’t know.’
Jake was about to answer him when Reece stuck his head through a door at the end of the corridor.
‘Brad’s leaving!’ he yelled.
Cody exchanged a glance with Jake as they rushed outside, shrugging on his Arctic coat as he walked. He heard the chugging of a BV’s diesel engine even before they got outside.
Bradley was fussing around the vehicle’s engine, closing an access door and checking the tyres and lights. The sky above was a vivid twilight cast by the low sun setting behind the Winchester Mountains, ribbons of tattered cloud drifting before a strong wind that spat brief snow squalls across the plains. The asphalt around the compound was now visible, the snow reduced to drifts piled up against the block walls.
Cody walked across to Bethany and Sauri.
‘What’s he doing now?’ Cody asked.
‘Says he fed up with waiting for Bobby to die,’ Bethany explained. ‘So he’s off whether we like it or not.’
Cody looked at Sauri. ‘You goin’ with him?’
Sauri shrugged but said nothing.
Bradley saw Cody and clapped his hands, a tight grin on his face.
‘You coming with me Doc?’ he asked. ‘Or are you just going to whine about how it’s not the right thing to do?’
‘We’ve been here before, Brad,’ Cody said. ‘You leave us, you’re killing everybody.’
‘We don’t leave,’ Brad shot back, ‘then Bobby has killed us all.’
‘Would you want us to leave if it was you lying sick in there?’ Bethany challenged.
Bradley walked right over and jabbed a finger at her. ‘Yes, I would.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ Bethany uttered. ‘You’d be crying like a baby for us to…’
‘You don’t talk down to me!’ Bradley yelled at her.
Cody stepped between them, his face inches from Bradley’s. ‘Nor you her, understand?’
Bradley laughed in Cody’s face and shoved him backwards with one big hand. ‘And what are you going to do about it?’
Cody staggered off balance. Anger flooded his synapses and surged like fire through his body, but somehow it failed to break the surface. He steadied himself. Bradley chuckled and shook his head.
‘That’s what I thought,’ the soldier uttered, ‘nothing.’
‘That’s right,’ Cody replied. ‘Because we’re nothing if we don’t stick together. A few weeks ago all you could do was whine about how we’d never make it out there. Now you’re threatening to run away like a scared schoolboy. The biggest problem we’ve got right now isn’t Bobby, it’s you.’
Bradley chuckled a
gain and turned his back on Cody, his voice mocking him as he walked away.
‘Like I said, there’s nothing you’re going to do to stop me.’
Cody heard a clicking sound from somewhere off to his right. He turned and saw Jake lift a shotgun from the back of the BV and aim it at Bradley.
The soldier stopped in his tracks as he heard the weapon being cocked. Any humour that his features might have harboured vanished as he glared at Jake.
‘You point that at me, old man, you’d better be prepared to use it.’
‘I am,’ Jake replied. ‘That vehicle isn’t yours to use, Brad. It’s a ticket out of here for all of us. You either wait or we’ll be travelling one person lighter.’
‘You won’t shoot Bobby to put him out of his misery but you’ll shoot me?’ Bradley sneered. ‘I should have left that snivelling little shit to get eaten. Might have fattened the bear up before we shot it.’
‘Not your choice to make, Brad,’ Jake snapped.
‘And it’s not your place to stop me from leaving!’ Bradley shot back. ‘We’ve been here for weeks now sitting on our asses waiting for the sun to come up, for the ice to melt, for Bobby to stand upright for more than thirty goddamned seconds. We don’t leave soon we’ll be stuck here for another winter. Any of you fancy that?’
Bradley was pacing toward Jake, who kept the shotgun levelled firmly at the soldier.
‘If we have to stay, we have to stay,’ Jake uttered. ‘But we’re not going anywhere without Bobby.’
Bradley stopped walking just short of the end of the shotgun, shook his head and turned away from Jake with a chuckle of despair.
‘You guys are all off your…’
Bradley span, one gloved hand flicking out to push the tip of the shotgun to one side as he stepped in toward Jake. Before Cody could even register what had happened Bradley had pushed Jake up against the wall of the accommodation block, the shotgun pinned between them and had a thick-bladed serrated knife shoved against Jake’s neck.
‘…rockers,’ Brad growled. ‘I’m taking the BV, and if you even think about trying to stop me I’ll fill your ass full of buckshot. Clear?’
Cody swallowed thickly as he waited to see what Jake would do.
But Jake did nothing. There was nothing that he could do. He relinquished his grip on the shotgun. Bradley yanked it from his hands and stepped back as he slid his knife back into its sheath on his belt.
‘You can all stay right where you goddamned well like,’ Bradley informed them. ‘But I’m out of here. Anybody wants to come along, now would be a good time to decide.’
Charlotte appeared from the block and looked at Bradley, her features drained and saddened. ‘Is this who you really are Brad?’
‘This is what it is,’ he replied, ‘and I’ve made my decision. You coming with me?’
Charlotte did not move.
Bradley looked at her for a long moment and then turned away.
Cody watched as Bradley strolled around to the driver’s side of the cab and clambered aboard. Nobody followed. The BV’s engine bellowed and it pulled out of the compound in a cloud of diesel fumes that swirled with the gusting snow. The vehicle’s tail lights turned away into the darkening twilight and slowly crawled away toward the south until they vanished behind a hill.
*
The dawn came crisp and clear, the sky above a perfect blue. Cody stood out on the north ridge, the nearby fuel silos glistening in the sunlight as the last of the ice and frost melted and spilled out onto the scattered patches of snow flecking the barren tundra. Beyond the airfield the Lincoln Sea crunched and cracked as it drifted slowly past the shore, jagged islands of ice floating in dark, frigid water.
He spotted a school of Beluga a few hundred yards off the coast, fountains of white water blasted from their breathing holes, the sounds reaching him seconds later.
‘We shouldn’t be able to see water this far north.’
Bethany stood alongside him on the ridge, her hands shoved in her pockets but her hood down. Her hair was bound tightly around her head, her face scoured of make-up. Clear and clean like the Arctic itself, her eyes as green as the aurora.
‘Climate change for you,’ Cody said. ‘The Lincoln Sea never used to melt this far up so early. It used to be solid until the Nares Channel at least.’
Bethany remained silent for a few moments before she sighed.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.
Cody shrugged. ‘We wait for Bobby to recover then I guess we use the remaining BV.’
‘We can’t carry enough fuel with seven of us on board,’ she replied.
‘Bradley didn’t leave us much choice, did he?’
Bethany shook her head and turned to climb off the ridge. ‘I hope he rots in hell, or wherever he ends up.’
Cody stared at his boots for a long time but could think of nothing to say. It was as if his mind had removed from him the ability to feel despair. He knew somewhere deep down that he was never going to leave this place, that he would never again hold his daughter or see her pretty little face. The thought provoked a spasm of grief that swelled inside him, threatening to break free and fly screaming up into the cold and uncaring sky above.
It was only Bethany’s voice that prevented Cody from falling to his knees.
‘I’ve figured out how we’re going to get out of here,’ she said simply.
Cody’s despair faltered somewhere in his chest as he looked over his shoulder at her. ‘How?’
Bethany looked up at him, a smile as bright as the sunlight plastered across her face. She pointed out to the south.
‘We’re going to sail out of here.’
Cody looked toward the south and in a moment of sheer amazement he believed that his eyes were deceiving him.
In the far distance, in the midst of the thick chunks of ice floating slowly through the Robeson Channel, a towering set of sails billowed like giant white flags as though somebody had erected an enormous tent in the middle of the bitter waters.
As he focused on the tent, it resolved itself as if by magic in his mind.
‘It’s a ship,’ he gasped.
‘It’s a ship!’ Bethany echoed. ‘It’s a ship!’
Bethany hurled her arms around him and shrieked like a small girl on a Christmas morning, then whirled and ran down the slope toward the camp, shouting her last sentence over and over again.
Cody stood on the ridge and watched the vessel’s glorious sails ripple as she eased her way north past lethal chunks of ice as large as tanks, and shook his head in wonder.
***
14
Jake drove the BV, squinting in the bright sunlight blazing through the vehicle’s scratched windscreen as it bounced and juddered its way across the tundra. Giant white snowdrifts contrasted sharply with expanses of barren rock and tufts of hardy grasses that clung to a meagre existence in the cold soil.
Cody, like everybody else in the BV, stared at the ship before them.
‘It’s like she sailed out of a time warp,’ Jake uttered in amazement.
The vessel was a tall-ship, a three-masted schooner of some kind. Her hull had once been a glorious white but was now stained with the grime of untold ages at sea, her sails dulled by the cruel blast of a thousand Arctic gales. Even as they closed on the beautiful ship at full throttle Cody saw the dark arrow of a huge anchor crash down into the dark water, sending chunks of ice spinning away on the undulating waves. A wash of relief and joy flooded his body.
‘Oh God, they’re heaving to,’ he said. ‘They’ve seen us.’
The schooner settled in the water, the wind spilled from her sails. Cody could see men hauling on rigging lines on the deck, dragging the heavy sails in to reduce the load on the anchor.
‘We’re going home,’ Bethany said, hugging Charlotte.
Even Sauri seemed to have a smile on his face, but that might just have been a squint as the low sun blazed across the distant horizon. Only Reece remained silent, watching from be
hind the ragged veils of his black hair.
Jake pulled the BV up close to the edge of the channel and as one they all leaped from the cab and onto the rocky tundra, waving their arms and shouting as they looked up at the vessel and the heads of several men pointing at them from the decks.
A puff of smoke burst from one of the men’s arms, and a chunk of stony earth was blasted upward in a fountain as Cody realised that they were pointing weapons at them.
‘Cover!’
Jake’s voice echoed across the tundra as Cody staggered to a halt and threw his arms in the air, his joy withering. Two more gunshots shattered the air, Charlotte and Bethany crouching down together and covering their heads as Reece tried vainly to shield them.
Cody stared up at the armed men in horror as a voice called out from the ship.
‘You come any closer, the next shot will hurt!’
Cody glanced instinctively at Jake, who was slightly further back. As the closest to the ship Cody inadvertently found himself compelled to reply.
‘We’re unarmed!’ Cody shouted back, his arms still stuck in the air.
‘All the better for us! Don’t move!’
Cody stood silent and still as several of the men vanished from sight. He heard a banging noise, and Cody watched as the men hauled canvas covers off a small launch and attached a winch before raising and swinging the launch over the side of the ship and down into the water.
Two men, both armed, clambered down a rope ladder into the launch. One rowed as the other aimed a rifle at Cody as they traversed the twenty or so yards between the ship and the shoreline.
The armed figure raised his head at Cody with a quick jerking motion.
‘You, alone, now.’
Cody hesitated. He had no idea who the people aboard the ship were and all thoughts of a benevolent rescue mission sent valiantly from Boston vanished from his mind. He edged forward and reached out for the launch.
‘No sudden moves,’ the man snapped.
Cody climbed carefully aboard and was rowed across to the ship on the silent water. More men aimed weapons and suspicious gazes down at him as the launch bumped alongside the long, graceful hull.
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