Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  The strongest evidence of all that things were aboveboard came from the mere fact that, after being promised the run of the ship, he’d actually been given it. No one had stopped him from going anywhere he pleased even though they had to suspect—and Colonel Balzano actually knew—that he wasn’t a scientist. More telling still was that no one followed him around to see what he was doing.

  Either that or the person following him was very, very good.

  Occam’s Razor was a good way to get yourself killed in the world of covert operations… but in this case, his instincts told him that the simplest explanation actually was the truth: the Argentine Antarctic expedition was the plain vanilla operation they said it was, even though the military was in control.

  Still, Breen trusted the evidence of his eyes more than words from a foreign government. He eyed the sun. The days were long here in the deep south of Patagonia, and nightfall was still a couple of hours away.

  He’d finish his evaluation then.

  ***

  The moon was out, three quarters full, and Breen wondered why the crew had elected to stay in port. There was no need to wait for the tide. Comodoro Rivadavia was an oil port with a deep water installation that didn’t require any outside assistance for ships to sail in and out any time they felt like it.

  It certainly wasn’t for political or PR reasons this time. They were scheduled to cast off at around six-thirty in the morning. No self-respecting news crew would be up at that time. If news didn’t happen after eleven in the morning, it would go unreported.

  The news actually made his own life easier. Had the ship been active and the night crew up and about, he would have had to be much more circumspect in his actions. As it was, he simply left his cabin and walked a short distance down a corridor to the stairwell, just as he would if he were out to smoke a cigarette or get some air. It wasn’t even that late, just past midnight. No one would be overly suspicious if they ran into him. Many of the Argentines on board were only just finishing dinner anyway.

  The wind was blowing hard, from the sea. Once over the ship, it would continue west, unimpeded, over the vast arid plains of the Patagonian desert until it finally smacked into the Andes and released the moisture it was carrying to help keep the beautiful lakes and woods at the base of the mountains verdant.

  Breen wasn’t concerned about any of that, but he was thankful for the chilly breeze: it would serve to keep people below decks where he wanted them. Even the smokers would come out as infrequently as possible.

  The cargo hold he needed was aft, below the heliports. Sailors and loading crews from the dock had spent the day packing the space full of pallets before sealing the bay doors. Breen hoped the side door would be easy to unlock. He’d brought along a set of lockpicks and some more modern electronic equipment for the task. He’d been assigned the equipment upon leaving, but not told where it came from. He suspected that, like most of the stuff he used on his missions, the CIA was involved.

  He felt the exhilaration that always accompanied the possibility of discovery. He’d originally been trained by Military Intelligence to sit in inhospitable places with a canteen and a set of binoculars and to watch enemy troop movements but, due to a certain number of unfortunate circumstances and the fact that he had features and skin color that allowed him to blend into most populations—European, Persian, Middle Eastern or Latin American—as long as he didn’t need to speak, had gradually gotten roped into more and more urban situations.

  Eventually, they’d begun assigning him missions like this one, where his military background served to quickly assess situations and respond if necessary, but where the primary objective was that of observation.

  In other words, they’d turned the soldier into a spy. He wondered why they didn’t just transfer him to one of the spook organizations and get it over with.

  Breen studied the door. The lock was a simple metal key, so lockpicks, then.

  The first thing to do was to test the latch to see what the movement felt like and whether he could get any information from the mechanism. He tested and the door opened outward.

  It hadn’t been locked.

  His amazement soon turned to anger. Anger at the Argentines for ignoring even the most basic tenets of operational security—hell, of common sense in places where enlisted soldiers from the lower classes had easy access—but also at his senior officers back home for sending him here to spy on a mission that looked more and more like the utterly insignificant science expedition it was supposed to be. They were paid to be paranoid, but this was just silly.

  Inside the storeroom, he looked around for cameras. If he saw one, he would simply leave and pretend he’d gone in the wrong door—the fact that it had been unlocked would lend unexpected credence to that particular claim—which would be backed up by the footage of him looking around in a confused manner and retreating back the way he came.

  No cameras presented themselves. Could they really be that trusting? He actually found himself hoping that the Argentines had some invisible fiber optic lenses hidden somewhere and that he’d have to call in his immunity to keep them from locking him up.

  But he doubted it.

  The next step was to use his own fiber-optic camera, similar to the ones doctors used for endoscopic exploration, to look inside the bales and crates of supplies the crew had loaded. The device resembled a cable with one end thicker than the other and connected directly to his cell phone. In fact, other than the lockpicks, which would be impossible to explain to anyone who knew what they were, all of his equipment looked like consumer electronics.

  Much of it wasn’t… but the camera was. Anything more would have been unnecessary overkill. It was small enough to fit into small cuts in bundles and knotholes and tiny gaps in the wooden crates. If the gaps weren’t big enough, one of the tools in his lockpick set was a drill just the right diameter.

  A bale of what looked to be arctic jackets met his first exploration, followed by one box of food after another. Machine parts sat in a few crates near the door. His heart began to race when he saw weapons boxes and tubes in a subsequent crate but, after maneuvering the camera for a look at the stenciled words on the dark case, he was disappointed to learn that it contained ten flare guns. The tubes must be the flares.

  The Irizar was armed, of course. It had a couple of 40mm cannons used mainly to deter illegal fishing boats if it happened to encounter them, but that was perfectly open and upfront. Likewise, the profusion of sidearms and even rifles carried by the soldiers and sailors on board. This ship wouldn’t fall prey to pirates—even if any had been stupid enough to attempt to operate in frigid southern waters patrolled by both Argentina and Great Britain.

  But likewise, he was confident that nothing on this ship posed a threat to another military vessel, to any of the British bases in the South Atlantic, or… to anyone other than illegal fishing boats, really.

  Breen left the storeroom and walked back to his cabin, just an unconcerned passenger out for a stroll. He’d been gone for an hour. No one would have noticed.

  He would confidently transmit his conclusion that the Argentine mission was exactly what they said it was: a routine operation to relieve scientists and soldiers, many of whom had spent ten cold months in Antarctica. The schedule had been moved up for the exact reasons they claimed—a broken satellite uplink which left the base incommunicado, but which wasn’t a cause for immediate alarm, as the base had been functioning for more than sixty years and its crew was well-trained for the conditions… they’d survived the winter, so summer would pose few problems.

  Unless his superiors had been overcome by their own paranoia and all the speculation he’d heard from them turned out to be off base, that meant that the Argentine government had no clue why he was really there, and less as to what might be going on right on their doorstep.

  Chapter 3

  The ever-present wind got steadily colder as they approached the icy south. Camila’s students, employing a combination of Eng
lish, Spanish and sign language, managed to explain the concept of mate, the herbal tea enjoyed by many Argentines and deemed critical to friendly get-togethers to the assorted Australians and Europeans, and they were all now seated on a pair of blankets that had been laid on a deck in the aft-most section of the ship.

  Javier could never resist a mate session, the infusion calmed him, plus, he wanted to see what the foreigners would do when faced with the fact that the bombilla, the metal straining straw that went with the gourd, was not washed between rounds. After one person drank, the next was expected to do so from the same bombilla. It was always fun to see the uninitiated try it for the first time.

  As soon as he sat down, Martin handed him the gourd, and he drank. “I didn’t have you down as much of a mate guy,” the bald student said, “but glad to have you here.”

  Javier chuckled. “You can’t be a soldier if you don’t drink mate. The men would automatically think you were a foreign spy and they’d take you somewhere out of sight and shoot you.”

  Everyone laughed at this. The conversation turned to lighter topics as the gourd made its way around the circle and eventually reached the first of the Swedish girls. Anna made a face, but drank. Ingrid did the same. Clark watched them both intently and when his turn came, it was almost funny to see the struggle he was dealing with. He obviously didn’t want to drink from the unhygienic bombilla… but at the same time he didn’t want to look like a wuss in front of Anna.

  When his turn came, he faked nonchalance and simply downed the mate in one gulp… precisely the wrong way to deal with a hot drink. To his credit, he kept up the act and the gourd continued its journey.

  “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Everyone looked as surprised as Javier felt. Breen had kept to himself for the entire journey. Everyone had assumed that the man would continue to do his own thing.

  Martin, who appeared to be the leader of this particular round of mate reacted first. “Of course. The more the merrier.” He refilled the mate gourd from a grey thermos and passed it to the American.

  The man sat down and drank without hesitation. He took his time and savored the mate before sighing. “Thank you. It’s been years since I last had mate. It’s very good, by the way,” he said to Martin.

  “Have you been to Argentina before?”

  “Oh, no. I drank it in Syria.”

  “In Syria? There’s no mate in Syria. It only grows in Argentina and Paraguay,” Camlia said.

  “Also in parts of Brazil,” Javier added. He’d been on an exercise in Rio Grande do Sul, and had been surprised when his Brazilian Army hosts had told him that the trees around him were mate trees. They told him that early Jesuit settlers had established themselves in the region because mate was highly valued in Europe, to the point that it was referred to as “green gold”.

  “Actually, they drink a lot of mate in Syria, but it’s all Argentine mate. Not that brand, though,” he pointed at the open package on the blanket beside Martin. “It’s a brand with a red, white and blue logo.”

  “Taragüí?” Martin asked immediately.

  “It might be. I don’t really remember. It was a few years ago.”

  “I wonder how that came about?”

  Breen smiled, the first time Javier had seen it. “That part I remember. From what I was told, a lot of Syrians and Lebanese emigrated to South America to escape oppression by the Ottoman Empire. Then, in 1946, when Syria won its independence from France, they went back, and they took the custom of drinking mate with them.”

  “That makes sense,” Martin said. “There are still a whole lot of them here. About ten percent of the population has at least a little blood from the region. Especially in the west of the country. San Luis and San Juan.”

  “But surely it’s just some exotic thing, like the way we eat sushi. Maybe once a week,” Camila said.

  Her students looked at her strangely. They really didn’t seem the type to eat sushi once a week. The two Argentines looked more the kind of people who had heard of sushi and maybe tried it once, cautiously, at the wedding reception of some rich friend. They came from families who’d been close to the poverty line all their lives, and who went for the simple things in life. They were likely the first generation of their line to go to college.

  Javier saw that a lot with the soldiers around him. Many of them had chosen the military as a way to have steady employment and regular food, a real step up in the world. They were the pride and joy of families who only qualified as working-class when someone under the roof managed to find work.

  The Venezuelan student, of course, was little more than a refugee. The few dollars his family managed to smuggle out of the country went towards food, books and lodgings. University, of course, was free, as were all public schools in Argentina.

  Breen shook his head. “No. It’s extremely well installed across the entire culture. Everyone drinks the stuff and you can buy mate in any shop, in fact…” He looked around to make certain that his audience was with him, “a Syrian lady told me that if you have a stranger in your house, the rules of hospitality demand that you give him coffee. But if your guest is a close friend or family member, then you bring out the mate.”

  “Wow,” Ernesto said. “I would never have imagined that.”

  Javier admired the way the man, an object of scorn for the week since the ship had left Buenos Aires had, with one perfectly chosen anecdote and a couple of smiles, won them over completely. But the difficult question had to come up sooner or later.

  “So, what were you doing in Syria?”

  “There’s a snake in Syria called the blunt-nosed viper, which has a venom that’s used in a number of natural remedies. An American lab was studying the properties to see if they might not also have some repeatable and beneficial pharmaceutical properties, so I went with the team sent to harvest the venom. It was a slow process, and I got to meet any number of Syrians along the way. Most of them were mate drinkers.” He looked sad. “Of course, the war put an end to that. Such a waste.”

  Javier nearly applauded the performance. His own money was on this guy being a forward artillery spotter for… he really didn’t know which faction the Americans might have been assisting. Probably the Russians, since, despite rhetoric on both sides, American and Russian interests in the region were remarkably aligned… and both powers were high on the hit list of the major terrorist groups.

  He kept his peace, however. No need to expose the man just as he was trying to make friends… and Javier decided to keep his misgivings about why the man was trying to make friends to himself as well. He would give the American the benefit of the doubt.

  The trip had gone surprisingly well. Well enough that even his superiors back in Buenos Aires had decided to concentrate on other stuff and leave him alone. They’d be back on the horn as soon as the Irizar reached its destination, of course… but seemed to have decided that he wouldn’t get into too much trouble on what was basically a working vacation.

  The sky was clear. For some reason the roof of the sky appeared to be higher than it was out on the Pampas. Maybe it was the way blue reflected on the sea, or maybe it was the way a few tiny wisps of white, barely a suggestion, floated high above where clouds should be.

  As the team continued to make small talk, Javier found himself watching the sea, trying to find the small ice floes the crew had said they might start seeing today. If there were any in sight, he couldn’t tell them from the places where the wind had churned the top of the small waves to froth.

  His anger at having been bamboozled out of his leave had faded. A cruise through the Caribbean couldn’t have been more relaxing than this trip. In fact, a cruise would likely have been much more stressful, what with having to pack unnecessary items such as swimsuits and decent clothes. Plus, if he’d been on vacation, he’d have gone with either one of his friends or, if his leave went well, he could have reconnected with one of his occasional girlfriends. That would just have added to the stress. Yeah, much b
etter to take a cruise while actually on duty.

  The sea, the motion of the ship and the wind against his face all conspired to lull him into a near-catatonic state.

  “Excuse me, Colonel?”

  The man stood to one side, not daring to touch Javier, but the word ‘colonel’ had a magic effect. Years of army training and, much worse, army briefings and meetings, had trained him to react instantly whenever he heard his rank.

  “Yes, sailor, how can I help you?”

  “Captain Celmi asked me to bring you to the bridge.”

  Strange. The captain had essentially left him alone every day except during meals, where all three of the senior officers present—the captain, Javier and the commander of the troops that would remain at the base—would sit together at a table which would then be completed with junior officers chosen on a daily basis. He frowned. “Did he tell you what it was about?”

  “No, sir. He just said to bring you upstairs as soon as possible.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  The captain must have really emphasized the ‘as soon as possible’ part of the order because the man scooted.

  “Ah, Colonel,” Celmi said when Javier arrived on the bridge. “Glad you got here so quickly.”

  “Of course. What’s happening?” There was a slight charge in the air, as if something was going on. Three men and a young woman at workstations seemed busy doing something naval.

  “We’re changing course. Someone at Ushuaia just received a distress signal from a Korean fishing boat.”

  “Legal?”

  “Of course not.”

  Javier whistled. “They must really be in trouble. They’re in Argentine waters… They know we’ll impound the boat and send the crew to jail.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, we’re the closest armed ship which means we’ll be the ones to arrest them after we rescue them. Are you armed?”

  “Yes. A sidearm, but I suppose it should be enough.”