by Alex Hyland
They never came back.
I don’t know whether my dad killed Nick Parry or not. But two months after we moved to Uncle Harry’s, I found the picture of the knight that I’d given him, and I tore it to pieces. Jon was watching, but I couldn’t stop myself.
I didn’t tell Jon why I did it. I didn’t tell him about any of it. He’d never have been able to think about dad again without wondering. It would have ruined every memory he had. And what would have been the point to that?
The search for magic in life is not a search for truth. If anything, it’s the opposite. You don’t want to see behind the curtain. You don’t want explanations. As profound as the truth may be, odds are it’s going to break your heart. You learn how they pull a rabbit out of a hat, and you’ll never see it the same way again.
The magic is gone forever.
12
The Northern Lights shivered across the sky as we landed at Svalbard. Ghostly green ribbons that twisted high above the mountains. Ella, Geary and I stayed seated as the plane ground to a halt on the strip – its hydraulics buzzing and clicking as the rear staircase descended.
An airport official in his thirties climbed aboard. A gaunt-looking shadow wearing a padded Gore-Tex coat, he looked like a bubble-wrapped vampire. A sharp set of eyes on him though as he picked off his gloves.
‘Good morning,’ he said.
We nodded and handed him our passports. He looked at each of us in turn as he checked the documents.
‘The satellite station?’ he said.
Ella nodded. Our cover story was that we were staff heading for the US facility at Svalbard Station. Sam had already cleared it with the Norwegian authorities.
As the guy took a cursory look around the cabin, I kept my demeanor casual, like I made these kinds of trips regularly.
‘How long are you here for?’ he asked.
‘Two months,’ Ella replied.
He continued checking the passports, then strolled down the cabin. He glanced around, then stared at the steel panels that lined the floor. Geary glanced nervously at Ella.
‘We rented three snowmobiles,’ Geary said to him.
The official kept his eyes on the steel panels. ‘Yes, they’re here,’ he replied. ‘And the clothes you ordered.’ He turned and looked at Geary. ‘You didn’t bring clothes with you?’
‘Some,’ said Geary. ‘But we’ve never been stationed this far north before. We thought it might be an idea to get in some extra things.’
‘You thought well,’ the official replied. ‘It’s minus sixteen.’
He wasn’t kidding. I could already feel the temperature in the cabin plummeting – my breath turning into clouds in front of me. He took another quick look at Ella and me, then nodded. He stamped the passports.
‘Enjoy your stay,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ said Ella.
As the guy stepped back down the stairs, Dillon appeared at the cockpit door. He waited until he was sure that the guy was gone, then quietly unbolted one of the cabin seats from the floor. He put it to one side, unlocked the steel panel beneath it, then reached his arm into a shallow cavity. He began pulling out lengths of rope and grappling hooks. Binoculars. Pistols. Ammunition.
He glanced at Geary. ‘I’m staying?’ he said.
Geary nodded. ‘If you haven’t heard from us by noon, get out.’
‘And the necklace goes to this Simon Faro guy.’
‘The World Review,’ said Geary. ‘You tell him everything.’
Dillon continued piling equipment on the cabin floor. He then produced a small steel case. Geary opened it – inside was a plastic remote, detonators and soft gray bars of explosive.
Geary eyed me carefully. ‘Cooper’s team are coming in behind us,’ he said. ‘We go in first, we take out the missile launchers with this. We’ve all got to know how to use it.’
He handed me the remote – a plastic trigger the size of a cell-phone. As I gazed at it, the reality of what we were trying to do sank into me like a brick in water. Geary was the only one here who actually knew what he was doing. Ella might have had some moves, but she was only one step up from me – a petty thief playing soldier. The three of us storming an armed yacht in the middle of the sea? It was a huge gamble at best.
The aurora lit the snow plains beyond the airport – soft drifts glowing like they were lit from within. Icy air and blue silence.
Our snowmobiles hummed across the landscape as we rode north. We bounced and carved our way across hills stained with coal dust, the cold scraping into my lungs like grains of sand. I pulled the scarf tighter across my face and twisted the throttle.
The fewer people who saw us the better, and we kept our distance as we skirted round Longyearbyen, the only town on the island. It might have been a remote settlement – one of the most northerly on the planet – but nearly two thousand people lived here. I kept my eyes on its streets as we sped past. The town looked quiet – a sodium-lit pool of red and green wooden chalets. Abandoned mining buildings and cable car stations in the hills above them. It looked like a post-apocalyptic Christmas card – and in the middle of it all was a Radisson. This was polar bear country, but you could still get room service. It reminded me of a documentary I’d seen. Anthropologists trying to locate a lost tribe in New Guinea, only to find the kids running around in Nike T-shirts. It really was a lost world.
The town lights faded behind us, and soon the last outpost of civilization was gone. The snowmobiles’ tracks spun plumes into the air as we sped on. A dark and alien world now ahead of us.
We rode across a ghostly terrain – a shadowy realm that brought back the taste of dreams. Pitch black peaks that loomed under an emerald sky. White valleys that dropped away in front of us, dizzying in their suddenness and depth. And all the while the icy air tearing through me. This was the world at its most brutal and honest. Unforgiving and cold.
The frozen land drifted by, hour after hour. The dark serrated peaks then fell away, and we emerged onto the rolling white plains of the northern coast. Ahead of me, Geary slowed his snowmobile to a quiet crawl. Ella and I followed suit as he led the way up a glistening snow-covered hill. We ground to a halt about fifty feet from its crest. Geary gestured for us to stay silent as we left the snowmobiles and crept by foot up to the hilltop.
The Arctic Ocean stretched out black and still ahead of us. Ice floes creaking against the shore. In the bay way below us sat Salvesen Point. A dirty oil soaked stain on the landscape, it was little more than a pyramid of fuel drums and a couple of fiberglass cabins. Beyond the drums, a wooden jetty stretched a hundred feet out to sea – its far end, broken and hanging limp in the water. No signs of life anywhere. We carefully searched the station with our binoculars. There were no boats in the water, but we could see the bow of one of the dinghies sitting in the snow just behind the cabins. Geary checked the station one more time, then nodded.
‘OK, let’s move.’ he said.
We grabbed our gear from the snowmobiles, then carefully headed down toward the station. Geary kept his pistol ready as he arced around the cabins. The fiberglass dinghy appeared in the snow in front of us, a large outboard hanging from its stern.
Geary lowered his pistol and ran for it.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
I caught up to him – then I saw it. An ugly tear running down the length of the hull. A ragged hole like the dinghy had hit the ice at speed. Geary studied the damage – but it was useless. Even I knew that no makeshift repair was going to fix it.
Ella scanned the rest of the desolate station. ‘There were two boats on the inventory,’ she said.
She ran to the larger of the two cabins – Geary and I checked the other. The doors were padlocked. Geary switched on his flashlight and shone it through the barred plastic windows. Inside was a bare office – a few supply cabinets, a desk and a radio set.
Geary glanced at Ella.
‘Nothing in this one,’ she said.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘There’s
nothing else along the coast?’
‘There’s a research station,’ Ella replied. ‘But it’s got to be forty miles south of here.’
Geary checked his watch. ‘That’s going to be cutting it too fine. Fuck.’
‘There could be life rafts in the cabins,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Twenty-eight miles. It might get us out to the yacht, but not in time to save Tully.’ He grabbed the satellite phone and dialed a number.
‘Cooper, where are you?’ he said into the phone. ‘We’re at Salvesen Point, there’s no transport. The boat’s trashed.’ He listened a moment. ‘Yeah, anything. Fast.’
He glanced at Ella. ‘He’s going to check what else is up here.’
As Geary hung on the line, I clambered back up the hill to get a better view of the coast. I searched the sea for the second dinghy – for any transport, trawlers, anything that might be coming in to refuel. I scanned the horizon, but the sea was lifeless. Just scattered ice floes glowing under the aurora like empty dance floors.
I heard Geary talking to Cooper again, then headed back down. As I trudged toward the cabins, I could see the footprints we’d left on our way down to the station. I glanced at them for a moment, then slowed. Cutting across them was another set of prints – they weren’t ours. I shone the flashlight at them. Heavy boot prints heading east, away from the cabins toward an icy ridge about a quarter of a mile away. The prints looked crisp. Fresh.
Geary hung up the phone. ‘OK, there’s nothing else up here,’ he said. ‘I’m going to head for the research station, you stay-’
I hushed him and pointed at the ground.
He and Ella stepped toward me, then saw the prints. They stopped, and followed the prints east with their eyes. Geary raised his binoculars toward the ridge – a crest of jagged white peaks, maybe a hundred and fifty feet high.
‘The tracks head right over it,’ he said.
He lowered the binoculars, then thought carefully to himself.
‘Both cabins are locked,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘This guy’s gone for a while. Where?’
If there was anything on the other side of the ridge, it wasn’t on any map – but I doubted our mystery man had just gone sightseeing.
Geary glanced at his watch – a little under two-and-a-half hours to go. He glanced down at the tracks, then nodded approvingly at me, like I was more than just baggage here.
With the coast too quiet for snowmobiles, we dumped our gear on the jetty and followed the tracks by foot. We plowed knee-deep through the drifts, listening for any signs of life on the other side of the ridge. Everything was still – just the sky dancing silently. Geary then slowed and gestured at the drifts near the water. I raised my binoculars and scanned the snow. A second set of prints led in from the sea and joined the first. Both sets then continued over the ridge together. Geary produced a pistol.
The ridge rose above us like a frozen wave. We followed the tracks up the slope, kicking our boots into the ice as the incline steepened. With the air beyond the ridge silent, we quietened to a crawl as we reached the crest.
On the other side was a frozen bay – a solid ice sheet that broke into floes as it met the sea. We saw it immediately – a small gray dinghy with an outboard, dragged up onto the ice. We grabbed our binoculars and studied where the footprints were leading now. In the glow of the aurora, I could see a white-washed wooden cabin at the far end of the bay, maybe five hundred feet from the boat. Three guys in white snow gear were moving around in the dark. One was working on the engine of a snowmobile that was lying dismantled beside a pile of steel fuel cylinders. The other two were carrying stacks of small plastic packages into the cabin. Two rifles resting against the cabin wall.
‘Looks like the trawlers around here don’t just carry fish,’ said Ella.
Geary nodded. ‘Fucking smugglers. Shit.’
We’d brought cash with us in case buying a boat turned out to be the safest option, but it didn’t look like these guys were the types who were going to sell. We were going to have to take it.
Geary studied the ridge – it arced around the bay like a ragged white horseshoe. He pointed to a small double-pointed peak just behind the cabin.
‘You think you can hit the fuel cylinders from there?’ he asked me.
I stared at the peak. It was maybe a two-hundred foot shot. But the target was large – four cylinders, each one, five feet high. I nodded.
‘When it goes up, I’ll grab the boat,’ said Geary. ‘Ella, you stay here and keep us covered.’
‘You’re a better shot,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the boat.’
He stared carefully at her for moment.
‘You’re a better shot,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘We meet back at Salvesen Point.’
I took out my handgun. As I screwed a silencer onto the barrel, Geary stopped me.
'Nine millimeter won’t do it,’ he said.
He reached into his jacket and handed me a huge silver pistol.
'One bullet, dead center,’ he said. ‘Don’t give them time to figure out where you are.’
I nodded and tucked the pistol into my jacket.
‘Good luck,’ said Ella.
I took another cautious look at the guys by the cabin – their demeanor seemed relaxed. That was good. They weren’t expecting any trouble way out here. I stepped down the slope a few feet, then started making my way around the inland side of the ridge.
The icy peaks rose and dipped beside me as I arced around the bay. I kept my pace slow – my footsteps gentle in the snow. I cleared the apex of the bay, the nerves in me rising as I began to hear the guys’ voices in the air. I listened carefully. They sounded Russian. I didn’t understand the language, but their tone seemed calm.
The double-pointed peak rose just ahead of me – its icy tips, forty feet apart, connected by a gentle trough. I took the pistol from my jacket, hunkered down against the ice, then edged my way up.
I reached the trough and carefully raised my head above its crest. I could see the guys clearly now – all three were standing by the cabin, smoking and sharing a bottle. I checked to see if there was any one else we might have missed, then took off my padded glove. I grabbed the pistol in my bare hand and eyed the cylinders – gray steel, frosted with ice. I aimed at the dead center of the nearest cylinder, kept it steady in my sights for a second, then squeezed the trigger. The cylinder rang as the bullet ricocheted off its side – a puff of ice crystals filling the air around it. All three guys glanced at the cylinders. I fired again. Another ricochet sparked as it caught the snowmobile. The guys stared up at the ridge, then ran for cover – one of them grabbed a rifle. Fuck. As I tried to stop my freezing hand from shaking, a red laser sight flickered across my jacket. I ducked down – a bullet tearing into the ice just beside me. I scrambled for another vantage point along the trough. As I did, I went still. The guy with the rifle was shouting at the others – I heard him say the name ‘Brager’. I couldn’t believe it – they knew them. We couldn’t afford these guys radioing anything in. I kept low as a stream of rifle-shots splintered into the ice above me – but I couldn’t just wait – they’d have a radio in the cabin for sure. I raised my head through the hail of bullets and aimed the pistol. The laser flashed across my face. I squeezed the trigger, then fell back as an explosion hammered against the slopes of the bay.
The crackling of burning wood in the air. The dull crunch of ice breaking. I picked myself up out of the snow, crawled back up to the crest and stared at the bay. The cabin was gone – what scraps were left were in flames. One of the smugglers was lying still by the snowmobile. A second was lying on the ice. Both looked like they were still breathing – struggling to move. I kept my gun on them as I looked around for the third. I couldn’t see him.
I stared down at the frozen bay – the ice was separating. I could see a shadow moving in the distance – Ella scrambling down the ridge toward the boat. She sprinted out onto the ice sheet, then slid to
a halt. The sheet beneath her was breaking – black veins spreading though the ice around her. As she turned to find another path, gunshots echoed across the bay. My blood jumped a gear, the pistol shaking in my hand as I searched the darkness. Machine guns flashing on the eastern crest of the ridge. Two new figures – army fatigues, heavy weapons. I took a shot at them, but it was useless, they were way too far out. As their machine guns tore into the ice around Ella, Geary returned fire. One of the figures went still – the other dived for cover, blazing bullets at the peak where Geary was perched. The guy then turned his gun back on Ella – and the panic gripped me. I didn’t know whether she’d lost her pistol, but she wasn’t shooting back – she was just lying low, a target on the ice. Movement in the corner of my eye as Geary tumbled down the ridge toward her. I followed suit. I cleared the crest and clambered down toward the bay. As I did, I caught sight of the dinghy in the distance – the ice was separating around it – it was drifting out to sea. Bullets thudded into the floes beside Geary as he ran for Ella, the ice erupting into clouds around him. I scrambled down into the bay, trying to get close enough to give him some cover. I took a shot at the machine gun, but the fucker kept shooting. Not that the bullets seemed to matter to Geary – he just kept running – making himself the target, drawing the fire away from Ella.
‘Go!’ he yelled at her.
Ella got to her feet and leaped across the teetering ice toward the dinghy. As the guy swept his machine gun fire toward her, Geary raised his pistol and squeezed a single shot. The machine gun went quiet. Ella jumped into the dinghy and fired it up. As she swung it round and headed out of the bay, more gunshots cracked through air – pistol fire. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I sprinted toward Geary.
