Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘The aetiology of Progeria isn’t known,’ reminded Dupuy, simply.

  ‘Until now?’ suggested Stoddart, remembering what Patricia had written. ‘It’s got to be an infection – a virus or bacteria – which for some reason is suddenly manifesting itself, becoming virulent in close to sub-zero conditions.’

  Pelham helped himself to what little of the coffee Geraldine had left. ‘That was our first investigation. We’ve subjected the organs, faeces, urine and tissue of every victim to every toxicological examination that is known to us here at this establishment. Which is every toxicological examination that’s scientifically known and recorded. We failed to locate one single virus or bacteria we couldn’t identify …’

  ‘It’s an unknown condition,’ Dupuy said. ‘Logically it could be caused by a bacterium or virus you couldn’t recognize. If we don’t know it, how can we identify it?’

  ‘There would need to be some commonality,’ argued Pelham. ‘We isolated every schizomycete—’ he looked at Stoddart. ‘There was nothing rotting … putrefying … at the station?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Everything was frozen solid.’

  Indicating Stoddart again, Pelham said: ‘Fortunately Jack thought to bring back their garbage. Again, no putrefaction in which bacteria could have grown.’

  ‘I know it was the Antarctic … and the Arctic …’ qualified Geraldine, before asking her question. ‘But what about saprophytes?’

  Again Pelham looked enquiringly at Stoddart who considered the question, glad he understood it. Slowly he said: ‘There was no decaying plant matter, upon which any bacterium could have fed … no plants grow in the Antarctic …’

  ‘But …?’ pressed Geraldine, aware of Stoddart’s doubt.

  ‘George Bedall was a palaeobotanist. His experiment was to work closely with Jane Horrocks, who was to sink ice bores as deeply as she could to retrieve oxygen isotopes, for period dating. George was looking for any nothofagus fossils – evidence of plant life during the Pliocene period. There might have been if Jane had sunk low enough He paused. ‘The only anomaly I’ve discovered in the logs – not just from the Antarctic but from Alaska as well – is that temperatures at both places were higher than normal when the outbreaks occurred …’ He stopped again, conscious of the abrupt concentration from the others in the room. ‘… Jane herself records that because of the ice softness she might be able to go deeper than she’d expected.’

  ‘What about Bedall?’ broke in Dupuy. ‘Is there anything about plant fossils … plants even … in the core samples …?’

  Stoddart shook his head. ‘No. There’s nothing to suggest they even sunk one, before they became affected.’

  ‘No samples … experiments … obvious at the station?’ asked the Frenchman.

  He couldn’t remember, Stoddart realized, his stomach hollowing. No, he decided, just as quickly. They had collected all the data: he and Patricia and Olsen, and if Bedall had started collecting, making slides, there would have been a reference in his personal log and there wasn’t. ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Alaska?’ demanded Geraldine.

  ‘I’m not through with everything from there. But one of the survivors, Darryl Matthews, is a palaeobotanist, too. He must have been there to carry out some plant research and he’s here for us to ask.’

  ‘This is good!’ said Geraldine, excited despite her tiredness. ‘We’ve potentially got something here!’

  ‘It’s a definite line of enquiry,’ allowed Pelham, more soberly.

  ‘We haven’t considered parasitic bacteria,’ said the Frenchman, also refusing any overreaction.

  ‘No internal parasites were discovered by the autopsies in the faeces, urine or resident in the gut,’ reported Pelham.

  ‘What about external: fleas, mites, body lice … something you hadn’t seen before?’ said the Frenchman.

  In the briefest of pauses that followed from the installation director, Stoddart wondered if such a search or test had been made. Then Pelham said: ‘Nothing.’

  The doubt had clearly occurred to Dupuy. He said: ‘Nothing on the bodies or nothing on – or in – the clothing?’

  ‘The bodies,’ admitted Pelham. ‘The clothing is still being examined. It’s already been done visually and microscopically. Now it’s being dissembled, for fibre tests under fluorescope lighting. After that there will be chemical analysis extending beyond parasitic search, to include microbes.’

  The reply was too detailed for Pelham or his appropriate team not to be genuinely conducting the experiment, conceded Stoddart. ‘So something might emerge from that source?’

  ‘I would have expected to have found an indication by now,’ cautioned Pelham.

  ‘Which brings us to viruses,’ said Dupuy.

  ‘Hostile environment,’ said Geraldine flatly.

  ‘Some resistant or unaffected pathogens existed there. And in Alaska and in Siberia,’ out-argued Dupuy. ‘Anyone ever heard of anything that can survive in those conditions?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Stoddart simply, glad to be able to make a contribution. ‘In 1999 scientists from Montana University found proteobacteria and actionomycetes, microbes commonly associated with soil, embedded in ice in Lake Vostok, which is one of the ten deepest lakes in the world, almost 12,000 feet below the surface of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The estimate is that the microbes, which were still active, could be 500,000 years old: maybe even older than that.’

  ‘And there’s a famous experiment with scorpions, the oldest known prehistoric arachnida species,’ reminded Geraldine. ‘A number were frozen, until the ice blocks became solid; just as, according to what I’ve understood today, the victims’ bodies were frozen in Antarctica. The scorpions were entombed in ice for varying periods: some for as long as a year. They went beyond hibernation – which they’re not capable of achieving – into suspended animation. Within minutes of being released from the ice they were unaffected: their poison was actually more toxic than the scorpions that had been left unfrozen as part of the controlled study.’

  ‘And if you’re looking for viruses, what about the common cold? And influenza?’ added Pelham.

  ‘There’s reference in the Antarctic logs to cold symptoms,’ remembered Stoddart. ‘The team leader, Armstrong, believed at first he was going down with flu—’ Stoddart looked at Pelham. ‘Did anyone who came back with me get a cold or flu?’

  ‘Neilson and Burke had respiratory difficulties but nothing developed,’ said Pelham.

  ‘From the log dates, the last person died in the Antarctic station three days before we got there,’ said Stoddart. ‘By then it was way below freezing yet whatever it is was still virulent enough to infect four people.’

  Pelham said: ‘That’s a pointer I’ve already flagged up in the preliminary medical assessments: it’s in your dossiers. If it is a virus it’s more likely to be transmitted through respiratory exhalation – coughing or sneezing or quite simply by breathing out – than through bodily function expulsion, after internal incubation. Any virus exiting the mouth would initially, very briefly, be wet but just as quickly it would dry, into an infectious droplet nuclei. It could survive – and travel – for a surprisingly long time: viruses are destroyed far more effectively by sunlight than by wet or cold.’

  ‘What about a long interrupted Stoddart. ‘I haven’t checked the wind speeds in Alaska yet but we know for a fact, because it stopped us getting there, that there was a blizzard around the Antarctic station for over a week. And there is log reference to strong winds even before the blizzard. How far could a gale blow droplets nuclei?’way?’

  ‘Answer your own question,’ said Geraldine, which sounded sharper than she’d intended. ‘Ground winds can get into upper atmosphere wind flows, right?’

  ‘Right,’ agreed Stoddart.

  ‘And upper atmosphere wind can be gale force?’

  ‘Yes,’ the climatologist agreed again.

  ‘So
there’s your answer,’ smiled Geraldine. ‘If the virus got into the upper atmosphere it could be blown thousands of miles.’ The smile went. ‘Are there regular air currents, from Pole to Pole, like there are permanent sea currents in the oceans?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stoddart. ‘And I see where you’re coming from. Two problems. Sun kills viruses, according to Walt. And it would be subjected to continuous sunlight – radiation – for most of an upper atmosphere transmission. Secondly, surely an airborne virus wouldn’t stay in the upper atmosphere all the way from the south to the north pole, without some dropping and infecting people en route?’

  ‘There’s no logic in that,’ supported Dupuy, to Pelham’s nodded agreement.

  Unabashed, Geraldine said: ‘Let’s agree that if it is a windborne virus there’s the potential for it to be carried to the populated areas of the world?’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘Certainly something else – a risk – to be flagged up,’ accepted Stoddart. ‘Which brings us back full circle to where we began. And the point at which to establish a working understanding. What about your support staff?’

  The question appeared to surprise both scientific advisors. Briefly lifting her fact file in front of her, Geraldine said: ‘Yours is the research. Ours – as far as I can see at the moment – is the interpretation of your already assembled and tested data, which –’ she swept her hand generally, to encompass the installation – ‘we accept as empirical …’

  Dupuy took up her pause. ‘… which is how I see it, too.’

  The above-politics, internationally accepted dissemination and analysis of scientific information? Or a pathology-blaming escape hatch? wondered Stoddart. He was at once irritated by his own cynicism. That was Washington thinking, not for here.

  After enough buck passing and paper shuffling at Langley to have defeated a Las Vegas casino pit boss, Paul Spencer’s intentionally limited White House briefing became the burden of the CIA’s directorate of science and technology and of Robert Stanswell, a twenty-five-year-old advertisementresponding Berkeley graduate who fortunately kept – and played – the hand he’d been dealt.

  His initial curiosity was at influenza being given as the common cause of death for a shoal of minke whales washed up at Kochi, on Japan’s southern Honshu island, and five others – two humpbacks and three bowheads – far to the north, at Oamori. When he carried out a computer search cross-referencing whales and influenza, he discovered similarly caused deaths in minke, fin, sei and humpback whales on Macquarie Island, the Australian protectorate deep in the southern Pacific, at Vishakhaptnam and Madras on India’s Bay of Bengal, further south at Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka, and Conception in Chile and Arica on the Chilean-Peruvian border. Astonishingly, until Stanswell ran a specific check through the CIA stations at the US embassies in Canberra, New Delhi, Colombo, Santiago and Lima, no connection had been made between the whale deaths and those so far caused by the outbreak of human influenza in the same locations. Most of the 1,200 fatalities were elderly. Fifteen of them – in Vishakhaptnam and Arica – were aged far beyond their years, the oldest being fifty, but in such places their premature ageing went unregistered.

  A pedantic crossword fanatic to whom lateral thinking came naturally, Stanswell created programs to surf the net for newly manifesting, non-marine diseases in sea mammals. Within a week he had a file on the deaths from a dog-like distemper, on a near epidemic scale, of harp seals from Greenland and grey seals in England’s North Sea.

  Coincidentally the Science Foundation’s David Hoolihan, responding to the same remit, discovered that marine biologists were describing as an epidemic the wholesale death of blue-fin tuna off South Australia from a herpes-type virus, and when Hoolihan added marine biology as a reference term to his web search, he found that whatever was destroying the oyster beds of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, was so new it didn’t have a name in any marine biology lexicon. A bleaching disease devastating coral reefs in the Indian Ocean was recorded as having reached the Caribbean in less than a month. By the same coincidence, Hoolihan’s account landed on Paul Spencer’s desk at the same time as that from the CIA headquarters at Langley.

  Twelve

  Henry Partington had spent his entire political life trying – and usually succeeding – to avoid coming off the back foot, the inferior position he objectively realized he now found himself to be in. The inference of Moscow’s abandonment of its Siberian station – and inference was all it could ever be – didn’t, upon longer consideration, equate or mitigate American spying, despite every which way he’d tried to rehearse his approach. Which by itself was more than enough to be thoroughly pissed off about. But it wasn’t by itself. In front of him was the word-for-word account of Robin Turner’s meeting with the British and French science ministers, both of whom had handled Turner like the amateur he’d shown himself to be. He regretted now planning the telephone conversation as a witnessed exchange with the Russian president. He certainly wouldn’t have agreed to the inclusion of Amanda O’Connell if he’d read the Turner debacle earlier. If he’d been able to – if there hadn’t already been the necessary preliminaries of alerting Moscow to the intended call and delegating interpreters through whom the conversation would be conducted – Partington would have aborted the whole idea.

  The Secretary of State and Amanda, escorted by Richard Morgan, arrived promptly on time, as instructed half an hour before the scheduled telephone link-up. For Turner’s benefit – or rather the man’s unsettling awareness – Partington very obviously lifted and tapped into order, with the title page facing outwards, the transcript of the previous day’s meeting and just as obviously relegated the folder to a side table.

  As he did so, only half looking at Turner, he said disparagingly: ‘Anything emerged since that – or from that – to make what I’ve got to do any easier?’ Would it be too blatant, even now, delegating Turner to make the call? Too late for that. Moscow had already been told it would be him, president to president: it would be a protocol offence substituting Turner. And from what he’d just read, Turner couldn’t be risked to handle it anyway.

  Turner said: ‘I’m afraid not, Mr President.’

  Amanda settled comfortably in her chair, conscious of the tension. Take your time, she told herself. That was essential, timing everything. The closer it got to the Moscow connection, the more effective she was going to be. From the man’s alertness, she guessed Morgan detected the atmosphere, too.

  Partington said: ‘I’m going in bare-assed and I don’t like it. Nothing from Fort Detrick?’

  Turner, relieved, looked to Amanda. She said: ‘Nothing that would help the conversation with Moscow.’ Or improve Partington’s temper, she thought.

  Openly accusing, Partington said to his Secretary of State: ‘I’d hoped for more from your initial meeting.’

  ‘They both came with prepared agendas,’ tried the academic.

  ‘I thought we had one, too?’ persisted Partington, relentlessly.

  Fifteen minutes to go, timed Amanda. Morgan sat, withdrawn protectively inside his shell.

  ‘Which I’m sure Amanda will be able to establish,’ said Turner. ‘It would have been a great mistake to have attempted to rush things on the basis of just one meeting.’

  Bastard! thought the woman irritably. She didn’t feel any sympathy for the man, after his trying to switch the onus on to her. Ten minutes to go, she estimated. Time for Robin ‘Failure’ Turner to witness some long overdue professionalism. She said ‘I’m sure I’ll be able to get things back on course.’

  All three men looked sharply at her. Partington said: ‘That’s good to hear.’

  ‘I’ve also been thinking of the difficulty of your approach to Moscow, Mr President,’ she continued.

  Partington’s concentration came around fully upon her. ‘And?’

  ‘The North Pole has a strong magnetic field. And there is a lot of unpredictable electrical activity, particularly in the ionosphere. It quite often creates
freak radio conditions: interference, interruptions … sometimes even interceptions …’ Amanda had everyone’s absolute attention now and liked it.

  Partington, who rarely needed signposts, was beginning to smile. ‘Go on!’

  ‘I talked about it with some people at NSA last night. There’s a lot of instances of airliners picking up outside communication …’ She answered the president’s expanding smile. ‘All American carriers use the polar route, to and from Europe, when there’s a stopover at Anchorage, Alaska. Some, in fact, virtually fly over Iultin. I checked that out last night, too …’ Amanda had been unsure whether to disclose how far she’d taken her idea but from Partington’s attitude decided she could. ‘… I’m told it would be possible, in fact, to splice some of the Noatak intercepts into an American pilot’s exchange with Anchorage, just after take-off, and make a master tape from which it would technically be impossible to detect that it wasn’t one original, freakish transmission. I told the NSA people that I found that difficult to believe and they said they could prove it so I told them to go ahead … just as an experiment, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ accepted the beaming president. ‘They say how long it would take them?’

  ‘Midday today,’ said Amanda. She steadfastly refused to answer the looks from either Robin Turner or Richard Morgan.

  Partington said: ‘You are one hell of an impressive girl, Amanda O’Connell.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr President.’

  ‘Thank said Partington. He picked up the secure telephone on its second ring to be told Moscow was on the line. ‘I’m ready,’ he said, lounging back comfortably in his chair.you,’

  * * *

  Henri Lebrun, who was thirty-two, was obviously – too obviously – dying. He was bowed by osteroporosis and his almost bald head was patched with isolated tufts of hair. He squinted heavily, near blind, towards the observation window when they announced their presence behind the glass. Softly, in French, Dupuy said: That’s incredible!’ More loudly, still in French, he identified himself and the climatologist tried to straighten at the desk at which he’d been laboriously writing.