Outpost

by Adam Baker

  'So what's on your mind?'

  'My brother. His wife. She and I . . .'

  'How long?'

  'Three, four years. I asked her to leave him. Asked her a million times. It's difficult.'

  'Does your brother suspect?'

  'I think he chooses not to know.'

  'How would he react if he found out?'

  'He's a placid guy. But I'd lose him. I'd lose him as a friend.'

  'Have you thought about the future?'

  'It's great when we're together. But each night she's with him, and I'm alone. Shit, they might both be dead for all I know. I'd like the chance to put things right.'

  'What do you think, deep down, you should do?'

  'I took this job to get away. I keep thinking: This isn't me. I'm better than this, you know?'

  Ghost steered the outboard motor. They cut through chop. Punch sat in the prow of the zodiac. He swept the shoreline with a spotlight. He lit a lunar landscape. Jagged rocks coated in ice.

  'There.' He pointed. A concrete jetty. Snow-dusted steps.

  Ghost detached the outboard motor and laid it on the jetty. They hauled the boat out of the water.

  'I'll come back for the motor,' he said.

  They carried the rubber boat up the steps and set it down in front of massive steel doors set into a rock face. Ghost released a padlock and chain.

  'Go inside,' he told them. 'I'll fetch the outboard.'

  Punch and Rye dragged the zodiac through the doorway into a cavernous silo. Wind noise dropped to silence. Punch took off his goggles and mask. He shone the spotlight on the walls. They were in a wide tunnel that receded downward into bedrock. The walls glistened with moisture. There were rails in the floor. The wall signs were Russian.

  'What is this place?' asked Punch. 'I thought the island was uninhabited.'

  'You've been ashore, haven't you?'

  'Just ashore. Never here.'

  'The Soviet Navy used to dump old reactors on the seabed. Each time they decommissioned a nuclear sub they simply cut off the tail section and dropped it in the Barents Sea. There are about twenty of them down there, all rusted and barnacled. This was going to be their new home. Salvage teams were going to bring them up and bury them in salt for a quarter of a million years.'

  'That explains the skull on the door.'

  'It's the same the deeper you go. Skulls on every wall, every door, etched in cadmium steel. Future generations will get the message. Bad shit. Keep out.'

  Rye pulled a dust sheet from a couple of red Yamaha Viking Pro snowmobiles. She checked them over.

  'Keep the light on me.'

  She opened a long wooden box on the floor and took out two Ithaca pump-action shotguns. She racked the slides a couple of times to check the action. There were wooden shelves propped against the wall. She opened a carton of twelve-gauge ammunition and slotted shells into the breech. She slid the guns into leather sleeves strapped to the bikes.

  'For bears,' she explained. 'We keep them here. Rawlins doesn't like weapons on the rig.'

  Ghost staggered through the bunker doorway carrying the outboard balanced on his shoulder. Rye helped him lower it to the floor.

  Ghost fuelled the bikes from a jerry can. Gasoline spiked with isopropyl alcohol to prevent freezing. He checked the oil. He gunned the engines to check they worked. He took a radio from his backpack.

  'Shore team to Rampart, do you copy, over?'

  'Rampart here.' Jane's voice. 'Glad you're safe.'

  'We're at the bunker. Any word from Apex?'

  'The guy is still transmitting, off and on, but he sounds delirious. I can't get a precise location from him. You'll just have to head for Darwin and see what you can do.'

  'Okay. We'll get our stuff together and head out at sunrise.'

  'There's another storm-front heading this way. A bad one. We can see it on radar. A solid wall of ice coming down on us like an express train. I reckon it will take you seven hours to reach Darwin, three or four to reach the cabin. If you leave now you might make it before the storm hits'

  'Shit.'

  'It's down to you guys. Rawlins says you should forget it and come back to the rig, but the decision is yours.'

  Ghost turned to his companions.

  'Quick vote. I say go.'

  'Go,' said Punch.

  Rye thought it over.

  'No,' she said. 'They're close to dead. We don't actually know where they are and a storm is moving in. I appreciate the sentiment, but it's a bad idea.'

  They took Rye's medical kit, half her food and left her behind.

  The snowmobiles had a top speed of a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, but Ghost throttled down to fifteen while they drove in darkness. Punch followed his tail-lights. His boots barely reached the footrest.

  Franz Josef Land was a chain of volcanic archipelagos. A series of pumice islands capped with permafrost. There were jagged boulders beneath the ice ready to rip the skids from the snowmobiles.

  They should have arranged a signal, thought Punch. If his Yamaha stalled, Ghost would drive on heedless.

  The sky began to lighten. The cold, blue light of an Arctic dawn. They cut through drifts sculpted into strange dune shapes by an unrelenting wind.

  Ghost accelerated. Punch revved and kept pace.

  Jane fixed breakfast for the crew. She made porridge. Punch had left a plastic spoon on the desk of his kitchen office. There was a note taped to the spoon.

  Sixteen level scoops of oats. Five and a half litres of water. No sugar or honey. No waste, no second helpings, no alternative food.

  She spilled a few oat flakes on the counter. She carefully gathered them up and put them back in the porridge box.

  Earlier that morning Jane went to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. She discovered the refrigerators locked and the food store padlocked. She found herself tugging on the refrigerator door like a desperate junkie denied their fix.

  The crew ate in silence. Ivan sat with the TV remote and flicked through a series of dead channels. A dozen different flavours of static. CNN was off air.

  Fox showed the stars and stripes fluttering in slow motion, grainy and monochrome.

  BBC News showed a union flag. 'God Save the Queen' over and over. The location of refuge centres scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  'One by one the lights go out,' murmured Ivan.

  Ghost swerved his snowmobile to a halt. Punch drew alongside. They were at the edge of a wide crevasse. A jagged fissure of blue, translucent ice. It went deep.

  They pulled off their ski masks.

  'Shit,' said Punch. 'We've blundered into a crevasse field.'

  'Yeah.'

  'Bike and rider. Nearly quarter of a tonne. We could drop through the ice any time. We should head back.'

  Ghost spat. He watched the gobbet of phlegm fall into darkness.

  'No. Just as risky to go back as to press on. I'll ride ahead. Anything happens to me, lower the rope.'

  'Okay.'

  The crevasse stretched to vanishing point either side of them.

  'Could be a long detour.'

  They pulled on their ski masks and set off.

  Jane washed the bowls and spoons. She put the porridge box back on a food store shelf and, on impulse, stole two packets of M&Ms. She wondered how long it would be before fights broke out over food. She locked the kitchen and gave Rawlins the keys.

  She returned to her room to get some sleep. She heard paper crumple as she lowered her head on to her pillow. A note from Punch.

  IN CASE I DO NOT COME BACK.

  Jane ripped open the letter.

  Jane, if you are reading this, either I am dead or you have no self-control. If you have looked in the storeroom lately you may have worked out we don't have enough food to last six months. I've checked and re-checked. We should have been resupplied by now. Two freight containers of edibles. As it is, we have empty shelves and an empty freezer. At the present rate of consumption we will run out of provisions mid
-winter. There simply isn't enough food to go around. Keep it secret. I don't want to start a panic.

  There is a map in this envelope. Hang on to it. You and Sian might find it useful in weeks to come.

  The internal door that connected the heated accommodation block to the rest of the rig was draped with silver, quilted insulation ripped from an airlock. Jane zipped her coat. She pulled the curtain of insulation aside and hit Open. The door slid back. She shone her flashlight into the dark. The corridor walls sparkled with ice. She closed the door behind her and set off, treasure map held in a gloved hand.

  Jane's route took her through miles of unlit rooms and passageways. She felt like an ARVIN drone exploring the silted dereliction of the Titanic.

  Eerie silence. The hiss and hum of climate control, the constant background to life on the rig, was absent. No sound but laboured breathing and the grit-crunch of snowboots on iced deck plates.

  Her torch beam lit gym equipment, vending machines and evacuation signs glazed in frost. Once the heating had been shut off, the temperature in the uninhabited sections of the refinery had quickly dropped to minus forty. Any moisture in the air had condensed to fine dew then crystallised. Ceiling pipes dripped ice.

  The map led her to a dank storeroom on C deck. A vacant space. Nothing but a row of lockers against a wall. Four of the lockers were empty. The fifth locker had no back, and was the gateway to a hidden room. Punch had obviously positioned the bank of lockers to mask the entrance to an adjacent storage space.

  Jane climbed through the locker into the hidden room.

  A dome tent. Guy ropes pegged down with heavy turbine cogs.

  Survival equipment stacked in the corner. Warm clothes, sleeping bags, a hexamine stove, frozen bottles of drinking water.

  An emergency hide-out. The obvious implication: there isn't enough food to feed the entire crew until spring. But three people could make it through winter if they sequestered themselves and let everyone starve.

  Jane opened a box. Torch batteries, protein bars, and three vicious kitchen knives. A Post-it note pasted to one of the blades.

  IN CASE THINGS GET UGLY.

  Jane returned to her room. She locked the door and took a packet of M&Ms from its hiding place in her running shoe. One M&M per day. She lay on her bunk and crunched the little nugget between her teeth. She let the chocolate melt on her tongue. Then, in a sudden paroxysm of self-disgust, she hurled the bag at the wall. M&Ms skittered across the floor.

  'We can do better than this,' she told herself.

  Punch and Ghost reached Darwin Sound. They headed for high ground.

  They dismounted the bikes. They took off their ski masks. Punch took a long, steaming piss while Ghost scanned the shoreline with binoculars. Miles of rocks and shingle turned blood red by sunset. Ghost took out his radio.

  'Shore team to Rampart, over.'

  'Rampart here.' Sian's voice. ' Good to hear from you.'

  'We're at Darwin. No sign.'

  'Nothing? Nothing at all?'

  'I've got five-, six-kilometre visibility. No sign of them. How's that storm?'

  'Big. Still coming.'

  'You've got fifteen minutes to raise them and get a fix. After that, we're out of here.'

  Ghost turned to Punch.

  'We gave it our best shot. Nobody can say we didn't try.' He pulled back the cuff of his gauntlet and checked his watch. 'Ten minutes, then we head home.'

  They shared a protein bar.

  'Personally, I'd do a Captain Oates,' said Punch. 'If it came down to frostbite and starvation, I'd take a long walk in the snow.'

  The twilight sky suddenly brightened, like someone flicked a switch and made it noon.

  'What the fuck?' said Ghost.

  They both looked up. Something bright at high altitude, behind the cloud, moving fast.

  'A plane?' said Punch. 'A burning plane?'

  'Too white. Too constant.'

  Later, when he was back aboard the refinery, Punch tried to describe what he saw to Jane.

  'It was like time-lapse footage. The sun zooming across the sky, dawn to dusk. It did crazy things to our shadows. I totally lost balance.'

  The fierce glow crossed the sky accompanied by a high whistle. Punch pulled down the hood of his parka so he could hear.

  'It's coming down,' said Ghost. 'It's going to hit.'

  The white glow sank below the western horizon. Seconds later they heard the impact. Deep, rolling thunder.

  'Now what in God's name was that?'

  Survival

  Simon woke.

  He studied the blue polypropylene weave of the tent fabric. Somewhere a voice was calling.

  'Apex, this is Rampart, over. Apex, this is Rampart. Can you hear me?'

  He had lost a glove. His right hand was bare.

  I'm dying, he thought. I'm dying, and I can barely remember who I am.

  He looked for the glove.

  Simon woke.

  He turned his head. Alan lay sheathed in three sleeping bags, unmoving, lips blue. Nikki had wrapped herself around him to impart warmth. Her head rested on his chest. She was unconscious, mouth open, a patch of frost on the sleeping bag where her breath had condensed and frozen.

  Simon's fingers were numb. He looked for the glove.

  Simon woke.

  Semi-darkness. Daylight outside, but the tent was half buried in snow.

  'Apex, this is Rampart. We need your location. We must have your position, over. There are men at Darwin, but they can't stay long. This is your only chance, Apex. If you don't respond you will be left behind.'

  Simon picked up his radio but was too disoriented to work the buttons. 'Hello? Hello?'

  He turned the frequency dial. Nothing but feedback. His fingers were swollen. He dropped the radio.

  He scrabbled at the tent zip and stumbled into the snow. Weak sunlight. Intolerable cold. He fumbled in his pocket without understanding what he was looking for.

  Ghost swerved and brought his snowmobile to a skidding halt. Punch copied the move.

  'There.' Ghost pointed east. A red flare slowly drifted to earth two miles distant. They gunned their engines and set off at full speed.

  They found Simon face down in the snow. They rolled him. Ghost stabbed him in the thigh with a syringe pre-loaded with epinephrine.

  Simon's right hand was blue.

  'Give me a spare glove,' said Ghost.

  Punch took a glove from his backpack and threw it to Ghost. 'He's going to lose fingers for sure.'

  Ghost threw the unconscious man over the saddle of his snowmobile.

  Punch slit open the tent with a lock-knife. He injected Nikki and struggled to drag her to the bikes.

  They strapped Alan to a sledge still covered in sleeping bags. Ghost hitched the sledge to the back of his snowmobile.

  'Think he's dead?' asked Punch.

  'Won't know until we get him unwrapped.'

  Ghost slapped Simon and Nikki awake.

  'You're both riding pillion, got it?' he shouted in their faces.

  'All you have to do is hang on.'

  Ghost pulled out. Simon sat in the saddle behind him. Alan was towed on the sledge.

  Punch pulled away. Nikki clung to his back. They followed their own tracks. They drove fast, spewing slush. They checked the sky for the coming storm.

  Jane sat with Rawlins in his office. They rewound radar footage. Jane pointed at the time code in the corner of the screen.

  'Fourteen forty-six. Any second.'

  'You didn't see it yourself?'

  'Out of the corner of my eye. I was sitting in the bubble. The sky lit up.'

  The radar sweep showed miles of empty ocean, the edge of the island, and the haze of the approaching ice storm.

  'It fell to earth north-west of their position. That's what they said. It hit land.'

  A sudden white flare, just out of frame.

  'Jeez,' said Rawlins. He leaned forward. 'The debris plume must be half a kilometre wide. Stuff in
the air for twenty, twenty- five seconds.'

  'A meteorite?'

  'Possibly. It wouldn't be the first up here. There have been a couple of strikes in Ontario and Troms. Chunks of asteroid the size of a football.'

  'Yeah?'

  'Back in '78 a Soviet reconnaissance satellite re-entered over the Northern Territories. Chunks landed in deep forest. The Canadian Army spent months looking for a plutonium power cell.'

  'I'd love to take a look.'

  'If things were different, I'd be out there right now with a rock hammer collecting a souvenir. But we only have two Skidoos. We can't risk them for a joyride.'

  'I suppose.'

  'Still manning the radio?'

  'Calling for help at the top of every hour. Rest of the time we broadcast Queen's Greatest Hits. Let people know we have an active transmitter.'

  'Good idea.'

  'Sian thinks she heard a voice a few days back. A man's voice. Brief. Very faint.'

  'What did he say?'

  'Couldn't make out.'

  'Well, keep on it. We can't be the only people stuck out here.'

  Three hours in the saddle. Simon let go of Ghost's waist. He toppled backward. He fell from the snowmobile. He lay in the snow. He pulled off his gloves. He tried to take off his coat.

  Ghost brought the Yamaha full circle. He dragged Simon to his feet and slapped him around.

  'Look at me. Look at me. Come on, man.'

  Simon's eyes were rolling. He couldn't focus.

  Ghost jammed gauntlets back on to Simon's hands. Simon tried to slide them off again.

  'No, dude. You have to wear gloves, you hear me?'

  Punch pulled up.

  'He's delirious,' said Ghost. 'Give him another shot.'

  Punch slammed epinephrine into Simon's thigh. The guy gasped and snapped awake.

  'Can you keep it together a couple more hours, Simon? Can you keep it together that long?'

  He nodded.

  They set off. Headlights at full beam. Fuel needle edging into red. Snow particles feathered Ghost's goggles, blurring his view.

  They made poor time. Ghost's snowmobile laboured to haul two passengers and a sledge. The sledge flipped twice, tipping Alan into the snow. They took off Alan's goggles and face-mask. His eyes were closed. They couldn't get a neck pulse. They couldn't tell if he was breathing.