Beneath the Ice

by Patrick Woodhead

  His eyes continued to drift before finally settling on the handle of a Pelican case standing upright no more than ten feet away. It looked battered from exposure to the elements; smatterings of ice still clung to the black plastic ridges. Katz had brought it into the main room upon waking and discovering that everything else was gone. The lake samples had been the first thing he had looked for in all the confusion.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got another couple of litres after all,’ Luca said, nodding towards the case.

  Both Joel and Katz followed his gaze, taking several seconds to grasp what he was referring to.

  ‘Not a fucking chance!’ Katz blurted, staggering forward to guard the case. ‘It’s taken three years of work to get these and you’re not going anywhere near them.’

  Luca stood up, wincing from the effort.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Katz growled. ‘No one is going to start drinking the fucking lake samples!’

  ‘Let’s see how you feel about that twenty-four hours from now,’ Luca replied, gingerly rubbing the side of his head. ‘Just hope you can drink the stuff after twenty million years.’

  As he spoke, they each became aware of a low vibration. It was distant, a soft mechanical thud that steadily grew louder. Several seconds passed before they realised it was the sound of a helicopter coming directly towards them. The noise grew and grew, becoming impossibly loud, until the dark underbelly of the machine suddenly passed directly over the skylights.

  ‘It’s a rescue mission!’ Joel shouted, hopping up and down as he tried to see further out.

  ‘But we were told Pearl’s helicopter was completely unserviceable,’ Katz replied. ‘All the ski planes had already flown back and so the chopper was the first thing we looked at to get us here. We were told it was completely knackered.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Joel replied, his mood already lifting. ‘Somebody got the damn thing working and now they’re here for us.’

  ‘That’s Pearl’s helicopter, right?’ Luca asked.

  Katz nodded. ‘Yeah. It came in by container ship and he flew it once or twice at the beginning of summer, visiting some of the other science bases. Then it broke somehow and it’s been sitting in the hangar at GARI ever since.’

  Luca nodded, processing the information. Eventually he shook his head.

  ‘What is it?’ Katz asked, watching his every move.

  ‘If that’s Pearl’s helicopter and he needs to launch the seed,’ Luca said, following the direction of Joel’s gaze, ‘then I don’t think it’s here for any rescue.’

  He turned towards Joel, who was still staring up at the skylights expectantly.

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ Luca warned. ‘We’re not out of this yet.’

  Chapter 20

  IN THE STATION chief’s office at GARI, Vladimir Dedov pulled a small black-and-white photograph off the wall, revealing a neat square of unblemished paint underneath. He held the print up to the light, tilting the grainy image to one side, and smiled. Despite his reputation as a poet, he was not a man prone to nostalgia, but, in the last few days, he had arrived at the inescapable conclusion that all he had left of any real worth were his memories.

  The image had been taken almost forty years ago and showed seven men dressed in Soviet-style polar clothing and posing in front of an old Antonov-2 bi-plane. It had been 1974 and the beginning of his first winter in Antarctica. As he stared from person to person, his eyes settled on his own slender face from all those years ago. His beard had been shorter back then, and untouched by grey, while his eyes were a deep, brooding brown. They stared unflinchingly into the camera, filled with the self-assurance only the young possess.

  Dedov shook his head, almost unable to believe how confident and energetic he had looked back then. His pose spoke of a man with his whole life ahead of him, a man destined for great things.

  Turning the photograph over in his hands, he saw his late wife’s handwriting scrawled across the back. His eyes narrowed as he tried to decipher the deep slanting letters and flamboyant loops. He heard himself tut affectionately, remembering how they had always joked that her handwriting was so bad it could have been used for military codes.

  Together always. Stay warm, my poet.

  Dedov sniffed as a flood of emotion caught him by surprise. His eyes misted up. Normally he would have been quick to fight any such sentimentality, but he was too old and too ill to pretend any longer. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut, forcing out a single tear which rolled down his cheek and quickly became lost in the thick hair of his beard. Katerina. His late wife had been so beautiful back then and they had laughed, even when times were so tough that they barely had enough food on the table.

  ‘My dear Katya,’ Dedov whispered. After so many years, his pet name for her felt so familiar on his lips. She had been killed outright in a car accident on the Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg. It had been a Tuesday, a totally unremarkable Tuesday.

  ‘Perhaps I will be seeing you sooner than I thought.’

  Placing the photograph in the shoebox in front of him, Dedov reached for a cigarette. He lit it with his father’s gas lighter, snapping the lid shut with the same click he had heard every day as a child.

  The seizures were happening regularly now. The last had left him feeling utterly drained, with barely the strength to lift himself off the ground. He had woken on the floor of his office with the back of his head damp with blood. Somehow, he had hit the corner of the desk on his way down. Although the cut wasn’t deep, with head wounds there was always so much blood.

  Dabbing at the mat of dried hair, Dedov glanced at the wall clock directly above him. After all this time, it seemed bizarre to be suddenly rushing.

  Outside his room, he could hear the clamour as the rest of the base readied themselves to leave. They had been working throughout the night, garaging the heavy machinery and battening down the external window hatches. Everything had to be sealed before the light faded and winter was upon them. The last plane of the season would be touching down in only a few hours’ time.

  There was the sound of heavy, clomping boots as one of his men sprinted down the narrow corridor just outside his room. Dedov listened, waiting for the sound to fade gradually. As much as he tried to be part of the whole process, he felt detached from it all, choosing instead to spend the last three hours alone in his room.

  Leaning back in his armchair, he watched the smoke drift up to the ceiling before settling into a faint haze. One thing was for certain – it wouldn’t be the cigarettes that got him, nor the drink as Katya had always warned. It was the seizures that would hasten his end.

  Before coming to Antarctica he had spent nearly six months feeling unwell before finally taking himself off to a hospital. A CAT scan had revealed that he had three metastases growing on the frontal lobe of his brain. The small carcinogenic tumours would most likely grow and multiply, said the doctor, but as for how fast and the exact timing of events, he couldn’t say.

  After some deliberation, Dedov had arrived at the conclusion that these kinds of things usually took months, if not years, to fully develop and as such, he could see out the Antarctic summer before returning home and actually doing something about it.

  But in the last two weeks all that had changed.

  He could feel the tumours growing. And fast. As millimetre followed millimetre they put inexorable pressure on his brain, squeezing it against the hard bone of his skull. Side effects followed. First to go was his sense of taste, then his sense of smell. As the tumours pressed ever harder on the outer cortex of his brain, he knew that the next side effect would be even worse. His personality would disappear.

  The certainty of this was worse than anything he could imagine. What else was a person apart from their personality?

  He knew that he should return home to Saint Petersburg and immediately go under the knife, spend his life’s savings to line up one of the best brain surgeons in the whole of Russia to perform the operation. In one fell swoop, he would rid himse
lf of the cancer and continue life as before. But as he sat in his office, watching the smoke curl against the ceiling, all that seemed like a distant promise. Circumstances were fast spiralling out of control and he needed to make a choice.

  Swivelling round in his chair, he broke the seal on a small 75cl bottle of Stolichnaya. With the stubby forefinger of his left hand, he dragged a nearby shot glass across the desk and dribbled in a measure of the vodka. But as he raised it to his lips, he suddenly stopped.

  What was the point? He couldn’t even taste the stuff anyway. He was drinking out of force of habit rather than any real enjoyment. All he could feel was a slight burn as the liquid passed down his throat. For the same effect, he might as well sip hot water. With a swipe of his hand, he sent the shot glass spinning off the desk and watched as it rolled in an arc across the floor, before coming to a halt somewhere beneath the nearby filing cabinet.

  ‘What have I done?’ Dedov whispered, clamping his eyes shut.

  He was not accustomed to feelings of guilt or self-loathing, but now the two emotions seemed to spread through him almost as fast as the cancer. He had been going over and over the same sequence of events in his mind and, whichever way he looked at it, Pearl had outplayed him at every turn.

  The American had arrived on his private jet three hours ago on what was ostensibly a ‘base inspection’. As one of the main investors in the drilling programme, he had the right to come and check that everything was sealed for winter, given that it would be GARI’s first test of the incredible winds and cold. But from the start, Dedov had known it was nothing more than a pretext to launch the seed.

  Pearl had arrived and, using Dedov’s own men, had got the Robinson 44 helicopter carried out of the garaging unit. In less than an hour, the female pilot travelling with him had fixed the machine and got the rotors spinning. All the while, Dedov simply stood and stared, the sheer powerlessness of his situation making him tremble with rage.

  Just as the helicopter was about to lift off, he had seen Pearl through the Perspex window and their eyes had met. A smile was plastered across Pearl’s face, a smug smile laced with venomous contempt and self-congratulation. Pearl knew that he had won. He had known it right from the start.

  Dedov had watched them fly away, almost unable to believe the train of events that had brought him here, or how quickly they had developed. In the beginning, it had been so simple – just a single request.

  A contact at the Polar Academy in Saint Petersburg had told him that a man named Richard Pearl needed his help to build a second drill site on the lake, but this time it was to be done in secret. He was told that the secrecy stemmed from the need to have a control experiment with which to compare samples extracted by the British. It didn’t make sense to Dedov, but given the fact that Pearl had just handed over a cheque for fourteen million dollars to the GARI programme, he didn’t feel he was able to question the man’s motives too deeply.

  For his trouble, Dedov was to receive a ‘personal expense account’. Nothing too extravagant, but in hindsight he realised that it had put him on Pearl’s payroll – and from there the slope was far more slippery than he could ever have imagined.

  All Dedov had been asked to do was to conceal the extra shipping containers coming off the boat. They were filled with sections of piping and drill equipment, and, he was told, would be collected by a man named Vidar Stang. That was to be the sum total of his responsibility and for the first few weeks, things had run their course.

  Then he had been out on the ice barrier one day and actually met Vidar Stang.

  The Norwegian was preparing to convoy back some supplies and almost immediately Dedov had found something deeply unnerving about the man. It wasn’t just his reclusive nature, nor even his grey, blank eyes that had been so badly burnt by the sun. There was something entirely unhealthy about his devotion to Pearl. He barely spoke, but when he did, it always seemed to be about Pearl.

  The more Dedov listened, the more he realised how unwholesome it was, like a son’s love for a father that had somehow been corrupted. There was something tragic about it too, mixed with an undercurrent of menace and fanaticism that Dedov found hard to take in, let alone understand.

  As they had stood together on the ice barrier and prepared to move the supplies, a storm had come up that had forced them both to shelter inside one of the tractors. For nearly three hours they had sat side by side with the cabin heaters on full blast, and it was then that Dedov had begun to understand the true depths of Pearl’s intent. For all Stang’s natural reticence and suspicion, on an emotional level he was little more than a child. Once he seemed to accept that Dedov was involved with the project and, more importantly, connected to the American, he opened up to him wholeheartedly.

  Dedov soon learnt of the seed’s existence and what it might do to the Southern Ocean. It was like a living nightmare. He had unwittingly become involved with a plan that could decimate his beloved Antarctica, a place that had been his passion and home for nearly forty years.

  Even now, Dedov could remember the sheer relief he had felt as he had climbed down from the cabin and got away from the Norwegian. In all his years of being cooped up with strangers at science bases, Dedov had never met anyone who had made him feel quite so uncomfortable.

  Almost immediately after the encounter, he had tried to detach himself from the whole scheme, even refusing Pearl’s offers of extra money. It was then that he caught his first glimpse of Pearl’s true nature. Somehow, he had found out about Dedov’s uranium-smuggling days and immediately threatened to expose him. But the smuggling had all happened such a long time ago and now no longer held any great threat for the Russian. Its significance, like the majority of the evidence, had long since faded into obscurity.

  Just as Dedov had been preparing to send a team round to the old Soviet base to finally put a stop to the whole nefarious project, an image had arrived on GARI’s main computer. It showed Dedov’s son, Nicolai Vladimirovich, sitting in a coffee shop in San Diego with a disbelieving smile on his face. He was staring across the table at a man mostly out of shot, but Dedov had instantly recognised him as Pearl. He could well imagine the fantastic job offer he was putting to Dedov’s unsuspecting son, drawing him in close. The inference was clear. His family was no longer safe.

  In that single moment, Dedov had realised that he would do nothing to endanger his own son’s life, not even to save his beloved Antarctica.

  But then Sommers had died in the crevasse and the British had informed him that they were sending out a new guide. Dedov had seized the opportunity, seeing it as his last-ditch attempt to blow the whistle on Pearl. He deliberately plotted a route close to the second drill site, feeling sure that the British would see it and, in turn, question its existence. He had even given a second satellite phone to the new guide, Matthews, and told him to report anything out of the ordinary.

  The spotlight would then have fallen on Pearl’s clandestine drilling without dragging Dedov himself, and by extension his son, into the affair.

  But it hadn’t happened. The British had only called once to report their position and, tragically, to say that one of their number had died in the terrible weather. Dedov slowly shook his head, regretting that he had pushed them so hard to leave ahead of the storm. Some of the responsibility for the man’s death would be on his conscience, but then again, perhaps there was more to it than just weather. Perhaps Stang was somehow involved.

  His eyes moved across to the double-glazed window and the clearing skies beyond. The British must have driven right past the second drill site but not seen it in the storm. Now, his only hope was that they would spot it when they emerged from the base and tried to make their way back to GARI.

  It had been seven hours since their last communication. Seven hours and Dedov was starting to get worried. Their satellite phones would be working fine in this weather, so why hadn’t they checked in to say they were on the move? It would be the most logical thing to do. They would then be able t
o establish a new rendezvous time for the tractors and coordinate a proper rescue.

  As much as Dedov asked the question, deep down he already knew the answer. Stang. He knew that the man would protect the secret of the lake at all costs and, if he had half a chance, would prevent the British from getting back to GARI.

  Dedov exhaled heavily. He lit a cigarette, expelling a cloud of smoke against the wall in front. That was another point to consider. Someone was going to have to stay behind and man the station throughout the winter months. Without any direct contact with the British, he couldn’t just write them off. What if one of them did make it back alive? By sealing shut the base and sending everyone home, he might as well be signing their death warrants.

  Dedov’s eyes moved skywards as he trawled through the list of names of his work crew. Every one of them was desperate to return home. For him suddenly to propose they spend another ten months in the long dark of winter might well incite a mutiny. He loved his men, just as they loved him, but from hard-won experience he knew that there was only so far he could push them.

  With a slow bow of his head, Dedov sighed, feeling the weight of the decision pressing down upon him. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt totally unsure of what to do. On the one hand he had to get back to Saint Petersburg for his own cancer treatment; on the other he couldn’t leave men in the field like that, even if they were British.

  Dedov turned towards the calendar hanging on the wall beside him. Flicking through the pages to the correct date, he stared at the handwritten entry he had placed there nearly six months ago when they had first arrived. In two days’ time, the cargo ship the Akademia Federov was due to dock alongside the barrier to unload. It would only be for a few hours as they dropped off some containers, but anyone left at the base would still be able to clamber on board and get back to Cape Town by sea. It bought them an extra forty-eight hours. But even now, he wondered if that would be enough.

  Dedov was about to stand up when he suddenly heard a high-pitched scream echo out from somewhere nearby. The sound was muted, but filled with deep-rooted terror. Swinging open his office door, he stood stock-still, listening.