Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  Danny laid a plate of food in front of me.

  ‘Where’s Martin?’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t come in.’ This from an athletic, trim-bearded blond with an Australian accent. The helicopter pilot, I seemed to remember.

  ‘Is he OK?’

  No one rushed to answer that one.

  ‘Has he radioed in or anything?’

  ‘Radio protocol is for check-ins at oh nine hundred and twenty-one hundred,’ Quam said. ‘He hasn’t missed one yet.’

  Twelve hours seemed like plenty of time for things to go wrong. ‘Who’s he with?’

  Quam stared down the table. ‘Annabel?’

  I remembered Annabel from the introductions. The only other woman besides Greta: tall, Asian and almost painfully slim, in a ribbed black turtleneck and hip-hugging black trousers. Her long black hair was pulled into a glossy ponytail down her back. Among all the beards and the baggy jumpers, she looked as though she’d dropped in from the pages of Vogue.

  ‘Hagger wanted to get some data up on the Helbreen,’ she said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I didn’t stop him.’

  ‘You mean he went alone?’

  ‘It’s a serious breach of procedure,’ Quam scolded.

  Annabel’s cheeks flushed under the dark skin. ‘I didn’t go anywhere alone.’

  ‘It’s not like Hagger ever plays by the rules,’ said one of the scientists, an intense American whose beard didn’t hide the fact he was younger than me. He was obviously sympathetic to Annabel. Most men on that base were.

  ‘Hagger’s not the only one who has a problem with the rules,’ said Fridge. He and Quam exchanged a look.

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Annabel. ‘He’s probably fucking a polar bear.’

  From the far end of the table, I heard the crash of cutlery going down hard on to a plate. I didn’t see whose it was. It came from Greta’s direction.

  I started to wish I hadn’t shotgunned my way in with the scientists. Behind me, the grad students had a party going on; our table was like open day at the Asperger’s clinic. Short, dull conversations that ended as mysteriously as they began; lots of chewing; not much eye contact.

  I couldn’t concentrate on my food. I couldn’t stop thinking about Hagger. I was relying on him, my ticket out of the wasteland where my career had stalled for nearly ten years. If anything had happened to him …

  ‘You settling in OK?’

  I looked up. The man opposite – the Irishman who’d taken my side in the table dispute – was waiting for my reply. The patient look on his face said it wasn’t the first time he’d asked.

  ‘A lot to take in,’ he said. ‘You’ll get used to it. I’m Sean, by the way.’ As if he’d read my mind – or the embarrassment on my face that I couldn’t remember his name. ‘Sean Kennedy, base doctor. Most people call me Doc, which is about as much imagination as you can expect from this lot.’

  He smiled collusively. The words ‘genial’ and ‘Irishman’ have an almost magnetic coupling, and they certainly stuck to him. About forty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a squashed-up face that you’d never call handsome, but open and cheerful.

  ‘Are you used to the cold yet?’

  ‘I think I’ll need all the jumpers I brought.’

  ‘You will if you go out in the field.’

  ‘Most of what I do is in the lab.’

  ‘And what is it you do?’

  ‘Molecular biology. I work on the artificial assembly of DNA.’

  ‘Where do you do that?’ He jerked a thumb out the windows, where the setting sun had turned the mountains across the fjord a peachy pink. ‘In the real world, I mean.’

  ‘I work in Cambridge.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence.’ He turned to Torell. ‘Fridge here’s at Cambridge, too.’

  Fridge gave me a suspicious look. He hadn’t brushed his hair; it still stuck up like a pair of horns. ‘Which college?’

  I could see where this was going – and no way to get out. ‘I’m at the Sanger lab.’

  It didn’t put him off. ‘Doesn’t everyone there have to be on the faculty of another institution?’

  ‘I’m on the science staff.’ My last line of defence, and it wasn’t enough. He leaned forward on his elbows, tilting the table towards him.

  ‘What exactly do you do there?’

  ‘I’m a technician.’

  If it hadn’t been for the grad students, you could have heard a snowflake drop in the room.

  ‘Well, it’s great to have another biologist here,’ said Kennedy brightly, as if he’d completely missed the academic pissing contest going on. Though I caught a shrewd look in his eyes that said he’d missed nothing.

  ‘Hear hear,’ said one of the men down my side of the table. He was the oldest one there, a pot-bellied man with a white beard. If it had been December, he’d have been a shoo-in for Father Christmas at the station party. ‘More biologists is what we need.’

  ‘Dr Ashcliffe studies polar bears,’ said Kennedy.

  I smiled. ‘I’ve just learned how to shoot them.’

  It was supposed to be a joke. Ashcliffe recoiled as if I’d insulted his mother; his knee banged the table, jangling the cutlery.

  Don’t make jokes about shooting other people’s research interests, I noted.

  ‘And not forgetting our dear leader,’ said the American who earlier had leapt to Annabel’s defence. He made a mock bow in Quam’s direction. ‘You’re a biologist too, aren’t you, Francis?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Quam.

  I watched the others turn on him. There was a subtext here I didn’t understand, but I could feel the hostility. It was like being back at school, the dread that you’d be noticed.

  ‘Why so coy, Francis? Tell him what you specialise in.’

  Quam shook his head, like a man with his neck in a noose.

  ‘Dr Quam is the world expert on the breeding habits of penguins,’ the American announced. ‘Adélies, isn’t it, Francis?’

  Unkind laughter rippled around the table. I thought it had to be a wind-up – but Quam flushed crimson and didn’t deny it.

  ‘Our new masters at the South Polar Agency thought we needed Francis to take us in hand,’ said Kennedy.

  ‘I wondered about the sign outside,’ I said.

  ‘Bonfire of the quangos. New government thought it was an unbearable extravagance having one agency for the North Pole and one for the South, so the decree went out from Caesar Augustus that henceforth and forevermore Utgard is part of Antarctica. Isn’t that right, Francis?’

  Quam glowered.

  ‘There won’t be any Arctic left at all if they don’t change their energy policies.’ That was Torell.

  ‘Fridge’s upset they haven’t turned Utgard into a wind farm yet,’ said the American. ‘Or was it an organic biomass generator you wanted?’

  ‘I’m more worried about the methane emissions from the poo barrel at Gemini,’ said Ashcliffe, the polar-bear man.

  ‘Hey Fridge, how many CFCs do you give off?’

  Someone bumped my chair from behind. The students had finished and were taking their plates back to the galley.

  ‘Movie night,’ said Quam.

  We cleared the table. The others settled down to watch the film – that night it was Alien – but I went to the radio room to Skype with Luke. I missed him badly; I wanted to be home. It wasn’t the solitude – I could have handled that perfectly well, I think. It was the people there who were making me lonely.

  It wasn’t a great connection. The picture froze; the sound stuttered. Luke was like that, too: eager questions one moment, monosyllables the next. I asked about school, about his friends, about my sister. I tried to describe the beauty of Utgard, but he didn’t look interested.

  ‘Did you deliver my letter?’ he asked.

  ‘I will do,’ I promised. I wanted to reach through the screen and hug him tight, like the days he was off school sick and we’d curl up on the sofa watching TV. But of course
I couldn’t.

  We disconnected. I was still staring at the blank screen when Greta popped her head around the door.

  ‘Did Hagger check in?’

  I stared at the racks of equipment in front of me. They had every communications device known to man, it looked like, but nothing that meant anything to me.

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  She glanced at a couple of the displays, then picked up a handset and dialled a number. I heard the burr of a ringing tone down the line.

  I pointed to the handset. It looked like the sort of mobile phone people carried in the mid-90s, complete with rubber aerial and real buttons. ‘I thought there was no reception here.’

  ‘Iridium,’ she said. ‘Satellite phone. He’s not answering.’ She turned it off and threw it down on the desk. I followed her back to the mess.

  ‘Hagger didn’t check in,’ she announced.

  ‘It’ll unravel,’ Quam said, without looking up. ‘It always does.’

  ‘He’s not answering his phone.’

  ‘Probably forgot to charge the battery.’

  ‘He’s missed the check-in.’

  ‘It’s not twenty-four hours yet.’

  ‘He must’ve dropped the phone down a moulin,’ said Fridge. ‘Or fallen asleep in his tent.’

  Greta turned for the door. ‘I’m going to find him,’ she announced.

  That got Quam’s attention. ‘There’s a protocol,’ he said firmly. ‘If Hagger misses his next scheduled check-in, we’ll initiate the search-and-rescue plan.’

  ‘If he’s in trouble, another twelve hours could kill him.’

  He jabbed a finger at her. ‘Do you know what the biggest danger is in a situation like this? People losing their heads, trying to play the hero and getting into far worse trouble than we’ve got already. It’ll unravel.’

  Her face blazed. ‘Fuck you, Francis. There’s worse things than penguins out there. Who’s coming with me?’

  She looked around the room. Standing behind her, I could see all their faces: Quam, furious; Jensen, the pilot, bored; Annabel, indifferent. Most of the others just seemed embarrassed – or kept watching the film. On the TV, John Hurt didn’t look at all well.

  ‘I forbid it,’ Quam said.

  I’d only been there a few hours, and I was already desperate to leave.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said.

  Five

  USCGC Terra Nova

  A rap on the door. A sailor entered and handed Franklin a sheet of paper.

  ‘Just came through from Washington, sir. Confidential.’

  Franklin read it. Anderson sat up in bed, cradling the mug in his fingers.

  ‘Has the helicopter reached Zodiac yet?’ he asked.

  Franklin shook his head. ‘What do you know about Bob Eastman?’

  ‘Eastman?’ Anderson swirled the dregs of tea in his mug. ‘He was at Zodiac. American, astrophysicist. He worked on gamma radiation, or something. Has he made contact?’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention him?’

  Anderson looked confused. ‘I did. At dinner, he was the one needling Quam and Fridge. I didn’t know his name then.’

  ‘Someone knows his name. And they want to know where the hell he’s got to.’ Franklin folded the paper. ‘What else?’

  ‘He was good at crosswords. He had a nice smile. He ate Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, which he smuggled up inside his telescopes.’ Anderson shrugged. ‘There were some rumours, but that was just bullshit. At Zodiac, people started rumours just to make life interesting.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  Anderson put down his cup and slid back under the sheets. ‘Can I just tell the story how it happened?’

  Franklin checked his watch. Washington could wait. ‘Be my guest.’

  Anderson

  In the Arctic, you never just go somewhere. By the time we’d suited up, fuelled the snowmobiles, loaded the rifles, gathered all the equipment, a full hour had passed. We even signed the exit book. The whole time, I expected Quam to come down from the Platform, threatening us with the sack or waving a gun. But the door stayed shut. Nobody wants to miss movie night.

  I waited while Greta hitched low metal sledges behind our snowmobiles. Hers, she loaded with enough equipment to reach the North Pole: spare fuel, a pair of skis, a tent and three steel boxes stencilled SURVIVAL. Mine, she left empty.

  ‘In case we have to bring anything back,’ she said, ambiguously.

  It was my first time driving a snowmobile, but that didn’t count for much. The moment we passed the flag line, Greta almost disappeared over the horizon. I squeezed the accelerator until my thumb went numb. The wind blasted my visor; grains of ice rattled against it like rock salt. The sledge behind me slid around, tugging me off course. And I still could hardly keep up.

  We crossed the fjord and drove up on to the ice cap. It was a magical landscape, but I didn’t see much of it. I had my head down, never looking more than a few metres in front, trying to spot Greta’s track and any ruts in the snow. My hands ached; I kept waiting for a rest. Each time she slowed down, my hopes lifted. But each time, it was only to navigate a bump or a slope, and then I had to gun the throttle to close the gap again.

  After about an hour and a half, she finally called a halt and tossed me a Thermos from her pack. While I fumbled the cup between my mittens, she rang Zodiac on the satellite phone.

  ‘Hagger still hasn’t called in.’

  We went on. Now we were on the dome, an ice sheet hundreds of metres thick that covers two-thirds of Utgard. Strange to say, it felt like driving along a beach. On my left, a chain of mountains; to my right, a flat surface stretching down to the horizon. A few lonely rocks broke the surface, trivial in that vastness, until I realised they were the tops of mountains that had been buried in the sea of ice weighing down the island. The Inuit call them nunataks.

  And it never got dark. The five-month-long polar day hadn’t quite dawned, but it was coming. Even when the sun got below the horizon, you knew it hadn’t gone far. We travelled in a protracted twilight, dim enough to see the tail light of the snowmobile in front, light enough that I could still make out the snow on the distant mountains. A few of the brighter stars peeked through the velvet sky. In that wide, wide space, so close to the top of the world, I could almost feel the planet spinning on its axis under me.

  Eventually, where the ice dome funnelled into a glacier between mountains, Greta stopped and waved me to come up behind her.

  ‘The last place his GPS clocked in was near here,’ she shouted over the idling engines. She jumped down and disconnected the sleds, then tied two lengths of rope between the snowmobiles.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Crevasses.’

  I surveyed the unbroken snow. ‘Are there many around?’

  ‘It only takes one.’ She made the rope fast in an intricate cradle of knots and carabiners. ‘Keep it tight. And don’t drive over the rope or you’ll rip it.’

  We moved down the glacier in harness. The snowmobile didn’t want to go slowly: if I feathered the throttle, it would rev but not move; if I pressed harder, it suddenly popped into gear and lurched forward. It took all my concentration not to mow down the rope … let alone watch for crevasses … let alone spare any thought for Hagger. I wasn’t even sure the rope would do any good. If Greta went into a crevasse, the rope would more likely pull me in on top of her than save either of us.

  Greta stopped. I let go the throttle so suddenly I almost fell off.

  ‘Is it a crevasse?’ I shouted. Then I saw it. A blue snowmobile, parked where the glacier rubbed up against the mountains. Pieces of equipment were scattered over the ground around it, hard to make out in the gloom.

  I got down from the snowmobile.

  ‘Wait,’ Greta called. ‘Hold on to the rope. And check the snow.’

  ‘I’ll follow your track.’

  ‘Check it,’ she repeated. ‘The snowmobile has better weight distribution than you do.’


  I edged over the snow, one hand on the safety line, the other holding the barrel of my rifle, using the butt to probe the ground in front. A hard crust had formed on top of the snow, but that was deceptive. It squeaked under my boots like polystyrene – and, like polystyrene, it snapped under my weight. Each time it broke, my heart froze while I waited for the drop. Each time, my feet landed softly in the powder snow underneath.

  Greta was prowling around, examining the equipment he’d left.

  ‘Don’t you have to worry about crevasses too?’

  ‘Martin knew the drill.’ She pointed to four fuel cans that made a rough diamond around the abandoned snowmobile. ‘He marked out a safe area.’

  ‘So where’s he gone?’ I looked at the snowmobile. I looked at the boxes of equipment. No sign of Hagger. A shovel stood planted in the snow beside a square pit, about a metre deep. An open Thermos stood upright on one of the boxes, lid off, cup beside it, as if Hagger had been about to pour himself a cup of tea. The water inside the Thermos had frozen solid.

  ‘Here.’ Greta bent down and lifted a red climbing rope out of the wind-blown snow. It had been tied off on Hagger’s snowmobile. She followed it across the glacier.

  Then she stopped. She leaned forward. The rope went taut behind her. I hurried over.

  A dark cut opened in the ice, a snaking fissure going down – I couldn’t see how far. Narrow enough that you didn’t see it until you were nearly there; wide enough you could easily climb in. Or fall. The rope trailed down into the void.

  ‘Martin,’ I shouted. I stepped forward. My foot caught a lump of ice half buried in the snow and kicked it over the edge. Loose snow showered down after it.

  ‘Careful.’

  Greta took a head torch from her pocket. Wrapping the strap around her wrist, she shone the beam down into the gloom.

  ‘Keep watching for bears,’ she said. ‘They come up quick.’

  I glanced around anxiously. The sun, never far off, was circling back. The sky had started to blue. Even so, the shadows were deep enough to hide all manner of evils.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Greta, and even she couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. She pointed the torch down, wrist trembling slightly.

  The crevasse was deep, maybe eight or nine metres. The walls bent and bowed, primitive shapes that seemed pregnant with meaning. The torch beam reflected brightly off them, all the way to the bottom.