Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  I almost shot him out of sheer frustration. That’s what power can do: overload you.

  ‘This place has a good, strong door,’ Malick said. ‘There a lock?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Not when I arrived. How’d you get through?’

  ‘I found the key.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. The gun in my hand felt solid and dangerous. ‘Don’t try to imply—’

  ‘Jesus, Bob, listen to yourself. You asked for this meet. You chose the place. If I was what you say I am, you think I’d have come in here, no gun, no backup? You’re the guy with the gun. You’re the guy with the key. Tell me, if the cops showed up now, who’d look like the bad guy?’

  ‘Hagger had the key.’ I wished I hadn’t have said it. ‘But—’

  He knew where I was going and cut me off. ‘I didn’t give it to him, if that’s what you think.’ Leaning forward, on the attack. ‘Hagger worked for you guys.’

  ‘You too,’ I reminded him.

  ‘One small job. For you, he was full-time.’

  When you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, it’s easy to ignore what the other guy’s saying. But I had just enough sense in me to hear it. What if DAR-X was a decoy? What if the Russians sent them up here, not to run the radar program, but to double bluff us. We’d be so busy looking at them, we’d never guess the real bad guys were right under our noses. Inside Zodiac.

  I put the gun down. Losing it made me physically nauseous, like when you’re so hungry you want to puke. My hand hovered over it, in case Malick made a move

  He gave me a fake smile that was supposed to reassure me. ‘Now. You want to tell me what this is about?’

  For a minute, I just stared at him. But either he was lying, in which case he knew already; or he was being truthful, and he could maybe help me. I told him in three sentences: the Russians, the satellite radar, the base station.

  ‘Well I’ll be goddamned,’ Malick said, like a guy who’s just found his wife in bed with his pastor. He looked up at the needle pointing into space over our heads, the taut wires holding it in mid-air. ‘That’s why we had radio trouble.’

  He pulled off his heavy mittens and wiped his nose. He noticed the wire that ran down into the black box on the wall.

  ‘Where does that go?’ he asked.

  I gave it a glance. Not for more than a second – but that was all he needed. You don’t make it in the oil industry, not in places like Athabasca and Prudhoe Bay, if you can’t handle yourself. He shot out his arm. Before I even knew it, he had his hand on the rifle barrel and was twisting it away.

  My grip was too slack. I snatched, but he had it before I could grab hold. He took a step back, reversed the weapon and pointed it at me just too fast for me to wrestle it back off of him. His finger danced on the trigger, warning me.

  Now I understood why he took off his mittens.

  ‘I really hate having a gun pointed at me.’ He squinted down the barrel, right at my chest. ‘Right now, I’m sure you appreciate that.’

  Oh fuck! Panic raced through me. I realised how cold I’d gotten. I’d been standing still in that room a long time. I was shaking.

  ‘You’re a good liar,’ I told him. ‘You played me just right.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know shit about this radar thing. But you …’ A jab of the rifle. ‘You seem real familiar with it.’

  My mind raced. It sounds dumb, but I had to know how much I could believe him. Was he one of the bad guys? Or just pissed off because I pointed a gun at him?

  ‘I only know what I told you.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off that gun. ‘Please. You have to believe me.’

  I hated myself for begging. I didn’t think it made me sound any more truthful, either.

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind. And a slug in the chamber.’ He nodded toward the loose cable that hung down from the needle, though the gun never left me. ‘Where does that go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let’s go see.’

  We went down through the hatch and outside, round the side of the building. Malick followed me all the way with the rifle. Now we knew what we were looking for, we saw it right away. A black cable coming out the brick and down the wall, like a TV antenna. Hiding in plain sight. It vanished under the snow.

  ‘You gonna tell me you don’t have a clue where that goes?’ Malick said.

  I looked him in the eye. White pearls of frost beaded his eyebrows.

  ‘I know why you don’t trust me. I get it. But if neither of us has anything to do with this, we’re on the same side. We can figure it out together.’

  ‘That’d be fine.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘So long as you go first and keep your hands where I can see them.’

  Every snowmobile carries a shovel with the emergency pack in case we have to dig a snow shelter. I fetched it, and dug away the surface where the cable went under the snow. A few inches down, it had already hardened to ice, but I could see the cable running below it like a vein. I scraped away more snow, peeling back the line. It pointed up the hill, towards the coal-processing buildings on the top level.

  ‘I checked there yesterday.’

  ‘Maybe you missed something.’

  We tracked the cable under the ice, pausing every ten feet or so to check we had it right. It went pretty straight, not hard to follow. Up the hill, and into a big corrugated-iron barn on the north-east edge of town.

  ‘This is where the coal came in,’ I said, to break the silence. Any silence is awkward when there’s a gun pointed at you – and this was a freaky place. The front of the building faced away, out to the cableway towers that went across the mountainside to the mine. Around the barn, elevated tunnels and rusted gantries led off to satellite buildings; cranes drooped from the sky and icicles hung off of the rails. The whole thing made a hell of a tangle, plenty of steel waiting to collapse on your head. Plenty of places for someone to watch.

  A beating noise broke the cold silence. I spun around, trying to see where it came from. Snow fell from one of the gantries. A white bird flew into the sky, almost invisible against the grey. Probably a ptarmigan. Behind me, Malick had the gun raised like a hunter. If he’d been faster, he could have had it for dinner.

  He saw me watching him and swung the gun back down to cover me. ‘Don’t get any cute ideas.’

  I put up my hands. ‘I’m as scared as you are.’

  He didn’t argue the point.

  We picked our way over the crap on the ground to the big barn. There was no entrance at ground level, just a creaky flight of stairs going up the side of the building to a door. They hadn’t put a lock on this one. Or a handle.

  ‘Open it,’ Malick told me.

  He was behind me, a couple of steps down. If I’d been Jackie Chan, I could maybe have knocked the rifle out of his hands and kicked him down the stairs. But that shit’s only for the movies. And tell the truth, I was more interested in finding where that cable went to. So long as Malick wanted that, we were on the same team.

  It’s a weird thing to say about a guy with a gun at your back, but I was starting to trust him. I believed he didn’t know about the radar. Sure, he could have been pretending, but why bother? Now all I had to do was stay alive long enough to convince him he could trust me too.

  I put my shoulder against the door and pushed. The only thing holding it shut was ice; it creaked like Scotch tape being peeled off. I opened it an inch, paused, then kicked it in and jumped inside.

  The metal stairs outside clanged as Malick ran after me. But I wasn’t trying to get away from him. I just didn’t want a bullet in my face the moment I stepped through the door. Not that my Delta Force impression would’ve fooled anyone.

  There wasn’t a sound. And – so far as I could see through the gloom – no one there.

  I was in a long corrugated-iron shed, thick plank floor, no windows, but open at one end where the cableway brought the coal buckets in from the mine.
It gave enough light to see by. A few of the buckets still hung off of the cables. In the centre of the room, I saw a rusted mess of gears and axles, and a huge flat wheel at head height that used to drive the cableway.

  I didn’t see anything that looked like what we wanted. A computer, I guess I was looking for. I listened out – a machine like that needs power – but I didn’t hear anything electric. Now we were in, I couldn’t even see where the cable we’d followed from the antenna came through.

  I went further in, carefully, stepping on the cross-beams where I could see them through the cracks in the planks. A couple inches of snow had blown in through the front, though it didn’t reach this far back. Neither did much light. I almost caught myself on a pointed iron hook someone had left hanging from the roof on a chain.

  I was just past the big wheel when Malick spoke behind me, sharp and cold.

  ‘Don’t take another step.’

  What a fucking idiot I was. I’d believed him. I’d let him bring me into a dark corner, no fuss, where no one would find me for five hundred years. I hated myself. I threw up my hands. Like that was going to save me.

  ‘There’s a hole right in front of you,’ said Malick. ‘You nearly fell in.’

  I nearly fell in anyways. That spike of terror flipped, the bottom dropped out of me and I almost collapsed. He’d only been trying to warn me. I hated myself all over again.

  I could see it now, four sides sloping down to darkness. A giant hopper head – where they tipped out the coal, I guess. God knows where I’d have landed if I’d have fallen in it. A black hole.

  Except it wasn’t. You probably know, in physics nothing escapes from a black hole. But something got out of this one. A black cable that came up the side and ran over the edge, dodging between the warped floorboards as it headed towards the centre of the room.

  ‘I got it,’ I said, forgetting that thirty seconds ago I thought he was going to kill me. I followed it back, sweeping aside drifted snow, until I reached the motor. The cable disappeared somewhere inside.

  Malick came over. We both stared, trying to find the line in the rusted machinery. ‘It sure as hell isn’t connected to that.’

  We’d forgotten the rifle. Malick didn’t point it at me, and I didn’t think about getting it off of him. All we wanted was an answer.

  ‘It’s gotta go somewhere,’ Malick said, frustrated. He knelt down and peered through the tangled metal. ‘I should get my flashlight. It’s back at the snowmobile.’

  I didn’t answer. My eyes ran over it, every nook and cranny. The cable had to come out somewhere. Unless we’d missed something. My eyes drifted upwards.

  And then I got it.

  ‘I know where it goes,’ I said.

  Malick gave me a quick look. ‘You see it?’

  ‘No.’ Without explaining, I ran to the end of the room and looked out the opening. The clouds raced in and the wind pushed me back; even so, the snow dazzled me after the darkness. I dropped my sunglasses on to my nose.

  I didn’t really need them. I knew what was there without having to look.

  A row of wooden towers, marching across the side of the mountain towards the mine.

  And strung between them, a cable.

  Twenty-seven

  Eastman

  Of all the places you think you’ll hear a cellphone, an abandoned coal plant on a frozen island at the end of the world is probably the last. For a moment, I thought the ringing must be the bell for the start of a shift, that a dead-eyed crew of Soviet miners would file through the door, pickaxes on their shoulders and lamps glowing over their faces.

  Malick unzipped his coat and took out his Iridium phone.

  ‘Yeah?’ He listened. ‘I’ll get back right away.’

  He pulled the phone away to hang up, then remembered something.

  ‘Wednesday afternoon,’ he said into the phone, ‘when we were packing up. Everyone was there, right? No one off base?’

  I didn’t hear the answer.

  ‘No one unaccounted for?’

  He listened, nodded a couple of times, grunted and hung up.

  ‘That was my crew chief. I checked, and he had eyes on every one of our guys Wednesday afternoon. Whoever chased your doc, it wasn’t us.’

  He zipped the phone back into his pocket. ‘Now I gotta head out.’

  A quarter-hour earlier, he had a gun at my back. Now, I didn’t want him to leave.

  ‘What about the mine?’

  ‘Gotta get back before the storm hits. As soon as it’s over, chopper’s coming to fly us home.’

  ‘We have to find out—’

  ‘Not my problem. If there’s some Russians in there, or some Nazis who didn’t hear the war ended, or a bunch of extraterrestrials trying to phone home, that’s your deal. Although,’ he added, looking at the sky, ‘don’t take too long.’

  We walked down the steps and back towards the snowmobiles in the main square. The buildings around us looked deader than ever.

  ‘You ever hear of an outfit called Luxor Life Sciences?’ Malick said suddenly.

  Meant nothing to me.

  ‘They came here a couple years back, just when we set up Echo Bay. A guy and a girl. He was called Richie, don’t remember her name, but she had a great pair of tits. Scientists, both of them, looking for a place to build a gene bank.’

  I didn’t hear him right. ‘A what?’

  ‘Somewhere to keep DNA. So that when the whole world looks like this’ – he waved at the skeleton buildings around us – ‘and there’s only eight survivors, and humanity’s family tree looks like a twig, we can spice up the mix some. That, or make us some new cows and horses, like Jurassic Park.’

  ‘Like that’s going to happen.’

  ‘Right. And if it does, we’ll be too busy chewing sticks and wiping our asses with our hands to think about sailing to Utgard for takeout DNA. But they had some money for it, so they came to check us out. All you need for a gene bank, turns out, is someplace dry and cold and no neighbours to look in when you’re not home.’

  ‘Say, a mine on an Arctic island?’

  ‘They came up and down this valley a bunch of times. Must have been at Mine Eight, too.’

  ‘Luxor Life Sciences,’ I repeated, making a mental note of it. ‘They ever do anything with it?’

  ‘Poured some concrete, brought in some equipment. Then they never came back. Guess they found somewhere else to keep their goop.’

  ‘Anyone at Zodiac help them?’

  ‘Don’t know. DNA, all that biology stuff. That would’ve been Hagger, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  We’d reached the snowmobiles. Malick strapped on his helmet and started the engine.

  ‘You’ve still got my gun,’ I said.

  He slipped it off his shoulder and looked at it, as if he’d forgotten. He thought for a moment, then handed it back to me.

  ‘Guess you just might need it.’

  I waited after he’d gone, trying to process everything that had happened in the last hour. I knew I didn’t have long. From up on the hillside, you could see all the way down the valley, right to the sea ice. Black clouds bigged up the horizon, and the wind was getting nasty. I wondered if I should go back now.

  I couldn’t. If I turned around, I could see the cable stretched across the mountainside, past that cave where we’d found all those cans of food, right the way to where the valley ended.

  No wonder the guy in the yellow parka had got antsy when Kennedy started sniffing around the cable towers.

  I started up the snowmobile. The slope was too steep to follow the cableway: I had to drive right down into the valley, then back up the other side. The mountain peak hid the mine, but I aimed for where the towers pointed. Up and up, the engine fighting the slope, until I came around a corner into a little valley. The towers were so close now I could touch them as I drove by; the noise echoed back off the valley walls like gunfire. And at the top of the valley, perched on the mountain face like some Blofeld sec
ret hideout, was the mine.

  I guess no one became a Soviet miner for the life expectancy. I guess they didn’t have much choice. Uncle Joe said, ‘Get in the hole,’ and they said, ‘How low do we go?’ Maybe it made a nice change from Siberia, I don’t know. But even with all that, the mine didn’t look like the sort of place you’d want to come to risk your life. The whole thing was built of wood, bleached planks peeling away like even the buildings wanted out. The sheds were built one on top of the other, with chutes and tunnels connecting them Rube Goldberg-style, running down from the mine to the cableway. No murals on the walls here to pep up the workers, just big metal letters on the front building: MINE 8. I guess that was all they needed to know.

  I made a quick search of the buildings, working my way up to the top. The place was emptier than Vitangelsk. I didn’t waste time looking for the cable: I knew where it was going.

  Beyond the buildings, where the mountain got so steep you couldn’t see the top, was the mine head. You couldn’t miss it: a massive concrete retaining wall, six feet thick and twenty feet high, propping up the mountainside. A run-down wooden shack leaned against the base, like the frill of a skirt.

  I climbed the wooden steps. There was no lock on the shack door, which surprised me. I was about to let myself in when something on the snow caught my eye. Utgard’s so pristine, any trash stands out a mile. I picked it up: a clear plastic bottle, smaller than a soda. The label said Rhodamine B.

  I put it in my pocket for later and went inside. Straight away, it reminded me of the boot room at Zodiac: hooks on the walls, shelves for boots and gloves. I could almost imagine those Commie miners coming off shift, downing tools and getting dressed to go out into the cold, joking about vodka and women.

  The back of the shack was the concrete wall, with a slab of something covering the mouth of the mine. In the bad light, I thought it must be plywood – until I touched it. Even through my mitt, I could feel the cold, even colder than the air. I looked closer.

  It was a steel door, surrounded by a steel frame riveted into the concrete. No lock, no keyhole, not even a handle. This one was strictly exit-only. Greta’s bolt cutters wouldn’t get me through there. Even oxyacetylene gear might not do it. Whoever put those doors on, they didn’t want visitors.