Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

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Twenty-one

Kennedy

Ash sat on a rock and rubbed snow out of his beard. If it surprised him to have two colleagues pointing guns at him at four in the morning, here on the upper edge of nowhere, he kept it to himself. Perhaps he expected it.

‘How did you guess?’ he said. No pretending.

‘Jensen told us he dropped you off here. We worked the rest out ourselves.’

‘I thought he might. I could see he wasn’t happy, not after what happened to Hagger.’

A pause.

‘You killed him,’ said Eastman.

Ash closed his eyes and nodded silently.

‘Why?’ I wanted to know.

‘I had no choice. He came at me, I had to protect myself.’

‘Why?’ I repeated. Eastman cut me off.

‘What about DAR-X? They were there too?’

‘They’d been around. I saw their Sno-Cat. I don’t think they saw me.’

‘And then you went back and pretended nothing had happened.’

He shrugged. ‘What else could I do? It would have been the end of my career if I’d confessed I shot him.’

That gave me a jolt – like a spelling mistake that jars you out of a book.

‘What are we talking about?’ I said.

Ash looked puzzled ‘What are we talking about?’

‘Martin Hagger,’ said Eastman. ‘And why you killed him.’

Ash blinked. He looked slowly between me and Eastman, started to say something, then shook his head. Strange to say, he was smiling.

‘You think I killed Hagger?’

‘You just admitted it,’ said Eastman.

Ash stood and turned towards the cave. Eastman’s rifle twitched, but it didn’t seem to bother him any more.

‘I’ll show you.’

Eastman and I followed Ash in with our head torches. The cave was just high enough to stand in, if you stooped. Perhaps it had been an attempt at a mineshaft; if so, they hadn’t got very far. A few metres in I could see a corrugated-iron wall blocking off the passage, with a heap of snow blown against its base.

Except the wall wasn’t corrugated iron. As my torch caught it, I saw colours, writing. Pictures of broccoli and tomatoes, spaghetti letters and smiling beans.

It was cans. Tin cans, all stacked up as you might find them at Aldi. Soups, vegetables, baked beans, spaghetti hoops – the whole fifty-seven varieties. So many, they walled off the back of the cave.

‘You been stealing from the kitchen?’ Eastman asked.

Ash looked as if he was about to cry. He shook his head and pointed to the floor. Then I understood.

The wall wasn’t corrugated iron – and the wind-blown snow at its base wasn’t snow.

Too soft; more yellow than white. As I shone the torch beam down, I made out two legs, the crease of a floppy tail. Further forward, I could see an outflung paw and a black nose resting on it. Much smaller than the bear that had chased me the day before. Just a cub.

Eastman got it a second before me. ‘Jesus Christ, Ash. You shot a baby polar bear?’

‘When did it happen?’ I asked.

‘The day Hagger died.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘I’m a zoologist. What do you think would happen to my career if it came out I’d shot a polar bear cub. I might as well take up whaling.’

‘But you said it was in self-defence.’

‘As if they’d care about the details.’

Eastman wiped his face. Out of the sun, the sweat he’d built up running had started to freeze. He was shivering.

‘I think some detail here would be good.’

Our torches were fading, the batteries sapped by the cold. In the failing light, the bear carcass seemed to swell up before my eyes.

‘Let’s get out.’

We went back to the snowmobile and shared a cup of hot water from Ash’s Thermos. Eastman hammered a chocolate bar until it snapped.

‘I don’t know what Jensen told you,’ Ash said. His eyes kept darting back towards the cave. ‘We’d flown around all morning looking for bears, no luck. Then Zodiac called – they wanted him back for something. I couldn’t afford a wasted day, so I had him drop me off here. I’d heard a rumour there might be a bear near Vitangelsk.’

He scratched the back of his head. ‘It’s like all these things – the wood for the trees. I was so busy looking for a bear, I didn’t see the one that was there. But he saw me. He must have been watching for a while: they’re used to being patient.

‘I found the cave. I thought there might be a bear denning inside, so I took a peek. No bear, but I saw those strange tins at the back. I went in, looked around. Couldn’t understand what so much food was doing there.

‘I went back out. That was when I saw the bear. Juvenile, probably a year old, but with my eyes not used to the daylight, rearing up, he looked like death incarnate. No time to think. I just fired.’

He wiped his mitten across his cheek, where a tear had fallen.

‘I shot him right in the heart, just the way they teach you. Greta would have been so proud.’

Another tear appeared. He jerked his head angrily, trying to shake it away. There’s not many sights as pathetic as seeing an old man cry.

‘It was him or you. We’d all have done the same,’ I said.

‘Would you?’ He stared at me. ‘Maybe I could have done it differently. He wasn’t charging, just making a display. Trying it on. Maybe a warning shot would have scared him off.’

‘A polar bear that had you trapped with your back to the cave?’

‘That’s not the point. It’s not what might have happened; it’s what I did. One of those moments when you don’t have time to think, to intellectualise it or worry what other people will say. That’s when you find out who you really are.’

‘What you are is alive,’ said Eastman, impatiently. Ash gave him a cold look.

‘There are more important things.’

‘Not in my world.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

Ash shrugged. ‘It’s better now. The secret was murdering me. Now I know what to do.’

‘Yeah?’ said Eastman.

‘I’ll tell Quam I’m quitting. I won’t tell him why – unless either of you gentlemen feels the need to disclose it. I shan’t blame you.’

‘I can give you a medical note,’ I offered. Ten minutes ago, I’d been ready to shoot him. Now I had nothing but pity.

Eastman looked back across the valley to Vitangelsk. ‘Did you come here yesterday?’ he asked.

‘I was at Zodiac all day. Then Anderson mentioned you’d radioed in, that you’d found a bear here. I thought …’ His gaze drifted back to the cave. ‘That’s why I came.’

‘We did see a bear,’ I told him. ‘Very much alive – and all grown up.’

‘Maybe your little dead guy’s momma,’ suggested Eastman.

Ash winced. So did I. There was still a bear out there – quite possibly an angry bear nursing a grudge. And worse. If Ash wasn’t the man who’d shot at me on the tower – and you couldn’t possibly think so, looking at that poor broken man – then he was still out there too. I looked around the desolate valley, the black cliffs too steep for snow. Plenty of places for someone to hide, to watch us. I listened so hard, the silence sang in my ears.

I exchanged a look with Eastman. After a cold, sleepless night, and then this bizarre episode, I just wanted to go home.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

It was only when we were in the helicopter, safely on the way back, that I wondered what all those cans of food had been doing there.

USCGC Terra Nova

The door opened. A sailor poked his head around the door.

‘Ops said you wanted to know when the other guy woke up?’

Franklin stood. His legs had started to go to sleep from sitting listening so long. On the bed, he could see Kennedy’s one good eye watching from behind the mummy mask.

‘Eastman?’

‘He’s ready to talk.’

Twenty-two

USCGC Terra Nova

No one had imagined a scenario like this. The Terra Nova had four body bags aboard – the same ones that had been issued when she was first outfitted. The bodies coming out of the helicopter now were wrapped in black trash bags, laid out on the deck like so much garbage. The crew handling them looked like they wanted to puke.

Santiago met Franklin by the flight-deck door.

‘Helo just made her second run. Everyone’s accounted for – except two.’ He showed Franklin the printout. The pages were heavily creased and damp with melted snow; most of the photos had red X’s scored through them.

‘This one, Fridtjof Torell, and her, Greta Nystrom. Both missing.’

‘She was the base mechanic,’ said Franklin. Again, it felt strange to confront a photograph of someone he’d already imagined. The woman in the picture looked like a ski instructor, or one of those round-the-world solo yachtswomen: hair in braids, tanned skin, and a natural glow that said she spent a lot of time outdoors. Her tight-lipped expression only made her look like she was pissed off with the photographer.

‘When are the Brits going to arrive?’

‘Gonna be a while. They launched a plane from Longyearbyen, a Dornier 228, the only thing they could find. But they had to abort the landing. They said the runway at Zodiac had gotten too chewed up.’

‘That makes sense.’

Santiago followed the captain down the stairs towards the sickbay. ‘There’s one other thing, sir. Flying back, the pilot says he got a signal on the emergency channel. A locator beacon.’

Franklin stopped on the stairs. ‘A beacon?’

‘He couldn’t be sure. Reception’s shitty, and he said it was faint. I figure it was probably sunspots.’

‘You seen any sun around, Ops?’

Santiago acknowledged the point.

‘There’s no way Anderson walked to where we found him alone. He must have had help.’

‘You’ve got a suspicious mind, Captain.’

‘Everything about this situation gets weirder and weirder.

‘Maybe the new guy can explain some stuff.’

Bob Eastman lay in the sickbay, on the bed where Anderson had been the night before. His shaved skull looked too big for his shoulders; his beard had grown wild. His hands were wrapped, like a boxer ready for a bout. An oxygen tube snaked into his nostrils, and two more tubes plugged into his arm. He looked helpless – except for his eyes, which never stopped moving. Franklin wondered if he was suffering from some kind of post-traumatic syndrome. Who could blame him?

The eyes locked on to Franklin as he approached.

‘Do you have secure communications? I need to talk to Washington.’

Franklin held up his hands in a ‘Stop’ gesture. ‘Before you make any calls, let’s get a few things straightened out.’

‘I have to—’

‘My ship, Dr Eastman. My rules. You want to tell me what this is about?’

Eastman leaned over as far as the tubes and bandages would allow.

‘Hagger used to say, everyone who comes to Zodiac has a secret. He called it Fort Zinderneuf – like in that old movie about the French Foreign Legion. You want to guess my secret, Captain?’

Franklin considered it. He hadn’t made captain by taking half-assed guesses. As the man who’d won most of the late-night poker games at the Coast Guard Academy, he hated to show his cards. But the nature of command, and of gambling, was that sometimes you had to make a leap.

‘You work for the CIA?’

The eyes opened wider. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Kennedy.’

‘Bullshit.’ Colour was coming back into Eastman’s voice. ‘I spent five days locked in a caboose with Kennedy. He doesn’t know jack.’

‘Am I wrong?’

Eastman sank back. ‘I’m an atmospheric scientist. But …’ He paused. ‘You know, you’re trained so hard to keep the secret, I don’t even know the right way to say it. Let’s say I work two jobs. One full-time, one part-time.’

The cook had it right. ‘Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about the CIA?’

‘NSA. They’ve had a bug in their ass about Utgard since the Cold War. When they found out I got a place at Zodiac, they asked me to feed back anything interesting. The Russians have been developing – this is classified, by the way, but what the hell – they’ve been developing a new radar. SAR – synthetic aperture radar. It can spot a boat the size of a Honda Civic from space.’

‘Not a lot of boats around here,’ Franklin said. ‘Anyhow, I thought they could read golf balls from space twenty years ago.’

‘You can see what the hell you like – if you know where to point the camera. What this does is tell you where everything is. All over the world, anywhere and everywhere. Now, that creates a shitload of data, and that data’s no use stored up on a satellite. You need a base station on earth to download it to. The reason everybody loves Utgard is that it’s in a sweet spot. Any orbit, any time, you can download data there.’

‘And you thought they were using Zodiac for that?’

‘Nuh-uh. Zodiac’s clean. But there was another outfit on the island.’

‘DAR-X. The oil exploration company.’

‘You’re up with the news, Captain.’

‘I’ve been speaking with Dr Kennedy.’

‘Kennedy’s an ass. He didn’t have a clue what was going on right in front of him. You know, the only reason he rocked up at Zodiac was because he was about to be sued for medical malpractice. Drinking on the job. You know how drunk you have to be before the Irish kick you out?’

‘He seemed sober to me.’

‘He cleaned himself up. To be fair to the guy, I never saw him touch a drop at Zodiac. Anyhow, DAR-X are a front. They’re just doing the exploration. The actual contract goes to a company registered in the Bahamas, which is owned by a shell outfit in Liechtenstein, which is controlled by an outfit in Cyprus – which gets its cash and its orders from the Russian national oil company.’

‘Is that common knowledge?’

‘They go out of their way to make sure people don’t know. Way out of their way, if you catch my drift. I don’t know how long it took our guys to pin them down.’

‘I thought the Cold War was over.’

‘Do they teach reality at the Coast Guard Academy? Russia these days, it’s like one of those stores where they’ve changed the name tags and the shelf stackers are now called Customer Fulfilment Associates. They’re still the same, and you know exactly what they are really. Instead of our nukes against their nukes, we play Amoco v. Rosneft. We don’t want truth, justice and the American way; and they don’t care about the brotherhood of the proletariat. It’s proven reserves and barrels per day.’

‘You said this was about satellites and radars.’

‘It’s all the same play. A few years back, people who said the Arctic would be ice-free by the end of the century were called crazies. Then serious folks thought it might be 2050. Then 2030. Now best guess is the end of this decade, and some people think that’s too conservative. It’s coming, faster than we think, and when there’s no ice left then everything’s up for grabs. The land, the oil, and the sea routes. As long as Walmart wants cheap crap stamped “Made in China”, they’ll need ships to bring it to us, and the shortest way to get cheap crap from Shenzhen to New York is across the Arctic Ocean. And the fuel they save, steaming across the melted Arctic? They’ll count that towards their CSR greenwash, and brag how they’re cutting down CO2 emissions.’

‘You almost sound like you’re sympathetic.’

‘Don’t be cute, Captain. Take a look at yourself – you’re a long way from Kansas here. You want to believe that’s because the United States Coast Guard gives a shit about polar bears? I’m guessing that strapped to the bottom of this tub, you’ve got the most expensive sonar Uncle Sam can afford, colouring in the seabed. So that when this place looks like Galveston with all the supertankers and container ships and drill rigs, our subs can keep an eye on them without crashing into an uncharted undersea mountain. But all that won’t be worth a nickel if the Russians get this satellite radar working. They’ll own the whole enchilada.’

His mouth had gone so dry he was croaking like a raven. He sucked water from a tube and glared at Franklin.

‘The Cold War didn’t go away, they just monetised it. And if history teaches anything worth a damn, it’s that the only thing countries really go to war for is cash. That’s why they sent me to Zodiac.’

There weren’t any chairs in the sickbay. Franklin leaned against a bulkhead, and folded his arms across his chest.

‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

Twenty-three

Eastman

I said DAR-X are a front and that’s true – but they’re a real oil company. My job was to get close to them, so I could find out if they were working on the satellite thing. So I started leaking them some confidential data from Zodiac, stuff they could use to undermine the global-warming mafia.

Don’t give me that look, Captain. It was for the greater good. What I do, science-wise – the reason the NSA approached me – is pointing antennas at space. And I was getting some screwy readings. You go to the Arctic because it’s pristine, no cellphones or TV or garage-door openers clogging the signal. But from the noise I was getting, I might as well have parked my telescope next door to Verizon. So I knew something was going down. If the Russians get that radar, they’ll have total mastery of the seas. You think that compares to whether our kids might need more sunscreen in a hundred years?

DAR-X had their base at Echo Bay, about halfway up the west coast. I went there to take a look round, didn’t find anything. They had a big drill rig that could have been used for an antenna, but it looked real enough. Rumour was they’re not drilling for oil, some kind of natural gas instead, but I don’t know.

There’s a million places you could hide an antenna on Utgard and nobody’d see it except the bears. But you can’t just stick that thing in the middle of a snowfield. You need infrastructure, power, a way of getting the data back to Echo Bay. So when I heard that DAR-X had been hanging out at the old Commie ghost town at Vitangelsk, I decided to check it out.

Kennedy tagged along: he had some theory about Hagger, the guy who fell in a crevasse. Not that I thought that was irrelevant – far from it. I figured Hagger most likely found something out about DAR-X, or the radar, or the Russians, and paid the price. I won’t pretend it didn’t freak me out. I’m not James Bond. At the same time, it made me feel Hagger must have gotten close to something. And I was going to find it.

Kennedy thought Hagger’d been murdered by a jealous scientist. Like I say, he didn’t have a clue. But then, none of us did at that stage.

I left Kennedy in the main square at Vitangelsk, next to the statue of Lenin, and climbed towards the top end of town. If you ever want to see the hypocrisy of the Communist system, take a look at Vitangelsk. It’s built up the side of a mountain: the workers lived in wooden barracks at the bottom, the managers in brick houses higher up, and everything that really mattered – the machinery, the stores, the processing plant – was up top, along with the power station. I don’t know how much coal they had to burn just so they could mine more of it, but it must have been a ton. You could still see the power cables stretched from roof to roof, down the mountain and right around the town, a total spiderweb.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Commies left Vitangelsk so fast they didn’t even bother to pack. Everything’s kept perfectly in the deep freeze: you can still see papers on the desks and rubber stamps with the hammer and sickle; beer and cookies and bread and pickles, still in mint condition. Hard hats, overalls and pickaxes hanging on pegs at the mine head where the guys finished their last shift. Like Lenin’s tomb, if you’ve ever been to Moscow. It’s hard not to look over your shoulder and wonder if they’re coming back.

The moment I got there, I knew I had to be close. I got out my spectrum analyser and did an RF sweep, checking all available frequencies. When I got to the C band, the satellite wavelength, it went off the scale.

There’s maybe thirty or forty buildings in Vitangelsk – too many to explore each one. But if you’re going to mount a satellite dish, the best place is on the roof. I was at the top of the town. I figured if I could get on top of one of the buildings there, I’d have a good view right the way down.

I got on to the roof of the old machine shop. From above, even that Soviet ruin looked almost quaint. Snow-covered roofs descending the mountain, the frosted power cables running like icicles between them. If someone had lit a fire, you could have imagined you were in a Disney movie.

I got out my binoculars and scanned the town. Nothing. No satellite dish, no masts, not even a TV antenna. No sign of Kennedy, either.

I walked across the roof to check the other side. Should have watched where I was going. My toe snagged something just under the snow and threw me forward. I stumbled a couple of steps, threw out my arms and bellyflopped on to the roof a few inches shy of the edge. I lay there a moment, sick with adrenalin and what had almost happened.

When I picked myself up, I looked back to see what I’d tripped on. A black rubber cable lay in the snow. Where my boot had rubbed off the ice, it looked about a hundred years newer than anything else in town.

I tugged. It didn’t give more than a couple of inches. I followed it through the snow. It ran all the way to the edge of the roof, where a steel clamp held it in place. But that wasn’t the end of it. It carried on, across the street and down on to the roof of the next building.

I found the binoculars where I’d dropped them and brushed off the snow. Focusing on the cable, I followed it over the next building, then the next. I lost it there, until I realised it had hung a right and was headed cross-town, where it disappeared behind a smokestack.

‘Holy shit.’

The wires I’d seen from the street didn’t go inside the buildings, like power cables should have. They ran across the roofs, building to building, making a single vast loop around the town. They weren’t power cables; they made an antenna, as big as the town, and you’d never see it because it was all around you. With that thing, you could probably hear what they were saying on Mars.

Now I knew where to look, I found other cables connected to it, running to the centre of the circle. They all seemed to come together someplace by the main square.

I ran back there. I hadn’t seen it when I was there before. Now I knew what to look for, I got it straight away. More cables, maybe a dozen in total, running in from every side of town and coming together on the old HQ building like the spokes of a wheel.

The door was an old piece of wood that cracked open with one good kick. Inside, it looked like the staff had gone for lunch and forgotten to lock up: chairs fallen over, papers blown in the corners, an old calendar from 1991 hanging crooked on the wall. I think if you’d looked, you’d have found old coffee frozen in the bottom of the mug.

But I figured what I wanted was upstairs. I chased up the first flight – and stopped.

I was in the right place. A heavy-duty steel trapdoor had been laid across so you couldn’t go up. A padlock, shiny with grease, made sure of it.

At that moment, I wanted to be on the other side of that door more than I’d ever wanted anything. I got the rifle out and put the muzzle against the lock. I almost pulled the trigger. But I’ve seen that Master Lock commercial (though this was a Yale); I didn’t want to risk a ricochet. I’d have to come back with the right equipment.

I was still looking at the lock, wondering if bolt cutters would do the job, when I heard the first gunshot. I’ll tell you, my first thought wasn’t Kennedy: I was certain the Russians had arrived. But I hadn’t heard anyone coming, no snowmobiles or helicopters buzzing around.

I heard another shot. The echo scrambled the sound so much I couldn’t tell where it came from; not so close I needed to duck, at least. It sounded like one of our Rugers. I’ve spent enough time on the range at Zodiac to know the sound.

Was it Kennedy shooting? If so, he was more than likely to blow his own head off. But the procedure at Zodiac is that if you hear your buddy shooting, you assume it’s a bear and go help. As Quam liked to say, procedure can save your life. He was wrong about a lot of things, but he got that right. Plus, I’d get a rocket up my ass if anything happened to Doc.

I ran down the stairs and out into the street, just quick enough to hear another shot. Then two more, almost on top of each other, but I couldn’t get a fix on them with all the buildings around. I followed Doc’s prints heading downhill.

The shooting had stopped. Normally, you’d assume that meant the bear had gone away – but this was pretty fucking far from normal. And I’d counted five shots. Kennedy must have been out of ammo. I tweaked the radio again, but no answer. Between the buildings and the massive antenna hanging over my head, I didn’t expect anything.

I searched everywhere. He’d traipsed around like a tourist, which made it harder; sometimes I lost the track when he’d gone inside a building. Finally, I came out on the edge of town, where the cableway heads off toward Mine 8. He’d definitely come this way: I could see his trail. And someone else’s, too, long strides that looked like they’d been chasing after him. Now I was really starting to freak out.

With so many prints pounding up the snow, I almost missed the bear tracks. But there’s nothing else like them on Utgard. Strange to say, the sight made me breathe easier. If a bear had got Kennedy, there’d be blood, and I didn’t see any. And I’d rather find a bear than Russians.

I had a flare pistol in a side holster, like always when I’m in the field. I took it out and loaded a cartridge. We carry the rifles because you can kill the bear if you have to, but a flare pistol’s much better for scaring them off before it gets to that.

The bear tracks headed out of town. I found broken snow where he must have sat down a while, near the base of one of the cableway towers, and more tracks going off across the mountain. Nearby, copper cartridges shone on the ground.

He used up all his ammo. But where did he go then? I still didn’t see any blood. Another set of footprints led away up the hill. Reasonably fresh, but they looked too big to be Kennedy’s. Probably one of the DAR-X guys who’d been here earlier.

I’d just about given up when I heard a low clang, like someone pounding on a bucket. I thought it must be some old machinery knocking in the wind. I started back towards town, figuring I must have missed something. The clanging kept going. If anything, it sounded louder.

Just before I hit town, I looked back. Christ knows, but he was a lucky s.o.b. I saw his arm sticking out of the coal car and realised what it was. I climbed the ladder and saw him huddled in the bottom.

‘What the fuck are you doing in there?’

* * *

I got him down. It was a hell of a job, and the story he told about how he got there was crazier still. Chased by a bear, then by a guy with a gun. He wanted to go home – frostbite had nearly crippled him – but I talked him out of it. I was too close. I’d found the antenna; then this gunman – he had to be DAR-X – had almost killed Kennedy. If he came back, I wanted answers.

You’ve heard this part? I won’t repeat it. Long story short, we froze our asses off all night jumping at shadows, thought we’d found something, and all we got was a sad old man and a dead bear. I mean, can you believe it? Guy shoots a polar bear and he goes around like the fucking Tell-Tale Heart. And Kennedy’s feeling like an idiot, because he more or less accused Ash of murdering Hagger.

I didn’t tell them what I’d found. I didn’t know who I could trust. But as we lifted off in the helicopter, I knew I had to get back to find out what the hell that antenna was receiving. And where it was going to.