Polar Vortex

Chapter 1

Any other place on earth, the men with balaclavas and assault rifles who boarded the ship at gunpoint would have been pirates. Here, they were the government.

The crew of the ship — eight women, twenty-two men — had watched the late-Soviet-model helicopter grow from an insect in the distance to an overhead monster, pummeling them with its rotor wash. A few terse radio messages were fired off. Some bags of marijuana (it was later alleged) were thrown over the side. Some of the activists tweeted.

For a few moments, they let themselves hope it was just a show of force. Intimidation, like the water cannon and warning shots they’d faced the day before. They were outside territorial waters, after all; their ship was Netherlands-registered. The Russians couldn’t board the ship without permission from the Dutch authorities.

Then the rope came snaking down.

‘Here they come,’ someone shouted.

A man in green fatigues and a black balaclava dropped down the line and landed on deck. He tugged on the rope, trying to steady it. The activists crowded round him, arms in the air, like basketball players trying to block a three-pointer. Passive aggressive, emphasis on the passive. Nobody wanted to get shot.

A cameraman ran up and started filming, not really comprehending that he’d already become part of the story. A second soldier came down the rope, and this one had a rifle. He jabbed it at the activists, shouting words most of them didn’t understand.

More soldiers came down the rope. Some of the crew surrendered at once; a few locked themselves in the toilet. The soldiers stormed the bridge. Anyone who got in their way, and some who didn’t, got kicked to the deck (the authorities later denied this).

A copper-penny Arctic sun circled the horizon behind the clouds, locked in a downward spiral towards winter. In a few weeks it would drop off the map completely.

The people on the boat wondered if they’d survive to see it come back.

Nine hundred miles to the north-east, three men were having breakfast. The room was unremarkable: grey carpet tiles, blue walls, functional furniture like you’d find in a suburban YMCA. But no-one would have mistaken the men for boy scouts. They wore long, untrimmed beards, baseball caps and plaid shirts. None weighed less than two hundred and twenty pounds, but their bodies were good for it: large frames, muscles honed and tested by years wrestling the Earth in some of her most inhospitable places. Two kept guns holstered at their sides.

‘You see the news this morning?’ one asked.

The second man — his name was Bill Malick — put a forkful of powdered egg and spam into his mouth. ‘Prirazlomnaya?’

It was a difficult word, but he said it fluently, though his Texan accent would have baffled any Russian. He was in a business which specialised in hard-to-find places with hard-to-say names.

‘I heard Greenpeace put two men on the rig. Russians threw them in jail.’

‘Damn straight,’ said the third. His name was Earl. ‘They know how to deal with these people.’

He chewed his spam. Somewhere he had a t-shirt that said, ‘Echo Bay — The Station Where Spam Survived’.

‘You ever think maybe we should’ve let them keep Alaska? All those problems Shell got themselves on the North Slope, goddamn Eskimos complaining we’re gonna poison their whale meat. Russkies would have just sent them to Siberia to pick up reindeer shit.’

Malick didn’t want to get in a political discussion with Earl. ‘HQ called, told us to look out in case Greenpeace try any stunts here.’

‘They look at a map?’ the first man asked incredulously? ‘Like any Greenpeace pussy would survive five minutes on Utgard. Even if they could have gotten here.’

They all laughed. Earl headed for the gun rack by the door and picked up a Supernova — a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded, very literally, for bear.

‘Careful,’ Malick warned him with a smile. ‘Any of those activists see you shooting polar bears, they’ll report you to the United Nations or something.’

Earl chambered a slug one-handed. ‘Not if I see ‘em first.’

Sleeping in a tent in the Arctic never got easy. Andy MacDonald — known to everyone as Mac — had been doing it for three months, and every morning it still felt like a terrible idea. Icy crystals dusted his face as he sat up, his own breath frozen to the canvas. His eyes watered; his nose was numb; his hair itched from wearing a wool hat all night. A plastic bottle pressed against his leg, the one he’d peed into so he wouldn’t have to leave his sleeping bag. He hoped he’d screwed the cap back on tight.

There was nowhere on Earth he’d rather be.

He inched himself out of the sleeping bag, trying not to shake off any more ice. He’d slept fully clothed: the one good thing about the temperature was you never smelled. Arctic deodorant, they called it. He pulled on his ski trousers and the heavy red coat he’d used as a pillow. Added a neckwarmer and the first pair of gloves. Tugged on his boots: the felt linings he’d kept at the foot of his sleeping bag, then the waterproof outers. Sunglasses. Second pair of gloves.

Ready to face the day.

The frozen canvas crackled as he poked his head out of the tent. The temperature dropped so far it made the tent seem warm. The air in his nostrils froze up. He looked around.

He’d always loved snow: could never get enough of it. Especially in the lowland town where he grew up, where winters were grey rather than white, and any snow melted almost on contact. But this was enough even for him. Snow as far as he could see, an ocean of it, running down to a distant shore in the west, lapping against a mountain ridge in the east. All that broke the space between was the nunataks — mountains buried up to their necks in ice. And the few dots on the landscape — Mac included — that made up Camp Gemini.

He drank it in, giddy with wonder. He’d seen this view every day of the summer, and it still made his heart race. The island of Utgard was the last inhabited land on Earth, and Gemini was its farthest outpost. At that moment, he was probably the northernmost person on the planet.

Top of the world, Ma.

All that spoiled the view, in the far far distance, was the sea. Not so long ago, Utgard had been icebound at least ten months of the year, sometimes more. But now things were changing — faster than people realised, certainly faster than politicians and their industrial paymasters were willing to admit. He looked at the nunataks again, and imagined how they’d look naked, without the ice. Like ships stranded by an ebbing tide.

He flexed his fingers and forced himself to take a deep breath. As a child, the thing he’d hated most was knowing that the snow had to melt. Now, even here, where it ought to last forever, it was threatened.

That was why he’d come, to drill the glacier cores that would prove beyond doubt that the world was warming like it had never warmed before. To show the people back home — the ones who drove Range Rovers at twelve miles a gallon, the ones who left the heating on when they went on holiday, that they had to change. He was twenty-five, and he thought he could make a difference.

He walked across camp to the mess tent. Camp Gemini wasn’t much to look at: half a dozen tents, five snowmobiles, and three round orange capsules like oversize fishing floats washed up on a beach. Cabooses, in the peculiar language of polar research. Some of the grad students had complained that they got tents while the cabooses sat empty, except for equipment. That’s because the instruments are important, they were told. They’re the reason you’re here. Most of the science was done back at the main base on the south of the island, Zodiac Station, but for some experiments they needed four hundred metres of solid ice to dig into. So they came to Gemini.

The others drifted into the mess tent. Danny the cook served up coffee and instant oatmeal. They wolfed it down before it got cold, warming their hands on the cups.

‘Did you hear the bump in the night? Shook the whole camp.’

‘Maybe we left one of the seismic charges down a hole.’

‘Kelly says it could have been a meteorite strike.’

‘Danny thinks it was an alien spacecraft.’

Mac had felt it too, and wondered about it. Before he could offer an opinion, everyone fell silent as their supervisor walked in. Tall and slim, even in extreme cold weather clothes, Dr Annabel Kobayashi intimidated everyone. There was a rule in academia that scientists started to resemble their subjects: her subject was glaciers. Behind her back, they called her the Ice Queen.

Martin Hagger, a biologist, trailed in behind her. Rumour had it they were sleeping together, though Mac found that hard to imagine on any number of levels.

Kobayashi grabbed a cup of coffee and drained it in one gulp.

‘Ready to get to work?’

The crew handed their cups and bowls to Danny and trooped out of the tent. At the door, Dr Kobayashi stopped Mac.

‘Did you feel the tremor last night?’

He nodded. ‘Do you know what it was?’

‘No idea. But it must have knocked out our recorders. You’ll have to recalibrate them.’ She pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch. ‘Another five thousand pounds down the fucking drain. Take Spoons with you.’

Spoons — aka Matt Spoonmeyer — was a Californian whose relaxed attitude drove Kobayashi crazy. No wonder she wanted him off site. Mac wondered if he was being got rid of, too.

He found Spoons by the snowmobiles, hitching up the emergency sled.

‘Cloud’s coming down. Don’t want to get lost out there.’

Mac looked at the sky. The view had shortened since breakfast; the air was grey. The dull light flattened the snowpack so you couldn’t see the bumps. That didn’t mean they weren’t there.

‘Gonna be a rough ride today.’