Polar Vortex

Chapter 4

He should have known what he was doing was wrong. Would have done, if he’d thought about it. So he didn’t. With the constant roar of the engine, the effort of scanning the fog ahead for rocks, there wasn’t any time for it anyway.

Louisa sat behind him, gripping the passenger handles, swaying with the motion. Her chest bumped and slid against his back as they moved, an unavoidable intimacy. He didn’t mind. If he was honest, he was more than a bit in awe of her. While he was trying to save the planet by counting icicles (as Spoons put it), she was putting her body on the frontline, taking the fight to the enemy. Doing what Mac only dreamed of doing.

He didn’t know if he could trust her — she’d already lied to him once. But then, perhaps she couldn’t entirely trust him, either.

They came down a twisting gully and onto the flat coastal strip. A breeze off the water had started to clear the fog. Not a lot, but enough to reveal shapes in the mist: dark blocks, leafless steel trees, and a red light pulsing high in the air. He stopped the snowmobile, hoping no-one had heard them arrive. A generator hummed in the background; muffled machinery spluttered from one of the huts.

Louisa leaned forward. ‘Where are we?’

‘Echo Bay.’

‘This isn’t on the way to Nadezhda’

He grinned, to hide his anxiety. ‘I took a detour. Seemed a shame to waste all your hard work just because you lost your snowmobile.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He unzipped his pocket and took out a small plastic bottle full of bubble-gum pink liquid. The label said Rhodamine-B Hydrological Dye.

‘We use this to trace the flow of meltwater through glaciers. It’s strong stuff. You get some on your fingers, you have to scrub your skin off to get rid of it.’

She glanced anxiously over her shoulder. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘We’ll them a message. An action. Whatever was on your banner, we can paint it up on one of the buildings with the dye.’

She looked at the ground. ‘I just need to get home.’

‘You’ve come all this way and survived ten days in the Arctic just to walk away?’ He knelt so he could look into her eyes. ‘I know you’ve had a rough time; probably all you want right now is a hot shower and forty-eight hours’ sleep. But if your friends could get aboard that oil rig, with the Russians firing guns and blasting them with water cannon, we must be able to do something.’

‘I don’t know … ’

The buildings were getting sharper, higher definition with every passing second. The fog was burning off. The shapes were turning into huts, shipping containers and scaffolding. He hadn’t seen any people, yet, but it could only be a matter of time.

‘Then I’ll do it,’ he said. And he meant it — no bluffing. But it had a galvanizing effect. Louisa jumped up as if someone he’d prodded her with an electrode.

‘What you’re talking about — we could be arrested, if they catch us. You could lose your job.’

‘I’m going home next week. Season’s over. As for the legality, Utgard’s international territory. There are no laws.’

‘You can’t,’ she insisted.

‘This is why I came to Utgard — to make a difference. I’ve seen the maps that show sea ice vanishing. I’ve seen the Keeling curve, the way the CO₂ shoots up each year no matter what the politicians say. I wake up every day and hate the thought that if I have children one day, they’ll come here and all they’ll see is rock.

She gathered herself. ‘You’re right. You’re right. But — I need to do this. And put that bottle away.’

‘Then how—?’

‘The banner, the message, that was never the most important thing. It’s just slogans and stunts. What matters is documenting what they’re doing here. We need to tell the world.’

He wasn’t sure what she meant. But she’d already started towards the drill site.

‘Stay here. We might need to make a quick getaway.’

She disappeared between two shipping containers. Even five minutes ago, they’d been Rothko blocks of fuzzy colour in the mist. Now, he could see the handles on the doors. Nowhere to hide if they caught her.

He waited, his mind turning over. He didn’t get her at all. She was tough enough to survive ten days in one of the harshest environments on the planet, but then so weak she nearly folded at the first setback. Then flipped a hundred and eighty degrees again. First the banner was so important she’d risked her life to get it here; then it was just a cheap stunt.

Documenting what they’re doing … What did that even mean? Was she serious, or was it a cop-out? Perhaps she’d just sneak around the site for a few minutes, take a couple of pictures and run away.

Perhaps she wasn’t as hard-core as he’d thought. But then, what was she doing there?

Something on the ground caught his eye. A dark green patch on the snow, almost black. Probably oil they’d spilled refueling their snowmobiles.

He took out his camera and snapped a photo. Anyone who worked on Utgard — even a lowly field assistant — had to sign a declaration to abide by the Utgard Treaty. Which meant, along with not harming the wildlife or using it as a base for committing acts of terrorism — no pollution. You could be thrown off the island for it.

Not that an oil company had to worry about a thing like that.

That was what really got to him. Not that they were destroying the planet; not that they bought politicians and bullied the media to turn facts on their head. It was the impunity. They raped the earth, and burned the future, and never once thought they might be doing something wrong. So arrogant, that when governments bent over and invited them in to this pristine wilderness, they couldn’t even be bothered to tidy up after themselves.

‘No,’ he said to himself. Forget documenting what they’re doing — that wouldn’t capture anyone’s imagination. It was time to act.

He felt the bottle in his pocket. The dye could travel through several kilometres of ice and still hold its colour when it came out the other end.

Should make for an indelible message.

He ran to the nearest hut. There were no guards at Echo Bay. He’d heard they’d tried to put up a fence when they built the camp, but the first winter storm had flattened it. They didn’t try to replace it; who was going to cause them trouble up here? But somebody had to be around somewhere. Now he wished the fog hadn’t lifted.

He peered around the corner of the hut. Echo Bay wasn’t much: a few supply tents and shipping containers, all liberally stenciled with the name of the oil company, DAR-X; one wooden Portakabin raised up on blocks. He noted the smoke coming out of its chimney.

Towering over everything was the drill rig, a ten-storey steel gantry standing on the rocks at the edge of the water. He knew, from some conversations he’d had, that it wasn’t supposed to be there. It should have been out in the bay, sitting on top of the two feet of ice that should have been there. The irony of an oil company getting thwarted by global warming wasn’t lost on him. It didn’t make it any better.

Three giant white tanks stood on stilts beside the gantry, connected to it by a tangle of yellow pipes. He sized them up. Nice, big white surface — and if he lined up the shot, he could get the rig behind them, with a few ice floes bobbing in the bay for effect.

He ran to the tanks, wishing he wasn’t wearing a bright red jacket. One of the containers mostly hid him from the main cabin, but he’d have to get higher to reach the side of the tank. There was a steel ladder leaning against one of the huts, probably for clearing snow off the roof. That got him high enough.

He unscrewed the bottle and poured a dribble of dye onto his mitten. Working quickly, he daubed it over the freezing metal canister — smeary serial-killer letters two feet high, like something written in (very pink) blood. #SAVETHEARCT

Footsteps crunched on the rocks behind him. He spun around. The bottle slipped out of his mitten and bounced on the ground, leaking dye over the stones. Trying to grab it, he lost his balance; he jumped before he fell. The ladder toppled over with a crash that rang across the bay.

It was Louisa. She didn’t look tired or defeated any more. She looked furious.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Direct action.’

‘Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?’

He looked at his handiwork. ‘You’re not the only one who cares.’

‘Are you mad? This was never about planting a banner for cheap publicity. What they’re doing at Echo Bay is much more than drilling for oil.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s no time.’ She waved something at him — a slim piece of metal like a pack of chewing gum. It was so out of place, it took him a moment to realise it was a memory stick.

‘I have to get this out of here.’

‘What—?’

‘No time,’ she said grimly.

A door slammed; footsteps came running.

They fled.