Zodiac Station

Twenty-two

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?’