Zodiac Station

Twenty-six

He lifted himself through the hatch. He noticed I hadn’t moved the gun.

‘What is this?’

‘You tell me.’ I nodded at the antenna hanging in the space above us like a giant spider. ‘In fact, there’s a few conversations we need to have.’

He looked up, and did a pretty good job of making himself seem surprised. ‘What the hell is that thing?’

‘You tell me,’ I said again.

‘I swear on my mother’s grave, I never saw it in my life.’

‘Yeah?’

He chuckled. ‘Truth to tell, Mom’s alive and well, doing just fine in Fort Lauderdale. But you get the point.’

I didn’t smile. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

‘I only came here because you asked me, Bob. If you want to show me whatever fancy toy you’ve got here, you go right ahead. But don’t make out like I should know what the hell you’re talking about.’

‘It’s not my toy. It’s a satellite antenna — and I want you to tell me what you’re doing with it.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m in the oil business.’

‘Really? I heard you have something called methane clathrates coming out of that well.’

He didn’t argue the point. ‘Either way, DAR-X isn’t exactly AT&T. We’ve got Iridium and UHF at Echo Bay, and that does us fine. We’re not searching for E.T. in our spare time.’

‘You expect me to believe that.’

He managed to make himself look genuinely hurt. ‘As a matter of fact, Bob, yeah, I do.’

I pitched him the change-up. ‘Tell me about Martin Hagger.’

He looked confused. ‘Your guy who fell down the crevasse?’

‘Who was doing a special project for you. Why did you need to get rid of him?’

Malick just stared at me. Big Texas oilmen don’t go down easy, but he looked floored.

I switched up again. ‘Were you here two days ago, Bill? Any of your people chasing us? Our doc almost got himself killed, running away from some guy in a yellow parka shooting at him.’

The fear I’d felt was flowing out now. Strength and weakness, it’s the same thing, they just run in opposite directions depending on which way the switch is flipped. I had the gun; I could make him do what I wanted. I jabbed it at him in case he’d forgotten.

‘I can account for every one of my guys. None of them’s been up here since the weekend. Show’s over; we’re breaking down the camp. Heading home tomorrow.’

That surprised me, if it was true. Maybe now they had this thing up, they could leave it to run itself.

‘Can we rewind?’ said Malick. ‘I came here because you said you had some data for me.’

‘I lied.’ I’ll admit it, I enjoyed saying that. Something about a gun that strips away the bullshit. ‘I just had to get you here.’

‘So you could show me this space needle?’

‘So you could tell me what it’s about.’

He looked at me like I was crazy.

‘What the hell are you on? Yeah, we’re drilling for methane at Echo Bay. Yeah, we were having problems with the pipes and Hagger looked into it. All above board. Why he died, and what that has to do with this great big radio you’ve found — maybe you can tell me.’

‘You know who you’re working for?’

‘I work for DAR-X.’

‘I mean, who’s paying you.’

‘Some company out of the Bahamas. Why are you looking at me like that? They’ve got the concession, they’ve got the permits, they’ve got the paperwork. We’re just the contractors. The only reason we keep quiet about the methane is to stop Greenpeace getting on our asses. You saw what they did to Shell in Alaska.’

‘The guys you’re working for are Russians, Bill. I guess you know that. And they don’t give a damn about gas or oil, do they?’

‘They do when I give them my progress reports.’

I nodded my head up at the giant web above us. ‘This is what it’s all about.’

He shrugged. ‘If I even knew what it was, I could tell you why you’re wrong.’

We stared each other down, like two gunslingers in a stand-off. Except, I was the only guy with a gun. And you know what?

I had no clue what the hell to do with it.

Like I said before, I’m a scientist, not Jack Bauer. I couldn’t waterboard the guy, or hook electrodes on his balls. I’d counted on the gun to scare him into confessing. Now what?

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.