Zodiac Station

Twenty-seven

Of all the places you think you’ll hear a cellphone, an abandoned coal plant on a frozen island at the end of the world is probably the last. For a moment, I thought the ringing must be the bell for the start of a shift, that a dead-eyed crew of Soviet miners would file through the door, pickaxes on their shoulders and lamps glowing over their faces.

Malick unzipped his coat and took out his Iridium phone.

‘Yeah?’ He listened. ‘I’ll get back right away.’

He pulled the phone away to hang up, then remembered something.

‘Wednesday afternoon,’ he said into the phone, ‘when we were packing up. Everyone was there, right? No one off base?’

I didn’t hear the answer.

‘No one unaccounted for?’

He listened, nodded a couple of times, grunted and hung up.

‘That was my crew chief. I checked, and he had eyes on every one of our guys Wednesday afternoon. Whoever chased your doc, it wasn’t us.’

He zipped the phone back into his pocket. ‘Now I gotta head out.’

A quarter-hour earlier, he had a gun at my back. Now, I didn’t want him to leave.

‘What about the mine?’

‘Gotta get back before the storm hits. As soon as it’s over, chopper’s coming to fly us home.’

‘We have to find out—’

‘Not my problem. If there’s some Russians in there, or some Nazis who didn’t hear the war ended, or a bunch of extraterrestrials trying to phone home, that’s your deal. Although,’ he added, looking at the sky, ‘don’t take too long.’

We walked down the steps and back towards the snowmobiles in the main square. The buildings around us looked deader than ever.

‘You ever hear of an outfit called Luxor Life Sciences?’ Malick said suddenly.

Meant nothing to me.

‘They came here a couple years back, just when we set up Echo Bay. A guy and a girl. He was called Richie, don’t remember her name, but she had a great pair of tits. Scientists, both of them, looking for a place to build a gene bank.’

I didn’t hear him right. ‘A what?’

‘Somewhere to keep DNA. So that when the whole world looks like this’ — he waved at the skeleton buildings around us — ‘and there’s only eight survivors, and humanity’s family tree looks like a twig, we can spice up the mix some. That, or make us some new cows and horses, like Jurassic Park.’

‘Like that’s going to happen.’

‘Right. And if it does, we’ll be too busy chewing sticks and wiping our asses with our hands to think about sailing to Utgard for takeout DNA. But they had some money for it, so they came to check us out. All you need for a gene bank, turns out, is someplace dry and cold and no neighbours to look in when you’re not home.’

‘Say, a mine on an Arctic island?’

‘They came up and down this valley a bunch of times. Must have been at Mine Eight, too.’

‘Luxor Life Sciences,’ I repeated, making a mental note of it. ‘They ever do anything with it?’

‘Poured some concrete, brought in some equipment. Then they never came back. Guess they found somewhere else to keep their goop.’

‘Anyone at Zodiac help them?’

‘Don’t know. DNA, all that biology stuff. That would’ve been Hagger, right?’

‘Right.’

We’d reached the snowmobiles. Malick strapped on his helmet and started the engine.

‘You’ve still got my gun,’ I said.

He slipped it off his shoulder and looked at it, as if he’d forgotten. He thought for a moment, then handed it back to me.

‘Guess you just might need it.’

I waited after he’d gone, trying to process everything that had happened in the last hour. I knew I didn’t have long. From up on the hillside, you could see all the way down the valley, right to the sea ice. Black clouds bigged up the horizon, and the wind was getting nasty. I wondered if I should go back now.

I couldn’t. If I turned around, I could see the cable stretched across the mountainside, past that cave where we’d found all those cans of food, right the way to where the valley ended.

No wonder the guy in the yellow parka had got antsy when Kennedy started sniffing around the cable towers.

I started up the snowmobile. The slope was too steep to follow the cableway: I had to drive right down into the valley, then back up the other side. The mountain peak hid the mine, but I aimed for where the towers pointed. Up and up, the engine fighting the slope, until I came around a corner into a little valley. The towers were so close now I could touch them as I drove by; the noise echoed back off the valley walls like gunfire. And at the top of the valley, perched on the mountain face like some Blofeld secret hideout, was the mine.

I guess no one became a Soviet miner for the life expectancy. I guess they didn’t have much choice. Uncle Joe said, ‘Get in the hole,’ and they said, ‘How low do we go?’ Maybe it made a nice change from Siberia, I don’t know. But even with all that, the mine didn’t look like the sort of place you’d want to come to risk your life. The whole thing was built of wood, bleached planks peeling away like even the buildings wanted out. The sheds were built one on top of the other, with chutes and tunnels connecting them Rube Goldberg-style, running down from the mine to the cableway. No murals on the walls here to pep up the workers, just big metal letters on the front building: MINE 8. I guess that was all they needed to know.

I made a quick search of the buildings, working my way up to the top. The place was emptier than Vitangelsk. I didn’t waste time looking for the cable: I knew where it was going.

Beyond the buildings, where the mountain got so steep you couldn’t see the top, was the mine head. You couldn’t miss it: a massive concrete retaining wall, six feet thick and twenty feet high, propping up the mountainside. A run-down wooden shack leaned against the base, like the frill of a skirt.

I climbed the wooden steps. There was no lock on the shack door, which surprised me. I was about to let myself in when something on the snow caught my eye. Utgard’s so pristine, any trash stands out a mile. I picked it up: a clear plastic bottle, smaller than a soda. The label said Rhodamine B.

I put it in my pocket for later and went inside. Straight away, it reminded me of the boot room at Zodiac: hooks on the walls, shelves for boots and gloves. I could almost imagine those Commie miners coming off shift, downing tools and getting dressed to go out into the cold, joking about vodka and women.

The back of the shack was the concrete wall, with a slab of something covering the mouth of the mine. In the bad light, I thought it must be plywood — until I touched it. Even through my mitt, I could feel the cold, even colder than the air. I looked closer.

It was a steel door, surrounded by a steel frame riveted into the concrete. No lock, no keyhole, not even a handle. This one was strictly exit-only. Greta’s bolt cutters wouldn’t get me through there. Even oxyacetylene gear might not do it. Whoever put those doors on, they didn’t want visitors.

I stared a while, until the wind rattling the shack walls reminded me I better go. Quam would have a conniption if I didn’t get back.

The day had gotten so dark it turned the ground grey, flat and featureless. Getting home, avoiding the bumps and lumps (and maybe worse) would be a bitch. But if I looked, I could see some not so old footprints breaking up the snow where they’d come out of the shack. I followed them until they stopped at a big dent in the snow near where I’d parked. About right for a snowmobile. And, if you looked, there was the track the snowmobile had made down the mountain, not far from where I’d come up.

I saddled up my snowmobile and followed the line to see where it went — straight back to Zodiac.