Zodiac Station

Three

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of the north. I suppose a lot of people do. That feeling you get with the first snowfall of winter, something like a cross between Christmas morning and the start of the holidays. The world’s new, the rules are suspended.

I was always a solitary child. Back then, those white deserts at the top of the globe fired my sense of adventure. I read Willard Price, Jack London, Alistair MacLean. Other boys could reel off every player who ever scored for Liverpool; I could tell you about Peary and Cook, Nansen and Amundsen. I grew up, a lot of things changed but my dreams didn’t. If anything, they were more urgent. The Arctic wasn’t a place to prove myself, but to lose myself. Somewhere to escape to.

You know what the two most seductive words in the English language are, Captain? New beginning. The north’s a blank page, tabula rasa, white space on our own private maps we can fill in all over again. Snow gives us hope that the world can be different. A glimpse of perfection.

I’d applied for a post at Zodiac twice before, but I didn’t make it past the selection boards. I thought I’d missed my chance. I was working as a technician in the Sanger lab at Cambridge — not high-status work, but I was glad to have it. I have an eight-year-old son, Luke; my wife died and I look after him alone. Between him and the job I kept busy enough. But every time it snowed, I felt that familiar tug, my internal compass swinging north again.

Then I got the email from Martin Hagger. You’ve heard of him? Ask some of your scientists — the biologists. He’s a big gun. Everyone thinks life began in the so-called primordial soup, a warm broth slopping around the tropics. Hagger’s theory was that it actually evolved at the poles: that the freezing and melting of the sea ice every year acted like a giant chemistry set to turbocharge the evolution of DNA. He found some pretty convincing evidence, made the papers and everything.

I’d studied with Hagger for my master’s, and the first year of my doctorate, before we parted ways. Since then, I’d kept up with his research, but we hadn’t spoken in eight years. Then, one day, there it was: an email from Hagger, inviting me to come to Zodiac as his research assistant. His previous assistant had had a wisdom tooth go wrong and needed to be evacuated. His loss, my gain. I had no idea why he’d chosen me of all people, after all that time, but I didn’t care. There aren’t many thirty-year-old lab technicians with a PhD. This was my shot. Tabula rasa.

The bureaucrats who run Zodiac fought it — hated it — but Hagger forced it through. No boards, no assessment. Forty-eight hours later, I was at Heathrow.

My sister was late. Ironically, it had snowed — only a centimetre, but the roads had jammed solid. Who expects snow at the end of March? Luke and I waited in the departure hall at Terminal 3, probably the most depressing place on earth, while the crowds tramped slush through the doors and the tannoy ran non-stop with delays and cancellations. Fog steamed off the passengers; the whole place stank of damp.

Just when I thought I might miss my flight, Lorna staggered in. There wasn’t much time for goodbyes. I gave Luke a long, tight hug and we both tried not to cry. When I let go, he gave me the envelope he’d been clutching. I smiled when I saw the address.

‘You can take it to the North Pole,’ he explained.

I tucked it in my pocket and kissed him goodbye.

‘Don’t get eaten by the polar bears,’ said Lorna.

I flew to Oslo, then to Tromsø, where I had a ham and cheese sandwich and transferred on to a small Twin Otter for the last leg to Utgard. There was no one else on the flight, just me and the pilot and a couple of tons of supplies.

I suppose you know about Utgard. It’s the last place in the world, the most northerly scrap of land on the planet. Easy to miss — so easy, in fact, that no one realised it was there until the twentieth century. Most of it’s covered in ice, so much that the weight has actually pushed the land below sea level. Not that there’s much sea, either: for ten months of the year it’s frozen solid. The only notable population is polar bears, and a couple of dozen scientists at Zodiac Station. I wouldn’t like to say who’s hairier.

Even from Tromsø, it took another six hours’ flying. We refuelled at the base at Ny-Ålesund, where the mechanics fitted skis to the plane and the pilot changed into his cold-weather gear. He gave me a dubious look, in my jeans and the jacket I use for walking the Broads with Luke.

‘They said they’ll issue me clothing when I get there,’ I explained.

‘Then hopefully we get there,’ he said. I took it as Norwegian humour.

We carried on north. I stared out the cockpit window, keen for my first sight of Utgard. Behind the clouds, dark patches swam in and out of view, like bruises forming under skin.

‘Will we be able to land?’ I asked. The pilot shrugged. Was that another joke?

My first view of Utgard was a swelling on the horizon, white peaks almost impossible to tell apart from the clouds. As we got closer, they resolved themselves into mountaintops. The clouds parted on a dramatic landscape, a Toblerone rampart guarding the western approach. The island was such a small dot on the map, it was hard to believe so many mountains could fit on it. They seemed to go on for ever.

We descended between the mountains and skimmed over a white fjord. The pilot banked, turned, and suddenly I saw two rows of red flags staking out the runway like drops of blood. The plane thumped down, bounced slightly, and skied to a stop. Considering we’d landed on solid ice, it was pretty controlled. Outside, I saw a limp windsock, a clutch of oil drums and an orange Sno-Cat. Otherwise, just mountains and snow.

‘Welcome to Zodiac,’ said the pilot.

The cold sank its teeth into me the moment I stepped off the plane. At the foot of the ladder, I saw a woman rolling an oil drum towards me. The first thing that struck me was that she wasn’t wearing a coat: just a thick knitted jumper, ski trousers, and a woolly hat with tasselled flaps covering her ears. A long blonde plait hung down her back. Her cheeks were flushed red with the cold, and the eyes that looked up at me were a cool ice-blue.

‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself.

‘You’re in the way,’ she shouted, though I could barely hear her. The pilot had left one of the engines running, and the propeller almost drowned her out. So much for the silence of the Arctic. I scrambled out of her way and stood on the sidelines while she and the pilot ran a hose from the fuel drum to the plane. When that was secure, the pilot climbed in the cabin while the woman reversed the Sno-Cat up to the door. The pilot began sliding out the boxes of supplies we’d brought, which she loaded into the back. They seemed to have forgotten I existed.

I wanted to savour my first sight of the Arctic, but it was hard to concentrate. The cold squeezed my skull; my ears hurt as if they’d been slapped, and the icy wind made my eyes water. The propeller racket beat against me, and every breath I took was heavy with aviation fuel. I had gloves on, but they might as well have been tissue paper.

‘If you freeze to death before you sign the paperwork, the insurance doesn’t pay out,’ said the woman. I hadn’t noticed her come over. She grabbed my arm and dragged me towards the Sno-Cat. I couldn’t believe how useless I’d got so quickly: I couldn’t even lift myself into the cab without a shove from behind. But the engine was on, and the heater made the cab decently warm. I didn’t like to think what all those engines running non-stop must be doing to the atmosphere. At that moment, I didn’t care.

The woman climbed in and circled the Sno-Cat round, while the Twin Otter executed a quick turn back down the runway. In an impossibly short distance, it lifted off and disappeared behind the mountains.

‘I hope you didn’t change your mind,’ said the woman. I still hadn’t caught her name.

‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself again.

She nodded, and kept on driving.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Greta.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Two years.’

‘Must be tough,’ I sympathised.

‘I like the silence.’

I took the hint. The Sno-Cat ground and bounced its way over the snow. Round the base of an outcropping mountain, into a low valley — and suddenly there was Zodiac.

It looked like a spaceship landed on an alien planet. The main building was a low, green oblong jacked up on spindly steel legs. A white geodesic dome bulged out of the roof; the rest of it was covered with a mess of masts, aerials, satellite dishes and solar panels. Subsidiary buildings clustered around it: a mix of faded wooden huts in assorted sizes, curved-roofed Nissen huts, and bulbous orange spheres with round portholes, like deep-sea submersibles left behind by a sinking ocean. Flags fluttered from a line of red poles that staked the perimeter, a shallow semicircle down to the frozen edge of the fjord.

We pulled up outside the main building — the Platform. It was bigger than it had looked from the top of the hill, almost a hundred metres long, with a jumble of crates and boxes stored underneath. A flight of steel steps led up to the front door.

A low bang rolled down the valley as I stepped out. I glanced over my shoulder.

‘Is that thunder?’

‘Seismic work,’ said Greta. ‘They’re blasting on the glacier.’

We climbed the steps. On the wall by the door, a scratched and faded plaque said Zodiac Station; under it, a much brighter sign added, British South Polar Agency. It looked like the newest thing on the base.

‘Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?’ I looked around, half expecting to see penguins.

‘New management.’

Greta kicked a bar on the base of the door and it swung in. All the doors at Zodiac opened inwards — to stop drift snow trapping you. Inside was a small, dark boot room, and a second door opening further in.

‘No shoes in the Platform,’ said Greta. She turned to go.

‘Wait,’ I called. ‘Should I introduce myself somewhere?’

The door slammed behind her.

I left my boots and coat in the vestibule and ventured through the next door. The first thing I saw on the other side was a gun rack bolted to the wall: half a dozen rifles standing upright, more spaces where others were missing. Beyond, a straight corridor ran for what seemed an eternity, dozens of doors but no windows. It reminded me, unpleasantly, of the set of the Overlook Hotel. You know, from the film The Shining. Stanley Kubrick directed it.

I padded down the carpeted corridor in my socks. I read the signs on the doors I passed, little squares of card that seemed to have been typed on an honest-to-goodness typewriter. Laundry Room; Dark Room; Radio Room; laboratories, numbered in no particular order I could work out. One said Pool Room, and under it someone had taped a holiday-brochure photo of an azure-blue swimming pool. I opened it, out of curiosity, but there was only a half-size pool table crammed in a windowless cupboard.

Further along, I found the door for Hagger’s lab. On a sheet of A4, a red skull and crossbones warned HIGH INFECTION RISK OF UNKNOWN DNA. Undeterred, I knocked and when no one answered I went in. None of the doors at Zodiac have locks except the toilet (and that had broken).

Hagger’s big reputation hadn’t won him any favours in the room ballot. His lab was tiny, though at least there was some daylight. Two small windows looked back to the mountains behind the base, a vision of clarity against the clutter inside. Wires and tubes were draped everywhere: you had to step carefully to avoid bringing down the whole show. Somehow, he’d managed to cram a complete laboratory on to the workbenches: a mass balance, a shiny electron microscope fresh out of the box, sample bottles, Erlenmeyer flasks, and a set of green notebooks lined up against the wall. A length of yellow pipe sat in a tray of water in the fumes cupboard. A small refrigerator humming under the bench made me think of the old joke about selling fridges to Eskimos.

A hard-topped table made an island in the centre of the chaos, though you could hardly see the surface for all the stuff piled up on it. Inevitably, I knocked something off when I walked past. A stapled sheaf of paper. I bent down to pick it up, and as I glanced at it — as you do — saw my own name staring back at me.

Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh. ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and its Applications for Synthetic Genomics’.

It was my Molecular Biology article: the first scientific paper I ever published. It was strange to be reminded of it on Utgard. Hagger must have wanted to remind himself I’d once been a decent scientist.

‘Ha. The new intruder.’

A man stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him approach — you never did at Zodiac. He was short and, unusually for that place, clean-shaven. He had a round head with not quite enough hair to cover it, and wore one of those drab army-issue jumpers with patches on the elbows and shoulders.

‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself. ‘Martin Hagger’s new assistant.’

‘I didn’t think you’d come to sell us double glazing. Ha.’ He shook my hand. ‘Quam. Base commander.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘I hear you rather put the cat among the pigeons in Norwich, coming up like this. Very irregular.’ He squinted at me. ‘Still, you’re here now.’

‘I am.’ I meant to add something like ‘Thrilled to be here’ or ‘Glad you could have me’, but somehow the phrases jammed in my head so nothing came out except a sort of hiccup. Quam looked me up and down.

‘I suppose I’d better show you around.’

‘It seems very quiet,’ I said, as he led me on down the corridor.

‘Normal, this time of year. October to February we almost shut down; just a skeleton staff. I only got here myself four weeks ago.’

I tried to imagine overwintering there: the endless darkness; the stale jokes and stale food; the long, mournful corridor and the empty rooms. You’d go insane.

‘The advance party come in March to set up. The rest get here in May. After that, it’s a madhouse.’ He opened a door numbered 19. ‘This is where you’ll be sleeping.’

I peered in, though I couldn’t see much because someone had decided to put the wardrobe in front of the window. Four bunks squeezed between four walls, with a leopard-print Claudia Schiffer looking down from a poster.

‘Nice to have some female company.’

‘That’s to hide the escape tunnel.’ Quam closed the door again. ‘Only you for now, but you’ll have to share when the barbarian hordes invade. You won’t spend much time there, anyway. Hagger will work you pretty hard, I imagine.’

A dull detonation from up on the glacier made the Platform rock slightly under my feet.

‘Is he here?’

‘Hagger’s up at Gemini. That’s our camp on the ice dome. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, when the helicopter gets in. Saturday night is movie night,’ he added, moving on down the corridor. ‘The lab, you’ve seen. Toilets, surgery.’ Doors opened, doors closed. ‘My office, if you ever need me. Radio room.’ Another cubbyhole, packed with dials, gauges and cables. Static hissed from a speaker, and an American-accented voice was saying something I couldn’t make out.

‘Is that for us?’

Quam shook his head. ‘The Americans have a ship up north. Coast Guard ice-breaker, crew of scientists. Two hundred miles away, but it’s the nearest thing to civilisation from here. Every so often we pick up their transmissions.’

He turned a knob and the sound went away. ‘Did you bring a mobile phone?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can leave it in your suitcase. No reception here. If you go out in the field, we’ll issue you a satellite phone.’

‘Internet?’ I looked at the antiquated computer taking up half the space in the radio room. ‘If there’s somewhere to connect my laptop … I promised my son we could Skype.’

‘We’ve no wireless because it interferes with the instruments. You can connect to the LAN with a cable, but you’ll need an account. You can use this machine with a guest account until we set you up. I’ll give you a form.’

I looked doubtfully at the machine. ‘Do I have to know Morse code?’

The front door banged; footsteps thudded down the corridor. A stocky man strode towards us. I’d been reading Greek myths to Luke that week: in the dim corridor, something about him made me think of a charging Minotaur.

He stopped in front of us, under one of the fluorescent lights. He had a wide face and blue eyes and a beard he must have been working on for months. On top, his fair hair was cut straight and short, sticking up in a couple of places from his hat. The slogan on the sweatshirt said, ZODIAC STATION — HELL DOES FREEZE OVER.

‘What the fuck’s going on with the supplies?’ His English was Scandinavian-perfect. A Viking, not a Minotaur. He flapped a pink sheet of paper at us. ‘Huh?’

Quam’s chest seemed to grow slightly. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘I ordered nitrogen. For cooling my instruments.’

I laughed. Well, it seemed funny, having to cool instruments in the high Arctic. A black look said there was nothing humorous about it. I started to stammer an explanation, something about Eskimos and fridges, but gave it up. Not a good first impression.

‘And?’ said Quam.

‘Instead of nitrogen, they sent me two hundred litres of this TE buffer solution. Two hundred litres,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t even know what this shit is.’

‘You use it for sequencing DNA,’ I said, trying to be helpful. All I got was a dirty look. ‘Do they think I’m running Jurassic Park here?’

‘Whose name was on the docket?’ Quam asked.

The Viking screwed the flimsy pink paper in his fist. ‘Mine. But I didn’t order it.’

‘You must have made a mistake.’

He threw the paper away. It bounced down the corridor. ‘Last flight, Annabel ordered some glacier drill and got a thermal cycler instead. You need to sort this shit out, Quam, or what the hell are we all doing here?’

He would have left it at that, but Quam blocked his way. He gestured to me.

‘This is Hagger’s new arrival.’

‘Right.’ The big man gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. I was starting to get a feel for how the crew at Zodiac welcomed newcomers.

‘This is Fridtjof Torell. Known as Fridge.’

I offered a handshake. Torell-known-as-Fridge ignored me.

‘Was there anything else?’

‘No,’ said Quam.

He disappeared into one of the labs.

‘Atmospheric scientist,’ said Quam. He opened the door at the end of the corridor. A handmade poster pinned to it said, Your Daily Horrorscope, decorated with grinning death’s heads and a clear plastic envelope where a slip of paper could drop in.

You are about to make some bad life choices, I read.

‘And this is the mess room.’

The mess reminded me of an old working men’s club: brown carpet and grey walls, long tables with plastic chairs. A few sofas and armchairs, leaking their stuffing, made a sitting area in one corner around an oversized television. Faded photographs hung crookedly around the room, a few of wildlife but most of stiff-backed men with hollow eyes and frost-rimmed beards. No one could have smoked in there for years, but you could still sense the stale nicotine. The only redeeming feature was the windows, which lined three full sides of the room and gave spectacular views of the fjord and the mountains. They made me want to go outside. Perhaps that was the point.

Through a serving hatch in the interior wall, I saw a small stainless-steel kitchen. A fat man with tattooed biceps and a too-tight T-shirt gave me a wave through the hatch and turned back to the pot on the hob.

‘Danny, the cook. Danny knows all the gossip.’

Quam stopped in front of two huge maps hung on the wall either side of the door. One was a topographic map of Utgard, mostly white, with Zodiac marked in the lower left-hand corner. The other showed the earth, not as you usually look at it with the equator in the middle, but as you’d see it from a spaceship hovering over the North Pole. The Arctic Ocean filled the centre, hemmed in almost continuously by the countries that bordered it. Nothing south of Shetland made it on to the map; even the southernmost tip of Greenland needed an extension.

‘The Antarctic is a continent surrounded by oceans. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents,’ Quam said. Passable imitation of a fourth-form geography teacher.

I found Utgard, between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land and further north than either.

‘What’s that?’ I pointed to a grey shadow shaded on the map, a thousand-kilometre barb pointing down towards Finland. It covered Utgard like a bespoke rain cloud.

‘That’s the Grey Zone — the old disputed border between Norway and Russia. That’s why Utgard’s unique. In the seventies, when they agreed to disagree, both sides committed not to press their claims to the island until they’d finalised the border. When they did, a few years ago, they found the easiest compromise was to leave it as an international scientific wilderness, administered by us. Technically, we’re beyond all laws and governments here.’

‘Good place to commit a murder,’ I said facetiously.

‘Or to make a killing. The 2010 treaty also opened up the area to hydrocarbon exploration. There’s a company here now prospecting for oil and gas. They can’t touch the land, but anything under the seabed is fair game.’ He tapped the Utgard map, halfway up the west coast at a spot labelled Echo Bay. ‘You might see them around.’

I stared at the tiny blot on the map — and the vast space around it. Most of the world, and almost all its population, might as well not exist.

The tour finished back at the front door. Next to the gun rack, Quam showed me two plastic boxes nailed to the wall and labelled In and Out. The outbox bulged with paper; the in was almost empty. A vinyl-bound notebook sat on a shelf below.

‘This is where you check out. Whenever you leave the base, even if it’s just for a wee, you sign in and out in the field book. If you’re doing fieldwork, you fill in a risk-assessment form and put it in the outbox. When you come back, you transfer it back to the in-box. Understood?’

I nodded. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘You’ll receive a safety briefing.’ I had the sense of a recorded message being switched on. ‘Pay attention, learn the procedures and follow them. Up here, procedure will save your life.’

‘What about clothes?’

‘Greta will issue your ECW gear when she does the induction.’

‘The woman who brought me here?’

‘Our base mechanic, field guide, vehicle engineer …’ He looked as though he wanted to add something else to the description. In the end, he settled for, ‘She’ll find you.’

I lay on my bunk and tried to trick myself into going to sleep. Twenty-four hours of airports and aeroplanes had wrecked my body clock, even before I got to the land of the endless day. Light leached around the wardrobe. I reached behind it and felt a roller blind; I fumbled with it, but the mechanism was jammed. When I tugged, it collapsed off its bracket and rolled under the wardrobe with a puff of dust. I gave up.

My eyes drifted. In the half-light, I noticed some graffiti on the wall, white letters scarred into the wood panelling at knifepoint. I sat up and squinted.

You’ve got it in the neck. Stick it — stick it.

I rolled over on my side, back to the wall. The words chased round my head like a song I couldn’t shake. I tried to get my journal up to date, and found I could hardly remember a thing.

The door opened. Greta stood silhouetted in the corridor.

‘Come and learn how to kill polar bears.’

She issued me my gear from the ECW store — a cupboard overflowing with winter clothes. ECW, it turned out, stood for Extreme Cold Weather. Insulated trousers; a thick coat with a fur-lined hood; a balaclava and face mask; Black Diamond mittens; felt-lined boots; a helmet; a heavy all-in-one suit with zips up the legs.

‘Your snowmobile suit,’ she explained.

She grabbed two rifles from the rack on the way out, slung one over her shoulder and gave the other to me. The moment we went outside, I was glad of all the layers. I pulled the balaclava up over my nose as she led me to a row of parked snowmobiles. As we were walking, she pointed out the different buildings with cryptic explanations. The shop; the summer house; optics caboose; the bang store. Some looked as if they hadn’t been opened in years.

‘What’s that one?’ I pointed to a small wooden hut, well away from the other buildings. It stood outside the main perimeter, in the centre of its own circle of flags.

‘Magnetometer.’

‘How come it gets its own little patch?’

‘It’s sensitive. Don’t take any metal inside the circle.’

I scanned the perimeter. At the far end, where piles of rocks and rubble broke the snow, the poles had been crossed against each other to make five X’s standing up out of the ground.

‘The Gulch,’ said Greta. ‘Big hole, where the glacier comes down. Don’t fall in.’

‘Let me guess: the insurance doesn’t cover it.’

‘No, it does. But you won’t be there to get the money.’

We’d reached the snowmobiles. ‘Do you know how to drive?’ she asked.

I shook my head. She showed me a little plastic paddle on the right handlebar. ‘The accelerator.’ On the other handlebar, a curved metal lever stuck out like a bicycle brake. ‘The brake.’

‘Is that it?’

She thought for a moment. ‘If you tip over, don’t put your leg down. The snowmobile will crush it.’

She pulled the starter cord. If she had any more advice, the engine drowned it. I moved to get on, but she waved me away. Standing behind the snowmobile, she put her hands under the back and hoisted the rear end off the ground. She held it there a few moments, then put it down.

‘The tracks freeze to the ground when it’s parked,’ she shouted in my ear. ‘If you don’t get them loose, you burn out the engine.’

She got on; I climbed on behind her. I moved to put my arms around her, like riding pillion on a motorbike, but she shrugged me off.

‘You’ve got handles at the side.’

I hardly had time to grab them before she gunned the throttle. The snowmobile bounded forward with a pop — slowly, then quickly up to full speed once we’d left the perimeter. The wind chewed my face; belatedly, I realised I’d forgotten to put down the visor on my helmet. I let go with one hand to lower it, and nearly got pitched off my seat as the snowmobile hit a bump in the snow.

The rifle range was on a low ridge to the north of the base. There wasn’t much to define it, except for the inevitable flags staking out the corners. At one end, a paper target shaped like a penguin had been stuck on to an ice wall.

Greta showed me the gun. ‘This is a Ruger thirty-oh-six. You ever fire a rifle before?’

‘Yes.’

She looked sceptical. ‘Show me.’

I took off my mittens, chambered a round and sighted the gun on the grinning penguin. My hands were already beginning to shake in their thin gloves; I tried to imagine how much more they’d be trembling if there was a polar bear right in front of me. Not a lot of time to get off the shot.

I pulled the trigger. Twenty metres away, a white hole appeared between the penguin’s eyes.

I cleared the round and gave Greta a smug look.

‘Can you do it again?’

I could and I did, half an inch to the right.

‘Most British scientists hate guns,’ she said.

‘There was a time in my life when shooting rabbits was the only way I could afford meat.’

Most people laugh when I tell them that, as if it’s a joke they haven’t quite worked out. They cringe when I explain it’s true. They don’t like to be reminded how close we all are to the survival line.

Greta acted as if it was perfectly normal. I liked her better for that.

‘But you always aim for the body on a bear,’ she told me. ‘Too many bones in the head. And if you have to shoot it, make sure you kill it.’

I took out the magazine, made it safe and shouldered the weapon.

‘If a bear comes too close, fire a warning shot. If he keeps coming, fire more — but count your shots. You don’t want to be out of bullets. Also, the regulation is that you can’t shoot to kill unless he’s closer than ten metres.’

‘Do bears know the metric system?’

I thought it was pretty funny. She just shrugged it off.

‘How fast can a bear move?’ I said.

‘Eleven metres per second.’

‘So I’ve got a bit less than a second to load, aim and fire the gun at a charging polar bear.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s the regulation.’

‘Has anyone at Zodiac ever been killed?’

‘Someone has to be the first.’

A throbbing noise rose behind her. A red-and-white helicopter swooped over our heads, almost low enough to touch. I watched it descend to Zodiac while Greta collected the target. A handful of people scrambled out and hurried towards the Platform. From that distance, all in their standard-issue cold-weather gear, I couldn’t tell which one was Hagger.

‘Movie night,’ said Greta brightly.