Zodiac Station

Five

A rap on the door. A sailor entered and handed Franklin a sheet of paper.

‘Just came through from Washington, sir. Confidential.’

Franklin read it. Anderson sat up in bed, cradling the mug in his fingers.

‘Has the helicopter reached Zodiac yet?’ he asked.

Franklin shook his head. ‘What do you know about Bob Eastman?’

‘Eastman?’ Anderson swirled the dregs of tea in his mug. ‘He was at Zodiac. American, astrophysicist. He worked on gamma radiation, or something. Has he made contact?’

‘Why didn’t you mention him?’

Anderson looked confused. ‘I did. At dinner, he was the one needling Quam and Fridge. I didn’t know his name then.’

‘Someone knows his name. And they want to know where the hell he’s got to.’ Franklin folded the paper. ‘What else?’

‘He was good at crosswords. He had a nice smile. He ate Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, which he smuggled up inside his telescopes.’ Anderson shrugged. ‘There were some rumours, but that was just bullshit. At Zodiac, people started rumours just to make life interesting.’

‘What rumours?’

Anderson put down his cup and slid back under the sheets. ‘Can I just tell the story how it happened?’

Franklin checked his watch. Washington could wait. ‘Be my guest.’

In the Arctic, you never just go somewhere. By the time we’d suited up, fuelled the snowmobiles, loaded the rifles, gathered all the equipment, a full hour had passed. We even signed the exit book. The whole time, I expected Quam to come down from the Platform, threatening us with the sack or waving a gun. But the door stayed shut. Nobody wants to miss movie night.

I waited while Greta hitched low metal sledges behind our snowmobiles. Hers, she loaded with enough equipment to reach the North Pole: spare fuel, a pair of skis, a tent and three steel boxes stencilled SURVIVAL. Mine, she left empty.

‘In case we have to bring anything back,’ she said, ambiguously.

It was my first time driving a snowmobile, but that didn’t count for much. The moment we passed the flag line, Greta almost disappeared over the horizon. I squeezed the accelerator until my thumb went numb. The wind blasted my visor; grains of ice rattled against it like rock salt. The sledge behind me slid around, tugging me off course. And I still could hardly keep up.

We crossed the fjord and drove up on to the ice cap. It was a magical landscape, but I didn’t see much of it. I had my head down, never looking more than a few metres in front, trying to spot Greta’s track and any ruts in the snow. My hands ached; I kept waiting for a rest. Each time she slowed down, my hopes lifted. But each time, it was only to navigate a bump or a slope, and then I had to gun the throttle to close the gap again.

After about an hour and a half, she finally called a halt and tossed me a Thermos from her pack. While I fumbled the cup between my mittens, she rang Zodiac on the satellite phone.

‘Hagger still hasn’t called in.’

We went on. Now we were on the dome, an ice sheet hundreds of metres thick that covers two-thirds of Utgard. Strange to say, it felt like driving along a beach. On my left, a chain of mountains; to my right, a flat surface stretching down to the horizon. A few lonely rocks broke the surface, trivial in that vastness, until I realised they were the tops of mountains that had been buried in the sea of ice weighing down the island. The Inuit call them nunataks.

And it never got dark. The five-month-long polar day hadn’t quite dawned, but it was coming. Even when the sun got below the horizon, you knew it hadn’t gone far. We travelled in a protracted twilight, dim enough to see the tail light of the snowmobile in front, light enough that I could still make out the snow on the distant mountains. A few of the brighter stars peeked through the velvet sky. In that wide, wide space, so close to the top of the world, I could almost feel the planet spinning on its axis under me.

Eventually, where the ice dome funnelled into a glacier between mountains, Greta stopped and waved me to come up behind her.

‘The last place his GPS clocked in was near here,’ she shouted over the idling engines. She jumped down and disconnected the sleds, then tied two lengths of rope between the snowmobiles.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Crevasses.’

I surveyed the unbroken snow. ‘Are there many around?’

‘It only takes one.’ She made the rope fast in an intricate cradle of knots and carabiners. ‘Keep it tight. And don’t drive over the rope or you’ll rip it.’

We moved down the glacier in harness. The snowmobile didn’t want to go slowly: if I feathered the throttle, it would rev but not move; if I pressed harder, it suddenly popped into gear and lurched forward. It took all my concentration not to mow down the rope … let alone watch for crevasses … let alone spare any thought for Hagger. I wasn’t even sure the rope would do any good. If Greta went into a crevasse, the rope would more likely pull me in on top of her than save either of us.

Greta stopped. I let go the throttle so suddenly I almost fell off.

‘Is it a crevasse?’ I shouted. Then I saw it. A blue snowmobile, parked where the glacier rubbed up against the mountains. Pieces of equipment were scattered over the ground around it, hard to make out in the gloom.

I got down from the snowmobile.

‘Wait,’ Greta called. ‘Hold on to the rope. And check the snow.’

‘I’ll follow your track.’

‘Check it,’ she repeated. ‘The snowmobile has better weight distribution than you do.’

I edged over the snow, one hand on the safety line, the other holding the barrel of my rifle, using the butt to probe the ground in front. A hard crust had formed on top of the snow, but that was deceptive. It squeaked under my boots like polystyrene — and, like polystyrene, it snapped under my weight. Each time it broke, my heart froze while I waited for the drop. Each time, my feet landed softly in the powder snow underneath.

Greta was prowling around, examining the equipment he’d left.

‘Don’t you have to worry about crevasses too?’

‘Martin knew the drill.’ She pointed to four fuel cans that made a rough diamond around the abandoned snowmobile. ‘He marked out a safe area.’

‘So where’s he gone?’ I looked at the snowmobile. I looked at the boxes of equipment. No sign of Hagger. A shovel stood planted in the snow beside a square pit, about a metre deep. An open Thermos stood upright on one of the boxes, lid off, cup beside it, as if Hagger had been about to pour himself a cup of tea. The water inside the Thermos had frozen solid.

‘Here.’ Greta bent down and lifted a red climbing rope out of the wind-blown snow. It had been tied off on Hagger’s snowmobile. She followed it across the glacier.

Then she stopped. She leaned forward. The rope went taut behind her. I hurried over.

A dark cut opened in the ice, a snaking fissure going down — I couldn’t see how far. Narrow enough that you didn’t see it until you were nearly there; wide enough you could easily climb in. Or fall. The rope trailed down into the void.

‘Martin,’ I shouted. I stepped forward. My foot caught a lump of ice half buried in the snow and kicked it over the edge. Loose snow showered down after it.

‘Careful.’

Greta took a head torch from her pocket. Wrapping the strap around her wrist, she shone the beam down into the gloom.

‘Keep watching for bears,’ she said. ‘They come up quick.’

I glanced around anxiously. The sun, never far off, was circling back. The sky had started to blue. Even so, the shadows were deep enough to hide all manner of evils.

‘Look at this,’ said Greta, and even she couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. She pointed the torch down, wrist trembling slightly.

The crevasse was deep, maybe eight or nine metres. The walls bent and bowed, primitive shapes that seemed pregnant with meaning. The torch beam reflected brightly off them, all the way to the bottom.

A dark shadow lay flat against the ice.