Zodiac Station (28 page)

A phone rang. After just long enough to make me look like an ass, I realised it was my Iridium. I pushed out through the crowd and took it in the hall.

‘We checked up on Luxor Life Sciences,’ said a voice. Those guys don’t do introductions. ‘Nothing funny, no connection to any known Russian organisations. Only flag that came up is the founder died in mysterious circumstances. Plane crash, body never found. British biologist called Richie Pharaoh.’

I remembered Malick had said the guy’s name was Richie. But Pharaoh sounded familiar, too; I couldn’t think where from.

‘There is one link to Zodiac,’ the voice went on. ‘Pharaoh used to be a professor in the UK, at Cambridge University. One of his PhD students was a guy called Tom Anderson.’

I went so quiet they heard it in Washington. ‘You still there?’

‘I got it,’ I said. ‘Get me some background on Anderson, any links to the Russians, anything suspicious.’

I hung up.

Anderson wasn’t watching the movie. I checked his room and his lab: nada. But there was the paper I’d seen that morning:
Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh
. I could have kicked myself for not checking on Luxor Sciences earlier.

Maybe he was still in Star Command. I checked the boot room. His coat and boots were gone. So were Greta’s. I opened the door and stuck my head out.

The temperature had dropped after the storm. Cold air pinched my nostrils and made my ears burn. Up on the Lucia glacier, against the black sky, I saw a flashing orange light. I caught it just in time to see the old Tucker Sno-Cat bounce over the ridge and disappear.

Fuck
. On the off chance, I checked the field log to see if he’d signed out. Amazingly, he had: I guess protocol dies hard.

If I’d had any last doubts, they vanished when I saw what they’d written.
Anderson, Nystrom. Out: 8:30 p.m. Destination: Helbreen glacier.

I ran back to the mess and found Kennedy. In the movie, they’d just reached the bit where Captain Hendry and Dr Carrington fight over whether they should kill the alien or try to talk to it.

‘There are no enemies in science, only phenomena to be studied,’ said the doctor on screen.

‘To science,’ everyone cheered. Luckily, Kennedy was on Coke. Probably the only sober man in the room.

‘Come with me,’ I told him.

The time it takes to get dressed at Zodiac, I thought I’d burst with impatience. Kennedy was even slower. I stood in his room, watching him pull on his two pairs of long johns and his pants, buttoning his shirt, finding the right sweaters.

‘You don’t need all that,’ I said.

Kennedy ignored me. And you know what? He was right. You take shortcuts up there, you die. Anyhow, a snowmobile can outrun the Sno-Cat, easy. We’d catch them up.

It must have been twenty minutes before we’d got ready. In the mess, I could hear everyone shouting along with the movie’s last line. ‘
Watch the skies! Watch the skies!
’

We grabbed a couple of rifles and ran down the steps to the snowmobile park. Predictably, just when I needed to go fast everything went to shit. I flipped the choke, pulled the starter cord but nothing happened.

I patted my pockets. ‘Goddam it,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I forgot my satphone.’

‘You’d better get it,’ said Kennedy.

And then the Platform exploded.

USCGC
Terra Nova

Franklin was on his feet. He crossed to the phone on the wall and dialled Santiago.

‘You still got the guard on Anderson’s room?’

‘Affirmative, Captain.’

‘Page him to tell him I’m coming.’

On the bed, Eastman had sat up. His hungry, hollow face stared at Franklin like the grim reaper.

‘Anderson’s here?’

‘We found him on the ice.’

‘You locked him up?’

‘He’s secure.’

‘I hope you chained him down.’

‘I’m going to check on him now.’

Eastman swung his legs off the bed and stood up. The blankets fell in a heap on the floor. ‘I want to see that cocksucker.’

Franklin pointed to the IV drip. ‘He’s going nowhere. You need to take it easy.’

‘Fuck easy.’ Grimacing, Eastman ripped off the Elastoplast strip and pulled the needle out of his arm. Blood welled out of the hole but he didn’t seem to notice. The tube dangled limp, oozing fluid on the floor.

‘He’s a spy who damn near murdered every man on Zodiac to cover his tracks. You bet your ass I’m coming.’

Franklin didn’t like to think how many regulations he was breaking, bringing a hypothermia patient through his ship in bare feet and a smock. Then again, if it turned out he’d unwittingly harboured a mass murderer working for the Russians, he wasn’t going to be short of explaining to do.

‘Did you find Greta?’ Eastman must barely have been able to stand upright, but he never dropped a step back.

‘Not yet. It was one in a million Anderson found us.’

‘Bullshit. You really think that? You were his way out. Heroic survivor, walking across the ice. No one left to spill his secret. He knew exactly where you were. If you search, you’ll probably find he ditched that Sno-Cat a half-mile from your boat. Unless he drove it into a hole in the ice.’

‘What about Greta?’

‘Maybe he killed her too. No witnesses.’

‘My pilot reported he’d heard something that sounded like an emergency beacon out on the ice. I sent a crew to take a look. Could be Greta.’

‘I hope you sent them armed.’

Eastman put his arm to his mouth and sucked off some blood from the IV hole. Franklin waited for him at the bottom of the next flight of stairs. Suddenly, his pager started buzzing. Before he could look at it, someone burst through the door on the deck above and came sliding down the stairs three at a time.

Only one man aboard the
Terra Nova
hit the stairs that hard.

‘Ops?’

Santiago came around the corner, swinging himself on the rail for maximum velocity. He stopped a couple of inches short of the Captain, breathing hard.

‘What is it?’

‘Anderson’s gone.’

USCGC
Terra Nova

The crewman sat on the bed with red welts burned around his wrists. White threads stuck to his cheek where Santiago had ripped off the surgical tape that Anderson had used to gag him. None too gently, Franklin guessed.

‘He said he needed the head.’ The crewman rubbed the back of his head and winced. ‘Next thing I knew, I was tied to the chair with my own belt.’

‘He can’t have gotten off the ship.’ Franklin looked out the porthole, almost by reflex, as if he expected to see Anderson running by. ‘Get the Doc up here to check that bump on your head, and pipe General Emergency. I’m going to the wheelhouse.’

Word spread fast on the
Terra Nova
. All his officers were already on the bridge, waiting for him. Glad it wasn’t them who had to take the PA.

‘All hands, this is the Captain. We have an escaped detainee aboard our ship. His name is Tom Anderson. He may be armed and he is certainly dangerous. I’m initiating a lockdown, and a search of the ship as per our evacuation drill. Use extreme caution.’

He paused, then added: ‘If you can hear this, Tom Anderson, I advise you to surrender yourself. You cannot escape.’

He hung up the mic and turned to Santiago.

‘Get the helo airborne and fly a SAR pattern centred on the ship.’

‘You think Anderson could have run for it?’

Franklin shrugged. ‘He got here, didn’t he?’

The wheelhouse emptied. Franklin sat down in his chair, staring out the windows at the panorama of ice. Anyone who made captain had learned to listen to his ship: even up here, he could hear the urgency of his order spreading through the
Terra Nova
. A faster rhythm, the vibrations of doors slamming and boots running. He could pick them out like an astronomer reading the stars through the fluctuations of radio waves. And all the while, beneath everything, the sawtooth rise and fall of the prow obliterating the ice.

‘There’s a good lead ahead,’ said the bosun’s mate on ice watch. ‘We should be able to get some speed up soon.’

Franklin nodded. He looked at Eastman. ‘What happened then? After the explosion?’

Eastman shivered. One of the crew brought him a space blanket and wrapped it over his shoulders, a silver cloak that made him look like some alien overlord.

‘They lit up Zodiac like the fourth of July. Oil barrels packed underneath, and all the blast cord we used for seismic work. With everyone packed into the mess for Thing Night, no one had a chance. Even if they’d survived, all the ECW clothing burned up in the Platform. So did the radios, the Iridium phones. Anderson took care of everything. If Kennedy and I hadn’t gone out when we did, no one would ever have known.’

‘Shit.’ What else could you say?

‘A disaster like that ought to be impossible. We keep emergency supplies cached all around the base – food, clothing, radios. That was the first thing we looked for, even while the Platform was still burning. All gone. Anderson must have cleaned them out.’

‘Survivors?’

‘The Platform was burning so hot, you couldn’t get within fifty feet of it. Fuel drums exploding, throwing off pieces of metal – rip your head off. One cut Kennedy’s arm. No one could have survived.’

He stared at Franklin, like it was the most important thing in the world.

‘No one could have survived.’

‘Got it.’

‘I don’t know what bad things you’ve done in your life, Captain, but if you ever die and go to hell, it can’t be worse than that. The Platform burning, the snow in the smoke. Me and Kennedy running around like chickens, digging up the caches, one after the next, finding everything gone. We must have spent a half-hour trying to get the snowmobiles started before we figured out Anderson had taken out the spark plugs. At that point, we were pretty fucking sure we were gonna die. And not quick, like the others, but slow, hungry and cold.’

The space blanket crinkled and rustled.

‘The weirdest thing was, it all happened in broad daylight. You think bad things happen at night, and maybe the sun’ll come up and things’ll get better. We didn’t even have that.’

He took a cup of coffee that someone had poured him.

‘Anderson came back with his Russian friends. A couple of snowmobiles – they must have stashed them someplace else. Looking for survivors, I guess. Me and Kennedy hid in the mag hut, only place that was intact.’

He stared into the cup of coffee. ‘I thought we were dead when Anderson opened that door.’

‘He found you?’

‘If I hadn’t busted my leg, I’d have launched myself at him. Instead, I just huddled in the corner. I swear he looked right at me.

‘Then he went away. It’s dark in there, and bright outside; maybe he didn’t see. We heard some shots—’

‘My crew found a shell casing.’

‘Then there was some shouting. I don’t know what that was about. After a while, I heard a snowmobile start up. I dragged myself to the door and peeked out, saw someone heading out on to the ice. Big guy.’

‘Not Anderson? He’s big.’

‘Not like this guy. I don’t know where Anderson had gone, couldn’t see him. After that, nothing happened for a while. I almost went out, but I didn’t like the fact I hadn’t seen Anderson or Greta leave. And I was right. After an hour, something like that, I heard the Sno-Cat come back. Greta poked around a little – didn’t find us – and then she rode off on the second snowmobile, following the tracks.’

‘Any clue where they were going?’

‘My guess? Evac. The Russians must have a ship someplace near here, maybe one of their nuclear-powered ice-breakers, and they’d gone to rendezvous with it.’

Franklin glanced at Santiago.

‘Nothing on the instruments.’

‘So you saw Greta and this other guy leave. How about Anderson?’

‘Yeah.’ Eastman scratched his beard. ‘I thought about that a lot. Best I can come up with is he jumped on the snowmobile somewhere I couldn’t see him. I didn’t exactly have a widescreen view, shitting my pants behind that door.’

‘But you survived.’

‘What saved us was their stupidity. The one thing they forgot. Went to all that trouble to sabotage the snowmobiles, then forgot they’d parked the Sno-Cat right in back of us. I mean, how stupid can you get. Not a lot of gas, but enough to run the heater a couple of times a day. And he’d left survival gear: food, sleeping bags, even a box of matches for the stove.

‘We holed up in the cab and sat there right up until we heard your helicopter flying in.’ He bared his teeth. ‘You know how boring being terrified can get? If I ever play another hand of gin rummy, I’ll slice my fucking wrists.’

A light blinked by the phone. Franklin let Santiago take it. When he turned around, he didn’t look happy.

‘XO says they finished searching the ship. No trace of Anderson.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘There’s a mustang suit missing from the locker. Also, they found a rescue line tied off on the deck rail.’

Franklin got out of his chair and walked to the back of the wheelhouse. He looked out astern, at the blue scar the ship had left behind in the ice.

‘What’s our speed, Helmsman?’

‘Four knots, sir.’

‘Anyone here think a guy can jump off a moving vessel, surf a piece of broken ice and get on to the main pack without falling in?’

No one answered. Franklin found a pair of binoculars and looked through them. Staring at all that ice and cloud, you couldn’t even be sure you had the focus right.

‘Might be trying to fake us out,’ Santiago suggested. ‘Get us chasing ice while he sits tight in the lifeboat with a bottle of Scotch.’

‘You think anyone on this ship would have missed an open bottle of Scotch?’

‘You think we could have missed a guy built like a linebacker?’

‘Look again.’

He sat back down, lost in thought. The phone rang. He snatched it before Santiago could pick it up.

‘You got him?’

‘It’s the radio room, sir.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘The helo just called in. They found something on the ice.’