‘I need to talk.’
Gus Raglan. A short, stocky man with a barbed tattoo round his neck. He caught up with Jane in the corridor outside her room. He looked furtive.
‘I need to talk things through.’
Jane looked for a room to use as a confessional. She picked the utensil cupboard at the back of the kitchen. A steel room full of pots and pans. It had thick walls and a strong door. People could speak and not be overheard.
Jane put a couple of chairs at the back of the cupboard. She sat with Gus. Frying pans hung overhead.
‘So what’s on your mind?’
‘My brother. His wife. She and I…’
‘How long?’
‘Three, four years. I asked her to leave him. Asked her a million times. It’s difficult.’
‘Does your brother suspect?’
‘I think he chooses not to know.’
‘How would he react if he found out?’
‘He’s a placid guy. But I’d lose him. I’d lose him as a friend.’
‘Have you thought about the future?’
‘It’s great when we’re together. But each night she’s with him, and I’m alone. Shit, they might both be dead for all I know. I’d like the chance to put things right.’
‘What do you think, deep down, you should do?’
‘I took this job to get away. I keep thinking: This isn’t me. I’m better than this, you know?’
Ghost steered the outboard motor. They cut through chop. Punch sat in the prow of the zodiac. He swept the shoreline with a spotlight. He lit a lunar landscape. Jagged rocks coated in ice.
‘There.’ He pointed. A concrete jetty. Snow-dusted steps.
Ghost detached the outboard motor and laid it on the jetty. They hauled the boat out of the water.
‘I’ll come back for the motor,’ he said.
They carried the rubber boat up the steps and set it down in front of massive steel doors set into a rock face. Ghost released a padlock and chain.
‘Go inside,’ he told them. ‘I’ll fetch the outboard.’
Punch and Rye dragged the zodiac through the doorway into a cavernous silo. Wind noise dropped to silence. Punch took off his goggles and mask. He shone the spotlight on the walls. They were in a wide tunnel that receded downward into bedrock. The walls glistened with moisture. There were rails in the floor. The wall signs were Russian.
‘What is this place?’ asked Punch. ‘I thought the island was uninhabited.’
‘You’ve been ashore, haven’t you?’
‘Just ashore. Never here.’
‘The Soviet Navy used to dump old reactors on the seabed. Each time they decommissioned a nuclear sub they simply cut off the tail section and dropped it in the Barents Sea. There are about twenty of them down there, all rusted and barnacled. This was going to be their new home. Salvage teams were going to bring them up and bury them in salt for a quarter of a million years.’
‘That explains the skull on the door.’
‘It’s the same the deeper you go. Skulls on every wall, every door, etched in cadmium steel. Future generations will get the message. Bad shit. Keep out.’
Rye pulled a dust sheet from a couple of red Yamaha Viking Pro snowmobiles. She checked them over.
‘Keep the light on me.’
She opened a long wooden box on the floor and took out two Ithaca pump-action shotguns. She racked the slides a couple of times to check the action. There were wooden shelves propped against the wall. She opened a carton of twelve-gauge ammunition and slotted shells into the breech. She slid the guns into leather sleeves strapped to the bikes.
‘For bears,’ she explained. ‘We keep them here. Rawlins doesn’t like weapons on the rig.’
Ghost staggered through the bunker doorway carrying the outboard balanced on his shoulder. Rye helped him lower it to the floor.
Ghost fuelled the bikes from a jerry can. Gasoline spiked with isopropyl alcohol to prevent freezing. He checked the oil. He gunned the engines to check they worked. He took a radio from his backpack.
‘Shore team to Rampart, do you copy, over?’
‘Rampart here.’ Jane’s voice. ‘Glad you’re safe.’
‘We’re at the bunker. Any word from Apex?’
‘The guy is still transmitting, off and on, but he sounds delirious. I can’t get a precise location from him. You’ll just have to head for Darwin and see what you can do.’
‘Okay. We’ll get our stuff together and head out at sunrise.’
‘There’s another storm-front heading this way. A bad one. We can see it on radar. A solid wall of ice coming down on us like an express train. I reckon it will take you seven hours to reach Darwin, three or four to reach the cabin. If you leave now you might make it before the storm hits’
‘ Shit.’
‘It’s down to you guys. Rawlins says you should forget it and come back to the rig, but the decision is yours.’
Ghost turned to his companions.
‘Quick vote. I say go.’
‘Go,’ said Punch.
Rye thought it over.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re close to dead. We don’t actually know where they are and a storm is moving in. I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s a bad idea.’
They took Rye’s medical kit, half her food and left her behind.
The snowmobiles had a top speed of a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, but Ghost throttled down to fifteen while they drove in darkness. Punch followed his tail-lights. His boots barely reached the footrest.
Franz Josef Land was a chain of volcanic archipelagos. A series of pumice islands capped with permafrost. There were jagged boulders beneath the ice ready to rip the skids from the snowmobiles.
They should have arranged a signal, thought Punch. If his Yamaha stalled, Ghost would drive on heedless.
The sky began to lighten. The cold, blue light of an Arctic dawn. They cut through drifts sculpted into strange dune shapes by an unrelenting wind.
Ghost accelerated. Punch revved and kept pace.
Jane fixed breakfast for the crew. She made porridge. Punch had left a plastic spoon on the desk of his kitchen office. There was a note taped to the spoon.
Sixteen level scoops of oats. Five and a half litres of water. No sugar or honey. No waste, no second helpings, no alternative food.
She spilled a few oat flakes on the counter. She carefully gathered them up and put them back in the porridge box.
Earlier that morning Jane went to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. She discovered the refrigerators locked and the food store padlocked. She found herself tugging on the refrigerator door like a desperate junkie denied their fix.
The crew ate in silence. Ivan sat with the TV remote and flicked through a series of dead channels. A dozen different flavours of static. CNN was off air.
Fox showed the stars and stripes fluttering in slow motion, grainy and monochrome.
BBC News showed a union flag. ‘God Save the Queen’ over and over. The location of refuge centres scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
‘One by one the lights go out,’ murmured Ivan.
