Arctic Gold

He knew one thing. They wouldn’t have been here at all if one of them hadn’t been the daughter of a New England congressman. Raymond C. Cabot had been pulling strings at NOAA and the Department of Commerce for a month, getting permission for Lynnley Cabot and her four friends to take this little junket into the frozen north. Tomlinson wondered if Cabot was just a doting father who couldn’t say no, or if he saw a way of making political capital. Cabot was a Democrat and liked thumping the environmentalist bible loudly and often. Maybe he thought a docudrama of his darling daughter in a parka would help him with his next campaign.

Tomlinson followed Segal through the door into the hut, letting the wind bang it hard behind him. The Quonset hut’s interior was surprisingly cramped, given the exterior size of the thing. Half was partitioned off into sleeping quarters, with the women’s area sequestered off behind a curtain at the back. Another curtain hid the chemical toilet and the tiny portable shower stall; most of the walls and available free space was occupied by boxes-food and scientific instruments. The opposite end was devoted to the radio set, two computer workstations, and the meteorology instrumentation. Clothing hung drying from various overhead hooks and hangers, creating a cluttered, humid forest of textiles. Social life inside the community was defined by the space around the stove and heater. Most of the people were there, at the moment, looking up at the sudden explosion of cold and wind from outside.

“Hey, we thought you were the Russians,” Tom McCauley said. He was a heavyset North Dakotan with a twisted sense of humor, who’d first used his degree in meteorology to get a job as a TV weatherman, but who later moved to Asheville to take a job with the National Climatic Data Center.

“Nyet, tovarisch,” Segal said, grinning as he threw back the hood of his parka. “Ya nyeh Ruskii.”

“Too bad,” Fred Masters said. He was playing cards with two other climatologists and slapped a card down on the table. “We were hoping you would save us from our Greenpeace friends, here.”

“That’s Greenworld,” Lynnley Cabot said, sounding disgusted. “Jackass.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” Masters replied, picking up another card. “From here I can’t tell the difference.”

“Ah, it’s easy, Fred,” Susan Fritcherson said, picking up the discarded card. “Greenpeace wants to save the whales. Greenworld wants the whales to inherit the Earth.”

“They’d do a better job running the world than we have,” Ken Richardson, the ostensible leader of the Greenworld group, put in.

“Pipe down, all of you,” Commander Greg Larson said. He was the senior NOAA officer and the expedition team leader. “I’ve told you yahoos before… we don’t have the room for that kind of nonsense. Or the patience.”

The bickering subsided, as it had to. The Greenworlders had been told in no uncertain terms that this base was under NOAA’s jurisdiction and therefore under military jurisdiction. They would obey the regulations and the orders given by the NOAA officers… or they could start walking the 650 miles across ice and open water to Point Barrow.

NOAA was a scientific agency under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Most of its employees were civilian scientists and administrators, but about four hundred of its personnel made up the NOAA Corps, one of America’s seven uniformed services. All were commissioned officers, wearing uniforms similar to those of the U.S. Navy.

Tomlinson stripped off his parka, boots, and snow pants, hung them on a wall hook, then squeezed into the tiny galley area to pour himself a cup of coffee. That was one good thing about this place; there was always a large pot more or less fresh brewed, and if your standards weren’t too high, it was pretty good. He’d only been outside for ten minutes, but there was ice laced through his mustache and beard.

“You get through to the Center yet, Bill?” he asked the man currently at the radio. Lieutenant Bill Walters was the third NOAA officer on the team, a communications specialist.

“Nah,” Walters said, pulling the headset off his head and tossing it on the desk. “Our Russki friends are being too noisy right now. And the solar interference is worse than yesterday, too.”

“Cold out there, Chris?” Masters asked.

“Not too bad. About minus two Celsius. But it’s going to get colder. Another squall’s coming in.”

“Is it going to be… bad?” Jenny Cicero, another member of the Greenworld delegation, asked. She sounded scared. When a full gale was blowing outside, the Quonset hut walls shook and pounded as though giants were plying it with jackhammers. Such a storm had hit a few hours after the Greenworlders had arrived last week, and Tomlinson had thought they were going to have to ship Cicero back to Point Barrow in a straightjacket.

Welcome to the Arctic, kids, he thought.

“Nah,” Fritcherson told her. “Twenty below… wind at fifty knots. Heavy snow and icing. Piece of cake.”

“Is Yeats going to get his people back here before it hits?” Larson asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Don’t know, sir,” Walters said. “They have a satcom with them, but…”

“Maybe we should take a couple of snowmobiles out to look for them,” Tomlinson suggested.

“Not yet,” Larson replied. “I don’t want more people running around out there and maybe getting lost in a whiteout.” He sounded worried.

“They have GPS,” Fritcherson pointed out. “Even if they can’t get through the radio interference, they can navigate by satellite.”

“Keep trying to raise them on the satcom,” Larson told Walters.

“Yes, sir. But our regular frequencies are full of garbage.” He listened for a moment. “I think the Russians may be holding some kind of military maneuvers out there.”

“Nothing to do with us,” Larson said. “Keep at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Larson looked around the crowded room. “Where’s Benford?”

“Sacked out, Skipper,” McCauley told him, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward the curtained-off bunks. “Said he was wiped.”

Larson scowled but said nothing. Tomlinson could guess what was going through his mind, however. The five Greenworlders were very unwelcome guests. They ate the expedition’s food, put a strain on the sanitary facilities, took up valuable space both with their bodies and with their baggage, and brought a nasty air of politics and confrontation into the tiny and tight-knit world of the NOAA climate research expedition, all without bringing a single useful skill to the camp. Oh, there was make-work enough-cleaning, cooking, stowing or unpacking gear, even taking turns cleaning the ice off the outside sensors-but it simply wasn’t enough compared with what they took. In Arctic exploration, no less than if this had been a scientific expedition to Mars, every person had to pull his or her weight. There was no room for freeloaders.

Tomlinson wondered what the Connecticut congressman had paid in the way of a contribution to the Climatic Data Center to get them to foist these five on the expedition. They were supposed to be filming some sort of documentary, and for the first few days they’d done nothing but get in the way with their cameras and sound equipment and inane questions. Lately, though, they’d pretty much kept to themselves.

The trouble was, space was at such a premium in Bear One that they still got in the way.

Benford in particular was a monumental pain in the ass. The guy started arguments with the team personnel, had to be chivvied to perform even minimal chores, and maintained an all-round sour and unpleasant attitude that already had affected the station’s morale.

Well, it wouldn’t last forever. The freeloaders had been here a week and were scheduled to be here for another two weeks more, until the next scheduled supply flight up from Barrow. When the tree huggers were gone, the ice station was going to feel a lot roomier.

Tomlinson had to squeeze past three of them, Cabot, Cicero, and Steven Moore, to reach an empty chair by the heater.

Yeah, he couldn’t wait for them to be gone.

Harry Benford lay in his narrow bunk, face to the wall and his privacy curtain pulled across the open side, but he wasn’t sleeping. He’d heard the bickering a moment ago. Good. Keep up the pressure…

In his hand, pressed up against his ear, was what looked like a transistor radio, the size of a pack of cigarettes. It tuned to only a single channel, however, one reserved for military transmissions.

The static was terrible, reception lousy, and atmospherics squealed and wailed as he listened, but twice a day at the same times he always sought the privacy of his bunk, the toilet, or outside in order to listen for five