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  Cody lost patience. ‘Better that, than the alternative.’

  Cody reached out and terminated the connection on the computer. He dragged a hand down his face as though trying to wipe the slate of his life clean and then got up and walked out of the room.

  The lights in the living quarters were on, the windows black as though it were midnight. Cody mentally reminded himself that it was barely past three in the afternoon. This far north the pale twilight that passed for day lasted only a few hours, the pink and gold glow on the horizon swiftly fading.

  Bethany Rogers sat at a dining table with a series of charts in her hands, and tapped one with a pencil.

  ‘Best place for the new CO2 monitors is definitely out at the ice camp,’ she said. ‘There’s a slim chance that aircraft activity at the airbase could contaminate our measurements here.’

  Cody nodded vacantly as he peered out into the darkness. ‘Sure. Reece will do it.’

  Bethany snorted in amusement. ‘Be quicker for us to take them out. Reece hasn’t set foot back in the observatory since we set the camp up.’

  Cody nodded.

  ‘You okay?’ Bethany asked.

  Cody blinked out of his glum reverie and turned to her. ‘Yeah, sure. Sorry. Just spoke to my wife and daughter, kind of brings it home how far away they are.’

  Bethany smiled. ‘You should have got this assignment out of the way before playing happy families, Cody.’

  ‘You got a boyfriend?’ Cody asked.

  ‘Are you hitting on me?’

  ‘No, not at all, I meant that… ’

  Bethany giggled. Cody picked up a pair of winter gloves and tossed them at her.

  ‘I’m not attached,’ she replied as she ducked the missiles. ‘I was, but we split up a couple of months back.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘It wasn’t serious.’

  ‘What about the others? They got families, partners?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Cody shrugged. ‘Jake seems interested in getting a feel for everybody’s status, for want of a better word. Says it helps figure out how well people will cope up here.’

  ‘You think they’d tell me?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Cody replied.

  Bethany shrugged.

  ‘Well as far as I know Bobby Leary is either single or a serial adulterer because I can hardly hold a conversation without him checking me out. Reece seems like the kind of guy who has only ever had a relationship with a petri dish, and Charlotte probably only mixes with other senator’s children.’ Bethany thought for a moment. ‘She’ll suffer the most.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Bobby will chase me around the whole time here, Reece will stay on his own, you’re married, I’m happily single and Jake’s too professional to play kiss-chase with anybody. Charlotte’s the fish out of water. It can’t be easy spending your life mixing with politicians and movie stars and then getting dumped out here on your own.’

  ‘I thought she said she wanted to do her research while she was young enough.’

  ‘Bull crap,’ Bethany snorted. ‘She’s only at home with caviar, champagne and chauffeurs. This is probably something her father arranged to bring her back down to Earth. You can tell she doesn’t want to be here and doesn’t like any of us.’

  ‘What about the two soldiers, Brad and Sauri?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I figured they’re on some kind of punishment detail, getting stuck with us here instead of with their team over at the base.’

  ‘Makes sense I guess,’ Bethany agreed. ‘None of the military seem interested in us.’

  Cody nodded and looked out of the darkened windows at the distant lights of the base.

  ‘Not exactly a comforting thought,’ he said.

  ***

  4

  Crystallised.

  That was the only word that described the Arctic for Cody as he guided one of four heavy duty snowmobiles across the bleak terrain. It felt as though he were in a vast dome of glass, the icy plains frozen in time and glistening as they reflected the starlight in the soaring vault of the heavens above. A thin sword of light glowed across the horizon ahead, keeping distant hills in silhouette. A few thousand miles away, down in Boston, it was midday and people were bustling out of their offices for lunch.

  Here, it seemed like they were traversing the surface of the moon.

  The snowmobile’s engine growled as Cody guided it toward a series of small prefabricated buildings erected out on the lonely plains, the headlights reflecting off sparkling particles of ice whipped up by the powerful belts of Jake’s snowmobile a few yards ahead.

  Behind Cody followed Bradley Trent and Charlotte Dennis on two more vehicles. Jake guided them in to the camp and slowed. Ahead, Cody could see Reece Cain about a hundred yards away out on the ice erecting a tower of aluminium tubing some ten feet tall. Nearby, Sauri stood guard with a rifle cradled in his grip.

  Cody shut off the snowmobile’s engine and revelled in a deep and frigid silence broken only by the sound of boots crunching on the ice as they dismounted.

  ‘He’s still building that?’ Charlotte asked, her voice muffled by the thick mask and goggles she wore.

  ‘Been too windy to finish it until now,’ Jake pointed out as they began walking toward the skeletal tower. ‘It’s too dangerous to risk a fall up here.’

  Cody hauled from the back of his snowmobile a plastic container some four feet long with a large disc at the end, as though the case contained a giant banjo. He hefted the container onto his shoulder and followed his companions out toward the tower.

  They were half way there when Bradley Trent slowed and crouched on the ice.

  ‘Wind wasn’t the only reason,’ the soldier said and gestured them to join him.

  Cody felt a ripple of consternation as he looked down at a series of huge paw prints tracking their way across the snow field. He glanced up at the prefabs a couple of dozen yards behind.

  ‘Size?’ Jake asked.

  Bradley looked up and down the tracks. ‘Big enough and it passed pretty close to the camp. Polar bears can smell a seal from a kilometre away even when it’s hiding under the snow. Reece and Sauri would have stunk like a madras curry.’ Bradley stood up. ‘It knows they’re here.’

  Charlotte looked down at the tracks and placed her boot down over one. The large, ragged print completely surrounded her boot.

  ‘Jesus,’ she uttered. ‘And Cain wants to stay out here?’

  Jake started walking again. ‘He hasn’t come screaming back yet.’

  They reached the tower, a rigid contraption of poles caked in frost and icicles. Reece Cain stood up on a narrow platform of aluminium plates coated in thick rubber as he yanked on a wrench, fastening the last of a series of bolts into the frame.

  ‘Afternoon,’ Jake said, raising a thickly gloved hand.

  Reece finished tightening the bolt and looked down at them. He nodded once and then glanced at Cody’s burden.

  ‘Just set them down there, thanks,’ he said, and pointed at the base of the tower.

  Cody slid the plastic container down onto the ice, then jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘You guys have had visitors out here.’

  ‘They’re not a problem.’

  ‘They will be,’ Jake replied as Reece clambered down onto the ice. ‘Polar bears are fearless and inquisitive. Sooner or later it’ll be sniffing around the doors. Once these are set up you should probably come back to the base.’

  Reece slipped the wrench into a nearby holdall. ‘No thanks.’

  Jake glanced at Cody. Despite the mask and the goggles, Cody could see that Jake was looking for support. Cody sighed behind his mask. Thousands of miles from anywhere and yet Reece Cain was still not quite as far from human beings as he clearly wanted to be.

  ‘You’re missing out,’ Cody tried. ‘Super Bowl’s on, spread bets are being made, still good odds available if you’re in.’ />
  Reece looked at him, albeit with his head and face entirely in silhouette against the glow of the horizon.

  ‘I’m good.’

  Reece started unpacking the container that Cody had carried out to the tower. A series of disc shaped detectors on four-foot poles, designed to be fixed to the top of the tower that Reece had erected.

  Cody turned to Sauri, who was watching the exchange with his gloved hands clasped patiently before him, the rifle now slung across his shoulder.

  ‘What about you?’ Cody asked. ‘Feel lucky?’

  Sauri gazed at him and shrugged. ‘No money,’ came the muffled, shy response.

  ‘Jesus,’ Bradley Trent uttered with a laugh, his mask caked with droplets of pearlescent ice frozen from his breath. ‘If these guys are happy out here with the bears, why worry?’

  Charlotte Dennis turned her head to look at the soldier. ‘I’m worried for them. Perhaps you should stay out here too, just in case that bear comes back?’

  ‘Like hell,’ Bradley shot back. ‘I’m not going anywhere without… ’

  Bradley fell silent as a faint humming noise broke the otherwise endless silence of the Arctic around them. Cody looked around them in confusion, unprepared for the deep rumbling that suddenly seemed to reverberate through the ice.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  The rumbling intensified into a deafening roar and Cody almost stumbled backwards as from out of the sky to the south a series of bright lights suddenly flared into view and bore down upon them. From behind the brilliant lights appeared wings and engines as a giant Hercules aircraft thundered overhead, streams of vapour trailing from its engines onto the brittle air.

  Cody instinctively ducked as the aircraft passed over their heads and thundered away toward Alert.

  Three more Hercules roared overhead in pursuit of the first. Cody and the team watched the aircraft fly away toward the tiny sprinkling of lights against the inky blackness of the Arctic to their north as the engine noise faded away.

  ‘What the hell do you suppose that’s all about?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘Supply flights?’ Reece suggested.

  ‘Had one two days ago,’ Jake pointed out.

  Cody looked across at Bradley. ‘What’s going on then?’

  Bradley looked across at Sauri. ‘You ever see that many planes fly in at once?’

  Sauri shook his head.

  ‘They were in a damned hurry too,’ Jake pointed out, ‘straight in approaches, one after the other.’

  Jake looked at the instruments Reece was holding.

  ‘You sure you don’t want to leave that until tomorrow?’

  Reece shook his head. ‘Sooner they’re up, the sooner we’re recording data.’

  Jake turned to Bradley. ‘Stay with them until it’s done. We’ll head back to base and find out what’s going on.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay out here with these two goddamned mutes.’

  Jake took two paces across the ice and got into Bradley’s face.

  ‘There are polar bears in the area. You’re here to protect our people, so get to it. You don’t, I’ll bring Sauri back with us and leave you out here on your own with Cain. Your call.’

  Bradley scowled behind his mask and goggles and then stormed away across the ice to nowhere in particular.

  Cody followed Jake and Charlotte back to the snowmobiles. The engines shattered the silence as they were gunned, powerful lights flaring into life as they turned and aimed for the distant lights of Alert.

  The half-hour ride across the rough ice plains was every bit as hard as it had been coming out, the bitter cold seeping through even multiple layers of dense Arctic clothing. Cody dimly recalled how Alert got its name: from a British vessel named HMS Alert that wintered in nearby Cape Sheridan in 1875. How the crew of a wooden sloop, using technology over a century old, had survived this bleakest of places stunned him. Much of the surrounding terrain was named after members of HMS Alert’s crew as testimony to their hardiness.

  Cody glimpsed a couple of Arctic hares bound away from the snowmobiles and the glowing eyes of an Arctic fox glimmer briefly from out of the darkness as they passed by. The lights of Alert grew brighter as Cody’s hands grew colder. He could see floodlights out near the end of the runway and the huge Hercules aircraft parked beneath them.

  Jake led the way into a small compound outside the base and pulled up as Cody swung in alongside him and killed the engine on his snowmobile.

  ‘You see the aircraft?’ Jake called above the noise of Charlotte’s snowmobile. ‘Their engines were still running.’

  ‘Why would they do that? Some kind of exercise?’ Cody asked.

  Jake didn’t reply as he walked out of the compound. Cody hurried alongside him with Charlotte behind as they walked across the icy surface of the road outside and scrambled up the snow bank opposite.

  Cody reached the top first and looked out across the plains to the distant airfield.

  The four Hercules were sitting on a parking area on the far side of the airstrip, the huge ramps at the rear of the aircraft lowered onto the ice as vehicles drove up into their enormous interiors. The sound of the sixteen aircraft engines turning was a deep hum muted by distance.

  ‘They’re loading up,’ Charlotte said. ‘Why?’

  Cody had no answer for her, and any that he might have concocted was drowned out as a Bandvagen thundered toward them down the road, its headlights slicing through the darkness. They turned as the vehicle suddenly shuddered to a halt and four soldiers got out. Three of them were armed, their rifles held at port arms but their eyes watching Cody, Jake and Charlotte as an officer clambered from the cab and gestured to them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the officer demanded.

  ‘We saw the planes come in,’ Jake replied. ‘We wondered what was going on.’

  ‘Bradley Trent, Sauri. Where are they?’

  ‘At the field station, just south of the observatory,’ Jake answered.

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘Five clicks south of here. Why?’

  The officer looked past the compound toward the fading horizon, clenched his jaw for a few moments, and then turned to the three armed soldiers behind him. He shook his head and waved a level hand across his throat. The soldiers whirled and leapt back into the transporter.

  The officer clambered up into the BV’s cab.

  ‘Hey,’ Jake shouted as he scrambled down the bank. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Jake’s last words were drowned out as the BV’s engine was gunned and the vehicle thundered past in a cloud of snow and fumes. Cody watched as the vehicle’s tail lights wound their way toward the airfield. Minutes later, it was driven carefully into the back of the last Hercules in the line.

  Jake joined him again at the top of the bank and they watched in amazement as the four aircraft withdrew their boarding ramps and lined up on the runway.

  ‘They’re leaving,’ Charlotte gasped in disbelief. ‘They’re leaving us.’

  ‘Can’t be,’ Jake said. ‘It must be some kind of exercise.’

  The roar of the Hercules’ engines increased and one after the other they thundered away down the ice strip amid clouds of ice spray until their winking navigation lights climbed into the night sky and turned south. As the last aircraft faded away into the darkness, Cody felt a twinge of concern twist in his guts.

  ‘They wanted to take Bradley and Sauri with them,’ he said to Jake.

  Jake looked at the distant aircraft as they vanished from sight.

  ‘Get back to Alert Five and get on the radio,’ he said, ‘Find out what the hell is going on.’

  ***

  5

  Cody hurried into the observatory compound, yanking his Arctic gloves and jacket off as he stumbled into the communications room.

  The computer was still on from when he had spoken to Danielle, and next to it was a bank of radios that linked to both terrestrial and satellite detectors. He glanced at his watch.
A little after six in the evening. The time in Boston was almost the same as Alert and there would no doubt be somebody available back at MIT — the place never slept.

  Cody dropped into the chair and grabbed the microphone.

  ‘Boscombe Base, this is Alert Five, repeat, Alert Five, do you copy?’

  A long hiss of static was followed by a cheerful voice that crackled as it was distorted by atmospheric turbulence and the extreme range.

  ‘Well a very good evening to you Alert Five, how fares thee in thine icy…’

  ‘Guys, something’s going on up here and we need some help,’ Cody cut across the jovial reply. ‘The Canadian Forces Station just cleared out and abandoned us.’

  A long hiss of static. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Would I joke about something like this?’ Cody snapped. ‘They’ve cleared out, flown south. You want to find out why?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll call back. Give me a minute.’

  ‘Great, make it fast okay?’

  Cody sat back in his chair and glanced at the monitor. The Internet Homepage of the Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology glowed back at him. Cody leaned forward and typed in the URL of a world news service and watched as the homepage opened. Maybe something major had happened in Canada and they were pulling in their service personnel for some reason?

  The page showed news reports from a fatal police chase near Seattle; the American President’s speech to the Senate on immigration reform before departing for a foreign affairs conference; New York getting its first dusting of snow; orange harvest failures after California’s drought. There was nothing untoward happening anywhere in North America, Canada or Alaska. In fact Canada was so quiet its Prime Minister was also departing for a conference overseas.

  Cody glanced over his shoulder and then typed in another search. A tingle of alarm pulsed through his body as the Boston Globe’s main pager flashed up a major headline:

  POLICE SEEK IDENTITY OF MALE HOMICIDE VICTIM FOUND NEAR LOCAL RESERVOIR

  Cody stared at the headline for what felt like an eternity as prickly heat irritated his back and shoulders and his heart thumped against the wall of his chest.