Black Ice (21 page)

‘That's as may be. But no one's going to give a damn about the results in the face of this type of sensationalism. That bloody explorer is ruining everything. Can't you shut him up, for God's sake?'

‘I thought I had,' Lauren replied.

‘Well, you clearly underestimated him. Now the question is what are you going to do about it?'

A sudden idea occurred to Lauren.

‘Hold the line, Alexander; I want to confer with my radio operator for a moment.'

She turned to Frank. ‘What do you say we ban Fitzgerald from all radio comms? This is getting well beyond a joke, and I can't think of any other way that's going to take the heat off us.'

A broad smile swept Frank's face.

‘There's a typed-in password facility on the satellite link,' he said. ‘I deactivated it at the beginning of the winter, but I can easily set it up with a new password so that Fitzgerald won't be able to sneak in and use it in the night.'

‘OK. Let's do it.'

Lauren picked up the handset. ‘We're going to bar him from the radio comms, Alexander, at least until he can give us a guarantee he's going to behave himself.'

‘Good plan.' The relief was tangible in De Pierman's voice. ‘If they can't get any new lies out of your blabbermouth down there, I guess the press will move on to some other story soon enough.'

‘Signing off now. And thank you for sticking with us, Alexander. It'll be worth it in the end, I promise you.'

‘I hope so, Lauren; I really do. Over and out.'

‘Listen to that,' Frank told her, putting his ear to the silent speaker with an expression of bliss on his face. ‘The sound of silence.'

Lauren smiled grimly. ‘Give us some peace and quiet,' she said. ‘Right now that's exactly what we want.'

Lauren went to Fitzgerald's room, only to find the door still locked.

‘You're poisoning this whole operation, Julian!' she called through the door. ‘You are banned from using the radio link as of now. We've put an access password on the satellite connection, and you're not going to be given it. If you start behaving yourself, we'll reconsider.'

There was no response from within the room.

‘I know you can hear me,' Lauren called again. ‘Your shit-stirring is over, Julian, over for good!'

Lauren went to her laboratory to write up some notes, feeling better than she had done for days.

43

Fitzgerald was building up his stash, little by little, night by night. The opportunities were not difficult to exploit, for none of the Capricorn stores were ever locked, and for six to eight hours every night he could cherry-pick the provisions he needed, package by package, tin by tin.

Tonight he was in the food store for no more than a couple of minutes, careful not to disturb the order of the boxes, wary of taking too much from any one of Murdo's supply chests in case he became suspicious. He knew precisely what he needed, long experience of hauling expeditions meant he needed no list other than the one which was in his head.

He placed the spoils in a canvas rucksack and walked the corridor to where his outdoor clothing was hanging on its hook.

The question of what to do with his gains was one which had taxed the explorer for a few sleepless nights. He had thought about hiding them beneath the base, in the gap between the glacier surface and the raised, insulated floor. But that was too obvious, as was the roof cavity and the loft space in the generator shed.

In the end he had acquired a small shovel and gone out into the endless night with the idea of digging a hiding hole somewhere discreet. As it happened, an easier solution had presented itself, and that was where he was heading now as he zipped himself into his thermals and stepped out onto the glacier.

The explorer brought out his compass and waited patiently until his eyes had adjusted enough to the dark to be able to see the illuminated face. He clicked round the dial and set it to due east, and, after a cursory glance over his shoulder to check that no one was watching him from the base, he set out on the bearing. He was counting his steps, ticking them off beneath his breath as he crunched across the glacier.

At five hundred paces he stopped, looking around until he spotted the dark crack across the ice. This was his target, a tiny fissure which would one day open into a crevasse, but which for the moment was just a metre or so deep and a couple of hand's-breadths wide. The ice cap was criss-crossed everywhere with these wrinkles of pressure, and the explorer had spotted this one as perfect for his purposes.

He checked back towards the base once more, seeking a shadow or a torchlight which would betray a follower. Then he began to unload the contents of his small pack. He'd gone for the nutritious foods, the ones which would deliver maximum calorific value when it came to the trek: there were a few different types of pasta, some tinned stews, a half-dozen cans of tuna, dried apricots and prunes. The weight of the tins was worrying, that would add to the load when he came to haul the sledge, but there was little he could do about it under the circumstances.

Fitzgerald packed the items carefully into the bottom of the small crevice, alongside the gas stove, butane cylinders and other essential items he had carefully been accumulating over the previous weeks. Slowly, slowly, a box of matches here, a tarpaulin there, he had built up the stash. No one had noticed, so far as he knew, and no one would if the explorer could help it. This was a good insurance, Fitzgerald reasoned, a hedge against the certainty that Lauren would refuse to supply him when it came to the crunch.

The base commander's reluctance to back his bid to restart his trans-Antarctic trek had struck Fitzgerald as particularly unfair. He deserved her support, and the fact that it wasn't forthcoming had created a smouldering ember of resentment inside him.

That, and the way she had given Carl a laptop. That was even worse.

It was a conspiracy, of course; Fitzgerald had already deduced that it was no accident that Lauren had given Carl the word processor. She
wanted
his lies to be made public; she
wanted
Fitzgerald to be humiliated and cowed. No doubt she had encouraged Carl, egged him on, tempted him with tales of massive publishing advances: that was why he had decided to start typing.

And where would it end? Two rival publications coming out at the same time, each telling a story from a totally different perspective? How would the public react? Fitzgerald wondered if his loyal fans would snub Carl's book. He knew them, the people who bought his books, who hung on his every word at public lectures in halls and clubs all over the land. He smiled and shook their hands; he listened with a smile to their tales of how a nephew, a cousin, a sister or an aunt had once climbed a mountain in the Alps. They were
his
people, not Carl's—and it had taken him a lifetime of exploration, of suffering, to build that loyalty up.

And now everything was under threat.

Fitzgerald patted the snow back into place around the top of the fissure and admired his handiwork with the headtorch. He knew there was virtually no chance that anyone from Capricorn could accidentally stumble across his secret stash, but he wasn't about to make it easier for them if they did. The work was good, he saw with satisfaction, the ice smooth and giving nothing away. Someone could pass a metre away and never know it was there.

Fitzgerald stood, stretching a little to ease the stiffness in his back. Far off, he could see the lights of the base, beckoning and warm, the faint hum of the generator carried to him on the light wind.

Best of all, towards the northeast, he could see the faintest of glows on the horizon. It was the gentlest yellow, so subtle, so pallid it might have been a trick of his eyes, but Fitzgerald knew what it meant: that winter had turned, that the sun would—within the next couple of months—once again pour light into this blacked-out continent. He took a deep breath, the dry, frosted air searing his lungs with small, familiar pinpricks of pain.

Soon it would be time to go.

44

Lauren could feel the muscles in her shoulders tense up as she waited in the drilling shed for the seven hundred and ninety-fourth extension to come up the bore on the wireline. The critical phase of the drilling operation was about to commence—the day on which they would break through to the under-ice lake and attempt to extract a precious water sample.

In the next hour they would de-rig the conventional cutting tool, fit the custom-built final extraction head and send it on its way into the black depths of the ice cap on its one and only journey.

‘Here she comes. And not a single break on the line,' Sean said with pride as the metre-long cutting head came smoothly up the bore with a satisfying hissing sound, spewing a little sludgy kerosene onto the floor as it emerged.

‘Don't speak too soon,' Lauren warned him. ‘The show's not over yet.'

Sean cut the power to the wireline winch and hitched the cutting head to the block and tackle which was suspended from the drill shed's main gantry. Lauren and Frank put on their thin leather work gloves and helped him with the bolts, working as fast as they could to minimise the exposure of their hands to the frozen metal. When they had the cutting head free, they swung it to one side and onto a wheeled trolley which was stowed in the storage area.

‘Time for Big Boy,' Sean said, rubbing his hands together with relish. ‘This is going to be fun.'

‘Big Boy' was the nickname Sean had given to the next piece of equipment to go down the bore, a one-off, two-hundred-thousand-dollar piece of drilling innovation, which they now lifted from its protective flight case.

Lauren and Sean had struggled long and hard over the design for the final extraction device. Crashing the main drill bit into the lake and pumping out a sample was the simplest option (the technology for this would be the same as for a conventional oil exploration bore), but would lead to unacceptable levels of contamination. The sample had to be pristine or there was no way for subsequent analysis to determine what was from the lake's ecosystem and what was foreign.

‘That's a laboratory down there,' Lauren had explained to Sean. ‘It's been untouched by the outside world for twenty-five million years, so it would be a bit of an embarrassment if we screwed it up now.'

Back in London they had spent several months agonising over the design for the extractor, dreaming up and discarding dozens of ideas, and consulting with mining engineers all over the world, until someone came up with the comment: ‘What you need is not a drill extractor, you need a giant biopsy needle.' The throw-away remark led Lauren into fruitful new terrain, and the more she looked at the technology of biopsy core needles, the more she realised that the problems—and objectives—of biopsies were the same as her objectives with the lake.

A biopsy needle is required to retrieve a completely uncontaminated tissue sample from an organ deep within a patient's body. To achieve this, a relatively large-diameter hollow needle is inserted as close as possible to the organ to be sampled, at that point, a sterile and finer-core sampling needle which rides inside the outer sheath is then fired—normally hydraulically—into the target organ, where it cuts the tissue core. Then the internal needle retracts and the entire device can be retrieved.

If they could engineer a massive sterile probe—in effect a giant biopsy needle—into the middle of a cutting head, Lauren wondered, could they use that to penetrate the lake?

Lauren and Sean had borrowed the biopsy technology, expanded and adapted it and then commissioned a specialist drill bit manufacturer in Norway to turn the designs into reality. The result was Big Boy, one hundred and forty kilos of titanium and chrome, which would shortly be sent on a journey down to the bore end, where it would be less than one metre from the roof of the lake. When they were sure it was in position, the hydraulic ‘needle'—several inches in diameter—would be spun out of the cutting head and slowly rammed through the ice, its progress eased by a heated annulus at its tip.

A radio echo sounder was built into the device, and, connected to a screen at the surface, it would enable an operator to judge the instrument's proximity to the lake. The hard, polished roof of the lake cavity would be perfect for this task as its radio signal would be totally different to the solid, compacted ice which surrounded it.

Then came the fine judgement. Inches before the final breakthrough, the sterile inner probe—this one of less than half a centimetre diameter—would be fired into the lake itself, where it would suck out no more than a litre of fluid and then snap back into the sleeve, in less than a second. If all went well, Big Boy would be pulled back up on the wireline with the sample safely intact.

‘Let's get it down there,' Sean said.

They rigged up the extractor, and Sean sent the unit down the wire. Lauren felt her stomach turn as she watched it descend, and, as she sat at the radio echo monitor with Frank, she noticed her hands were shaking.

A few minutes passed before Sean confirmed the unit was in position.

‘Turning on the heater core now.' Sean activated the switch which sent power down to the tip of the cutting head.

Lauren and Frank focused on the neon-green screen of the radio echo monitor, watching intently as the fuzzy edges converged centre screen, minute by minute, into a well-defined line which was unmistakably a harder barrier.

‘That's the roof of the cavity.' Frank pointed to a lozenge-shaped mass. ‘We're about thirty centimetres off.'

‘Stop the burner, Sean.'

‘Heater off.'

Seven hundred and ninety-four metres beneath them, the fragile heated tip of the probe began to cool.

‘Give it three minutes to let it freeze,' Lauren instructed Sean. ‘When the needle goes in, I don't want any meltwater going in with it.'