Ice Claw (48 page)
Sophie understood. She would go back to her father and help with the endangered species. She hoped Max would return home and find a way of talking to his dad.
She had hugged Max. “Hey?”
“Yeah. It’s cool,” he had said, smiling.
Bobby Morrell had been brought to the clinic from a French hospital. His broken arm, leg and ribs would heal in time, but the pain he felt over his grandmother’s death would take much longer.
But as far as Max was concerned luck had been the most generous to Sayid. Not since a Japanese man had recovered from being frozen on a mountaintop some years earlier had anyone survived such intense cold. The doctors agreed—Sayid had fallen into a hypothermic state similar to hibernation. His brain and organ functions had been locked away as if in a cyberspace retrieval system, and had been protected without being damaged. He’d made a complete recovery.
They all sat wrapped in blankets, gazing out across the clinic’s gardens towards the snow-capped mountains.
“I don’t know how you found me,” Sayid said to Max, knowing Max would tell him the whole story one day.
“I heard you snoring,” Max replied.
The others laughed, but Max soon fell silent, letting them talk and shout each other down as they excitedly told how each had survived their own experience.
Farentino had disappeared in the confusion of the rescue operation by the Swiss and French forces, but his words were as sharp and hurtful as when they were first spoken. What had really happened to Max’s mother? Did his dad know about Farentino’s love for her? An uncertain future faced Max. He had to find the truth behind his mother’s death.
And discover whether his father had lied to him.
Max heard the distant, echoing roar of a bear, and the answering howl of a big wolf. It made him shiver. It was as if they called out to him.
“Did you hear that?” he asked the others.
“Hear what?” they said.
Max shook his head and gazed back into the mountains.
“Nothing.” Max smiled. “It must be my imagination.”
Author’s Notes
If any of you are budding (or even experienced) skiers or snowboarders, you should make sure you understand the safety guidelines for going into the mountains. Our climate change means there’s an increased risk of avalanches, so if you are going off-piste take a transceiver with you—probably the only way a rescue team can reach you in time if an avalanche strikes.
The Château d’Antoine d’Abbadie exists pretty much as I have described it, though the elderly French caretaker is a character of fiction and nothing like the charming French lady who helped me there. I will have pictures of the château on my blog.
Biarritz is a great European surfing destination, and although the comtesse is a fictional character, her château can be seen just about where I described it. It’s a private property, so I can’t be more specific than that.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, did have a tunnel collapse in 1986, and Switzerland is considered by its government to be at risk from earthquakes. The country lies on the edge of the Eurasian tectonic plate, and the area of Valais—where Tishenko was based—is considered to be particularly at risk. Experts fear tidal waves could be triggered by landslides falling into the country’s lakes and reservoirs.
Telluric currents have been known since ancient times, and geobiologists, among others, now use telluric and magneto-telluric currents for exploration below the earth’s surface.
I discovered quite a lot about lightning during my research. A Russian scientist, Alex Gurevich of the Lebedev Physical Institute, proposed the theory that lightning strikes are triggered by cosmic rays that ionize atoms, producing an avalanche of relativistic electrons directed through the clouds.
In 1901 Nikola Tesla constructed his famous Tesla coil, which generates electrical charges—high-energy “lightning” strikes. Lightning is a phenomenon about which little is still known, but lightning towers, based on the Tesla coil, have already been built. Continuous discharges of lightning can be “thrown” between the two towers. Experiments along these lines—to harness lightning—go back as far as 1932, when two scientists stretched a cable across two peaks in the Alps. Sparks of several hundred feet were created, and the scientists planned to install a tube for the acceleration of particles, but the death of one of them caused the project to be abandoned.
Crystals, of course, do carry energy and information, and scientists at Stanford University have succeeded in putting a three-dimensional image (of the Mona Lisa) into a quartz crystal and then retrieving it. There are also some theorists who maintain that life began in crystalline form, then genetics took over and developed life into cellular form.
One of the most interesting challenges in writing
Ice Claw
was to try and find planetary movements that were synchronous with events on Earth. I wrote
Ice Claw
in 2007, setting it in winter 2007/08. The book would be published in
the UK in summer 2008, so I needed to predict a potential disaster for about March 2008.
My dilemma was how to explain that Zabala, a scientist and astronomer, who also understood astrology, could have been so wrong in his predictions of a disaster twenty years earlier. I was looking for a feasible situation in which planetary alignments would reflect potentially catastrophic events on Earth at a given location.
Over the months I worked with an accomplished astrologer, David Matthews, and he realized that three planets, Eris, Sedna and Quaoar, had recently been discovered, and these had astrological properties—or energies—that could reflect events here on Earth. My old astrologer monk, Zabala, could not have known about them and so was missing vital information when he made his original prediction. Then my astrological expert discovered that these were the same planets that lined up in exactly the same place in March 2008 as they did in March 1988.
Some stars and planets connect with events on Earth, not necessarily causing these events, but reflecting them. The universe is a complete unity, so it might be considered that “as in the heavens so it is upon the earth.”
So now I had a chart that showed me the same degrees of planetary conjunction in 1988 as in 2008. Human-created powers being unleashed are represented by the planet Uranus—lightning and energy—and so, unexpectedly, this planet was also (as were others) in the right place in the sky to fit very neatly into my story. Pluto and Capricorn represent great transformation at this exact time. The relevant research fell neatly into place.
And what about the wild animals in
Ice Claw
? Not only is our climate change destroying species and placing others at risk, but there is a terrible trade in endangered animals. I’ve only touched on it in this story, but illegal trapping, shipping and killing are widespread. For more information on this, there are books in libraries and interesting facts on Web sites. Here are some you might want to look at:
wwf.org.uk
,
kidsplanet.org
and
newscientist.com/topic/endangered-species/
.
Acknowledgments
There is not a great deal known about the Basque people, their culture and language, so I am extremely grateful to Louise Letoux for translating the text I wanted to use into Basque. David Matthews, astrologer, spent many patient hours with me as I tried to create a feasible catastrophe. Elizabeth and Victoria Chiazzari advised on some technical points for whitewater kayaking. Oliver Wren kindly read, and commented on, my snowboarding sequences, and Dr. Grenville Major has, as always, advised me on medical matters. Any errors in the text, deliberate or otherwise, from these experts’ help are mine alone.
Once again, thanks to Keith Chiazzari and James McFarlane for their invaluable input. Isobel Dixon, my agent, manages to calm the storms before they escalate into hurricanes. A safe harbor for a sometimes stricken vessel.
I am fortunate to have a great team at Delacorte Press, so thanks go to Cindy Mapp and Jennifer Haase for flying Max Gordon’s flag! Beverly Horowitz’s and Wendy Loggia’s ongoing enthusiasm for Max Gordon and Danger Zone is a constant encouragement. I’m also very lucky to have my publishers at Random House in Canada—Lara Hinchberger and Amy Black, at Doubleday.
For the past nine years, David Gilman has been the principal writer on the UK television show
A Touch of Frost
. David has worked as a firefighter, a professional photographer, and a marketing manager, and served in the British Army’s Parachute Regiment Reconnaissance Platoon. He lives in England and has traveled the world, gathering inspiration for the Danger Zone books along the way.
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