Sun at Midnight (11 page)

‘Hold tight, won’t you?’ The touch of warning sarcasm was wasted as the wind tore the words out of his mouth and hurled them away.

They had made the fifteen-minute journey to the Adélie penguin rookery several times before. Rook accelerated,
with tiny snowflakes driving pinpricks into the narrow band of skin left exposed between his goggles and hood.

The Adélie colony consisted of more than a thousand breeding pairs. The males had come ashore first, hopping and sliding on their long journey from the outer margins of the ice where they had spent the winter, all of them heading for the exposed rocks where a nest of stones could be built. The females had followed them for the brief mating season, and their pairs of eggs would soon be deposited amongst the stones. Rook stopped the skidoo a hundred yards short of the rocks, and first Jochen and then Laure dismounted. Jochen shouldered his bag but Rook hoisted Laure’s and carried it for her. It was extremely heavy, he noted. She gave him a quick smile of gratitude from under the peak of her parka hood.

As they crested the rise, the noise of the rookery burst on them. It was a solid and constant chorus of guttural chirring. The rocks seethed with a black-and-white tide as late arrivals searched for last year’s mates or for new partners, and new nest builders tried to thieve stones from established pairs. There was a flurry of flippers and beaks everywhere, covering every inch of rock. The smell was as powerful as the noise. It was a piquant mixture of fish and oil and guano, and it permeated the clothes and hair and even the skin of anyone who ventured near. One night at the base, after a day’s work at the rookery, Laure had buried her face in her gloves and exclaimed ‘
Parfum de pingouin
’ with as much delight as if it were Chanel No. 5. She loved everything about penguins and Rook liked her for that. He could hardly distinguish what the other scientists specialised in. Especially Shoesmith. Shoesmith was the most bloodless man he had ever met. He sat over his papers as impassively as if he were carved out of wax.

Rook carried Laure’s pack to the point a few yards from the colony’s edge where a hump in the snow made a small vantage point. He was happy to help her, but he also liked
seeing the penguins. There was a whole miniature universe of greed and ambition and devotion and determination crowded on this expanse of rock at the bottom of the world.

As he watched, one bird turned its back on its perfunctory nest, and instantly two rivals filched a stone apiece and dropped them into their adjacent nests. The original owner turned back and made a threatening flurry in each direction, beak wide with outrage. As Rook stood there, three apparently unmated birds marched across the snow to investigate him. They came fearlessly up to the toes of his boots, then stood with their flippers slightly akimbo. They turned their heads to gaze at him, their white-ringed eyes unblinking. After a minute one of them sank down on to its front as if exhausted by the effort of curiosity.

Laure and Jochen unpacked the equipment. At this stage the task was to map the nest sites and ring-mark some of the birds. Later in the season, once the chicks were hatched and established, Laure would take feather and blood samples from her ringed birds for DNA analysis back in Paris. One of her studies, Rook had learned, related to the amount of heavy metals and toxic elements accumulated in the birds’ feathers. The annual accumulation of pollutants could be measured and so provide a precise bio-indicator of new pollution levels on the subcontinent.

This was the gist of what she had told him one night at dinner, in her perfect English. In spite of himself he was interested. To emphasise something about penguin behaviour that particularly intrigued her she would rest her hand lightly on his arm.

It had become accepted that everyone sat in the same places every night, so now Laure was always on his right and Phil on his left. Shoesmith presided at the table’s head, of course.

Laure had her net. She made a quiet circuit past the nests of birds she had already marked, then deftly swooped on a
bird quietly sitting with its back to her. Once it was netted, she slipped a hood over its head. The extinguishing of daylight fooled it into lying still, she had explained to Rook, and she could either ring its leg or fire a microchip into a flipper. Jochen followed behind her, an eager assistant, and they moved deeper into the penguin universe.

Rooker would have liked to stay longer out here, watching the birds, but there was the ship and the new arrival. Of course, Russ or Shoesmith himself could have taken the Zodiac out, but whereas Shoesmith was flexible with the other members of the expedition he seemed to expect Rooker to do everything that fell within his area of responsibility, without assistance from anyone else. So he checked the radio link with Jochen and then left them to their work.

As he came over the headland, Rooker saw the supply ship already gliding towards the mouth of the bay. It was only a small cargo vessel with an ugly high prow and a squat bridge tower, but it looked huge against the black water and the white-draped cliffs. The cabin and mast lights made a glittering garland in so much emptiness.

The sea was getting choppy in the wind, with ice rattling and churning in the swell. It wouldn’t be an easy journey in the inflatable. It would have been much better if the ship could have come closer in to shore, but the bay was too shallow. It was one of the reasons why the British had withdrawn from Kandahar. There was no deep-water landing in the summer season, and in winter the sea froze and the base became inaccessible by ship.

Either he made the pick-up right now, Rook thought, or the new arrival would have to stay on the ship until after the storm.

As he passed the radio room at one end of the lab hut he heard Niki’s voice.

‘MV
Polar Star
, MV
Polar Star
, this is Kandahar Station. Do you read me? Over.’

The laconic voice of the ship’s radio op crackled back. Rook waited until Niki pushed his headset aside and gave him the thumbs up.

‘The lady waits for you.’

Rook tramped to the main hut and exchanged his parka for a huge orange float suit. To fall into these ice-bound waters without protection would mean death within minutes. As he zipped himself in he saw that the table was laid for tea with Russell’s fresh loaf, jam and a plate of chocolate cupcakes. Shoesmith was hovering nearby while Russ and Arturo, the precise little Spanish climatologist, pulled on chest-high waders.

‘We’ll give you a hand, mate,’ Russ said.

Rooker took a spare life-vest. The three of them scrambled down the rocks to the shingle beach and ran over the jumble of ice and snow to the floating jetty where the Zodiac was tethered. It strained against the moorings as waves smashed around it. With Rook aboard, Russ and Arturo waited for a lull, then rushed the black inflatable out into waist-deep water. Rook lowered the outboard and to his relief it fired at the first pull. He was already broadside to the waves racing into the bay. A big one rushed at him and almost tipped the Zodiac over. He brought the boat round into the wind and opened the throttle. The inflatable roared forward, the prow lifting as high as his head as it breasted the waves, and ice and scudding water punched the rubber floor as he headed for the bay mouth.

The air was thick with spray and sea mist and gouts of snow. He turned on the powerful lamp he had brought with him and scanned the mass of heaving water for the ship. He caught sight of the masts pitching in the distance and drove steadily towards the lights.

CHAPTER SIX

Alice stood at the ship’s rail with her kitbags at her feet. She had spotted the station in the distance – it was nothing more than a pair of reddish specks marooned against a vast expanse of hostile emptiness. Then the clouds of snow and fog closed in again to obliterate even that much.

The breadth of the land’s desolation made her feel afraid, even though she had been longing for this moment ever since the ship had left Chile. She had been abjectly seasick for three days. The only glimpse she had caught of the Antarctic coast, when it finally appeared out of seas as high as mountains, had been through her cabin porthole. Yet now the moment had come to leave the little ship and the friendly Spanish crew, she was full of misgivings. She clamped her hands on the icy rail. The base looked so tiny and she knew just how remote it was. More than three days’ sailing to reach the southernmost tip of a distant continent again, then twenty-four hours of flying to reach home.

Two sailors lowered the flight of metal steps at the ship’s side. As the ship rolled, the platform at the bottom plunged under several feet of glassy water, then it rocked up again with spray cascading off it. One of the sailors drew a finger
across his throat and winked at her. Weakly, Alice smiled back.

Over the drumming of the ship’s engines, she caught the higher-pitched note of another engine. At the same moment a nimbus of light formed in the white murk. The sailors ran down the heaving steps as confidently as if they had been a set of stairs in Benidorm. On the platform they unhitched ropes and waited. A black dinghy, pitched at a threatening angle, materialised behind the smear of light. A big man in orange waterproofs swept the tiller in an arc, the boat crested a wave and landed neatly at the foot of the steps.

One sailor made it fast to the steps, so that ship and Zodiac rolled in unison. Waves swept over the dinghy and the platform, and ice-clogged water cascaded everywhere. The other sailor ran nimbly up the steps again, grabbed Alice’s luggage and yelled ‘
Vamos!
’ at her. She let go of the railings.

The metal treads were steep and slippery. With Spanish instructions and the boatman’s terse commands both unintelligible through the din of engines and surf, she half scrambled and half slithered down to the platform. Water immediately submerged it. The man’s orange arm grabbed her and hoisted as the dinghy flew upwards like a fairground ride. On the downwards plunge Alice launched herself with a sob of panic on to the dinghy’s floor. Her bags tumbled in after her and some nets of more-or-less-fresh vegetables.

The ropes snaked away and the Zodiac roared free from the ship’s flank.

With his eyes on the white wave caps, the boatman kicked a red life-vest towards where Alice was cowering amongst the bags of onions and peppers. The water’s cold sucked all the breath out of her. ‘Put that on,’ he shouted without taking his eyes off the sea.

She struggled to get her arms through the holes and fasten
the clasps across her chest. A rogue wave broke amidships and icy spray stung her face. Even though she was wearing weatherproofs she felt she was soaked to the skin. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably.

Behind her there were two long blasts on the ship’s hooter. Up on the bridge the captain and the mate were wishing the English scientist
bon voyage
.

The dinghy man loomed above her with his feet braced, one hand on the tiller, the other clasping a radio. He shouted again and Alice thought she caught the words
five minutes
. She huddled on the floor of the dinghy and prayed that they would either be ashore or dead within that time. She didn’t even care which, so long as it was fast.

The Zodiac and the waves raced each other to the shore. She had never been so far from home or felt the effects of distance so acutely. Nor had she ever been so apprehensive of what lay ahead of her.

It had happened with bewildering speed. It was barely a month since she had arrived at Lewis Sullavan’s London headquarters to be interviewed by Dr Richard Shoesmith.

The walls of the Sullavanco foyer were hung with representations of Sullavan newspaper front pages cast in bronze and television screens showed Sullavan TV programmes from around the world. There were three receptionists with identical smiles behind a long curved reception desk made of polished wood.

‘The Polar Office? You’ll find it on the fifth floor, if you’ll take the lift behind you.’

The lift was one of the kind that slides up a glass tube mounted on the outside of the building and which always tended to give her vertigo. The carpet of the fifth-floor corridor seemed to rise up to meet her as she stepped out and she steadied herself with one hand against the inner wall.

The Polar Office receptionist sat behind another sleek expanse of curved wood. There was an arrangement of hot-orange flowers at one end of it that made Alice think of Margaret.

‘Dr Shoesmith shouldn’t keep you too long,’ the receptionist said.

A secretary brought Alice a cup of coffee while she waited. This was all so mutedly but distinctly high-rent that it made her smile. It couldn’t have been further from the dowdy clutter of the Department of Geology, or any other academic institution she had ever known. If the Polar Office was anything to go by, Kandahar Station would have an indoor swimming pool and a resident manicurist.

Dr Richard Shoesmith did keep her waiting – a full twenty minutes. When he finally emerged from his inner office Alice saw a compact man perhaps ten years older than herself. He was noticeably good-looking, but there were pale vertical furrows etched between his eyebrows that stood out against his weather-beaten skin. When they shook, his hand enveloped hers. He looked fit and slightly out of place in the plush Sullavan offices.

‘I’m sorry, Dr Peel. I was talking to the French. They maintain a full research programme of their own down south, as you know. There are Antarctic politics, as there are politics everywhere else in the world.’

‘Yes.’ Alice smiled.

They sat down, Shoesmith behind his desk, and Alice to one side and in a slightly lower chair.

‘You have no previous Antarctic experience,’ he began.

‘None,’ she said steadily.

He looked through a neat sheaf of documents. She could see that there were offprints of some her published research papers, a copy of the full academic CV she had submitted at the request of Beverley Winston, Lewis Sullavan’s
assistant. There was also an excellent reference provided by Professor Devine.