“I didn’t think . . .”
“Right!”
“I didn’t think it was important, Simon . . .”
“Not important! Christ. He killed them alclass="underline" Robin, Jeremiah, Smith, McCann, the rescue team, eleven men in all, and you don’t think . . .”
“Five years, Simon, more! Can’t you forget?”
“Would you forget your brother?”
“No, but . . .”
“You should have told me, Doc.”
Warren’s eyes hunted round for something to break the round of increasing hysteria. They lit on his tall, golden daughter: perfect.
“Simon, I want you to meet my daughter Katherine. Katherine, Simon Quick, my camp director. Simon, Katherine is going to be my assistant.”
Kate saw a man of middle height, fine-boned, almost birdlike, but giving off an aura of power and energy which verged on the frenetic. Even in practical jeans and anorak, he was neat, nearly dapper. His face was thin, precisely put together, almost beautiful, but marked now with white strain, black rings under the eyes, a blood-crusted bruise on the left cheek. The hand he held out was bandaged.
“Mr. Quick, how do you do?”
“Please call me Simon, Miss Warren. I am as you see me: battered but unbowed. In a spot of bother.” Another English accent. The voice was calmer now.
“You really need a bandage on that bruise, Simon,” she told him.
“First aid too? You will be a treasure. Yes. The doctor said I needed looking after. No, not your father; he doesn’t care if the whole world needs looking after as long as his floating flowers are OK.” He paused to shake his head, then grinned ruefully: “But of course, you’ll be the same! Here I am talking as though you’re a normal human being, and you’re really here to aid and abet this marine lunacy!”
“You disagree with my father’s theories?”
“Good heavens no! I don’t know anything about your father’s theories. Can’t tell a plankton from a poppy; but anything that has me out to sea in rubber boats fetching green goo in a milk bottle from out among the summer floes in a high wind, that’s lunacy.”
She shivered. “Is there always a high wind?”
He grinned again. “Not always, no. And we don’t really use a milk bottle.”
Her father’s hand came down on his shoulder. “Simon . . .”
The thin body stiffened, the laughter draining out of his eyes. Ross and Job came slowly across from the airport building. Quick remained calm, but he shook with the effort of doing so.
Ross held out his hand. “They didn’t tell me you were camp director, Simon.”
Quick waited until the hand dropped. “They didn’t tell me it would be you working on the winterisation,” he said, his voice shaking, full of loathing. He held out his hand to Job. “How are you, Job?”
“I’m fine, Simon. But you look terrible. Trouble up at the camp?”
“A little. That’s what I’m doing down here.”
There was silence.
Ross and Quick looked at each other like a couple of animals preparing to fight.
“Look,” said Warren, his voice suddenly commanding, “Can you two get on? Can you bury the past? Work together?” Silence.
“For Heaven’s sake.” He started again. “I’ve got almost no choice in this. I have my orders too, and they,” his hand made a vague gesture towards some far distant head office, “they want both of you on this project. In the field you’re each the best we’ve got. That’s all they know. They don’t care about personalities.” He paused again, took a deep breath. “Look.” His voice was hard, his tone absolute, “if you can work together we’ll forget this. I don’t want you to love each other, I want you to work together. If you can, OK. If not, I’ll have to get on to New York, and have one of you taken back.”
“I can . . .” said Ross.
“Simon? If anyone’s going back, it’ll be you. Colin has to get that camp set up fully for the winter work. If you can’t manage it, say now, and you needn’t come back up with us. Colin can be camp director until they send up a replacement.”
“No,” said Simon Quick. “I can do it.”
“Good. It’s time this thing was forgotten.”
Quick made a guttural noise in his throat. “I’ll never forget. Eleven men he killed.”
“Ten,” said Job.
It took the wind out of Quick for a moment. But his rage was too great to be controlled at that moment, even by the Eskimo’s massive calm. “You mean to tell me Jeremiah’s still alive, then?”
“Jeremiah’s dead, Simon, you know that; but Colin bears no guilt for it.”
“No guilt? He’s guilty all right. For all four of them. And for those seven poor bastards that had to go out and look for them and never came back. He’s guilty for all of them. And Charlie? What about Charlie? Not guilty again?” His white face worked, eyes blazing. “I’ll work with you Ross, but I won’t forgive you . . . That’s my whole family you killed. My whole damned family.”
He turned, and began to walk towards the plane. “Simon!” snapped Warren. “You will work together. Make up your mind to that now, or you go straight into Anchorage and wait for the next plane south.” Simon’s head nodded. He did not turn back. Ross watched him, his face a wilderness. Warren shrugged. He didn’t want to send Simon back because it would do untold damage to his career, but he really had no time for all this now. He decided to think the whole thing over. If Simon continued to carry on like this, he could always come back down when the plane returned from Barrow.
Kate turned to Job. “This Charlie,” she whispered, “was he another of Ross’s friends?”
And Job turned to her, his face expressionless, his eyes distant. “No,” he said, “Charlie was his wife.”
iv
The plane levelled out over Fairbanks on its way north from Anchorage. The whine of the twin jets died as the throttles eased back from climb to cruise power. Unseen beneath the cabin floor the orders given by the levers passed along conduits and wires in the plane’s belly to the harnessed fires in her engines; information passed back to the dials and gauges of the lighted instrument display panel. The co-pilot was doing the flying, and now they had reached cruise altitude he was adjusting the trim by turning a small wheel on his right. He looked at what his instruments told him, and his instruments told him all was well, so he watched the artificial horizon roll and settle with the actual horizon as the plane turned on to its course to Barrow field.
The pilot, like most of his kind, had the ability to do many things at once. At the moment he was chewing gum, smoking a cigarette and whistling.
They could have been father and son, such was the difference in their age and experience; indeed this was the relationship upon which they had modelled their own, the pilot teaching and ageing, the co-pilot learning and maturing. The older man’s name was Ed. He had taught the younger how to fly and the younger man had learned well. Ed had passed on the knowledge culled from flying more types of plane than the younger knew of, and in more varied conditions than the other could imagine. He had flown all over the world during the Second World War, had been a captain in his own right immediately it had finished, boosted up the ladder by the demise of so many of his generation. He had been a captain ever since, for one airline or another; but the big jets taxed him more than he could ever admit now, so he had moved over to flying smaller ones. As pilots of his generation were notoriously nostalgic this move in no way undermined his great reputation, so that whenever his name was mentioned among senior captains and aircrew there would be a sober shaking of heads and someone would say, “Now there is a flyer.”
Hiram was the co-pilot’s name. Hiram Preston. He was a man approaching thirty who had somehow missed out on his twenties. He was fairly senior but still young; maturing but immature. He still thought of himself as the All American Boy because he had yet to find out that he wasn’t. He checked the instruments which told him all was well. He looked out at the clear blue sky and his eyes, with nothing to fasten upon, focussed a little more than two feet in front of him. Like the pilot, he was whistling a tune, but he was neither chewing nor smoking.