The refinery was constructed around three great distillation tanks, each the size of a cathedral. The structure was spiked by radio masts and cranes. The platform floated on four buoyant legs. It was tethered to the seabed by cables as thick as a redwood tree trunk. It looked like something out of a nightmare: a squat spider big enough to crush cities. A million tons of steel. Product of twenty different slipways. Assembled in a deep-water fjord and towed north.
‘Terrifying,’ said Jane.
‘What is?’
‘It’s one thing to sit with our feet up in the canteen, dreaming up plans to sail home. It’s another thing to see it for real. The ocean. The ice. We wouldn’t last a day.’
‘We have time to prepare,’ said Punch. ‘Plenty of survival gear aboard Rampart. And you wouldn’t be out here alone. We would have each other. Ghost is a solid guy. Kind of man you can rely upon in a crisis.’ ‘Yeah.’
‘And we have you.’
‘Sure. When we run out of food I’ll be first in the pot.’
‘I saw a kid on TV a few years back,’ said Punch. ‘He went hiking in the Rockies. He got hit by a landslide. He woke up with his arm pinned by a boulder. He lay there for a couple of days hoping for rescue. Nobody came, so he used his belt as a tourniquet, then sawed off his arm with a penknife.’
‘Good God.’
‘Picked up his canteen and walked back to civilisation minus an arm.’
‘Damn.’
‘This is your moment. You know that, right? I’ve seen you, since this shit kicked off. It’s like watching someone wake from a long sleep.’
‘But what good is it?’ asked Jane, looking out to sea. ‘In the face of this. All our heroism. All our will to live. It’s a bad joke.’
Sian cleared Simon’s room in Medical. She gathered up his dog-tags, his signet ring, his watch. She found a heavily annotated copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in his coat pocket. She put it all in a plastic box and gave it to Nikki.
Nikki was in the observation bubble staring out to sea.
‘Thanks,’ she said, as Sian handed her the box. She tossed it aside without looking at it.
Nikki spent the afternoon scanning wavebands.
She turned up the volume and put her ear to the speaker.
‘Are you sure you heard it?’ asked Sian.
‘There was a voice. Male. English. It faded in and out. Has done for days.’
She turned the dial.
‘There. You hear it?’
‘…elp… ear us?.. urgent assis..!’
‘Get your coat. We have to boost the range on this thing.’
Nikki found a coil of steel cable in the boathouse. She carried it to the upper deck.
‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Sian.
‘When I was at university I had a crappy transistor radio on my desk. It had a broken aerial. If I let the stub of the aerial touch my anglepoise lamp I got a signal. Maybe we can lengthen the antenna and pull the same trick.’
‘Perhaps we should talk to Ghost. He might be able to help.’
‘Girl, you’ve got to shake off that passive mindset. We’re in deep shit. You can’t constantly rely on Ghost to kiss it all better. You’ve got to start taking care of yourself.’
The short-wave antenna was a scaffold spike four metres tall. Nikki climbed the spike and lashed the cable to the top. She climbed down. She tied the other end of the cable to a balloon pod.
‘Okay. Stand back.’
She pulled the red rip cord. The plastic case split open. Silver balloon fabric spilled, unravelled and began to inflate. An explosive roar as the helium canister discharged. The foil swelled and rose. The balloon lifted skyward taking the cable with it. A silver teardrop shimmering like a globule of mercury. The cable extended the antenna ten metres.
‘Let’s see if that does any good.’
They returned to the observation bubble and threw their coats over a chair.
‘This is refinery platform Kasker Rampart, can you hear me, over?’
‘Hello? Hello?’
‘This is Rampart. Go ahead.’
‘Thank God. Thank Christ. This is drilling station Kasker Raven. Hope you’re in better shape than us, Rampart. We could use your help.’
Kalashnikov. Four rotting cabins facing the sea. A wooden Orthodox church with an onion dome. Wooden grave markers.
Jane tethered the boat to the jetty. She climbed ashore. Punch passed her backpacks.
The cabins had been built by whalers. They had partially collapsed. Rooms choked with roof beams and snow. The little church was intact. Some of the fittings were a hundred years old. Rotted pews. A rotted altar.
The back room. A blubber stove with a cobwebbed flue. A shelf loaded with antique supplies. Fry’s cocoa. Heinz Indian relish. Tins of boiled cabbage.
The floor was littered with modern camping detritus. Empty stove canisters. Food wrappers. A ripped sleeping bag.
Jane found a box. Calorie bars and a couple of cans.
‘Eight years old,’ said Jane, checking the expiration date. ‘Probably still edible.’
‘Bit of a wasted trip. The place is good for firewood, I suppose.’
‘What’s worth more right now, do you think? By weight. Bullion or a packet of peanuts?’
They stood in the doorway and watched sunset. Mid-afternoon. Eighteen hours of night.
‘By mid-winter the ocean will be frozen,’ said Punch. ‘You could walk to the Canadian mainland. A fifteen-hundred-kilometre hike. Pitch dark and minus fifty, but if you, me and Sian took the snowmobiles and a sledge loaded with fuel we could get a hell of a long way before we had to ski.’
‘Global warming. The sea freezes less and less each year. No guarantee we would reach Canada.’
‘Worth a shot.’
‘And leave everyone else behind?’
‘Too many of us. An entire football team. I doubt it’s possible to get us all home, by land or sea.’
‘I read a lot of travel books before I came here. Fantasised what it would be like. I read Scott’s journal. Those last entries as they froze to death in that tent. “Had we lived, I should have made a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.” I got totally caught up in the romance.’
‘Scott was a self-aggrandising dick.’
‘That’s my point. Shackleton got his men home. Shipwrecked on an ice floe. Couple of lifeboats. Bit of food. He got them home. Every single one.’
They closed the door and used the ripped sleeping bag to plug holes in the frame.
Punch unfolded a map.
‘One or two research stations on this side of the island. Marine biologists. Geologists. Most of them like Apex: little more than a couple of tents. Pretty much all of them will have been evacuated for winter.’
‘This one?’
‘McClure. Seismologists, I think.’
‘Walking distance?’
‘Yeah, what the fuck.’
Jane unpacked the radio.
‘Shore team to Rampart, do you copy, over?’
She waited for a reply, but instead heard a strange tocking sound like the crackle of a Geiger counter.
‘Atmospherics?’ suggested Punch.
Jane re-tuned.
‘Shore team to Rampart.’
‘Rampart here.’ Sian’s voice.
‘We made it to Kalashnikov, over.’
‘Tell Punch we miss him. Rawlins is brewing some atrocity in the kitchen. Regurgitated egg, I think.’
‘That ticking noise. Can you hear it at your end?’
‘It comes and goes. It’s not our equipment.’