An envelope was thrust into his hand as the car drove away. The man felt the sheaf of papers inside, but first reached in and pulled out an object lying loose at the bottom. It was a golden ring, lustrous with age, and as he raised it he felt his lips brush against the symbol as they had done since childhood, a symbol so different from the one in his prison cell yet so familiar. He slipped the ring over the index finger of his right hand and pulled out the sheaf of papers. On top of them was a newspaper image imprinted in his brain for more than five years now, showing an old man with a swastika armband lying in a pool of blood. He looked at the dead face and then out at the lowering sky, and whispered to himself: “Payback time.”
“There she is now,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s the first time I’ve seen her on the open sea. It’s like meeting a long-lost friend, born again.”
Seaquest II had been commissioned only three months before, and the west Greenland ice-core project was her first official outing as a deep-sea research vessel of the International Maritime University. Ever since her predecessor had been lost in the Black Sea six months ago, Jack had been determined to find a replacement, and had decided to rename a vessel already on the stocks for IMU in the yards in Finland. Whereas the original Seaquest and her sister ship Sea Venture had been derived from the Akademik-class Russian research vessel, designed originally for acoustic submarine surveillance during the Cold War, Seaquest II was an entirely new concept planned from scratch to IMU specifications. Her state-of-the-art navigational features included a dynamic positioning system, using lateral thrusters and ballast control to maintain stability in virtually any sea conditions-vital for position-keeping and search tracking as well as to maintain a level platform for laboratory work. She could launch remote-operated vehicles and submersibles, using either deck cranes or an internal docking berth which allowed underwater egress. Like all IMU vessels she had a defensive capability, with a gun pod retracted below the foredeck. And, crucial for polar research, the ice-strengthened hull allowed her to plough through the shattered sea ice which choked the coastal waters north of the Arctic Circle even in early summer.
Jack was still casting a critical eye over her deck arrangements as the Lynx bounced on to the helipad and the rotors shuddered to a halt. While the awaiting crewmen secured the undercarriage to the deck, Jack eased off his helmet and released his seat belt harness. The sun was burning off the sea mist and ahead of him he could see the entire length of the superstructure, gleaming white in the pellucid Arctic light. He was in his element again, and his excitement showed as he leaned back and grinned at Maria and Jeremy. “Welcome to Seaquest II. This is where the fun really begins.”
James Macleod led them directly from the helipad through the hangar entrance and down a steep gangway into the bowels of the ship. They were joined by Costas, who had been winched down from the US Air Force Chinook fifteen minutes before and had been busy uncrating his cargo on the stern deck. He looked as if he needed about a week’s sleep, but with his sleeves rolled up on his burly forearms and fresh smears of grease on his beloved overalls, it was clear he was not going to waste a moment getting the equipment operational.
They reached the lower deck and Macleod ushered them through an open door into a brightly lit lecture room, gesturing for them to stand beside a projector screen to the right of the door. Ranged in front of them on plastic chairs was a motley group of about thirty men and women, some talking intently among themselves and others hunched over laptops and sheaves of printouts. They all looked up as Macleod entered, and Jack could see several bearded blond men with the Danish flag on their parkas, a couple of native Greenlander faces, and a number of men and women wearing the navy blue sweaters of the US Air Force. He nodded courteously to a man in the front row splayed languidly on his chair and stroking his sideburns, so lost in thought that he failed to catch Jack’s gesture. Lanowski was a brilliantly adaptive engineer who had been indispensable to IMU since they had poached him from MIT, but he had a manner calculated to irritate almost everyone who came into contact with him.
“People, you should all be familiar with Jack Howard, my colleague at IMU. At least from the TV news.” Jack looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Macleod gestured to the other three. “Dr. Maria de Montijo and her graduate student Jeremy Haverstock from Oxford, though he’s originally from the States. Costas you already know.”
They gazed with evident curiosity at Jack, a face familiar even to those who did not know him personally. Costas grinned at a few old friends, several of whom had got to know him very well when he had attended the project briefing several weeks previously at the IMU campus in Cornwall.
“We’re an international team, as you can see,” Macleod said to Jack. “Officially the project’s a collaboration with NASA and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, and there are also a couple of guys from the International Ice Patrol. We’re all doing our own thing, glaciology, biology, palaeoclimatology, but we’re pooling basic resources. IMU provides the research vessel, NASA the satellite imagery and GSDG the aerial photography and laser altitude measurements. A lot of the work’s just monitoring, making sure the ice conditions are safe enough for us to get the samples we need. With the summer melt almost in full swing we’re working against the clock. I wanted you here for a quick meet and greet. Any questions for this group now, fire away.”
“I don’t want to detain anyone, so just a few,” Jack said. “The Greenland ice cap, the inland ice. Can we have a swift rundown on its age and significance?”
“Most of it dates from the last two hundred and fifty years, and most of the ice at Ilulissat is from the last hundred thousand years,” Lanowski said, brushing his shoulder-length hair from his face. “It’s an outstanding survival from the last glaciation of the Quaternary.”
“Meaning?” Maria asked.
“Meaning the Ice Age we all know about, the one that ended ten thousand years ago when the ice sheets receded,” Lanowski explained, sighing impatiently. “Quaternary is a geologic term encompassing the recent Ice Age, beginning about one-point-eight million years ago, encompassing many episodes of advance and retraction in the ice. We’ve been in one of those warm spells for the last ten thousand years.”
“So what makes Greenland so special?”
“There are plenty of glaciers around the world dating from the Ice Age, and of course there are the polar ice caps,” Macleod said. “But the Greenland ice cap is the last remnant of the continental ice sheets that covered the northern hemisphere until ten thousand years ago. It’s a fantastic window into the past, as exciting to me as any of your archaeological discoveries.”
“Which brings us to why you’re here,” Jack said.
“It’s still early days, but the results are very promising,” one of the Danish scientists said. “We’re mostly looking at air bubbles trapped in the ice as it formed, preserving a detailed record of atmospheric conditions in the Ice Age. The calving front is now exposing areas of ice formed very recently, in a cold snap just prior to the Great Melt ten thousand years ago. It’s an unparalleled opportunity, the first time any research like this has been possible.”
“Global warming has its uses,” Costas remarked wryly.
“We can’t turn back the clock now, so we may as well get all the science out of it we can,” the Dane replied.
“One question,” Maria said. “You wouldn’t get me going anywhere near that calving front we just saw on the glacier. How do you get your samples?”
“We drill cores, just like a sedimentologist or an oil prospector on land,” Macleod said. “Each band of ice represents a cold spell, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It’s a bit like dendrochronology, tree-ring dating.” Macleod turned and looked intently at Jack. “Which brings me to why you’re here.”