Daedalus dropped like a stricken angel. Bazza threw himself clear, and bang, Queequeeg hit the deck.
‘Not the most elegant of landings,’ Starbuck said.
‘Good enough,’ Drake replied.
When Queequeeg stepped out, Bazza was apoplectic, doing a song and dance. Queequeeg laughed at the little man, pointed down the fiord and then, looking up, saw Drake, Colby and the guys on the circuit. Forgetting Bazza, he gave a thumbs-up sign.
‘Hunting must be good,’ Colby said.
Not long afterwards, the fiord’s double-locked gateway opened and two tugs entered, towing between them what looked like a large, uncut sparkling diamond.
Drake hit the showers.
The run was a bonding thing. Showering together, too, allowed the squad to be easy in their skins with each other. The guys were good mates, always looking after each other. Such things mattered, especially when they were on patrol where anything could happen.
Flask, Starbuck and Samurai Sam were horsing around, pressing into Colby as she made for the women’s shower room. ‘Hey, Colby, save some water and shower with friends,’ they laughed.
‘You guys are all macho, penis-oriented, honcho shits,’ she answered, slipping easily past them and slamming the door.
‘We love it when you talk dirty,’ Czar and Hari called. ‘Wa-hey!’
‘Wa-ho!’ came the bellowing response.
The infra-red came on, the aged pipes wheezed and coughed, and the fine steam whooshed at them from all angles for the sixty-second max timing reserved for airmen; everyone else at the base got forty-five seconds. And why shouldn’t airmen be privileged? After all, they were the reason why the base existed; without them, the Tangaroa Consortium wouldn’t have anything to sell to the international community.
As the men dressed, Drake checked them for dings and bangs that they might not have reported to the medic after their last operation. He was worried at Samurai Sam’s limp. ‘Better tell him to get that checked.’ Most of all, he was pleased by the men’s good mood as they zipped themselves into their black overalls and leather flying jackets. Sixty seconds of steam was just enough to warm and sting them all a little, to remind them of their humanity.
And that they were still alive.
In the cafeteria, Drake picked up a tray and headed for the breakfast counter. Matilda was on duty.
‘Bacon and eggs?’ Drake asked. Well, the soggy yellow, white and brown concoction looked like it had once had poultry and pig origin.
‘Rank has privileges,’ she answered. ‘Do you want coffee with that? Real beans today, all the way from Chile.’
‘Thanks.’ He, Starbuck and Flask moved to their usual table near the window where he sipped at the coffee and thought back to his Pacific island dream. Even the notion was problematic. Did anybody live in Hawaii any more? Ha, with climate change, anywhere within 20 degrees latitude north or south of the equator was too hot to live in now.
‘Hey, Matilda,’ he called, ‘is Hawaii still alive?’
She looked at him, puzzled. ‘Yeah, just,’ she said.
‘The military airbase at Hickam’s still operable,’ Czar added, ‘for long-range military.’
‘Thanks.’ No locals. Sweet leilani, heavenly flower? No palm trees. No golden strand of beach. Certainly no mai tais and dancing hula girls. Definitely in your dreams, mate.
But a memory welled up. His aged Maori grandfather, whom he called Huppapuppa — from childhood days when he couldn’t quite say Wharepapa, which was Grandad’s name. The old man helped Hemi and Phyllis with the cows. He had his own small bach on the farm — didn’t want to take up space in the farmhouse — and as a teenager Drake loved to go over and have a yarn after dinner.
Huppapuppa was a mine of information about the world before the Big Burn. During one rambling talk, his eyes had lit up at the mention of the Hawaiian Islands. ‘Oh, Honolulu …’ he had coughed, catching his breath on his roll your own, ‘that was one lulu of a place. Met myself a cute local girl on the beach … they had beaches then … and we went swimming at Hanauma Bay … it was paradise.’
Paradise wasn’t a word you could associate with the Tangaroa Consortium, where the sky was always grey, the personnel were ex-military and the wind could freeze your balls off. Here, the locals were just a bunch of flying buccaneers and base personnel, with an equal contingent of women thrown in like Colby, Sally and Matilda, to maintain equity between the sexes. This core contingent was supplemented by mercenaries like Samurai Sam, Starbuck and Flask, all drawing pay from the consortium, one of many in the lucrative business of capturing the best water in the world for the commercial market:
Antarctic 100 % Pure, the finest water on the planet.
When Colby came into the cafeteria Drake excused himself and went to join her.
‘Fixing her up for a date tonight, boss?’ Hari kidded him.
‘Don’t you mean another date?’ Flask added with a wink.
Colby overheard them. When Drake sat down beside her, she was smouldering. ‘I’m no trophy,’ she warned him. ‘You know that, don’t you?’ Then, abruptly, she said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages now, how did you get your name?’
‘It’s really Francis but after too many punch-ups on the marae I changed it. And Drake went with Francis. My grandfather was really disappointed in me because he had given me boxing lessons and thought I was wimping out.’
Not only did Huppapuppa teach Drake boxing: it was from him that Drake had developed his love of books. And it was from his lips, as they milked the cows one day and the milk spurted, rich and foaming into the cups, that Drake as a teenager had learnt about the opening up of Antarctica to the water trade.
Huppapuppa told him that, with climate change, the ice shelves of Antarctica had begun calving. Huge icebergs broke off, filling the air with a constant crack crack crack as they split away, creating huge waves when they crashed into the sea. The original Antarctic Treaty partners had tried to maintain ownership of the giant bergs when they hit the warmer northern currents, but because they were no longer part of the continental mass, the UN said no. They decreed a Free International Zone (FIZ) that allowed any nation to capture what had become unexpected bounty: the pure, fresh, glacial water of the bergs. Any ice that made its way from the frozen continent could belong to anybody who hoisted a flag on it.
The Maori-owned Tangaroa Consortium dated from the days when the government returned Maori land under the Treaty of Waitangi. They didn’t think the fiord would be of use to anyone, let alone have strategic value someday.
Were they ever wrong.
Drake watched as more bergs came up the narrow neck of the fiord, sliding serenely through the still water. Not only had they been towed; forward sails had been attached to them and, belling in the wild wind, had brought them faster to the fiord. However, as soon as they entered the double-locked gateway, the sails immediately fell limp, gathered in by tug personnel. From the gateway, the bergs moved through a carefully controlled system of locks, one opening while the other behind it was closing; the purpose was to progressively diminish the amount of saltwater that might have come through the gateway with the bergs.
The Tangaroa Consortium preferred to harvest tabulars, the colossi of the iceberg world. These floating frozen islands scraped both sky and earth. Below the surface they carried keels a massive two-thirds of their mass, often skidding along the bottom of the fiord. There the natural contours had been deepened and engineered to capture the bergs on automatic rails that took them to melting positions.