Tundra (7 page)

Lenilko looked at the passport photo. Yes, there was no doubt. It matched the one in John Farmer’s passport.

‘Get on the Hughes information, find out how extensively he was followed up, and what was missed,’ said Lenilko, his voice more businesslike now, but still tinged with good humour.

He rose, strode to the window once more, gazed out at the white sky, rapt, feeling as light and unburdened as the flakes of swirling snow.

Y
ears earlier, Purkiss had met a man who had a phobia for cold temperatures. Not just an excessive dislike of them, but a full-blown clinical syndrome which resulted in severe panic attacks whenever he found himself caught outdoors with the weather turning bad, or even when a shower head in an unfamiliar bathroom failed to deliver within a few seconds water that was at least warm. The man had developed the phobia when, working on an oil rig in Alaska, he’d fallen into the sea after a partial collapse of the superstructure. He had been rescued half-drowned and with severe hypothermia, but his physical injuries had healed fully.

For the first time Purkiss understood fully how such an intense, overwhelming terror of the cold might develop.

He ducked his head down as low as he dared while still allowing himself to peer through the snowmobile’s windscreen at the ground ahead. The machine handled beautifully, gliding across the snow surface as gracefully as an Olympic iceskater. There was a danger in that. The passage across the tundra was so smooth that it was easy to lose awareness of just how fast you were moving. Purkiss’s speedometer showed ninety-five kilometres per hour. He slowed a fraction.

Ahead of him, across the yards of undulating whiteness, he could make out Wyatt’s own machine. The man handled it confidently, almost arrogantly, with the occasional flourish such as a tilt towards one side or the other before a correction back to the middle.

Behind Purkiss was the third snowmobile, carrying Montrose and Dr Clement.

Back at the hangar, a minor argument had broken out. The engineer, the big and taciturn Swede, Haglund, had insisted Purkiss ride with Wyatt. Purkiss had other ideas.

‘I want to get to grips with one of these. Get a feel for what all of you experience when you go out in the field.’

Haglund said: ‘They are not toys.’

‘I’m aware of that, and I promise you I won’t do anything reckless. Nor would I suggest I ride one on my own if I wasn’t confident I could handle it.’

Purkiss had used a more basic type of Arctic Cat in rural Wisconsin one winter. That was several years ago, when he was still working for SIS and had been on a trip to try and persuade a retired agent to return to Britain and to intelligence work. The visit had been brief, and a failure. But Purkiss was of the opinion that no experience was wasted experience, and now it appeared his introduction to the snowmobile would come in useful.

Haglund didn’t look happy. But Wyatt spoke up: ‘Go on, Gunnar, let him. We’ll keep an eye on him.’ He glanced at Purkiss, his expression light but neutral.

Purkiss hadn’t encountered Wyatt all morning, had met him again just a few minutes earlier when Purkiss had gone to the hangar with Montrose and Clement. Wyatt was with Haglund, loading kit on to the snowmobiles. He nodded at Purkiss.

‘Good morning?’

‘Informative.’

And that was the full extent of their interaction.

Haglund sighed heavily. ‘Okay. You ride alone. But you damage my machine, you pay for it. Understood?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Purkiss.

Haglund showed him the Cat, a small, single-person model. Purkiss got in, familiarised himself with the controls.

‘Aren’t you bringing anything with you?’ said Montrose. ‘Equipment or something?’

‘I have my camera.’ Purkiss lifted his shoulder bag. ‘But I’m here more about the story than anything else.’

Outside, it was as though the cold had been milling about, waiting for victims, and descended upon them ravenously as soon as they emerged. Purkiss cringed within his layers of clothing, pulled the goggles he’d been provided with down over his eyes, feeling as if their very sclerae would freeze into brittle shells within seconds. He looked at the others. They seemed unfazed. Even Patricia Clement moved naturally, without huddling, as she climbed on to the rear of the snowmobile into which Montrose had already settled himself.

Now, the vehicles sped across the tundra, the bleak landscape less threatening than the very cold itself.

Montrose had briefed Purkiss succinctly and unenthusiastically on the way to the hangar. ‘The site’s Outpost 56-J, not that the name’s important. It’s seventeen kilometres due east of here, so it’ll take us twenty minutes, unless we encounter any freak weather. Which Wyatt says isn’t likely, and he’s the expert.’

‘What sort of site is it?’ Purkiss asked.

‘It’s useful to most of us in our different fields, because of its nature,’ Montrose said, his tone thawing a little. ‘It’s on the southern side of a ridge, which protects it to some extent against the winds from the north. The soil’s unusually fertile there, which means good sampling for Medievsky and Budian, and for me. The protection from the wind allows Wyatt to set up his equipment without too much difficulty.’

Purkiss glanced at Clement, who was walking alongside Montrose on the other side. ‘And you’re interested in every site, because you get to study the people.’

Clement smiled. They were in the entrance corridor, heading for the front door, and in the fluorescent light from overhead the psychologist’s skin looked more transparent than ever. ‘Yes, Mr Farmer,’ she said. ‘But I also get to familiarise myself first-hand with some of the work my colleagues are doing. It’s essential to understand the work in order to understand why they engage in it.’

To Purkiss the scenery looked frighteningly uniform, and when he checked the dashboard clock and saw they’d been riding for a full twenty-five minutes, unease clawed at his throat. Had they overshot? Were they lost in the vastness of Siberia, thirteen million square kilometres of some of the harshest terrain on the planet?

He watched Wyatt veer rightwards ahead, and slow, and in the distance through the hazy gloom an elongated bulky shape loomed. As they drew nearer, Purkiss saw it was a ridge of rock, its height difficult to be sure of as the upper regions merged into the darkening sky.

Purkiss pulled the Arctic Cat in next to Wyatt’s. A rudimentary prefab structure had been set up against the base of the ridge, its door half-obscured by a bank of snow. Wyatt climbed off the snowmobile and lifted two cases of equipment from the back. He unclipped a shovel from the side of the vehicle and nodded to Purkiss.

‘There’s one on yours, too. Give me a hand clearing the entrance, will you?’

They set to work digging away the snow as Montrose and Clement brought further cases from their own vehicle. Inside the prefab hut Montrose lit a paraffin heater. Purkiss felt himself drawn to it with a selfish greed he imagined starving men experienced at the sight of a limited food supply. It was all he could do not to shove the others aside and hunch himself over the sudden warmth.

‘You know about permafrost, right?’ Montrose said.

Purkiss nodded. ‘Soil or rock that’s remained below the freezing point of water for at least two years.’

‘The permafrost in this part of Siberia is around three kilometres deep. On top of it, there’s an active layer, a covering of soil and sediment which freezes and thaws seasonally. The active layer’s where we find our interesting stuff. In my case it’s microbes. Here at Outpost 56-J the active layer doesn’t often get cold enough to completely freeze. That means it’s a virtual paradise for the likes of me and Medievsky and Budian.’

To Wyatt, Purkiss said, ‘What sort of data will you be gathering here?’

‘Wind profiling,’ said Wyatt. ‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

Purkiss pulled his goggles down once more and followed Wyatt out into the cold. He strode behind the man, watching his back. Was Wyatt intending to confront Purkiss directly, to tell him he knew who he was and why he was there?

Twenty yards or so from the hut, a squat canvas shape stood alone on a flat stretch of ground. Wyatt removed the canvas cover. Underneath was something that looked like a large, functional office desk, with a square dish mounted on the top and facing skywards.

‘This is a SODAR system,’ said Wyatt. ‘SOnic Detection And Ranging. It measures wind speeds at different heights, and the thermodynamic structure of the troposphere. That’s the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere.’

He moved around the instrument, pointing out working features, talking with a scholar’s earnestness about the uses to which it might be put and the scientific benefits thereof. To Purkiss he sounded like an expert lost in his topic and eager to convey a sense of its importance to a lay person.

He didn’t sound like a man who had something to hide, and had just met the person who was there to expose him.

Purkiss acted his own part, asking questions, requesting clarification now and again. At no point did he get personal, asking Wyatt how he come to pursue this line of work. Those weren’t the sort of questions for a field trip.

When the conversation had run its course, Purkiss headed back towards the hut, grateful for the warmth within. He found Clement there on her own, seated with a mug of coffee in hand and a dictaphone in the other. She stopped in mid-word.

‘Sorry,’ said Purkiss. ‘Should’ve knocked.’

Clement gave another of her faint smiles. She nodded at the coffee urn. Purkiss helped himself, taking it black and scalding. He’d been intending to go out and find Montrose, but the coffee gave him an excuse to linger in the hut a little longer.

‘Recording your observations of me?’ he asked. It was rude of him, and gauche, but it was something that would have come up eventually.

She raised her eyebrows mildly. ‘Of course. I probably creep you out at first. But you’ll get used to me. The others did.’

‘You’ve had no opposition at all?’

‘Oh, some. But this is what I do. I study groups of people in unusual workplaces. Remote research facilities, oil rigs, air traffic control stations. By their very nature, the staff there are under pressure. It’s normal for people to feel uneasy with me hovering around. As I say, they get used to it.’

She tipped her head a fraction. ‘Your question’s interesting, though. Why did you ask it? Have you experienced opposition since you arrived here, Mr farmer?’

‘John.’

‘John, yes.’

Purkiss shrugged. ‘I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours. It’s too soon to tell how I’m going to be received.’

‘Evasive answer, John.’ Her smile was gently chiding. ‘I’ve noticed a few things. A few looks people have been giving you.’

Purkiss’s interest was piqued. He decided to make the first move. ‘Well, Ryan Montrose doesn’t seem to like me much.’

‘I’ve seen that, yes.’

‘Neither does Dr Keys.’

‘Correct.’

‘Do you have any idea why?’

He thought she’d become coy, and cite confidentiality or something. But then he remembered these weren’t her clinical patients. They were simply people she was observing. ‘Doug Keys is annoyed with everybody. It’s not personal in your case. He’s a fairly competent doctor - I sustained a suspected wrist fracture after a fall on the ice a few months back, and he was entirely professional in his approach to me - but not what you’d call a
people person
. And he’s nearing retirement, which can’t come soon enough for him. He’s open about that.’

‘Is he ill?’

‘You mean the restlessness, the sweating?’ Clement raised her eyebrows, seeming to approve Purkiss’s sense of detail. ‘He’s diabetic. Not that well controlled, I suspect. He’s often verging on the hypoglycaemic.’

It made sense.

‘What about Montrose?’ said Purkiss.

Clement hesitated for a second, though it wasn’t through reluctance, in Purkiss’s view. ‘This is pure speculation on my part.’

‘Yes?’

‘Ryan wants to be head of station. It’s an open secret. He sees himself as the best qualified of the staff, and he quite possibly is. His PhD’s from Princeton, he was a Rhodes scholar. Oleg on the other hand has the advantage of age, and of far more years in the field. He knows his stuff first-hand in a way Ryan doesn’t. It rankles with Ryan, though.’

‘Why should he dislike me?’

‘Because you’re the journalist who’s going to come away with the impression that this is Oleg’s station, and you’ll write glowingly about his leadership of the place. Ryan will feel further eclipsed.’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘It’s plausible.’ He took another sip of the coffee, which had cooled so quickly it was hard to believe this tepid brew had burned his lips a couple of minutes earlier. ‘Dr Clement – Patricia – can I ask why you’re telling me all this?’

Over the rim of her own mug she looked amused. ‘My job is mainly to observe. But also, sometimes, to provoke.’

‘Isn’t that a bit unscientific? The whole point is that the observer shouldn’t influence what’s being observed.’

‘But that’s unavoidable, John. You must know that from quantum physics.’

The door opened and Montrose appeared. ‘There you are. Want to come and see what I do?’

Purkiss put down his mug, gave Clement a brief nod and followed Montrose out.

*

T
he first sign that there was a problem was the smell.

Purkiss was wearing a woollen mask which covered his nose, and his olfactory sense was markedly restricted as a result. But the tang was so sharp and so characteristic that it cut through the barrier.

They’d spent just over two hours at Outpost 56-J, and were heading back to the station in convoy once more, Wyatt leading the way and Montrose and Clement bringing up the rear. If anything the temperature had dropped since their arrival, and Purkiss felt the cold wrenching and twisting at him.

The smell was that of fuel.

Purkiss crouched lower over the controls of the Arctic Cat and peered at Wyatt’s vehicle, fifty yards ahead. There was nothing obviously wrong there, no slick trailing behind him. He risked a look over his shoulder. Montrose’s snowmobile was slightly further back, but it too appeared to be following normally.