Lord of All Things Page 40

  “Devil’s Island?” Adrian repeated. “Why’s that?”

  The copilot laughed. “Well, I have my own theory. Do you know what the island looks like? On the map, I mean?”

  “Sure,” Adrian replied. They had a whole folder of satellite images, radar scans, and so on.

  “Okay. The island is a sort of stretched oval, except that it also has two spits of land that run out into the sea, north-northwest. They’re the ends of the two mountain ridges either side of the big glacier—did you see?”

  “I know what you mean. Two tongues of land that drop away steeply.”

  “Exactly. So, those are the devil’s horns, I think. The island looks like a devil’s head, don’t you see? Hence the name.”

  “Uh-huh,” Adrian said. “That makes sense.”

  Charlotte thought that it made no sense at all. Quite the opposite. As far as she was concerned, it was possibly the least plausible explanation anyone could have come up with for an old folk legend. The only way to see the shape of the island was from the air. Only an airman could come up with an idea like that.

  She turned and peered through the porthole by her left shoulder. The view was unchanged: a gray sea, almost black, moving in a curiously sluggish fashion, with more and more ice floes drifting on the surface. A leaden, featureless sky above it all. Desolation as far as the eye could see.

  Devil’s Island. What had she gotten herself into?

  The island eventually appeared below them like the back of a white whale floating, crippled, in the water. The helicopter circled it. Saradkov was about twelve square miles of snow and ice with two parallel lines of bare rock rising out of it. That was all. At the southernmost tip, where the pilot was headed now, scraps of dark brown rock showed through on the shoreline. From up here it looked as though they were about to land on the brim of a rather squashed hat. It couldn’t be much less welcoming than this on one of Jupiter’s moons, Charlotte thought.

  “There’s the hut,” said Adrian.

  Charlotte followed his gaze. A little farther up from the sloping shore stood a tiny, dark, forlorn dot. She blinked in surprise. If that really was the old weather station, then…then everything was even huger and more barren than she had thought. Nobody knew what kind of condition the hut was in; nobody had been on Saradkov Island for decades. They were welcome to use the building if they wanted, but they had been instructed to bring good tents just in case. Which they had of course done.

  It was a bumpy landing. The helicopter shuddered and swung left and right, and the pilot had to take it up again for another approach. When they finally landed, it was with all the grace of a hammer dropping on an anvil. The pilot kept the engine idling, obviously worried the ignition wouldn’t catch if he switched it off, so they had to unload their equipment with the rotor blades sweeping over their heads with a threatening wumm-wumm-wumm. The copilot helped them unload.

  When Adrian made some remark about the rough landing and what a shame it was they hadn’t had good weather for the approach, the young Russian laughed. “This is good weather. If it had been bad weather, we would have had to turn back.”

  Charlotte saw Adrian flinch at the news. He seemed genuinely shocked. “That’s good to know,” he said lugubriously.

  “The older pilots say that back in the sixties someone managed to land a jet on the island—during a storm, no less,” the copilot went on. “He had some kind of malfunction. But, to be honest, I think that’s a myth.”

  Morley had been stumbling zombie-like through the process of unloading, giving only token assistance, but he seemed to be slowly coming to his senses. The unhealthy pallor of his face gave way now to an unhealthy red flush, doubtless due to the cold wind that scoured their skin. At last, everything was unloaded and the helicopter’s cargo bay was empty, though all five of them checked to be sure. It was unsettling. It had looked like so much when they collected it from the shipping company back in Murmansk—when they loaded it onto the helicopter, it had been a mountain of gear—but in this desolate expanse it seemed a miserable little heap. This was supposed to last them three months? Five people? Charlotte felt certain they must have miscalculated.

  The pilot made a gesture that looked like telephoning. “Ah yes,” the copilot remembered. “You have to test your radio transmitter before we take off again. Regulations.”

  Adrian fetched the device, which was the size of a briefcase and reassuringly rugged, with thick, solid switches that could be worked even by gloved hands. The antenna was twenty yards of cable, which took two people to string it up like a clothesline.

  Charlotte wanted to take one end, but Adrian shook his head and passed her the earphones and mic. “Your job is to do the talking.”

  At last, she was needed. Charlotte pressed the transmission button. “This is Saradkov research base,” she said in Russian. “Calling Rogachevo base. Rogachevo, please copy.”

  The headphones crackled and hissed, and then she heard a deep voice, tinged with amusement. “Saradkov, this is Novaya Zemlya, Rogachevo base. Receiving you loud and clear. How’s the weather up there?”

  Charlotte had to smile. “Too cold for swimming, I’m afraid.”

  “What a pity. Who knows, perhaps you’ll have a warm summer.” The voice became businesslike. “Test confirmed. I wish you the best of luck. Rogachevo, over and out.”

  “Thank you. Saradkov, over and out.” Charlotte switched off. She was glad to be able to take off the headphones and pull her hood back up.

  When she looked up, the copilot caught her eye. “They say you’re the daughter of the French ambassador,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Charlotte replied in Russian.

  “You speak excellent Russian. If anybody told me you were from Moscow, I’d believe it.”

  Charlotte stood up and smiled. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Not a bit.”

  The pilot waved to her, obviously to show that the base had confirmed the radio link with him as well. He even seemed to attempt a smile, though Charlotte wasn’t quite so sure about that. She waved back all the same.

  The copilot shook her hand and then everybody else’s, wished them all the best, and finished by saying, “See you in three months!”

  Then he turned and walked back to the helicopter, waving once more as he buckled himself in. The next moment the engine roared back to life and the aircraft took off. It thundered away over the sluggish, gray sea, trailing a dirty plume of dark exhaust. They all watched the helicopter until it was out of sight and out of earshot.

  So here we are, thought Charlotte. Five people cut off from the world. No telephone, no Internet, no television. For three months. All alone and left to ourselves. But although the cold was already creeping into her limbs, she was amazed to discover she wanted to whoop for joy.

  They all stood there motionless, despite the cold. Each of them seemed to savor the moment when their Arctic adventure began. Then Leon van Hoorn came back to the group, having photographed everything—the handshakes, the helicopter lifting off—from a distance. He had even scurried off to the side again and again during the process of unloading to snap a few shots.

  “Brisk weather, isn’t it?” he called, packing his camera back into its padded case. “Makes you almost wish that global warming would hurry up and do its stuff.”

  The two climatologists glared at him as one.

  “Not funny, Leon,” Adrian said.

  He raised his hands apologetically and grinned. “Got you. I shouldn’t try cracking jokes. That’s what my ex always told me.”

  Adrian nodded grudgingly and then looked around at the others. “Okay. First item on the agenda: living quarters.” He looked dubiously at the ramshackle hut that stood a couple of hundred yards away at the foot of the cliff. “The weather station here on Saradkov was in use from 1949 to 1967. Meaning that place has been standing empty for for
ty years and change. It’s probably just a ruin.”

  “We should take a look at it all the same,” Angela said. “It’s the only bit of human history around here.”

  Adrian raised his eyebrows. “There’ll be time for all kinds of sightseeing soon enough. We should start off by finding a spot for the tents. As flat as possible, and sheltered from the wind…” He stopped and looked all along the coastline. There was no shelter from the wind here. “Flat anyway.”

  “I think we should have a look at the hut first,” Leon said. He raised his hand to show he meant no criticism. “Just a word of advice from someone who’s been around a bit. The great advantage of a hut is that it has solid walls. You very soon learn to appreciate that, especially in a snowstorm.”

  Charlotte suddenly saw in her mind’s eye how a raging storm might tear her tent loose and sweep it away. Nonsense, of course; the tents they had chosen were stormproof. Nevertheless, she looked imploringly at Adrian.

  He nodded noncommittally. “Okay. Let’s take a look at it. Before this turns into a debate.”

  They toiled up the slope over bare rock and patches of snow that crunched beneath their boots. Charlotte decided the place could easily serve as a film set for a story about some other planet. Nothing grew here, not even lichen. The brown rocks and the cliffs above were stark and bare.

  The hut was not much more to look at from close up than it had been from a distance: a simple blockhouse built of weathered gray wood with a steeply sloping roof and a tin chimney sticking up from it. It had a door made of planks and a single small window in each wall. And it was tiny, meant to house the one or two people posted out here to perform their desolate tour of duty.

  “It’s not exactly the Hilton,” Adrian said once they were standing in front of it.

  “But it’s still standing,” Angela pointed out, clearly in favor of solid walls around herself.

  “Huts like this are usually built to last, and the cold preserves everything,” Leon declared. “Woodworm and all the rest have no chance. The huts Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott built down in Antarctica more than a hundred years ago are still standing. You could still live in them today. Comfortably, even.”

  Angela looked askance at him. “How do you know that? Were you ever there?”

  Leon nodded. “I was there, oh, about five years ago doing a photo feature about McMurdo Station, the American research base out on the Ross Ice Shelf. Five weeks in the Antarctic. That’s cold! This is a trip to the beach by comparison.”

  There was no lock on the door. It was fastened by a simple wooden bar that could also be opened from the inside with a handle through a slit cut in the door.

  “The wind must whistle in through there,” Adrian commented, opening the door.

  They stepped into a little lobby, where the Soviet meteorologists had presumably hung up their outer clothing and kept their boots. A door to the right gave onto a storeroom, which still held a stack of firewood and two sacks of coal.

  “This is already looking good,” Leon said delightedly.

  The door on the left opened onto a narrow closet with a seat and a hole. There was no smell at all; the cold must have simply frozen all the excrement.

  “Looks like they simply shook quicklime over it,” Angela pronounced after peering knowledgeably down the hole.

  The door across from the entrance led into the actual living quarters. A heavy cast-iron stove in the middle of the room must have been used for cooking as well as heating. Charlotte had expected the room to smell of old clothes, damp wood, and stale air, but there was no such stench. Instead, it smelled of…nothing at all. The obvious reason was that there were no clothes hanging to dry that could have caught the damp—the only textiles in the place were the mattresses on the two beds at a right angle to each other. The wood was dry with cold. And despite the best efforts of whoever had built this place, the wind presumably gusted through strongly enough to keep it well ventilated.

  “Cozy,” Angela declared. “We girls get the beds.”

  Adrian also seemed to like what he saw. “I have to confess I had expected worse. Food scraps all over the floor and rats dancing around, that sort of thing.” He glanced at a framed portrait of Lenin that hung on the wall. “Okay. Let’s get the kit in here.”

  Morley squatted down in front of the stove and opened a hatch. “Pretty basic technology. I wonder how we’ll get on with it.”

  “Careful,” Leon warned. “We’ll have to take a good look at the chimney before we fire up that stove. It might be rusted shut or have something blocking it. In which case we’d poison ourselves with the carbon monoxide.”

  “We’ll set up our own stove to begin with,” Adrian said. They had brought along a liquid-fuel heating stove. “Otherwise, it’s not bad.” He turned and looked around. “You get the feeling they only just left.”

  “Making sure they took their radio set with them.” Leon stepped up to the heavy desk that was bolted to one wall and ran his gloved hands over parallel scratches. “Look, that’s where it stood.” Then he pointed to empty clamps running up the wall. “And that could have been the wire up to their antenna.”

  “In which case they must have had a generator,” Morley said. He looked up at the ceiling where a bare lightbulb still dangled in its socket. “Yup. For sure.”

  “They took that with them too, then.” Leon reached under the desktop and pulled open a drawer. “Hey, look at this.” He brought out a thick old ledger. “It’s the station logbook, isn’t it?” He opened it up at the back cover and leafed through the empty pages until he hit the last entry. “Bingo. Nineteen sixty-seven. Twenty-first of something.” He passed the book to Charlotte. “You know Russian.”

  Charlotte glanced down at the page full of neat Cyrillic handwriting and sighed. “Now we get to see that I couldn’t be from Moscow.”

  Leon stared at her, baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

  She looked back at him. Ah yes. He hadn’t understood any of what she said to the copilot, since they had been talking in Russian. “I can speak Russian, but I have trouble reading it. I don’t have much of a memory for other alphabets.”

  However, if she deciphered the words letter by letter, and spelled them out loud…she studied the date on the last entry. An O, a k…well that was easy. “Oktyabr. October. Twenty-first October, 1967.”

  Leon looked at her in amazement. “How on earth do you learn Russian without being able to read it?”

  “By ear. Listen and repeat.” Charlotte shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how it works. Whenever I go to a new country, I simply understand the language.”

  “Wow. I wish I could say the same.”

  Adrian came up to Charlotte, took the logbook from her, and began to leaf through it. Clearly a daily journal, it contained all sorts of numbers—temperature, air pressure, wind speed, and direction. He whistled softly. “This is a treasure trove. Even if we don’t understand all the text, we can read the numbers. Which are a lot more useful anyway.” He stopped at a page where a faded black-and-white photograph was glued into the book. “Have a look at that.”

  They all huddled together and looked. The picture showed the hut, buried in snow almost to the windows; two men in thick fur coats posed in front of it with fierce smiles on their faces.

  Adrian pointed at the date written above it. “Nineteen sixty-two. Can you make out the month, Charlotte?”

  That was easy, too. The only month with three letters. He could have done that himself. “May.”

  “In May?” Morley gasped. “So much snow in May? That’s astonishing.”

  “You see?” Adrian said, turning to Leon. “Global warming is already well advanced. One cold winter or rainy summer in Europe doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “I never said it did,” Leon said peaceably.

  “Okay.” Adrian looked around thoughtfully. “The women get
the beds, of course. Do we have enough room on the floor?” He took a good look at the space available to them. “It’ll be a bit of a squeeze, but it’ll have to do.”

  Charlotte was suddenly reminded of her first year at Harvard, where she had shared a room in the dorm with a woman called Carrie Walsh. Strange: the layout had been almost exactly the same as here. The way the beds stood, the desk they had constantly squabbled over…all just the same. This room had shelves where they had wardrobes. The only extra piece of furniture here was the stove. Strange indeed. Well, it was only three months. They would be over soon enough.

  They fetched the equipment and unrolled the sleeping bags. They piled up the crates of food, numbered by week, along with the fuel cans, in the storeroom, where everything would stay cold. The liquid fuel was specially developed for Arctic use and had a freezing point of minus seventy degrees centigrade. They would never have temperatures like that here. In the summer months it would be between minus ten and minus two, and in July they could hope for peak temperatures of around two degrees. They’d probably be strolling around in T-shirts by then, Charlotte thought, and shivered.

  They had another look at the earth closet. “We won’t use that,” Adrian declared. “We’ll set up the expedition toilet in here instead.” They had brought along a type of toilet that was used on Antarctic expeditions. All the excrement was collected in special plastic bags into which they had to pour a precise dose of chemical fluid. Once the bags were full, they could be burned.