‘Brother?!’ said McCann, a return to his usual cockiness. ‘What we got here? Vanilla Ice made cap’n?’
The winds rose in the night, screaming around the fuselage at what Winter estimated was a sixty-mph northerly. They slept and dozed upright, taking turns with feet to the fire, backs to one another, sharing blankets and body heat. Gallen was glad they’d collected as much insulation as possible and tried to seal their tubular shelter. It wasn’t perfect, but with a system of dropping tarps, snow banked up against the gaps and insulation packed around holes it kept most of the wind out.
When Gallen opened his eyes in the morning half-light, the wind had died and he was aware of weeping behind him. Climbing out of the shared blankets he found Florita leaning over McCann, sobbing.
‘What?’ he said, before meeting Florita’s eyes.
‘I can’t do this, Gerry,’ she said, gasping back the tears. ‘I can’t.’
Kneeling, Gallen put an arm around her heaving shoulders. ‘Guess what, Florita?’
‘What?’
‘You’re already doing it.’
‘I can’t—’
‘And you’re doing a damn fine job.’
They buried McCann against the cliff face, rolling what rocks and stones they could find to make a basic cairn, puny and out of place in the eternal wilderness. Mike Ford made a cross from pieces of a suitcase and they gathered around the Marine, silence descending on the group as they stood in snow to their hips.
Gallen became aware of the eyes on him. He wasn’t religious, even though he’d gone to church as a youngster and been confirmed, at his mother’s insistence. Winter nodded at him and for the first time in a long time, Gerry Gallen couldn’t think what to say.
‘Um,’ he said slowly, self-consciously, in the vast silence of the morning, hoping some words would come. ‘The first time I shipped out for combat, an old staff sergeant in the Corps gave us a pep talk. He told us that being a combat Marine was different to anything else we’d ever do in our lives. I remember he said there’s only one thing more powerful than putting your life in another man’s hands, and that’s knowing he’s good for it.’
‘Fucking eh,’ said Winter.
‘Got that right,’ added Ford.
‘That reliance on other men is not something we talk about much in the military,’ said Gallen, hoping he was giving the folks what they wanted. ‘We’re either totally hyped up or we’re too embarrassed about how scared we are, or we’re just too busy drinking and forgetting. But that old staff sergeant was right: there’s this bond that happens when there’s only us, and that’s all there is.’
‘Fuck yeah,’ said Winter.
‘Donny McCann was a tough guy from Compton and he was one of the best Marines I ever worked with. He was a ladies’ man and he liked to party but I never saw him disrespect a woman, although I saw him get into fights to stop others doin’ it.’
Florita looked up.
‘He was a corporal in my unit when I was a captain, up there in the hills of the northern Ghan. Donny was a rear-facing turret gunner in the convoy and he was the last man standing, the guy still hammering away with that fifty-cal while the rest of us were hiding under the vehicle, hoping the incoming would stop. That’s who he was.’
Gallen looked around at the faces, saw Florita crossing herself, saw Winter and Ford staring at him.
‘So, Donny,’ said Gallen, turning to the grave, not wanting anyone to see what the cold was doing to his eyes. ‘I wish I had some church words for you, brother. But for now, let me say that you were always a thousand per cent. You were the real deal. I put my life in your hands, and you were good for it.’
Gallen took the lookout shift himself, finding a rocky outcrop at the top of the cliff where he could sit without getting the seat of his arctic fatigues wet. He had a set of naval binoculars around his neck, huge things that had been stashed in an overhead locker by persons unknown. Leaning against the rock was the Heckler G36 assault rifle. If he saw a fox or a hare, he was going to try and shoot it, but he wasn’t going to stalk it. Winter was right: the country was too tough. Chasing the wildlife would take more out than eating it could put back in.
He tried to clear his mind, stay focused. There was the immediate concern of survival but there was also payback. Ford and Winter wanted to strike back at the bombers and they were annoyed that Durville wasn’t forthcoming about who might have done it. Never mind that Durville was close to death.
He’d heard a couple of comments from Winter, and the way the two had looked at him when they buried McCann was a pure call to arms. In officer school, they were trained to think like a leader so that potentially negative responses among the men — revenge, lust, rage, fear — could be used to create a positive energy for the whole team. But Gallen didn’t know if he had the right to manipulate the men away from their sense of vengeance. Having a goal — any goal — was sometimes fuel to keep going.
Standing to stretch his legs, Gallen glassed the horizon. It was a landscape of mid-sized hills and small mountains, escarpments and glacial riverbeds, covered in snow and ice and seeming to stretch forever in all directions; from one angle it looked like an ocean of white, while from another perspective it was a desert of snow. The sun bounced off each surface in a slightly different way, giving the terrain the creepy quality of being both uniform and constantly changing. It was an optical illusion and one that — once you watched it for too long — left the observer with almost no sense of distance or height or depth. Luckily they’d managed to recover enough polarised sunglasses that no one had to go without. Adding snow-blindness to their impossible situation would have been cruel punishment.
A figure walked slowly up the side of the cliff, a ramp-like block of snow and ice that led around the long way to the top of the escarpment. Gallen saw the red parka, black backpack and blue arctic pants and knew it was Florita.
She took half an hour to reach the rocky outcrop and was exhausted when she arrived, sitting heavily beside Gallen.
‘You didn’t need to do that,’ he said. ‘I would have come to you.’
He could see her smiling, way back in her parka hood, hiding behind fur trimming and a Thinsulate balaclava.
‘I needed the air, needed to talk,’ she said breathlessly.
‘Should have made an appointment. Can’t you see I’m busy? ‘
Florita laughed and shrugged the pack off her shoulders. ‘Look what I found.’
She pulled out a bright orange plastic box with a lid. It could have been a fishing tackle box, but Gallen knew it as an emergency flare kit.
Taking it from her, he opened it and looked inside: there was a white pistol with a blue handle, while an array of twelve flare charges in two rows of six gave the user a choice of white, red, blue, green and orange.
‘Nice work,’ said Gallen, smiling as he handed back the box.
Florita put it in her pack. ‘I know you want more from Harry, especially after Donny.’
‘You noticed?’
‘And I know that Kenny and Mike will leave him till you give the word.’
‘They want some answers and so do I,’ said Gallen. ‘I mean, you like being out here ‘cos someone bombed your plane?’
Florita shook her head, a plume of steam erupting from her hood as she sighed.
‘So, who’s Reggie?’
‘He’s Russian, his name is Kransk, and Harry believes he holds the key to the richest oil and gas reserves since Saudi was opened up in the 1930s.’
‘Where? Out here?’
‘Under the Arctic Ocean,’ said Florita. ‘Harry and Oasis Energy are working on cornering a resource that will control the world’s oil and gas supply for the next century.’