‘What’s the problem?’
‘They’re custom-built and hard-wired into the antenna systems. The antenna itself is part of the radio. No antenna, no comms.’
Gallen breathed out.
‘The base that picks up our signal has to be using the same scatter wave receiver as we’re putting out,’ said Winter. ‘It looks like a giant relay system.’
‘So we’re going to have to go out there, climb the tower and find the break,’ said Ford. ‘Sun rose about three hours ago. We were going to eat and get out there.’
‘Okay,’ said Gallen. ‘But be careful. One of us with pleurisy is enough.’
Gallen lay on the bunk, drifting in and out of sleep in the warmth of the stove-heated room. Ford had found a box of VCR tapes, and Rain Man was now playing on the TV—Rain Man because the copy of Die Hard was worn out from too much play. He flipped through a Time magazine from 1988, in which George Bush senior was running against Michael Dukakis and someone was trying to explain why the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian airliner and killing two hundred and ninety people was a bad thing yet also justifiable.
The idea of justifying the unjustifiable was playing on his mind. Harry Durville was not his favourite human being, but they’d left him back at the fuselage camp to die a lonely death. They certainly had their reasons, and Winter had tried to make it more comfortable for the billionaire. Yet Gallen felt guilty about it. ‘No man left behind’ wasn’t a cliche of war movies: it was a real commitment in Gallen’s world and he wanted to return to the camp, at least check on Durville.
The door burst in before the end of the movie, and Ford and Winter were standing in the room, dripping sheets of ice and snow from their parkas and gloves. Leaving the wet gear on the racks in the corner, they moved to the stove in their thermals, Ford stoking it with more wood as they got themselves warm.
‘So?’ said Gallen.
‘It’s been disabled,’ said Winter, reaching for a smoke and offering one to Ford. ‘Guess when this place was decommissioned, they did a total job.’
‘We can’t fix it?’ said Gallen, unable to disguise his disappointment.
‘It’s rooted,’ said Ford, pushing himself back onto the stove as he sucked on his smoke. ‘It’s fucked, mate.’
‘Any ideas?’
Winter cleared his throat. ‘Mike found a garage and workshop.’
‘And?’
‘And there’s a snowmobile parked in there.’
Gallen shook his head, not wanting to hear it.
‘Looks like it works, boss,’ said Ford.
‘Holy shit,’ said Gallen, wishing he could smoke. ‘We gonna travel five hundred miles across this country on a snowmobile that hasn’t been used for twenty years?’
Ford and Winter looked at him and Gallen could tell that neither wanted to be the one to say it.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘What’s that look?’
‘Three wouldn’t make it,’ said Ford.
‘But two might,’ said Winter.
Gallen nodded, reality setting in. ‘Don’t tell me — two fit guys, right?’
‘We’d come straight back,’ said Winter.
Gallen snorted. ‘How nice of you, Kenny.’
CHAPTER 26
Ford dragged an aluminium medical sled into the heated inner room and started packing it with supplies. It looked like the kind of emergency capsule in which injured skiers were transported off the mountain but it was now going to carry food, shovels, tents and spare clothing, and a replacement snowmobile track they’d found in the garage. But mostly it was going to carry two hundred pounds of gasoline in jerry cans.
‘Okay, boss,’ said Ford, the sound of the snowmobile’s revs coming from the garage area. ‘We’re gonna shut down all the electrical points in this building except the ones you have in here. Lights and TV.’
Gallen nodded, still too tired to talk properly.
‘There’s enough diesel for the generator to tick over for five or six days,’ said the Aussie. ‘And that wood pile is good for a week, just don’t overdo it. Keep it on the slow combustion and stay in your foil bag.’
Looking down at the table in the heated room as Winter came through, Gallen saw the map from the Challenger lying open, saw the guesstimates for where they were and the various routes to Baker Lake, the only settlement in the southern region of Nunavut; it was, they all agreed, at least five hundred miles away.
The calculations were stark in their simplicity: two men would have to travel at least one hundred miles per day, in an east by northeast direction, hoping to find Baker Lake, which was not exactly a massive metropolis. The terrain was as bad as any of them had seen, just an endless procession of ice, snow and water, arranged in various obstacles and traps. Snowmobiles were useful machines — Gallen had grown up using them on the farm — but they bogged in deep snow, and once you broke a track, you were finished.
Gallen had already resigned himself to waiting in this concrete igloo for at least a week. If no one came, he’d starve, if he didn’t get a secondary lung infection and die from that first. It was Ford and Winter he was worried about: there were so many things that could go wrong on their mercy dash that their calmness was both disturbing and inspirational.
Watching them put on their layers and adjust the snow goggles they’d found in the stores, Gallen felt a pang of sadness, something he hadn’t felt since he’d been to the Joe Nyles fundraiser in Florida.
Winter saw the look, cracked a smile as he slipped on his Thinsulate balaclava. ‘No speeches, boss. None of us asked for this — we just do what we can, right?’
Gallen slumped. Two weeks ago these two men were making a living with their skills, free from the dangers of a military life. Now they were in the middle of the Arctic tundra, having to make a trek that was probably going to end in death.
‘We do what we can,’ said Gallen, short of breath again. ‘No heroes, okay?’
The VHS copy of Wall Street was good enough that Gallen could follow the story, and when it finished he ate a cup of dried raisins and dried apricots and made a pot of coffee. He’d promised himself to preserve the generator’s diesel consumption by limiting himself to one movie per day, and he already had them lined up as a countdown to when Ford and Winter should return with the search-and-rescue helicopter: Predator, The Untouchables, Beverly Hills Cop II, Robocop and Twins.
Gallen took his penicillin and lay in the cot with two cardboard boxes of magazines beside him. The room was warm and he was tired again, although breathing was slightly easier than it had been before Ford drained the fluid off his lung.
As he dozed, he tried to put some of the pieces of this disaster back together. He’d been targeted to form a crew and take on the bodyguard assignment of a person who lived a dangerous life. Responsible for the security issues surrounding Oasis Energy’s global interests was Paul Mulligan, a former intelligence bigwig from DIA. Mulligan had stalked him to a motel in Red Butte before making his offer. Where else had he been followed and put under surveillance? And why was Mulligan in that motel car park? It was like asking the Secretary of Defense to make a purchase order for infantry boots. It was an unlikely role.
Gallen ached for a cigarette but kept with coffee. Then there’d been the tails that had been on Winter and Gallen in Los Angeles, and probably also in Denver and Calgary. Gallen thought about the LA tail and Reggie’s security crew in Kugaaruk: were they the same people? Working for the same employer? He’d have to do work on that if he ever got out of the Arctic.