Negroponte had changed into pale blue coveralls with his name on the right breast and he hurriedly rolled down his sleeves, covering what Gallen took to be a military tattoo on the inside of his right forearm. The eagle clutching the laurel leaves made the bottom part of it US Army, which surprised Gallen — he’d assumed US Navy. But he spotted something else as Negroponte covered the tatt. It was an insignia on the man’s arm. Gallen didn’t know it but decided he was going to find out all about it.
They exchanged small talk for a couple of minutes, then Letour broke off as he checked his watch and Negroponte left them.
‘Shall we have a look in the engine room?’ said Gallen, moving to Negroponte’s hatchway. He wanted to have a good recce behind that door.
‘Can’t do that, Gerry,’ said Letour.
‘Can’t?’
‘It’s off-limits to me too,’ said the XO.
‘Off-limits?’ said Gallen. ‘But you run the joint.’
‘Sure I do, but Oasis has some proprietary technology down there and John is the only one with access.’
‘And if John gets sick or goes mad?’ said Gallen.
‘They land another engineer.’ Letour shrugged.
‘And you’re happy with this?’ said Gallen.
‘Not unhappy,’ said Letour. ‘Oasis want this guy to run the power, so that’s who we have. If he wants to shut himself off, hide away like a hermit, then that’s his business, so long as the lights are on, the air’s fresh and the water’s hot.’
Having looked at Tucker’s quarters in the officers’ section, Gallen wandered out of the Ariadne and rezipped his arctic suit against the blast of sub-zero wind. He was due in the officers’ mess room, where the media was going to be briefed in half an hour. Helos were ferrying crews from the airport at Kugaaruk and Gallen watched the reporters running from the Sikorsky to the helipad companionway, stooped over against the shock of the cold.
Making his way back to his state room, Gallen thought about the insignia on Negroponte’s arm. A guy at sea, sporting an Army tatt? It gnawed at him, and he had an idea.
Taking off his arctic suit, Gallen took a seat at the fold-down table between two bunks and took a piece of plain foolscap from the writing set. He’d gone through three pieces of paper before he was happy that he’d re-created the insignia. In Force Recon the capacity to commit what you’d seen to a diagram or schema was a skill that had come to some more readily than others. Gallen had taken a while to get it — he’d been a jock at high school, not an arty type, and free-drawing was not his thing. But even with the rise of digital imaging, digital recording and the cut-and-paste age, the US Marines needed its recon operators to be able to demonstrate what they’d seen, and if that meant drawing on the back of a beer coaster with a borrowed ballpoint, then that’s what they wanted.
Gallen felt that pressure now, the pressure to use his training to pull from his memory the exact shape of that insignia. He looked down at what he had: it looked like an upside-down crucifix with curved bars attached to the cross-piece of the crucifix. It looked like a lollypop, with a cross inside it.
There were voices at the door and Winter entered, Ford behind him.
‘Hey, boss,’ said the Aussie. ‘That PR guy, Dave, is after you. There’s a press conference about to start.’
‘Shit,’ said Gallen, checking his G-Shock. He’d lost track of the time. Grabbing his arctic suit, he followed the other two along a wood-panelled passage to the companionway that would take them down one flight to the officers’ mess.
‘By the way,’ he said, as Winter grabbed the door handle, ‘either of you recognise this?’ He handed over the paper with the drawing and watched Winter and Ford take their time looking at it. It was a special forces habit: if someone asked you to look at something, you took it all in because you never knew when a higher-up was going to ask you to remember it.
‘It’s kinda familiar,’ said Ford. ‘But I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Same here,’ said Winter, handing back the paper. ‘What’s it about? ‘
‘The chief engineer on the Ariadne. He’s got this tattooed on his right forearm. It’s part of a US Army tatt.’
‘I know who’d know,’ said Ford. ‘You want me to fax it?’
‘Please,’ said Gallen. ‘Now.’
Following Winter down the stairway, they came out in a passage crowded with milling reporters, photographers and cameramen. Gallen noticed how the media seemed to take up twice the space that their physicality would suggest — what was known in the recon game as a ‘big projector’: someone who seemed to dominate the area around them and therefore stood out. Most recon operators and spies tried to project the opposite: small, inconspicuous, blending with the human traffic.
Pushing through the scrum towards the mess door, Winter paused and looked down on a man Gallen recognised as being from Fox News. The man decided not to get out of the way until the woman he was talking to suddenly caught a look at Winter and pointed. When the reporter turned, Winter smiled at him like a wolf and the reporter almost fell over getting out of the way.
Dave Joyce the PR guy stood on a small stage talking with Aaron, the Oasis corporate logo on a banner behind them. Joyce saw Gallen and cracked a big smile, sweeping his hand in a chivalrous gesture. ‘Mr Gerry Gallen, please meet Dr Martina Du Bois, the president of ArcticWatch.’
Turning to his left, Gallen faced a head of raven hair and waited as the woman turned slowly to greet him.
‘Hello, Captain,’ she said, a flashing smile and intelligent eyes.
‘Gerry will do fine,’ said Gallen, shaking her hand and taking her in. She was about five-ten, physically beautiful and very expensively dressed. She gave him that slightly wide-eyed look of expectation that beautiful women give a man when they’re waiting to be fawned over.
‘So it’s your man on the Ariadne with us?’ she said, her face serious but eyes laughing. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Pleasure.’ Gallen released her hand and turned to the three men who were with her. Du Bois introduced her crew, whom Gallen knew from their files. He smiled and introduced them to Kenny Winter. But his alarm bells were going off. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d expected from a film crew, but three men built like athletes wasn’t it.
As Du Bois and her ArcticWatch crew drifted away to set up their filming, Gallen turned to Winter and Aaron. ‘Is it just me?’
‘What’s the problem now, Gerry?’ said Aaron.
‘Nothing,’ said Gallen, trying to relax.
‘Excellent,’ said Aaron, ‘because the boss is diving with that tin can in exactly forty-five minutes, and if you’re good, we’re away.’
CHAPTER 58
Gallen walked the sidelines of the press conference as Winter took one side of the Oasis executive team on the stage, and Tucker the other. He noticed how the news crews had different agendas, different tones in their voices when they yelled their questions at the stage. The varied news angles that Joyce had devised in the briefing document now made sense, as did the five-minute one-on-ones that had preceded the press conference: the journalists had what they wanted and now they got to preen in front of one another.
Keeping his eyes on the ArcticWatch film crew, who were camped at the foot of the stage, Gallen caught Du Bois’ eye as she looked away from Florita. He didn’t like this woman or her crew, but he wasn’t going to make it personal. His job was to keep Florita safe and he would focus on that.
‘Red Fox, Red Fox, this is Blue Dog,’ he said into his radio as a Danish reporter became tangled in his argument against colonising the sea bed. ‘Sitrep, over.’