‘It’s down to you guys. Rawlins says you should forget it and come back to the rig, but the decision is yours.’
Ghost turned to his companions.
‘Quick vote. I say go.’
‘Go,’ said Punch.
Rye thought it over.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re close to dead. We don’t actually know where they are and a storm is moving in. I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s a bad idea.’
They took Rye’s medical kit, half her food and left her behind.
The snowmobiles had a top speed of a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, but Ghost throttled down to fifteen while they drove in darkness. Punch followed his tail-lights. His boots barely reached the footrest.
Franz Josef Land was a chain of volcanic archipelagos. A series of pumice islands capped with permafrost. There were jagged boulders beneath the ice ready to rip the skids from the snowmobiles.
They should have arranged a signal, thought Punch. If his Yamaha stalled, Ghost would drive on heedless.
The sky began to lighten. The cold, blue light of an Arctic dawn. They cut through drifts sculpted into strange dune shapes by an unrelenting wind.
Ghost accelerated. Punch revved and kept pace.
Jane fixed breakfast for the crew. She made porridge. Punch had left a plastic spoon on the desk of his kitchen office. There was a note taped to the spoon.
Sixteen level scoops of oats. Five and a half litres of water. No sugar or honey. No waste, no second helpings, no alternative food.
She spilled a few oat flakes on the counter. She carefully gathered them up and put them back in the porridge box.
Earlier that morning Jane went to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. She discovered the refrigerators locked and the food store padlocked. She found herself tugging on the refrigerator door like a desperate junkie denied their fix.
The crew ate in silence. Ivan sat with the TV remote and flicked through a series of dead channels. A dozen different flavours of static. CNN was off air.
Fox showed the stars and stripes fluttering in slow motion, grainy and monochrome.
BBC News showed a union flag. ‘God Save the Queen’ over and over. The location of refuge centres scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
‘One by one the lights go out,’ murmured Ivan.
Ghost swerved his snowmobile to a halt. Punch drew alongside. They were at the edge of a wide crevasse. A jagged fissure of blue, translucent ice. It went deep.
They pulled off their ski masks.
‘Shit,’ said Punch. ‘We’ve blundered into a crevasse field.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Bike and rider. Nearly quarter of a tonne. We could drop through the ice any time. We should head back.’
Ghost spat. He watched the gobbet of phlegm fall into darkness.
‘No. Just as risky to go back as to press on. I’ll ride ahead. Anything happens to me, lower the rope.’
‘Okay.’
The crevasse stretched to vanishing point either side of them.
‘Could be a long detour.’
They pulled on their ski masks and set off.
Jane washed the bowls and spoons. She put the porridge box back on a food store shelf and, on impulse, stole two packets of M&Ms. She wondered how long it would be before fights broke out over food. She locked the kitchen and gave Rawlins the keys.
She returned to her room to get some sleep. She heard paper crumple as she lowered her head on to her pillow. A note from Punch.
IN CASE I DO NOT COME BACK.
Jane ripped open the letter.
Jane, if you are reading this, either I am dead or you have no self-control. If you have looked in the storeroom lately you may have worked out we don’t have enough food to last six months. I’ve checked and re-checked. We should have been resupplied by now. Two freight containers of edibles. As it is, we have empty shelves and an empty freezer. At the present rate of consumption we will run out of provisions mid-winter. There simply isn’t enough food to go around. Keep it secret. I don’t want to start a panic.
There is a map in this envelope. Hang on to it. You and Sian might find it useful in weeks to come.
The internal door that connected the heated accommodation block to the rest of the rig was draped with silver, quilted insulation ripped from an airlock. Jane zipped her coat. She pulled the curtain of insulation aside and hit Open. The door slid back. She shone her flashlight into the dark. The corridor walls sparkled with ice. She closed the door behind her and set off, treasure map held in a gloved hand.
Jane’s route took her through miles of unlit rooms and passageways. She felt like an ARVIN drone exploring the silted dereliction of the Titanic.
Eerie silence. The hiss and hum of climate control, the constant background to life on the rig, was absent. No sound but laboured breathing and the grit-crunch of snowboots on iced deck plates.
Her torch beam lit gym equipment, vending machines and evacuation signs glazed in frost. Once the heating had been shut off, the temperature in the uninhabited sections of the refinery had quickly dropped to minus forty. Any moisture in the air had condensed to fine dew then crystallised. Ceiling pipes dripped ice.
The map led her to a dank storeroom on C deck. A vacant space. Nothing but a row of lockers against a wall. Four of the lockers were empty. The fifth locker had no back, and was the gateway to a hidden room. Punch had obviously positioned the bank of lockers to mask the entrance to an adjacent storage space.
Jane climbed through the locker into the hidden room.
A dome tent. Guy ropes pegged down with heavy turbine cogs.
Survival equipment stacked in the corner. Warm clothes, sleeping bags, a hexamine stove, frozen bottles of drinking water.
An emergency hide-out. The obvious implication: there isn’t enough food to feed the entire crew until spring. But three people could make it through winter if they sequestered themselves and let everyone starve.
Jane opened a box. Torch batteries, protein bars, and three vicious kitchen knives. A Post-it note pasted to one of the blades.
IN CASE THINGS GET UGLY.
Jane returned to her room. She locked the door and took a packet of M&Ms from its hiding place in her running shoe. One M&M per day. She lay on her bunk and crunched the little nugget between her teeth. She let the chocolate melt on her tongue. Then, in a sudden paroxysm of self-disgust, she hurled the bag at the wall. M&Ms skittered across the floor.
‘We can do better than this,’ she told herself.
Punch and Ghost reached Darwin Sound. They headed for high ground.
They dismounted the bikes. They took off their ski masks. Punch took a long, steaming piss while Ghost scanned the shoreline with binoculars. Miles of rocks and shingle turned blood red by sunset. Ghost took out his radio.
‘Shore team to Rampart, over.’
‘Rampart here.’ Sian’s voice. ‘Good to hear from you.’
‘We’re at Darwin. No sign.’
‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’
‘I’ve got five-, six-kilometre visibility. No sign of them. How’s that storm?’
‘Big. Still coming.’
‘You’ve got fifteen minutes to raise them and get a fix. After that, we’re out of here.’
Ghost turned to Punch.
‘We gave it our best shot. Nobody can say we didn’t try.’ He pulled back the cuff of his gauntlet and checked his watch. ‘Ten minutes, then we head home.’
They shared a protein bar.
‘Personally, I’d do a Captain Oates,’ said Punch. ‘If it came down to frostbite and starvation, I’d take a long walk in the snow.’