During the autumn of this year, the sun, declining rapidly towards the Tropic of Capricorn, nevertheless shone with unremitting heat upon the equatorial jungles south of troubled Mau. Great masses of air rose into the sky and raced invisibly northward until their energy was dissipated and all that was left to them was exhausted weight. Downwards they plunged onto the Sahara which stood naked, dry and cold. Already the night-time temperatures in the white sand and red rock of the desert were plunging well below zero. It so happened that a combination of fallout from Chernobyl, Tomsk Seven and several severe volcanic eruptions was still trapped high in the jet stream, forming a layer of dust thick enough to give spectacular sunsets to the northern hemisphere, and solid enough to turn the daytime rays of the lowering sun off the desert, reflecting away both light and heat with millions of minute mirror surfaces. Even at midday, the Bedou shivered as they walked beside their camels across the great sand sea; and in the battered lorries rumbling southwards out of Ghardaia down the trans-Sahara highway across the Erg, the slight, dark-faced Tuareg drivers narrowed their eyes and checked the settings of the air conditioning in the cabs.
The weather man at the airport at Tamanrasset high on the Hoggar tapped his barometer and frowned, for the ambient pressure of the unusually cool air was worryingly high. He reached for his phone and, still frowning, began to ring round his colleagues at the airports of Oran, Tangier, Casablanca, Santa Maria, Funchal and Las Palmas.
But it was an old female camel, taking her ancient ease on the dry slopes below Tindouf, who first noted what was beginning to happen. At noon, when the heat should have been fiercest and her rest at its most uncomfortable, some atavistic memory jerked her long head round until her dull eyes and wise nostrils were pointed south. Slowly, she turned her head from side to side, disregarding the stench and noise of traffic from the ridge above which bore the roadway north to Bechar, and read the southern quadrant with the fine hairs and acute surfaces of her nostrils. Moving in on the air from the south-east, she found just the hope of distant water from some oasis, no more than a promise, far away. From the south-west, the planes within her nostrils detected the oven odour of hot rock surfaces and, beyond it, the familiar sand grains of the Yetti and the Erg Iguidi. But from die south, due south, she recognised the grains of sand from distant deserts, from the Erg Chech, from El Khenachich, borne upon a wind which had blown for more than a thousand kilometres to bring them here. The camel turned her head and sneezed, then she pulled herself erect and limped away. No beast wise enough to read the wind would remain on a south-facing slope while the harmattan was blowing north.
Psyche’s helipad was a bustle of activity, and Captain Peter Walcott looked down upon it with a mixture of wonder and relief. He was standing on the starboard bridge wing, away from the ice cliff, watching as Richard Mariner managed to make order out of the apparent anarchy attendant upon the refuelling of the incredibly thirsty long-range helicopter from the naval air base at Culdrose in Cornwall two thousand kilometres north-east of them and the loading into its extremely limited capacity of the four plastic body bags which were the reason for its long flight south. The helicopter itself was standing well over to the starboard side, where the constant drizzle from the overhang of ice cliff was its weakest, but in fact, they were all getting used to it now and either disregarded it or varied their activity in order to avoid it.
During the ten days it had taken to reach this point, all the routines had shaken into place, and none of the Guyanese captain’s dark fears had come to obvious fruition. A close watch had been kept on his superstitious crew, but no more juju dolls had turned up. Tom Snell had replaced the one he had found — on Richard’s orders. Although the major had been offended by what he saw as superstitious disrespect for the dead, Richard had astutely calculated that Tom would be spending most of his time on Kraken or on the ice; the men who had placed the doll, for whatever reason, would be spending most of their time on Psyche with the corpses. And if the doll gave them a measure of relief from their worries, then it was performing a useful function.
It had been a wise decision. And Peter found that he was becoming more and more impressed by the simple wisdom of the leader of their enterprise. The big Guyanese had been prepared to dislike Richard Mariner in spite of — or perhaps because of — his reputation, but the Englishman had proved impossible to hate for any length of time.
Peter had worked for the United Nations for a long time, however. The association had made him a little cynical. He liked Richard Mariner, there was no way round that; liked him and respected him. But he was all too well aware that on the great stage of world politics, it was only too easy for even the most able to be broken by forces far beyond their control; Peter had seen it happen too often. And the tall English captain had all the open, boyish, almost naive confidence of a man riding hard for a very bad fall indeed.
Though, to be fair, the confidence had been wearing thin over the last few days. Ever since they had lost the current, in fact.
The whirl of cold water from the North Atlantic Drift had swept them east and south for more than a week until they had swung almost imperceptibly onto a due southerly course reaching down on an arc inside the Azores, and there, three days ago, it had dissipated. The movement of the water had ceased with surprising abruptness. According to Yves Maille it had simply tripped over the submarine heave of the Cape St Vincent ridge which reached up from the seabed like a range of mountains below them. That sounded plausible enough to the Guyanese captain who knew well enough how the undulations of the seabed could affect the currents flowing over them. Whatever the reason, they had awoken two mornings ago to find themselves pulling the increasingly inert bulk of Manhattan across water which was every bit as dead as the mysterious, skeletal woman in the cold store below.
‘They’ve loaded the bodies safely aboard and they’re just off.’ Richard strode onto the bridge wing so abruptly that Peter jumped.
‘That was an incredibly quick turnaround,’ he observed.
‘Well, in spite of everything, we’re still heading away from their base at more than ten knots,’ Richard said. ‘We’re at the limit of their range as it is. They’ll be lucky to make their scheduled refuelling stop in Corunna if we leave it any longer. The pilot didn’t even want to think of the paperwork involved in taking all those dead people for an unscheduled ride into Portugal looking for fuel. Can’t say I blame him.’
His last words were all but drowned by the surge of power as the helicopter lifted off. The two captains stood side by side in silence and watched it heave its bulk up into the blue sky with apparent effort and grinding slowness. It came level with the upper galleries of the ice cliff, laboured into the upper air, turning its blunt nose away towards Ajax and Achilles, sixty kilometres to the north, pulled itself wearily upward a few hundred metres more, and was abruptly snatched away, like a leaf in an autumn gale.
After the time and effort it had taken for the helicopter to achieve level flight, the speed of its departure was striking, and the brows of both captains folded into frowns of surprise tinged with concern. ‘There’s something going on up there,’ said Richard.