For the first time Purkiss understood fully how such an intense, overwhelming terror of the cold might develop.
He ducked his head down as low as he dared while still allowing himself to peer through the snowmobile’s windscreen at the ground ahead. The machine handled beautifully, gliding across the snow surface as gracefully as an Olympic iceskater. There was a danger in that. The passage across the tundra was so smooth that it was easy to lose awareness of just how fast you were moving. Purkiss’s speedometer showed ninety-five kilometres per hour. He slowed a fraction.
Ahead of him, across the yards of undulating whiteness, he could make out Wyatt’s own machine. The man handled it confidently, almost arrogantly, with the occasional flourish such as a tilt towards one side or the other before a correction back to the middle.
Behind Purkiss was the third snowmobile, carrying Montrose and Dr Clement.
Back at the hangar, a minor argument had broken out. The engineer, the big and taciturn Swede, Haglund, had insisted Purkiss ride with Wyatt. Purkiss had other ideas.
‘I want to get to grips with one of these. Get a feel for what all of you experience when you go out in the field.’
Haglund said: ‘They are not toys.’
‘I’m aware of that, and I promise you I won’t do anything reckless. Nor would I suggest I ride one on my own if I wasn’t confident I could handle it.’
Purkiss had used a more basic type of Arctic Cat in rural Wisconsin one winter. That was several years ago, when he was still working for SIS and had been on a trip to try and persuade a retired agent to return to Britain and to intelligence work. The visit had been brief, and a failure. But Purkiss was of the opinion that no experience was wasted experience, and now it appeared his introduction to the snowmobile would come in useful.
Haglund didn’t look happy. But Wyatt spoke up: ‘Go on, Gunnar, let him. We’ll keep an eye on him.’ He glanced at Purkiss, his expression light but neutral.
Purkiss hadn’t encountered Wyatt all morning, had met him again just a few minutes earlier when Purkiss had gone to the hangar with Montrose and Clement. Wyatt was with Haglund, loading kit on to the snowmobiles. He nodded at Purkiss.
‘Good morning?’
‘Informative.’
And that was the full extent of their interaction.
Haglund sighed heavily. ‘Okay. You ride alone. But you damage my machine, you pay for it. Understood?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Purkiss.
Haglund showed him the Cat, a small, single-person model. Purkiss got in, familiarised himself with the controls.
‘Aren’t you bringing anything with you?’ said Montrose. ‘Equipment or something?’
‘I have my camera.’ Purkiss lifted his shoulder bag. ‘But I’m here more about the story than anything else.’
Outside, it was as though the cold had been milling about, waiting for victims, and descended upon them ravenously as soon as they emerged. Purkiss cringed within his layers of clothing, pulled the goggles he’d been provided with down over his eyes, feeling as if their very sclerae would freeze into brittle shells within seconds. He looked at the others. They seemed unfazed. Even Patricia Clement moved naturally, without huddling, as she climbed on to the rear of the snowmobile into which Montrose had already settled himself.
Now, the vehicles sped across the tundra, the bleak landscape less threatening than the very cold itself.
Montrose had briefed Purkiss succinctly and unenthusiastically on the way to the hangar. ‘The site’s Outpost 56-J, not that the name’s important. It’s seventeen kilometres due east of here, so it’ll take us twenty minutes, unless we encounter any freak weather. Which Wyatt says isn’t likely, and he’s the expert.’
‘What sort of site is it?’ Purkiss asked.
‘It’s useful to most of us in our different fields, because of its nature,’ Montrose said, his tone thawing a little. ‘It’s on the southern side of a ridge, which protects it to some extent against the winds from the north. The soil’s unusually fertile there, which means good sampling for Medievsky and Budian, and for me. The protection from the wind allows Wyatt to set up his equipment without too much difficulty.’
Purkiss glanced at Clement, who was walking alongside Montrose on the other side. ‘And you’re interested in every site, because you get to study the people.’
Clement smiled. They were in the entrance corridor, heading for the front door, and in the fluorescent light from overhead the psychologist’s skin looked more transparent than ever. ‘Yes, Mr Farmer,’ she said. ‘But I also get to familiarise myself first-hand with some of the work my colleagues are doing. It’s essential to understand the work in order to understand why they engage in it.’
To Purkiss the scenery looked frighteningly uniform, and when he checked the dashboard clock and saw they’d been riding for a full twenty-five minutes, unease clawed at his throat. Had they overshot? Were they lost in the vastness of Siberia, thirteen million square kilometres of some of the harshest terrain on the planet?
He watched Wyatt veer rightwards ahead, and slow, and in the distance through the hazy gloom an elongated bulky shape loomed. As they drew nearer, Purkiss saw it was a ridge of rock, its height difficult to be sure of as the upper regions merged into the darkening sky.
Purkiss pulled the Arctic Cat in next to Wyatt’s. A rudimentary prefab structure had been set up against the base of the ridge, its door half-obscured by a bank of snow. Wyatt climbed off the snowmobile and lifted two cases of equipment from the back. He unclipped a shovel from the side of the vehicle and nodded to Purkiss.
‘There’s one on yours, too. Give me a hand clearing the entrance, will you?’
They set to work digging away the snow as Montrose and Clement brought further cases from their own vehicle. Inside the prefab hut Montrose lit a paraffin heater. Purkiss felt himself drawn to it with a selfish greed he imagined starving men experienced at the sight of a limited food supply. It was all he could do not to shove the others aside and hunch himself over the sudden warmth.
‘You know about permafrost, right?’ Montrose said.
Purkiss nodded. ‘Soil or rock that’s remained below the freezing point of water for at least two years.’
‘The permafrost in this part of Siberia is around three kilometres deep. On top of it, there’s an active layer, a covering of soil and sediment which freezes and thaws seasonally. The active layer’s where we find our interesting stuff. In my case it’s microbes. Here at Outpost 56-J the active layer doesn’t often get cold enough to completely freeze. That means it’s a virtual paradise for the likes of me and Medievsky and Budian.’
To Wyatt, Purkiss said, ‘What sort of data will you be gathering here?’
‘Wind profiling,’ said Wyatt. ‘Come on. I’ll show you.’
Purkiss pulled his goggles down once more and followed Wyatt out into the cold. He strode behind the man, watching his back. Was Wyatt intending to confront Purkiss directly, to tell him he knew who he was and why he was there?
Twenty yards or so from the hut, a squat canvas shape stood alone on a flat stretch of ground. Wyatt removed the canvas cover. Underneath was something that looked like a large, functional office desk, with a square dish mounted on the top and facing skywards.
‘This is a SODAR system,’ said Wyatt. ‘SOnic Detection And Ranging. It measures wind speeds at different heights, and the thermodynamic structure of the troposphere. That’s the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere.’
He moved around the instrument, pointing out working features, talking with a scholar’s earnestness about the uses to which it might be put and the scientific benefits thereof. To Purkiss he sounded like an expert lost in his topic and eager to convey a sense of its importance to a lay person.