He didn’t sound like a man who had something to hide, and had just met the person who was there to expose him.
Purkiss acted his own part, asking questions, requesting clarification now and again. At no point did he get personal, asking Wyatt how he come to pursue this line of work. Those weren’t the sort of questions for a field trip.
When the conversation had run its course, Purkiss headed back towards the hut, grateful for the warmth within. He found Clement there on her own, seated with a mug of coffee in hand and a dictaphone in the other. She stopped in mid-word.
‘Sorry,’ said Purkiss. ‘Should’ve knocked.’
Clement gave another of her faint smiles. She nodded at the coffee urn. Purkiss helped himself, taking it black and scalding. He’d been intending to go out and find Montrose, but the coffee gave him an excuse to linger in the hut a little longer.
‘Recording your observations of me?’ he asked. It was rude of him, and gauche, but it was something that would have come up eventually.
She raised her eyebrows mildly. ‘Of course. I probably creep you out at first. But you’ll get used to me. The others did.’
‘You’ve had no opposition at all?’
‘Oh, some. But this is what I do. I study groups of people in unusual workplaces. Remote research facilities, oil rigs, air traffic control stations. By their very nature, the staff there are under pressure. It’s normal for people to feel uneasy with me hovering around. As I say, they get used to it.’
She tipped her head a fraction. ‘Your question’s interesting, though. Why did you ask it? Have you experienced opposition since you arrived here, Mr farmer?’
‘John.’
‘John, yes.’
Purkiss shrugged. ‘I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours. It’s too soon to tell how I’m going to be received.’
‘Evasive answer, John.’ Her smile was gently chiding. ‘I’ve noticed a few things. A few looks people have been giving you.’
Purkiss’s interest was piqued. He decided to make the first move. ‘Well, Ryan Montrose doesn’t seem to like me much.’
‘I’ve seen that, yes.’
‘Neither does Dr Keys.’
‘Correct.’
‘Do you have any idea why?’
He thought she’d become coy, and cite confidentiality or something. But then he remembered these weren’t her clinical patients. They were simply people she was observing. ‘Doug Keys is annoyed with everybody. It’s not personal in your case. He’s a fairly competent doctor — I sustained a suspected wrist fracture after a fall on the ice a few months back, and he was entirely professional in his approach to me — but not what you’d call a people person. And he’s nearing retirement, which can’t come soon enough for him. He’s open about that.’
‘Is he ill?’
‘You mean the restlessness, the sweating?’ Clement raised her eyebrows, seeming to approve Purkiss’s sense of detail. ‘He’s diabetic. Not that well controlled, I suspect. He’s often verging on the hypoglycaemic.’
It made sense.
‘What about Montrose?’ said Purkiss.
Clement hesitated for a second, though it wasn’t through reluctance, in Purkiss’s view. ‘This is pure speculation on my part.’
‘Yes?’
‘Ryan wants to be head of station. It’s an open secret. He sees himself as the best qualified of the staff, and he quite possibly is. His PhD’s from Princeton, he was a Rhodes scholar. Oleg on the other hand has the advantage of age, and of far more years in the field. He knows his stuff first-hand in a way Ryan doesn’t. It rankles with Ryan, though.’
‘Why should he dislike me?’
‘Because you’re the journalist who’s going to come away with the impression that this is Oleg’s station, and you’ll write glowingly about his leadership of the place. Ryan will feel further eclipsed.’
Purkiss thought about it. ‘It’s plausible.’ He took another sip of the coffee, which had cooled so quickly it was hard to believe this tepid brew had burned his lips a couple of minutes earlier. ‘Dr Clement — Patricia — can I ask why you’re telling me all this?’
Over the rim of her own mug she looked amused. ‘My job is mainly to observe. But also, sometimes, to provoke.’
‘Isn’t that a bit unscientific? The whole point is that the observer shouldn’t influence what’s being observed.’
‘But that’s unavoidable, John. You must know that from quantum physics.’
The door opened and Montrose appeared. ‘There you are. Want to come and see what I do?’
Purkiss put down his mug, gave Clement a brief nod and followed Montrose out.
The first sign that there was a problem was the smell.
Purkiss was wearing a woollen mask which covered his nose, and his olfactory sense was markedly restricted as a result. But the tang was so sharp and so characteristic that it cut through the barrier.
They’d spent just over two hours at Outpost 56-J, and were heading back to the station in convoy once more, Wyatt leading the way and Montrose and Clement bringing up the rear. If anything the temperature had dropped since their arrival, and Purkiss felt the cold wrenching and twisting at him.
The smell was that of fuel.
Purkiss crouched lower over the controls of the Arctic Cat and peered at Wyatt’s vehicle, fifty yards ahead. There was nothing obviously wrong there, no slick trailing behind him. He risked a look over his shoulder. Montrose’s snowmobile was slightly further back, but it too appeared to be following normally.
The second sign of something wrong was the spark and flash behind Purkiss and to his left.
He jerked his head round, saw the flame licking blue-and-orange from beneath the chassis, and reacted by instinct, the answer to the sum fuel plus flame driving his reflexes so that he punched the release on the safety belt and leaped to the right and up and out even without slowing the vehicle.
The churning white ground rushed towards Purkiss and he braced himself, tucking his head in and raising his arms to cushion the impact of landing. An instant before the snow exploded in his face he felt the blast of light and heat at his back. He landed hard, plunging into the coating of snow so deeply that the bedrock beneath slammed his shoulder, but he welcomed it, clinging to it and flattening himself as far as possible because the sound hit him then, the thump-roar of the snowmobile’s engine going up, and he kept his head down because there’d be shrapnel, black ragged chunks of metal speeding at him with lethal force. He felt something whine over his head and bit the numbing frost smothering his face, sucking life and sustenance from it as if it would protect him from a shard of hot steel embedded in his back.
For two seconds, three, five, Purkiss held his breath, the dissolving snow filling his mouth and disappearing into warm fluid, and suddenly it felt as though he should lie here forever, safe in the tundra’s embrace, the earth shielding him against the madness of the human race that stalked about on its surface.
The realisations struck him like a pair of tightly-spaced gunshots.
He was in danger of frostbite.
More imminently, he was in danger of drowning.
Purkiss rolled, keeping his head against the ground because he didn’t know what was happening behind him, and looked back. Over the curve of the snow surface he saw a messy ribbon of black smoke spilling towards the sky, many yards away.
Purkiss sat up, the sudden movement making him feel groggy. To the left, Montrose’s snowmobile had pulled up. To the right, further away, Wyatt’s had veered in an arc and was heading back towards him.
His own vehicle had ploughed into a bank fifty yards away and was unrecognisable, a smashed and charred pile of flickering metal. Behind it, the ground was furrowed by scorched tracks.