The eyes opened wider. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Kennedy.’

‘Bullshit.’ Colour was coming back into Eastman’s voice. ‘I spent five days locked in a caboose with Kennedy. He doesn’t know jack.’

‘Am I wrong?’

Eastman sank back. ‘I’m an atmospheric scientist. But …’ He paused. ‘You know, you’re trained so hard to keep the secret, I don’t even know the right way to say it. Let’s say I work two jobs. One full-time, one part-time.’

The cook had it right. ‘Just so we’re clear, we’re talking about the CIA?’

‘NSA. They’ve had a bug in their ass about Utgard since the Cold War. When they found out I got a place at Zodiac, they asked me to feed back anything interesting. The Russians have been developing — this is classified, by the way, but what the hell — they’ve been developing a new radar. SAR — synthetic aperture radar. It can spot a boat the size of a Honda Civic from space.’

‘Not a lot of boats around here,’ Franklin said. ‘Anyhow, I thought they could read golf balls from space twenty years ago.’

‘You can see what the hell you like — if you know where to point the camera. What this does is tell you where everything is. All over the world, anywhere and everywhere. Now, that creates a shitload of data, and that data’s no use stored up on a satellite. You need a base station on earth to download it to. The reason everybody loves Utgard is that it’s in a sweet spot. Any orbit, any time, you can download data there.’

‘And you thought they were using Zodiac for that?’

‘Nuh-uh. Zodiac’s clean. But there was another outfit on the island.’

‘DAR-X. The oil exploration company.’

‘You’re up with the news, Captain.’

‘I’ve been speaking with Dr Kennedy.’

‘Kennedy’s an ass. He didn’t have a clue what was going on right in front of him. You know, the only reason he rocked up at Zodiac was because he was about to be sued for medical malpractice. Drinking on the job. You know how drunk you have to be before the Irish kick you out?’

‘He seemed sober to me.’

‘He cleaned himself up. To be fair to the guy, I never saw him touch a drop at Zodiac. Anyhow, DAR-X are a front. They’re just doing the exploration. The actual contract goes to a company registered in the Bahamas, which is owned by a shell outfit in Liechtenstein, which is controlled by an outfit in Cyprus — which gets its cash and its orders from the Russian national oil company.’

‘Is that common knowledge?’

‘They go out of their way to make sure people don’t know. Way out of their way, if you catch my drift. I don’t know how long it took our guys to pin them down.’

‘I thought the Cold War was over.’

‘Do they teach reality at the Coast Guard Academy? Russia these days, it’s like one of those stores where they’ve changed the name tags and the shelf stackers are now called Customer Fulfilment Associates. They’re still the same, and you know exactly what they are really. Instead of our nukes against their nukes, we play Amoco v. Rosneft. We don’t want truth, justice and the American way; and they don’t care about the brotherhood of the proletariat. It’s proven reserves and barrels per day.’

‘You said this was about satellites and radars.’

‘It’s all the same play. A few years back, people who said the Arctic would be ice-free by the end of the century were called crazies. Then serious folks thought it might be 2050. Then 2030. Now best guess is the end of this decade, and some people think that’s too conservative. It’s coming, faster than we think, and when there’s no ice left then everything’s up for grabs. The land, the oil, and the sea routes. As long as Walmart wants cheap crap stamped “Made in China”, they’ll need ships to bring it to us, and the shortest way to get cheap crap from Shenzhen to New York is across the Arctic Ocean. And the fuel they save, steaming across the melted Arctic? They’ll count that towards their CSR greenwash, and brag how they’re cutting down CO2 emissions.’

‘You almost sound like you’re sympathetic.’

‘Don’t be cute, Captain. Take a look at yourself — you’re a long way from Kansas here. You want to believe that’s because the United States Coast Guard gives a shit about polar bears? I’m guessing that strapped to the bottom of this tub, you’ve got the most expensive sonar Uncle Sam can afford, colouring in the seabed. So that when this place looks like Galveston with all the supertankers and container ships and drill rigs, our subs can keep an eye on them without crashing into an uncharted undersea mountain. But all that won’t be worth a nickel if the Russians get this satellite radar working. They’ll own the whole enchilada.’

His mouth had gone so dry he was croaking like a raven. He sucked water from a tube and glared at Franklin.

‘The Cold War didn’t go away, they just monetised it. And if history teaches anything worth a damn, it’s that the only thing countries really go to war for is cash. That’s why they sent me to Zodiac.’

There weren’t any chairs in the sickbay. Franklin leaned against a bulkhead, and folded his arms across his chest.

‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

Twenty-three

I said DAR-X are a front and that’s true — but they’re a real oil company. My job was to get close to them, so I could find out if they were working on the satellite thing. So I started leaking them some confidential data from Zodiac, stuff they could use to undermine the global-warming mafia.

Don’t give me that look, Captain. It was for the greater good. What I do, science-wise — the reason the NSA approached me — is pointing antennas at space. And I was getting some screwy readings. You go to the Arctic because it’s pristine, no cellphones or TV or garage-door openers clogging the signal. But from the noise I was getting, I might as well have parked my telescope next door to Verizon. So I knew something was going down. If the Russians get that radar, they’ll have total mastery of the seas. You think that compares to whether our kids might need more sunscreen in a hundred years?

DAR-X had their base at Echo Bay, about halfway up the west coast. I went there to take a look round, didn’t find anything. They had a big drill rig that could have been used for an antenna, but it looked real enough. Rumour was they’re not drilling for oil, some kind of natural gas instead, but I don’t know.

There’s a million places you could hide an antenna on Utgard and nobody’d see it except the bears. But you can’t just stick that thing in the middle of a snowfield. You need infrastructure, power, a way of getting the data back to Echo Bay. So when I heard that DAR-X had been hanging out at the old Commie ghost town at Vitangelsk, I decided to check it out.

Kennedy tagged along: he had some theory about Hagger, the guy who fell in a crevasse. Not that I thought that was irrelevant — far from it. I figured Hagger most likely found something out about DAR-X, or the radar, or the Russians, and paid the price. I won’t pretend it didn’t freak me out. I’m not James Bond. At the same time, it made me feel Hagger must have gotten close to something. And I was going to find it.

Kennedy thought Hagger’d been murdered by a jealous scientist. Like I say, he didn’t have a clue. But then, none of us did at that stage.

I left Kennedy in the main square at Vitangelsk, next to the statue of Lenin, and climbed towards the top end of town. If you ever want to see the hypocrisy of the Communist system, take a look at Vitangelsk. It’s built up the side of a mountain: the workers lived in wooden barracks at the bottom, the managers in brick houses higher up, and everything that really mattered — the machinery, the stores, the processing plant — was up top, along with the power station. I don’t know how much coal they had to burn just so they could mine more of it, but it must have been a ton. You could still see the power cables stretched from roof to roof, down the mountain and right around the town, a total spiderweb.