The space blanket crinkled and rustled.

‘The weirdest thing was, it all happened in broad daylight. You think bad things happen at night, and maybe the sun’ll come up and things’ll get better. We didn’t even have that.’

He took a cup of coffee that someone had poured him.

‘Anderson came back with his Russian friends. A couple of snowmobiles — they must have stashed them someplace else. Looking for survivors, I guess. Me and Kennedy hid in the mag hut, only place that was intact.’

He stared into the cup of coffee. ‘I thought we were dead when Anderson opened that door.’

‘He found you?’

‘If I hadn’t busted my leg, I’d have launched myself at him. Instead, I just huddled in the corner. I swear he looked right at me.

‘Then he went away. It’s dark in there, and bright outside; maybe he didn’t see. We heard some shots—’

‘My crew found a shell casing.’

‘Then there was some shouting. I don’t know what that was about. After a while, I heard a snowmobile start up. I dragged myself to the door and peeked out, saw someone heading out on to the ice. Big guy.’

‘Not Anderson? He’s big.’

‘Not like this guy. I don’t know where Anderson had gone, couldn’t see him. After that, nothing happened for a while. I almost went out, but I didn’t like the fact I hadn’t seen Anderson or Greta leave. And I was right. After an hour, something like that, I heard the Sno-Cat come back. Greta poked around a little — didn’t find us — and then she rode off on the second snowmobile, following the tracks.’

‘Any clue where they were going?’

‘My guess? Evac. The Russians must have a ship someplace near here, maybe one of their nuclear-powered ice-breakers, and they’d gone to rendezvous with it.’

Franklin glanced at Santiago.

‘Nothing on the instruments.’

‘So you saw Greta and this other guy leave. How about Anderson?’

‘Yeah.’ Eastman scratched his beard. ‘I thought about that a lot. Best I can come up with is he jumped on the snowmobile somewhere I couldn’t see him. I didn’t exactly have a widescreen view, shitting my pants behind that door.’

‘But you survived.’

‘What saved us was their stupidity. The one thing they forgot. Went to all that trouble to sabotage the snowmobiles, then forgot they’d parked the Sno-Cat right in back of us. I mean, how stupid can you get. Not a lot of gas, but enough to run the heater a couple of times a day. And he’d left survival gear: food, sleeping bags, even a box of matches for the stove.

‘We holed up in the cab and sat there right up until we heard your helicopter flying in.’ He bared his teeth. ‘You know how boring being terrified can get? If I ever play another hand of gin rummy, I’ll slice my fucking wrists.’

A light blinked by the phone. Franklin let Santiago take it. When he turned around, he didn’t look happy.

‘XO says they finished searching the ship. No trace of Anderson.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘There’s a mustang suit missing from the locker. Also, they found a rescue line tied off on the deck rail.’

Franklin got out of his chair and walked to the back of the wheelhouse. He looked out astern, at the blue scar the ship had left behind in the ice.

‘What’s our speed, Helmsman?’

‘Four knots, sir.’

‘Anyone here think a guy can jump off a moving vessel, surf a piece of broken ice and get on to the main pack without falling in?’

No one answered. Franklin found a pair of binoculars and looked through them. Staring at all that ice and cloud, you couldn’t even be sure you had the focus right.

‘Might be trying to fake us out,’ Santiago suggested. ‘Get us chasing ice while he sits tight in the lifeboat with a bottle of Scotch.’

‘You think anyone on this ship would have missed an open bottle of Scotch?’

‘You think we could have missed a guy built like a linebacker?’

‘Look again.’

He sat back down, lost in thought. The phone rang. He snatched it before Santiago could pick it up.

‘You got him?’

‘It’s the radio room, sir.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘The helo just called in. They found something on the ice.’

‘Patch them through.’

A click, and the sound changed. Static, throbbing rotors, and the pilot’s voice coming through the cold air.

‘No sign of Anderson, but we got that radio beacon. Fifteen miles north of your position.’

‘Is the ice stable? Are you able to land?’

‘Yes, sir. We set down and had a look. Signal’s coming from inside of a tent.’

‘Anderson?’ The minute he said it, he knew that couldn’t be right. No way could he have gone that far across the ice so fast.

‘I …’ A flare of static. ‘… ought to come … see for yourself, Captain. And bring the Doc.’

Thirty-six

The ice fled away below the helicopter — and however much they covered, there was always more. Hard to believe in global warming when you saw a sight like that, though Franklin had served on enough Arctic deployments that he wasn’t fooled. Every year, a little less ice. A lot less, some years. If it kept up, the Terra Nova would be the last Coast Guard ship of her kind.

Out the window, a speck of colour broke the infinite whiteness. A drop in the ocean — but his eye picked it out. As the helicopter flew nearer, it separated in two, like an amoeba. A bright red Scott tent, pitched in the shadow of a huge ice ridge, and in front of it a black snowmobile.

‘Hell of a place to go camping,’ said Santiago.

The ice hardly stirred as the helicopter touched down. Concrete solid. Franklin remembered a class at the academy, some guy in World War Two who’d calculated how thick ice needed to be to hold a given weight. At two inches, it would hold a man; ten inches, a truck. What he was standing on now was probably a good couple of feet. Still.

The tent door opened and an ensign came out, waddling over the ice in his bulky mustang suit. They must all look like a group of old-school comic-book astronauts, Franklin thought. All they needed were the fishbowl helmets.

‘Nothing’s changed, sir.’

As they passed the snowmobiles, Franklin noticed someone had rubbed a hole in the frost that covered the gauges.

‘Out of gas,’ the ensign explained.

‘Of all the luck,’ said Santiago. ‘There’s a Mobil two miles up the road.’

They reached the tent and hesitated, unsure who should go first.

‘Take a look,’ the ensign said.

The first thing that hit Franklin when he crawled in was the colour. Soft, opium red after the whiteness outside. A survival bag lay on a mat on the floor, surrounded by candy-bar wrappers. Two heads stuck out, a man and a woman spooning side by side fully clothed, straining the close-fitting bag almost to breaking. A strand of blonde hair escaped from under the woman’s hat; the man wore a beard that couldn’t be much more than a week old.

‘Are they …?’

The ensign had stuck his head through the door behind him. ‘Hanging in there. Passed out. I thought it was better to let them rest.’ A sheepish look. ‘In case, you know, they weren’t happy to see us.’

Franklin fished out the battered sheet of paper and studied it. The photographs had never been great. Now, emailed, printed, handled and frozen, they looked more like masterpieces of impressionism. Even so.

‘That’s got to be Greta Nystrom.’

He looked at the man next to her. ‘But there’s no way that’s Fridtjof Torell.’

He unzipped the sleeping bag. The man still wore his coat underneath, the white Zodiac Station insignia half covered by his arm. Above it, a name stitched into the Gore-Tex, dim in the tent’s red gloom. Anderson.

A little dizzy, Franklin pulled apart the Velcro fastenings that held the coat together. No zip — it had broken. He opened the coat and reached inside to feel a pulse. Weak, but not gone yet.