‘Jesus,’ Bluey said with a half-disbelieving, half-admiring whistle. ‘And she’s your fiancée? Y’know, mate, for an ugly bugger you don’t half pick up some cracking sheilas.’ Hien scowled. ‘But they’re nothing compared to you, darlin’!’ he hurriedly added with a big smile.
‘Why do you need help from a terrorist?’ demanded Hien, not mollified.
‘The bad guys needed her - we’re trying to stop them,’ said Chase, deciding to simplify the explanation. ‘They’re looking for something, and we need to find it before they do. If we don’t . . . well, we’re dead, pretty much. And that’s why we need your help.’
‘And what happens after? To her?’ Hien jabbed an angry finger at Sophia.
‘I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,’ Chase admitted.
‘Then you should!’ She indicated the handcuffs. ‘You think she’s going to try to escape - what happens if she does? We’ll have helped! I’m not going to be part of that. Helping people start a new life is one thing, but this? No!’
‘I wouldn’t have come if there was any other choice. But you’re the only people who can help us.’ Chase gave Bluey a pointed look. ‘As a favour.’
‘Aw, Christ, mate, that’s not fair,’ said Bluey plaintively. ‘If it was just you, then no problem. But . . .’
‘You owe me, Bluey,’ Chase insisted. ‘Like you said, you wouldn’t have met Hien if it hadn’t been for me.’
Bluey chewed his bottom lip, then turned to his wife. ‘Hien . . .’
‘No!’ She turned on her heel and stalked out.
‘Back in a minute,’ he told Chase and Sophia, before following Hien and closing the door behind him. Shrill shouting came through the wood.
‘Well, this takes me back,’ said Sophia, listening. ‘You know, I rather miss married life.’
‘Yeah, but your arguments ended with a gunshot,’ Chase reminded her.
‘Oh, only twice. I must say, she’s got an awfully big voice for such a little woman. No wonder he carries a shotgun in his own house. What exactly did you do to help him, by the way?’
‘Got him out of some legal trouble,’ he said evasively.
‘What kind?’
‘The putting a bullet into someone he shouldn’t have kind.’
‘Really?’ Sophia seemed almost impressed. ‘And I thought I knew all your dark secrets. So you helped cover up a murder, did you?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Chase, uncomfortable at the memory. ‘The guy was a total scumbag - he deserved it. He was an Afghan warlord who was robbing every refugee who came through his territory, and raping and killing anyone who didn’t pay up. Problem was, he could get away with it because he was one of our Afghan warlords, who was supposed to be helping us fight the Taliban.’
‘But your friend Bluey took matters into his own hands, I take it.’
‘Yeah. We were coming back from an op when we ran into this arsehole and his men beating up some refugees. Bluey told him to stop, he told us to fuck off and let him get on with it . . . so Bluey shot him. Then his men tried to kill us, so we shot them as well.’
‘And then you lied about what happened on the official report, I take it.’
‘I said that the guy pulled a gun on Bluey, so it was self-defence. The politicos weren’t happy about their “trusted ally”,’ the words dripped with sarcasm, ‘getting killed by one of our guys, but the refugees backed us up, seeing as we’d just saved their lives, so that was the end of that. If I hadn’t, Bluey’d still be in some shithole Afghan prison right now.’
‘How very noble of you,’ said Sophia, equally sarcastic.
‘What the fuck would you know about being noble?’ Chase snapped. ‘Kill a bad guy to protect an innocent, I’d do it again in a second. Remember that.’ The last was delivered with a clear undertone of threat. Sophia took the hint and remained silent.
The shouting stopped and the door opened again. Bluey entered, red-faced. Behind him, Hien’s expression was black with anger, her arms folded tightly across her chest. ‘All right, mate,’ said Bluey with exaggerated heartiness, ‘we’ve, ah, reached an agreement. We’ll help you out.’ Hien muttered something through clenched lips. ‘So long as this means we’re all square. Sorry, Eddie, but, well . . .’
‘That’s okay. I understand.’ Chase extended his hand, and Bluey shook it. Hien’s scowl deepened, but she said nothing more.
‘So, what do you need?’ asked Bluey. He indicated the machines around him. ‘You name it, we can do it.’
‘Passports?’
‘Just tell us the country! Got Australian, American, British, Canadian, Russian . . . even rustle you up a North Korean one if you fancy.’
‘British’ll do us,’ Chase said. ‘What about the biometrics?’
Hien snorted derisively, pride in her work momentarily overcoming her displeasure. ‘Biometrics? Hah! Cracked them before they even came into use.’
‘Wonders of the Internet, mate,’ said Bluey. ‘We’ve got friends all over the world who share this stuff around. Takes governments ages to change anything, but every time they do, somebody’ll bust it open in less than twenty-four hours.’
‘And how long’ll it take to make new passports?’
‘Less than twenty-four hours,’ Bluey told him with a half-hearted grin. ‘Just need to take some pictures, pick a name, get your biometrics, all that. Anything else?’
‘Credit cards’d be useful.’
‘No worries.’ He reached into a drawer and took out a stack of different ones, fanning them out like a pack of colourful playing cards.
‘That’ll do nicely.’ This time, it was Chase’s turn to grin. ‘They’re not stolen, are they? Don’t want to be racking up a fortune on some little old lady’s card.’
‘Nah. Got a load of dummy accounts set up, so you just pick a name you like. Don’t use it too often, though. First unpaid bill, and alarms go off.’
‘Won’t need to, hopefully. Either we find what we’re looking for, or . . .’ He let the unsaid alternative hang in the air.
‘Got you, mate,’ said Bluey, briefly downcast. ‘Hey, what about your fiancée? Will she need a passport as well?’
‘Probably, but she’s got something else to sort out first.’
‘No probs. Just bring her in. All right, then - time to take some snaps!’
19
‘Okay,’ said Trulli, ‘where do you want to start?’ ‘Good question,’ Nina replied. Now at the engineer’s apartment, she was using his computer to run the GLUG program, cycling between it and UNARA’s survey of Antarctica, the rocky landmass hidden beneath the desolate ice cap laid bare by the probing radar beams. ‘It must be somewhere in eastern Antarctica - it’s the nearest place to make landfall from their settlement in Australia.’
Trulli zoomed in on the appropriate section of the radar map, the edge of the Ross Sea on the left side of the screen, the Shackleton Ice Shelf on the right. ‘Still a bloody big area to cover. The coastline’s two thousand kilometres long!’
‘Let’s see if we can narrow it down, huh? You got the sea level data from a hundred and thirty thousand years ago?’
‘Give me a sec,’ said Trulli, calling it up. A few clicks, and a yellow line was overlaid on the map, inland of the current icy coastline. ‘There.’
‘Okay, so we need to find any underground lakes within . . . the inscription translated as just “near” the sea, so let’s say five miles. Eight kilometres.’
Trulli zoomed in further, adjusting the program’s settings so that underground lakes showed up in a vivid false-colour magenta, impossible to miss against the dull grey shades of the buried rock. ‘You do realise that the lake might not even be there any more?’ he asked as he scrolled along the coast. ‘If a glacier moved over it, it’d erase anything that was underneath.’
‘If it has, then I’m wasting my time and the Covenant’s already won,’ said Nina. ‘But if it’s still there, we’ve got to find it.’
‘And if you do, the
n what? It’ll be buried under God knows how many metres of ice.’
‘We’ll have to drill down to it somehow. Maybe we could borrow your equipment once you’re finished.’
Trulli chuckled. ‘Yeah, I’m sure Bandra’d be happy to do that.’
‘Bandra?’
‘Dr Bandra. The expedition leader.’
‘I thought you were the expedition leader?’
‘I’m the technical leader,’ he explained. ‘Bandra’s the scientific leader. As long as the project’s still officially in a test phase, I’m in charge. Soon as Cambot’s good to go, he takes over.’
‘Cambot?’
He smiled. ‘My latest gizmo. Combination ice borer, mini-sub and semi-autonomous robot. Just what you need for poking about under kilometres of ice - and he’s environmentally friendly, too. No need to fill the drill shaft with thousands of litres of freon and avgas to stop it from freezing up. Really cool, if you’ll pardon the pun.’ His attention snapped back to the screen. ‘Oh, hey. Got a lake here, about four clicks from the old coastline.’ He switched from an overhead view to a three-dimensional topographic map, the magenta blob of the lake now seeming to hang some distance above the bedrock.
‘That’s not it,’ said Nina as he rotated the map to view it from other angles. ‘The city was in a valley, which they flooded - so the lake has to be on rock rather than ice. We’re looking for something that’s surrounded on at least three sides by the terrain.’
‘That’s not the fella, then.’ Trulli returned the image to an overhead view and continued searching. ‘But yeah, Cambot still needs a final test before we can let him loose on a proper scientific survey, so we’re going to drill into a lake that’s not of any scientific interest. So if anything goes wrong we don’t accidentally screw up a million-year-old ecosystem. If everything works, then we move on to Lake Vostok. Four kilometres of ice to drill through - should give Cambot a real workout!’
‘The only downside is that you have to live in Antarctica for weeks to do it.’
‘Well, it’ll be an experience, won’t it? And at least there I won’t be snacking all the time.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I could stand to lose a few kilos, don’t you think?’
She smiled. ‘Not my place to say. Oh, is that another lake?’
Trulli switched back to the 3-D view. ‘Yep. Less than half a kilometre from the old coastline, and on the rock to boot. Fits your bill so far.’ He rotated the image. ‘Definitely in a valley . . . and the seaward end looks a bit crook, if you ask me.’
‘Could it be a dam?’
‘Maybe, but I can’t say for sure, not at this resolution.’
‘How deep is the lake?’
Trulli checked. ‘Not very. Maybe twenty metres at the deep end.’ He adjusted another setting, revealing the shape of the ice above it in translucent, glass-like form. ‘Some weird shapes, though. The ice on top of the lake’s mostly flat, but there’re these indentations in the ceiling. Wonder what . . . ah, I know!’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Volcanic vents, that’s it. They warm the water and it rises up and melts the ice above them. Not enough to reach the surface, though - the lake’s about forty metres down.’
‘Volcanic vents?’ Nina echoed, remembering something. She quickly went back to her notes on the inscription. ‘“Tiny mountains of fire”, of course! Can you get in any closer?’
‘Yeah, but the resolution’s not high enough to show any details.’ He moved the virtual camera closer to the lake, then changed the colour of the water so it too was translucent, revealing the shape of the terrain in more detail.
‘There’s something in the lake,’ Nina realised, almost elbowing Trulli aside to get a better look. ‘See, there - something on the ground. It could be a building.’
‘Or it could be a rock,’ Trulli pointed out. ‘The resolution’s only about five metres per polygon; anything smaller just gets averaged out. And there’s still a hell of a lot of coastline to go; there could be plenty of other lakes. You ought to check everything else out before you get too excited about this one.’
Nina had to concede his point. ‘Okay, okay. But mark this site so we can come back. I’ve got a feeling about it.’
He gave her a sidelong look. ‘The kind of feeling you get when you’re about to find something amazing?’
She smiled. ‘That kind, yeah.’
‘The kind of feeling that usually means somebody’s going to try to kill you?’
Now she pouted. ‘All right, smart guy. Just mark it, will you?’
There were indeed other underground lakes along the Antarctic coastline. But none of them matched Nina’s deductions so closely.
She zoomed in on the image. If it really was the location of the lost city, then it was well positioned. The coastline of that era had a large bay that would give boats shelter from the fierce conditions in the open ocean, and the valley in which the lake had formed would have provided further protection from the harsh winds sweeping the continent. Given its latitude, outside the Antarctic Circle at sixty-six degrees south, it was even possible that the considerably warmer climate of a hundred and thirty millennia earlier would have allowed vegetation to grow. The inscription had certainly made reference to trees.
It was the right location. Somehow, she was sure of it. And without knowledge of the recordings contained on the cylinders, there was no way the Covenant could find it. It was her discovery, hers alone.
The problem was, how could she possibly get to it? She was still suspended from the IHA, so its resources were unavailable - and besides, telling the IHA about her findings would, she was sure, result in their being passed on to the Covenant in short order. And Antarctica was hardly a place that could be visited on a whim. Expeditions took time and planning - and money - to organise.
So the only way to get there would be—
Her cell phone rang. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, love.’ Chase.
‘Where are you? Did you meet your friend?’
‘Yeah, we just finished. Got everything sorted, for the moment. Are you still at Matt’s?’
‘Yeah. Eddie, listen, I know where the city is. I’ve found the site in the Antarctic, I’m certain of it. We need to get there and check it out.’
A sarcastic snort came from the other end of the line. ‘Right. I’ll just pop into the travel agent and get some tickets to the South Pole.’
‘I’ll take care of it. Just get over here. You’ve got the address?’
‘Yeah. What do you mean, you’ll take care of it?’
‘I think I’ve got a way. Or I will have, in about five minutes.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of Trulli re-entering the apartment. ‘See you soon. Bye!’
‘Nina, wait—’
She disconnected and went into the next room as Trulli took a couple of bags of groceries into the kitchen. From the brightly coloured packaging inside them, she guessed he hadn’t been stocking up on fruits and vegetables. ‘I thought you were giving up on snacks while you were in the Antarctic?’
‘Well, I’m not there yet,’ he said with a grin. ‘Might as well get a few home comforts for the trip.’
‘Speaking of the trip,’ she began, wondering how he would respond, ‘can you show me your test site on the map?’
‘Sure, no worries.’ He followed Nina back to the computer. The screen still showed the lake she had been examining; he switched to the overhead view and zoomed out, scrolling further inland. ‘There we go.’
She glanced at the scale. The test site was about seventy kilometres from ‘her’ lake; just over forty miles. In the vastness of the frozen continent, that was practically nothing. ‘What were the criteria you used to pick that particular lake? You said it was of no scientific interest.’
‘That’s right,’ said Trulli, nodding. ‘Lake Vostok’s huge, and it’s over half a million years old, so if there’s any life down there it might have evolved completely differently, which is what the expedition’s going to try to find out. But the test site
needed to be a lot newer and smaller, somewhere that couldn’t support its own ecosystem, so if anything went screwy we wouldn’t damage it.’
‘How much younger?’
‘Dr Bandra reckoned a hundred and fifty thousand years old was the cut-off point. So we found a bunch of lakes that fit the bill, and I picked one that looked like a good test for Cambot.’
‘You picked the lake?’
‘Yep.’
Nina put an arm round his shoulders. ‘Matt . . . what would you say to trying a different test site?’
‘What, at this short notice? It’d—’ He suddenly realised where Nina was heading. ‘Aw, what? You must be joking!’
‘I wish I were. But really, is one underground lake that much different from another?’ She scrolled the map back to the other lake. ‘I mean, this one’s less than a hundred and fifty thousand years old, it’s small, it’s not even that far from where you were going to go . . . and there might just be something absolutely incredible at the bottom of it. You can kill two penguins with one stone.’
‘I don’t want to kill any penguins!’ Trulli protested. ‘For Christ’s sake, Nina, I’m flying out there with a five-million-dollar robot tomorrow - I can’t just say, “Oh, by the way, fellas, I’ve decided to change the test site”!’
‘Why not? You’re in charge. And the expedition isn’t actually on site yet, is it?’
‘No, they’re still at sea. But—’
‘So it doesn’t make much difference, does it? Just say that you reviewed the map data and found a better site.’
‘Dr Bandra’d go absolutely mental,’ he said unhappily. ‘And what if something goes wrong? If Cambot carks it because the conditions aren’t what he was designed for, then that’s five million dollars down the Swannee, and probably my balls on the block for it!’
Nina pressed on. ‘But if I’m right, then not only do you get to test out your robot, but you also find the most amazing archaeological discovery since Atlantis. And how would you rather test your cameras - looking at bits of rock and ice, or the ruins of an unknown civilisation?’