Simon Morden - The Curve of The Earth

“Yeah, okay. I’ll take your advice. If I start banging on again, let me know.” He dropped his bag on one of the cabin seats and started to warm up both the cockpit and the instruments. He had enough fuel to get to Deadhorse, maybe with a teaspoon or so spare, and everything else working more-or-less fine. Nothing was going to drop off just yet.

He wondered if he actually needed Newcomen at all; whether the kindest thing would be to abandon him here, where there was civilisation and some way of getting back — because he was certain he was flying straight into a trap. He just didn’t know who the trap was intended for.

But he’d already offered him an out, and the agent had refused. That meant something. Or other.

“Yeah, Michael. Is there any possibility that Newcomen is a plant? That he’s the best agent they have, trained in all sorts of black-ops stuff, and has been reprogrammed like Tabletop was so he doesn’t remember any of it — until the critical moment when he knifes me in the back.”

[We have done a thorough background check on Joseph Newcomen. As far as we can tell, his life can be completely accounted for and verified by external sources.]

“And you’re absolutely certain the guy who’s walking towards me right now is the same one who broke his arm in a football game, and that Joseph Newcomen isn’t holding up a bridge somewhere.”

[We have a confidence of almost one hundred per cent on that being the case.]

Petrovitch looked out of the windscreen at the figure dragging its feet through the snow.

“You know what? I’m regretting this more and more.” He got out of his seat and went to get his polar bear gun from his bag. Then he decided that the rest of the bag ought to be in easy reach too.

He was sitting back in the pilot’s seat when the plane rocked and Newcomen appeared.

“Is everything, uh, ready?”

“Yeah.” Petrovitch told the ladder to retract and the door to close. “We’re ready now.”

There were several roads that led out of Fairbanks. Route Eleven headed north towards the Arctic Ocean and Prudhoe Bay. Sometimes it made seemingly random turns, swinging to the left or right to navigate a hidden obstacle or difficult terrain, but what it did do was follow the pipeline wherever it went. The two were never far apart, and in winter, when snow and ice covered the landscape, it was often the only indication of where the road was: somewhere parallel to the fat grey tube held clear of the ground on pylons.

The pipeline ended where Petrovitch’s search started, six hundred kilometres away on the shore of a mostly frozen sea, inhabited only by oil men and natives — some of whom were also oil men.

He was flying low, out of necessity, out of habit, bare metres above the trees where there was forest, and the folds in the ground where there wasn’t, following the road north because that was the way Jason Fyfe would have gone. Cross-country wasn’t an option in anything but a tracked vehicle: the RV that Fyfe had borrowed had fat balloon tyres with studs for gripping the frozen surface of the snow, but if it had left the hard substrate of the road surface, it would have foundered.

He knew — Michael had told him — that most of the oil companies moved their personnel by plane, and most of their equipment by landship around the coast to avoid the mountain range between south and north.

That was what had made the trucks heading towards Deadhorse stand out so. Anonymous, white, big. Taking the road was the quicker option, and a series of massive transport planes dropping in on a runway at the edge of the world would have been simply blatant.

Even if the Freezone hadn’t been watching for it, someone else — the Chinese, perhaps — would have seen them from space.

Something was going on, and it infuriated him that he didn’t know what. Yet. He would, eventually. And he’d find Lucy, too, and bring her home.

There was a lot to concentrate on: the act of flying, the minute course corrections even when the road was straight, the slew of other data flooding in, his own thoughts, the gun burning heavy and hard against his chest. They flew on, and the trees petered out. Nothing now but rock and ice until the sea — not a featureless landscape, but muted; its vastness muffled and softened by the deep drifts of snow.

He almost missed the figure raising his hand to the plane as it roared overhead in the half-light, dragging a snowstorm in its wake.

“Did you…?” asked Newcomen, twisting around in his seat, as if he could see behind him through the opaque fuselage of the plane.

“Barely.” Petrovitch pulled back on the throttle and executed a long looping turn that took them wide over the tundra. As they turned, they could see the man again as a dark shape against the white ice. A snowmobile stood a little way off, and behind that, a towed sled.

The man had his arms outstretched, angled up. He held them there, turning to face the plane as it came back around.

“What does he want?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Petrovitch. “And that’s talk to him.”

He lined up with the road and lessened the power to the gravity pods. They sank towards the ground and started to drift laterally. He gave the control surfaces a nudge: the plane turned, and he came to a halt with the nose diagonally to the direction of travel.

The man lowered his arms. Petrovitch could just make out button-bright eyes hiding beneath the fur-rimmed hood, and the outline of a rifle slung across his back.

“Muffle up. It’s even colder outside than it was in Fairbanks.” Petrovitch slid from his seat and made his way back to the cabin. He cracked the door open, dislodging a thin layer of ice that had formed there.

The ladder extended reluctantly, and he jumped the last step down on to the iron-hard surface. His coat steamed with stored moisture, and a white crust formed on its skin. Newcomen followed him into the freezing air, shuddering at its touch.

“Hey,” said Petrovitch, when he was close enough. “We almost missed you.” He could feel the hairs in his nostrils bristle and grow hard.

The man pulled his collar down to expose his sallow, tanned face. “Hey. Where’re you from?”

Petrovitch looked around, flicking from visible light to infrared and back. The skidoo was just about warmer than its surroundings, meaning it had been there a while without having been parked overnight.

“Out of Fairbanks,” he said. “You?”

“Allakaket.”

The man was an Inuk, then. Petrovitch could cobble together some Inupiaq, but he wasn’t confident he’d be at all intelligible. He stuck to English.

“Hunting?”

“Got me some wolf.” He nodded over at the sled, and the lumpy tarpaulin covering its contents. “I heard you coming from the south. A vehicle’s come off the road: I was going to report it next place I came to, but seeing as you’re here…”

Petrovitch’s eyes narrowed. “RV?”

“Big one. It’s in a river just over there. I wouldn’t have seen it, but I went over its rear fender.”

“Plates?” asked Newcomen.

The Inuk turned his attention to the tall American, dressed in traditional clothing but on a vastly different scale. His face sneered for a second in a way it hadn’t when talking to Petrovitch.

“Alaskan. I wasn’t going to dig it out any further than that: it’s nose down on the ice, and the snow’s covering it all.”

“We’ll have a look,” said Petrovitch. There was a shovel strapped to the side of the skidoo, and he pointed to it. “Okay if we take that?”

“No reason why not.” He freed it, deftly manipulating the clips despite his thick mittens, and led the way below the underside of the plane to a spot that looked almost exactly like every other, except for the small mound of freshly turned snow.