Cold Blood Read online

  Up until a few weeks ago, I’d have thought that was really funny.

  3

  The pilot made another approach. The wind had slackened, the cloud cleared and suddenly I was looking at the primary-coloured houses close up. The visibility was pin-sharp. That was the thing about the Arctic. One minute you could see no more than a few inches, even when the sun was out, the next you could see for miles.

  I’d never been a big fan of fucking about on ice. I hadn’t even liked watching Torvill and Dean on TV when the rest of the world couldn’t get enough of them. It was just easier to start off hot and try to cool down, instead of the other way round.

  When I became a squaddie, NATO was shit scared of the Russians pulling a fast one and invading Europe from the top while we were busy looking east. Every couple of years we were issued with Arctic warfare kit – extra-thick socks, a woolly hat and a pair of mittens – and sent off to Porsangmoen, a Norwegian training area. We would spend two months each year freezing our bollocks off in the Arctic Circle in temperatures of –45° centigrade when the wind picked up. Some of the lads loved playing snow soldiers, but the idea of sliding along with a twenty-five-kilo Bergen and a fifty-kilo sledge never did it for me – especially when I was trying to steer clear of big white bears that could smell us from miles away and thought we were meals on skis.

  Immersion training was what I hated most. We all had to ski through a hole in the ice into the water below. The cold took your breath away, and even with quick-release buckles, it was unbelievably hard to get your Bergen off your back with fingers that were so fucking cold they no longer did what you told them to.

  Once the thing was off – and hopefully floating – we had to drag ourselves out before we froze to death. There were always safety guys nearby in case someone was in the water for too long, but it wasn’t just the cold that could kill – the shock could literally take your breath away so you asphyxiated instead.

  Even when you’d scraped yourself back onto the ice, that wasn’t the end of it. We had to stand at attention, shout our name, rank and regimental number, then yell an even louder Sir! to confirm our minds were still in gear. Afterwards we were pushed into a steaming hot shelter, stripped, shoved into sleeping bags and given hot drinks before we got very dead.

  That wasn’t my idea of happy camping, and neither was being an appetizer at the polar bears’ picnic. But as with pretty much everything in my life, when it was done I’d told myself it really hadn’t been that bad – then tugged on the mittens and the extra-thick socks twenty-four months later and started honking about the Arctic all over again.

  And playing soldiers on ice taught me one thing I was never going to forget: in the Arctic Circle, mistakes were only made once.

  4

  The wheels finally dropped onto the ice-coated tarmac with little more than a squeak and the aircraft taxied towards the low-level, rectangular and quite new-looking terminal.

  The Owl looked as though he’d just been sprung from Death Row. As soon as we started taxiing he was out of his seat and reaching for the overhead locker, budget-airline style. The Russians all had the same idea and the aisle filled with padded coats and vodka fumes. The flight attendants threw their hands into the air and let everyone get on with it.

  The Owl wrestled out an oversized bag and let it fall onto the seat beside me. The colour had returned to his cheeks for the first time since the aircraft had started bouncing around in the sky.

  A low sun glinted off the runway. I knew it could really mess up your vision, even if there was some cloud cover. I put on my Julbo CAT 4 gigs and watched a ragged queue of big men with bloodshot eyes and broken veins stumble down the steps into the place they’d call home for the next six months.

  I reached inside my day sack and pulled out the thick Rab Expedition duvet jacket I’d picked up in Oslo. My arms stood out from my sides like the new kid in the starched uniform once I’d put it on over my inner layer of padding.

  The flight attendants had their jackets on, fur hoods pulled up, and were getting impatient. Fair one: they wanted to get us drunken noisy shits off their aircraft. I had my thermals in place and could pull on the padded trousers later.

  They cracked a series of identical smiles as I passed through the door: we both knew what was about to hit me. A second later, I was being shoved into a deep freeze at the same time as having my face sandpapered by someone bent on revenge. I coughed with the shock of it, and as I breathed in it felt as if a claw made of ice-coated iron was reaching down my throat and into my lungs. I coughed again and bent forward.

  ‘Will ya look at that?’ The Owl’s yell was almost lost in the driving wind. ‘Last time I was here, back in the fall, ours was the only plane.’

  Parked up on the apron were a couple more Antonovs, several private jets and an Airbus A330 freighter in blue livery that called itself ‘Skyship’.

  ‘Why the build-up?’

  ‘Everybody wants a piece of what’s down there.’ He pointed at the ground. ‘Like I said, it’s the black-gold rush.’

  Munnelly cruised up alongside and steered the Owl away towards a frosted black Chevy Suburban waiting on the apron. No formalities for those guys. Even in this security-conscious age there were always some with enough muscle and money to cut their way through the red tape.

  ‘Nice meetin’ you,’ the Owl called over his shoulder. ‘And watch your back out there. Ain’t no trees, but it’s a jungle.’

  5

  Cauldwell was waiting under the Arrivals sign, greyer and a little more lined than he had been the last time I’d seen him, but he still carried himself like a Rupert, all six-five of him towering over the throng. He was very much a Queen-and-country man. I saw it as a crutch, something to lean on, a bit like religion, because something else was missing. Any soldier at the bottom of the food chain would be very wary of Cauldwell’s type of commitment, and I was no different.

  He gave me a stiff handshake. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘How could I resist?’

  ‘How was the flight?’

  ‘Interesting.’

  I realized I didn’t know how to address him. I’d never called him ‘sir’, and wasn’t about to start now, but couldn’t imagine us on first-name terms either. In the Regiment he’d been called various things, but none to his face.

  Outside a sign said: ‘Oslo 2046, London 3403, Tokyo 6830’. It was exactly the kind of place I needed: a long way from everywhere.

  He started to lead the way to a Merc G-Wagen, then pulled up. ‘That all you’re carrying? Where’s your kit?’

  I shrugged.

  He carried on walking. ‘Stupid question. Well, you’ll be able to sort that out here. They’ve got everything you’ll need. Been this far north before?’ He didn’t give me time to answer. ‘Because up on the ice it’s at least ten degrees colder.’

  He put on his sun-gigs and fired up the engine, then slammed the shift into Drive and moved off. I checked the temperature display on the dash: –14°C.

  He’d gone all quiet, like he was concentrating hard on the road, except it was almost empty. At least the signs were keeping me entertained. The wildlife warning triangle didn’t have a silhouette of a deer. It had one of a bear.

  After greeting us briefly on the tarmac the sun had vanished again almost immediately, leaving nothing more than a ghostly glow on what might have been the horizon. In a couple of weeks it would be spring, or ‘light winter’, as they called it, then summer – when the temperature reached a sweltering six degrees – and the sun wouldn’t set again until late August. The months of no light followed by months of no darkness were said to drive you mad. And the lack of decent broadband.

  The moisture in the atmosphere was freezing into fairy dust. The coloured houses came into view again, and I could now see the stilts holding them all a metre or so proud of the ground.

  Cauldwell followed my gaze. ‘The permafrost is up to forty metres thick – the soil’s frozen all year round. The top lay
er melts in the summer, so the stilts keep these places from sinking into the sludge.’

  Behind them, the forbidding Arctic terrain surrounded the town, looming over it in a way that, if you were the nervous type, you might find unsettling.

  We passed a couple on foot, rifles slung casually over their shoulders.

  ‘It’s the only place I know where you get into trouble for not carrying. The bears get quite bold when they’re hungry, and when they see something edible they don’t hang about. There are more of them here than there are people.’

  Cauldwell moved to the centre of the road to avoid the pedestrians. ‘Fuck knows why anyone wants to stay here. It’s the constant daylight.’

  ‘I don’t mind the idea of eternal dusk.’ It suited my current state of mind.

  He looked at me as if I’d completely lost it. ‘Well, wait until you try getting to sleep. You’ll remember why people keep prisoners awake under interrogation. It’s bloody torture all right.’

  If he was trying to sell this trip to me he was making a pig’s breakfast of it. Except for that last thing. I hadn’t wanted to go to sleep much lately.

  ‘So where’s Jack now?’

  There was a pause before he replied. ‘You’ll catch up with him in due course.’ He chewed his bottom lip. ‘Something you need to know from the start. We’ve not been on the best of terms, him and me. The usual father–son stuff. You know how it is. It’s nothing, really, but children can be a major fucking …’

  I gave him a look that said all I needed it to.

  ‘Sorry, forget I said that. Bit distracted.’ He gave me a side-long glance, then, seeing I hadn’t broken down in floods of tears, decided to press on. ‘I haven’t seen the lad for the best part of a year … This tab, I was all for it. After lying around moping, he finally seemed to be pulling his finger out. It’s just what he needs – something to focus on, a challenge.’

  He let out a long, despairing sigh that probably said more about what he thought of his son than any words could.

  ‘But he … he’s been hell bent on going his own bloody way on it. Kept me pretty much in the dark, despite my offers to help. Anyway, there is one detail that I didn’t have time to explain to you.’

  He took a breath, ready to give me the bad news. Stuff that there was never time to explain was always bad news.

  ‘His sponsorship’s gone tits up. Cold feet – if you’ll pardon the pun – about the condition of some of his fellow travellers.’

  He misread my silence for lack of interest. It wasn’t that. Either the trip was off or it was on. Either I had a couple of days to distract myself or I had a whole lot more.

  ‘It’s all right, Stone, you’re being handsomely rewarded.’

  That was the last thing I was thinking of. I was reminding myself of what a fucking awful judge of character Cauldwell was.

  He was interrupted by the sat nav, telling him to turn left. He swung the wheel. ‘Anyway, I’ve pulled a few strings and put something together to help save the expedition so he can get it back on the rails.’

  His face brightened. ‘Quite a coup, frankly. Proper Arctic expertise, proper backup and kit. No arsing about. But he has to get going. It’s now or never.’

  ‘Why the hurry?’

  ‘Well, they can’t just sit around here freezing their arses off.’

  That didn’t sound like the real reason. ‘But Jack’s pleased, right?’

  ‘He doesn’t know yet. That’s where you come in. You’re going to give him the good news. He won’t accept anything from me.’

  I was starting to get pissed off. He’d lied to get me there. Then I took a breath too. Fuck it, so what? ‘How’s that going to work? What happens if he tells me to piss off?’

  ‘Then he’s fucked. He can’t go without backup, decent kit, or the funding for the round trip. He needs cash for the flights – and do you have any idea how much fuel costs up there? There’s the transport cost, the distance, the difficulty of transferring barrels of aviation fuel from one transport to another, the quality of the fuel. It has to be perfect because it powers everything up there, not just the aircraft.

  ‘Getting aviation fuel this far is expensive enough. Further north it can be anything up to six hundred dollars a litre. That’s expensive flying to get where they need to go, and it’ll cost even more if they have problems and need airlifting out. They simply do not have that kind of money.

  ‘I’m handing him all he needs on a plate. It’s his last hope. Without it, the whole thing’s off.’

  He hit the brakes too hard and the wagon started to slide. He cursed, released them, and the tyres bit again.

  ‘And all I ask from him in return is that you go with him.’

  ‘He doesn’t know about that either?’

  ‘Look, I moved Heaven and Earth to make the going easy over the years. He’d never have got into Sandhurst if I hadn’t pulled a few strings. He’s never been what you’d call leadership material, and based on his all-too-brief time in the field, I can’t exactly vouch for his judgement. So I need a grown-up watching he doesn’t put his remaining foot in it.’ He gave a half-hearted laugh.

  ‘You mean getting blown up counts against him?’

  He glared at me. ‘For God’s sake, you’re starting to sound like his mother. What I mean is, he and his crew of— Well, they’ve all had a few bits knocked off them. But the deal is they have to get there. I’ve put a lot of effort into making this happen and I don’t want it fucked up because one of them can’t manage to put up a tent.’

  Great. Hired for a job, by someone who didn’t believe in it, to babysit someone who probably wouldn’t want me anywhere near him. For money I didn’t need. I guessed it was a bit better than spending my life working in a job I didn’t like to buy things I didn’t need and impress people I didn’t give a fuck about.

  Or maybe not.

  I should have opted for the Nigerian tin mine.

  6

  Cauldwell gave me a big shit-eating grin, willing me to believe that some of the old can-do conviction was coming through, but I heard more than a hint of desperation in his voice, as if he had more riding on this than he was letting on. ‘You’ll convince him it’s the right thing, Stone. I know you will.’

  Either he had an absurd amount of confidence in my abilities or he really was even more desperate than he sounded. ‘How do you think Jack will take it?’

  ‘If he’s got any sense he should bloody welcome this option with open arms. Without the sort of expertise and resources I’m bringing to the table, the whole thing’s dead in the water so he should be over the moon. All the more so because it’s coming from you.’ He nodded enthusiastically, willing me to agree. ‘You’ll be the bearer of very good news. It should go down well. Extremely well.’

  Or like a cup of cold sick, I couldn’t help thinking. Something about the way Cauldwell was selling this suggested there was more than a mountain to be climbed before anyone set foot on the Arctic ice. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. At least for now. After all, Jack was his son. He should know how his mind worked. And the fact that the sponsorship had gone south should make it a no-brainer for him.

  A black Chevy Suburban swept past, empty now, heading back towards the airport, lights blazing, owning the road.

  ‘Fucking Americans.’

  ‘I met a couple on the way up. That was probably their wagon.’

  Cauldwell let out one of his trademark sighs. ‘They think they can waltz in here like it’s D-Day all over again, behaving as if they own the place, winding everybody up. Frankly, I think it’s only a matter of time before the Russians bite back.’ He turned a corner without indicating, so a knackered two-door Toyota was now skidding along the ice, horn blaring, its driver fighting to keep moving in a straight line.

  Cauldwell thought about what he had just said. ‘Well, they are already. This is the third year they’ve conducted Arctic exercises. The Chechen Airborne jumped onto the ice last week. They flew
directly from Murmansk. Not just troops, but heavy drop. Full support, very impressive.’

  It was. Airborne was not just about getting boots on the ground. It was about having the kit and heavy-support weapons to keep the force there, if needed. The Brits could no longer do it, and until recently only the USA had had that capability. Now the Russians wanted everyone to know that was no longer the case and, to rub it in, their Murmansk military base was within spitting distance of Norway’s northern border.

  After the Russian Army had kicked Georgia’s arse in 2008, its generals had told Putin it was completely due to Russian numerical superiority, not the quality of their troops or weapons. Because the invasion had given his country a sense of pride and dignity, Putin had had no problem with putting plenty of its new-found oil and gas wealth into rebuilding the military, moving from a largely conscript army to a professional one with world-beating kit.

  ‘I know Norway are impressed, but in a bad way. They’re flapping big-time about Russian power in the region, what with the Russians upgrading their airstrips to take heavy military, and making claims on old territories left, right and centre. I bet Norway’s very happy it’s in NATO. There’s even a Norwegian TV show about Russia invading Norway.’

  ‘Really?’ Cauldwell never liked being told stuff he didn’t know. And I doubted he’d even heard of Netflix. ‘Hmm. Interesting.’

  ‘The reality’s more complicated than that, but the same idea. Russia in charge.’

  ‘So you know about what’s happening up here?’

  ‘A little. The Moscow news covers a fair amount, and there are religious services on TV praying for the return of the Federation’s power. The footage of the two flags being planted on the seabed under the Pole is still an audience-pleaser. It’s a big deal for them. Putin keeps pumping out the message that the Pole belongs to them and the West is trying to fuck them over by taking all the oil and gas away.’