An ebook short story set in the coldest place on earth, perfect for fans of Dan Brown, Dan Simmons and Alistair MacLean. Utgard: a tiny island at the frozen edge of the world. Home to scientists, oil men, and the occasional polar bear. For Andy MacDonald it's the most awe-inspiring place on earth: isolated, beautiful and pristine. Mac has always respected the Arctic. He's always understood how dangerous it is. Until the day that a beautiful woman emerges from a whiteout, claiming to be nothing more than a lost environmental activist. Before long Mac is caught up in a dangerous game of cat and mouse. And he's about to find out exactly how deadly the Arctic can be. 'Polar Vortex' takes place six months before ZODIAC STATION, the novel Chris Ewan calls 'thrilling and immersive'.
Release date:
May 8, 2014
Publisher:
Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages:
32
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Carl Franklin, Captain of the US Coast Guard ice-breaking cutter Terra Nova, stared out the wheelhouse windows. A 360˚ field of view – but he might as well have his nose pressed against a painted wall. The clouds had settled after the storm, fusing the sky with the air and the air with the ice to make a perfect blank. Growing up in Maine, he thought he’d seen fog, but this was like nothing else. Even the bow light wasn’t much more than a rumour.
He put his hand against the cold glass, just to touch something solid. Hopefully the crew didn’t notice. In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, a thousand miles of ice around them and four thousand metres of near-freezing water below the keel, he didn’t want them thinking their captain was losing his grip on reality.
He rocked back on his heels, reassured by the mass of sixteen thousand tons of steel under his feet. The Terra Nova was state of the art, the pride of the Coast Guard: an ice-reinforced vessel capable of making a steady three knots through four-foot ice, of smashing her way to the North Pole if need be. She’d already been there twice in her short working life.
A wobbling reflection ghosted up out of the fog. Santiago, the operations officer, an Arizona Latino who’d traded his hot, landlocked state for a frozen ocean. A thing for deserts was how he explained it; a thing for desserts, they teased him back.
Franklin turned. The spooky Santiago in the window became the real deal, six foot two of seafaring muscle, slowly being promoted to fat. By the time he made admiral, Franklin thought, the doctors would be giving him a hard time on his health assessment.
‘The geeks want to go play,’ Santiago announced.
The geeks were the scientists, the Terra Nova’s cargo, and her mission. Thirty-three scientists from all over the world, measuring the water, measuring the ice, measuring the snow, measuring the air. Fifty kinds of cold, Santiago called it. It kept them happy.
‘What’s the ice like?’ he called to the crewman hunched over the satellite chart. A tie-dye swirl of greens, oranges and reds, constantly mutating as the ice shifted.
‘Shitty for fishing, sir.’
Franklin checked his watch. Ten thirty at night, but that didn’t mean anything here. The sun had come up four days ago and wasn’t going to set for five months. Not that you’d know, with that damned fog.
‘They can have three hours.’ He looked out the window again, at the blank grey void that held the ship fast. They’d be lucky to measure their own feet in that.
‘Put an extra man down there on bear guard.’
What the hell is out there?
Boatswain’s Mate (second class) Kyle Aaron hugged the Remington 870 to his chest and hoped he wouldn’t have to use it in a hurry. The gloves made his fingers so fat he could hardly get them round the stock, never mind pull the trigger. Not that the gloves kept him warm, either: the only thing he could feel in his hands was prickling cold.
He shouldered the shotgun and swung his arms to get some blood flowing. Behind him, the geeks did their thing on the ice. Some of them had put up a tripod and were using it to winch a yellow buoy down through a hole they’d bored. Others paced out survey lines, walking backwards and forwards over the snow like they were checking for litter. Aaron, who’d scraped a D in ninth-grade bio, and spent four years of high school avoiding chemistry, wondered why they did it. He stamped his feet and wished they’d hurry the fuck up.
The fog had thinned a little. A ways back, the Terra Nova’s red hull loomed over the ice, her white superstructure dissolving into the cloud. He could hear the rasp of the deck crew scraping off the ice, and the low throb of her engine as the propellers turned slowly to maintain position. The yellow crane arm on her foredeck dangled the gangway on to the ice. He wondered how fast the scientists could run up it if a bear came.
The ground trembled; the ice cracked and growled. The shotgun wobbled in his hands. Growing up in Florida, cold . . .
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