Ice Age Read online

  Ice Age

  Brian Freemantle

  Indications are that it is too late

  to prevent global warming.

  Dr Klaus Topfer, head of the

  UN Environmental Programme.

  London, 15.9.99

  Acknowledgement

  I wish to offer my very sincere and grateful thanks to Professor Martin Bobrow, CBE, DSc, FRCP, FRCPath, FMedSci, head of Medical Genetics at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, not only for his patience in trying to guide me through the labyrinth of DNA technology, but for afterwards reading the manuscript of Ice Age to correct my layman’s misunderstandings and ignorance. My thanks also go to Professor John Shearer, MBCHB, PHD, MRCS, for his equally patient responses to my many orthopaedic questions. And to Lachlan Mackinnon, who knew the word.

  Author’s Note

  Ice Age is a work of fiction. It is not intended to be a polemic on global warming. The disease around which the plot revolves does not occur in adults, although forms of it are rare conditions affecting children.

  Much of the book is, however, factual.

  The ice caps of the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland are melting at an unprecedented rate. The American Geophysical Union estimates that in four decades the Arctic ice sheet has become 40 per cent thinner and Russia’s Perma-Frost Institute at Yakutsk predicts that in less than fifty years Siberian cities will sink to destruction into the melting ground. In 1999 the body of a perfectly preserved 23,000-year-old woolly mammoth was exposed by global warming near the town of Khatanga. Scientists are seriously discussing cloning a living creature from the DNA still existing in the animal. Microbes and viruses, unknown to modern science or medicine, are being released into world oceans after being trapped for millions of years. In a core sample sunk in Greenland, scientists discovered a 140,000-year-old virus still capable of infecting plants. A scientific team from the University of Montana found a 500,000-year-old microbe linked to proteobacteria and actinomycetes 11,000 feet beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet near the glacier-covered Lake Vostok.

  Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1999 recounted several instances of marine mammals and sea life either dying from inexplicable causes or from cross-species infections. Birds transmitted influenza – a species-jumping disease that in a 1918 pandemic killed at least forty million – that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of seals and whales. An unknown virus decimated the oyster beds of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. Viruses carried by porpoise and dolphin killed incalculable numbers of Mediterranean monk seals off the coast of Mauritania. The same infection killed grey seals in Britain’s North Sea. Sea urchins, a key herbivore in the Caribbean food chain, were virtually wiped out by a mystery disease. An epidemic of a herpes-like virus destroyed hundreds of blue-fin tuna off South Australia and the unique fresh water seals of Siberia’s fresh water Lake Baikal died from doglike distemper. Lake Baikal is a geophysical phenomena, provably dating from the Paleocene and Lower Neocene era. It has the greatest depth of any water in the world. Its twenty-five million-year-old virus and microbe-active sediment bed is estimated to be more than a mile thick. Only indigenous sea creatures and plants can survive in its waters. Any outside living thing dies and its remains – including bones and clothing in the case of humans – is untraceably devoured by a connate species of minute crab. So unique is the lake that a special scientific institute has been permanently established at Listvyanka to study it.

  Nearing completion, worldwide, is the Human Genome Project. On June 26, 2000, in a satellite-linked joint press conference, US President Bill Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair – supported by genetic scientists – announced the mapping of 90 per cent of the genetic ‘Book of Man’. It will be fully sequenced by 2003. The American president described it as ‘learning the language in which God created life’. The book is DNA, a huge coiled molecule over three feet long packed inside every human cell in twenty-three chromosomes. The chromosomes contain genes that control the behaviour and health of every human cell. Already some of these chromosomes – 5, 16 and 1.9 – have been partially decoded. Chromosome 22 – the smallest in the human body – has been completely read.

  The plant-attacking virus was discovered in the Greenland ice by a joint scientific team from Syracuse University, New York, and the State University of New York. Their virologists, as well as those from the universities of Montana and Oregon, readily speculate about the risk of long-frozen, unknown viruses and bacteria causing worldwide pandemics against which there are no vaccines or antibiotics.

  Ice Age is such a speculation.

  Winchester, 2002

  One

  Patricia said: ‘Oh dear God! What is it?’

  No one else spoke: was initially able to speak. They instinctively, protectively, pressed back against the insulating door of the out-station, repelled because they were scientists who worked by and to formulae – so far understood rules and so far unarguable equations – and there was no formula, no rational explanation, for what they were looking at.

  Jack Stoddart, the project director and at that numbing moment leader of an intended rescue mission, knew he should say something but couldn’t. He felt as frozen as the razor-winded wastes outside, sharpened by the briefly interrupted blizzard that had prevented their arrival until now but, from the increasing battering sounds outside, was blowing up again.

  ‘Oh dear God,’ said Patricia again.

  All four of the field team were dead.

  Harry Armstrong, the team leader who’d tried to raise the alarm, was slumped at the table in front of the powerless radio, his arthritically twisted hand beneath the useless tuning dial from which it had finally fallen. His white hair – as white as the packed snow beyond the station – was so long it merged with the white beard spread like a sheet in front of him. What skin that could be seen, on his face and hands, was shrivelled and pocked with liver spots. They could see Jane Horrocks on her bunk, through the open door of the adjoining sleeping quarters. She, too, was hugely white-haired, a disordered, uncut and uncombed straggle, but she had lost a lot on the crown of her head, the baldness showing through. Her face and hands were wizened, the untrimmed nails like claws, and she lay as she would have stood in fading life, almost foetally, her back hunched by osteoporosis. George Bedall, who appeared to have fallen trying to move between the two linked rooms, had begun to lose his hair when he was twenty-one. Now he was totally bald, his skull deeply furrowed above a more tightly, fissure-riven face. Both outstretched, entreating arms had snapped, where he’d collapsed, and spread out distortedly, like a child’s discarded puppet. Buckland Jessup, whom they’d called Bucky because he’d come from Texas and claimed to ride in rodeos, was the closest and the figure from whom they most obviously seemed to be withdrawing. He couldn’t have been intentionally praying – more likely reaching out, desperate to escape through the door at which they stood – but he’d crumpled oddly, rigored in a kneeling position, his hands clasped before him in supplication. Like all but Bedall, he was enveloped in a profusion of ancient hair, his face dalmationed with liver spots. The eyes were what horrified the most. They bulged, with panicked terror, although they were whitely opaque from geriatric blindness.

  It was Patricia Jefferies who spoke yet again, although only a dry-voiced whisper. ‘Old … they’re all so old! Eighty … ninety …’

  Stoddart said: ‘Harry was the oldest. Forty-two. Muriel gave him a birthday party just before he came out here, three months ago.’

  The carcase of the minke whale was hauled slowly, trailing blood, up the lowered rear ramp of the ice-speckled factory ship towards the waiting, waterproofed fishermen, their chain-sawed cutters churning in readiness.

  It had been a good beginning to t
he illegal, Convention-ignoring season in the Antarctic. There were four whales already roughly dissected in the refrigerated holds, their unwanted entrails and bones discarded for the scavengers that shoaled anxiously in the ship’s wake.

  There wasn’t room for any more whales after this one was cut up. The support ships had a record catch of tuna, too.

  It was time to go home.

  Two

  It was Stoddart who moved at last, the leader he was supposed to be, forcing himself further into the newly constructed building that was technically part of the South Pole’s Amundsen-Scott Station, itself an outer field base of America’s Antarctic programme headquartered seven hundred miles south at McMurdo. It was from McMurdo that Stoddart had launched the rescue, able at last to skirt the early winter blizzard that had closed in nearer the Amundsen base for the past three weeks. It was precisely twenty-two days since Armstrong’s first static-broken plea for help over the just installed short-wave radio.

  The station was an ice tomb, numbingly sub-zero, because the generator – the generator that should have taken over powering the radio after the outside aerial had blown down – had failed. Stoddart was beside the blindly praying Bedall, unthinkingly reaching out to touch the solidly frozen body, before he became conscious that the others in the team were still huddled in the doorway, unable – certainly unwilling – to shift.

  Stoddart said: ‘Let’s move it! I want all their data, everything …’ He looked more fully at Chip Burke. ‘We able to fly them all out at the same time?’ McMurdo’s normal, US Navy bulk-carrying LC-130 was grounded with a rear ramp hydraulic malfunction and they’d come up in a little used English-built DHC-8.

  The pilot, on his first Antarctic tour, frowned. ‘Four people, dead weight. We’ll be pushing it.’

  The new and strengthening blizzard smashed and tore at the protective sheath of the stilted field shelter, snow hitting the outer fabric like bullets from a gun and with what sounded like the same velocity.

  Stoddart said: ‘You think you could make two runs?’

  ‘I’m not sure we’ll get out from this one,’ said Burke. He shivered, not at the cold but at the thought of being trapped with four grotesquely aged corpses.

  As if prompted by the thought, Patricia said: ‘It’s the dead weight of four very wasted old people. None of them can be more than a hundred pounds.’ The two women had been friends – Patricia a virologist, Jane a geologist – inducted into the US Science Foundation programme at the same time. Patricia had been Jane’s bridesmaid, eighteen months before.

  No one had moved from the tight cluster directly inside the door. ‘If we’re going to get out at all it’s got to be right now!’ said Stoddart.

  Patricia was the first, going past Stoddart and the statued Jessup to where her friend lay in the adjoining room, curled in her bunk.

  Stoddart called: ‘Bring everything you can from there: diaries, notebooks, anything that might help. Tapes, too. They might have dictated something.’ He had to get everything right the first time: no second chance. He looked back to the door, where the other two men – Morris Neilson, McMurdo’s winter resident medical doctor and James Olsen, a glaciologist – still remained behind the pilot. ‘Jim, for Christ’s sake! Morris!’

  There was a final stir. Neilson came to where Stoddart stood, reaching out to touch the kneeling figure. The doctor said: ‘He’s frozen virtually solid. There’s nothing I can do … could have done …’

  ‘Was that how he died, frozen to death?’

  Neilson shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We’ll need autopsies.’

  From the radio bench Olsen said: ‘Jesus!’ and turned immediately to Stoddart’s look. Then, ‘I’ve found the log.’

  ‘What!’ demanded Stoddart.

  ‘The writing, it’s normal, firm, three weeks ago. At the end it’s an old man’s. I can’t make out the last three days … he’s talking of growing old … all the time getting older … getting weaker …’

  ‘We haven’t time—’ Stoddart started, but stopped at Patricia’s sudden appearance at the connecting door.

  ‘Jack! I’m not thinking … we’re not thinking … it’s got to be viral. Or bacterial. We’re not protected …!’

  ‘Oh fuck!’ said Olsen.

  For the briefest moment Stoddart thought his stomach was going to open, the sensation strong enough for him to clench, holding himself. He’d failed: failed them and himself. Failed Patricia, whom he was newly beginning to love. It wasn’t his science but it didn’t need to be. It had been obvious – too glaringly fucking obvious from the moment of their entering – and he’d let them stay there exposed for … for how long? And to what? He didn’t know. Too long. Long enough for … ‘Oxygen!’ he blurted. There were no mountains or ice plateaux high enough to need oxygen support in the event of a forced landing, but it was a regulation that all McMurdo air transport carry breathing apparatus.

  ‘I’ll go!’ declared Burke at once, anxious to get out of the station. ‘I need to check the plane’s de-icing. Need to be there instead of here …’

  Everyone remained as rigid as the frozen bodies among which they stood, as if not moving would lessen their chances of infection. His voice fraying with the beginning of panic, Olsen said: ‘We’re dead: we’re going to die, like they did …’

  ‘No, we’re not!’ refused Stoddart, intentionally loud. ‘It’s a sensible precaution, that’s all.’ He looked at Patricia, whose expertise was the study of viruses. She stared back tight-faced but expressionless.

  ‘We should salvage their rubbish,’ decided Neilson, quite controlled, contributing to the need for calm. ‘It’ll be important to know what they ate. If it’s something they all ingested it’ll be all right … for us it will be all right …’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Patricia from the doorway, although doubtfully. ‘If they were poisoned …’ She trailed off, unable scientifically to support the reassurance.

  Olsen said: ‘If we’re blizzarded in we shouldn’t keep the bodies inside with us.’

  They’d be covered, lost, if we put them outside in the snow,’ said Neilson.

  ‘It would be best, to bury them here,’ said the other man.

  ‘There needs to be autopsies, to find out what happened. What it is,’ insisted Patricia. She paused, talking directly to Stoddart. ‘I don’t want to leave Jane here.’

  ‘We won’t,’ promised Stoddart. Where the hell was Burke with the oxygen sets!

  ‘They could be contagious!’ argued Olsen.

  ‘I’ve got ranking authority,’ reminded Stoddart. ‘Go on collecting everything there is.’

  ‘That authority doesn’t apply any longer,’ dismissed Olsen. ‘This isn’t the fucking army.’

  Stoddart exaggerated his dismissal by walking towards the radio table; at his approach Olsen flinched away, as if frightened of any physical contact. Still ignoring the glaciologist, Stoddart reached out to start assembling strewn-around paperwork, but before he could, the double doors opened behind him. Chip Burke was already wearing an oxygen set, only just visible through a head-to-foot covering of snow. More confidently – believing himself now safe – the pilot went to each of them, distributing masks and backpacks.

  Before putting on his mask, Stoddart said: ‘Can we still get off?’

  Burke retreated as far as possible from the dead bodies before lifting his own face covering. ‘The de-icing is only just managing and the batteries are being strained keeping the engine idling. And there’s a lot of drifting. I’d say another thirty minutes … as it is the skis are freezing to the strip … we could get out now. Come back for the bodies when it lifts. Nothing’s going to happen to them …’

  ‘That makes sense,’ seized Olsen at once. ‘They’re frozen … preserved … there’s nothing we can do to help them …’

  ‘We have to find out why! What it is,’ insisted Stoddart. ‘What if it’s not confined to here? There’s two hundred and fifty Americans at McMurdo. Thirty at Amundsen.’

>   ‘What good are we going to be, dead?’ demanded Olsen, his voice rising.

  ‘We’re taking them,’ determined Stoddart, flatly.

  ‘They are frozen,’ said Neilson, still trying to help. ‘I don’t think any contagion would have survived in this temperature.’ He gestured to the ice formed on the inside of the hut, at the joins between ceiling and wall.

  ‘We don’t have body bags,’ protested Burke. ‘How are we going to carry them?’

  ‘Sleeping bags,’ decided Stoddart. ‘Morris and I will handle the bodies. Jim, you and Patricia get everything else together …’ He looked back to the pilot. ‘We need their garbage. It’ll be in plastic bags. Sealed. Load it aboard. Try to raise McMurdo on your radio. Say it’s a major emergency: that we have fatalities but they’re to wait until they speak to me for details.’

  Enclosing the bodies was a problem. All had to be contained in the way in which they’d frozen, which made the kneeling Buckland Jessup the biggest difficulty, almost too squat to encompass in a sleeping sack. They had to leave the top unzipped. George Bedall’s disjointedly broken arms wouldn’t fit until Neilson abruptly and professionally snapped them again to be dropped alongside the body. Armstrong wasn’t in a convenient shape, either, and again they had to leave the bag partially unzipped. Patricia Jefferies had finished collecting her share of all the logs, experimental data and records before they got to Jane Horrocks and came to help the two men lift the dead woman from the bunk. She’d physically diminished so much they were able to completely enclose her in the bag in which she’d partially been laying.

  ‘I’ll carry her,’ announced Patricia, muffle-voiced, and was able to, without any help. Stoddart, Olsen and Neilson were just as easily able to carry one body apiece.

  The blizzard hit them like a solid blow as they emerged, making Olsen stagger, but it wasn’t yet the white-out that Stoddart had feared although the drifts were heavy, knee-deep in places. Neilsen stumbled and fell, dropping the corpse of Harry Armstrong which actually sank several inches into the soft snow. The ski-plane was quite visible, twenty yards away, despite the permanent near darkness of Antarctic winter. The engine was idling uncertainly, seeming to miss sometimes. Burke kept jerking up the power. As they stowed the corpses at the rear he said: ‘Too much magnetic interference to reach McMurdo.’