Beneath the Ice Read Online Free Page A

team’s turn and our boys were tasked with extracting the first samples. Only now, we can’t get back to the damn drill site.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘The route goes over this narrow pass and that’s exactly where the tractor was swallowed. Those idiots had been driving over a crevasse field for years and not even realised.’
    Luca blew the steam off his tea, already guessing what was coming.
    ‘We need someone to get our boys back to the drill site before Antarctica closes down for winter in just over a week’s time. The seasons are about to change. Soon, it’ll be twenty-four-hour darkness down there and as soon as that happens,
nothing
moves in or out for the next ten months. So, if we don’t get back to the drill site before then . . .’
    ‘. . . the hole will re-seal,’ Luca interjected.
    ‘Yeah, the hole will re-seal. And three years of Russian drilling will be up in smoke.’
    ‘So just plot another route.’
    ‘Believe me, we’ve tried. The only way back to the lake is over a mountain. The lake sits right in the middle of a semi-circular range of them. They bar the drill site to one side, while the other is locked in by the sea.’
    ‘Why not just use a boat then?’
    ‘You ever heard of the barrier?’ Bates asked, but his short pause suggested that the question was purely rhetorical. ‘It’s a two-hundred-foot-high ice sheet that surrounds most of Antarctica. There are only a few places where you can actually dock a ship down there, and this lake isn’t one of them.’ He gave a smile that faded as quickly as it had appeared. ‘There’s a good reason why ye olde sailors used to stamp
Here be Dragons
and have done with it. Bottom line, Luca – we need a climber.’
    He had barely finished the sentence before Luca started shaking his head. ‘Come on, Norm, choose someone current. I can name five guys who could do the job for you.’
    ‘It’s a walk, Luca. Barely any climbing involved,’ Bates countered, ignoring his protests. ‘All you have to do is babysit a few scientists across to a lake. That’s it.’
    Before Luca could interject, Bates continued, ‘Job starts in Cape Town. From there, it’s a five-hour flight due south to the ice runway in Droning Maud Land.’
    ‘Cape Town?’ Luca asked, having been to the city many times before. All that time spent on the southern tip of Africa and he had never known that it was a gateway to Antarctica.
    ‘That’s right. And we’ll pay you twelve grand a week. Starting tomorrow, with a minimum of four weeks guaranteed.’
    ‘Twelve grand? That’s a bit more than the going rate, isn’t it?’ Luca stared hard at his friend. ‘You little shit. There’s a catch, isn’t there?’
    Bates didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and, taking Luca’s mug, walked back to the tea urn by the counter. He refilled it, careful not to get any of the noxious fluid on his suit trousers, before handing it back and sitting down next to his friend.
    ‘I mentioned the Russians. Well, the head of this international base is a man called Vladimir Dedov. Everyone calls him ‘‘The Poet’’ because he’s published one or two works. I read some of his stuff and it’s actually not bad. Lacks the self-pity that most Russians love prattling on about. Anyway, he’s been on our radar for a while now as he’s been using the science bases to smuggle contraband.’
    Luca sipped his tea, wincing slightly as the scalding liquid touched his lips. He pictured the scene in Antarctica; a web of isolated science bases, all operated by different nations and shipping hundreds of tons of cargo each year in machinery and supplies. If you wanted to move contraband from Russia to almost any other continent, it would be easy enough just to deliver it to their science base. There were no border controls or customs; there were barely any people. The package would then be forward shipped using the base’s own logistics to get it where it needed to be. Who would even