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  The US, having sworn to defend the principles of the Antarctic Treaty banning military entrenchment, was outraged by the recent publication of satellite photographs clearly showing a Chinese military convoy landing at Belgrano II, the Argentine base camp on the Weddell Sea. But with its oil industry lobbying to establish offshore platforms in the region, the US position is weak. The Chinese have refused to comment.

  > SPORTS AND WEATHER NEWS FOLLOWS … >>>

  WEATHER HEADLINES:

  SEVERE WEATHER PLAGUES WHOLE CONTINENTS

  ICELAND–2 PM GMT

  Reports are emerging of an imminent flood in the southern coastal region. Glacial ice has started melting from within for some weeks now and whole reservoirs of melt water have built up to disturbing levels. Preliminary indications also show sea temperatures have risen by five degrees in the last three weeks and are on a steady increase. The fear is that the warm seawater will rapidly erode the glacier walls, which are holding back the melt water. Similar reports of a sudden global rise in sea temperatures are emerging from all over the world. Scientists are at a loss to explain it, other than as another manifestation of Global Warming.

  [click for more information on these environmental hotspots]

  Madras, India–Typhoons continue. 1500 dead.

  Tokyo, Japan–Multiple Tsunami warnings issued.

  California, USA–200 dead in massive earthquake.

  London, England–pre-tremors detected.

  Midwest, USA–storms and severe weather freeze potato belt.

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  Users are advised. If error message 343571 appears—DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SYSTEM. An error has occurred in the communications system. A satellite has stopped responding to messages and may not be relaying information. This is usually caused by solar flare activity and is nothing to be alarmed about. Normal service will be resumed shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused …

  LAT. 67°20’S, LONG. 180°16’W ROSS SEA—OFF THE ROSS ICE SHELF NEW ZEALAND ROSS DEPENDENCY

  Ralph Matheson felt nauseous. So much so, he’d just lost his breakfast, which was now a glistening yellow tiger-stripe frozen solid down the side of Red Osprey’s iron-oxide-colored hull.

  He had the shakes bad. Always did when he felt sick. He quickly wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve before gripping the rail tightly and heaving again. Frozen chunks hit the swell below, but the sound was lost in the roar of the storm.

  “Hey, dickhead!” a crusty voice commented. “There’s a ten-thousand-dollar pollution fine for puking in the ocean.”

  Jack Bulger was a craggy old bastard. Fifty and solidly built. His voice sounded like throat cancer was paying a visit, while he wore his gray hair in a buzz-cut like a marine’s. A sharp contrast to Matheson’s curly nut-brown mop which he kept firmly tucked inside his hood. Matheson was sure Bulger had his head bare just for machismo. Not that Matheson could care less. He just wanted to stay warm. That was why he’d grown the beard to begin with.

  Bulger be damned. Matheson didn’t want to be out here anyway, checking main derrick uplinks. He’d avoided it all morning. Hid in the galley for a half hour, reading a printout of Reuters news reports off the Web and nursing a coffee and doughnut.

  As far as he could tell, the sensors attached to the base of the huge, battered drilling tower were fine. The intermittent signal dropout was down to a faulty connection which he’d fixed in seconds. There was no way that his equipment was going to jeopardize the drilling process. The weather, on the other hand, he had absolutely no control over.

  He eyed the mass of nine-foot sectioned steel drill pipe as it shot up and down, caged inside the derrick. Bad idea. He gripped the handrail again. Clenched his stomach.

  Bulger swiped his co-worker on the back. It seemed playful to outsiders, but Matheson knew better. Bulger was trying to make him spew his guts again.

  Matheson watched the smoke from Bulger’s cigar mix with his breath and drift his way. He shivered. Trying to keep his voice slow and even so he could hold his temper and the rest of his breakfast down all in one go, he said, “There are seven lows gathering—all within a fifty-mile radius. This is not typical Antarctic weather. I was told to expect four, maybe even five lows—ferocious weather conditions by anyone’s standards. But seven is unheard of! I do not relish the idea of being part of weather formation history!”

  Bulger puffed on his cigar. “Bracing, isn’t it?”

  “Bracing is not a word I’d choose to use!” Matheson shrieked. “Hell on earth, maybe. Or the final Canto in Dante’s Inferno, if you knew what the hell that was! If you read anything other than Penthouse!”

  The weather fronts were moving in fast and deadly. Coming out of nowhere. Matheson was acutely aware that out here there was a good chance it might get him killed. And listening in on the scientific chatter from McMurdo Station hadn’t helped matters. The scientists had absolutely no explanation for such severe weather.

  Antarctic weather. The only certainty was, it was going to be bad. At approximately 60 degrees of latitude south, the winds thundered in from every major ocean with nothing to stop them. Not one island. Not one mountain. A ship could set a course to follow precisely LAT. 58°s, in effect circumnavigate the globe, and never once run into dry land. The Antarctic was the most forbidding place on earth and Matheson was certain of one thing: he wanted to go home.

  “What do you want, anyway?” he asked Bulger shakily, wiping at his mouth again. Bulger didn’t bother replying. Just braced himself as a small wall of water crashed across the bow and sprayed the crew. He watched with a satisfied air as it caught Matheson off-guard.

  Matheson wiped his face down.

  They were both engineers. Matheson was usually a desk man, designing setups on a workstation and never going anywhere near the field. Bulger was the exact opposite. A real hands-on kind of guy who spent most days elbow deep in grease, fixing problems with common sense, guile and a wrench. They both knew their stuff, of course. Pressures per square millimeter, per square inch. How to cause a stress fracture, and how not to. They both knew textbook stuff and more. But Bulger knew construction workers and roughnecks. He knew how their minds worked and how they liked to work. As far as he was concerned, Matheson knew shit. And Matheson knew this.

  Bulger climbed up to the upper deck, announcing, “There’s a problem with your node.”

  Matheson’s face fell. “What kind of problem?”

  The drill ship lurched, bucking on another ferocious wave. They were getting bigger, Matheson thought. That one had to be at least 30 feet high. He felt his knees tremble as he watched the turquoise ocean race up to meet him, then dip away again. A thunderous blast of freezing blue water and ice crashed over the bow and swept up deck in a tidal wave. In the time it took him to turn his head to see, the vast yellow derrick, the mighty drilling tower, had already borne the brunt of the impact and the 50-knot winds were whipping the water back into a frenzy. Before he even knew what hit him, Matheson was knocked on his ass and smacked backward.

  He jerked to a stop, his nylon safety line creaking with the strain. There was little he could do but stay put until the bitter salt water washed over him. He choked when he could finally take a breath, and shuddered from the cold despite the protection of his rubbery Day-Glo orange survival suit and layers of thermal underwear.

  Thank God he’d remembered to clip himself on. It wasn’t the sort of routine he was used to. After all, there wasn’t much chance of being swept overboard on the way to work in San Francisco. Trams were like that.

  Staggering to his feet, Matheson went to pull his cold and wet balaclava back into place but it stank of bile, so despite it being minus 80°C with the wind-chill factor, he removed it instead. As a result, he could feel his nose hairs freezing. Breathing through his mouth made him cough. Breathing through his nose wasn’t much better, but it was vital. He had to warm the air up despite his sinuses. People were known
to die of shock breathing air that was too frigid.

  He had to get out of the cold. He could feel the seawater freezing on his face. What kind of a welcome would he get if he went home to Wendy and asked her to marry him with his skin hanging from his face?

  Bulger was watching him from the upper deck. “What sort of problem?” Matheson demanded, well aware that his voice was turning hoarse and feeble. “What’s wrong with the node?”

  “Check it out for yourself,” Bulger snapped. “You couldn’t design a fucking vending machine for a parking lot.”

  Matheson wanted to yell after him, but Bulger was gone. Ralph was only out here in Antarctica because Bulger had insisted he come out and field test the thing. The man was going to make his ulcer worse, keep plugging away at him like this.

  He made a grab for the ladder, then changed direction. He jerked his head to the side rail again and hung over it. He could feel the freezing cold of wet metal through the thermal gloves. Already the seawater was starting to freeze around his hand and he had trouble pulling his fingers away. He retched, but there was nothing left to bring up.

  The roughnecks were watching. That was the most embarrassing part. Matheson tried to compose himself; he had his pride. He wanted to look them in the eye and exit gracefully, but of course he knew if he took his eye off the horizon he’d throw up again. So instead he clung to anything he could find that was solid enough and inched his way to the ladder.

  He clipped his safety line to a rung and had just about plucked up enough courage to climb when a delicate ungloved hand thrust a small silver hipflask into his hand. He glanced around surprised to find the cool blue eyes of Ilana Petrova, one of the Russian roughnecks. He couldn’t see her straw-blond hair. Like him, she kept her hair hidden away in the warmth of her survival suit hood. They all wore them on deck. He could see her tight smile though. Her thin, pink lips. “Thank you,” he said meekly. “What is it?”

  “It’s good,” she said in her thick Muscovite accent. “Rum. And eat dry bread. When you throw up again, you need something to—to—”

  “To throw up,” Matheson smiled, embarrassed. “Yeah.” Ilana nodded at the flask encouragingly. Matheson took a swig. Wiped the top and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said.

  She tucked the flask away, slipped a glove back on and nodded in that curious Russian way. They eyed each other, and for just a brief moment Matheson actually didn’t feel quite so ill. It didn’t last long.

  “What’s the problem with the node?” he asked tentatively.

  Ilana frowned. “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing?” Matheson mused. He watched her walk away, her familiar wiggle on display as she negotiated the rusty metal deck plates. He watched her climb the crane, get a slap on the ass and kick the guy in the face as another wave hit the bow and crystal droplets scraped against his skin. His stomach twisted in knots again as he climbed up out of the bitter cold. Questions formed in a torrid swirl in his mind. Why weren’t his seasickness pills working? What was the point of wearing a survival suit in a place where you were unlikely to survive?

  And what was Bulger playing at?

  The control room was dark, bathed in a deep red glow. Banks of monitors blinked reams of data at hunched engineers. The room stank of cigarette smoke and every so often he could smell Bulger’s cigar. He was lurking in here somewhere. The murmuring was active as information traded hands and the drill’s progress was tracked. He glanced at a bank of screens showing the rig outside and watched for a moment as the pipe appeared to ram up and down inside the tower like a piston, as the ship bucked on the waves. It was impressive. There had been trials up in Alaska, of course, but this was the first true exploratory oil drill in a polar region. Problem was, this was Antarctica. Where it was illegal.

  But then, illegal was not an alien concept to the big oil companies. Matheson never forgot his college days when a ship by the name of the Exxon Valdez poured over ten million gallons of oil straight into the ecosystem. That may have been an accident, but Exxon’s poor attempt at wriggling out of cleaning up its own mess was not.

  But there was no National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Antarctica to bring Rola Corp. into line if it screwed up. The company could effectively do what it liked. Yes, a permit was required to be here, but unofficially if Red Osprey struck oil in the meantime, the company was sure it could all be worked out. That was the trouble—Rola Corp. had plans on Antarctic oil, with or without Ralph Matheson. So he figured it might as well be with him and by default with somebody who would make sure the Exxon Valdez never happened out here.

  Trouble was, they’d pulled the rug out from under him. They weren’t supposed to be out here for another six months. They just weren’t ready.

  “What’s going on? Bulger said something about a problem with the node.” Matheson unzipped the parka part of his suit and made a beeline for Charlie Harper, a black systems specialist from Wisconsin. They were friends, and had worked together before out in Saudi Arabia a few years back. He was about the only person Matheson trusted on this ship. He could feel his teeth chattering as he lowered himself into a comfortable chair.

  Charlie replied almost too lethargically: “Nothin’ much. Just the same ole same ole.” Which was Charlie-speak for: Shit’s hit the fan.

  Charlie was focused on his monitors. Clicked the mouse a couple of times. When his gaze met Matheson’s it was worried. “We got a warship. Chinese.”

  Charlie had the Global Positioning System, or GPS, on line and was busy monitoring air and sea traffic. GPS kept track of the position of every vehicle linked into its network of satellites. Those vehicles could access all kinds of navigational data, including pinpointing all the other vehicles plugged into it, anywhere on earth, at any given time. It had been developed by the U.S. military sometime in the last century. Now it was an everyday part of civilian life.

  Clearly a Chinese warship was bad news. There was every chance now they would have to dump the pipeline and move on quickly. Red Osprey had a distinct advantage over the warship in that, thanks to some bright young computer programmer, it didn’t actually register on any GPS system. At a distance, Red Osprey was to all intents and purposes invisible. But if they were found, they would be boarded.

  Matheson had seen the news. He knew what was going on and it wasn’t good. Red Osprey was flying the U.S. flag. To the Chinese right now that was a red rag to a bull. “Is this what Bulger came down to see me about?” Matheson snapped, agitated. He didn’t need this right now.

  “Yeah. He thought maybe they could hear what we’re doing in the water.”

  “And can they? Charlie, I need to know. My ass is on the line here.”

  “No, man! No way they could hear us. You did good.”

  “I did good? I did good? I did a goddamn miracle, Charlie. Next to loaves and fishes, bringing this project forward six months was a goddamn, honest to goodness miracle. How do you know they can’t hear us?” Matheson was working himself into a sweat.

  “I know they can’t hear us, coz I’ve been listenin’ to them on the radio for a half hour. Man, they too busy partying to be bothered snooping around for us. They’ve been hanging around all morning watching our guys over at McMurdo preparing a new landing strip. They’re too distracted. Shit, I can hear somebody over there singin’ Abba—in Chinese.”

  Matheson frowned in surprise.

  “What can I say?” Charlie shrugged. “The node’s got great ears.”

  “What song?”

  “‘Supertrooper.’”

  If Red Osprey were discovered it would blow the whole situation. They’d already had one close encounter with a wing of Chinese fighters out on patrol. They hadn’t been discovered, but with Chinese and U.S. forces facing off over mineral rights, in a world where dwindling fossil fuels were sending prices skyward, Red Osprey’s surreptitious oil tapping could spark a war.

  Bulger had been bugging him about friction vibration for weeks. It was what they had been most co
ncerned about. Screw whether it actually worked. Just make sure the damn thing didn’t make any noise.

  The “damn thing” was the heart of Matheson’s design, a device called the Depth Node. It had been transported out to the Ross Sea under cover of darkness last winter and dumped directly beneath them. Then, controlled remotely, it had dug in on the sea floor. It was the main point for capping the well and heating the buried pipe-work. The node was what made polar oil exploration possible and the company intended to set up nodes all over the Antarctic coast. Drill, strike oil, then cap off, only returning to a node when they wanted to fill a tanker. Refining was done aboard ship. The node would take care of everything else. Its power unit ran on hydrogen and oxygen—essentially water—and was designed to last twenty years. But the prototype had only been in the ground for nine months. It was supposed to run silently. What if it had failed?

  Water power was a new technology which Rola Corp. had acquired the patent to about fifteen years previously and sat on. So far, the rival water-powered generators that had emerged onto the market were so extremely expensive only western nations could afford them. Which was good because it meant it would be decades before the Third World could scrape together enough cash to buy the technology. Until then, they would need oil. The problem was, there had been no mass testing of this new technology. What if there was a problem with the water-powered section of the node, something beyond Matheson’s predicting capabilities, and the Chinese had detected this? They were a sitting duck.

  Charlie handed Matheson a mug of coffee as he watched the screens. Absorbed, as if he were playing a game. “What’s that?” Matheson asked, pointing to a series of blips.

  “That red one’s the Chinese sub. The other’s a U.S. carrier. And that there, see that blue one? That’s a plane on its way from Chile to Pirrit Hills, in the Chilean sector. And I can tell you right now, they’s up shit creek without a paddle.”