Amelia read this aloud and snorted. ‘That’s got to mean orchestrate a cover-up, or something along those lines.’

  ‘What’s more, the investment they actually seem to be making, right now, is definitely to do with liquid natural gas and other fossil fuel infrastructure. There’s a new Russian-backed pipeline that American investors – fronted by Finn Macmillan – want a slice of. The sustainability stuff looks, at best, like window-dressing.’

  ‘And you’re saying Armfield was involved from the start in setting up the deal?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ Xander replied. ‘And I’ll tell you what’s strange. These messages were actually pretty easy to extract. Not originally; I couldn’t find them when I first looked. But today I was just rechecking old leads and boom, there they were.’

  Amelia, sitting cross-legged on her bunk, folded her arms. ‘Did you turn up anything more on the shockwave disruption event?’

  Xander shook his head with a grimace. ‘Nothing. But don’t worry, I’m not done yet.’

  Hearing the news that Armfield was in on the true nature of the deal, had made the initial contact, and even seemed to have been involved in setting the thing up made me feel hollow. Though I was unaffected by the lurching of the boat, I felt a bit sick. I thought of Mum at home. Our On the Brink film entry was supposed to support her; in fact, it played into GreenSword’s hands. Sponsoring the film – and our disastrous trek – was all part of their cover-up. Armfield was playing me – but for what? Money, I supposed. He was no doubt in for a huge payout when the deal went through.

  I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I could do to right the situation, but I wasn’t about to give up. For now, it seemed best to play along with the guy, pretend we hadn’t worked out what was going on. He’d packed us off out of the way for the first days of the trip: presumably that was when the real deal-making had been done. Now he had us captive on the boat, helping to document the cover-up. Xander gave me a ya-think? look when I asked if he was up to joining us for dinner. ‘I can just about cope with nothing inside me,’ he said. ‘A bellyful of anything would be a disaster. Leave me to it here.’

  The half hour had passed; if Amelia and I were to join Armfield, we had to get going. My balance is generally pretty good, but the boat was really slamming about in the waves and to reach the mess we had to hang on to the handrail as we made our way down the corridor. Ordinarily I’d have enjoyed the rollercoaster journey through the boat, but the prospect of playing dumb with Armfield snuffed out the fun factor. I felt grim.

  45.

  Armfield hadn’t invited us to join him for dinner alone. Macmillan and Timo were already seated opposite him at the centre table in the mess. The latter stood politely as we arrived and said how sorry he was to hear of ‘the incident with your guide, and your friend’s illness’. But although these words came out of his mouth, he managed to say them in a way that made it clear he couldn’t have cared less. His bald head shone beneath the strip light. I turned away to see Macmillan grinning. How could Armfield take these guys seriously – unless he stood to benefit from whatever they were up to?

  The cook served us bowls of steaming hotpot infused with something that tasted like horseradish. The bowls would have slid all over the place if we’d let them, but following Armfield’s lead I held mine with one hand and used the other to spoon the food into my mouth. Eating like that, with all the pitching and rolling of the boat going on around us, should have been funny, but it just made everyone silently concentrate on what they were doing. It wasn’t until we’d finished and handed our utensils back that Macmillan offhandedly asked whether we’d got what we needed, film-wise. Not bothering to wait for an answer, he turned to Timo and started a conversation with him. The background noise of the boat made it hard to follow, but I heard the words ‘yield’, ‘payoff’ and ‘cubic metres’: business talk, not intended for us.

  I felt Armfield’s gaze on me, and turned to find he was indeed looking at me. Evidently my poker face wasn’t working, because he asked, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Swell getting to you?’

  ‘No. Xander’s looking forward to things calming down though.’

  ‘You seem a bit weary, Jack.’

  ‘When do we reach our destination?’ I asked. ‘You know, the shallow bit of seabed you guys are so keen to scope out?’

  ‘First light tomorrow, more or less. Things should have calmed down by then.’ Turning to Amelia he continued, ‘Oh, and we are deploying the submersible. I’ll get you a look at it, and you’ll be able to film the crane in action.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, unable to hide my sarcasm.

  Armfield’s penetrating gaze narrowed on me. Macmillan was looking at me too, with that amused glint in his eye. I felt the urge to create a scene, yell at them both, let everyone know we’d worked out what was going on. I fought it back. Slowly, Armfield said, ‘Maybe the sea’s getting to you more than you realise, Jack. Why not turn in early, have a good night’s sleep, and perhaps you’ll wake up feeling more enthusiastic?’ Having made this suggestion, he calmly struck up a conversation with Timo about ‘the latest news from our Slavic friends’.

  If I’d been able to shove my seat back from the table, I’d have done so to make a point, but instead I had to clamber awkwardly out from the fixed table. ‘You know what? That’s a pretty good idea,’ I muttered, as if implying that he didn’t normally have them. Amelia had risen too, and followed me as I lurched out of the mess room.

  I didn’t head straight back to our cabin though, and Amelia didn’t ask why. We sway-walked to the stairs and dropped a level to the deck Armfield’s cabin was on. When we’d followed him there earlier in the day, he’d let himself in so swiftly, I doubted it had been locked. Amelia, intuiting exactly what I was up to, whispered, ‘Give it a go. I’ll keep watch.’

  I had no idea how long Armfield would stay talking to his colleagues and didn’t waste time pausing to think about it. I simply tried the door, which opened easily, and slipped inside.

  The file was where I’d seen it last, neatly on the desk, up against its rim. I’d wondered whether this was the same folder that the consortium had handed over at the Helsinki meeting, but I doubted that now. That file had been bulky and plastic; this one was made of card and comparatively thin. I opened it and began flicking through the sheaf of papers it contained, not knowing what I was searching for – and, if I’m honest, not really taking much in. There were a few pages of handwritten notes, the odd spreadsheet, a drawing or two, but none of it made any immediate sense.

  Quickly I stepped to the door and cracked it open. ‘Swap places,’ I hissed.

  As Amelia passed me, I handed her the file and whispered, ‘I’ll keep him out of here if he comes back. See what you make of this.’

  How I thought I’d distract Armfield if he returned, I didn’t know. But as I swayed there outside his door, my heart loud in my ears and my palms sticky, I trusted myself to come up with something. As it was, I didn’t have time to, and not because of Armfield. In under two minutes Amelia pulled the door open, calmly stepped over the sill and said, ‘Let’s get out of here. I’m done.’

  ‘You can’t be!’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  Even she couldn’t have taken in all that information in such a short time. Granted, her memory is more or less photographic, and she reads twice as fast as anyone I know, but she does actually have to, well, read stuff for it to stick.

  ‘We may not have another chance,’ I said.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Read the thing properly.’

  In response she dug her phone from her pocket and held it up briefly. ‘Yeah, we will. I took photos of every page. And I recognised some of what was there. Let’s head back to Xander and see if he can help make sense of it all.’

  I hadn’t thought to take pictures of the pages myself. That made me feel pretty stupid, but there was no point beating myself up about it. As we staggered back to our cabin, I contented myself with the fact that we’d got one over on Armfield. Given what we now knew about the man, getting back at him was – to me, at that moment – all that mattered.

  46.

  Amelia transferred the photos to Xander’s laptop so that the three of us could look at them on a decent-sized screen. He immediately scrolled through to the diagrams. I’d sped past them, turning the pages of the file, but as soon as he brought the image up on his screen, I recognised what I was looking at: Armfield’s file contained copies of the blueprint Xander had uncovered online, referred to in the context of directed-energy weapons and electromagnetic pulses. It wasn’t the same drawing, but the resemblance, once Xander pulled the original up next to it, was unmistakable.

  We pored over the other pages Amelia had photographed as well. The specifics didn’t make a great deal of sense to me, but there were references to kilowatts and bore holes and carbon emissions and money, specifically dollars, embedded in equations, some of them two or three lines long. There were also maps, showing Murmansk and the north Russian coast, Bear Island and the Barents Sea, the Svalbard archipelago, the Arctic Circle, North Norway and Finland. Somebody – Armfield, presumably – had annotated these maps with ruled pencil lines, each labelled with a number.

  ‘Those don’t make sense,’ Xander said, pointing at the numbers. ‘They’re certainly not distances.’

  ‘No, but they could be times,’ I replied. ‘Sailing hours, for example?’

  Amelia pointed to Hammerfest and traced her finger along one of the lines leading out from it. ‘We could be somewhere along this axis, for example.’

  I pulled out my phone, opened Google Maps and waited for the blue dot showing us where we were to appear. When it did, I pinched the map down in scale until it more or less matched the one on Xander’s screen and held it up for comparison. Though it was hard to say for sure, it did look as if we were in the vicinity of a point on Armfield’s pencilled trajectory.

  ‘Where does that end up, then?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I said, zooming in on the projected end of the line. ‘It’s just the sea, short of Bear Island.’ I tapped the only land mass on the screen.

  ‘Presumably it’s where they’re scoping out the seabed for the wind farm,’ Amelia suggested.

  Xander, meanwhile, was tapping at his keyboard.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.

  ‘I was just wondering … no.’ He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Well, if we’re about here,’ said Amelia, pointing to where the dot placed us on Armfield’s pencilled line, ‘we still have this far to go, which tallies with what Armfield said about us arriving at first light.’

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Xander, scrolling through the photos again, paused to look at a page that, apart from some handwritten letters and numbers, was mostly empty. And what was there didn’t make sense to me at first. I recognised the handwriting though: it was Armfield’s, compact and assured, exactly the same as on the letter he’d written to me. One set of numbers slowly came into focus for me: 24000804. Next to them were four letters: SWDE. I pointed to them without knowing why, then surprised myself by saying, ‘Twenty-four hundred hours on the eighth of April, shockwave disruption event.’

  Both Amelia and Xander looked at me.

  ‘Plausible,’ he said.

  ‘More than that, credible,’ Amelia countered. ‘Too big a coincidence otherwise.’

  My shoulders sagged. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I heard myself say. ‘He’s in on that too?’

  ‘Whatever “that” is,’ said Amelia.

  A heaviness spread through me. I felt utterly exhausted all of a sudden. I shut my eyes; nothingness was preferable to the implications on Xander’s screen. Xander reads me well in general and somehow clocked how I was feeling.

  ‘If we’re roughly here on the line, and not due to reach the end of it until first thing in the morning, then we should probably turn in early so we can be up and ready before we arrive.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ said Amelia.

  I didn’t even have the energy to agree, but did as he said. I brushed my teeth, stripped to my underwear and climbed into my bunk in silence. Within minutes I’d blotted out the day entirely.

  Sleep didn’t bring relief though. I plunged straight into a nightmare. As ever, my dream was at once absurd and realistic, ridiculous and totally believable. I was underwater, in a sweltering jungle, running down our street. My ears were full of the sound of rumbling engines and screeching tyres and the whumping of an enraged gorilla beating its chest. Sharks were circling and a good friend was drifting out to sea. I couldn’t find a lifebelt to throw out to him. Now I had a lifebelt, but he was too far away and my throw was falling short, again and again and again. He would drown soon. Meanwhile the useless lifebelt was on the pavement outside our house. And pirates were swarming onto the Polar Flow. They’d already tied us all up and thrown us in the hold. It was pitch black at first, but now I was blinded by sunlight that bounced off a rushing windscreen, a pair of glasses, a bald head. I was thirsty, famished, sick. There were flies everywhere. I was caught in a snare. The windscreen belonged to an open-topped Mini, which was swerving around a recycling truck and accelerating hard. Mum was holding our school bags as we raced down the street. It was happening again: I was ahead of my brother Mark, leading him straight into the path of the car. The gorilla noise was in fact a metal-on-metal smashing, astonishingly loud. And Mark was stretched out on the pavement in front of me, his bottom half pinned between the car and the wall. I knelt next to him on the seabed. The gorilla thundered through us and the shark closed in. Mum sat with her head in her hands for days, weeks, years. I bent over Mark. He was trying to tell me something. These were his last words, but I couldn’t hear them, much less understand what he was trying to say.

  I woke with a start, struggling to free myself from the bed sheets, and forced myself to breathe slowly until my heartbeat returned to its normal rhythm. Something had changed. It was the pitch of the Polar Flow’s engines. They were quieter now, more distant. And the motion of the boat had altered subtly too. It had slowed – or even, possibly, stopped. We were no longer plunging through high seas, but becalmed on a lesser swell. With no natural light in the cabin, I had to look at my phone to see the time. It was just after five. This far north, the sun would be up soon.

  I woke Xander and Amelia. We threw on our clothes and headed for the observation deck.

  47.

  We’d only made it a few paces along the corridor when Armfield appeared at the end of it. He put his hands on his hips and did a passable impression of a smile. ‘Great, you’re up. I was just coming to wake you.’

  ‘We were on it,’ I said, needing to emphasise that fact. ‘We’re just heading for the observation deck.’

  ‘I can get you closer to the action than that,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  The others fell in behind him. Though a part of me wanted to resist, I followed too.

  He took us to the stern and we emerged onto the low deck beneath the helipad, which housed the crane. The sky was clear: stars were still visible against the inky dark vault above us. They faded towards the east where the blackness was turning an extraordinary deep blue. The wind had dropped, and the sea with it. The water rolled, silver-black, towards a horizon empty in every direction.

  A couple of guys in high-vis gear were at work on the deck, inspecting a boxy-looking thing that had to be the submersible. It had been raised through a hatch to sit beneath the crane. Two cables connected it to the ship. One was coiled on the deck next to it; the other was attached to the stout crane-arm above it. Xander said what I was thinking: ‘Wow, bit cramped in there.’

  ‘It’s not a manned vehicle, it’s an ROV,’ said Amelia, in a tone that suggested Xander had mistaken something obvious – a cat for a dog, say.

  ‘Of course – an ROV,’ he said cheerfully.

  Amelia backtracked. ‘A remotely operated vehicle. Basically, an underwater robot controlled from the ship and attached to it at all times. Unlike an AUV, or autonomous underwater vehicle, which operates remotely at a distance from the ship, like an underwater drone. ROVs and AUVs can be compared to pressurised, manned submersibles, which are basically mini-submarines. That thing there is bilaterally tethered to the ship and has no window to look out of: hence it’s an ROV.’

  ‘Hence indeed,’ said Xander. ‘Also, a person would have to be curled up in a ball to fit inside it. Just saying.’

  The submersible was much smaller than I’d imagined: basically, it was a yellow and grey metal-framed crate bristling with lights, lenses, antennae, grab arms and other bits of unidentifiable kit. One of the technicians was busy double-checking it while the other rearranged the coil of cable and made sure the clasp above the submersible was securely connected to the crane. When the first technician gave the all-clear, the second operated the crane from a panel in the deck wall beneath it. First, he raised the submersible above the deck rail. Next, he swung it out over the stern. Last, he lowered it into the swell. I was pleased that Xander had thought to film this scene as it happened, but once the submersible was beneath the waves there was only the cable unspooling into the depths to watch, which wasn’t exactly riveting.

  ‘Want to see what it gets up to down there?’ Armfield asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Amelia replied instantly.

  ‘Come with me.’ Briskly, he led us back through the ship to what he called ‘the operations room’. We’d seen this on our guided tour: it was next to the laboratory and was basically a dark space filled with backlit keyboards and screens. Macmillan was in here, leaning against a wall, his arms crossed. He yawned when he saw us. ‘Morning, kids.’