Keeping Secrets on Ice

Sunday Dec 30 2010. The gunman pressed the end of the barrel hard into the back of the other man's neck squeezing the trigger at the same time. The sound of the gunshot was partly muffled by the heavily padded hood of the victim's parka, the rest of it snatched away in the blizzard of wind and ice that swept over the two lone figures. The large calibre round entered the man's lower neck and exited through the other side of his skull, taking most of his face with it and spraying sizable chunks of bone and brains over the white surface. Feng's dead body collapsed like a wet sack. The killer knelt next to the body quickly going through the dead mans pockets. He found what he was looking for and carefully examined it. It was a cylindrical piece of ice that with the exception of the black globules near its centre was crystal clear. He retrieved a small plastic container from his own jacket and dropped the sample inside, sealing the lid.
The gunman stood for a moment, holstering the weapon and replacing the outer glove back on his gun hand. He watched with satisfaction as the drifting snow quickly covered the bloody evidence staining the ice. The body was also collecting snow and would be covered in minutes. In 70,000 years, as the ice floe continued its steady march north; they might find it at the other end of the lake. The man with the gun grunted and returned to the waiting snow tractor, climbing into the warmth of the cab.
The driver waited until he was seated then shifted the snow machine roughly into gear without looking up. "Wet feet?" he asked.
"Big fucking mouth," the gunman said, Frozen feet now.
"You think Feng knew you were going to kill him?"
The gunman thought about the exit wound, "didn't show in his face." He said, at least what was left of it. Hong Liu squirmed himself comfortably into the trucks seat. He worked for the Second Bureau of the Chinese Ministry for State Security, the Foreign Bureau, the one responsible for operations abroad.
"What about Hamilton?" The driver asked.
"If he sniffs around here again kill him." He looked through the windscreen into the blinding snow, the wipers scraped back and forth furiously in an almost futile attempt to maintain some visibility. But he wasn’t thinking about the snow, he was thinking about the Australian. Hamilton was a risk, too great a risk to leave walking and talking. He pulled his gloves off, checking his pocket for the cylinder. "Hamilton was talking to Feng,” He continued, “when the time is right..." Hong left the sentence hanging because he was really talking to himself, he knew if anyone were to find out about the ice core sample, China’s future would be gravely jeopardised.
The driver nodded. "We have agents in Australia, why not have them do it?”
"No,” Hong Liu said, a little troubled by the other mans complacence. “This I need to do myself.” What they were undertaking now would take many years to come to fruition and could turn the world and the balances of power upside down.
The driver had no idea what was in Hong’s pocket or what they were doing here. He didn’t want to know; in this case ignorance was bliss. Like Shultz in Hogans Heroes, his chances of survival were much better if he ‘knew nothing!’ anyone in the PLA could tell you that. He replayed the German accent in his head, he wasn’t about to try it out loud.
"Durnovo is preparing the drill site," Hong said shivering a little, but not from the cold. "We don't need any more complications like Feng." He looked at the driver. “Or we might join him.”
The driver inwardly shrank and looked away. Yes, the least said the better; Hong seemed to have an unusual degree of latitude with Beijing. He didn’t want to be Hongs next job. What ever they were doing was clearly worth killing for, not that that had ever been a problem.
He looked up and for a fleeting moment and saw the squashed orange pumpkin shape of the moon between the racing clouds of blowing snow. The squashed shape was due to atmospheric bending of light or refraction - an effect which is more severe closer to the horizon, something poor old Feng would never see again he thought, but something the driver wanted to see many more times.
On the way back to camp the driver tracked the moons path until it sank below the horizon, fearful now thinking somehow his fate and the moons presence were somehow entwined. As he watched the moon disappear, a whole world away and at the very same time someone else was watching it. Actually there were probably millions watching it, but most of them were mindless ponderings of something far away, something unreachable. The individual that mattered to this story was scouring its surface looking for something left behind from decades before, and he had one heck of view. The other important thing here was that this individual along with the snow cat driver and Hong had something else in common other than just the moon. A set of events had just been set in motion that bound them all together in a struggle that would pit them against each other, see two of them dead plus untold others and a planet on the brink of destruction.