There are some moments, Luke thought, that can seem like a lifetime: the seconds before he went through the doorway of a mud-walled compound of a high-value target in Afghanistan, a weapons-drawn face-off in the Gulf of Aden with a skiff full of Somali pirates high on narcotic qat, the instant before his first kiss with Elise. This, right now, was one of those extended moments. He saw Skeet look him straight in the eyes, he saw him hesitate, and he saw him turn and break into a run, making for the nearest buildings.

‘Stoppe!’ The shout came from behind them, the command sounding identical in Norwegian and English. But Skeet was moving fast now, closing the distance between himself and a row of green-painted buildings. He wasn’t stopping for anyone.

The crack, when it came, was deafening, shattering the stillness of the Arctic morning, splitting the air as the bullet broke the sound barrier and slammed into its target. Skeet fell, clutching his right thigh, and groaned once. Luke could see him staring down in consternation at where his blood was spurting out, as if from a garden hose. A crimson pool was rapidly forming on the pristine snow. Everything in Luke’s training was telling him to race forward and slap a tourniquet on before the man bled out. He had spent enough time in Afghanistan and Iraq to know Skeet had been hit in his femoral artery by the high-velocity bullet. But Skeet, they all suspected, was carrying the pathogen, and Luke simply couldn’t take that risk. He knew that an average adult human has around five litres of blood in their body, but, left unstaunched, a severed major artery will usually be fatal within two minutes. And so it was, on that icy morning in Barentsburg.

Victor Skeet, ice-core engineer, Arctic researcher and resident of Cambridge, England, took 124 seconds to die on that empty, frozen street in Barentsburg. He had, at least, enjoyed a quicker death than the man who had infected him.

12

Svalbard

Tuesday, 8 March, 0757hrs GMT, 0857hrs local

THE NOISE OF the helicopters approaching the hut was deafening. But to Dr Sheila Mackenzie it was the welcome sound of salvation. The choppers would be bringing in the very people who would save her life. That’s it. Just dose me up with the right antibiotics and I’ll get through this in a week or two. Might even write a paper on it for the British Medical Journal once I’m over it.