Polar Vortex Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Transcript Audio 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Transcript Audio 2

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Transcript Audio 3

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Transcript Audio 4

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Final Transcript Audio

  Chapter 47

  From the Author

  Author Discussion on Polar Vortex

  Other Books by Matthew Mather

  About Matthew Mather

  POLAR VORTEX

  Copyright © 2018, Matthew Mather ULC

  Written by Matthew Mather

  ISBN: 978-1-987942-09-5

  Cover image by Momir Boroki

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to the memory

  of my father, David Alan Mather,

  who passed away while I was writing this novel.

  This story is a testament to the love

  of a father for their child.

  He was, and will always be,

  my greatest hero.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank Monte Dunard, a pilot for American Airlines who flies Boeing 777s over the North Pole, for his invaluable insights and help in writing this novel. I’d also like to thank Bill Stafford, Station Manager for the Alert base in Nunavut—the most northerly inhabited place on planet Earth. Finally, I’d like to thank my dedicated fans who helped with early readings. Without you, none of this would be possible, so thank you.

  PROLOGUE

  “IS THIS HEAVEN?” Lilly held out one tiny hand.

  A haze of gold and red shimmered around my daughter and me. The colors shifted to violet and then pink, enveloping us in a humid blanket. I held my hand out next to hers—our arms fading into the mist—outstretched my fingers and then wrapped them around hers.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  And it was.

  The iridescence pulsed and surrounded us like a living thing.

  “Are we dead?” She whispered so low I could barely hear her.

  “Of course not.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Mommy is waiting for us. We’re going back to her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The light dimmed and flickered.

  “I’m frightened,” she said.

  Me too, I thought, but I held her tighter and said, “Everything is going to be okay.”

  TRANSCRIPT AUDIO 1

  National Transportation Safety Board.

  Mid-Flight Disappearance of Allied 695,

  Boeing 777, NTSB/AIR.

  Washington, DC

  October 18th

  “NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE, no transponder signals.” Richard Marks cleared his throat and spoke louder for the audio recording. “No emergency locator transmitters…”

  How did a modern airliner literally vanish in one of the most heavily monitored places on Earth? Like it was swallowed by a black hole.

  “Don’t want to take a break?” his newly appointed partner, Peter Hystad, asked. “Three days with no sleep. You sure you want to be lead investigator on this?”

  “I’m fine,” Richard said. “And I’m sure.”

  Something had happened out there, a bizarre event beyond simply an accident. Even secured back at their offices in Washington, he felt the eyes of the world on them in here. Twelve stories down and through the concrete walls, he sensed the swarming media and grieving families massed outside.

  There were only the two of them in the twenty-foot long, wood-paneled conference room. A fresh pot of coffee on a stand in the corner. The door locked.

  Peter said, “So, a Boeing 777 with three hundred seventy-eight souls disappears over the North Pole, and all we have is that?”

  Richard held up a beaten leather-bound notebook, three inches wide and six long.

  “That’s it so far.”

  “Is it real? I mean, given where it was found, it’s hard to understand—”

  “Seems to be his handwriting from the samples we received.”

  “I could hand that over to some FBI friends for analysis.”

  “I’m not giving this to anyone.”

  A pause. “Matthews was a passenger? That’s confirmed?”

  “I checked the Chek Lap Kok camera logs myself.”

  “Hong Kong airport systems are back up?”

  Richard opened the notebook. “His entries start two weeks ago. I’m going to read aloud for the record. This is the journal of Mitch Matthews…”

  CHAPTER 1

  October 4th

  “MITCH, COULD YOU get some of those?” my wife, Emma, said. “Are they the piggy ones?”

  “Let me check,” I replied.

  Lilly shrieked and ran past me, chased by two of her chubby-cheeked cousins. The trio almost ran straight into a cart stacked high with wooden dim sum baskets. The elderly Chinese woman behind it stoically pushed forward without missing a beat, calling out, “Char siu bao!”

  I held up a hand to the cart pusher, who with practiced deftness whisked a basket in front of me, paused an instant to see if I wanted more, then continued on without saying a word.

  Three pillow-soft-looking white buns adorned with little ears and eyes stared up at me.

  “Yeah, they’re the piggy ones.”

  A lunchtime crush of hungry patrons mobbed the entrance of the Lin Heung Kui restaurant. Emma’s father had wanted to do lunch at the Four Seasons, but the rest of her family wanted something a little more yit lao—lively—so we ended up here, in one of Hong Kong’s oldest dim sum parlors.

  We had just arrived, disembarked from a bright yellow double-decker trolley that had inched its way through the skyscraper canyons. Crowds of people jammed every intersection. It was the middle of the Golden Week, the holiday after National Day, the Chinese equivalent of the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving all rolled into one.

  My first time to Hong Kong. Nearly my first time outside of America.

  I wrote a few notes into my journal trying to capture the mood of the place. The leather-bound pad was a gift from my wife. She said it would help stimulate me, get the creative juices flowing.

  Emma’s family was arranged around a large circular table almost spilling over with wooden baskets. Her grandmother and grandfather were across from us, her British father next to me, her Chinese mother two seats to my right past Emma, and then her cousins. I did my best, but I was terrible at remembering names even in English—never mind Cantonese.

  “Lillypad, come on, sit down and eat.” I put one arm out to intercept her on her next pass around the table. She squealed but let me wrap her up and pull onto my lap.

  I held Lilly’s five-year-old body tight, felt her tiny ribs beneath her sweater. She was small for five; had always been small. Wisps of her fly-away blond hair tickled my chin, her head tucked under mine.

  My Lillypad.

  “Look,” I said. “Pigs. Try one.”

  I picked one up in demonstration and bit into it, tasted oozy salted egg beyond the soft dough. My daughter crinkled her nose. A fussy eater. Like her mother. It was a constant battle to get her to eat, as opposed to me, where the battle went the opposite way.

  She leaned into me, and with one of her little index fingers she traced a pattern into the palm of my left hand. It was a secret game we played, a way to talk without talking. It started when I was teaching her letters, and she made up her own “skin signs” as she called them.

  This one was easy. She traced an “N” into my hand. No. She wasn’t hungry.

  I was about to admonish her, tell her she had to at least get something into her stomach when I noticed the wheezing.

  I listened closer.

  She was panting, struggling to suck air into her lungs.

  I reached into the backpack by my feet and rummaged around for her inhaler, shook it and lifted it up to her mouth. I pressed down and she took a breath.

  The air in Hong Kong was terrible, the pollution so dense sometimes it was like a hazy fog, and acidic enough to make the eyes water. I shouldn’t have let her ride on the open deck of the trolley.

  Lilly poked one of the piggy buns, picked it up and took a bit
e. I was going to put the inhaler back, but on reflection, left it on the table top. She would probably need it again.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to fly over the North Pole?” Emma asked.

  My wife held my gaze with her doe-like brown eyes. She knew she was doing it—worrying—but she couldn’t help it, and needed me to play along.

  I said, “Do you think it’s safer flying across the Pacific?”

  “Isn’t flying over water safer?”

  “Not for me.”

  She shook her head. “Your daughter is going to learn to—”

  “Anyway”—I changed the topic—“it is mostly water. I don’t think there’s much ice left up there.” It was a joke, but only half of one.

  “It’s not that.”

  Under cover of the table, she showed me an article on her phone’s screen. With my free hand I took it and looked closer. Russian bombers intercepted by American fighter jets over the Arctic, read the headline.

  I handed the phone back. “You have to stop looking up articles like this. It happens all the time. You notice it now—”

  “—my husband and daughter are flying over the North Pole?”

  “Come on. Your brother is piloting the plane. How many people can say that?”

  Josh flew for Allied Airlines, one of the biggest commercial carriers. We hadn't seen him in two years and he had called unexpectedly, said he was flying back to the States on a new assignment. Said he had heard we were in Hong Kong seeing the family.

  I had jumped at the chance to fly back a bit early, but my wife needed to stay.

  “Maybe I should come,” she said.

  “You should stay, but Lilly…I mean, do you want us to stay?”

  She shook her head. “And he’s my half-brother.”

  Josh was from her father’s first wife. From what I had gathered, a tumultuous affair that had ended with the woman retreating back to England. Josh and Emma were almost twenty years apart in age. He was off to college by the time she was born. They had only met a few times, but as her sole sibling, she had tried to stay in touch—at least with what was going on in his life.

  She added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if that side of the family wanted one of us dumped into the ocean.”

  “I know I would.” I laughed. I could laugh, because it didn’t involve me.

  It was an old dispute from her father’s side of the family over ownership of a house in England. Something about wills and rights, but nothing that affected us.

  Family arguments were something I could relate to, and I cringed to think of how things could have spiraled out of control if my own family had any real money to speak of. My father had died twenty years ago. Left us nothing but debt.

  Emma’s face softened. “Can you talk to Josh? Try and have a conversation with him? He’s supposed to meet you at the airport.”

  Josh was getting divorced. A nasty split. She had learned about it through her aunt, who said he was having a hard time.

  “Ask him to come and stay a night when you’re back in New York,” Emma said. “Make sure you talk to him before you get on the flight.”

  “I’ll try. I mean, he’s working.” Honestly, it was the last thing I wanted to do.

  Her face changed again, her eyes narrowing. “You know what I mean.”

  Her brother had a reputation as a heavy drinker. Never when he flew, of course. I hoped.

  “Didn’t he say he was going to make New York a regular stop? You can talk to him yourself, when you get back.”

  Her gaze lowered, her beautiful dark hair falling around her shoulders. She closed her eyes. “I wish I was coming with you.”

  I whispered, “Stay here as long as you need. I’ll take care of Lilly.”

  We weren’t here just for the family reunion. Emma gave me a tight smile and exhaled before turning to her right.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked her mother in a way that was more than casual.

  Her mother—Nian Zhen was her full name, although we called her Nanni—had been diagnosed with cancer. Seventy-two years old and her mother still had the same graceful beauty as my wife, but Nanni had lost a step since the last time I’d seen her, five years ago on their visit to New York when Lilly was born.

  Back then she’d been a whirlwind of energy, and had stayed with us for three months before Emma finally shooed her back to Hong Kong. Now she seemed shrunken and quiet.

  “Mom, we’re going to see the doctor tomorrow,” Emma said.

  “But I’ve already seen my doctor,” I heard Nanni reply.

  “I mean, a real doctor. You can’t ignore this.”

  “I’m not ignoring it.”

  “Dad.” Emma turned to her father. “Can you tell her? Tomorrow. The doctor with Mom.”

  “Yes, yes, tomorrow,” Alasdair replied.

  The old guy was busy picking out a pork dumpling, and it was obvious he didn’t really know what his daughter was talking about. He had a habit of agreeing with whatever anyone said. Or thought they said. Hard of hearing. More like deaf. He wasn’t much help, but not that he didn’t want to be. The codger was eighty-five-years old, thirteen years senior to Emma’s mother.

  He needed help almost as much as she did.

  Alasdair sat on my immediate left. Seeing I’d finished talking with Emma he leaned over and poked Lilly’s ribs. Lilly giggled and picked up another piggy bun, even though she had skin-signed she wasn’t hungry. She liked the buns. I made a mental note.

  “So when are you bringing us another one of these little monsters?” Alasdair asked me.

  “We’re working on it,” I replied. “As a matter—”

  Emma interrupted, “—of fact, we’re working very hard on it.” She smiled at her father, then gave me a stern look.

  Her father winked. “Well, you keep working on it.” The old man laughed throatily.

  Emma and her dad lived halfway around the world from each other, yet somehow remained tight. It was something I envied. I had never felt close with my own father.

  Alasdair said to me, “Have you been reading about the Hong Kong independence movement? Bloody well should separate from China. That’s what I think.”

  Emma shook her head. “Dad, I told you to stop talking about that. You certainly didn’t think Hong Kong should separate when it was attached to England.”

  “That was different.”

  “Different how?” Emma held up one hand to stop him responding. “I don’t want to hear it. Can you please stop talking about it? It’s not your place to have opinions on this anymore.”

  “I’ve lived here almost all of my life.”

  “Which you should be grateful for.”

  “But—”

  “Stop. Please.”

  Her father’s wispy white eyebrows furrowed but he shrugged and with his chopsticks retrieved another pork dumpling with expert precision. “Did I ever tell you I played polo with the Shah of Iran?” he said to me.

  He had. Every time I’d met him, but I said he hadn’t and he began to tell his tale again. My wife’s father was a relic from a different time. A leftover piece of an empire.

  He had stubbornly stayed in place after the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. He’d been in import and export, at least that was the story. British Foreign Service, or something. He’d fought the Chinese in North Korea during the war in that peninsula, yet now lived happily with the same people he’d been trying to kill fifty years ago.

  Guess that pretty much summed up humanity, and maybe families as well. All of humankind was one big family, come to think of it. At war with each other one minute, then happy together the next. I took out my journal and scribbled that down.

  Yeah, that sounded like family to me.

  CHAPTER 2

  EMMA KNELT IN front of Lilly at the edge of the sidewalk and held our daughter’s two small hands in hers. A tour bus growled into gear and belched a cloud of exhaust and pulled away. Blue letters on glass walls straight in front of us announced Hong Kong International Airport in English with Chinese characters over the top.

  In front of our taxi, a gaggle of young schoolgirls all in matching white-and-baby-blue tracksuit jackets and pants had disembarked. The girls squealed and chased each other around a pile of suitcases. Jumping out from a divider between the lanes, a woman wound through the departures traffic and barked a command in Cantonese. The girls came to attention and lined up in two rows.