Frozen Solid: A Novel (15 page)

She and Hallie had ridden there on one snowmo, Guillotte on another.

“Its official name,” Merritt continued, “is the Amundsen-Scott Research Station Dive Operations Center, but that’s a bit fancy for an Army-surplus Quonset hut with a plywood floor.” She glanced from Hallie to Guillotte. “I heard about Bacon’s Cat going through.”

“Word travels fast,” Hallie said. “It’s warm in here. Well, warmer.”

“Seventy below freezes up the dive gear,” Guillotte said. “So we keep it about zero. Balmy, yes?”

Several Draggers were working on compressors and other machinery. No one stopped for the new arrivals. Racks of double- and singletank scuba rigs lined one long wall. A workbench ran the length of one short wall. Along the other short wall stood five-foot-tall cylinders of air, pure oxygen, and helium for blending Trimix and Nitrox breathing gas mixes. Two blue argon cylinders provided insulating gas for use with dry suits.

Sharing her secret with Fida had been a tremendous relief for Hallie, but she was still walking around with the knowledge that a
murderer might be roaming the station. Any person in this shed, other than Merritt, could have done it.

Once, deep in a cave, her main headlamp had failed. Then, both backup lights. It was the first and only time that had happened to her. She never forgot what it felt like to suddenly lose all light, to know that twenty steps in any direction could send her over the lip of a pit or into a sump. It was paralyzing knowledge, and the feeling now was almost as powerful. In the cave, she had simply sat down and waited for another member of the expedition to come along with light. Here, that wasn’t going to happen.

Regardless, the dive had to go forward. If she had not had the conversation with Fida and learned what Vishnu could mean, she might have called it off. But not now.

“We will go over to my, ah, office and talk through the dive plan.” Guillotte pointed to a four-by-eight sheet of plywood on four saw-horses. Hallie was following him when she saw a burly man stumble and, to keep from falling, grab a rack of scuba tanks.

“Hey,” she yelled.
“Don’t do that!”

The rack was already starting to fall. Hallie was closest, about eight feet away, and she reached it just before the whole assemblage, tanks and rack, tipped. She shoved it back upright and stood for a second, collecting herself. If an impact broke the valve head off a full scuba tank, the escaping gas, pressurized at thirty-two hundred pounds per square inch, would propel it like a lethal and unguided missile. Hallie had seen one, dropped by a careless customer in a dive shop, break clean through an outside wall and smash in the side of a parked car beyond. What it would do to human bodies in an enclosed space she preferred not to imagine.

When she realized that none of them were going to die, she turned to the clumsy worker, who was standing there looking far less guilty than she thought the moment required.

“You need to be careful around those things,” Hallie snapped. “They can—”

She stopped. Bulky body, red face, boozy breath.

“Hey, it was an accident,” Brank rasped. “Chill the fuck out.” He
took a step forward, his face contorted with anger, and she thought:
Him. He could have killed Emily
. But her own anger flashed then, and she planted herself in his path.

Instantly, Guillotte slid between them and put his hand on Brank’s chest. “Go sober up,” he said. “You have no business here drunk.”

“Fuck yourself, Frogman,” Brank said, shoving Guillotte’s hand away. “I don’t take no orders from you.”

The two men stood glaring at each other, and Hallie wondered which would throw the first punch. Before either could, Agnes Merritt stalked over and stood on tiptoes to put her face inches from Brank’s.

“You don’t take orders from me, either. But if you’re not out of here in five seconds, I’ll have Graeter on you like stink on shit and you can kiss your fat Pole paycheck goodbye.
Forever
.”

Hallie was as surprised by Merritt’s transformation as by its effect on Brank, who was already backing toward the exit. To Hallie, he said, “Ain’t seen the last of each other, blondie,” and slammed the door so hard the DOC shook.

“I cannot apologize enough for Brank,” Guillotte said to Hallie. “He works for someone else. I do not even know why he was here.” He looked at the door, then back at her. “But I promise you it will never happen again.”

Hallie tried to sound settled. “At least no one got hurt. That’s the important thing.”

“Indeed,” Guillotte said. “So. Let us plan your dive now.”

“I’m curious. Why aren’t you doing this dive yourself?” Hallie asked.

“I would love to, believe me. Two years before coming to Pole, I suffered a decompression accident diving a U-boat in two hundred and sixty feet of water. I was paralyzed from the waist down for several days. After many hours in the reco chamber I could walk. But as I am sure you know, there is no more diving after an accident like that. It would be suicide. So …” He drew an index finger across his throat. “I am done.
Finis
.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Hallie said.

“Was hard at first,” Guillotte said. “Okay now. Not good, but okay.”

He pointed to a round hole, five feet in diameter, cut out of the plywood floor in the center of the hut. Two feet below the rim, black water sloshed. “They bore these shafts with big, hot-water drills. This one broke through about thirty feet down. So you descend in the shaft, and at that depth enter the cryopeg through its ceiling.

“Poor Dr. Durant made four dives before she found her thing at a hundred and five feet.”

For twenty more minutes they planned the dive—route, distance, maximum depth, destination, bottom time, possible emergencies and resolutions. Then it was time to gear up. Hallie had brought her own critical components—first- and second-stage regulators, mask and fins, dry suit, thermal undergarments, computers, lights, assorted tools.

She shed all her ECW except her silk long underwear and, over that, black, expedition-weight polypropylene long johns. That got the Draggers looking up, but she quickly donned a Viking Arctic Plus insulated dive suit with booties, size medium, and over that another, size XL. Last, her red DUI CF200 crushed-neoprene dry suit. She preferred lighter, more flexible trilaminate dry suits. But when diving wrecks, with so much ragged metal, or in any environment with unknown hazards, she used the crushed neoprene. It was heavy, thick, and stiff but much tougher.

She put on insulated dive boots, gloves, and a fifteen-millimeter neoprene hood. After purging her suit three times with argon gas, a much more efficient insulator than air, she buckled two dive computers onto her left arm and a bottom-time calculator and compass onto her right. The compass would be no use here at the South Pole, but Hallie’s donning protocol never varied. Two freeze-proof, submersible pressure gauges were clipped to D-rings on her left hip, and three high-intensity, handheld dive lights were fastened to D-rings on her chest harness. She clipped primary and backup dive reels to D-rings on her right hip and snapped an Envirotainer, a flashlight-sized, stainless steel cylinder she would use to retrieve samples of the extremophile, to another D-ring.

She was impressed with Guillotte’s efficiency. As soon as she finished donning one piece of gear, she found him standing close by, next piece in hand. Experienced, skillful, attentive. Where an extra set of hands was required, he was firm and steady, not erratic and yanking. Overall, a manager she could trust. Very good to know for a dive like this.

She strapped on a rig with double steel tanks, each with one hundred cubic feet of capacity, equipped with her specialized Scubapro cold-water regulators. She put on her fog-proofed mask, and Guillotte secured her diving helmet with a headlamp that had a front bulb and single-bulb lights on either side. All told, she was now weighted down with close to 125 pounds of gear, so Guillotte supported most of the weight from behind, with his hands under the tanks, while she shuffled over to the shaft. Then he helped her sit on its edge. She pulled on fins and dangled her feet in the water. Even through double socks, insulated inner booties, and eleven-millimeter outer neoprene boots, she felt the cold.

They ran through the final predive checklist items. Guillotte raised a hand with thumb and forefinger circled. “Okay?”

His voice sounded distant through the thick hood. She returned his okay signal, placed both hands on the lip of the shaft, and eased forward and down into the water.

SHE VALVED GAS OUT OF HER DRY SUIT TO ACHIEVE NEGATIVE
buoyancy, dropped to fifteen feet, hovered, and performed predive checks, testing both regulators, all her lights, both computers, her suit inflator and deflator valves.

She released more gas and sank down through the shaft. The hot water drill had left smooth walls that gleamed in her light. Dropping from the bottom of the shaft into the cryopeg, she stopped, got neutrally buoyant, and played her light over the ceiling. It was not, as she had expected, like the jagged, spiked roof of a cave. Instead, slightly concave and riddled with dish-shaped depressions, it reminded her of the surface of a vast golf ball.

She had thought that such high salinity would probably cloud the water, and indeed visibility was only about twenty feet. There was so much backscatter that her light beams looked like car headlights on a very foggy night. Her computers registered the water temperature at twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. So much salt kept the water from freezing, but fluid that cold and saline had a molten, syrupy feel. At this temperature, the thick crushed neoprene of her dry suit became stiffer and more resistant, too, so every kick and hand movement required
extra effort, which meant increased respiration. Gas management would be especially critical on this dive.

Emily had placed an ice screw in the ceiling next to the shaft bottom and run a guideline from that point diagonally down to the extremophile colony. Hallie tied her own guideline to that ice screw as well. It would spool out from her main reel as she descended. If she did not do that, and anything happened to the primary, fixed line, she would have no way to return to the shaft.

Circling the main line with her thumb and forefinger, Hallie started following it down. Even with all her layers, she was feeling the cold, and more than the whisper she had experienced on entry. Now it was more like standing in damp clothes in a brisk fall breeze. She looked at her computers for a depth check: eighty-three feet. Nothing compared to some of the extreme technical dives she’d done, but it was impossible to forget the thousands of feet of black water beneath her.

She descended slowly, keeping contact with the line, equalizing the pressure in her ears with each breath. It took her almost twenty minutes to reach the vertical wall of the cryopeg, where strange ice formations sprouted and flared in her light beam. They were not the sharp, spearlike shapes of cave stalagmites or stalactites but more like ornate coral growths. Some resembled giant mushrooms twenty feet long and other bulbous domes, but most were as random as snow-flakes. Unlike cave formations, which were colored brightly by mineral deposits, everything in the cryopeg was blue. But not
just
blue. As she played her light over the wall and the various shapes, she saw the blues of sky, turquoise, berries, violets—everything from blue so light it looked almost white to the blue-black of a moonless night. Water this murky normally filtered out much of any color’s intensity, even in strong light, but here, strangely, the colors were sharp and intense.

There was no perceptible current, nor any sediment to stir up, and the only sounds were the hissing and burbling of her regulator’s second stage when she inhaled and exhaled. Then, suddenly, the extremophile colony blazed up in the bright spot of her headlamp. It covered the cryopeg’s wall in a foot-thick layer of matter that resembled
bright orange cauliflower with irregularly shaped yellow patches. The largest extremophile colony she had encountered in terrestrial caves had been no bigger than a refrigerator. This one stretched out on the wall and down into the depths, far beyond the reach of her light. There was simply no telling how large it might be.

Establishing neutral buoyancy, she detached the Envirotainer from its D-ring on her chest harness and opened its hinged top. Using a scalpel-sharp excavating tool, she removed some biomatter and placed it inside the container, which had filled with cryopeg water. The extremophile might resemble cauliflower, but it was much tougher. Slicing through it was more like cutting canvas. She rehung her tool, secured the Envirotainer’s top, and reattached it to the D-ring. As she did so, she inadvertently hit the switch on her headlamp’s waist-mounted battery canister.

She knew what had happened and wasn’t alarmed. In fact, it was not unpleasant to hover there in complete darkness—except for the glowing displays of her computers. Any variation of pressure in her ears would tell her if she was rising or sinking. She rotated slowly a full circle, enjoying being one with this strange environment, and moved her hand toward her waist to turn her lights back on.

A faint, reddish glow began to come from the thing Fida called Vishnu. It wasn’t limited to one spot but seemed to emanate from the entire mass. She felt her respiration and pulse increase. She didn’t feel afraid so much as surprised. Bioluminescence was fairly common in the oceans, but she had not expected to find it down here. As she watched, the glow became brighter, then dimmed and went out completely.

Something touched her right knee.

She jerked her leg away, grabbed for her light switch, missed. The damned clumsy, three-fingered mitts.

She recoiled again, swiping one hand through the water in front of her knee while she fumbled for the switch with her other. Felt it, clicked it on, saw the beam shoot from her helmet. She swept it down toward her legs and spun 360 degrees, lancing the water with her light.

Nothing.

A computer alarm sounded.

She gasped involuntarily, sucked in a spoonful of freezing, salty water, spat it back through her regulator.