Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire (7 page)

When Millie woke him, Gabriel felt disoriented and dehydrated, a feeling not unlike a bad hangover. He dragged himself upright and slipped his altitude-swollen feet back into his too-tight boots, grunting wordlessly as Millie slid into the sleeping bag in his place. Staggering down the tunnel to empty his aching bladder, Gabriel still felt foggy and half asleep. He kept going till he was a good, respectful distance away from the others and leaned against the wall with one hand while he struggled with the other through far too many layers of snaps, buttons and zippers. By the time he was able to begin relieving himself against the wall, Gabriel found that he was flushed and damp with sweat from the effort. He realized that while it was certainly still cold here, it was substantially warmer than it had been back by the tunnel’s mouth. The wall against which he was leaning felt like rough stone beneath a thin crust of ice, not the solid ice of the section in which they’d slept.

Curious, he headed farther along the tunnel, head cocked and listening. He could have sworn he’d heard—yes, there it was, at the edges of his hearing, a delicate trickling sound.

Running water.

He came around a bend and discovered a tiny, winding stream flowing along a deep groove in the ice.

Gabriel rushed back to the mouth of the tunnel, where he found Nils awake and melting chips of ice over a camp stove.

“Nils,” Gabriel said. “There’s a stream up ahead. About fifty yards down the tunnel.”

“What?” Nils stood, frowning. “That’s not possible. It’s far too cold for liquid water here.”

“Well, it’s warmer there,” Gabriel said. “Much warmer than it is here.”

At the word “warmer” Velda was wide-awake and on her feet.

“It’s just like my father said. We must be getting closer to the place he found. The place he vanished.” She jammed her feet into her boots and hastily began rolling her sleeping bag.

“Hold on a minute,” Gabriel said, keeping his voice low. He motioned to Millie and Rue, both of whom were still sleeping. “We need to let them rest for a while first.”

“No time to rest,” Velda said. “Not when we’re this close. Not when my father’s been on his own here for weeks—maybe sick or hurt, starving. No. We’re going.”

Gabriel watched Velda shoulder her pack and head down the passage. Nils bent to turn off and pack up the stove. He offered Gabriel a drink of meltwater from the small tin pot and Gabriel accepted gratefully.

“Better wake the others,” Nils said.

Millie and Rue were not happy to be dragged from their sleeping bags.

“Who the hell put her in charge?” Rue grumbled, when Gabriel had explained.

“She’s right about her father,” Gabriel said. “If he’s
still alive, he needs help. And we can’t let her go on alone.”

“
You
can’t let her go on alone,” Rue said. “She’s not smoking
my
joint.”

“We must all stay together,” Nils said. “Going alone down here is suicide. That’s how Lawrence vanished.”

“So this way we can all vanish together,” Rue said. “Much better.” But she tugged on her boots.

Millie came up behind her. “Man, Rue, you’re getting grouchy in your old age. What’d you think you were getting into when Gabriel called and said, ‘Wanna go to the South Pole?’ A five-star hotel with a feather bed and a down comforter—”

“Ah, fuck you, Millie,” Rue snarled, “and your down comforter. I’m a driver. You see anything down here for me to drive? No. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.” She gave Gabriel a big false smile. “So, we going, or what?”

Gabriel led the way down the passage after Velda. They followed the stream a hundred yards and found her crouching beside it.

“It’s water all right,” she said, pulling off her glove and scooping up a handful to drink. “It’s cold as hell, but it’s water. It’s real.”

Gabriel bent down and took a drink from the stream. It was deeper here than the little trickle he’d first spotted, and the water was cold, fresh and delicious. He could feel his dehydrated body soak up every drop and beg for more. But it was still too cold to expose his bare skin to it for long—his hand felt almost as if it were burning where it had touched the water, and he had no choice but to dry it off as quickly as possible and tuck it up under his parka.

Nils brought out the tin cup and they took turns
filling and emptying it. When the team had all had enough, they set out to follow the stream. It bubbled along the left side of the narrow tunnel, sometimes shallow enough that you could see the stone bed beneath the water, sometimes deep and wide enough to cover almost the entire floor of the tunnel, forcing the team to walk single-file along a skinny strip of higher ground against the right-hand wall.

Gabriel was beginning to lose track of time in the dim unchanging sameness of the tunnel. Even though he had slept, he still felt tired. It was far too easy to lose focus, and at one point he nearly lost his footing as well, his boot coming within inches of plunging into the icy stream.

“Careful,” Nils said, gripping Gabriel’s upper arm and steadying him. “It may be warmer down here than on the surface, but it’s still cold enough that you do not want to have a wet boot. I can tell you from personal experience that frostbite is nothing you want to become familiar with.”

Gabriel was suddenly keenly aware of the missing fingers on the hand that gripped his arm. He nodded, and continued carefully along the edge of the stream.

About thirty minutes later, the tunnel opened into a wide, high-ceilinged ice cave. There, the little stream ended, depositing its flow of water into a rushing underground river, more than twenty feet wide and disturbingly deep. Peering down into the water, Gabriel could see, beneath the spume and froth on the surface, several sharply crenellated columns of ice plunging vertiginously downward into what seemed no less than a water-filled canyon. The river traveled sinuously around several small humped islands of ice—some of them large and bulky, some as small as manhole covers back
in New York—before disappearing into a crevice on the far side of the cave. To the left of the crevice was the entrance to another small tunnel. On the right side of the river—the side they were on—was a dead end, the path they’d been following coming to an abrupt halt against a wall of ice.

“That tunnel looks like the only way forward,” Gabriel said.“And I think it’s fair to say that swimming across is right out.”

“Without dry suits and specialized diving gear?” Nils said. “Hypothermia would set in almost immediately. Even if you made it across, without a change of warm, dry clothing on the other side, death would not be long in coming.”

“What about those?” Velda asked, pointing at the islands in the middle of the river. “Couldn’t we work our way across using them as stepping stones?”

“Maybe you could,” Rue said. “I’ve got shorter legs.”

“I’ll go,” Gabriel said. “I’ll carry one of the ropes across. You anchor one end here, I’ll anchor the other in the wall over there, and that’ll give the rest of you a guide line to hold onto. Rue, you can even go hand over hand if there are gaps that are too wide for you to step across.”

“Do we both remember the condition my hand’s in?” Rue said. “I know I do.”

“Seeing as how I bandaged it for you, I think I do, too,” Gabriel said. “But unless you’ve got a better plan to suggest…”

“All right,” Rue said after a moment, kicking a fragment of ice into the water. “I’ll do it. But you anchor that rope tight, you understand?”

With the rope spooled over his shoulder and Millie holding onto the other end, Gabriel stepped out onto the first of the ice islands. The surface was damned slippery—even with his spike-soled boots, Gabriel found himself sliding and had to put his arms out to either side for balance. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to see the faces of the other team members to envision the looks of concern he knew they’d be wearing. What he needed to do was to concentrate. He took a series of slow, deep breaths and steadied himself. The nearest island was just two feet away on a diagonal—he could make that one easily. Rotating slowly, slowly, till he was facing the other island, Gabriel balanced, raised one leg and shifted forward.

His foot landed squarely, the spikes biting into the ice. But as he brought his other leg across, he felt himself teeter and start to fall. Behind him, he heard someone gasp. He swung his arms up and corrected his balance, throwing his weight to the opposite side. Concentrate, he told himself. Focus. There’s no one here, there’s no water, there’s no river, there’s just your feet and these islands, and you either make it across or you’re dead.

Once he was steady again, he looked across to the
far side, mapping the shortest path from here to there. Five more islands. Five more chances to fall.

He stepped across to the next island, one of the largest, and rested there for a moment. It was big enough he could even have sat down, but he didn’t. No point trying to get comfortable on a frozen, slippery surface, least of all when you had four more ahead of you.

The next crossing went smoothly. He heard Millie call out for him to stop and then felt a slight tug on the rope coiled on his shoulder. “Got your angle now,” Millie shouted. Gabriel could hear him hammering a piton into the wall and attaching his end of the rope to it. Gabriel waited till the hammering ended and Millie shouted, “All clear,” before taking a careful step across to the fourth island.

This time Gabriel did chance a look back over his shoulder. He was a bit more than halfway across. It felt strange, standing on a tiny, ice-crusted rock with a deadly torrent of water rushing by just inches away from his feet. The bigger problem, though, was that he only had two more tiny, ice-crusted rocks left, to cross nearly the same amount of space that he’d had four islands to get him across so far. There’d be no more stepping across from here on—these two would require jumps, and jumping from one icy surface to another, with zero tolerance for error…

He steadied himself, aimed, and leapt, landing squarely in the center of the island. But it wasn’t a flat surface—what he hadn’t been able to see from where he’d jumped was that on the far side the ice was canted steeply to the right. He found himself pitching forward. He tried to lean back, but he couldn’t—too much momentum was dragging him forward, downward, toward the water—

Then he felt a mighty tug on his shoulder and found himself lifted off his feet, like a fish on the end of a line. “No you don’t,” Millie shouted. “You stay outta that water, y’hear?” And Gabriel landed flat on his back on the surface of the little island. He felt himself start slipping again and spun onto his belly, scrabbling with the palms of his gloves for purchase. Gabriel stopped his skid and lay facedown on the ice, gripping tightly with all four limbs. “Thanks,” he said, too quietly to be heard. But Millie knew he’d said it and called back, “Ain’t nothin’, brother.”

Slowly, Gabriel rose to his knees, brushing off the surface of his parka as best he could. It was wet, maybe even dangerously so—but a hell of a lot less so than it might have been.

Gabriel re-coiled the rope, replaced it around his shoulder, and got to his feet.

“You sure you’re okay?” Velda called.

“No,” Gabriel said, and bent his knees for the next jump. He landed unevenly and had to take a step forward to keep his balance. But he kept it. “But if you wait till you’re sure about things,” he shouted, “you’ll never get out of bed in the morning.” He jumped from the island to the far shore and, pulling the rope tight, secured it to a piton he hammered into a cleft in the wall. The rope now stretched across the river, within easy reach of five of the six islands and not completely out of reach of the sixth.

He cupped his hands on either side of his mouth. “So, who’s first?”

Millie was the last to cross. Rue had gone hand over hand most of the way, relieving some of the pressure on her injured palm by using her legs as well, crossed at
the ankles over the rope. Velda had crossed carefully, measuring each jump. And then Nils had gone, his long stride making several of the crossings easier for him than any of the others had found them.

Then it was Millie’s turn. He avoided putting his weight on the rope, not only because he was the heaviest by far but because there was no one left on the far shore to hold onto the rope if it came free from its mooring.

He made it to the last island without incident—a few tense moments, but he kept his head and his balance. But then as he landed on the surface of the final island, his foot slipped. His free arm pinwheeled for balance as he gripped the rope. It dipped low under his weight and before he could right himself, he plunged one leg into the water up to the knee.

“GodDAMN,” he hollered, yanking his foot back up as if he’d dipped it into boiling oil and nearly overbalancing the other way.

“Hang on,” Gabriel called, hauling on the rope with all his weight to keep it up while Millie leaned against it. “You’re almost across.”

Millie regained his balance and then jumped the last six feet to the bank. Gabriel and Nils reached out to catch him and haul him away from the river’s edge.

“Get his boot off,” Nils said. “Quickly.”

Gabriel pulled off Millie’s boot and dripping sock and then took off his own parka and wrapped it around Millie’s cold, corpse-pale foot. Nils pulled out a knife from his pack and began cutting sections from Millie’s sleeping bag, an L-shaped corner piece and a batch of narrow strips. While Gabriel rubbed warmth back into Millie’s icy foot, Nils cobbled together a temporary foot covering for Millie to wear while his boot dried.

“Damn that was close,” Millie said, letting out a
long shaky breath. “I never realized how much I like having ten toes until just now.”

Nils tied the makeshift boot onto Millie’s foot and helped him up, handing the parka back to Gabriel.

“Can you walk like that?” Gabriel asked.

“Remember that time in San Borja, with the hot tar?” Millie said. “Compared to that, this is a piece of cake.”

“Just the same,” Gabriel said, and put an arm across the big man’s waist. Millie didn’t object and leaned on him heavily as they headed into the narrow tunnel.

As they went, Gabriel started to notice veins of exposed rock peeking through gaps in the ice on the walls and ceiling. And after a series of snaking hairpin turns and switchbacks, the team found themselves in an entirely different type of cave.

It was long and narrow, approximately the size and shape of the interior of a school bus—but that was not what was unusual. What was unusual was the fact that the walls had no ice on them at all. It was solid rock on every side. It was also warmer, uncomfortably so.

At the far end of the cave was a crooked, vertical crack that looked like it wouldn’t be wide enough to admit Millie unless he turned sideways and held his breath. Beside the crack was a heap of broken rock.

“Look,” Gabriel said, pointing to a bit of neon green fabric barely visible beneath the rubble.

Velda made a soft, anguished sound in her throat and ran to the pile, dropping to her knees. She began moving pieces of stone off the fabric, revealing it to be the sleeve of a thermal parka.

“It’s empty!” Velda cried, pulling the parka from beneath the rocks. She pointed to the large, indelible
marker letters above the label that read SILVER. “It’s my father’s.” She frowned and gripped the parka’s collar tighter. “He couldn’t last thirty minutes without this on the surface. Why would he take it off?”

“Same reason I’m about to,” Gabriel said. He was starting to sweat profusely under his many thermal layers. The ambient temperature in the cave had to be nearly fifty degrees. He unzipped his parka and removed his gloves. “Can’t you feel how much warmer it’s getting?”

Nils unzipped as well. “We must be near some kind of previously undetected geothermic anomaly.”

“You think it’s warm there,” Rue said, having slipped easily into the crack in the rock wall. “Check this out. This is where the warm air’s coming from.”

Gabriel walked over, stuck his hand inside. Sure enough.

“Listen,” he said. “We need to take some of our gear off or we’ll get overheated—but we can’t leave it behind. We may not be able to return the way we came.”

“No problem,” Millie said. “I can carry the lot of ’em.”

“We’ll each carry our own,” Gabriel said, squeezing his parka into a compact bundle.

The other team members quickly stripped out of their freezer suits, but the polar fleece pullovers and pants beneath were still much too warm for the inexplicably balmy temperature inside the cave. Even stripped down to their last layer of high-tech, lightweight, moisturewicking thermals, they still felt sticky and overheated.

“Shh,” Velda said, pausing from trying to force the zipper shut on her now overstuffed pack and putting a finger to her lips. “Do you hear that?”

“What?” Mille asked, cocking his massive head.

“Sounds like…” Velda began.

Millie casually slapped at the back of his neck and Gabriel grabbed his thick wrist, eyes wide. Millie frowned quizzically as Gabriel turned the big man’s hand over to reveal a squashed mosquito and tiny splotch of bright blood.

“A mosquito!” Velda said, her voice incredulous.

“So what?” Millie shrugged. “This little squirt ain’t nothing compared to the blood-sucking bombers we got back home.”

“There are no mosquitoes of any size at the South Pole,” Nils said. “No insects at all, in fact.”

Millie looked down at the minuscule corpse in his hand.

“Should we try to preserve it or something?” Millie asked. “I feel kinda bad now for squashing the only living insect ever found at the South Pole.”

“Guys,” Rue called from the depth of the tunnel. “I really think you ought to see this.”

While the other four were marveling over the unfortunate mosquito, Rue had followed her curiosity down the tunnel. She had turned a sharp corner, so she could be heard but not seen.

Gabriel twisted sideways and entered the tunnel, motioning for the others to follow. Inside the tunnel it was not just warm, it was humid, as utterly the opposite of the bone-dry chill aboveground as could possibly be imagined. The air had an odor, a rich green loamy smell that told Gabriel that Dr. Silver had not been hallucinating in his final transmission. When he came to the dogleg bend in the tunnel, his eyes confirmed what his nose had already told him.

The tunnel widened to a broad triangular opening. Rue was standing in the opening, hands on her hips. The other four joined her and stood together in awed silence, regarding the valley below. It was green. Lushly, verdantly, impossibly green.