In Cold Pursuit (22 page)

“What is serious business?”

“You’ve got to understand something, Valena. When we fly one of those planes somewhere, we’re on mission. It’s our job.”

Valena nodded. “So you have something to tell me, and it does not go beyond me.”

“Right. I’m part of the Wing, so pretty much what I understand
is ‘salute and execute.’ We’ve got to have people who will take action without questioning things.”

“I see,” she said, not certain that she did.

Larry moved closer to her and snaked one hand around the small of her back. “We are taking precautions. Anybody sees us talking, they’ll just think I’m hitting on you. Okay?”

Valena tried desperately to relax. “Okay, on my great-great-grandfather’s 1929 Case, you have my word.”

Larry nodded. “That will have to do. So what happens when something strange comes up? Like you’re out there flying your mission and you see something that maybe you weren’t supposed to see, or that you weren’t required to see, maybe, but it’s important.”

“Like when you pick up a corpse that’s supposed to have died of altitude sickness,” said Valena.

“Or something else, like when you fly certain investigators out to the site where that someone died of altitude sickness, and they found something that suggested that maybe there was more to it than all that.”

“Such as?”

Larry put his lips close to her ears. “You never heard this, and if someone puts the thumbscrews on you, you don’t know where the notion came from, right?”

“Why, is this information dangerous?”

“Understand that we’re here because you’re here. The Air-lift Wing flies in support of science in the polar regions. We think what you’re doing is important. We’re not doing this
just
because we love to fly our planes.” He lifted his chin toward McMurdo. “This whole place is here to get you guys into the field and out again.” He pulled her even closer, and began to whisper. “Last Friday, one of our crews flew certain people out to a certain site to make sure things were as certain people said they were.”

“I see.”

“Okay, so here it is: this crew flew the feds out there. Your professor was along to show them how the camp had been set up. Over the winter, the winds had swept the place clean. It
was like nothing had ever been there, except for just a few things.”

“What things? Come on, give,” she said, leaning her body against his.

Larry gave her a smile that didn’t match what he was saying, and ran a hand up one of her sleeves. “The wind blows hard up there,” he whispered, breathing into her ear. “It blew like a banshee all winter, really smoothed the place out again, like no one had ever been there. Except that things were buried there.”

“Buried?”

“Yeah. See, last year when your professor wanted in there, we made several flights. Precautionary. First, we had a mission make a reconnaissance flight, to overfly it to make sure we could land on it. The weather’s hell out there, so it’s seldom clear. Well, for a rekkie flight we need severe clear from ground up to mother sun, so we get the shadows we need. We fly it low and slow with a photographer going click-click-click taking pictures,”—he grabbed her tighter with each click—”and we’re mapping out the snow cover to make sure it will hold our ship when we land. No crevasses. Hopefully no snow swamps.”

“Snow swamps?”

“Really soft snow. Hasn’t been packed hard yet.”

Valena answered his squeezes with a coy pat on his chest.

He grinned. “Right. So we don’t land unless we’re sure we’re not about to snag a ski in some mother-sucking crevasse or bury the whole bird in ten feet of vanilla fudge.”

“Got you.”

“But what ho, the powers that be also wanted to make a fuel depot out of the place. It is strategically located, it would seem, so they schedule not only our mission but also a mission to drop twenty barrels of fuel. That’s AvGas for Twin Otters and MoGas for snowmobiles. Right, so we need severe clear for our rekkie mission, but the air drop can go off under cloud cover. So guess what? Our rekkie gets CANX-ed six days running, but the fuel drop goes off on schedule. So now what do we have?”

“Some kind of a delay?”

Larry put his other hand on her other sleeve and massaged her arms through all the layers of down and polypropylene. “Did I mention the storms up there? Wow. Blew like hell for three days after they dropped those barrels. Then finally we get out there for the rekkie and I can show you photographs of those barrels, or what little was still sticking up through the snow.”

“They got buried?”

“Mother Mary and Jesus, they got buried! We could only see the edges of a few of them sticking out.”

Valena said, “So you are in a zone of accumulation.”

“Where the barrels landed, yes. Your professor was collecting ice about a quarter mile away, where the wind kept scouring the fresh snow away.”

“Zone of ablation.”

“What you said. Right, so when we took your man in last year, Raytheon sent extra personnel to dig up the barrels.”

“Did they find them all?”

He slid one hand from her arm up to her cheek. “It’s a lot of work to dig up a barrel that’s been buried in that much hard-packed snow. You may have noticed that they need a snow saw to quarry blocks of it at Happy Camp.”

Valena nodded.

“Now take it to high elevation.”

“Even more work.”

“Now add weather, repeatedly forcing you to retreat to your tent.”

“Gotcha. So some barrels were left.”

“Seven, to be exact. So this year we took special equipment in to find the rest. Ground-penetrating radar works like a charm in such conditions. Shows us where all the bodies are buried.” He laughed mirthlessly at his own joke. “Right. We wanted to know where they are, so if we ever truly need them, we can retrieve them. So anyway, when we made the flight last week, we took along some special equipment.”

“A crew with ground-penetrating radar?”

“Emmett Vanderzee. And the federal agents. And yes, we had radar.”

“And you found something.”

“Right. Let’s call it an additional radar signature.”

“You were missing seven barrels, but you found eight signatures?”

“Exactly. The eighth was not far from the others.”

“And what was making the eighth signature?”

“Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.”

“You found the barrel that was with the Gamow unit. But what was it doing that far away? Surely your accuracy is better than a quarter mile.”

“Our accuracy is within one hundred feet. The place where it was located was a quarter mile from the camp, about where the first barrel would have been dug up.”

“I’m with you. But there was something about the condition of this airdropped Gamow unit when it was found that got Emmett hauled off the ice.”

Larry’s expression darkened. “Yes, there was.” He raised his other hand to her face and traced her cheekbones with his thumbs.

Valena murmured, “And this is where you are telling me something that I never heard.”

He leaned so close that he was almost kissing her. “You never even heard that we found the unit.”

“Never at all,” she said, staring into his eyes. “But there was more.” She waited.

Larry spoke very softly. “The chute was underneath the sled.”

“You mean—”

Larry pressed his lips to her temple. “Precisely,” he breathed. “Someone had purposely bunched up the chute and stuffed the whole works in one of the excavation holes left when they pulled out the first thirteen barrels. Someone had buried it so that it would not be found. And that, dear Valena, is why the reporter with the altitude sickness died in that camp.”

T
HE EDGE OF
A
NTARCTICA DROPPED AWAY TO THE
south as Major Hugh Muller piloted the LC-130 out over the Southern Ocean, willing the craft to move faster than it was built to fly. The man behind him was not doing well.

He turned to look at the stretcher, which they had managed to lift up onto the flight deck and mount on the bench at the back wall. The man’s hand protruded from under the fleece blankets they had wrapped around him. It was gray.

Hugh returned his attention to his job, to the controls, to anything that would occupy his mind and help him think positively.

The evening was clear and the air was still, and the miles of ocean slid by, turning increasingly gray as the sun dipped toward the horizon. It would be dark by the time they reached Christchurch. Too bad; he always loved to watch the cloud-shrouded islands of New Zealand slide down over the horizon.
Ao Tea Roa
, the Maoris called it: the Land of the Long White Cloud.

As they crossed sixty degrees south latitude, Major Marilyn Wood’s voice reached his ears through his headphones. “Leaving grid navigation,” she said, referring to Antarctica’s system of grid lines laid parallel and perpendicular to the Greenwich meridian. In the world north of the Antarctic Circle, lines of longitude approached parallel, but over Antarctica, the lines of longitude converged until they were too close to be useful for navigating, necessitating the grid system. And the magnetic south pole was somewhere off the coast and in the ocean.

Hugh looked at the compass in front of him. From its grid course of 170, it spun 180 degrees, coming to rest pointing 350 in the standard system, his bearing for Christchurch.

The minutes rolled past, and a lengthening twilight covered the sea. His copilot yawned and stretched, then murmured that he was going to get a cup of coffee. He glanced at his wristwatch; it was 1100 Zulu. That made it 2200 McMurdo and New Zealand time. Back home in New York it would be 0600. His wife would be waking soon, putting on the coffee, putting the dog outside to do its business. In half an hour his younger daughter would awaken, then his son, and finally his older daughter. She was the night owl in the family, next to him. He loved Antarctica, but he loved his family much, much more.

A hand came to rest on his shoulder. He looked up to see the strained face of the doctor. Her lips moved, but he could not hear her words.

The strange tricks of wave skip over the curve of the earth brought radio calls from San Francisco Approach to his headphones. Home, half a world away, was calling to him. Suddenly, his need to hear his wife’s voice weighed on his heart with a thousand atmospheres of pressure.

V
ALENA HEADED FOR
C
RARY
L
AB TO RETRIEVE THE
sleeping bag that Emmett Vanderzee had checked out for her and stored in his office. She marched down the path between the buildings, dodging around banks of filthy snow and ice, her mind spinning with the information she had just been given. Was Emmett Vanderzee a killer? Somebody had prevented aid from reaching that reporter, and if James Skehan was correct—that Sweeny had made Emmett’s life a living hell, misstating his findings at a national level, keeping him busy defending his right to do science rather than doing the science itself—then, regardless of Skehan’s assertion that scientists prefer a live adversary to a dead one, Emmett might have seen the chute, chased it, and buried it just to shut the man up.

Was he capable of such an act? She did not know.

She jogged up the wooden steps that bridged the gang of heating pipes that ran between buildings, grinding on these questions.

At the top of the stairs, she stopped, suddenly transfixed by an object mounted on the railing. It was a sundial. She had noticed it before, but it hadn’t really sunk in that it read as a twenty-four-hour clock.

She realized that until this time she had hurried almost everywhere she went like an astronaut so busy doing her job that she forgot to look out the window of the spacecraft. Standing still for the first time, she noticed that a poem ran up the steps and down the other side, carved into the soft pine, an anonymous gift to all who passed this way. And there were
unusual objects on the steps. A mobile made of shiny discs. Plastic toys nailed to the wood. And underneath the steps, a scrap metal sculpture of a troll swinging a sword or some kind of axe. The whimsy of McMurdo Station suddenly delighted her.

Putting herself back into gear, she crossed the ground between the steps and Crary Lab. With a smile, she noted that it was beginning to seem usual to get into her office by pulling open a heavy steel door that looked like the entrance to a walk-in freezer. Though it was the reverse walk-into-the-warm-place door.

Inside, she ran down the ramp that led to phase 2, hung a right, and hurried to the door of her office, pulling her key out as she went. As she closed the last few yards of distance, her brain registered a change in the way things looked: the door stood open, and there was nothing whatsoever inside the room except her computer and the furniture that was attached to the wall.

She came to a stop with the key at the ready position, four feet from the yawning doorway. This did not compute. Did she have the wrong phase of the building? No, Vanderzee’s name was still on the plate in the bracket beside the door. She stepped forward and looked inside. Everything, down to the last pen and pencil, was gone. Why?

A man cleared his throat behind her.

She turned. It was Michael, the electrical technician. What was he doing there at ten at night?

“They told the head office to pack up his equipment and ship it to Hawaii,” he said.

“Who told the head office to do that?”

“The feds, I guess. The people from Berg Field Center picked up the field equipment.”

“But I need—”

“Wow, was any of that equipment yours? I got them to leave your computer.”

“No … I…” Yes, that was her laptop and she had taken Emmett’s. Did that make her an accessory after the fact?

“Anything I can help you with?”

Her heart pounded. Somebody had killed that man, just as surely as if they had run a knife through his heart, and now more than ever she wanted to know who had done it. The Black Island traverse was the next task and she needed a sleeping bag in order to join it. She needed to be at Building 17 with that sleeping bag at 7:00 a.m. “When does Berg open?”

“I don’t know. Seven-thirty? Eight?”