In Cold Pursuit (45 page)

“You think this guy knows Valena is on his trail?” said Marilyn.

“Let’s hope not,” said Hugh, “but assume he does. We’re just going to have to figure out how to reach her before he does, and pray that he’s not Dan Lindemann.”

O
N
C
LARK
G
LACIER
, N
AOMI
B
OSCH LOOKED OUT THE
flap of the cook tent. “It looks like it’s clearing. I was thinking we should ski down to the terminus of the glacier,” she said.

Twenty minutes later, everyone had bottles of hot water in their packs and rations of chocolate and granola bars in their pockets. The drillers had their skis on first and shot out ahead of them. Dan Lindemann and the other student followed second, and Naomi and Valena brought up the rear.

“I’m sorry I don’t have better equipment,” said Valena, noticing that Naomi was wearing gear that looked like it must be the latest, greatest thing.

“Never fear. We do things on the buddy system here. We’ll all swap off. Did you get much out of Dan yesterday?”

Valena stared at her. “You sent him to talk to me?”

“I did. He would have hidden in his tent until you left if I’d let him.”

“Well, he wasn’t all that informative.”

Naomi took this in. “Then I’ll have another talk with him, let him know that he has a choice: he can help or he can walk home.”

They skied away across the wide expanse of Clark Glacier, the fresh snowflakes glinting at them like a thousand separate gems. They were soon warmed from the effort and shed parkas into their packs, switching to wind jackets. As they left the center of the saddle, the glacier began to curve downward—the reverse of a ski slope, which has a concave curve toward its base—and the skiing became easier and easier
until it was in fact too steep for the equipment Valena was using. Waving for one of the drillers to stay with Valena, Naomi shot away down a half-pipe-shaped chute that descended along one side of the glacier.

The wind had blown the snow away, revealing blue-green ice. The edges of Valena’s skis were too dull to cut into it, so she took off her skis and began to kick steps in the side of the pipe, working her way down. The others waited at the foot of the glacier, examining it, waving their ski poles as they discussed it.

She arrived at last, stepping for the first time onto the dry ground for which the Dry Valleys had been named. The surface was a fine trash of ventifacts—stones that had been polished into smooth facets by blowing grit—and broken on a much larger scale by the odd frost-fracture pattern called polygonal ground. Valena was in a world of magic, the coldest dry ground on earth. She wandered out across the patterned ground.

She knew the simple facts that had rendered these valleys ice-free—at this low elevation and in this location, the ice sublimated away faster than it could accumulate—but still it seemed strange. All but two percent of Antarctica was covered with ice, and the lion’s share of uncovered ground was here.

The terminus of Clark Glacier was a cliff about a hundred feet high and draped with icicles. Valena wandered closer. She could see layers in the ice, great festoons of strata etched by melting. She was just considering walking even closer to it when an icicle several times her mass detached with a ballistic snap and crashed to the valley floor, scattering chunks of ice like shrapnel.

“That one almost got you,” someone called from a position well behind her. “You might want to back up.”

Valena turned. It was Dan Lindemann. “Thanks for the tip,” she said. “Do you have any other key intelligence for me?”

Lindemann scowled. “Naomi says it’s my turn to babysit you.”

Valena closed her eyes to blot him temporarily from her
world. She had heard this scornful tone a thousand times from cousins and schoolmates who would not accept her, but she refused to let it sting her as it always had. This was her place now, and he could not take it from her.
When I open my eyes
, she told herself,
I shall see only a sad person who cannot sneer his way out of a wet paper bag.
She opened her eyes. Dan Lindemann was still looking at her, but his demeanor had shifted from disdain to uncertainty.

She looked around to see where everyone else was, and to her horror realized that they were already climbing back up the glacier. She wanted to question Lindemann but not be left alone with him in a dangerous place. Hefting her skis onto her shoulder, she led the way.

Dan put on his skis and shuffled along behind her. “Too bad you don’t have skins for your skis,” he said. He made it sound like a taunt.

Valena stepped lightly over the snow, following the steps she had kicked coming downward. She had put on both layers of boot liner and had tightened the laces as tight as she could, but it was still tough going.

“I don’t have anything to tell you,” said Dan, pulling up beside her.

“That’s too bad,” said Valena evenly. She was becoming interested in the way the snowflakes refracted the light. They were like diamonds, and here and there lay a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire, or richest citrine.

“Emmett was going down, and if I’d stayed with him, I’d be sitting in Reno right now with Taha. Or I’d be in your shoes.”

“Mm-hm.” She glanced up the slope. The distance to the others was widening. She picked up her pace.

“Okay, what do you want to know?”

“I want to know who was where when it happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“When the Airlift Wing dropped the bundle. Where were you?”

“I was in the cook tent. We heard it go overhead. But it was blowing and snowing so hard
…
well, we stayed put.”

“You stayed put.”

“No, I followed the ropes down to my tent. The one I shared with Bob. We were together the whole time. Emmett told me later that he and Cal went out right away, but they were nuts.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? That’s it?”

“Okay, and who was in the cook tent?”

“Sheila. Morris. Dave.”

“That’s interesting. You called him by his given name.”

“Who?”

“Morris Sweeny. He was a real person to you.”

“Oh, sure. Kind of an ass, but he was a good writer.”

“Even if he misrepresented Emmett’s work?”

“It was Frink who wrote that article, not him, though we had some lively debates about all that. But Morris seemed more intent on
…
well, like he was looking for something here in Antarctica. Another story. Maybe his own story.”

They were on the steepest part of the slope now. Valena tilted her head back to look for Naomi. She was just disappearing up over the convex curve of the glacier. “What sort of story?”

Lindemann said, “I don’t know … human interest, more. He asked a lot of questions about the people he was going to meet in camp.”

“Who in particular?”

“He was pretty cagy, didn’t focus on anyone in particular, but asked lots of questions about who had been in the military, or how long they’d been around the university. How well Emmett knew everybody.”

“And how well
did
Emmett know you all?”

Lindemann stopped to take a drink of water from his pack.

Valena looked upslope. The two drillers had disappeared. Only the second graduate student was still in sight.

Lindemann started moving again, but he changed the subject. “Like Frink, Morris didn’t get the science. Just didn’t have a clue about how it’s done. You know how it goes: he thinks a theory is a fact, and thinks the facts are negotiable
based on who observed them. Doesn’t understand the scientific method, or what it’s good for and what it’s not. Basically clueless. Educable, perhaps, if you get him away from his neo-con buddies. That’s why Emmett invited him down, or at least, that’s why he said he did.”

“And was he getting educated?” She looked again uphill. They were alone. She quickened her pace.

Dan shook his head. “It was kind of a mess. The storm hit just after we got him to the high camp, and then he got sick. It sure put an end to our arguments.”

“You argued with him?”

“About the science.”

“Had you ever met him before?”

“Huh? No. Why?”

“Then how do you know so much about him?”

“I was down in McMurdo when he arrived.”

“I didn’t know that.” She was sweating from the pace.

“Yeah. I’d gotten sick, so Emmett left me behind when he went up to the high camp. In fact the only way I got up there at all was because they had the plane scheduled to fly in to pick up some of the fuel barrels that had gotten buried to another site.”

“I don’t understand. Why drop the barrels and then move them?” She was panting with the effort. She dropped her skis and put them on, hoping the gradient was now shallow enough that she could ski and pick up the pace. She slipped, then the skis caught, and began to surge forward.

“I don’t know, really. The Airlift Wing had dropped them, and someone needed some over in another camp, so NSF sent in the Otter to pick a couple up. That meant there were two seats for us going in, and Morris push his way into the high camp because there had been such delays and he hated McMurdo. Too many liberals.”

“I can just imagine.”

“So NSF went along with it. They should have called his bluff, but they didn’t.”

“So you had kind of gotten to know him while waiting in McMurdo.”

Lindemann nodded. “The Coffee House.”

“Wine.”

“New Zealand merlots. We had that in common.”

“And women.”

“Yeah, he liked women. So do I,” he said, sliding an evil look her way. “So what?”

“Okay.” She was making better time now, the slope of the glacier shallow enough that she could really begin to move.

“And I was making progress with him. Helping him understand things a little better.”

“That’s good. So then you were at the high camp, and Ted the blaster flew out with the Otter pilot, and the storm hit, and Morris got sick, and that was that.” Her breath burned in her lungs from the effort of speaking while she pushed so hard on the skis. “Have I got all that straight?”

“Yeah.”

“So how did the other Gamow bag find its way back to McMurdo?”

“That—” Dan shuffled along for a while, thinking. “I don’t know,” he muttered.

“All right then, here’s another question: did you notice anything unusual or unexpected after you got there? I mean, as regards Morris’s conversations with the others. Before he got sick.”

“What do you mean?”

Valena thought carefully about how to phrase her question. Whoever had visited Naomi’s camp to pass the word of Emmett’s arrest would not have known the particulars she knew, so if Dan offered them up, he knew them from having been there rather than from having been filled in after the fact, and she did not want to contaminate him as a witness. “Well, the feds assumed that Emmett was the one who caused the death because he was the one who was angry with the deceased. But perhaps someone else had a beef. So who else did he communicate with?”

“Oh, I see what you mean.” Dan thought a while. “It’s hard to remember after all this time. Mostly what I recall was how scared Emmett and everyone was when the guy got sick.”

At last, they were back up on top of the glacier and could
see the tops of the Scott tents coming up over the curve. “Let’s put it another way, then. Who wasn’t scared?”

“Oh, that’s easy. That Wee Willy guy. But I figured he was just too damned stupid to get scared.” Dan stopped skiing. He stood still, thinking. “And come to think of it, there was another guy Morris didn’t like.” He gave her an appraising look. “Exactly what’s it worth to you to know?”

Valena pushed ahead. Over her shoulder, she called, “It’s worth your damned doctorate!”

“Dave,” called Dan. “He didn’t like Dave.”

O
N
M
ONDAY WHEN THE
AS
TAR THUDDED OUT OF THE
sky onto Clark Glacier, Valena was ready and waiting next to the loaded core boxes. The downdraft from the rotors of the descending helicopter blasted her and everything within fifty yards with flying snow. She said her good-byes and thanks to Naomi, waved to the others, and climbed aboard. Her departure accomplished, she greeted the liftoff with the sharp focus of the single-minded. She had narrowed her search to two suspects, and it would soon be one.

The pilot on duty was not the talkative type, which was fine with Valena. Her brain was already in Crary Lab, where she would requisition a microscope just as quickly as she could. The gorgeous ridges and valleys rolled past beneath them as they flew south to pick up another passenger. There were stunning views of volcanic dikes, swarms laid naked along glacier-polished mountain tops. Like a settling leaf, the little craft spiraled down into the steep-sided valley that held the frozen length of Lake Bonney. They barreled out from the edge of the continent out across the ice, passing the big rig run by the ANDRILL project. When they landed at McMurdo, she refused a ride to her dorm, instead heading straight up the hill to the lab, saying that she would be back for her gear.

In Crary, she stopped only an instant at Emmett’s office to check for notes—there were none—then set down her duffel and parka and relocked the door before heading up the ramp in search of a binocular microscope, which she found in the storeroom near the head offices. She peered at the contents of the plastic bags. Instantly, she saw more than she had
expected. Not only did the sample from her boots have lithic fragments and phenocrysts, it had tiny little penguin feathers, their short, thick barbules unmistakably belonging to flightless birds.

To identify the phenocrysts, she headed down the hallway and found a young woman from the Erebus team.

“Anorthoclase,” said the vulcanologist as she squinted through the lens. “Yeah, that’s the main feldspar phenocryst you get around here.”

“Do you find it only in the basalts on Cape Royds?” asked Valena hopefully.

“Oh, heck no, it’s pandemic. And to be more specific, those aren’t basalts, they’re phonolites. It’s more alkaline than your basic basalt.”

“Oh. Okay. But I don’t see the anorthoclase phenocrysts here in Mac Town.”