In Cold Pursuit (5 page)

A wave of sadness and frustration broke over Valena, and she looked away.

Taking this as a hint that the conversation was over, Kathy said, “Well, welcome to Antarctica, Valena,” and headed on down the hallway.

Valena lifted her gaze again to the office’s one small window. It looked out across the frozen sea toward the dancing run of mountains. High ice clouds had formed, painting a dizzying wave over the far-off summits. In the foreground, the four-jet-engine C-17 on which she had arrived dwarfed the smaller turbo-prop LC-130s, which rested in trim ranks beside the ice runway with their noses pointed eastward, their tall red tails lifted to the west. Even though it was still
early morning, the sun was somewhere high overhead, casting short shadows to the southwest.

The scene was breathtakingly beautiful, a symphony of white and blue, but instead of lifting her heart, it seemed a tease, a chimera.
All of this is so close, so tantalizing, and yet if I can’t get Emmett back down here …

Looking out across the cold wilderness she now began to comprehend the form that death took in this environment, for everybody involved. They were isolated from the world, and when the wind blew, they might just as well have been the first explorers with no radio, no planes, and no ship to save them.

Shaking her head in an attempt to dispel the ghosts of anxiety and loss, she left her laptop and backpack on the desk, re-locked the office door, and headed back up the ramp to the stairs that led up to the library.

Crary Lab’s library proved to be a broad, airy room with windows that ran all along the wall that looked out over the ice. She gazed through them awhile, again lost in the cold majesty of the scene, and then sat down at one of the computers that hummed in the center of the room. She hit a key on the keyboard to wake it up. Nothing happened.

A man who was sitting at a nearby machine turned toward her, reached over to her mouse, moved it a bit, and gave it a click. The desktop screen came up. “Cussed thing,” he said, in an accent that betrayed an upbringing somewhere in the American midwest. He had a beard and soft brown eyes that seemed telescoped back by his thick, steel-framed glasses.

“Thanks.”

He smiled and went back to work at his own machine.

Out of the corner of one eye, Valena studied the soft curve of his nose, the curly fringe of his mustache, his closely cropped hair shot with early gray. Almost palpable kindness radiated from him. Again, and a little more loudly this time, she said, “Thank you.”

He glanced back her way and gave her a wink. “You’re welcome.” He continued working.

“I really appreciate that.”

He took his hands off his keyboard and folded them across
his chest. Tipped his head her way. Regarded her with a gentle smile. “First time on the ice?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too. I’ve been here about a month. I was minding my own business one day and a colleague said, ‘They’ve got jobs in Antarctica. Want to go?’ and I said, ‘Sure, where do I sign up?’ How about you?”

“I have always, always wanted to come here,” she replied. “Or at least, ever since I was a kid and my granddad read to me about Shackleton’s winter in the ice and all that. I wanted to come here and know what he loved so much about it that he would take such a risk. And … I hoped that I would love it that much, too.” Now she felt embarrassed. She hadn’t told anyone any of this, ever. Why was she blurting it out now, and to a total stranger?

The man held out his right hand to be shaken. “Michael.”

“Valena,” she replied. “Nice to meet you, Michael.”

“Been to Happy Camp yet?”

“The survival training? No. I start tomorrow.”

“Really? Excellent! We’ll be there together.” He got up and crossed to the coffeemaker, poured some for each of them, handed one to Valena, and sat back down in his chair. “Excuse me, please. I’ve got to finish this and then get over to the chapel in time for tai chi.” He focused his eyes on his computer screen, lined his fingers up over the keyboard, and dove back into his work.

She turned to her computer and tapped into the Internet, bringing up her e-mail account.

She wrote to Taha Hesan, the other graduate student who was supposed to be coming to the ice to serve on Vanderzee’s project. He was a doctoral candidate. She had gotten to know him only slightly as they prepared for the trip.

She paused a moment. It didn’t make any sense to be writing this. A renewed sense of shock gripped her. Her fingers felt cold on the keyboard. Shaking herself free, she deleted “with” and simply put a period to mark the end of the sentence. Then she added:

She hit send and then sat with her fingers suspended half an inch above the keys.
Who can I go to for help?
she wondered.
Who would know where to start with a mess like this?

Suddenly the answer came to her. She would write to Emily Hansen, a woman she had gotten to know during her undergraduate studies at the University of Utah. Em had been doing her master’s there at the time, and she now worked for the Utah Geological Survey. Her specialty was forensic geology, and she was famous for the work she had done unraveling crimes. Yes, that was it, write to Em; she could tell her how to proceed, and she could keep her mouth shut, so it would be okay to tell her everything!

Valena looked up the Utah Geological Survey Web site to find an e-mail address for Em, then tapped out a message stating what had happened, ending with:

Remembering her manners, Valena asked after what was new in Em’s life, signed herself, “Affectionately, Valena,” thought better of it, given the gravity of the situation, and changed “affectionately” to “yours” and then hit send.

She glanced over at Michael. His face was calm and tightly focused on something he was reading. She thought of offering to freshen up his coffee but didn’t want to seem too earnest about getting to know him. She had heard that the ratio of men to women in McMurdo was seven to three, so it might be unwise to seem too friendly.

Turning back toward her Internet account, she wrote an e-mail to send to her list of interested friends and family, extolling the beauty of the view out the window and trying to put in words just how big it was and how tiny this frail outpost of humanity seemed by contrast. In thus doing, she at last plunged herself into an enjoyment of having made it to Antarctica. Time flowed and the clock crept past 10:00 a.m. and approached 11:00. Valena’s stomach growled, breaking her concentration, and she decided to get some food.

She found her way downstairs and out through the heavy doors of the airlock, out across the yard past a row of tracked vehicles, up over the stile, and back toward Building 155. The icy wind was blowing toward her, and she could smell cooking fumes coming from the exhaust system. A short, stubby tracked vehicle ground past the upwind end of the building, and a few seconds later, she smelled gasoline. Just as quickly as it had reached her, the odor dissipated and was gone.

Both odors were oddly overpowering.
Why?
she wondered. Then she noticed that there were no other odors around her, no stink of rotting compost, no soft scent of flowers.
Rocks and snow have no smell
, she realized.

Valena continued into the building, then turned into the
dorm hallway to her left, so that she could leave her parka in her room. Deciding to look her very best, she doffed the turtleneck and slipped into a creamy white fleece pullover that clung to her curves. She then continued down the main corridor toward the scents of food and people. The air smelled of sweetness and grains—waffles?

Following the flow of people swarming in for the meal, she arrived at a TV monitor that was scrolling information about movies, flight schedules, and the weather. It was a robust fourteen degrees Fahrenheit outside, negative ten degrees Celsius. She checked the flight schedules and saw that her name was not on any of the manifests. This was the first bit of truly good news she had had since arriving.

Next she headed for the hand-washing station,
DON’T SPREAD THE
CRUD, a sign on the wall above the sink advised. Following the instructions listed, she used plenty of soap and scrubbed assiduously for fifteen seconds, pondering how little Emmett Vanderzee had told her about survival in this harsh and bizarre environment. She tried to give her absent-minded mentor the benefit of the doubt, but his lack of advisement bothered her. Had he not, in fact, been the leader she had thought he was?

And if he was not that kind of leader, just what was he? A murderer? The thought was absurd. But was he a bungler? Had she bet on the wrong horse?

She grabbed a sheet of paper toweling and began to dry her hands. People filed past her on their way to brunch. Most made eye contact, smiled, and nodded; some said hello. What had Brenda said? In a place like this, you can’t really hide anything. That meant that Valena was about to meet several hundred people who might have ideas about where to look for things that were supposed to lie hidden.

Valena turned toward the dining hall. It was time to get acquainted with more good citizens of McMurdo Station.

D
AVE
F
ITZGERALD CRUISED THROUGH THE FOOD LINES
in the galley in search of something hot and filling. It had been a long, cold week rolling snow into ice out at Pegasus runway, and he needed to stock up for another.

Building this landing surface at Pegasus was a satisfying challenge. It was built in layers, using the only road metal they had in Antarctica: snow. He and the other heavy equipment operators out of Fleet Operations used a 966 Cat loader with a snow-throwing attachment to coat the runway, then drove a Challenger 95 tractor up and down the runway pulling a Reynolds box, laying the snow out in a smooth three-inch layer. Next, they transformed the three inches of snow into an ultra-hard-packed, one-and-a-half-inch-thick surface of white ice by dragging 124 tons of weight carts behind the Challenger. The weight of the rollers caused a process that metallurgists called sintering, in which the structure of the fine ice crystals they called snow were compressed and reformed into a dense, interlocking crystal lattice hard and smooth enough to land jets. Each layer took about three days of working around the clock, and it would take ten layers to get the desired effect.

Building runways and dressing the flagged routes that led out to them was slow, exacting, and satisfying, his favorite kind of work, and the solitude of the long hours in the tractor in all that gloriously empty space was eased by a weather-tight cab and the Armed Forces radio station that piped in classic rock. But riding back and forth in the cold for nine hours a day, six days each week, built up an appetite.
It looked like the Belgian waffles were the cure today, and hey, how about some eggs and bacon and a little dessert? He moved over to the sweets table. What was this little confection that the kind pixies from the kitchen had left for him? Looked like lemon bars. And oh, that fresh-baked bread, mm-hm!

Dave forked two of the lemon bars straight onto his tray and picked out a nice, thick slice of bread to chew on while he waited in line for a waffle. He snagged a little bowl of stewed fruit just in case all those folks who touted diet pyramids knew what they were squawking about, loaded up two glasses with milk, grabbed a fork and a knife, and turned toward the waffle line. Having slept in after an evening sipping Jim Beam and Cokes at Gallagher’s, he was hungry as a bear.

“Hey there, Dave,” said the chef as he reached the front of the line. “Fix ya up with a waffle here?”

“You know you can,” Dave replied. “Hey, you were doing purty well at the pool table last night at Gallagher’s.”

The chef winked. “Gotta shark me some extra dollars. When I get out of here I’m going to travel up through south-east Asia. Ride an elephant, all that.”

“Sounds great.” Dave gave him a friendly smile. The folks who worked in the galley were really decent. They took the job of feeding the horde of people who flowed through McMurdo very seriously and greeted each soul who stood in their lines with dignity and professional pride. He especially liked the omelet guy. He was older than the rest and had learned exactly how Dave liked his eggs, but waffles were only an option on Sundays.

“Here ya go, man. Check out the strawberries. They’re fresh!”

“They look wonderful,” said Dave, scooping several spoonfuls onto his waffle.

“Go for it. We got a whole load of freshies in from Cheech yesterday with that late flight. Cool, huh? Yeah, loads of lettuce, too; they’ll be up for dinner. Man, I’m salivating just thinking of it.”

“Me, too. I never was a fresh foods man before coming down here, but now I’d walk a mile in tight shoes for an orange or a banana. Hey, is it true that you sometimes get spiders and such on the lettuce?”

Waffle Guy grinned. “Yeah.”

“What do you do with them? Put them in the compost?”

“Oh, hell no! We keep them as pets!”

His waffle acquired and heaped with strawberries and whipped cream, Dave turned toward the galley to choose a seat. He craned his neck to see if Ben, the biologist he had enjoyed visiting with the morning before, was sitting up in the beaker zone. No luck. He spotted his roommate Matt at one of the tables where the heavy equipment operators tended to sit and headed over to join him.