Reckoning (21 page)

Figuring that their plane must be unloaded and nearly ready to fly back the eight hundred miles to McMurdo, they made their
way to it.

“We have to ship some instruments back for repair,” a crewman told them. “It’ll be more than three hours before they’re disconnected
in the lab and secured on board. Why don’t you borrow a snowmobile and take a look around. You can see four hundred miles
in all directions.”

Murdoch steered the machine and headed out in a straight line across the level wastes of snow. From time to time, Dartley,
sitting behind him, looked back to make sure the blue dome was still in sight. A compass was useless at the poles. Although
the strong wind was blowing snow across the surface, the sky was clear. It would have been an even pleasanter ride if only
the air
wasn’t so cold and thin at this elevation of nine thousand feet.

Dartley noticed the wind grow stronger, raising the blowing snow higher off the surface.

“We should turn round,” he yelled over Murdoch’s shoulder.

Murdoch brought the snowmobile around in a half circle and they headed back toward the blue dome away in the distance on the
shimmering white plain.

“Looks like a space station on a distant planet,” Murdoch shouted back.

The wind grew stronger on Dartley’s back, the blown snow raised higher. They were looking over the top of a whole cloud of
it by now. The wind picked up again and the snow blotted out their visibility for a minute or so. They could see the blue
dome at intervals and keep their bearing on it.

“Go with the wind direction,” Dartley shouted.

Murdoch was getting panicky—speeding, then slowing, veering off at angles. He wouldn’t listen to Dartley. The wind grew stronger
and they saw nothing around them except flying particles of snow. Murdoch hit a bump and Dartley barely hung on. He cursed
him loudly. Murdoch hit another and Dartley was unseated. It was the force of the wind as much as anything which knocked him
off.

Standing in the snow in his bright red parka, he heard Murdoch circle around, trying to find him. The fool had no sense of
direction. Gradually the noisy
engine’s whine was farther and farther away, until finally it was lost in the roar of the wind.

The wind was screaming now across the unprotected plain. It wasn’t snowing. He could see the blue sky above him through the
haze of blowing snow. He estimated that the depth of blowing snow was about ten feet. He began to freeze and started to walk,
keeping the wind at his back. He had no great hopes, knowing he could pass within twenty yards of the blue dome and not see
it if this wind kept up. But he had to keep moving if he wanted to live.

So long as he felt the pain on his face, so long as his feet and hands hurt from the cold, he was okay. It was when he stopped
feeling that he had to worry about going numb and frostbite setting in. So far as Dartley could judge, from the present level
of acute discomfort all over his body, he had nothing to worry about in this area.

The wind helped to push him onward through the snow. Underfoot the going was firm, since the wind had scoured all the recently
fallen soft stuff. He began to think that so long as he didn’t overshoot the mark, he might even make it. This wasn’t bad
for a guy who got dizzy after a hundred yards only a week ago. If Dieudonne and the Ituri forest people could see him now.
If only he was there instead of here…

Dartley kept going. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t waste energy. He just hoped and persevered.

The wind was dying down.

At first Dartley didn’t believe it, suspecting he was
becoming lightheaded again. But it was true. Visibility was improving. The blowing snow gradually dropped below the level
of his neck. The blue dome was ahead—he had made good progress toward it. Going the way he had been headed, he would have
missed it by about four hundred yards. It would have made a nice heartbreak story. He was not sorry to disappoint everyone.

But what about Murdoch? That fool could be anywhere by now. Though the chances of finding him were good, so long as the wind
didn’t rise again. Dartley sure as hell didn’t want to feel responsible for his death before the assassin even got to him!

Dartley let loose a rebel yell when the blowing snow lowered and showed him Murdoch in his red parka sitting on his stalled
snowmobile only a couple of hundred yards from the blue dome! The lunkhead had almost made it there and stopped just too soon.

He waved at Dartley, got the snowmobile started again and came to fetch him.

Dartley laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

Murdoch looked scared. “I sure thought I was a goner there. I spent the whole summer on the ice and I never did anything as
dumb as this.”

The crewman who suggested they take a ride gave them a big welcome. “We were just about to fly a search party for you. I feel
kinda personally relieved you guys showed up. Be too bad if I was the cause of you two buying it. You know, a fella was lost
out of McMurdo last week. All flights are keeping an eye out for his body on the snow.”

* * *

The food at McMurdo was strictly Navy quality. So was the social life. The movie hall and TV showed awful movies and some
of those short documentaries so beloved by the Armed Forces, with dynamite titles like “Personal Hygiene” and “Your Department
of Agriculture at Work.” The bars closed at eleven. At the liquor store, each person was allowed one bottle of spirits and
two of wine per week. Vending machines in the dorms sold cans of beer. It seemed to Dartley he was the only one in the place
who was dry.

He listened to Murdoch bitch about not being able to get a flight. Dartley assured him that as soon as he got one, he would
be on it too. Murdoch was surprised he could manage this.

“Global has a lot of influence down here,” Dartley said. Actually what he found he could do was to have Murdoch bumped from
any flight he could not also get on. It was a lot easier to remove someone’s name from a flight list than to put one on. He
tactfully did not tell Murdoch this.

“I’m going to take a run out to look at some rocks, if you want to come along,” Murdoch told him one morning. “No snowmobile
this time—they’ll drop us in the chopper and pick us up later.”

Dartley was glad to go, for the change. They took along an emergency tent and a week’s rations in case they were marooned
by bad weather. The Huey flew along the edge of the pack ice and open water and they saw seals and penguins beneath them.
The rocks where
Murdoch wanted to go were ugly black things poking out of the snow near the pack ice.

The chopper pilot looked for a place to land on solid ground. The crewman slid open the side door and dropped a smoke grenade.
Its cloud of red smoke moving across the snow gave the pilot the wind direction and force. The crewman clipped on a safety
harness as the pilot tested the ground for firmness with the chopper’s skids. The pilot kept the craft’s weight off the ground
while the crewman jumped out. He disappeared up to his armpits in snow. Dartley and Murdoch had to haul him back in. Next
attempt produced a firm landing zone.

They felt a bit forlorn as the chopper lifted and flew away, making them feel like castaways, except this was no desert isle.
Dartley was surprised the Huey’s loud engine hadn’t frightened away some nearby penguins on the ice. He went down to look
at them. They waddled forward to meet him, poking their heads this way and that, utterly fearless. They even seemed fussily
annoyed at him.

Murdoch used a mountaineer’s ice ax to bare the rock surface and then pecked away at it with his geological hammer. Dartley
left him to it and wandered around. An icy wind came in off the sea. No matter what way he turned or where he tried to shelter,
it seemed to blow right through his parka.

He grew steadily colder and more bored. He was damned if he was going to hammer rocks in order to stay warm. It occurred to
him to erect the tent. The
temperature was almost ten above zero, so when he was out of the wind he would be comfortable. He unrolled his sleeping bag
inside the tent and lay on it, taking it easy, listening to Murdoch chipping at the rock.

When he no longer heard Murdoch chipping, Dartley guessed that he, like himself, had grown hungry. He prepared to make room
inside the tent for Murdoch by pushing his sleeping bag full length against one side of the tent. While he was doing this,
right next to his left hand, the sharp end of the mountaineer’s ice ax came through the tent’s nylon wall and buried itself
into the sleeping bag.

Dartley stared at the shining steel spike as it was withdrawn through the tent wall. He had the presence of mind to duck his
head down near the bag and moan. He pushed the bag against the tent wall, like he had been doing. From the outside it must
have looked like a body moving.

The glittering steel spike arced in through the tent wall for a second time and again sank deep into the bulk of the sleeping
bag. Dartley’s timing was better this time. He delivered a hideous groan and rumpled the bag against the tent wall.

Dartley could not let himself be trapped inside this tent. He
was
trapped inside it! A nylon bag contained him; its skin blocked his vision but did not protect him from blows.

Murdoch sank a series of vicious rapid thrusts through the tent wall. He would find out any second he was not sinking that
ax into a body, that the tent wall
was not cleaning all the blood off the spike. He would hear him if Dartley tried to slide up the zipper on the tent door,
maybe even see his shape against the light.

Dartley pulled off his right glove and drew his sheath knife. On the side opposite where Murdoch stood, he used the blade
to silently slice through the nylon wall nearby at ground level. He lay down fast and quickly rolled through. Dartley jumped
to his feet, knife in hand, and faced Murdoch across the tent top. Murdoch’s mouth fell open.

“You bastard,” Dartley said. “You tried to kill me down at the Pole too, didn’t you? When that wind sprang up, you deliberately
unseated me and headed for the base at top speed after pretending to make a short search for me. Once you knew where the blue
dome was exactly, you could afford to sit the storm out and hope it lasted. Once you were sure I was beyond rescue, you could
stagger in as the sole survivor.”

Murdoch smiled. “It was a reasonable opportunity. I thought I should take it. But let me tell you this, Paul, I wouldn’t have
bothered to kill you if you hadn’t started to interfere with my flight plans out of here. I found out about that.”

“You called me Paul?” Dartley inquired, stepping around the tent to keep it between him and Murdoch, who was now pursuing
him with the ice ax.

“I know that you are Paul Savage, although with all your clothes, your beard, your sunglasses, I’d be hard put to swear you
were the same man I saw in Zaire.”

“In Charleston. Unfortunately I didn’t recognize you.”

“On the Brent field.”

“Douglas Dockrell.”

“A name I haven’t used in years, Paul, and expect never to again.”

He was still coming after Dartley. The four-inch blade of Dartley’s knife wasn’t much of an answer to an ice ax. The Huey
wasn’t due for two hours. It was going to be an interesting 120 minutes, assuming the two of them lasted that long.

Dartley needed to keep him talking. “You picked up a week on me because of my wounds. Did you meet Harrison Murdoch here?”

“I was waiting for him when he arrived. I’d been here only an hour myself. I took advantage of the lucky timing to switch
places with him. I took him aside before he had a chance to talk with anyone. I told him I was you. I used this ax to kill
him, took his ID and buried him deep in the snow. I became Murdoch. He became the missing man with the fake credentials that
I used. Then I tried to get out of here. This will make you laugh, Savage. I’d done my job and I couldn’t get out. Then you
arrived a week later and started pestering me. I was pissed off before you arrived, Savage. You were the final straw.”

Dartley laughed. “How are your nuts?”

Dockrell’s face clouded over. He began to use the ice ax to chop his way through the tent. Dartley waited only long enough
to see if his mukluks would become
entangled in the tent material. When this didn’t happen, he took off toward the pack ice, with Dockrell after him.

He headed out toward the edge of the sea, where the pack broke into floes. This was Dartley’s only chance. He figured he must
be thirty, maybe even forty, pounds lighter than Dockrell. He had to walk out on ice that could take his weight but not that
of his pursuer.

Dartley kept going until Dockrell trapped him on a promontory of thin ice. Dartley followed it toward its point. As he went
seaward, the ice cracked beneath him like reverberating pistol shots. But the surface held in one piece.

Dockrell decided to advance no farther. Instead he began to use the ice ax to chop a line across and set Dartley adrift. Dartley
could do nothing except stand and watch as the big man delivered powerful blows that sent vibrations through his feet.

Then he saw some hope. Dockrell didn’t realize that he was sending powerful pulses through his own legs as well as through
the ax when he delivered each blow. Dartley watched the ice crack and then break up behind Dockrell. Delivering one mighty
blow, Dockrell nearly fell in when he tipped what was now an ice island.

Dartley headed fast for solid pack ice, taking advantage of Dockrell’s instability to jump from one floating piece of ice
to another right by him. Then he stopped, turned around and began to push against the large piece of ice upon which Dockrell
stood. It moved
out surprisingly easy into the water, opening a gap too wide to jump.

Dockrell saw the danger. He leaped from the large island to a smaller one, and then tried to jump from small piece to piece.
He stepped close to the edge of one and it tipped beneath his weight.

He started to slip slowly off the ice toward the black seawater. Dockrell dug into the floe with the ice ax and held on, regaining
his balance. Once the piece had righted itself, Dockrell freed the ax and leaped a four-foot gap to the solid pack ice. He
now approached Dartley carefully, looking around for anything else his victim could use against him. There was nothing.