Nick fights to step forward, struggling not to lose his footing. It’s difficult to move. He’s on the verge of toppling backward. The wind seems to lighten him. It’s as though it’s trying to lift him off the ground. The storm toys with him like a child.
A gloved hand rests in the center of his back. Jazz pushes his upper torso forward. Her motion is calculated, pressing between his shoulder blades, causing him to lean into the wind.
“Over. Right over,” Jazz yells above the howling gale. She’s beside him, but she’s bent at the waist. She keeps her head down, staring at the rocky ground. “This is hurricane-walking. Wide, slow steps… lean into the wind… trust the wind to take your weight… big sweeping steps… use your poles as a guide.”
It feels entirely unnatural to stumble on with the grace of Frankenstein’s monster, albeit staring solely at the ice and rocks a few feet in front of him. Once he’s facing down, Nick dares not raise his head for fear of being bowled backward by the wind. He has visions of being knocked over the edge of the ridge and rolling down the rocky slope.
“That’s it,” Jazz yells. “Work your way into the storm. Use the wind. Imagine you’re leaning on a shopping cart. Keep your legs pumping.”
“H—How?” he yells. “How do I go back?”
“Slowly,” she replies. “As you turn, you’re going to take a broadside from the wind. It’ll shift your center of gravity. Take your time. Use your poles. Stay down. Don’t straighten up until you’re off the ridge.”
He offers her a thumbs up, but any change in posture is met with the vicious strength of the gale. It’s almost as though the storm has a mind of its own. It’s vengeful, wanting to beat him into submission.
Turning away, Nick steps off the ridge, watching the placement of each boot. He picks rocky spots with care as he slowly sinks below the wind.
“Damn,” he says as he reaches the hut half-buried on the side of the hill.
“Yeah, quite something, huh?” Jazz says. “You really can’t explain it. You have to experience it.”
“That was crazy,” Nick manages. He’s aware his body temperature has plummeted. He pulls his hood up, shivering, shaking heat back into his muscles. His cheeks feel as though they’re frozen solid.
Jazz and Dmitri sit on a couple of large rocks beside the tiny hut. Nick joins them. His hands are trembling. He slaps his gloves together, working warmth back into his fingers. Jazz tosses him an energy bar.
“Is this what it was like?” he asks. “When you lost him?”
Although that conversation took place over an hour ago, Jazz instantly picks up on his concern.
“Worse.” She gestures with her head, nodding toward the antenna. “Up there, you’re facing winds under a hundred miles an hour and a wind-chill factor of about ten to fifteen degrees. That night, we were hit with one-sixty and forty below before factoring in the wind chill. And it was dark. The snow and ice cut through me like a knife.”
Dmitri’s body language is telling. He raises his snow goggles, resting them on his forehead. His eyes dart between the ice clinging to his boot laces and the surrounding rocks. He’s not comfortable talking about this. He knew Maxim, and not just as an acquaintance. Nick doesn’t want to open old wounds, but he has to know. This could happen to him. He feels compelled to learn more.
“And when you found him?”
Jazz replies, “He wasn’t in any pain. He’d curled up against a snowdrift to get out of the wind. He should have dug in. He froze to death. When we found him, it looked like he was waiting for someone to offer him a hand to get up.”
“I’ve never seen a dead body,” Nick confesses. His choice of wording is telling. Not a dead person. A body—devoid of life. For him, it’s difficult to conceive of anything more than a mannequin. “I mean, I’ve seen skeletons, but not an actual body.” In Nick’s mind, they’re different, even though they’re not.
“It is not a sight you would wish on anyone,” Dmitri says.
Jazz chews on a granola bar, talking with her mouth full.
“First time I saw one was on Everest. I thought this guy was resting under an outcrop. He looked so calm. Peaceful even. A light dusting of snow sat on his jacket. I think it was his gloves that threw me. His jacket was dull green, but his gloves were bright red. They looked vibrant and new, with barely any ice on them. I thought he’d fallen behind one of the lead expeditions and was resting out of the wind, but then I realized his lower torso was buried in ice. His legs were completely covered. That’s when I knew he’d been there a long time.”
Jazz still has her goggles on. The curved, mirrored surface reflects the lifeless landscape, hiding her eyes, but like Dmitri, her gaze is distant. Her head barely moves as she speaks. She’s staring off at the horizon, looking out over the bay, but not at the warship or the icebergs.
“I’ll never forget that moment.”
“It’s the eyes,” Dmitri says, finally looking over at her. She nods but doesn’t reply. He says, “They stare right through you.”
“They do,” she finally says, busying herself. Jazz buries the plastic wrapper deep in her backpack, making far more effort than is necessary.
Nick is intrigued by the dynamic before him. Jazz doesn’t trust Dmitri, and yet there’s a bond between them. Also, this isn’t some distant memory. Jazz might be describing a stranger on Mt. Everest, but her mind is on the researcher she lost in Antarctica.
Nick’s unsure how he knows, but he feels as though he’s picking up on the subtleties in their body language. Dmitri wasn’t there, but he knew the guy. They were friends. Jazz feels as though she let them both down. It seems neither of them have closure. They’re still processing what happened. With that, Nick feels the cold on another level. He lifts his goggles, resting them on his head. The cool air bites at his eyebrows. There’s something primal about the bitter wind, something that needs to be experienced, not ignored. Vapor forms on his breath.
Out over the bay, the sun sinks below the jagged hills on the distant peninsula, plunging the land into darkness. Clouds roll over the mountains, swamping the land in a mist.
“Time to go,” Jazz says, slapping her thighs and getting to her feet. It seems enough has been said about their loss. She changes the subject. “At night, in the dark, your footing is important. Don’t let fatigue make you lazy. You may not be able to see very well, but plant each step as though it were your last. If you don’t, it may well be.
“Sprain an ankle on the ice and, depending on how far you are from base and how bad the weather is, you’ll leave your team in a difficult position. Do they carry you? Or do they set up camp and call for help? Do they split the team and leave someone with you while they go for help? It’s hard to know what the right decision is when you’re freezing to death. Do yourself a favor. Don’t sprain your ankle.”
Jazz swings her backpack up over her shoulders and hunches forward, trudging off along the track.
The cool of the evening descends. Their boots crunch on the ice and rocks as they follow the path winding down the slope.
“During the day, you look where you’re going,” she says, leading the way. “Not at night. In the darkness, you need to look around on either side of the track. Keep scanning the ground. Keep your eyes moving. Your night vision relies on the fringes. That’s where you’ll pick up the real detail, out of the corner of your eye.”
As they march along, Nick watches the subtle motion of the hood on her jacket, picking up on the frequency with which she’s running her eyes over the rocks. He copies her. It’s hard work. Who would have thought looking around would take so much effort, but she’s right. If he relaxes, looking only at the fall of her boots in front of him, the rocks become a blur in the darkness. It would be easy to trip and stumble. Looking around, though, even just a few feet on either side of the track, brings the darkness into focus.
Going downhill is harder than climbing up. After an hour, Nick’s thighs are burning from how they’ve steadily resisted the fall
of the land. His calf muscles begin to tremble. The faint lights of the base station, nestled in against the hill, are a long way off along the coast. It takes Nick a while before he realizes they’re following a different track.
Red flashing lights mark a helicopter flying low over the water, returning from the warship. The sound of rotor blades drifts on the wind.
Another hour passes in silence before the crackle of a radio takes Nick by surprise. He’s expecting to hear someone talking to them, but Jazz has an earpiece in so all he catches is her reply.
“Copy that... We are just over a mile out... Understood. Archangel, out.”
“Any news?” Dmitri asks.
“We’re wheels up at twenty-three hundred.”
“Really? So soon?”
“The weather’s closing in down there. Mikhail doesn’t want to wait any longer. As it is, we’ll be landing to flares in the darkness.”
“At McMurdo?” Dmitri asks.
“Yep, then overland to Vincennes.”
“No choppers, huh?”
“They’re grounded. It’s going to be tough enough getting a Galaxy in this late in the season. Damn, it’s going to be a long haul across the ice.”
Nick is quiet.
Neither of them talk to him even though they’re talking about dragging his ass across the frozen southern continent in the dead of winter. Right about now, a warm, safe prison cell sounds appealing. Like a leaf caught in a river, swirling with the current and flowing downstream, Nick’s being swept along by the events around him. With each passing second, he’s being dragged further away from his home in South Carolina. He wants to say something, to challenge Jazz and Dmitri, but to what end? He shouldn’t be here. Nick shouldn’t be anywhere near Antarctica, let alone an alien spacecraft buried beneath the ice. This is crazy. Insane. Unthinkable—to him, at least. And yet, he can already see lights flickering along the track leading from the base to the airfield. Someone’s driving a snowcat back out there, no doubt prepping the aircraft for departure.
Whatever’s happening in Antarctica, it’s got Uncle Sam rattled. Marshaling aircrews and equipment to survive in such a harsh environment is a colossal undertaking. And for what? For him? To get him in the jury box? It doesn’t make sense. Joining the debate halfway through is going to leave him starved of context. He’s going to be lost on even the most basic concepts. Besides, there’s been no crime.
Although Nick understands the UN’s reasoning in appointing an impartial jury, it strikes him as profoundly shortsighted, but what other choice is there? Placing that level of responsibility in the hands of average, everyday, common men and women seems crazy. There’s too much power in too few hands, but decisions have to be made. He figures they couldn’t hold a public vote on outcomes. Hell, getting the public to pick between just two parties is hard enough without the complexity that must arise from this discovery. Then there’s the way voters can be swayed. The pundits and prognosticators would have a field day. Nick understands why they’ve gone with a small, select jury to avoid conflicts of interest among soldiers, politicians, and even scientists. What he doesn’t understand is why him? There are almost four hundred million people in America, and they chose a washed-out mechanic?
At a stretch, Nick figures he broadly fits the demographic they’re after. Middle-aged. Not too young or old. Healthy. Kind of fit, if only modestly so, but he’s not overweight—at least, not in his estimation. He figures he’s got just enough padding for a North American winter. He’s average enough. White. Male. Middle class. High school educated. No kids, so there are no dependents. No partner—not anymore, so there’s no one to miss him beyond Mom and Dad and a few work buddies. There has got to be millions of other people like him. Certainly, the Twitteratti would challenge a white southerner being chosen for jury duty. Not woke enough.
It’s supposed to be a jury of peers, right? Whoever’s selecting the jury should be responsible for diversity, not him. He’s there to represent his strata in society, not everyone on the planet. To properly represent the people of Earth, a jury would have to contain hundreds, if not tens of thousands of people from various cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Ten people from the permanent members of the UN Security Council sounds horribly limited.
Regardless of the structural issues with the jury, Nick struggles with his personal involvement. He does not want to be here. Perhaps that’s why they think he’s ideal for the role. Anyone that wants to be part of this madhouse is the kind of person they need to avoid.
In the confines of his own home—his personal Fort Knox—Nick loves to brag about his prowess. A bit of ego never hurt. Well, Sandra would disagree, but she was like that. She was always on about privilege as though it were the toss of a coin. To his mind, privilege is a fuel tank. Some people are running on empty. Others have a quarter of a tank to play with. Still others have the needle on full. In his mind, he isn’t a billionaire or one of the Hollywood elite, so he has no problem with what little privilege he has. So someone has less. Someone is always going to have less. Sandra didn’t like it when Nick talked like that. He wonders what she’d think of the jury. She’d probably hate it.
A knot forms in his stomach. Nick feels sick, but he knows it’s not physical. He’s heard of imposter syndrome, but this ain’t it. It’s not a syndrome if you really are an imposter.
Trudging down the frozen ridge in the darkness, all pretense is stripped bare. This is wrong. Unequivocal. No doubt whatsoever. Nick can’t rationalize what’s happening to him as somehow noble or deserving. Funny that. In his imagination, he’s always been the hero. Now the opportunity has arisen, he’d rather lounge on the couch watching football.
Courage is easiest from the sideline of a football field. When a two-hundred-pound linebacker capable of bench pressing an easy four hundred came crashing through the scrimmage, Nick found his legs going to jelly. Nick was sacked once. That’s all it took to snap his left arm like a twig and knock him out of his senior team. In the cold, his arm still aches, reminding him of the folly found in unbridled bravado. Monday morning quarterback—that’s the role that suits him best.
He could refuse, but he wouldn’t want to be seen shirking his duty. Nick’s not sure he could face being labeled a coward and dragged back to the US in chains. What if he got sick? He could sprain his ankle while he’s here on South Georgia. Nah, they’d still drag him on that godforsaken aircraft. Getting a bout of gastro might delay things. As it is, he feels nauseous, although whether that’s because of all that damn butter or just his mind unraveling is debatable.
They can’t force him onto the plane, can they? Back in South Carolina, Nick was taken by surprise. He was in shock at how crazy things got with Sandra and the cops. He was drunk. He wasn’t thinking straight. Now, though, with the snow drifting across the frozen rocks in front of his boots, he has clarity.
“Don’t think too much about it,” Dmitri says from behind him, apparently reading his mind. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
And just like that, the machinations of his mind evaporate.
Like a prisoner on death row being marched to the execution chamber, all hope is gone. Everything’s going to be fine. Hah! The chances of that are slim to none. Even Nick knows that. He has no idea what he’s walking into down there in Antarctica, but this sure as hell doesn’t feel like jury duty.
A gloved hand grabs firmly at his shoulder as he works around a rocky ledge. He turns. Ice clings to Dmitri’s thick beard. The Russian smiles, revealing crooked teeth.
“You’re okay, Nick. Don’t worry. I believe in you. You’re going to do fine down there.”
Maybe Dmitri’s right. Maybe everything will run smoothly in Antarctica and he’s getting all worked up over nothing.
Lies are a poor substitute for truth, but they’re all he’s got.
The Call
“You get one call,” Jazz says, holding out a satellite phone within the relative warmth of the commons room inside the base at Husvik on South Geo
rgia.
“But not to a lawyer, right?”
Dmitri bursts out laughing. “You don’t have a lawyer.”
That bland cliché even evokes a smile from Jazz. She shakes her head. Nick was half-serious, but he knew the answer before that quip left his lips.
Jazz unfolds the thick stalk of an aerial and powers up the device. The digital display flickers as it springs to life. “Dial two zeroes and three ones before entering any US landline or cell phone number.”
Nick takes the phone and stares at it for a moment. Who the hell should he call? Has anyone even noticed he’s gone? Other than his parents, does anyone care? Hell, most of his calls these days are over the internet, using an email address instead of a phone number. He only knows a few numbers other than his own.
Nick’s at an age where most of his friends are acquaintances. Sure, they’ll miss him, but not for long. Within a week, they won’t even notice he’s gone. His bowling team will call in a replacement. Oh, he’s got a few high school buddies, but those days are gone. They’ve settled down. Wife, kids and a mortgage. No more hell-raising. On those rare occasions they do catch up, there’s nostalgia for the old days, but they all know those days were pretty shitty back then. Nah, all he has is his folks—only they love to talk about everyone and anything but him.
What could he tell them?
No, there’s only one person he can call. Jazz stands at a distance, leaning against a wooden door jamb, no doubt wanting to listen in and make sure nothing untoward is said. Ooooooh, aliens under the ice. Who would believe that shit anyway? Are you drunk, Nick? That would be the reply. No, Jazz has nothing to fear from his loose lips as no one would believe him anyway. They’d just laugh him off.
Jury Duty (First Contact) Page 6
