In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “As long as you exercise the utmost discretion. We probably can’t get you on a flight until Wednesday, anyway. Watch the bulletin board near the entrance to the galley. They’ll post your flight north. Make sure you’re on it.”

  Valena’s chill suddenly turned to heat. She turned and gave the big man with the pale hands a quick but defiant stare, then shoved open the door that led into the airlock, bowing her head against the cold blast of air that awaited her outside.

  2

  THE DORMITORY ROOM WAS A NIGHTMARE. VALENA HAD been assigned to a barracks room with seven other women, two of whom were abject slobs. Their duffels spewed clothing, and their skis formed tripping hazards between her bunk and the door. The bunk beds and freestanding closets had started out cheap and had been badly abused from there. And being last into the room, she had drawn an upper bunk. What was it going to be like if she had to get up in the night and pee?

  It was a struggle to tuck in the sheets and army blankets issued by Housing. She had to duck her head to clear the ceiling while kneeling on the bunk itself, and every time she moved, her knees twisted all previous smoothings. She wanted to scream.

  What is my problem? she asked herself. I’ve hiked or skied to fourteen of Colorado’s highest summits and have kayaked the Grand Canyon, camping in the most primitive conditions—loving every minute!—so why does this room seem so stark?

  The woman on the upper bunk of the bed to her right began to snore loudly. Valena stared across the dim room toward her, wondering how anyone could fall asleep in such a setting.

  She lay down on her back and stared at the ceiling. Time inched by. It was past 9:00 p.m., perhaps 10:00. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she had left her flight lunch in Bellamy’s office. She tried to push hunger out of her mind by meditating on the landscape she had witnessed after leaving the Chalet. Too upset to think straight, she had marched the short distance out to the edge of the slope that led down toward the salt ice of McMurdo Sound and stared at the towering peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains, which marked the edge of the continent. Ross Island, where she stood, was separated from them by at least thirty miles of frozen ocean.

  In the broad daylight of a springtime evening seventy-seven degrees south of the equator, the mountains had danced alluringly. Everything south of the Antarctic Circle saw daylight for the six months of the year that the South Pole faced toward the sun during its annual revolution and darkness during the six months it faced away, so during Valena’s planned eight-week visit, the sun would not set.

  But George Bellamy had just told her that she would not be staying even one week. She willed herself to forget her fears and cherish this first solo moment with the land she had longed to meet, but the sting of disappointment was too intense to overcome, and after a short while she had turned toward Building 155, where this horrifying room awaited her. Now her only view was of the stains in the ceiling. She mapped them slowly, trying to trace a route that would lead her out of her troubles.

  Half an hour later, she was still staring at the ceiling when another of her bunkmates came into the room. Valena closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She was too wired and too tired to talk to strangers, and her old bugaboo of feeling isolated in a crowd had set in with unusual force. She had heard stories about McMurdo, that people came here the first time for the adventure, a second time for the money, and the third and every other time because they had figured out that they fit in nowhere else. Did she fit in here?

  The unseen roommate stepped quietly through the room, making only the softest sounds of zippers unzipping and the muffled thump of shoes landing on floor, then a rustling as she slipped between the sheets. A moment later, the sound of singing erupted from the hallway, the door again opened, and two more of her roommates entered, giggling, tripping over the skis, whispering to each other to observe the request another roommate had posted—DAY SLEEPER, GOING ON SHIFT AT MIDNIGHT, HAVE A HEART. It took them twenty minutes of muffled laughter and thumping around to settle down. Saturday night in Antarctica.

  Finally, from sheer exhaustion, Valena slept. When she opened her eyes next she had no idea what time it was. The light that filtered through the sheet someone had tacked up over the window was every bit as bright as it had been when she fell asleep. Soft breathing and gentle snoring rose from all the pillows around her. She began to doze again herself, so tired that her body seemed to be spinning. This jolted her awake, and another quarter hour passed before she again found sleep.

  The next time she awoke, there was no getting back to sleep. She rose, grabbed her toilet kit and a change of clothes, and went looking for the shower room, which proved to be as Spartan as the bunk room.

  Ten minutes later, freshly washed and dressed in clean jeans and a purplish-blue turtleneck sweater, she shrugged her way into the big red parka, grabbed her backpack, which held her laptop computer, and set off in search of her office at Crary, the science laboratory on station where all grantees were given office space. If she had only three days to figure out how to not get sent home, she figured she’d better get cracking.

  Apart from the shadows on the far mountains being cast to her right instead of her left, Sunday morning looked surprisingly like Saturday evening. The wind had picked up, blowing grit from between the broken sheets of ice that covered what passed for a street, and even with her parka cuddled to her chin and the hood up, the cold bit quickly through her blue jeans. She began to shiver.

  She hurried down a path and up to a stile that crossed a gang of eighteen-inch-diameter pipes that snaked between buildings. She ran up the steps and down the other side and crossed to the steel building with the big refrigerator doors that had been referenced during the in-brief. Insulating her hand with the cuff of one parka sleeve, she grabbed a steel door handle and slipped inside the airlock.

  The inner doors of the airlock were locked.

  Remembering the card key that had been issued to her when she had picked up her dorm room key the evening before, she dug through the pockets of the big red parka, ran the card through the slot in the card reader, and continued inside.

  The interior of the building felt a little more like home: pale, institutional, off-white walls with glass display cases. The nearest one was filled with dinosaur bones collected out in the Transantarctic Range, remnants of a long-ago time when the whole continent lay closer to the equator, making it warm enough for lizards. Posters explaining scientific findings of various research projects papered the walls. Hallways branched off to left and right, and a long ramp led downhill to more halls as the building descended the side of the bluff on which it had been constructed. She turned and headed along a short hallway to the left, instinctively searching out the administrative offices.

  There was no one present at any of the desks in the office marked DIRECTOR. Of course—it’s Sunday, she reminded herself. That’s the one day Raytheon Polar Services gives its personnel. They explained that at the in-brief.

  As she walked back down the hallway toward the entrance, Valena spied a dark-haired woman sitting at a desk inside another office. She paused. The nameplate beside her door read BRENDA UTZON. “Can I help you?” the woman asked kindly, peering at Valena over her glasses.

  Valena braced as the woman’s gaze slid over her face, taking in what everybody noticed: the unusual angles and curves of bone and flesh, the seemingly mismatched colors of her skin and eyes. Even though people usually liked what they saw, their evident surprise told her again and again that she was different. She muttered, “I’m, um, looking for my office. I just arrived.”

  “What event number?” the woman asked.

  “What event? Oh, yeah, my project number. I’m with Emmett Vanderzee’s group. 1-543.”

  “Oh, you must be Valena Walker. I’m so sorry about Emmett.”

  “What happened?” she asked. Bellamy might have told her to keep her mouth shut about what he’d told her, but if other people wanted to open theirs, well, what was the harm in that?
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  “Oh, you don’t know? You poor thing. Well, they didn’t tell us much, either, but in a place like this you can’t really hide anything. We saw the marshal take him into custody.”

  “Into … custody? Wait, Bellamy said—”

  “Well, they tried to make it look like they were just going for a stroll, but they put him in Hut 10, right where they put the last fellow they incarcerated.”

  “Incarcerated?”

  “It’s like a little house. You can rent it for parties. They put the young man who attacked another with a hammer in there. Put him on suicide watch, in case he was going to try to hurt himself, but he was actually quite cooperative, I hear.”

  “Emmett Vanderzee? Suicide?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m talking about the man who hit the other one with the hammer. Three years ago.”

  “They have a marshal here? Where’s his office?” I should go talk to him, Valena decided.

  “Yes, they do. Chad Hill, the NSF man in charge.”

  “I thought George Bellamy was in charge.”

  “He’s on the Science side. Chad is Operations. Somebody had to be the local law, so he went up to Hawaii a few years back and was deputized, or whatever you call it.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Everyone wants to know if he has a pistol!”

  “A pistol?” Valena squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. None of this was making any sense.

  “There are no weapons here in Antarctica. That’s part of the Antarctic Treaty, I think. Anyway, there’s no need for them. Who in their right minds would fight a war here? They’d freeze their behinds off! And there’s no hunting allowed here, either; that’s absolutely part of the treaty, or is it the environmental protocol?”

  Valena heard Brenda’s words but was stuck back at the beginning of the conversation, trying to imagine her highly intellectual, ironic, tall, skinny professor being marched into a makeshift jail. The idea of Emmett Vanderzee being held under armed guard was nothing short of ludicrous. Valena shook her head, trying to clear it. What was going on here?

  Brenda spirited a huge bag of corn chips off the table behind her and offered the open end of it to Valena. “Take some,” she said. “It’s why it’s here.”

  “No thank you,” she said. Five minutes earlier, she had been so hungry that her stomach seemed to have grown teeth, but now it felt like she had eaten clay. Her professor was in jail and she was nowhere. Fourteen years of effort had gone up in smoke.

  Brenda’s soft brown eyes glowed with concern. She said, “Well, breakfast’s being served in the galley if you need it. I don’t go over until brunch on Sundays, usually, which starts at eleven. You do know that it’s Sunday, don’t you? So many get mixed up when they cross the international date line. I’m just over here writing my e-mails because the computers are faster here than the ones in Building 155, and I don’t have to wait in line. But you were asking where your office is. Biology is on this level. Glaciology and geology are down on the second phase. Down the ramp and to your right.”

  Valena began to back out of the room. Somehow having someone care about her made her feel even more lonely and exposed. “I’ll just take a look downstairs.”

  “Okay. When are you scheduled for Happy Camp?”

  “You mean survival school?”

  “Yes, Snowcraft 1. Are you in the Monday-Tuesday class?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, have a good rest today. You can’t go much of anywhere else until you go to Happy Camp. Maybe there’s a movie at the Coffee House. We had a showing of March of the Penguins last week, and it’s always a good laugh when they show Madagascar. I just love those psychotic penguins: ‘Cute and cuddly, boys!’”

  Before Brenda could say anything more, Valena gave her a vague wave and moved quickly along the hall and down the ramp.

  VALENA FOUND A DOOR MARKED WITH A PLAQUE listing Emmett’s name and event number. She inserted her key. The door opened to evidence of Emmett’s somewhat chaotic office housekeeping. His equipment was stacked everywhere. Big shipping cases and duffels, file boxes filled with air photos and satellite imagery, mountaineering equipment. She unzipped one of the larger black duffels. It contained an enormously thick sleeping bag and layers of closed-cell foam matting.

  They didn’t take away his equipment, she noted. That’s a good sign. As she stared at the jumble, it occurred to her that Brenda had not spoken to her as someone who was about to be sent home. That meant that her fate was not generally known or perhaps even clearly decided. And that meant that there were possibilities. She now looked at the heap of equipment with a keener eye.

  His cloth attaché was stowed underneath his desk, as if he had left it there just a moment before. With a certain sense of invasion, she opened it, but she found only a few unused tablets of lined paper, some pens and mechanical pencils, and his electronic camera. She noted that its memory chip had been removed and that his laptop computer was missing, too. The marshal took his digital media as evidence, she decided.

  Then she realized, I’m thinking like a detective.

  For the first time since that horrible moment the evening before when George Bellamy told her what had become of her professor—and her plans—Valena felt her heart lift. She let her mind follow the concept of detection down a narrow, turning passageway of thought. The world seemed to spin and shift, now taking in one point of view, now considering things from yet another.

  Why would they arrest him now? If that journalist’s death wasn’t an accident, and Emmett killed him—which is absurd!—they would have arrested him a year ago, when it happened.

  Then she turned these thoughts around another way. What evidence exists that suggests that the reporter died through anything but mischance? What new evidence has come to light that justifies a change in their conclusions?

  She ran what she knew of the story of the death in Emmett’s camp through her mind. This amounted to precious little. When it happened, she had been in her first semester at UNR, the University of Nevada at Reno, where she had enrolled for her master’s degree. She had worked the summer before at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, processing cores Emmett had collected, to prove her interest—and her capacity to function in the negative thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit cold of its vaults—and had enrolled immediately in Vanderzee’s glaciology class, the only class he taught at UNR, so that she could show him how smart and dedicated and hard-working she was. Her plan was to get him to take her on as a research assistant out at the Desert Research Institute, where he kept his laboratory, become indispensable, and persuade him to take her with him to Antarctica.

  “Hello.”

  Valena turned to see who had spoken.

  It was a woman, leaning in the doorway with arms folded. Blond. Thirties or forties. Fit. Easy smile. Intelligent eyes. “New here?” she inquired.

  “Yes. I’m Valena Walker. Glaciologist. Just arrived yesterday.” It felt good to identify herself not as a hapless graduate student who was about to be sent home, but as a professional.

  “Kathy Juneau,” the woman said. She pointed up toward the upper level of the lab. “Biologist.”

  Valena tipped her head a bit to one side. “I thought there was almost no biology to study down here. Are you a marine biologist, then?”

  “No, freshwater. I’m here to collect a cubic yard so I can extract a carbon sample, then archive it for scientists worldwide to study.”

  “Carbon?”

  “We’re studying the carbon cycle as it occurs in lake water. This is about the only place on earth we can do that, because everywhere else carbon is washed in from surrounding vegetation and other organisms that live outside the lake.”

  “Oh. Right. I had heard that there were lakes under the ice.”

  “This particular lake is not underneath a glacier. And the microbes that live in it can be found most anywhere, but here there’s essentially nothing growing in or around the lake except these microbes.”

  “You mea
n, like, there’s no vegetation?”

  Kathy smiled. “You are new. Haven’t you noticed? Look outside the window. Tell me if you see any trees, grasses, even algae.”

  Valena did as she was told. All she saw was ice.

  Kathy said, “We do get influx of penguin guano, but we can easily identify that contribution and subtract it out.”

  “Penguin guano?”

  “Yes. The lake is at the edge of an Adélie penguin colony. However, the lake has not been kind enough to thaw yet this year, so in the meantime I am finding other projects to keep myself busy. In Antarctica, one must be adaptable.”

  Valena sighed. “I’d love to see a penguin in the wild. Is it far to this lake of yours?”

  “Fifteen minutes by helicopter, a couple of hours by tracked vehicle or snow machine.”

  “Not a casual visit.”

  Kathy shrugged a shoulder. Getting anywhere in Antarctica is a logistical undertaking. First you’d need to have your survival training, then sea ice training—you have to go over the sea ice, because cutting across land is too dangerous; crevasses and such, and the sea ice is not to be trifled with, either—and you’d need basic training on the use of a vehicle, presuming you have no helo hours. Then you’d also need someone to go with you, as one does not go anywhere alone here, and then there is the matter of permits—the colony is of course protected, so they require that you justify your visit on grounds of research—and then—”

  Valena held up a hand. “That’s almost too much to take in.” “It is rather overwhelming, at first. It took me three seasons to really begin to learn the ropes.”

  Valena stared at her feet. “This is my first season, and it looks like it’s going to be incredibly short.”

  “I heard that Emmett left. What was that all about?”

  “Something about that death in his camp last year.”

  Valena thought fast, trying to come up with a statement that would not defy George Bellamy’s edict. She settled on being vague.