In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  Cupcake said, “Oh, yeah, Cal. Wasn’t a scientist or anything, more like a ski bum, but Emmett said he was a good guy to have around. He told me, ‘He’ll do anything I tell him to and he doesn’t complain when it gets cold.’ Contrast that to Schwartz and Lindemann, who are both whiners.”

  “That’s eight,” said Valena, making a mental note to keep her complaints to important things, like, My leg just fell off.

  “There were nine, aside from me, and like I said, I was gone before it happened, so who did I forget?” He stared at the ceiling, tapping a ninth finger. “Oh yeah, the deceased. Though of course he wasn’t dead when he got there.”

  “He had a name,” said Cupcake. “Morris Sweeny.”

  Ted gave her a look. “You’d know?”

  “Yeah. I’d know.”

  Ted put his lips together and whistled. “You don’t miss a chance, do you?”

  “Am I missing something?” Valena inquired.

  Ted glanced her way. “Our Dorothy’s telling us she played a little Wizard of Oz with the man.”

  Cupcake shrugged. “He was okay. Nothing great.”

  “So how come Mr. Sweeny died?” Valena asked, steering the discussion away from what either was or was not great about the reporter’s capacities in bed.

  Ted took another good guzzle. “The guy arrived on schedule, but Emmett had been delayed getting started and was still out in the mountain camp. Emmett wanted to have him on the ice sheet, out at WAIS Divide, not up at altitude.”

  Cupcake cut in again. “I don’t get what that WAIS project is all about. And what’s up with the acronym? Everybody’s got to have a goddamned acronym around here.”

  Valena said, “It stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet. They’re setting up to drill a continuous core, or sample, of the ice.”

  “I don’t know what you want with all that ice,” said Cupcake.

  Without thinking, Valena shifted into science teacher mode. “The ice is made up of snow that fell a long time ago, trapping some air with it. So we collect a core, a long cylinder that goes from the top of the ice sheet to the bottom. Ice has layers, one for every year, just like tree rings. If you know what you’re doing you can read the layers just like you’re reading the pages of old weather reports.

  “I was just jerking your chain,” said Cupcake. Don’t you guys have enough cores? The Russians got one at Vostok. I read the newspapers, and I’ve seen Al Gore’s movie. You look at the CO2 in the core and it gives you the temperature.” She made a horizontal zigzag through the air, mimicking the classic illustration of rises and falls in CO2 and temperature, then threw the sharp rise onto the end, indicating the spike of CO2 and corresponding rise in temperature with modern burning of fossil fuels. “So we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. Why blow a gazillion more dollars drilling another core?”

  Valena shook her head in frustration. “Vostok is on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. This continent is huge! Would you look in Cincinnati if you were trying to find out what the climate was like in Las Vegas? We need as much information as you can get from as many places as we can get so we can continue to refine the climate models. We know from Greenland cores that the climate has changed many times, and quickly. Ten degree changes in a time period of as little as ten years. Like as if you moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco or Atlanta to Pittsburgh.”

  “Climate changes happen that quickly?” asked Ted.

  “Yes. The variables that change climate—like change in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface, or the level of greenhouse gases—build up and up and up, and it looks like not very much is happening, but then the climate system crosses a threshold and bang, it’s a new game, like flicking a switch. The ocean currents flip to a new circulation pattern and ecosystems either adapt or die. If changes like we’ve seen in the cores happen today there will be huge social impact until our water and agricultural system gets back in synch with the new climate.”

  “We’d be fighting over every single resource,” said Cupcake.

  “Right,” said Valena. It doesn’t help that we’re doing a global-scale experiment by increasing greenhouse gas and altering the thermal balance of the earth. We could be pushing toward one of those thresholds.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then Ted said, “I don’t like being part of that experiment. I mean, good planets are hard to come by.”

  Valena said, “And we drill here because this is where most of the ice is, and because it’s important to understand whether global climate changes start in the Arctic or the Antarctic. There are ice core records from Greenland that go back 104,000 years; that’s pretty good, but we can do better here. We want to see how climate changed in the past when the amount of greenhouse gasses changed, so we need an Antarctic ice core from a place where it snows a lot—like right smack in the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—so we can read the years.”

  Ted said, “But why put the WAIS project out on the divide? It has the worst weather in Antarctica. It’s a logistical nightmare to get the drill and all the housing and everything in there.”

  Valena said, “The worse the weather, the more snow accumulates, and the more snow, the better we can read the annual bands in the ice, and better we can refine the gas and isotope analyses.”

  Cupcake said, “You’re stalling again, Ted. So it was WAIS that the reporter was supposed to see, not the high-elevation camp. But they were still setting up the drill last year at WAIS and building the covering structure. What was he going to do out there?”

  Valena said, “It’s a huge project that involves about twenty different PIs. Before you go to the expense of flying in that huge rig and setting up the building that will house all that brainpower, you do some test drilling to make sure the condition of the ice is what you expect. So there would have been drilling last year, just not the big rig yet.”

  “But let’s get back to the high camp,” said Cupcake, popping the top on another beer.

  Valena, said. “So the guy showed up there instead of WAIS Divide, and he got sick. And you were there working with explosives, Ted?”

  “No, Emmett had a drill going getting shallow test cores from that location, but he also wanted to get some bigger block samples, and that’s where the other muscle and I came in. But then suddenly here’s this guy from New York at high altitude, and he hadn’t come up in stages like you’re supposed to. Emmett told him to sit tight and rest, not exert himself until he was acclimated, but he was one of those macho types who just couldn’t stand himself unless he was breaking a sweat. Said he was really fit, shouldn’t be a problem. He’d been in the military, said he could handle it fine. He was a real piece of work, all cocksure and not listening to reason.” He shook his head. “Things got off to a bad start, lots of arguments.”

  “About what?”

  “Guy stuck his bare hand on one of Emmett’s ice samples, for a start.”

  “He didn’t!”

  Cupcake asked, “Why’s that a big deal?”

  Valena said, “The whole point is to get uncontaminated data. The ice is like a big deep freeze that keeps past climate records intact. The instant you introduce modern contaminants—well, then it’s worthless. We only handle the ice samples with special gloves. When someone puts bare hands on them, it’s as if someone spat in your beer.”

  Cupcake curled her upper lip in disgust.

  Ted said, “Yeah, so it went downhill from there. Things get pretty intense when you’re camped out there on the high ice together, even at the best of times. It’s cold, and the cold intensifies the effect of the thin air, and you’re doing dangerous work handling machinery, and then here’s this chucklehead breathing down the good doctor’s neck, and bugging the help with what he liked to call ‘interviews.’ Hell, I call it cornering people and bugging them until they blow their tops. Schwartz popped off at him pretty good, Sheila looked like she was going to hit him with a fry pan before the first meal was done, and even cool Cal was cutting a wide margin
to avoid him. It just wasn’t right. You have to be able to depend on each other in a place like that, and this guy’s shown up looking for a fight.”

  Valena said, “Was he trying to argue that the climate isn’t warming?”

  Ted said, “Yeah, there was a lot of arguing about a story for the Financial News.”

  Valena said, “Emmett probably wanted to take the guy to the source and show him how the work was done and maybe correct some of his confusion, open a healthy dialog. It was a reasonable idea.”

  Ted said, “Yeah, it would have been reasonable if the guy had been inclined to listen, but it sounded to me like he was going to write an exposé on what a waste of the taxpayer’s money Emmett’s efforts were. But he got sick.”

  Cupcake said, “It was altitude sickness, right?”

  Ted nodded. “That’s what they tell me.”

  “You’d left by then,” Valena prompted.

  “I’d pulled out to come back here just a couple hours before he started showing symptoms. Caught a ride in one of the Twin Otters they had moving through the area; they’re your smaller ski plane. It had stopped to pick up some fuel from the cache. That was the other reason some of us were there. We were digging up fuel barrels that had gotten buried in the snow. Damned windy place.” He shook his head. “The storm came in really fast, just barreled down off the plateau, a particularly nasty herbie.”

  “That’s a hurricane-force storm,” Cupcake explained to Valena. “They usually come from the south. Air pours off the big ice sheet that covers East Antarctica. You can get sustained winds up to a hundred miles per hour, and the gusts …”

  Ted nodded. “Laurence Gould, who came here with Admiral Byrd in 1929, wrote about a wind so strong that when he reached up and grabbed the strut of his airplane, it blew him out like a pennant. And he was not a small man.” He shook his head. “Anyway, Emmett radioed in that evening to say that Sweeny was in real distress. They got the doctor from the hospital here on the horn at Mac Ops, and they decided that it had to be altitude sickness. They couldn’t evacuate him, as there was no way they could land any kind of aircraft. Visibility was down to zero, a total white-out blizzard. So the flyboys got creative and sent in a Herc to drop supplies.”

  “LC-130 Hercules,” Cupcake explained. “The Hercs are the big workhorses down here. They carry the heavy loads in and out of field locations, haul everything that goes to Pole, and they make all the flights from here up to New Zealand during the times when the ice runways are too soft to land wheeled aircraft. The Herc’s got skis they can lift up, so’s they can land on wheels up in Cheech.

  “And they’ve got some damned fine pilots,” Cupcake went on. “They’re career officers from the Air National Guard. Great guys.”

  Ted said, “Anyway, they figured they’d fly over Emmett’s camp, drop a parachute with a Gamow bag and other medical supplies. A Gamow is like a pressure tent. You put the guy in there, pump it up, and it’s like bringing him down to sea level. Fluids in the lungs clear. He lives.”

  “But he didn’t live,” Valena said. “Because they couldn’t find the camp in the storm.”

  “Oh, the plane found the camp,” said Ted. “Problem was, the camp couldn’t find the chute. When you’re in condition 1—zero visibility—the dictum is, don’t go anywhere. Stay in your tent, or your vehicle, or your building, wherever you are. You’ve noticed the monitors by the main exit doors?”

  Valena nodded. She had seen the lighted overhead signs that scrolled the information. “They’ve said ‘condition 3’ each time I look at them.”

  Cupcake said, “That means clear and no restrictions. Condition 2 is watch out and pay attention, get to where you’re going and don’t mess around. Condition 1 is stay put. Don’t go out. Remember that.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So they had a total howler.”

  Ted continued, “Yeah, and Emmett ordered everyone in camp to stay put, not that anyone was foolish enough to go out. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Of course, the newspaper holds this against him, because they’ve never been in such conditions. The toughest thing they’ve ever had to do is cross Fifth Avenue to buy a cruller.” He shook his head vehemently. “That asshole had no business coming down here.” He finished his beer. “You got another of these, Do-roddy?”

  Cupcake pointed at the little fridge. “You know where to find it.”

  Ted popped another open and drizzled several ounces into the maw between his whiskers. Belched. “‘Scuse me. Yeah. So they wait for the first break in the weather—things are only up to condition 2, and ragged at that—and out they go.” He shook his head. “Didn’t find it. Storm closed in again. Back to the tents.” Ted fell silent. “They had to wait until the storm abated. Took another two days. First chance, a Herc came out and loaded them up. Sweeny was frozen solid by then. I saw it land. They brought the body out in its sleeping bag. Hell of a long sleep that boy was in for.”

  Everyone was silent for a while.

  Ted sighed. “They held him overnight in the ice core storage unit over by Crary Lab and then shipped him out in the cargo hold of a C-17. It didn’t matter that he was an asshole. If you lose anyone down here for any reason, everyone feels like they’ve had a hole torn in them, and in a very real sense, everyone is accountable.”

  “But the storm,” said Valena.

  “Yeah, the storm,” said Ted.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Cupcake. “What could you have done differently?”

  Ted had finished his second beer. His big hand crumpled the can like it was made of paper. “I should have hauled his ass out of there with me on the Otter. Or William was almost done with his work. I could have sent him out, and then I would have been the one to stay. Maybe I could have found the damned chute.”

  Cupcake had an arm around him. “No one found it,” she said.

  The big man hung his head. “Yeah, right. Not until five days ago they didn’t.”

  6

  BRENDA UTZON POURED HERSELF A CUP OF TEA AND headed down the ramp that led to the lower levels of Crary Lab, leaving phase 1 for phase 2 and continuing all the way down to the aquarium. She had seen Michael heading down this way, and she had a job for him.

  She was always fascinated by the maze of tanks with their burbling waters being circulated by humming motors. It was usually her pleasure to stop and stare into the nearest aquarium, a small Plexiglas arrangement labeled CRARY TOUCH TANK. The biologists kept examples of Antarctic marine creatures in there so that visitors could see who lived underneath the sea ice and to keep them from sticking their hands into the other aquaria, which housed the creatures they were actually studying. But today Brenda was on a mission. Instead of stopping to look, she hung a right and knocked on the door to the electrical tech’s shop. “Michael?” she called. “Are you in there?”

  “Just a moment,” she heard, through the heavy steel door. Presently, Michael opened the door and let her into his sanctum. It was lined with shelves packed with widgets and gizmos that kept all the equipment in Crary Lab ticking. He was new this year, but in the short time he had been on board, she had come to know him as a gentle, caring man, and she had a job for someone with just those characteristics.

  “What can I do for you, kind lady?” Michael inquired. He was perched on his swiveling stool, his back against the side counter. On the counter in front of him lay the disassembled parts of some bit of equipment that Brenda did not even try to comprehend, but from the scent of the air, she could tell that she had interrupted a job of soldering. Why was he working on a Sunday?

  Michael reached to one side and dragged another stool out from under a counter. “Have a seat. I don’t get much company.”

  “Thanks, Michael. This is nice down here. So, you’re going to Happy Camp tomorrow, am I right?”

  “At last. I’ve been bumped twice, but now’s my big chance. I’m looking forward to being able to hike past Ob Hill.”

  “Oh, I know, it’s kind of constraining to be in
this great, huge place and not be allowed to go anywhere.”

  Michael nodded.

  Brenda said, “Well, I was wondering if you could help look out for someone who’s going to be there. She’s just a kid, and she’s having a rough time.”

  “Oh?” Michael’s soft brown eyes softened further. “What’s the problem?”

  “You’ve heard about the scientist who was taken off the ice under guard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the young lady I’m concerned about was his graduate student. Scheduling missed the chance to turn her around in New Zealand, so she’s here. She came in on yesterday’s flight. I saw her this morning and she looked pretty scared, like she didn’t have a friend in the world. Because she’s here and there won’t be another flight north until Wednesday, George Bellamy said she could go ahead and attend Happy Camp.” She shrugged her shoulders in what she hoped was a fetching approximation of innocence. “So anyway, I was hoping you could keep an eye out for her.”

  “Sure,” said Michael. “Sounds rough.”

  “Yeah. Imagine working hard enough to get in on a grant to work in Antarctica and then having it snatched out from under you.”

  Michael began fiddling absentmindedly with a loose bolt on his countertop. “How old is she?”

  “Well, she has to be mid-twenties, but she looks like she’s about eighteen. Nice-looking girl, sort of unusual-looking.”

  “I think I’ve met her. Valena?”

  “Yes, that’s her. Valena Walker.”

  “Wow, and she was Vanderzee’s student? Rotten luck. So what’s the scoop on that, anyway? I heard the basics—that someone died in his camp last year, and that now they think he killed the guy—but what happened? I mean, he walked out of here last year a free man, and this year something’s different?”

  “Well, that’s what we’d all like to know.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “There was of course a big flap about it last year. It’s very bad when someone dies on the ice. Not only does it scare everybody—morale plummets—but also it’s a black mark on NSF and Raytheon. When I left the ice at the end of the season last February and returned to Denver, I was amazed at how much trouble it had created at headquarters. The newspaper the deceased man worked for kept badgering everybody for details, as if we had been keeping things from them, which we hadn’t. Heavens, how was I supposed to know anything, for instance? I never leave McMurdo. I certainly wasn’t at Dr. Vanderzee’s camp when it happened. But sure enough, I got a call as soon as I returned to Denver. I’ll bet they’d have phoned me here if they could have figured out how. They even got hold of e-mail addresses for the winter-over personnel and asked questions of them.”