In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  Dave and the others shifted like a group of cormorants fighting for positions on a rock. The minutes ticked by. Nobody said anything.

  “Fleet Ops, this is Mac Ops,” the radio sputtered.

  “Go ahead, Mac Ops,” the Boss replied.

  “I’ve got Search and Rescue on coms. Conditions have improved, so they’re going to take their Haaglund out along the flag route toward the runway. Over.”

  “Thank you for that. We’re going to send another Challenger. Say conditions extended area. Over.”

  “Mac Ops copies Challenger aiding search. Conditions east and south still alternating 1 and 2. Cape Crozier currently condition 1 and Black Island condition 2. Conditions east: Penguin Ranch reports condition 2 and clearing, no one is at Cape Royds to report, Dry Valleys report high clouds and one hundred miles visibility. Mac Ops clear.”

  “Fleet Ops clear.”

  Cupcake turned to Dave. “We’ll use your rig,” she said and headed toward the door. Dave slapped the toggle on the coffee urn to refill his insulated mug, grabbed a pack of juice boxes, and followed.

  “We’re coming too,” said Wilbur, as he and Joe hurried after them.

  “You won’t all fit in the cab,” Cupcake snarled. She stood in the open doorway, one hand on the knob to block their passage. Snow sifted in, covering her shoulders. “Besides, you idiots care too much. You’ll get in trouble, too. Stay here and help the Boss. Come on, Dave.” She grabbed him by the cuff and pulled.

  Dave and Cupcake hurried along the line of parked tractors. They could hear the Boss hollering at Joe and Wilbur, ordering them to stay put. “You got emergency rations in your Challenger?” asked Cupcake.

  “Sure enough.” They were running now.

  Cupcake waved Dave up the flight of six steps that led up over the front of the treads toward the cab of the towering tractor. “It’s your rig, you know it better,” she hollered.

  Dave roared the big engine into life, then spun the steering wheel with one hand, reaching for the gear lever with the other, thankful for the machine’s exquisite power steering. He slapped it into second out of the ten forward gears. The huge tractor lumbered authoritatively down past the line of parked vehicles and, at another touch of the wheel, turned out onto the road that led down past the gas pumps toward the main road and the transition from land to ice.

  The view ahead was daunting. Conditions had indeed improved from total whiteout, but ragged gray storm clouds still packed the sky, their maelstrom of wind and frozen moisture obscuring all but a few glimpses of the mountains. The wind scoured the great plane of ice that opened out before them, kicking up a blur of moving snow. The horizon was lost in shades of blue and gray.

  When they reached the juncture between the land and the frozen sea, Dave stopped and unclipped his microphone. “Mac Ops, Mac Ops, this is Dave Fitzgerald with Challenger 416 at the transition. Two souls on board. We are proceeding via flag route to ice runway and beyond to assist with search and rescue, over.”

  “Challenger 416, this is Mac Ops. Call in every quarter hour to report your position. Sooner if you find him. Over, out, and Godspeed.”

  BRENDA UTZON HEARD ABOUT THE MISSING TRACTOR driver as she joined friends for lunch. News of Steve’s disappearance was rolling through the galley like ball lighting. As she settled into a chair, the woman who managed McMurdo’s library leaned forward and passed the word. “SAR is out looking for a missing tractor driver. Guy named Steve, from Fleet Ops. How I hate this.”

  Brenda glanced around the galley. Friends were stopping friends in the aisles between the tables. Facing the demon as a group, as a community, as one soul with a thousand faces. One man lost in an Antarctic storm made all hearts beat in one anxious rhythm.

  The PA system popped into life and George Bellamy’s voice filled the air. “May I have your attention please for an important announcement. This is to confirm that a search is under way for a missing person. If anyone knows the whereabouts of Steve Myer, please contact the Firehouse with that information. In the meantime, please stay calm and do not attempt to assist in the search without direct instructions from the Search and Rescue team under the direction of Manuel Roig. Repeat, do not attempt to assist without instructions from proper authority. Conditions are still variable between 1 and 2 and … and we don’t want anyone else going missing.” The PA channel remained open for several moments. Everyone in the galley stayed frozen with ears cocked toward the speakers, waiting. Finally, Bellamy added, “Uh, that is all for now,” and closed the channel.

  Brenda shook her head. She was not personally acquainted with Steve Myer, but that didn’t matter. The US Antarctic Program was a community built on interdependence, and that meant that a part of herself was missing.

  She looked down at her tray full of food. Suddenly it did not look appetizing. She really liked the thick, creamy soups that the kitchen staff turned out, but just now this one smelled awful. She pushed it away. “I think I’ll just go back to my office and get back to work,” she said.

  MAJOR MARILYN WOOD FOUND MAJOR HUGH MULLER at his desk in the Airlift Wing offices. “You heard?”

  “About the missing Cat driver. Yes. Any news?”

  “Not yet. Anything back from Bentley?”

  “I was just typing him another e-mail. This is what I got from him this morning.”

  Bentley’s message glowed from his screen:

  Listen, chucklehead, you weren’t there last year when we loaded that corpsicle onto the bird. It was not pretty. I agree that there was something funny about what we found up there this year, but I vote we leave this one to the proper authorities. What’s over is over. Kick it upstairs to the Colonel and be done with it.

  Marilyn said, “By that I take it that he means that you and I are improper authorities.”

  Hugh snorted. “Right.” He wrote:

  Okay, dipstick, we’ll hold short for takeoff, but let’s keep our engines warm. SAR is at this moment out on the ice looking for a missing somebody. They just found his tractor between the runway and town but he’s not in it. I tell you, the Hughster has a nose that smells rot in all its forms, and ol’ Wrong Way Wood here is flaring a nostril, too. Something is going south down here, bigtime, and when we say “south” down here, we mean SOUTH.

  Hugh hit send and leaned back in his chair. “Loadmaster got everything dialed in for emergency takeoff with medical crew?”

  Marilyn snorted softly, as if to say, Need you ask?

  Hugh said, “I sure don’t like sitting when something like this is going on.”

  Marilyn’s face had set like stone, but her words came out light and easy. “What say we get ourselves out to the runway and drink that galley’s coffee for a while? This pot’s almost out.”

  13

  AFTER HELPING THE OTHER HAPPY CAMP PARTICIPANTS unload the Delta into the cargo bay at the Science Support Center, Valena went looking for Manuel Roig

  “Didn’t you hear?” Dustin asked. “He’s gone off with the search and rescue team.”

  Valena wrinkled her brow. “But we’re already rescued.”

  “Not you, someone else. You were never in danger. You had food and water and fuel and tents and each other. This guy’s out there alone in the storm in a tractor. Scratch that, without a tractor. They just found the one he’d been driving and he’s not in it.”

  “How strange,” Valena said. “Why would he leave his tractor in this weather? I mean, shouldn’t he have stayed inside it and waited for the storm to let up?”

  Dustin gave her a look of appraisal. “Go to the head of the class,” he said.

  “Then something’s wrong. I mean, really wrong.”

  Dustin said nothing.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Steve Myer. Now, if you’ll excuse me. Class is dismissed. I have to go help with the search myself.”

  Valena nodded. As she watched Dustin disappear out into the storm, she ran down her mental list of people who had been with Vanderzee during his p
revious season on the ice. Steve Myer was not a match.

  Em Hansen’s words of caution flashed in Valena’s mind. Waiting for those hours on the ice, unable to see farther than she could have thrown a cinder block, it had begun to come home to her that this was not a safe place. Caution was necessary for even the simplest, most basic things, like staying alive.

  Uncertain what to do next, she left the building and walked back along the rutted road that led to Building 155 and her dorm room. Suddenly the banks of melting snow and ice that bordered the path seemed painfully fragile. Life was finite in Antarctica, almost insignificant when opposed to the overwhelming expanse of ice that surrounded her. She had cruised through Happy Camp with arrogance, pleased with herself for having withstood its hardships with such ease, confident that theirs had been a practice situation made uncomfortable for the sake of training. But now a real Antarctican doing a real Antarctic job was missing and presumed in real trouble. A tractor driver. Valena pictured her grandfather on his farm tractor, pulling the potato harvester, caught in a sudden storm.

  Grandpa. Being a practical man, he had let her drive the tractor when needed because she drove it well. Through hard work, she had built a place in his life.

  Rounding the corner past the McMurdo General Hospital, she humped her duffel up the steps to the entrance into Building 155. She pushed open the door and walked inside.

  Life seemed oddly normal within the building. People were walking here and there up and down the hallways, one stepping into the coatroom alcove to fetch a parka, another moving into the computer bay halfway down the main hallway, a third rushing up the steps that led to the galley.

  Valena stood at the nexus of the hallways, glazed with fatigue. Blinking to adjust her eyes to the interior light, she glanced around, taking in details of her surroundings. A TV monitor mounted on the wall presented various data, the screen changing every few seconds. It presented local time: 13:32. Military time, she told herself. Subtract twelve; so it’s half past one in the afternoon. Damn, lunch is over. While waiting to be brought in from Happy Camp, she had eaten a couple of helpings of reconstituted freeze-dried crud, but her stomach longed for something more recognizably foodlike, and the idea of sitting on a chair at a table in a heated room while she ate it seemed downright heavenly.

  The monitor rolled to a different screen, this one listing the flight schedules for the day, all canceled. Valena closed her eyes and opened them again, correlating this information with her immediate concerns. Flights north have all been bumped forward a day, which means that I won’t be sent home tomorrow!

  Smiling with new hope, she headed down the hallway that led to her room with the lovely concept of a hot shower blooming in her imagination. Halfway to the door to the dorm rooms, she noticed a pair of bulletin boards housed behind locking glass doors and stopped to take a look. They appeared to be passenger manifests: southbound flights coming from New Zealand and those going onward to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to the left; northbound to New Zealand to the right. Today’s lists were in place, but marked CANX, which, she reasoned, must be military-abbreviation-ese for canceled.

  She spotted her name on the northbound list for the next day’s flight, confirmed that the flight was marked CANX, and let out a sigh of relief. Also on the list she found Calvin Hart’s name. It seemed that everyone working for Emmett Vanderzee was being sent home.

  Not surprisingly, the southbound manifest did not list Emmett Vanderzee’s name among the arriving flood of scientists, all of whom must be pacing the streets of Christchurch waiting for the weather to clear. And she realized that Major Bentley would be stuck in New Zealand as well. She would not be questioning him at the Tractor Club meeting tonight. It seemed that every good thing that happened in Antarctica had a bad side as well.

  Valena headed down the hallway toward the dormitory rooms and the hot shower and clean underwear that awaited her there. She told herself that, after showering, she would check her e-mails and would find a message from Taha or even one from Emmett, saying that everything had been straightened out and that they would join her just as quickly as they could. She would then celebrate by going to the little store she had spotted near the entrance to the galley and get some postcards to send to her grandpa and the teacher from grade school who had first gotten her interested in science. And then she would take a walk in the wind and the snow.

  Taped to her dormitory room door she found a note from an administrator at the Chalet, which read:

  We’ve managed to squeeze you onto an LC-130 flight to New Zealand Thursday morning. Sorry for the delay. Please see me in the Chalet for details.

  Valena let herself into the room, dumped her duffel, and trudged sullenly toward the Chalet.

  “It’s the earliest we could get you out,” the administrator explained when she got there. “Sorry. But your situation is rather unusual. We’re used to people staying here a bit longer before they redeploy.”

  “I don’t mind staying, really. In fact, I’d like to stay. Prefer it. Greatly prefer it. I was hoping there’d be some word from Dr. Vanderzee. That he’d be coming back.”

  The woman gave her a you-poor-thing look. “Sorry,” she said. “At least you don’t have to go through any more in-briefs. Or out-briefs, for that matter. You haven’t been anywhere and you’re not a PI, so there’s no paperwork to fill out.”

  Right, I haven’t been anywhere at all. Suddenly, a thought occurred to Valena. “Could I become the PI?”

  “I don’t think so.” She looked across the assembly room toward George Bellamy’s office. “I suppose you could ask, but… well, no. I don’t think so, dear.”

  Valena stared at Bellamy’s door. The expression “a snowball’s chance in hell” filled her mind, consuming all hope. “Well, if for any reason you need to bump me from that flight, you just feel free to do so, okay? I’m supposed to be doing research for my master’s thesis, and I can just hunker down in the library at Crary and get plenty done. Really.”

  The woman fixed her stare on her computer screen. “Welcome to Antarctica,” she said.

  Valena said good-bye and headed out the door and turned away from 155 and away from the heartbeat of McMurdo before the tears began to roll down her cheeks. She was not given to fits of crying. Tears were pure humiliation: hot; useless; sad evidence of the collapse of her dreams. Right now she needed privacy. She ached for solace. She sought the out-of-doors.

  The weather was clearing, the sky opening wide in its blinding pale blue. She followed a road up past several weather-beaten Quonset huts toward the conical prominence of Observation Hill. With each step away from the strange ant-hive of human endeavor called McMurdo, she felt more safe, more self-contained. It was difficult to make the hike in the enormous blue boots she had been issued. They were designed for staying warm while standing still on the ice, but the soft sides provided no ankle support, and the thick, stiff soles and layers of felt provided no arch support and the quilted liners tended to work around sideways, making her socks bunch up.

  She was high above McMurdo when she heard the engine of one of the helicopters down on the pad below Crary Lab whine into life. She turned and looked down on the scene. The rotors began to turn. Was this a crew of scientists heading out across the ice toward the continent? They could be geologists going out to study the history of the landforms in the Dry Valleys, biologists on a mission to study the single-celled life forms that scraped out a meager existence in one of the frozen lakes there, or perhaps a team of glaciologists on their way to study a giant iceberg that had calved off the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

  She surveyed the severe landscape. The wind had dropped to its usual nattering levels and the snow had stopped falling. The clouds were breaking up in the south, replaced by a high, scattered overcast. She could now see beyond the ice runway, clear past Black Island, and the first of the peaks on the Transantarctic Range were beginning to resolve themselves from the clouds.

  Even though the blades were
now turning so quickly that she could see only a blur, people were just loading into the helicopter. She thought that strange until she noticed their sense of urgency and a white van parked nearby. An ambulance? Was this a medical crew departing? Did that mean that search and rescue had found the missing man?

  The helicopter lifted off, pivoted, and skimmed along the contours of the hill, then turned and accelerated away toward the end of Hut Point, staying so low that it skimmed barely fifty feet over a small wooden hut that was parked on the ice. It thudded heroically as it shrank into a dot and disappeared around the point.

  Valena sat down on the clinkered ground, watching it go. Then she noticed that someone else was on the trail below her. Not ready to give up her privacy, she rose and continued up the steep slope toward Scott’s cross. The other person continued to gain on her. She picked up her pace, but still the other lone hiker overtook her before she reached the summit. Only as he came quite close and she saw his wild hat did she recognize him. It was Peter, the energy conservation engineer whom she had met in the galley during Sunday brunch.

  “They’ve found Steve Myer,” he said. “Isn’t that a relief! I thought I’d come up here and watch them bring him in, offer my spiritual support.”

  “Do they usually send a helicopter?”

  “There’s nothing usual about this. In fact, nothing like this has ever happened, not so far as I can recall.”

  “It looked like they sent a medical crew. That must mean he’s alive. Maybe he’s really cold and they need to warm him quickly.”

  Peter looked uncertain. “Maybe that explains why he wandered off. Like maybe he’s all confused or something.”

  “Does that happen much?”

  Peter shook his head. He had kind, inquisitive eyes.

  They stood together at the cross for several minutes in silence. Finally, they heard the return passage of the helicopter. It began as a faint pattering and grew again into a thunderous rumble as it emerged around the point, flying low and fast toward the helicopter pad. Someone had turned the white van around and opened its rear doors, waiting to receive the patient. The wild mechanical bird settled, and, even before the whine of its engine changed pitch or the whirl of the blades diminished from a blur to the spinning of individual blades, the personnel on board disembarked. In one quick motion, they transferred a stretcher from the helicopter to the van. Someone closed its doors, and they were off uphill toward the hospital.