In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  Valena stepped lightly over the snow, following the steps she had kicked coming downward. She had put on both layers of boot liner and had tightened the laces as tight as she could, but it was still tough going.

  “I don’t have anything to tell you,” said Dan, pulling up beside her.

  “That’s too bad,” said Valena evenly. She was becoming interested in the way the snowflakes refracted the light. They were like diamonds, and here and there lay a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire, or richest citrine.

  “Emmett was going down, and if I’d stayed with him, I’d be sitting in Reno right now with Taha. Or I’d be in your shoes.”

  “Mm-hm.” She glanced up the slope. The distance to the others was widening. She picked up her pace.

  “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “I want to know who was where when it happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the Airlift Wing dropped the bundle. Where were you?”

  “I was in the cook tent. We heard it go overhead. But it was blowing and snowing so hard … well, we stayed put.”

  “You stayed put.”

  “No, I followed the ropes down to my tent. The one I shared with Bob. We were together the whole time. Emmett told me later that he and Cal went out right away, but they were nuts.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s it?”

  “Okay, and who was in the cook tent?”

  “Sheila. Morris. Dave.”

  “That’s interesting. You called him by his given name.”

  “Who?”

  “Morris Sweeny. He was a real person to you.”

  “Oh, sure. Kind of an ass, but he was a good writer.”

  “Even if he misrepresented Emmett’s work?”

  “It was Frink who wrote that article, not him, though we had some lively debates about all that. But Morris seemed more intent on … well, like he was looking for something here in Antarctica. Another story. Maybe his own story.”

  They were on the steepest part of the slope now. Valena tilted her head back to look for Naomi. She was just disappearing up over the convex curve of the glacier. “What sort of story?”

  Lindemann said, “I don’t know … human interest, more. He asked a lot of questions about the people he was going to meet in camp.”

  “Who in particular?”

  “He was pretty cagy, didn’t focus on anyone in particular, but asked lots of questions about who had been in the military, or how long they’d been around the university. How well Emmett knew everybody.”

  “And how well did Emmett know you all?”

  Lindemann stopped to take a drink of water from his pack.

  Valena looked upslope. The two drillers had disappeared. Only the second graduate student was still in sight.

  Lindemann started moving again, but he changed the subject. “Like Frink, Morris didn’t get the science. Just didn’t have a clue about how it’s done. You know how it goes: he thinks a theory is a fact, and thinks the facts are negotiable based on who observed them. Doesn’t understand the scientific method, or what it’s good for and what it’s not. Basically clueless. Educable, perhaps, if you get him away from his neo-con buddies. That’s why Emmett invited him down, or at least, that’s why he said he did.”

  “And was he getting educated?” She looked again uphill. They were alone. She quickened her pace.

  Dan shook his head. “It was kind of a mess. The storm hit just after we got him to the high camp, and then he got sick. It sure put an end to our arguments.”

  “You argued with him?”

  “About the science.”

  “Had you ever met him before?”

  “Huh? No. Why?”

  “Then how do you know so much about him?”

  “I was down in McMurdo when he arrived.”

  “I didn’t know that.” She was sweating from the pace.

  “Yeah. I’d gotten sick, so Emmett left me behind when he went up to the high camp. In fact the only way I got up there at all was because they had the plane scheduled to fly in to pick up some of the fuel barrels that had gotten buried to another site.”

  “I don’t understand. Why drop the barrels and then move them?” She was panting with the effort. She dropped her skis and put them on, hoping the gradient was now shallow enough that she could ski and pick up the pace. She slipped, then the skis caught, and began to surge forward.

  “I don’t know, really. The Airlift Wing had dropped them, and someone needed some over in another camp, so NSF sent in the Otter to pick a couple up. That meant there were two seats for us going in, and Morris push his way into the high camp because there had been such delays and he hated McMurdo. Too many liberals.”

  “I can just imagine.”

  “So NSF went along with it. They should have called his bluff, but they didn’t.”

  “So you had kind of gotten to know him while waiting in McMurdo.”

  Lindemann nodded. “The Coffee House.”

  “Wine.”

  “New Zealand merlots. We had that in common.”

  “And women.”

  “Yeah, he liked women. So do I,” he said, sliding an evil look her way. “So what?”

  “Okay.” She was making better time now, the slope of the glacier shallow enough that she could really begin to move.

  “And I was making progress with him. Helping him understand things a little better.”

  “That’s good. So then you were at the high camp, and Ted the blaster flew out with the Otter pilot, and the storm hit, and Morris got sick, and that was that.” Her breath burned in her lungs from the effort of speaking while she pushed so hard on the skis. “Have I got all that straight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did the other Gamow bag find its way back to McMurdo?”

  “That—” Dan shuffled along for a while, thinking. “I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “All right then, here’s another question: did you notice anything unusual or unexpected after you got there? I mean, as regards Morris’s conversations with the others. Before he got sick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Valena thought carefully about how to phrase her question. Whoever had visited Naomi’s camp to pass the word of Emmett’s arrest would not have known the particulars she knew, so if Dan offered them up, he knew them from having been there rather than from having been filled in after the fact, and she did not want to contaminate him as a witness. “Well, the feds assumed that Emmett was the one who caused the death because he was the one who was angry with the deceased. But perhaps someone else had a beef. So who else did he communicate with?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean.” Dan thought a while. “It’s hard to remember after all this time. Mostly what I recall was how scared Emmett and everyone was when the guy got sick.”

  At last, they were back up on top of the glacier and could see the tops of the Scott tents coming up over the curve. “Let’s put it another way, then. Who wasn’t scared?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. That Wee Willy guy. But I figured he was just too damned stupid to get scared.” Dan stopped skiing. He stood still, thinking. “And come to think of it, there was another guy Morris didn’t like.” He gave her an appraising look. “Exactly what’s it worth to you to know?”

  Valena pushed ahead. Over her shoulder, she called, “It’s worth your damned doctorate!”

  “Dave,” called Dan. “He didn’t like Dave.”

  41

  ON MONDAY WHEN THE ASTAR THUDDED OUT OF THE sky onto Clark Glacier, Valena was ready and waiting next to the loaded core boxes. The downdraft from the rotors of the descending helicopter blasted her and everything within fifty yards with flying snow. She said her good-byes and thanks to Naomi, waved to the others, and climbed aboard. Her departure accomplished, she greeted the liftoff with the sharp focus of the single-minded. She had narrowed her search to two suspects, and it would soon be one.

  The pilot on duty was not the talkat
ive type, which was fine with Valena. Her brain was already in Crary Lab, where she would requisition a microscope just as quickly as she could. The gorgeous ridges and valleys rolled past beneath them as they flew south to pick up another passenger. There were stunning views of volcanic dikes, swarms laid naked along glacier-polished mountain tops. Like a settling leaf, the little craft spiraled down into the steep-sided valley that held the frozen length of Lake Bonney. They barreled out from the edge of the continent out across the ice, passing the big rig run by the ANDRILL project. When they landed at McMurdo, she refused a ride to her dorm, instead heading straight up the hill to the lab, saying that she would be back for her gear.

  In Crary, she stopped only an instant at Emmett’s office to check for notes—there were none—then set down her duffel and parka and relocked the door before heading up the ramp in search of a binocular microscope, which she found in the storeroom near the head offices. She peered at the contents of the plastic bags. Instantly, she saw more than she had expected. Not only did the sample from her boots have lithic fragments and phenocrysts, it had tiny little penguin feathers, their short, thick barbules unmistakably belonging to flightless birds.

  To identify the phenocrysts, she headed down the hallway and found a young woman from the Erebus team.

  “Anorthoclase,” said the vulcanologist as she squinted through the lens. “Yeah, that’s the main feldspar phenocryst you get around here.”

  “Do you find it only in the basalts on Cape Royds?” asked Valena hopefully.

  “Oh, heck no, it’s pandemic. And to be more specific, those aren’t basalts, they’re phonolites. It’s more alkaline than your basic basalt.”

  “Oh. Okay. But I don’t see the anorthoclase phenocrysts here in Mac Town.”

  “No, but half the flows on the island have it, though the size of the crystals may vary.”

  Valena thanked her, stuffed the samples into her pockets for safekeeping, relocked the door to the office, and headed off to find Jim Skehan. He wasn’t in his office, so she went to the library and looked for e-mail messages. There was one from her friends at the Airlift Wing:

  Valena

  Edgar Hallowell served during Iraqi Freedom. Went AWOL en route court martial for theft of body armor. No current address.

  Signed, Your friends

  There was also one from Em Hansen:

  Valena

  I checked with a friend at the FBI lab, here forwarded. Try to stay warm. Stay out of trouble. Em

  The forwarded e-mail from the FBI lab began:

  Feldspars and broken antique glass—well how cool is that? Shackleton’s discards would be worth money even if they were Budweiser bottles. In 1907, quality control still wasn’t the big thing in manufacturing processes. There would be a lot of variability—measurable variability—in the composition of those bottles, even within a single bottle. Also, they didn’t have the respect we have today for heavy metals leaching from containers, and there would probably be some interesting trace elements in the bottles too. The light green and brown glass were probably colored by iron oxides (differing oxidation states), and the blue was usually cobalt oxides.

  There was a long paragraph on analytical equipment she could use to identify the bottle glass, how large a sample she needed for each, but the lab tech had assured her that that the binocular microscope was as good as it was going to get here in McMurdo. She was going to have to find a lower-tech way of establishing a connection between boot grit and Cape Royds.

  She read onward:

  Volcanos are as distinctive as people. Each one spews out its own unique output, and each eruption is a little different. Chemically, even the start of an eruption is different than the end. If you had a decent sample and the right reference material, you could tell which volcano produced which ash, and that will tell you where someone/something has been.

  Valena pondered this. So petrography as it is practiced at the FBI lab is a little more detailed than a volcanologist can manage here with a hand lens. That’s a relief!

  She read on to the closing salutations:

  As for the penguin guano, well, the defense community always said that the FBI Lab doesn’t do shit, and in this case they’d be right.

  Valena threw back her head and laughed. But her mind was still racing. She had come up dry trying to figure out who had killed the journalist, but if she could nail the penguin egg theft to the man who had been seen riding south along the route from Cape Evans to Hut Point the morning Steve was killed, and if that person had also been at Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp when the journalist was killed, then she might be able to tear a hole in the whole picture, at minimum opening the way for doubt in the minds of the feds. And she thought she knew exactly how to identify that way.

  42

  HUGH MULLER STOOD UP FROM HIS TABLE IN THE GALley and scanned the room for any sign of Valena. He unconsciously stood in almost full brace, his major’s leaves flashing on his fatigues.

  “She’d be coming through the food lines, wouldn’t she?” said Marilyn.

  “Sit down, Hugh,” said Waylon. “You don’t want to draw attention to this.”

  Marilyn said, “It may be time to come out into the open with this, Waylon.”

  “There’s Matt, I’ll ask him if he’s seen her,” said Hugh. He moved through the crowd to the table where the heavy equipment operator was sitting with a few other men. “Tractor Matt,” he said, making it sound like a social call. “You heard from our newest recruit lately?”

  “You mean Tractor Valena?” said Matt. He wasn’t smiling. “I was just talking about her with Father Jim here. Jim, Hugh flew the mission last year to the high camp.”

  Skehan stood up and shook Hugh’s hand. “We sent her into the field. She was expected back on a helo this morning, but she has not reported in. I left a note for her, but it’s gone now, and I don’t think it was her that took it down.”

  “That’s not good,” said Hugh.

  “No, in fact, that’s bad.”

  Hugh said, “I left a note for her yesterday. I don’t suppose it was there when you last checked.”

  Skehan shook his head. “I put my note up early this morning, well before she was due, and there were no notes waiting for her.”

  Hugh leaned closer to the scientist. “I’m going to take a chance here. We military generally keep to ourselves here on the ice, but this is a special case. When that man was killed up in the high camp, it was because our drop bundle was tampered with, and that makes it personal. So I think it’s time we told each other everything we know, and put our heads together on this.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  Hugh said, “Valena asked us to look into the military record of a man named Edgar Hallowell. There was an Edgar Hallowell who served in Iraq at the beginning of the war. He was suspected of a number of petty thefts, but when he got to stealing body armor, the investigation went onto the fast track. They brought him back to the States for court-martial, but he went AWOL. We were able to obtain a photograph of him. Well, I was the pilot who flew Vanderzee’s event into the high camp last year, and guess what?”

  Skehan’s eyes narrowed. “Cal Hart.”

  “Got it in one.”

  Skehan’s face grew dark with anger. “We do our very best science, and an opportunist threatens to take us down.”

  Matt said, “That problem goes all the way to the White House.”

  Skehan stood up. “I’m on my way to Bellamy’s office.”

  43

  VALENA STOPPED FIRST AT THE POST OFFICE, WHICH WAS housed in one end of a large, white building just down the hill from the Boss’s office in Building 17. At the end of the room, she found a window where stamps were sold and packages weighed. She presented herself to the clerk.

  “Hi,” she said. “Is it true that I can mail things from here just like I was shipping something locally at home?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “This is an Army post office, which means that you pay as if you were s
hipping from our port of entry into the United States. Well, actually, things have to go through customs in New Zealand, which means that you can’t send anything that would be hazardous to New Zealand wildlife. They have very strict rules about that.”

  “I see. So you X-ray the packages.”

  The woman shook her head. “No. We weigh them and sell you the postage. You fill out the customs form, just like at home in the States.”

  “And what if the contents are particularly fragile? Or…temperature sensitive?”

  The woman smiled. “We supply all the bubble wrap you can stand. If you need to send something especially fragile, you can get heavy cartons over in BFC or Crary Lab. Everything gets recycled around here, and the scientists get special equipment shipped to them all the time, so it’s easy to skua a really good box over there. And they have wonderful stickers you can put on the boxes that say ‘Do Not Freeze’ or ‘Keep Frozen,’ depending on what you need.” She smiled. “They have little penguins on them.”

  Little penguins, thought Valena. How ironic. “How does something with a sticker like that get home?”

  “The scientists can have boxes shipped home on the cargo vessel that comes in at the end of the season, or they can ship things through here. This is much faster, and costs very little. I once sent my skis all the way home for six dollars.”

  “Fantastic. And how long do packages sit here before they go out?”

  “Oh, usually only a day or two. We can usually get them on the next flight. This time of year, it’s the southbound flights that are overfilled.”

  “So if someone brought you a package say, last Tuesday, when would it have gone out?”

  The clerk looked at her askance. “You mean during that big storm.”

  “Yes, that was the day.”

  “Well, we had a flight go out that evening, but it took off in a hurry, too fast for us to get the mail on board. You’ll recall that was the day Steve Myer died.” Her face tightened and she gazed down at her fingertips for a moment. “But there have been two flights out since.”