by Tim Curran
First Mount Hobb losing its crew and now a chopper crash.
If these were omens for the coming winter, then they were not good ones.
6
THE CRASH SITE.
They saw the smoke from it long before they got in visual range.
Out on the polar plateau, if it was clear and cold, you could see for miles. But on a day like today with the sun barely making a showing and the snow blowing down from the mountains and that gloomy haze reflected up off the ice itself, visibility was down to twenty yards at best. It made it hard to tell which was the sky and which was the earth itself. It became one. Something that was only multiplied by the dimness of the dying early winter sunlight.
Horn piloted the Sno-Cat down the flagged ice road, the headlights jumping as they passed over humps and dips. The ice road was safe, but beyond its perimeters there were great jagged crevasse fields blown by ice-mist and glacial wind, meandering rows of scalloped sastrugi that looked like five-foot breakers heading ashore that had frozen in place. Back in the old days, Coyle knew, you had to rope your sledge to five or six men and drag it over obstacles like that, something that was accomplished only by straining brute strength and willpower. Even dog teams had a hell of a time.
“There . . . that’s smoke out there,” Special Ed said, jabbing his finger at the windshield. “See that?”
They all did, of course. Out in that unbroken glaring whiteness where even the shadows were pale gray, the black plumes of smoke boiling in the sky were in stark contrast. Frye’s Sno-Cat was already at the scene when Horn downshifted and rolled them to a stop. He brought it around so the headlights were on the wreck like the other ‘Cat. He left it running.
They strapped their Stabilicers on—extra soles with steel cleats on them that you strapped to your boots so you didn’t slip and slide all over the place—and jumped out.
The crashed helicopter was a Huey.
It looked like some fluorescent orange wasp that had fallen to earth, been stepped on, and kicked to fragments by a precocious child: wings here and thorax there and abdomen over there. It was just a smoldering mess of iron and plastic and composite. Fuselage crushed and rotors snapped off, tail boom flattened and jutting up vertically now like an exclamation mark. The entire thing was burning, fuel tanks rupturing on impact and spraying gasoline in every which direction, creating a flaming wall that kept everyone away from the wreckage. The flames were burning out gradually, but it was still pretty hot and dangerous if you got too close.
Things were sputtering and popping. Now and again, a sizzling piece of metal broke free or was ejected by pressure and heat.
“Shit and shit,” Coyle said.
“Oh boy, oh my God,” Special Ed kept saying, circling around in his ECWs, bunny boots crunching on the hardpack.
Frye’s team—which was composed of Frye, a kid they called Slim, and Flagg, the camp doctor—just stood there hopelessly, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing they could do. The heat was melting the snow and ice, putting out a barrier that was hot like a breath from a kiln.
Frye just shook his head, unmoved by it all. “Sweet little mess, ain’t she?” he said, spitting tobacco juice into the snow. “Jee-ZUZ-Christ, what a clusterfuck. Where’d this guy get his chopper license? Box of Cracker Jacks?”
Nobody commented on Frye’s sensitivity to it all. That was Frye. Down deep, he was good as gold, but on the outside just plain crusty.
“So what’re we supposed to do, Ed?” Horn was saying. “Whoever was on her is toast.”
“Show some respect,” Flagg said, the wind ruffling the fur of his parka.
Horn shrugged. “It’s cool, Doc.”
Frye spat another stream of tobacco juice at a smoking shard of metal. “He’s right, though. Ain’t nothing alive in that mess. Crew must be tater tots by now. Can’t even see nothing in there that looks like a man. Unless you got a big spatula to flip ‘em over with, ain’t shit we can do.”
“That’s enough,” Flagg said. “Good God, there were men on board.”
“Ain’t no men there now, Doc. Whatever was on board is bacon fried real crispy.”
“Dude, that’s cold,” Slim said.
“I want your opinion, sunshine, I’ll ask for it,” Frye told him.
Slim was a General Assistant, a GA, which meant he pulled any shit job that came along. And this was beginning to look like one of those.
Coyle stood there, the heat coming off the wreckage so intense that he could have stripped down to a t-shirt and shorts. As it was, he was sweating in his heavy ECWs, his Extreme Cold Weather gear. He backed away, smelling acrid fumes of burning fuel and scorched metal, less pleasant odors that he figured were probably human flesh and bone. The wind shifted and blew smoke right into everyone’s faces. Coughing and fanning the air, they stepped further back.
“Must’ve come down damn hard,” Frye said. “Looks like she went nose first right into the ice. That’s funny.”
“Why?” Slim wanted to know.
“Because, kid, it ain’t right. I’ve seen chopper crashes out here before. What usually happens is that the pilot has mechanical failure or whiteout conditions confuse him and he skims the ice. Either way, the chopper comes in horizontally with the ice, see? Follows the plane. This one looks like it was driven down vertically.”
“Oh,” Slim said, not getting it at all.
But Coyle was getting it and so were the others by the looks on their faces.
“You’re right,” Horn said, pulling off his hood and hat, wrapping an American flag bandanna over his sweating head which was steaming in the wind. “Looks like that pilot drove her straight down like a nail. Like maybe he did it on purpose.”
Special Ed kept opening and closing his mouth like a fish trying to get a good pull of water through its gills. “Really, people, we don’t know what happened here. It’s not our place to speculate.”
“Why not?” Horn said. “Why the hell not? If that chopper was from Colony, then you never know what kind of crazy-ass shit it was up to.”
“That’s right,” Frye said. “Could be them Martians you hear about.”
Slim giggled . . . then stopped when he saw no one thought that was funny. Not down here. Not on the Ice.
Coyle just watched the inferno.
The sight and smell and sound of that burning debris made something twist up in his belly like a screw seeking threads. It was horrible. The wreckage was scattered easily for two-hundred feet in all directions, fanning out from the central flaming mass. There were lots of charred things and smoking clumps everywhere. In the semi-darkness with the shadows thrown from the clouds of smoke, it was hard to tell much of anything.
Slim and Horn started ducking around the flames, checking things out while Special Ed told them to stay back, throwing his arms up into the air when they wouldn’t listen.
Frye and Coyle sat on the treads of a Sno-Cat while Special Ed called it in on the radio and Flagg just stood there with his hands on his hips, his medical bag hanging from his waist.
There was a humming sound in the distance that got louder and louder until it became the telltale thunk-thunk-thunk of an approaching helicopter. It was coming in fast.
“Another chopper,” Frye said. “And I can just about guess where it’s coming from.”
Coyle did not move. He just watched Horn and Slim playing amongst the burning wreckage like boys, kicking smoking shards of metal around and leaping over blackened sections of the chopper itself.
“Fuck is that?” Horn said. “That a body?”
“A couple of ‘em,” Slim said. “I think.”
Flagg was interested now.
He moved around the perimeter of the wreckage, trying to get a look at what they’d found.
Both of them sounded excited. Even Horn who got excited about nothing but the idea of anarchy. Flagg was sixty-years old and he was in no shape to be leapfrogging burning debris. He held a hand to his face to shield the smoke and heat.
; Frye just shrugged, disinterested.
But Coyle was interested. He went over there and jogged around the far side. The sound of the approaching helicopter was getting really loud now.
“Look at that,” Horn said. “A body, all right.”
Coyle saw it. Looked like a man all twisted-up, mangled. He was burning and the stink was nauseating.
A section of the tail fell right over on top of him and he was completely engulfed in flame.
“Damn,” Slim said.
“Something else over here,” Horn said.
They darted around behind the wreckage, trying to get at something near a flaming section of tail stabilizer. Something large and oblong. It was covered in a tarp that was smoldering, flames burning around its edges. Whatever was under it was steaming like it was frozen and melting very fast.
“Is that a man over there?” Flagg said.
“Can’t tell,” Horn called out.
In an act of bravado born of youth and inexperience, Slim leaped the stabilizer and tried to get at the tarped form. Smoke was in Coyle’s eyes, so he could not really see what was going on. Just Slim trying to yank that burning tarp away and commenting on the stink coming from underneath it.
“Be careful!” Flagg called out.
Horn was peering into the smoke as Slim took hold of the edge of the tarp and gave it a quick yank with his mittened hand. He pulled his hand away quickly.
“Ow! Ow! That shit is hot!”
“Something under there,” Horn said. “Something big and it ain’t no man.”
Slim tried again and managed to pull it away and as he did so, he stumbled and fell back like whatever was under there had scared him.
“Goddamn!” he said, the tarp falling back into place. “You see that, Horn? You see that fucking thing under there?”
There was a sudden explosion and a fireball leaped from the wreckage, casting a wall of sparks over at Slim. Horn grabbed hold of him and yanked him away as burning bits flew free and sizzled in the snow like shrapnel.
Special Ed was hanging out of the cab of his ‘Cat with the mic still in his hand. “Get away from there! You two, get away from there right now!”
“Yeah,” Frye said. “Johnny! Tommy! You quit playing with that burning helicopter! You might get your pants dirty or scuff your Sunday church shoes! Fucking kindergarten.”
Horn and Slim raced away from the wreckage and Slim’s face was pinched white, his eyes huge. He didn’t look frightened, really, but shocked.
Then the other helicopter buzzed overhead, hovered, and dropped down far behind the remains of the first, its rotor wash sending smoke and snow in every which direction.
“Hell you see over there?” Flagg called out to Slim over the noise of the chopper.
But Slim kept shaking his head and Horn kept licking his lips like maybe there wasn’t enough spit in the world to lubricate his tongue so he could tell what he saw.
Something was up.
And Coyle figured it was more than just a charred body. This was something else. Something bad.
Three men came out of the chopper and they were all dressed in military-issue olive drab wind pants and parkas and snow goggles. They were big men and they carried sidearms. Two of them formed a perimeter at the wreckage like they were daring anyone to get too close. The other guy jogged over near the Sno-Cats.
“Here come the spooks,” Horn said under his breath.
“We have a crash team en route from Colony,” the guy said beneath a thick black mustache that looked like a particularly large and hairy spider that was trying to mate with his mouth. “We’ll take care of it from here on in. Thanks for getting here so soon.”
Flagg said, “The site is very hot, but we saw no survivors. The remains are trapped inside, I’m guessing.”
“That’s fine,” mustache said. “We can handle it from here. You guys can pull out now. We have it well in hand.”
In other words, Coyle thought, thanks and now get the hell out of here.
“We’ll hang around to see if we can be of assistance,” Flagg said.
“That’s not necessary. We can handle this.”
Special Ed hopped off the Sno-Cat. “Captain Dayton! How nice to see you again! We got here as fast as we could, but I think we were a little too late as you can see from the wreckage. My God, what a tragedy, what a terrible–”
Dayton ignored him. “I want this area cleared.”
“Wait a minute now,” Flagg said, getting his gumption up. “This is a crash site with fatalities. My assistance will be required.”
Dayton narrowed his eyes. “Your assistance is not required.”
Coyle was watching the exchange, but he was also watching Horn and Slim. They both had the same pale wide-eyed look about them, their mouths pulled into gray pressed lines just as sharp as razor cuts. They looked like they’d both just looked through a window into Hell.
Coyle was also watching Dayton.
Flagg was arguing with him and Special Ed danced around the periphery trying to make peace like a good little wind-up company man.
Coyle didn’t know who Dayton was, but he did not like him.
Just an inflexible, rigid military man with a pole shoved up his ass. He and his two troopers had the same crewcuts, the same pickle jar heads, the same winter-dead eyes. You could read guys like that just fine if you spent enough time around them like Coyle had back in his Navy days. Maybe Special Ed was an obedient yes sir/no sir bureaucratic doormat, but guys like Dayton were one step above all that. They got the order, they’d slit your throat.
“Okay everybody,” Special Ed said. “Let’s load up and head back.”
“I don’t think we should,” Flagg said to him, never taking his eyes off of the good captain. “We scrambled and came out here almost ten miles from the station and we did that because it’s standard procedure. And now this guy is trying to order us off. I think we better stay. I think something about this whole situation really stinks.”
Suddenly, it got very quiet.
Dayton was bristling, not used to having his authority questioned.
Nobody was saying a thing and nobody was making to leave either. Dayton just stood there glaring with his dead eyes and Flagg gave it right back to him while Special Ed looked from man to man, wondering how he could defuse this and keep everyone happy.
But Flagg was right: this did stink.
There was something wrong about the whole situation and they all knew it. Coyle knew it and it was sitting on him very wrong. Dayton was coming on far too strong for a simple helicopter wreck. He was acting like a flying saucer had crashed and he didn’t want anybody stealing the little green men.
Dayton looked at Special Ed and Special Ed looked like he needed to piss real bad. “You will get your people out of here right now. Do you understand me?”
Special Ed was nodding his head so frantically it looked like it might fall right off.
Then Frye stood up. “No, sorry, chief, we’re not leaving. There’s something shitty in the old horsebarn and I plan on finding out what. These boys here—” he motioned towards Horn and Slim “—they found something under a tarp over there, something that must have been thrown clear of your chopper and I wanna know what.”
Dayton took a step forward, brushing Special Ed aside. “What is under that tarp is Colony business.”
“Sorry, chief. I think otherwise.” He turned to Horn and Slim. “Now tell me, boys, what did you see under there? Don’t worry about this jarhead. He has no jurisdiction here.”
Horn wisely kept his mouth shut, smelling something on Dayton he did not like.
Slim just shrugged, that same shell-shocked look on his face. “I don’t know . . . it was big and weird and ugly,” he said, having trouble framing it into words. “It wasn’t a man . . . it was some kind of thing.”
“You hear that, chief?” Frye said. “It was some kind of fucking thing. Now you want to tell us what kind of cargo that chopper was carrying or do we wait
around until things cool and find out for ourselves?”
Special Ed looked like there was something stuck in his throat he could not swallow down.
Coyle stepped forward because he knew that Frye was incapable of backing down from any man. Problem was, Dayton was the same type. Only he had a gun.
“Again, what is under that tarp is Colony business,” Dayton insisted. “Now, please, sir, leave the area. I won’t ask you again.”
Frye grinned, all working class attitude. “And if I refuse? You gonna pull that gun on me, junior? You got three boys and I got a good spit more. I’m thinking we’ll cornhole your merry ass three ways to Sunday if you try.”
“Okay,” Special Ed said, “that’s enough.”
Coyle figured it was, too.
He got in-between Frye and Dayton and pulled Frye away, leading him over to the ‘Cat while Frye bitched the whole way, saying how there was one thing in this world he hated and that was uppity little Annapolis jarheads sucking government root. Frye cast Dayton a hard look and got into the ‘Cat. Flagg followed and Special Ed went with them like he didn’t trust those two not to get out again and make trouble.
“C’mon,” Coyle told Horn and Slim who were just standing there in the wind. “Get in the fucking ‘Cat.”
They moved now like they’d been slapped, climbing up into the cab.
Coyle jumped up on the treads and took one last look at Dayton and his toy soldiers. No, this was all wrong. This whole scenario was spooky and strange. First Mount Hobb and then this crash and now Dayton with his James Bond shit. Not good, not good at all.
As Coyle cranked up the ‘Cat and got it moving, he cast one last look at the burning wreckage and that singed tarped form. Then he looked at Horn and Slim.
They stared at him without blinking.
7
WILLIAMS FIELD,
ROSS ICE SHELF,
WEST ANTARCTICA
IN THE DYING LIGHT, Kephart watched the Caterpillar loaders hauling crated skids of machine parts, lab equipment, food, and construction supplies over to the DC-3 which sat on the snow runway. The wind coming in off the Ross Sea had a glacial bite to it today but it was nothing in comparison to the weather where the DC-3 was going: the edge of East Antarctica, right in the shadow of the mountains. A place called Colony Station that was getting a really spooky reputation. Kephart never paid much attention to the gossip.
