Blood and Ice

by Robert Masello

  But it wasn't easy. As he lay there in the dark, the bed curtains enclosing him like a coffin, he could only think of the dive… and the girl in the ice. Her face haunted him. He rolled over and punched the foam pillows a couple of times, hoping to get more comfortable. He could hear Darryl gently snoring down below. He closed his eyes, tried to concentrate on his own breath, on letting the tension flow out of his muscles. He tried to think of something else, something happier, and his thoughts of course turned to Kristin… to Kristin before the accident. He remembered the time they'd entered a couples-only chili-eating contest, and won first prize… and the time a cop had caught them going at it in a parked car and threatened to give them a ticket… or the time they'd flipped their kayak three times in as many minutes in the Willamette River. Sometimes it seemed like they'd always been taking on challenges, or getting into scrapes, together. They'd been friends as well as lovers, and that was why losing her had opened such an achingly huge hole in his heart.

  The events that led to the catastrophe, in retrospect, were so small, so incremental. He kept thinking that if only one little thing had changed, one little thing had been done differently, the outcome would have been completely altered. If they hadn't assumed that the climb on Mount Washington would be such a cakewalk, they would have planned their expedition better. If they'd set out on schedule instead of arriving at the trailhead later than expected, they wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get cracking. If they'd taken the time to study the route diagrams, they wouldn't have wound up on such a treacherous part of the cliff face just as dusk was beginning to fall. And if he had only held her back, just a little, none of it would have happened.

  But reining her in was something he hated to do… and something that Kristin would never tolerate even when he tried.

  They were dressed for Alpine climbing, in light clothes, and carrying a minimal amount of gear-enough for one overnight on the mountain. And Kristin thought she'd spotted the perfect perch on which they could spend the night-a flat ledge that jutted out like a card table another fifty yards or so above their heads. Michael volunteered to go first, with Kristin belaying him from below, but she said it would be safer to have him do the belaying. “I'm not sure I'm up to stopping you in the middle of a free fall,” she'd said.

  But Michael had known that wasn't really it. Kristin always wanted to be the one who forged ahead first, who planted the flag that others would then aspire to reach.

  They'd roped up, and Michael had driven a couple of nuts and cams into a jagged seam in the rock that zigzagged its way all the way up to the ledge. The climbing guidebook showed this very seam, though to Michael's eye the real thing looked a lot less direct than it did in the diagram. And the rock, to his consternation, seemed more friable. As he'd hammered in the hardware, flakes and grain of the stone had come away too quickly and easily. He'd mentioned it to Kristin, who was already moving, like a spider, up the cliff, but she'd sort of brushed it off, and he hadn't made a federal case of it. One more thing that he wished he could do over.

  It was getting late in the day, but the view was perhaps more extraordinary than ever. For much of the early climb, they'd just been hiking through a pine forest, then scrambling over mild slopes of consolidated pumice. But the climber's trail had disappeared under the snowpack, and for the past couple of hours they'd been working the rock itself, searching for toeholds, finger grips, fissures sufficient to hang on to for a few seconds and catch a needed breath. Even though the temperature was still mild, the air was thinner, and the afternoon sun was sending its long beams over the crests of neighboring Mount Jefferson and Three-Fingered Jack. Far, far below lay Big Lake, and the parking lot where they'd left his Jeep.

  A spray of loose stone rattled down the cliffside and Michael looked up, shading his eyes with one hand. He could see Kristin's legs, in stretch fleece shorts, scraping at the wall, then one of her feet catching hold on a tiny protuberance. Of just such little bits of luck were successful ascents made.

  “You okay?” he shouted.

  “Yep.” Then he heard her hammer driving home a nut.

  He adjusted the 10.5 mm rope around his shoulder, and bit into a high-protein bar. He could hear his mother's voice telling him he'd spoil his appetite for dinner.

  “There's a seam here, and somebody's already left a hex in it!” she called down. There was nothing like coming upon free hardware.

  “You think it's secure?”

  He could see her tug at it. “Yeah, it is-must be why they left it.”

  And again, a distant alarm bell had gone off in his head; he made it a point never to trust anyone else's work-especially when it was someone he'd never even met. But he did not insist that Kristin replace it. He was anxious, too, to reach that ledge and start setting up for the night; it promised to be a very romantic sunset.

  She'd placed another of her own nuts into the crooked seam, and started inching up again. He made sure she had just enough slack, and he could see her groping for a handhold, when suddenly something went awry.

  “Damn!” he heard her mutter, and a second later even more of the rock came scuttling down the cliff and pattered on the top of his helmet. Dust blew into his eyes, and before he could do anything to clear his vision, the rope went loose-terribly loose-and he heard a pinging sound-nuts and pitons and hexes popping out of the rock-and Kristin screaming as she hurtled past. Instinctively, he had braced himself, clutching the rope, but the rapidity of her fall was too much-the anchor-pieces he'd hammered in held for no more than an instant before jerking free, the rope around his shoulder had fastened like a tourniquet, and he'd been whipped around, half-blind, just in time to see Kristin swinging headfirst, like a wrecking ball, into the cliff below. Her scream had stopped dead, and even as he felt his shoulder pop out of the socket in a blazing shot of pain, he'd managed, though he still could not imagine how, to arrest his own fall. He'd been dragged to the very edge of the narrow strip he'd been standing on, and lying flat, hanging on to the lifeline, all he could hear was the creaking of the rope and the grinding of the rock that was fraying it.

  How long he stayed that way, he could never tell. And he had only the vaguest recollection of looping the rope around a block of stone, then running it through a fresh piton, hammered home with his one good hand. He called down to her, but there was no reply. He dug into his gear, found the emergency whistle, and blew on it as loudly as he could, but the sound simply echoed off the surrounding cliffs.

  Before he could even think about hauling her up, he had to attend to his left shoulder, and with no one there to help, he would have to try to knock it back into place on his own. With the rope secured, he considered his options, and the only one looked like a flat wall of stone behind him. He lined himself up parallel to it, then- after taking a deep breath-bashed himself up against it. The arm exploded in pain, but it did not fall back into the socket. He dropped to his knees and vomited the remains of the high-protein bar he'd eaten. When he could stand up again, he wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand, then took another look at the side of the cliff. There was a section where the wall swelled, like a pregnant belly, and he thought that it might be possible, if he could stand the pain, to use that swell to massage the shoulder back. He approached it gingerly, trying to gauge the best way to use it, but he also knew that he had to move fast. Kristin was still swinging at the end of a rope, above a thousand-foot fall to the pine trees below.

  He braced himself against the rock, laid his shoulder on it, and pressed hard-then harder; he could hear the popping and grinding of the joint, as the parts sought to regain their proper places, and though the pain was excruciating, he kept thinking only of Kristin, and pressed up, then down, then sideways. With each motion, he felt the parts realigning, until, like the pieces of a puzzle all of a sudden falling into place, he heard the shoulder click back to where it belonged. He gasped several times, and waited, terrified, to see if it would hold… but it did. His entire body was drenched in sweat.<
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  He took a swig of water from the bottle in his backpack, then began the laborious process, a few inches at a time, of hauling Kristin up to the ledge. He had tried calling to her again and again, but ominously there had been no answer. He prayed that she had only been knocked unconscious and would come to her senses soon. But when her head appeared above the rim, and he saw that even the yellow safety helmet had been pulverized as if by a giant mallet, he knew that things were bad. Very bad indeed.

  Once he had her body all the way up, he unfastened her harness and removed her backpack, which had ripped open in the fall; everything, including their cell phone, had spilled somewhere far below. He checked her heartbeat and her breathing, then unfurled his sleeping bag and laid it over her. He felt his own body going into a kind of delayed shock, and he stopped to take four Tylenol from their first-aid kit, then tried to eat another protein bar to keep his energy levels up. But his mouth was so dry he could barely chew, and he wound up just breaking it into pieces and washing them down with sips of water. He debated trying to give Kristin some water, but he was afraid of making her choke. Instead, he simply elevated her head on a mound of dirt and gravel he'd gathered, and waited.

  The last rays of the sun were tingeing the Western Cascades a pale pink, and Big Lake, far below, was as black as obsidian. He remembered thinking that it was a beautiful sight, and that Kristin should really sit up and enjoy it. She loved sunsets, especially when she was off in the wilds somewhere; she used to say that she slept better under the stars than she did at the four-star hotels where her family sometimes stayed. The stars that night were out in profusion.

  But the temperatures were dropping.

  Michael made a windbreak out of whatever loose rocks he could assemble, then tucked his nylon jacket carefully around Kristin's head, leaving her shattered helmet in place. Her face was blissfully unmarred, and she looked peaceful. Not in pain. And for that at least he was grateful. Until the first light of dawn, when it would be possible to begin the descent, he would just have to stifle his own fears, hunker down and try to keep her as warm as possible. For what it was worth, he blew on the whistle one more time, and as the sound faded away among the surrounding peaks, he scrunched up next to her under the sleeping bag, and whispered in her ear, “Don't worry-I'll get you home. I promise I'll get you home.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  December 9, 1 p.m.

  Darryl felt a lot like an astronaut who'd just been told he couldn't take his space shot.

  “But I feel fine,” he repeated as he watched Dr. Barnes make another note on his chart.

  “That's not what your body temp indicates,” she said. “You're still suffering some hypothermia from yesterday's dive, and I'm not letting you go down today, no matter what you say.”

  As Darryl had predicted to Michael, the chief had indeed authorized another dive, to retrieve the sunken chest if nothing else. And as for the ice princess, he'd said they should bring her up, too, if she wanted to come.

  “But you're letting Michael go,” Darryl now complained to Charlotte in a last-ditch appeal.

  “Michael is fine,” she said, “and besides, if Michael leapt off a bridge, would you do that, too?” She laughed, scrawled something else on his chart, and Darryl knew that he wasn't going to get anywhere with her.

  He buttoned his shirt up and hopped off the examination table. In his heart, he knew that Charlotte was right-he was still feeling the effects of the dive. No matter how much hot tea he drank, and how many pancakes smothered in syrup and butter he ate, there was still some spot at his core that remained chilly. Last night, he'd slept under every blanket in the room, and at around 3 a.m. he'd awakened, nonetheless, with his teeth chattering.

  “Killjoy,” Darryl said, as he left the infirmary. In the hall outside, he bumped into Michael, just coming back from delivering his own medical clearance papers to Murphy's office.

  “You coming?” Michael asked, and Darryl had to give him the bad news.

  Michael looked surprised. “You want me to talk to her for you?” he said, nodding at Charlotte's office.

  “Wouldn't do any good. The woman is made of stone. You just go out and make the discovery of a lifetime without me-I'll be in the lab guzzling your bottle of wine. It ought to be safely thawed by now.”

  Michael clapped him on the shoulder and loped off down the hall. Darryl pulled on his parka and his hat-even the shortest excursions, from one module to another, required protection from the elements-and, after a quick stop in the kitchen, headed back to the marine biology lab.

  Although he had a lot of more important things to do, the bottle of wine was waiting for him, right in front of his lab stool, and he did find the damn thing strangely intriguing. True, it wasn't going to make his name or his reputation in the scientific community, but how many times did you get the chance to study some historic artifact? He felt like the guys who scraped the encrustations from the Titanic's dishes just to see the doomed ship's name appear again. And this bottle had a good chance of being far older than anything from the White Star line.

  He reached into the tank, filled with room-temperature seawa-ter, and lifted out the bottle. Illegible shreds of the label hung down into the water. When he held it up to the light and tilted it, he could see the liquid sloshing around inside. Plenty of wine left-and possibly aged to perfection-for a victory toast that night. All he would need for his routine tests were a few drops. And it would be nice to know-if he ever did submit a small piece on the find to a scholarly journal-what kind of wine it had been.

  The cork had held, reinforced as it had been by a quick and durable coating of polar ice. He took out the corkscrew that he'd just borrowed from the commons kitchen, but he was afraid to just insert it into the bottleneck and start drilling away. He wanted to go slow, and make sure the wine remained as uncontami-nated as possible. First, he secured the bottle in the vise attached to the counter; the clamp was normally used on reluctant bivalve shells. After a quick survey of the lab and its instruments, he selected a scalpel freshly sterilized in the autoclave and used it to cut away the remnants of the red sealing wax around the tip of the bottle. When had the wax been applied, and by whom? A French peasant in the time of Louis XVI? An Italian winemaker during the Risorgimento? A Spaniard, perhaps, and contemporary of Goya?

  He placed the waxy bits in a pile to one side, then inserted the tip of the scalpel between the cork and the bottleneck and began gently to cut around the edge. He wanted the cork to be as loose as he could make it before employing the corkscrew. When the circle had been completed, he put the scalpel aside and stopped just long enough to put the triumphal march from Aida on the Bose audio system; then, to its opening flourishes, he placed the mechanical corkscrew to the cork and began to turn the handle. There was a moment of resistance, followed by a smooth entry-so smooth that Darryl was afraid the cork was going to disintegrate, after all. But the corkscrew eventually made it all the way through, and its lateral wings began to rise as the cork came up and out in one sustained motion. There was even an audible pop as the cork broke entirely free.

  Success, Darryl thought, as he bent down to inhale the first fumes of this vintage wine… and immediately recoiled.

  If he'd been wondering if the wine would still be even remotely drinkable, he would wonder no more. The odor was vile. He gave it a few seconds to dissipate, then, pricked by curiosity, put his nose to the bottle again. It wasn't just a bad aroma-and it wasn't just wine that had long ago turned to vinegar. The scent was something else, and it was something that, to a biologist, was disturbingly familiar. His brow furrowed, and he opened a counter drawer to remove and prepare a clean slide.

  “All right, mates,” Calloway was saying in his manufactured Aussie accent, “I want you to listen carefully to what I'm about to say and do exactly what I tell you.”

  Suited up once more in the suffocating dive suit, and with Bill Lawson dressed just the same, Michael was not about to argue with anything. He just wanted
to get into the water as quickly as possible.

  “You've got dual tanks today, but that still gives you a max- max, I say-of ninety minutes. And given the exertion of sawing through submarine ice, probably a fair bit less than that. Any difficulty with the saw, and you come up, pronto! Got that?”

  Michael and Lawson nodded.

  “That means, any tear in your suit, no matter how small, and you come straight up. Any tear in your skin-anything that leaks blood-and you come up even faster. We've seen leopard seals around the dive hut today, and you know they're not your friends.”

  Michael did know-the Weddels were frisky but harmless; their close cousins, distinguishable by their large reptilian heads, were not. A Weddell would play with you, but a leopard, with its immense curving mouth, would bite.

  “If you have to, defend yourselves with the ice saws.”

  Each of them had been equipped with a fifty-two-inch-long Nils Master ice saw; it wasn't necessarily the most precise ice-cutting instrument, but with its wing-nut design and razor-sharp teeth, angled inward like a shark's, nothing could cut through underwater ice faster.

  “Michael, you know where you're going, right? So you'll go down first and lead the way. Bill, you take the net and salvage line and follow.”

  Michael was nodding the whole time while he inched in his fins toward the beckoning ice hole. A cool bloom seemed to rise up off it and into the overheated dive hut, and he noted that its diameter had been enlarged.

  “That's it then, mates,” Calloway said, slapping Michael on the shoulder to indicate it was time to go. “Masks on, feet in the deep freeze.”

  Michael sat at the edge of the hole, then slipped down the icy funnel and into the sea. He didn't have to go in search of the sunken chest; an earlier dive team had already gone down and retrieved it, and he'd seen a team of huskies dragging it back on a sledge toward the base camp. A big guy named Danzig was mushing them, and as he passed Michael, he raised one hand in salute. Word had quickly spread around the compound that Michael had made a pretty unusual find, and even if the ice princess didn't turn up, his stock had definitely risen.