In Cold Pursuit vw-1

by Sarah Andrews

  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 previous 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 sta
y. 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.

  “Well, they’re hurrying,” said Peter. “That means he’s still breathing. But what was he doing clear out around the point? I mean, even if you’re confused from some kind of injury, you don’t wander that far.” He shook his head. “I don’t know Steve except to say hi, but he seemed a reasonably smart man. Better than smart. In fact, he used to be a pharmacist.”

  Valena cocked her head in question.

  Peter chattered on. “Oh, yeah, you get all kinds down here. PhDs driving Cats just to be here. People get jealous of me because I’m actually doing what I was trained for.” He smiled shyly and looked intently into her eyes, as if mapping her.

  Uncomfortable with this scrutiny, Valena turned toward the cross that dominated the top of the hill. “So this is a monument to Sir Robert Falcon Scott,” she said.

  “Oh yeah. Right. He didn’t make it. Died just a hundred miles or so out there on the ice shelf, coming back from the pole.”

  “They didn’t have helicopters back then.”

  “Or radios to call for help. Or McMurdo Station, for that matter.”

  They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the amphitheater of buildings, Quonset huts, gravel roads, fuel tanks, miscellaneous vehicles, and layout yards that was McMurdo. “What a strange place,” said Valena. “It’s kind of like a mining camp, only without the mine.”

  “Oh, it’s ugly as hell, there’s no way around that. But we call it home.”

  Valena turned her attention back toward the far distance from whence the helicopter had returned. “What’s out there, anyway?”

  “There’s a flag route leading around to the north toward Cape Evans and Cape Royds, with a fork continuing straight west to the Penguin Ranch. Beyond that there’s a drilling project… something about the ocean floor.”

  “The ANDRILL Project,” Valena said.

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re gathering data from the sediments that are dropped by the ice as it slides off the edge of the continent. The ice carries all sorts of clues about climate variation.”

  “That’s what you’re doing here, right? Gathering climate data from the ice?”

  “Yes. When we get our core back to the States we’ll analyze the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in the water, the gasses caught in the bubbles, and also the fine dust that settled out of the air into the ice.” She began to walk back down along the trail, descending the hill.

  “Peter followed her. I didn’t know that there were different isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in water,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, there are,�
� she said, bending down to tighten the laces on the soft FDX boots in the hope that her feet would not slide forward inside them. “Most of the O in the H2O that makes up the snow that recrystallizes to form all this ice is good old oxygen 16—eight protons and eight neutrons—but a small percentage of oxygen has extra neutrons, making oxygen 18, which is heavier. The thing is, the ratio between the two—how much 16 versus 18—is governed by the temperature of the clouds from which the snow falls.”

  Peter said, “Oh, I get it. You can figure out when the global climate was warmer and when it was cooler by measuring that ratio.”

  Valena shrugged. “The isotope ratios are a proxy for temperature. It’s simple physics. The laws of thermodynamics. The hydrogen in the water molecule is a slightly different story. Hydrogen typically has just one proton, but sometimes two. We call that deuterium. How much deuterium you find in the ice is a reflection of the temperature of the water that evaporated to form the cloud. So by analyzing the isotopes in the ice, you can read the surface temperature of the ocean waters up in the tropics where the water left the ocean and entered the atmosphere as vapor.”

  “So even though you drill in Antarctica, it’s not just about Antarctica.”

  Valena laughed. “Why would the taxpayers who are paying for this research care how cold it is in the middle of Antarctica? We chose the WAIS Divide site because it will give us a global record. We’ll study the dust in the ice to figure out where it came from and how hard the wind was blowing. That tells us about atmospheric circulation patterns throughout this hemisphere. The amount of salt tells us how far into the ocean the sea ice extended around Antarctica, another indicator of ocean currents and global temperature. Organic compounds tell us about marine productivity in the southern oceans. The chemical and optical properties of summer snow and winter snow are different, so we can make measurements on the ice core that identify each annual layer of snowfall. It’s like counting tree rings, really old tree rings. But the gasses, they rock.”