In Cold Pursuit vw-1

by Sarah Andrews

  “Frosty Boy on sandwiches has been tried,” said Hugh, “but it’s the suppertime dessert crowd who really have it down.”

  “Frosty Boy on brownies with some of that cherry sauce and some of those chocolate ants on top,” said Valena, spying tubs of other accoutrements arrayed around the machine.

  “She’s quick!” said Hugh, rolling his eyes toward Betty. “Gotta keep an eye on our Valena! Ah yes, how many ways people use that soft-serve Frosty Boy goodness on the lovely desserts this galley puts out for the faithful!” His smile was aglow.

  “They can’t stop themselves,” said Betty laconically. “They are enthralled. Like vermin to the bait,”

  Valena could feel something coming. “And so…?”

  The brilliance of Hugh’s grin rose to twenty thousand candlepower. “So we have to trap the vermin!”

  “Trap?” asked Valena. “You mean, like a mousetrap?”

  On cue, Hugh whipped mouse trap out of his pocket and handed it to Valena. “It comes with a trapping license. All very ecology-conscious. Thus we observe both the spirit and the letter of the environmental protocols of the Antarctic Treaty.”

  Valena turned the trap over and saw the card that was glued to its back. “Antarctic Trapping License,” she read. “Bearer is authorized to trap fur-bearing mammals on the continent of Antarctica in accordance with ‘the Treaty.’” She looked up at Hugh. “And you put this by the Frosty Boy machine. How’s hunting?”

  Hugh almost burst his face smiling. “Not by the machine, right there on the floor below it! Catch the little critters on the approach! We even sprinkle some of those chocolate ants on the floor all around it.”

  Trying to keep up with the twists and turns in this conversation, Valena said, “I didn’t know there were mice in Antarctica.”

  “Not a one,” said Betty. “The largest land animal that spends its entire life on this continent is a half-inch-long wingless midge. All those birds and seals only come to land to breed and pup.”

  “There’s the odd skua,” said Hugh. “A penguin or two.”

  Betty said, “Or twelve hundred, if you go up to Cape Royds.”

  “They’ve got twelve hundred penguins on Cape Royds?” Hugh asked.

  Betty said, “Twelve hundred pairs.”

  Valena said, “They do? Right now?”

  “Ask the penguin guy. He’s sitting right over there.” Betty gestured toward a very fit, middle-aged beaker who sat at a nearby table, munching a brownie while he read one of the summaries of world news from the New York Times that could be found lying about on some of the tables.

  Valena sighed. “Penguins. But no vermin.”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Hugh, his smile vanishing. “Just no mice or other rodents. But we do have the sort of vermin that run around on two legs.” He gave her a very penetrating look, his smile gone. With that, he stood up from the table, grabbed his tray, and left.

  Valena waited, watching Betty to see if she was going to drop another conversational bombshell, but the firefighter only yawned, stretched, said, “See you later,” and got up and left the dining room.

  Valena’s eyes shifted immediately to the penguin scientist who was reading the paper. He was halfway through his brownie, chewing slowly. He turned the page on his New York Times summary. He began reading the last page.

  Springing into action, she hurried with her tray into the scraping room and dumped things into the appropriate recycling bins—food scraps here, burnables such as paper napkins there—and stacked her plates and glasses where the dishwashers could reach them, dropping her tray onto a third stack and her silverware into a bin filled with antibacterial solution. Rock music pounded from the far reaches of the adjoining dishwashing room, where two men in rubber gloves and aprons stood aiming a big spray nozzle at the encrusted plates.

  She hurried back to the food lines, poured herself a fresh glass of milk, and grabbed a brownie, one of the butterscotch kind with chocolate chips. Then she drew a bead on the penguin guy and headed to where he was sitting. “Um, hi, can I join you?” she inquired.

  He said, “Please do.”

  She lowered herself into a seat across from him. “The fire-fighter lady says you work with penguins,” she said.

  He nodded. “Betty.”

  “Can I ask you some questions about them?”

  “Sure.” He laid down his news summary and laced his fingers together on the tabletop. “They’ve just finished mating. The males are on the nests. The females have taken off to feed. They’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

  “So they’re not emperors? Because they walk around with the eggs on their feet, right?” She was digging into her paltry storehouse of penguin facts, trying to sound knowledgeable.

  “They’re Adélies.”

  “Littler.”

  “Yes. All other species of penguins are smaller than the emperors.” He waited, watching her politely.

  “Can I… is there any way I could see them?”

  The penguin guy nodded. “I’ll be going out there again tomorrow. Perhaps you’d like to come then.”

  “That would be wonderful! But um, how do I get there?”

  “I’m flying. Helicopter.”

  “Is there a spare seat?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Most likely. The only problem would be getting back.”

  “Can’t I ride back in the helicopter?”

  “No. They’ll drop me and take off to the next location. They usually head off to Marble Point next, on their way to the Dry Valleys. They have a very full schedule.”

  The Dry Valleys, she thought, I could go for that! But she said, “Is there another way to get back? How far is it?”

  “Oh, about twenty miles. You could come up around the edge of the island on the sea ice on a snow machine, or check out a Pisten Bully or a Haaglund, if you’ve got one in your event budget. And you’d have to find someone to ride with you.”

  “I know. You can’t go anywhere alone around here.”

  He nodded. “It would be better if you waited until you can put together a plan, then come out with someone else. Tomorrow isn’t such a good day for me anyway.”

  Valena closed her eyes. Penguins. Real, live penguins living where penguins really lived, doing what penguins really did. But tomorrow was her last day. “I’ll stay in touch,” she whispered.

  15

  WHEN CUPCAKE TIRED OF THE VICTORY CELEBRATION in the galley, she doused her dishes at the dishwashing window, grabbed her parka, and headed over to the hospital to see how Steve was doing. No one was seated at the desk near the entrance door to tell her to go away, so she walked through the catacombs of rooms until she found the action. The sight of Steve all trussed up to keep his neck from moving, oxygen mask covering half his face, and IV drips going in and out of him made her suck in her breath.

  A short, round nurse turned around and saw her. “Hey, Cakes,” she said. “Who let you in here?”

  “I did. How is he?”

  “Still out,” said another nurse. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Let her stay,” said the doctor. “I’ve got some questions for her.”

  Cupcake asked, “Is he sleeping?”

  “You wish. This is a level 3 trauma with subdural hematoma. So tell me, do you believe this crap about he slipped on a step?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  “Then what happened out there?”

  “Wouldn’t I like to know.”

  “Hazard a guess.”

  “Someone hit him with a board.”

  “Are there boards out there?”

  “No. Shovels, maybe. Is there an edge to that bruise? I never got a good look since you got him cleaned up.”

  “Here, put on a mask first. He’s had fluid leaking out of his ear, which means the lining around his brain’s ruptured. It happens a lot in closed head injuries. They can get septic really easily, and then you’ve got a head injury and encephalitis.”

  Cupcake p
ut on the mask the nurse offered and bent over her fallen comrade, examining as much of his face as she could see. “Aw, shit,” she said. “If he’d slipped on the tractor, he couldn’t have done that.”

  “Because…?”

  “Is his skull fractured?”

  “Yes.” The nurse pointed at the X-rays.

  “To do all that on the bottom step of a Challenger, his legs would have had to fly out sideways, like someone grabbed them and yanked them out from under him bringing him down like a hammer. And I don’t see any tread marks from the step or anything.” She shook her head. “But even that isn’t what tells me it wasn’t any falling off any steps. Tell you the truth, I suspected as much before I came in here.”

  “Give,” said the doctor.

  Cupcake pointed. “Whatever hit him, or whatever he was hit with, made him bleed. There was coagulated blood all down the side of his head when we found him.”

  “And?”

  “He never wore a hat. And his hood was pulled up onto his head.”

  “Which means?”

  Cupcake walked over to where Steve’s ECWs were laid out on another bed. She turned the hood inside out. “There’s no blood on it, see? That means that when the injury occurred, and the blood dried, his hood was down. How long does it take for blood to clot, even in the cold? Several minutes, I’d bet. So it was down. In that blizzard would you take your hood off, even for a minute? No, you wouldn’t, which means that he wasn’t outside when it happened, or he’d just stepped out and hadn’t pulled it up yet.”

  “Point well taken.”

  “Right, and even if any of that made sense, I can’t buy the idea that he hit his head and walked off into the storm. Someone would have seen him, and when you’re that screwed up, you don’t get into your Cat, drive it a ways, then get out and take a stroll.”

  “Right.”

  Cupcake shook her head. “You know what I think? I think some son of a bitch sapped him and dumped him out on the ice, thinking that we’d never find him in time.”

  The doctor looked at her watch. “I agree. His blood pressure is dropping, and vital signs are unstable. If we can’t get them under control soon, we’re going to have to take the risk of flying him to the ER in Cheech, or that son of a bitch will have succeeded anyway.”

  16

  VALENA SETTLED IN WITH A CUP OF TEA AND WAITED FOR Manuel Roig to come into the galley. The minutes ticked past, and she got herself a second dessert, and then a third. As the hour for the food lines to close neared, the dining assistants came out of the kitchen and began to remove the steel serving tanks from the steam tables, and she began to wonder if she had missed him, but at last she spotted him through the windows, coming out of the hospital. He crossed to Building 155 and a few moments later arrived in the serving area. There he crossed to the wall adjacent to the kitchen doorway and opened a cupboard door, revealing a warming locker. Waiting there for him was a plate loaded with food.

  Valena made one more pass back through the food lines, nailed some fine-looking devil’s food cake and a cup of decaf coffee, then headed back toward the corner of the room where she’d seen him sit down. He had his head bowed over his plate as if he was either at prayer or nearly asleep. He didn’t look up when she approached his table, even though there were very few people left in the galley.

  For a moment, Valena felt sorry to disturb him, but urgency won out over manners. “Manny?”

  He looked up as if suddenly wakened. “Oh! Uh… Valena, right?”

  “You’re good.”

  “I’m tired. Excuse me, please, it’s been a long day.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Of course. I don’t mean to be rude.” He made a tired gesture toward the chair across from him and returned his concentration to his dinner.

  “You were out on the search for the man who got lost. I hear he’s in the hospital, beginning his recovery.”

  “Yes, we were lucky, gracias a dios.”

  “How did he get to where they found him?” she inquired, immediately sorry that she had applied the wrong pronoun. Manuel had said “we” and she had demoted that to “they.”

  “Walked, I suppose.”

  “How far was it?”

  Manuel made a gesture with his fork and looked glassily through the walls of the building and the rocks and ice beyond. “Five, six miles.”

  “How far from his tractor?”

  “Call it four, four and a half.”

  Valena nodded slowly, thinking. “So, how fast do you think a man can walk in a whiteout? Maybe two miles per hour, tops? And how likely do you think it would be that he’d be able to do that in a straight line?”

  Manny raised his gaze from his dinner to look at her inquiringly. “Depends on whether he was following the flags. They found him not far from the route. And conditions might have been less severe where he was walking. It cleared to the west before here in McMurdo. We won’t know until he wakes up.”

  “So three hours he was walking, minimum. Was he not a very hardy man?”

  Manuel’s eyes drew into a squint. “Why are you asking?”

  “Because I think it odd that he would succumb to exposure that quickly. It’s cold here, sure, but I noticed that when the storm came in last night it actually got a little warmer overall. Even with the windchill factor. So a grown man properly dressed for the conditions walks for three hours and suddenly keels over in a coma?”

  “He seems to have fallen off the bottom step of the Challenger and hit his head. Got a concussion. It can really screw up your judgment. In fact he hit it hard enough that he started to bleed inside.”

  “Is that the theory?”

  “Theory? What are you—oh, I get it, you’re a scientist. Always a theory. So, multiple working hypotheses, you’ve got to have at least one more. What’s the null hypothesis? He didn’t have an accident? Someone hit him? Dragged his body five miles and dumped it on the ice. Nice way of thinking.”

  Valena stared at her hands.

  Manuel said, “Perhaps there was something else wrong with him. He had a small stroke or something, enough to make him stupid enough to get out of his vehicle during a whiteout. Why? What’s this to you? Listen, I don’t like to be unfriendly, but like I say, it’s been a long—”

  “Valena interrupted. I’m supposed to be heading out to the field with Emmett Vanderzee,” she said.

  Manuel put down his fork and closed his eyes. Cleared his throat. “Oh. Well, I suppose then there’s a connection, in your mind at least. Forgive me, Valena, but I just can’t tell you how tired I am. Today was in fact the worst day in my life since I left Emmett’s camp.”

  “Why?”

  He opened his eyes and glared at her. “I do not wish to lose another man to the ice.”

  “Look, I’m being pushy, I know. But I was hoping you could tell me what happened last year at Emmett’s camp.”

  Manuel bowed his head again. “I’d rather not. Oh please, I’d rather not.”

  “You’re teaching Happy Camp, babysitting fingies instead of going up into the mountains with field parties. Why? Was it that bad?”

  For several moments, Manuel said nothing. Then, in a harsh whisper, “You simply cannot imagine just how bad it was, Valena. It was my job to keep that man alive, but instead I watched him die. I heard him take his last breath.” He picked up his fork and stabbed at his meat. His hand was shaking. He tried to lift it to his lips. He set it down and left it there.

  “So you stayed in the tent with him while Emmett looked for the chute with the Gamow unit?”

  Manuel clenched his teeth. “You think you saw a whiteout this morning? That day was infinitely worse.”

  “Then how did you look for the Gamow bag? Did you tie up together with ropes?”

  “No. Yes! Toward the end we did. As mountaineer, I was in charge, so yes, I had everyone rope up because we were working close to a crevasse field. In places, the surface was sheer ice, and our crampons were of little comfort. If any
one lost their footing and landed on their belly, they’d slide for thousands of feet, accelerating before they hit something. So yes, we were tied in. But that was after the storm had begun to abate. You must understand that no one could do anything while it was blowing. We heard the Herc fly over, we heard the pilot call us over the radio to say he’d made the drop, that it should be right on top of us, but we could not find it.”

  “Major Bentley,” she guessed. “He was the pilot in the Herc.”

  “And he was the pilot with the crew that came and took us out.”

  “How big an object was this they dropped?”

  Manuel shook his head in frustration. “You ask this. Everybody has asked this. ‘A four-foot cube of wood and iron with a big, orange parachute on it and you can’t find the thing,’ they say. And what do I have to tell them in reply? Nothing. We could not find it, I tell them. It was nowhere.”

  “Four feet on a side?”

  “That’s what the loadmaster told me later. He packed the thing on a four-by-four wooden pallet. It was too light, he said, so he put a fifty-five-gallon barrel of fuel on it, to give it weight. And I tell you, it was nowhere to be found. It was almost like they hadn’t dropped it at all.” He made a slashing motion with his hand. He was getting angry.

  Valena decided that it was politic to change the subject slightly. “Who was there? Were you all in the same tent?”

  Manuel stared at the tabletop. “Why are you asking all these questions?”

  “Because I’m supposed to be on a flight out of here Thursday morning. I’ve got less than thirty-six hours to clear Emmett or I go home. I’m supposed to do something called bag drag tomorrow evening. My little clock is ticking down.”

  “I don’t know what I can do to change that.”

  “I’m trying to help my professor, Manny! And yes, I’m trying to help myself. If he returns, I stay. So tell me, please. Who was there? Who was in which tent?”

  Manny looked up again. “So many questions! Okay. Okay, I’ve told this a thousand times to the FBI, but I’ll tell you, too. There were eight in camp. Emmett, me, the… dead man… the cook, the two grad students, Emmett’s assistant, the blaster’s assistant, and the other guy, the gopher. That was it.”