Wee Willy lurched up off the seat and began to empty himself out the door.
‘“Hasta luego, amigo. Vaya con dios,” said Hilario.
Wee Willy did not reply. Heaving himself down out of the door frame, he dropped onto the ice and shambled off toward one of the snow machines, leaving the door open to the breeze.
Valena slammed the door with rather more force than was necessary.
“Oh, you’ll get used to him,” said Hilario. “Or not.”
The snow machines were bigger and more utilitarian versions of what Valena would have called a snowmobile at home. They had the usual setup of skis in front and a single track behind and a saddle in the middle right behind motorcycle-style controls. But beyond that, they differed from their streamlined northern cousins in a matter of studied inelegance. As Wee Willy pulled the canvas cover off of one, she could see that the front cowling was one big, charmless expanse of blaze orange. The seat was a single slab of black plastic. And toward the back of the vehicle, a simple plywood box had been added to carry gear.
The heater in the cab had risen from pleasantly warm to full roast, so Valena cracked the window a few inches and shrugged off her big red parka, then turned and packed it onto the backseat, rearranging the duffels and equipment stowed there so that they wouldn’t shift en route. “What’s this?” she inquired, picking up a tube of fake fur that hadn’t been there before.
Hilario let out a sardonic chuckle. “That’s Wee Willy’s hand warmer. His ma gave it to him.”
“Oh.” She put it up on the backseat.
The Challenger pulled up next to them, and Valena watched as the fifth member of their party climbed out of a jump seat in its cab and climbed down the steps to the ice. “Is that Dave?” she asked Hilario.
“Yeah. Good guy. Drove out there and found Steve.”
Valena realized that it was the man who had stared at her in the hallway outside the galley the evening before. Her heart sank. I’m replacing a man who died, one of the team glares at me, and another just plain stares, thought Valena. This is going to be a long trip.
Dave crossed to one of the snow machines, checked its number against the tag of his ignition key, brushed the snow off its canvas cover, removed the cover and folded it neatly, then stowed it in a compartment. That done, he swung a leg gracefully over the saddle and lowered himself onto it. He stuck the key into the ignition and began clearing snow off other parts of the machinery.
Edith’s voice crackled over the radio that was mounted in the ceiling of the cab. “Mac Ops, Mac Ops, this is Challenger 283, how read?”
“Mac Ops copies, go ahead.”
“This is Edith Tanner. We are five souls in four vehicles—a Challenger, a Delta, and two snow machines. Contact is the Boss. Destination Black Island. We will traverse to KOA, then start setting flags at the edge of the dead zone. Intend overnight at Black Island Station and return tomorrow by eighteen hundred. Over.”
Dave completed his snow-clearing task, set the primer and the choke, switched on the engine, and, with a few quick compressions of the hand-grip throttle, revved it to a level past which it kept running on its own. Then he set to adjusting his cuffs so that they would not become wind scoops.
“Mac Ops copies. Call from KOA before you enter dead zone, but in any case I want to hear from you by sixteen hundred, over. And you be careful, okay?”
“We will. Challenger 283 copies. Over and out.”
“Mac Ops out.”
Edith maneuvered the big Cat into place in front of the goose, which was an eight-foot-wide hydraulically operated grading blade mounted on a trailing chassis that was supported by skis. Once the machine was in position, she climbed down the steps out of the cab to secure the hitch and connect the hydraulic lines.
Dave continued to adjust his clothing, now pulling his polypropylene neck gaiter up over his nose, cinching his hood tight against his cheeks, and then putting a pair of goggles over the top. Last, he replaced his gloves, adjusting their cuffs over the cuffs of his parka.
Valena asked Hilario, “Why’s he wearing red instead of tan?”
“It’s a matter of preference. Most of us are more used to smearing grease all over tan. OF Dave here works as hard as the rest of us but somehow stays cleaner.”
“Oh. What’s the dead zone?”
“Oh, that’s where we’re behind Black Island and the radio can’t ‘see’ us. We have to go all the way around the south side of the island to get to the station that’s on it, because the ice is all screwed up on the north side, facing McMurdo here.”
“Why isn’t there a radio repeater?”
Hilario let out a rueful cackle. “Because there’s nothing out there, that’s why. What, you think a continent half again the size of the US with only, say, three thousand people on it—and that’s in summertime—has a radio antenna in every little place you might like to go?”
“I suppose not.”
“Then you suppose right. Look up there. That’s all we got between us and Black Island Station.” He pointed at the array of antennae on top of the building that housed Mac Ops and the Airlift Wing. “Black Island’s got the big satellite dish, but it’s there for telecommunications, not radio, and it ain’t looking south.”
“Where is it looking?”
Hilario rolled his eyes. “It’s pointed north. It looks at a geostationary satellite over the equator. Damn thing is tipped up within four degrees of standing on its edge to see it. So you can do the math. It’s seventy-eight degrees south latitude, looking how many thousand miles north—that puts that satellite up pretty high, eh? Like, so the dish can see it over the curve of the earth?”
“Doing trigonometry in my head has never been my forte.”
Wee Willy had by this time finally made a match between his key fob and a snow machine number, had balled up the canvas covering on his machine and stuffed it into the wooden box mounted toward the back, leaving bungee cords dangling near the tread, and was having trouble getting it started. He cranked the ignition, hammered on the throttle, then stopped, waited a moment, kicked the machine, then repeated the whole routine, as if he could beat it into submission.
Dave sat adjusting his gear box, paying no attention to Wee Willy.
Edith opened the door to the cab of the Challenger and shouted, “Hey! You ever heard of the primer and choke, or what?”
Wee Willy shot her a scowl.
Edith hoisted herself out of the driver’s seat and started down the steps toward her colleague. She closed the distance between her vehicle and his, pushed him out of her way with one hip, set the primer and the choke, gave the starter a switch and a yank, gave the throttle a couple of pumps, held it until the machine revved nice and high, adjusted the choke, and then stepped back and waited.
Wee Willy gave no outward evidence of noticing that Edith had assisted him. He settled himself back on the saddle like a load of turnips and pulled up his hood. As an after-thought, he pushed his hood back again, dug at the throat of his parka until he found his neck gaiter and pulled it up to the bottom of his nose, pulled his goggles down to meet it, then pulled his hood over the top of the elastic. He took off his gloves to accomplish this, dropping both on the ice. The wind caught one and blew it five feet away. Wee Willy climbed off his machine, galumphed after it, slipped and almost fell in the process of picking it up, then at last caught it and put it on, stuffing the cuff under the cuff of his parka.
“This is going to be a long trip,” said Hilario.
Edith had headed back to the Challenger. As she placed her foot on the bottom step and started to raise the other, she slipped and took a tumble off onto the ice.
Dave instantly hopped off his idling snow machine and rushed to help her up. “You okay? You scared me, Edith. We don’t need any more accidents around here.”
Edith brushed snow off her Carhartts. “It’s just like the Boss said. These bottom steps are all crammed with ice. He warned us about this in the safety meeting at the beginni
ng of the season.” Edith headed back up the steps, placing her feet with greater care.
Dave moved in and kicked the steps free of ice, then turned and strolled back to his waiting snow machine.
“But both she and Dave came down without slipping,” Valena said, to no one in particular.
Hilario said, “She gets to rushing sometimes. Buckin’ for pro-mo-tion,” he said, singing the last word.
The Challenger, dragging the trail-grooming bar called the goose, swung out ahead of them and headed down the flag route that led out toward the ice runway. A snow machine shot out on either side of it, kicking up loose snow. Hilario swung in line behind them. They were off.
23
HILARIO LOOKED TO VALENA’S EDUCATION AS A DELTA driver. “Watch and learn,” he said, pushing the mammoth snow-crawler into higher gear. “You gonna be driving this thing in less than an hour.” They began to roll faster. “This baby’s got five forward gears, automatic shift. You can start it out set in high gear and it’ll shift itself up there as it goes, or start in a lower gear and shift up when you’re ready, but you always got to downshift by hand, except you don’t have to work no clutch. Cardinal rule, don’t let it break traction. You feel the thing beginning to labor, or hear the engine speed slow, you downshift like this,” he said, demonstrating with an easy tug of the shift lever.
“Seems simple enough.”
“Don’t get overconfident. Pay attention all times.”
“Check.”
“Don’t go off the trail. That Challenger’s got treads, you got tires. With this load, you weigh fifteen tons. Especially don’t go off the trail here.” He pointed to the trail ahead of them, where it choked down to a narrows that led between two clusters of flags. Many of the flags were black.
“Big crack in the ice or something?”
“This is where the fuel lines cross from the island out to the ice runway. Don’t go outside this slot or you gonna make yourself very unpopular round here.” They rode up over a concealed bridge and down the other side. The route widened out again. “Okay, now here we got four lanes, closest thing to an Interstate highway on this whole continent. Outer two lanes are for tracked vehicles, inner two are rubber tires, that’s us.”
Training continued as they took a left at the first fork in the route, toward Williams Field—”Willy, they call it; it’s named after this dude who drove a Cat through the ice over by Cape Evans,” Hilario explained—then turned right a mile or two later, heading south toward Pegasus. “The third runway,” said Hilario, “is for landing C-17s after the sea ice gets too soft to take the weight. We gotta resurface it every year, and it’s farther from town, so we use the sea ice as long as we can.”
The flagged trail dropped from four lanes to two. Finally, the turn to Pegasus swung off to the right, the route dropped to one lane, and they were on the Black Island route.
“Nothing beyond here but ice,” said Hilario. “That flagged route to pole heads off down here. That’s it. Nothing else. No man’s land.”
They moved at ten miles per hour. The Challenger ground along ahead of them, carving through snowdrifts, smoothing and compacting the trail. They had now left what Antarctica had in the way of civilization, and the human universe shrank quickly in contrast to the immensity of the ice on which they traveled. As they rode along, Hilario and Valena chatted sporadically, swapping unimportant facts about themselves, such as favorite foods and things to do in leisure time, and commenting on the variations in the crests and hollows the wind had carved into the hard-packed snow that shrouded the ice. Finally, Hilario said, “Time for you to start driving.”
“Where are we?” asked Valena, searching the raw, white scenery for familiar landmarks. Hut Point and McMurdo Station had disappeared behind a rise and clouds had gathered about the towering heights of the Transantarctic Mountains and Mount Erebus. Their world had been consumed by snow and ice.
He pointed to a black smear of ice-dappled volcanic rock in the distance. “That’s Black Island there, and that’s—”
“I mean are we still on the sea ice or are we coming up onto the ice shelf? I saw a map that put the boundary between the two out here somewhere.”
“Well, if you can’t see an edge, then there’s really no difference, now, is there?”
“Yes, there is. A huge difference. The one is ocean water that freezes and breaks up annually. The other is freshwater snow that refroze into ice thousands of miles from here and—”
“Oh, so you’re going to split hairs. Okay, then, we’re on the ice shelf.”
“But where? I was expecting a cliff, or a climb of some sort.”
“What are you, a glaciologist or something?”
“Well, yes, in fact I am.”
“I heard you’re a grantee. So why you in this bucket?”
Valena did not answer. She was thinking, It’s like McMurdo is one big communal organism, like a sponge or a jellyfish. The odd experience of being sent through the kitchen by the omelet man returned to mind. Somehow, between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., half of McMurdo had heard about her change of plans, not to mention who she was and what she did here. This was not comforting, especially now that the man named Steve was dead. And how exactly had he died? It occurred to her that he might have been murdered.
She chided herself for thinking this thought, but murder had indeed occurred at Emmett’s camp; there was no doubt of that now. Larry’s information of the evening before had changed all that from speculation to certainty. Emmett himself had been taken into custody as a result, and… and who was she to say that he was innocent?
She hardly knew the man. Was Emmett Vanderzee a coldblooded killer? His graduate students from the year before had gone on to other projects. They could have stayed on. Why had they jumped ship? Had they left him because they no longer trusted him? If so, what had changed their minds?
Somebody had prevented the journalist from getting the aid he needed, and that was murder. Had the feds fingered Emmett because he was the only one who had a motive to kill that man or because he was the only one who had had the opportunity? Perhaps one of the graduate students had buried that Gamow unit and had now separated himself from the whole situation by scorning his former professor. Was that why Bob Schwartz ran off without answering my questions?
Thus far, she had spoken to only three of the people who’d been present in the camp—Cal Hart, Bob Schwartz, and Manuel Roig—and they had each seemed reticent to talk about the situation. No, wait, Cal Hart was interrupted by Jim Skehan, she reminded herself. But what was Bob’s problem? And was Manuel Roig in fact too exhausted after searching for Steve? Or was the memory of watching a man die in Antarctica too painful to visit? But what if this was a foil, an easy explanation behind which to hide? Did he have a reason to want the journalist dead? Valena’s brain buzzed with the questions she had not thought to ask these men, such as, Did you know Sweeny before you went to Emmett’s camp?
She ran down her mental list of possible killers. William the dogsbody was there by accident and was supposedly lazy or incompetent. She had no way of knowing whether he had a motive. David/Dave—the other muscle sent to the high camp—was a blank.
She looked out the window of the Delta, wondering if the David and William who had been present at Emmett’s camp could possibly be the Dave and Wee Willy who were at that moment cutting lazy figure eights in through the drifts beyond the groomed trail. No, too much of a coincidence, she decided. A thousand people work at McMurdo during the season, and David and William are common names.
The cook she was about to meet. What was she like? A bit cranky, having been alone with a tribe of men at high elevation? Would that make her a killer? And Calvin Hart: what was his story? What did he do for the project?
Cracking into Valena’s silence, Hilario repeated his question in a different form. “So really, what you doing driving out to Black Island?”
Valena blinked. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a little tired. Still jet-lagged, I gu
ess.”
“It takes a while to adjust,” said Hilario. “First time on the ice, it takes at least a week. Dehydration, the endless daylight, all the weird people, eating food that comes out of a can…”
“I like it fine.”
“And you are going to Black Island because…?”
She tried to decide what of substance, if anything, she wanted to tell him. Clearly her story was getting around, but how much of it? “I wanted to see the Ross Ice Shelf,” she said at last. “I’d read so many accounts by the early explorers of how vast it was, and…” Her grip on her mind slipped again. And what? Deep in her guts she did want to see it, if only a glimpse. Had always wanted to see it. Had longed for it, and for all of Antarctica. She shook her head and closed her eyes. Fatigue was definitely beginning to get the better of her. Fatigue and stress. She needed more sleep.
“Well, what do you think? Seen enough yet?” He fell into his low chuckle again.
It is beautiful, she wanted to say. Painfully, astonishingly, joyously, severely beautiful, but instead she guarded her heart and, from her intellect, said, “I had expected something more dramatic, not that this isn’t pretty awe-inspiring. But I thought there would be a cliff, or at least a steep rise.” She had wanted an edge to cross, past which she could say, Now I have been to that place that summoned me.
She felt Hilario’s eyes on her. “Any time this month you want to learn to drive this thing,” he said, letting it roll to a stop. “Come on, it won’t bite you. Climb over here.”
They switched places and Valena settled herself behind the wheel, which was about eighteen inches in diameter and mounted almost flat, like that on a bus. Hilario showed her which gear to start out in—second for most purposes, first for soft snow or other questionable conditions. She gave it some gas and the big beast began to move. A smile spread across her face.
In Cold Pursuit vw-1 Page 20
