In Cold Pursuit vw-1

by Sarah Andrews

  Hilario whipped his snow machine around and thundered toward the Delta, hollering for him to stop, waving his arms. Wee Willy either could not hear or was not listening, and kept the monstrous beast thrashing. Finally, as the axles began to disappear, he stopped the vehicle, climbed out, shambled twenty feet off the trail, and sat down in the snow. He did not move or speak but instead just sat there, staring off across the ice.

  Far down the trail, Dave turned the Challenger around and made a slow approach, ready to smooth the trail once the Delta was freed.

  Valena got off her snow machine, walked over to the Delta, and began to kick loose snow away from around the wheels. “Got a shovel?” she asked Edith, who was very slowly climbing down off the load. “I’ve seen this kind of problem before on my grandfather’s farm. Dead of winter, he once got a tractor trailer stuck out in the pasture. We dug away the loose stuff, got a low-angle slope, set the vehicle in granny gear, and drove it on out.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Hilario, producing a shovel from underneath the back seat of the Delta.

  They took turns digging.

  Wee Willy sat and stared away to the south.

  After taking her second turn with the shovel, Edith said, “I’ll be back in a minute. I’m ChapStick dependent, and I left it in my other ball gown.”

  Valena asked Hilario, “Why do you guys let him get away with this crap? I don’t see Dave letting him get away with this. For that matter, why am I doing this for him?”

  “You? You’re just a show-off. Dave had his fill of Willy long ago. Me, I don’t get excited about Willy ‘cause I figure he got dropped on his head somewhere along the line. And Edith? She’s just shaping her charge. She’s pretty even-tempered, and she knows that no matter how much this may look like a simple job of ramming flags into the snow, each and every moment it’s also a matter of survival. Somebody gets twisted a little too tight out here, sometimes it’s better to give them a chance to cool off.” He laughed. ‘And we all know there’s plenty of cooling off you can do around here.”

  “Yeah, but why not send along a stronger team member?”

  Hilario laughed again, with an edge this time. “The Boss sent him along as sort of a morale booster. Hah. Total waste of a perfectly good boondoggle, if you ask me. I think he just wanted him out of Mac Town before someone murdered him. Okay, your turn with the shovel again.”

  With the snow excavated into a ramp, Valena had the pleasure of driving the Delta out of the rut Wee Willy had made, and Dave got to work with the Challenger and goose filling in the hole. When they were ready to proceed again, Edith took a turn at the wheel of the Delta and put Wee Willy on the top of the load tossing flags, and Valena and Hilario went back at it with the pikes.

  The wind continued to rise. Clouds now filled the southern horizon. Streamers of snow wailed past them at an angle to the trail, immediately smoothing the tracks left by their vehicles.

  By 1750 hours, they were climbing the lower slopes of Black Island. With relief, Edith made her call to Mac Ops while Dave dropped the goose from the Challenger and Hilario and Valena put the covers on the snow machines. They had set ten miles of flags, and they were a half-hour ahead of deadline. Wee Willy climbed along the side of the cab and heaved himself inside. Hilario climbed into the Challenger with Dave, and Valena joined Edith in the Delta for the ride up the steep pitch of bare rock road that led to the station.

  Edith gave Valena a pat on the shoulder. “You’re a real trooper,” she said. “You didn’t have to do anything but drive, but you busted your butt for us all afternoon. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Okay, then, next stop, Black Island Station. Hold onto your hat; the wind here knows no mercy. The food’s amazingly good for a dry camp, and if you don’t mind a little coarse language, the station manager’s a kitten, but the bunkhouse… well, it’s not my fault, so I won’t apologize.”

  Valena realized that she was grinning. She was the happiest she had felt in years.

  24

  IN MCMURDO, TED FINISHED LOCKING UP THE BLASTING equipment for the day and indulged himself in a regal stretch, pulling the front of his Carhartt parka taut. It had been a good day. The afternoon’s blast had gone off text-book perfect, the heavy equipment operators tasked to him had moved the rubble quickly and efficiently, and Wilbur had not pissed him off even once. It was time for a quick shower, a hearty dinner, and a shot or two of good whiskey. The only blemish on the day was the crushing news that the man who had turned up lost on the ice was dead. On second thought, Ted decided, I’ll make that four shots from my secret stash of single malt.

  As he started down the hill toward his dormitory, Ted spotted the unmistakable form of Cupcake coming uphill toward him. There was a man next to her, a beaker by the look of him: big red, black wind pants, beard. Cupcake raised an arm and waved to him, the sort of stop-where-you-are motion that says, You’re the guy we’re coming to see. What now! Ted wondered.

  “Ted!” Cupcake called out. “Wait!”

  Ted hadn’t realized that he had begun sidling toward an escape route until she spoke. “Who’s your friend?” he asked.

  “This is the Padre,” she said.

  The man stepped forward quickly and offered a gloved hand to be shaken. “Jim Skehan. Glaciologist out of DRI.”

  Ted tensed. Having someone offer the answers to McMurdo’s first two questions of acquaintance caught him off guard. It indicated trouble, somehow. Why was it important what the guy did or where he was from? And then the dime dropped and he realized that this man must be a colleague of Emmett Vanderzee’s. What in hell was Cupcake up to now? He waited for her to explain herself.

  Ted waited.

  Skehan watched him wait. Something about the glaciologist’s face bothered Ted. Skehan’s almost expressionless mug, perhaps, or was it the laser-sharp eyes that floated in that impassiveness?

  Cupcake said, “Okay, enough with the alpha dog act, fellas. Woof, woof, now you’re friends.”

  “Father Jim?”

  “He’s a Jesuit. Get over it. “Father Jim and I have been out to the place where we found Steve,” she said. We found something important out there. We found tracks.”

  Ted’s eyes shifted to Cupcake. “After that blow?”

  Skehan said, “Even a footprint compacts the snow just a little, moving it from snow toward ice. And more importantly, the layers are disturbed by anything that transits over the snow. Maybe you’d have a hard time finding penguin footprints out there, but anything as heavy as a man, or certainly a vehicle, will leave a trace. Then, unless the wind scours down below the level of compaction, you can still see the tracks. If they get buried, you can cut a small trench to find them.”

  “So let me get this straight: You two were able to find the exact place again in all that ice and went at it like a couple of archaeologists, or something.”

  Skehan shrugged. “Actually, the helicopter helped us. When it landed and took off to pick up Steve, it blew the newest layers of snow away. The spot wasn’t that hard to find. Dorothy here isn’t exactly a new hand, either.”

  Cupcake said, “The point is, we were able to examine the tracks around where Steve was lying.”

  Hunger to know what had happened to Steve won out over ego. “All right, what did you see?” he asked.

  Cupcake said, “He was near the flagged route that leads out to Cape Evans, but not on it, so the footprints that led up to him had been cut into fresh, uncompacted snow.” She turned to Skehan. “Tell him the rest.”

  Skehan said, “We went to the hospital afterward, and they still had Steve’s boots. He had been wearing his own boots, not USAP issue. They had a different tread pattern from the ones we found out there. The pattern we found was exactly the same as FDX—you know, the blue boots.”

  “Beaker boots,” said Ted. “Were the tracks bigger, smaller, or the same size as Steve’s?”

  “We didn’t get perfect recovery on any of the tracks. What we sa
w were fragmental. When you walk in stiff-soled boots, you either walk flat-footed or you kind of mash the snow around, rolling off the toe and crushing the rest of your print. And whoever dropped him there took certain pains to step back toward the flag route using the same footsteps, which further disrupted them, and then there were the footprints of the rescuers. But we were still able to find three good prints that tell the story. What we could see seemed bigger than Steve’s boots.”

  “And there were marks where Steve’s feet were dragged across the snow,” Cupcake added.

  Skehan nodded. “Whoever did it was in a hurry. It was a hasty job. You can just see the little wheels in his head going, ‘I’ve just hit this guy across the head, so what am I going to do with him? I don’t want him waking up, and if I hit him again it sure won’t look like an accident anymore, so what should I do? Let’s see… I’d better let him freeze to death. To make sure that happens, I’ll put him somewhere they won’t find him in time. Now, where’s a good place? It has to look like something he could have done on his own, so dumping him in a blowhole for some Weddell seal isn’t quite the ticket. How about just dumping him near the flag route a couple miles out past the point? No one’s going out there anytime soon, not in this weather, and when they find him, they’ll just think he headed the wrong way in the storm.’”

  Ted shook his head. “One little problem: the storm. If nobody else could get out there and back in that weather without getting lost, then how could our killer do it?”

  Skehan said, “I’d use GPS. I’ve done it myself in Greenland. You need to have mapped the route beforehand, set your waypoints, but you can do it.”

  “We’re pretty far south here, lad. The satellite coverage can be a little sketchy.”

  “Maybe I get lucky.”

  “Nasty,” said Ted. “I suppose it could work, on a long shot. Then let me ask another question: Why are you two telling me this? Why aren’t you going straight to the Chalet with this?”

  “We’ll get around to telling Bellamy,” said Skehan. “But you know the party line over there. They don’t want the publicity. The muzzle he put on Emmett’s arrest was appalling.”

  “But once again, why me?”

  “Because you were there last year,” said Cupcake. “Or almost. You know the players. We’ve done some figuring, and almost all the other people who were at Emmett’s camp when the man died were in or around McMurdo yesterday when this happened. Calvin, Dave, and William were here. Sheila had come in by helicopter the day before to do her laundry and pick up supplies and was held up by the storm until evening. Bob Schwartz’s flight to WAIS Divide was canceled, so he was here. Manny Roig led the SAR team. Dan Lindemann was supposed to be in the Dry Valleys, but I’m checking on him. The only person who was up at that camp when the man died last year who has a bomb-proof alibi for yesterday is Emmett himself, because he’s locked up in Hawaii.”

  Ted said, “And what’s your agenda?”

  Skehan said, “Simple: I want Emmett’s name cleared. He’s more than a colleague, he’s a friend, but even putting that aside… okay, I’ll be entirely candid. When Frink attacked Emmett in the Financial News, he attacked all of us. He attacked the whole planet. He distorted the facts. He distorted how science is done. He was just plain wrong. He was selling a story designed to woo readers into believing that scientists who study climate don’t know what they’re doing. He was telling everyone to just sit back and keep comfy and keep burning all the oil and coal they want.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  Skehan stared him down. “He was supporting the guys who say, ‘I don’t care if greenhouse gasses heat up the atmosphere, because when we build our 120 new coal-fired plants in the United States, and more in China, yet more in India, we make money, so to hell with our grandkids! Let them make money selling ice to cool us back down!’ Of course, there will be no ice left for them to sell, but that’s progress!”

  Ted said, “I’m not arguing with you, Skehan, but I was one of the last people to see that man alive. I didn’t see any horns coming out of his head, and he isn’t the one who wrote that article.”

  Skehan said, “Do you want any more deaths out here? No. And if we can connect the two deaths, then Emmett’s in the clear, because he wasn’t here for the second one.”

  Ted said, “But that doesn’t clear him of the first one. Not really. And what if they aren’t connected? Sounds like you have no concern for who killed Steve. After all, he wasn’t a scientist. He was only support staff. A tradesman. A Carhartt.”

  Skehan closed his eyes. “Ted, I don’t know who bit your ass,” he said, keeping his voice soft and slow, “but I’ve worked on this ice five seasons, and two more in Greenland. When one is on the ice, death is always right there waiting for us. “He opened his eyes again.” If we die by mischance, or through sickness, that’s a tragedy that affects us all. But we don’t often die out here, simply because we are a community. We work together, and live almost inside each other’s pockets. It’s a time-honored tradition, a necessity, that dates clear back to Scott and before. I do this work in part for that fellowship and that sense of shared honor, heartless intellectual though I may appear.” He pulled off his right glove and reached out between them, palm up. “And if someone’s out here purposefully causing people to die—out of cowardice, malice, greed, his motive matters not—I want him stopped. Is that good enough for you?”

  Ted stared into Skehan’s eyes for a long moment, then removed his own right glove and met him flesh to flesh. “I’m in.”

  MAJOR MARILYN WOOD PERCHED ON A STRAIGHT-BACKED chair in the conference room at the Airlift Wing offices, nursing her fifth mug of coffee for the day. “The Hummingbird,” the others called her, when they weren’t calling her “Wrong Way Wood,” which inversely referred to her prowess as a navigator. It also made a joke about the strange business of flying “north” to the south, following the grid navigational system.

  She blinked wearily, having just made the transit from New Zealand to the ice for the umpteenth time, returning with Major Hugh Muller from Christchurch after their depressing flight north with the dying tractor driver. Major Waylon Bentley finished pouring his own cup of coffee and joined them.

  Marilyn knew from years working with the Airlift Wing that Hugh preferred his caffeine fix in the form of cola and Waylon drank only water. One thing he liked about Antarctica was the ready supply of purified water that came out of the reverse osmosis system down the hill at the desalinization plant.

  The three majors sat quietly together.

  “Okay, this is what we’ve got,” Marilyn said, breaking their meditative silence. “They had eight souls on board: Vanderzee, his graduate students Schwartz and Lindemann, Sheila the cook, two guys out of Fleet Ops—Dave Fitzgerald and the guy they call Wee Willy—and Calvin Hart. Oh, and of course, the deceased. They call for a replacement Gamow thirty-six hours after we pull the blaster out. It takes us six hours to get it to them, but they never find it, or so they claim. Waylon, you saw it this year when they dug it up.”

  Waylon twisted in his chair. “Yeah, the bundle was intact. Medical rig, pallet, fuel drum, and tracking beacon. The chute was buried underneath it, all crumpled up. It was absolutely not the result of a chance trick of the wind. No way.”

  Hugh said, “And the beacon had been disabled.”

  “Disconnected,” said Waylon.

  “You’re sure,” said Marilyn.

  “Damn certain sure,” Waylon affirmed. “And here’s the thing: it wasn’t like it had been smashed by chance or yanked apart by an amateur. Whoever did it not only turned it off, but knew how it worked, and he had to know what the thing was in the first place. The wires were neatly disconnected. So it was either ex-military or someone with electronics experience.”

  “But how did it all get buried?” asked Hugh. “I mean, all that weighed something. Was it all still rigged together?”

  “Yes. The cargo straps were still in place. So you’re right,
it was heavy. Wrong Way, did you get into the loadmaster’s records on that?”

  Marilyn nodded. “It was rigged to exceed four hundred pounds. And have you ever tried to push a pallet when it was loaded? It’s not like it’s on skis.”

  Hugh said, “I’ve looked up the weather records. The wind was blowing from the camp toward the place where it was buried, but we dropped nice and low to minimize drift. Even if we were off in our calculations, someone still had to move that mass three hundred meters at least. So we’re still talking major effort. With apologies to the fairer sex, Marilyn, I think that eliminates the cook.”

  “Unless she wasn’t working alone,” Marilyn said.

  Waylon scratched his chin. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, we haven’t considered the conspiracy angle. We keep thinking it was one person acting alone. That rather opens the field.”

  They all looked at each other.

  “They had a snow machine out there,” said Marilyn.

  Waylon pondered this. “Man, I would not like to try to drag a bundle with one of those hogs in that weather. Give me a nice, warm cockpit any day.”

  “Right,” said Hugh. “So any way you slice it, we’ve got a defeated bundle. So it comes down to this: which one of them had the technology or the know-how to a) find it in full blizzard conditions, b) bury it, and c) defeat the beacon while he was at it? Surely that’s got to narrow the field a little, now, doesn’t it?”

  Waylon said, “I’m still thinking ex-military.”

  ‘And trained in navigation,” said Marilyn.

  Hugh gave her a grin. “That would be your department. What would it take?”