In Cold Pursuit vw-1 Page 17

  “Yes,” said Valena. “He… once he let me drive it.”

  “Oooo…”

  “Or rather, I sat on his lap, and he let me steer.” The heady scent of the old man’s sweat, the warmth of his skin and the hard and soft edges of his ancient bones and body felt through his cotton duck pants and plaid shirt came back to her as if it were still happening. How she had longed for that moment, the official “now I am eight years old” grandchild ride, with all the cousins watching. They were cheering, proud of her, for the moment not calling her those names…

  And then Great Aunt Dilla had emerged from the kitchen door. She blew out onto the porch like a storm, roiling in her dark intensity, her head coming forward in a threat, and shrieked, “Get that child off that tractor!”

  All the cousins turned. One laughed, a toxic little snicker.

  She felt Grandpa’s leg stiffen as he stamped on the clutch. The tractor rolled to a stop. Dilla was coming at them now, her stiff legs with their varicose veins moving like a man on stilts, her craggy hands whipping this way and that like vicious attachments on a machine of death. “I will not have it! I don’t care what your wayward daughter brings home in her twisted notions of Christian charity, I will not have her drive that tractor!”

  Grandpa had stood up for her, scolding his sister, saying, “God sees your lack of charity!” but the joy of the moment was ended. Gone forever. The cousins were smirking and sneaking looks at her. The tractor had stalled. A cloud had swept across Valena’s heart and it was still there.

  “What did it sound like?” asked Matt.

  Valena’s mind snapped back into the low, arching room in the Coffee House. The people seated at the table with her came back into focus. “Sound?” These people were smiling with her. Their merriment was shared, and at no one’s expense.

  The wraiths of remembered cousins slunk away like feral cats and curled up in the shadows at the far corners of the room, their dark eyes blinking at her from the gloom.

  She heard a strong male voice behind her. “Are you Valena Walker?”

  She turned to face the man who had approached from the bar. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “I’m in charge of Fleet Ops. I hear you have some time free, and that you know how to drive a tractor.”

  Valena looked up at this man, at his kind, calm face, his aura of bemused command. “Yes, I do. I’ve driven all the tractors on my grandfather’s farm in Idaho, and some of those up and down the way from his. I’ve helped with the harvest several times. It was fun.”

  “Ever driven a truck in soft dirt? Or snow?”

  “Countless times.” She smiled. “There’s a matter of finesse.”

  “Then I’m wondering if you’d be available to assist one of my crews. I’m a man down, as you may have heard.” Sadness rippled across his face. “Steve Myer. He had to be flown out to Christchurch this evening, and he was scheduled to go on the Black Island traverse tomorrow to resupply the telecommunications station there. This involves hauling water and other essentials over the ice shelf and fixing the flag route along the way. We have a good weather window and we need to take advantage of it, but we need a full crew, and like I say, I’m down one driver. Matt here said you might be available to assist us. Are you interested?”

  Larry said, “I’d give my left nut for a trip like that.”

  Black Island, thought Valena. That’s where the cook from last year is stationed this year. And… and it’s away from here! Out on the ice! An adventure! “I’d love to!” she said excitedly. “But, ah… well, how long does it take?” If we can get out there and back in one day, I can do this!

  “Oh, you’ll be gone overnight,” said the Boss. “It’s sixty miles, and at least thirty of those need new flags set every two hundred feet, slow going. You’d be driving one of our Deltas, carrying the cargo, and maybe you’d like to take turns on the snow machines. And then of course we’ll have one of the Challengers along to groom the trail ahead of the Delta. A Challenger 95. I’ll bet that’s a mite bigger than any you had on the farm.”

  “Oh, it is! But… I’m supposed to fly out on Thursday.”

  “I imagine I can get them to delay your flight a day or two.”

  “You can?”

  “Try me.”

  “Then it’s yes!”

  Cheers broke out around the table. Someone started a chant of, “‘Lena, tractor, ‘Lena, tractor!”

  The Boss patted her on the shoulder. “Good. You be at Building 17 first thing tomorrow—that’s seven in the a.m.—and have your ECWs with you. You got a sleeping bag?”

  Matt said, “She can use mine.”

  “There’s one in my office at Crary Lab,” said Valena.

  “Great. Matt, you help her get her gear up to 17?”

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I can handle it,” said Valena. “It’s just a big duffel.”

  “Then it’s settled. Make sure to get a good breakfast in you, and you’ll probably want to take it easy on the joy juice this gang is pushing on you. You don’t want to dehydrate out there.”

  Appreciative laughter broke out around the table. Matt gave her a wink.

  “I’ll be there,” said Valena. “Straight up, sober, and ready to drive.” She was grinning so hard that her face hurt. This is a lot better than driving a 1929 Case, she decided. A whole continent’s worth of better!

  VALENA FELT A PSYCHOLOGICAL JOLT WHEN, FIVE MINutes later, she stepped out of the lock into the blinding light of Antarctica. It was almost ten in the evening, but the sun was still well above the mountains.

  “Confusing, huh?” said Matt, who came out behind her. He smiled merrily at Valena. “Get some sleep. It’s a long way to Black Island, even if it is only sixty miles.”

  “I’m on my way,” she said, but she tarried awhile, taking in the odd sight of nighttime sunlight glinting off far glaciers. “Thanks again, Matt. I really appreciate your sprinkling pixie dust for me.”

  “Think nothing of it.” He gave her a wave and headed toward his dorm.

  The door opened again, and Larry came out. He marched toward her, saying, “So, Betty says you’re an okay kid.”

  “Kid? Well, next to you, I guess.”

  “I’m forty. Not quite old enough to be your father, but I mean to make a point here. I have some serious business to discuss.”

  “What is serious business?”

  “You’ve got to understand something, Valena. When we fly one of those planes somewhere, we’re on mission. It’s our job.”

  Valena nodded. “So you have something to tell me, and it does not go beyond me.”

  “Right. I’m part of the Wing, so pretty much what I understand is ‘salute and execute.’ We’ve got to have people who will take action without questioning things.”

  “I see,” she said, not certain that she did.

  Larry moved closer to her and snaked one hand around the small of her back. “We are taking precautions. Anybody sees us talking, they’ll just think I’m hitting on you. Okay?”

  Valena tried desperately to relax. “Okay, on my great-great-grandfather’s 1929 Case, you have my word.”

  Larry nodded. “That will have to do. So what happens when something strange comes up? Like you’re out there flying your mission and you see something that maybe you weren’t supposed to see, or that you weren’t required to see, maybe, but it’s important.”

  “Like when you pick up a corpse that’s supposed to have died of altitude sickness,” said Valena.

  “Or something else, like when you fly certain investigators out to the site where that someone died of altitude sickness, and they found something that suggested that maybe there was more to it than all that.”

  “Such as?”

  Larry put his lips close to her ears. “You never heard this, and if someone puts the thumbscrews on you, you don’t know where the notion came from, right?”

  “Why, is this information dangerous?”

  “Understand
that we’re here because you’re here. The Air-lift Wing flies in support of science in the polar regions. We think what you’re doing is important. We’re not doing this just because we love to fly our planes.” He lifted his chin toward McMurdo. “This whole place is here to get you guys into the field and out again.” He pulled her even closer, and began to whisper. “Last Friday, one of our crews flew certain people out to a certain site to make sure things were as certain people said they were.”

  “I see.”

  “Okay, so here it is: this crew flew the feds out there. Your professor was along to show them how the camp had been set up. Over the winter, the winds had swept the place clean. It was like nothing had ever been there, except for just a few things.”

  “What things? Come on, give,” she said, leaning her body against his.

  Larry gave her a smile that didn’t match what he was saying, and ran a hand up one of her sleeves. “The wind blows hard up there,” he whispered, breathing into her ear. “It blew like a banshee all winter, really smoothed the place out again, like no one had ever been there. Except that things were buried there.”

  “Buried?”

  “Yeah. See, last year when your professor wanted in there, we made several flights. Precautionary. First, we had a mission make a reconnaissance flight, to overfly it to make sure we could land on it. The weather’s hell out there, so it’s seldom clear. Well, for a rekkie flight we need severe clear from ground up to mother sun, so we get the shadows we need. We fly it low and slow with a photographer going click-click-click taking pictures,”—he grabbed her tighter with each click—”and we’re mapping out the snow cover to make sure it will hold our ship when we land. No crevasses. Hopefully no snow swamps.”

  “Snow swamps?”

  “Really soft snow. Hasn’t been packed hard yet.”

  Valena answered his squeezes with a coy pat on his chest.

  He grinned. “Right. So we don’t land unless we’re sure we’re not about to snag a ski in some mother-sucking crevasse or bury the whole bird in ten feet of vanilla fudge.”

  “Got you.”

  “But what ho, the powers that be also wanted to make a fuel depot out of the place. It is strategically located, it would seem, so they schedule not only our mission but also a mission to drop twenty barrels of fuel. That’s AvGas for Twin Otters and MoGas for snowmobiles. Right, so we need severe clear for our rekkie mission, but the air drop can go off under cloud cover. So guess what? Our rekkie gets CANX-ed six days running, but the fuel drop goes off on schedule. So now what do we have?”

  “Some kind of a delay?”

  Larry put his other hand on her other sleeve and massaged her arms through all the layers of down and polypropylene. “Did I mention the storms up there? Wow. Blew like hell for three days after they dropped those barrels. Then finally we get out there for the rekkie and I can show you photographs of those barrels, or what little was still sticking up through the snow.”

  “They got buried?”

  “Mother Mary and Jesus, they got buried! We could only see the edges of a few of them sticking out.”

  Valena said, “So you are in a zone of accumulation.”

  “Where the barrels landed, yes. Your professor was collecting ice about a quarter mile away, where the wind kept scouring the fresh snow away.”

  “Zone of ablation.”

  “What you said. Right, so when we took your man in last year, Raytheon sent extra personnel to dig up the barrels.”

  “Did they find them all?”

  He slid one hand from her arm up to her cheek. “It’s a lot of work to dig up a barrel that’s been buried in that much hard-packed snow. You may have noticed that they need a snow saw to quarry blocks of it at Happy Camp.”

  Valena nodded.

  “Now take it to high elevation.”

  “Even more work.”

  “Now add weather, repeatedly forcing you to retreat to your tent.”

  “Gotcha. So some barrels were left.”

  “Seven, to be exact. So this year we took special equipment in to find the rest. Ground-penetrating radar works like a charm in such conditions. Shows us where all the bodies are buried.” He laughed mirthlessly at his own joke. “Right. We wanted to know where they are, so if we ever truly need them, we can retrieve them. So anyway, when we made the flight last week, we took along some special equipment.”

  “A crew with ground-penetrating radar?”

  “Emmett Vanderzee. And the federal agents. And yes, we had radar.”

  “And you found something.”

  “Right. Let’s call it an additional radar signature.”

  “You were missing seven barrels, but you found eight signatures?”

  “Exactly. The eighth was not far from the others.”

  “And what was making the eighth signature?”

  “Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.”

  “You found the barrel that was with the Gamow unit. But what was it doing that far away? Surely your accuracy is better than a quarter mile.”

  “Our accuracy is within one hundred feet. The place where it was located was a quarter mile from the camp, about where the first barrel would have been dug up.”

  “I’m with you. But there was something about the condition of this airdropped Gamow unit when it was found that got Emmett hauled off the ice.”

  Larry’s expression darkened. “Yes, there was.” He raised his other hand to her face and traced her cheekbones with his thumbs.

  Valena murmured, “And this is where you are telling me something that I never heard.”

  He leaned so close that he was almost kissing her. “You never even heard that we found the unit.”

  “Never at all,” she said, staring into his eyes. “But there was more.” She waited.

  Larry spoke very softly. “The chute was underneath the sled.”

  “You mean—”

  Larry pressed his lips to her temple. “Precisely,” he breathed. “Someone had purposely bunched up the chute and stuffed the whole works in one of the excavation holes left when they pulled out the first thirteen barrels. Someone had buried it so that it would not be found. And that, dear Valena, is why the reporter with the altitude sickness died in that camp.”

  18

  THE EDGE OF ANTARCTICA DROPPED AWAY TO THE south as Major Hugh Muller piloted the LC-130 out over the Southern Ocean, willing the craft to move faster than it was built to fly. The man behind him was not doing well.

  He turned to look at the stretcher, which they had managed to lift up onto the flight deck and mount on the bench at the back wall. The man’s hand protruded from under the fleece blankets they had wrapped around him. It was gray.

  Hugh returned his attention to his job, to the controls, to anything that would occupy his mind and help him think positively.

  The evening was clear and the air was still, and the miles of ocean slid by, turning increasingly gray as the sun dipped toward the horizon. It would be dark by the time they reached Christchurch. Too bad; he always loved to watch the cloud-shrouded islands of New Zealand slide down over the horizon. Ao Tea Roa, the Maoris called it: the Land of the Long White Cloud.

  As they crossed sixty degrees south latitude, Major Marilyn Wood’s voice reached his ears through his headphones. “Leaving grid navigation,” she said, referring to Antarctica’s system of grid lines laid parallel and perpendicular to the Greenwich meridian. In the world north of the Antarctic Circle, lines of longitude approached parallel, but over Antarctica, the lines of longitude converged until they were too close to be useful for navigating, necessitating the grid system. And the magnetic south pole was somewhere off the coast and in the ocean.

  Hugh looked at the compass in front of him. From its grid course of 170, it spun 180 degrees, coming to rest pointing 350 in the standard system, his bearing for Christchurch.

  The minutes rolled past, and a lengthening twilight covered the sea. His copilot yawned and stretched, then murmured tha
t he was going to get a cup of coffee. He glanced at his wristwatch; it was 1100 Zulu. That made it 2200 McMurdo and New Zealand time. Back home in New York it would be 0600. His wife would be waking soon, putting on the coffee, putting the dog outside to do its business. In half an hour his younger daughter would awaken, then his son, and finally his older daughter. She was the night owl in the family, next to him. He loved Antarctica, but he loved his family much, much more.

  A hand came to rest on his shoulder. He looked up to see the strained face of the doctor. Her lips moved, but he could not hear her words.

  The strange tricks of wave skip over the curve of the earth brought radio calls from San Francisco Approach to his headphones. Home, half a world away, was calling to him. Suddenly, his need to hear his wife’s voice weighed on his heart with a thousand atmospheres of pressure.

  19

  VALENA HEADED FOR CRARY LAB TO RETRIEVE THE sleeping bag that Emmett Vanderzee had checked out for her and stored in his office. She marched down the path between the buildings, dodging around banks of filthy snow and ice, her mind spinning with the information she had just been given. Was Emmett Vanderzee a killer? Somebody had prevented aid from reaching that reporter, and if James Skehan was correct—that Sweeny had made Emmett’s life a living hell, misstating his findings at a national level, keeping him busy defending his right to do science rather than doing the science itself—then, regardless of Skehan’s assertion that scientists prefer a live adversary to a dead one, Emmett might have seen the chute, chased it, and buried it just to shut the man up.

  Was he capable of such an act? She did not know.

  She jogged up the wooden steps that bridged the gang of heating pipes that ran between buildings, grinding on these questions.

  At the top of the stairs, she stopped, suddenly transfixed by an object mounted on the railing. It was a sundial. She had noticed it before, but it hadn’t really sunk in that it read as a twenty-four-hour clock.

  She realized that until this time she had hurried almost everywhere she went like an astronaut so busy doing her job that she forgot to look out the window of the spacecraft. Standing still for the first time, she noticed that a poem ran up the steps and down the other side, carved into the soft pine, an anonymous gift to all who passed this way. And there were unusual objects on the steps. A mobile made of shiny discs. Plastic toys nailed to the wood. And underneath the steps, a scrap metal sculpture of a troll swinging a sword or some kind of axe. The whimsy of McMurdo Station suddenly delighted her.