Frozen Solid: A Novel

by James Tabor

  Something touched her shoulder and she started. “Jesus!”

  Graeter. He had come back without her hearing. “I told you about ghosts,” he said.

  17

  “COFFEE, TEA, OR GLENFIDDICH?” DON BARNARD ASKED AS WIL Bowman settled into a red leather chair. They were in Barnard’s office in the BARDA complex, outside Washington, D.C. It was ten A.M. on Tuesday.

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  They sat with a coffee table between them. Barnard brought a mug of coffee with him. “Thanks for making time on short notice.”

  “When the director of BARDA calls, I answer. Especially when it has to do with Hallie.”

  “It’s good to see you under happier circumstances. The last time was …” Barnard shook his head, unable to find the right word.

  “Scary as hell,” Bowman said.

  “Amen.”

  It was at BARDA, thanks to Don Barnard, that Bowman had first met Hallie Leland, a year earlier. Barnard had assembled a team of scientists to search the world’s deepest cave for a natural antibiotic that might stave off a pandemic. He made no secret of the fact that people could die. When an uncomfortable silence extended—these were scientists, not SEALs—Hallie stalked to the front of the room and declared that this was the opportunity of a lifetime: millions of lives might be saved. The rest of them might not go down into the cave, but she sure as hell would. Alone, if she had to. Bowman, in his government’s service, would go, of course. The others could choose. In the end, they all went, and Bowman had never forgotten how she’d galvanized that team.

  Not many men outsized Don Barnard, but Bowman was one. Six feet four, 230 pounds of hard muscle. A natural mesomorph, big-shouldered and narrow-waisted, clean-shaven, with a straw-colored brush cut. His nose showed the effects of nonverbal conflict resolution, and a thin pink scar divided his right eyebrow into two short dashes. His was a lean face of juts and angles, hardly handsome but surprising enough to attract stray glances and hold them.

  Bowman worked for, or was attached to, or emanated from—Barnard had still not found the right word for Bowman’s affiliation—some dark entity hidden invisibly deep in the government’s intelligence labyrinth. Bowman had never volunteered its name, and Barnard had never pressed him for details. He suspected that Bowman had a military special operations background. Hallie had said he held a PhD in some esoteric engineering subspecialty.

  “Have you heard from Hallie?” Barnard asked.

  “No,” Bowman said. “You?”

  Wil smiled rarely and frowned almost never. If Barnard had been pressed to describe the man in a word, it would have been centered.

  “No.”

  “Really? I was sure she would have contacted you.”

  “I thought the same thing about you,” Barnard said.

  “That’s not like Hallie at all. Do you know if she actually reached the Pole?”

  “Not even that. I got an email from her at McMurdo on Sunday, but nothing after.”

  “I emailed her earlier this morning but haven’t gotten an answer. Have you tried to call?” Bowman asked.

  “A number of times. Apparently the moon is easier to talk to. All communications to the Pole are satellite-dependent. Right now, there are just two two-hour windows in every twenty-four-hour period. And lots of things can screw those up—storms, solar events, power failures.”

  “She told me she would be replacing a scientist who had died unexpectedly. And that she’d known the woman here at one time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who was that woman working for? Durant was her name, I think.”

  “National Science Foundation,” Barnard said.

  “How long ago did she die?”

  “Not exactly sure. Sometime early last week, though.”

  “And you don’t know how?”

  “Here’s where it gets a bit strange.” Barnard recounted his conversation with Laraine Harris.

  “There should be an autopsy and a medical examiner’s report by now,” Bowman said.

  “I thought so, too. So I called a man at my own level over there. Director of Antarctic Programs. He didn’t know how she’d died, either. I explained my interest and asked if he could look into it. Very nice fellow. He agreed. I made an appointment to see him tomorrow.”

  “He wouldn’t just send a copy of whatever he found?”

  Barnard chuckled. “He’s a bureaucrat. The normal response to such a request would be to forget about it for a week or two, then hand it off to some subordinate. Bureaucrats learn never to do anything too quickly, because it will be expected of them next time.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “It’s like fencing. Can be fun if you understand the rules and weapons. I pointed out that since neither of us knew what happened, it would be better to meet in person. Possible discretion required, et cetera. Slow response is one thing; no response is another.”

  “You put him in a corner.”

  “I figured if he was blowing smoke about getting the information, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to meet. This gives him a little incentive to really find something.”

  “Keep that kind of thing up and I might have to recruit you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. But my ops days are over.”

  Bowman’s expression hardened. “I don’t like this.”

  “Me, neither. Less and less, in fact.”

  “Hallie’s supposed to fly out of there before the station shuts down for winterover, right?” Bowman asked.

  “Yes. After the last flight, it’s totally isolated for eight solid months.”

  “So if anything happened and she missed that flight …”

  “It would be a long winter. For all of us.”

  Bowman stood. “Thanks for bringing me in, Don. I’ll look for that report.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Let me know when you get through to her. I’ll keep trying, myself.”

  Barnard had been worried not to hear from Hallie but shocked to learn that Bowman hadn’t, either. He knew that the two had grown close over the past year, and he knew, as well, that neither was the kind who did that easily. He had watched the relationship change Hallie, rounding edges, softening points. He wasn’t sure she’d noticed the evolution herself. Barnard loved Hallie, but that did not keep him from seeing her as she was: an excellent scientist and a lovely young woman, but one who had grown up with two older brothers in an Army family. A colleague of Barnard’s had once commented on the “porcupine suit” she sometimes wore.

  Barnard stared out a window. Now that he and Bowman had talked, Barnard was feeling the edge of an old dread that rarely visited him these days but slept always in some deep place, ready to wake at the right disturbance. It had come back with him from Vietnam, where night after night he had led soldiers even younger than himself out into the black jungle, knowing with absolute certainty that on this patrol, or the next, or the next, some of them would not come back alive.

  18

  “SIX MORE DEGREES,” SAID GRAETER, “AND WE WOULDN’T BE OUT here.”

  They were standing in front of the station. It was close to one P.M. and pitch-dark.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s called Condition One. Eighty and colder, no one egresses.” From his parka he took a plastic bag. “Watch this.” From the bag he took a chicken leg. He poked it with a mitten. “Raw, right? Soft?”

  She nodded.

  He stood for twenty seconds, then rapped the chicken on a metal stair rail. The leg shattered like a lightbulb. “See?”

  “I saw. What is this, fourth-grade science?”

  “Showing beats telling. Especially with someone like you.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “I detect a certain disdain for authority.”

  “ ‘The wisest have the most authority,’ ” she said, quoting.

  “Socrates, right? If he was so wise, why’d he drink the Kool-Aid?”


  “Plato said the thing about authority. Didn’t they teach philosophy at Annapolis?”

  He squinted at her. “How come a microbiologist knows philosophers?”

  “Nothing to do with microbiology. I know about authority from my father. He knew about philosophers.”

  “An ivory tower family,” Graeter said. “Should have guessed.”

  So he didn’t really look at my file, she thought. In any case, he was wrong about her family. She started to correct him, then let it go. She liked him better wrong.

  They walked to a row of yellow snowmobiles. Before getting on one, he looked into a red box bolted onto its rear deck, behind the passenger seat. Hallie remembered that there had been one on Bacon’s snowmo, too.

  “What’s that?”

  “Emergency kit. These snowmos go out to field camps all the time. Some are miles away. Spare lights, first aid, flares, the usual stuff. SORs require operators to check their kits before using the snowmo. Ready?”

  Hallie straddled the seat, and the snowmo jumped forward before she could answer.

  Hallie understood that she might be going for a ride with Emily’s killer. That she might have been in the Underground with him, too. She had zipped a dive knife into a pocket of her parka. As they drove away from the station, she touched that pocket. With so many layers on her hands, it took a few seconds of fumbling, but then she hit it. The long, sharp knife was there.

  After they’d gone a half mile, the headlight illuminated rows of what looked like giant black sausages lined up on the snow. She tapped Graeter on the shoulder, pointed, and he stopped.

  “What are those?” she asked.

  “Fuel bladders. Two thousand gallons each, hauled on sleds all the way from McMurdo. Eight hundred miles, six weeks in tractor caravans at five miles an hour. Now, there’s some tough people.”

  “Can’t fly it in?”

  “Burns up more than they bring. Hauling over ice is slower but lots cheaper.”

  He turned right, running parallel to the station. From the skin out, Hallie was wearing regular underwear, lightweight long underwear, expedition-weight long underwear, a wool shirt, fleece pants and jacket, insulated coveralls, and the special Antarctic parka they called Big Red. On her feet, three pairs of socks, thermal boot liners, and bulbous white bunny boots. Silk glove liners, fleece gloves, wool mittens, and down-filled overmitts. Fleece neck gaiter, face mask, down-filled, fur-ruffed hood. A Petzl headlamp. And still her toes and fingers were already starting to go numb.

  After a few more minutes, Graeter stopped. She glanced back over her shoulder. The station looked very far away.

  “Welcome to the Dark Sector,” he said. “They use radio telescopes and neutrino catchers and cosmic ray detectors here. This area extends several miles out from the station limits. It has to be free of light and electromagnetic interference.”

  “What’s that?” She was pointing to something that looked like a giant lunar landing module with a tall silver silo on each side. The silos were one hundred feet from the main structure and connected to it by metal tubes extending from near their tops.

  “That is Operation IceCube,” Graeter said. “Drillers were sinking shafts a mile deep all around that and putting neutrino sensors down into them. To the left there is the dive shed, where you’ll be working. They built it over the shaft that struck water.”

  “Good to know,” she said. “Hey. It is cold.”

  “White Death, we call it,” Graeter said. “Sucks heat, not blood. Your brain is the first organ affected. You can be half gone before you know what’s happening.”

  A huge Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, sparkling with red and yellow and white lights, came roaring and clanking off to their right, heading for the iceway. In the immaculate air, its headlight beams were like shafts of crystal.

  “Bacon,” Graeter said. “Best operator here. Cranky, but she can do surgery with that thing.”

  The bulldozer drew abreast of them, about a hundred yards to their right. Hallie saw the operator, visible in the red light from the instrument panel. She started to wave before realizing that Bacon could see only what the headlights illuminated. She kept looking. It was hard to know for sure, but there seemed to be something odd about Bacon’s posture, her torso inclined forward against the seat belt, head down, almost as though she had dozed off.

  “Mr. Graeter, I think there’s something wrong with—”

  “I see it.” He pulled out his radio, then shoved it back into a pocket. The D9 veered right, heading straight for a line of red danger flags twenty feet away. Bacon’s Cat crushed the wands and kept on going. Graeter sat frozen for an instant, as if he could not believe what he was seeing.

  “Hold on!” he shouted to Hallie.

  Opening the throttle too quickly, he flooded the motor. He jumped off and yanked the starter, again and again, but it took half a dozen pulls to clear the flooded carburetor and get the engine to fire. By the time they stopped at the line of red wands, Bacon’s Cat was one hundred feet beyond and still moving.

  “What’s in there?” Hallie shouted.

  “It’s the area over Old Pole. Completely unstable. Do not move!” Graeter yelled. He jumped off and ran into the restricted area. He had gone only ten feet when the D9’s front end broke through the surface. The fracturing ice sounded like rifle shots.

  “Jump!” Hallie screamed, but Bacon, still bathed in red light, sat motionless, pitched forward, held in place by her seat belt. Hallie watched in horror as the machine, haloed by its lights, sank deeper into the hole, tilting forward like a ship going down at the bow. Then came a huge, crumpling sound, and the D9 disappeared completely. The ice shook under Hallie’s feet. She heard a rumbling, then more ice fracturing at the bulldozer dropped deeper into the huge crevasse. Big enough to swallow locomotives, Graeter had said.

  His headlamp beam danced crazily as he stumbled, turned around, fell to his hands and knees. A fracture line opened between Graeter and Hallie. The ice on which he lay began to tilt, and suddenly he was sliding toward the crevasse that had swallowed Bacon and her machine. Just before he dropped in, another, smaller crack appeared. The glow of his headlamp showed him grabbing its edge with both mittened hands. The whole section of ice swung down beneath him, like a giant trapdoor on hinges, finally stopping just short of dead vertical. All Hallie could see of Graeter was the bright glow of his headlamp showing above the edge of the fracture.

  She ran toward him and, fifteen feet from where he held on, dropped to her belly like a baseball player sliding headfirst. Spread-eagled to distribute her weight as widely as possible, she pulled with her hands and pushed with her toes. Her own headlamp showed Graeter’s black mittens—all she could see of him from her prone position.

  “Graeter,” she yelled. “Are you secure?”

  “Barely.” He sounded breathless but uninjured. “I kicked little holes, but my boot toes could slip out at any time.”

  “Do you know how deep it is?”

  “No. And I don’t want to look.”

  Could be a hundred feet, she thought. Or a thousand.

  “I’m going to ease forward until I can grab your wrists.”

  “Are you insane? I could pull us both down. You back off and wait until some people get here with ropes.”

  “Can’t wait. You’ll lose your grip or the ice will break. They probably don’t even know anything happened. And you have the radio.”

  She knew that a proper crevasse rescue involved belays and ropes and pulley haul systems, but there was no time for those niceties here. And what was the option? Let the man hang there until he dropped? She inched forward some more, reached out with her right hand, and gently closed her fingers around his left wrist. Two layers of gloves and mittens did not help, but the base of his thumb and the heel of his hand flared out like small handles, helping her hang on. She repeated the move, clutching his right wrist with her left hand. “Okay. Go ahead and kick new toeholds and try to step up.”

  She felt t
he pull increase on her left hand as he picked up his right boot and began kicking a new cavity. “Good as it’ll get.” He kicked another. “Here goes.”

  She felt him stand, slowly and gently, on that precariously poised right boot toe, felt him repeat the motion with his left, and then he had gained a foot. She could visualize the placements: a half-inch of boot sole pressed into the shallow concavities he had kicked. The only thing saving him was the extreme temperature. When it was that cold, friction could not generate enough heat to liquefy the ice’s microsurface. Instead of the slick ice that would have been there at warmer temperatures, this was more like sandpaper.

  “Go again,” she said.

  She waited, feeling her hands starting to numb. He kicked, again and again, then the agonizingly slow process of putting weight on each toehold and standing. But it was working. She could see his headlamp and most of his face. A crack opened up behind Hallie’s feet, and the ice surface on which she lay lurched, tilting down toward the crevasse. The angle was gentle yet, and she didn’t slide forward, but she knew that their combined motions and weight shifts could trigger a collapse and send them both plunging into the void. There was no time for him to finish coming up as he had been.

  “Do you know how to do a mantle?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s a climbing move. Put the palms of both hands on the edge of the crack right in front of your chest and push yourself up as far as your waist. Then you can flop forward and you’ll be out of there.”

  “What the hell” was all he could manage.

  She held on to his wrists as he leaned forward far enough to place his forearms and elbows on the sharp edge of the crack, with his palms on the ice right in front of his sternum.

  He took a deep breath. “Here goes.”

  She felt his forearms clench as he pushed down. Slowly his body rose until his waist was even with the edge of the crevasse and he could go no higher. Gently he folded over, gasping, laying his chest and belly flat on the ice, so that only his legs were still hanging over the side.