Frozen Solid: A Novel

by James Tabor

  55

  SHE ROSE TO THE SURFACE, EXHALING A THIN STREAM OF BUBBLES on the way up to keep her lungs from exploding as the pressure lessened, and floated there without making a sound. At first, she let only her lips and mask show above water. She had no way of knowing what she would find in the dive shed. Guillotte and Merritt might well be waiting there—just to make sure she didn’t return. If they were, this time they would knock her unconscious or kill her before putting more weights around her waist and shoving her back into the hole.

  She waited and listened for several minutes, hearing nothing. As quietly as possible, she worked free of her diving harness and let go of the double tanks. Still fully charged, they were negatively buoyant and sank out of sight. The edge of the dive shed’s ice floor, with its plywood covering around the shaft mouth, was two feet above the water’s surface.

  She performed a slow, careful 360-degree rotation, listening for any sound Guillotte or Merritt might make. Nothing. No scraping boot, indrawing breath, rustling clothing. She had begun to shiver, the first stage of hypothermia. She needed to get out of the water. But looking up at the edge of the circular shaft gave her pause. In the salt water she was positively buoyant. Her body weight was about 135 pounds. The dry suit, underlayers, fins, and mitts added another 25. Every inch of her and gear that came out of the water would reclaim its full weight. Looking up at the lip, she knew she would have to get at least far enough above it to perform a mantle, the climbing move she had shown Graeter to help him escape the crevasse. To do that, she would have to lift three feet of her body out of the water: head, arms, and shoulders above the edge, which meant that her torso in the shaft would be above water, too. So at least 50 percent of her body and the dry suit—say 70 or 80 pounds.

  The question would be whether she could submerge with a full breath, fin and swim straight up, and pop out high enough to hook her arms and elbows over the lip of the shaft. It was a very good thing that they had floored the shed with plywood. She would have no chance at all trying to claw her way out of the hole over slick ice.

  It would be the height of black irony, she thought, to have saved herself from dying as Merritt and Guillotte had intended only to freeze to death two feet from the surface. There was still the possibility that one or both of the others might be up there waiting for her. If they were, she would fight, of course, and probably could overcome Merritt, though the encumbering dry suit would be a huge disadvantage. She would have no chance against Guillotte.

  She needed to push herself deeper into the shaft, as deep as possible until her buoyancy overcame her strength, but her mitted hands could find no purchase on the smooth ice walls. She unbuckled both of her dive computers from her left arm and held one in each palm, straps around her knuckles. Each computer was worth $2,000, and using them as imitation claws would destroy them, but this was not the time to be worrying about money. The computers had rectangular metal cases with sharp corners and edges. Her hope was that when she slapped them against the ice wall, they would dig in and grab enough to let her push herself down a couple of feet, then repeat the action until she had gone as deep as her buoyancy allowed.

  If that worked, she would propel herself upward with fins and arms. Their energy, plus that of the buoyancy, would have to shoot her far enough out of the shaft. If not, somebody would find her floating right there in the hole, frozen solid.

  56

  “I’VE NEVER BEEN ON A WARRANT SERVICE BEFORE,” BARNARD said. He was sitting in the front seat of a white Ford Expedition with mirrored glass all around. Bowman was driving. A salt-and-pepper team of deputy U.S. marshals, Dolan and Taylor, sat in back. Dolan was the salt, Taylor the pepper. It was, Barnard had to admit, exciting in a way he had not felt for a very long time.

  “Just so we’re clear, you wouldn’t be part of this one were it not for Dr. Bowman. No disrespect, you understand,” Taylor said. He was a big man, not as big as Bowman but thick in every aspect, from neck to calves.

  “None taken. I’m grateful to be included.”

  As they neared their destination, Dolan said, “We don’t expect any problem, but we always follow protocol. All you two have to remember is stay behind me and Taylor. Okay?”

  Bowman and Barnard both acknowledged. Barnard said, “I don’t think that judge appreciated our visit.”

  Bowman shrugged. “Comes with her job. She was the on-call.”

  “Pretty young for a judge,” Dolan said.

  “And pretty good-looking. I didn’t realize they came in that model,” Taylor said.

  “Yeah,” Dolan said. “Even at two in the morning. Go figure.”

  “They never look that good on the bench,” Taylor said.

  57

  IT TOOK THREE TRIES, BUT HALLIE FINALLY HAULED HERSELF OUT of the shaft. She lay on her belly for half a minute, unable to do anything more than pull off her mask and gasp. If somebody wanted to bash her head in, they could just have at it. As soon as she was able, she sat up, removed her fins, and looked around. The valves had broken off three single tanks, which escaping, high-pressure air had transformed into giant, caroming bludgeons. The interior of the dive shed looked like a tornado had blown through it. One tank had smashed halfway through the Quonset’s wall and stuck, a giant silver sausage hanging from a ragged mouth.

  Guillotte was not there. Merritt was, lying on her back, right where she had been standing when one of the tanks killed her. She looked like someone had hit her in the face with sledgehammers.

  Hallie searched for a weapon and grabbed a big ball-peen hammer. Her clothes were gone—Guillotte must have taken them. So he was still healthy enough to do that. Calling the station was not an option. This was the Dark Sector. No telephones or radios here.

  She had to get back to the station. Thought about what she was wearing: long underwear, two Viking insulated dive suits, the thick neoprene dry suit, hood, wool gloves, and dive mitts. Not your regulation ECW, but it would have to do. She jumped up and down and windmilled her arms to build body heat and push warm blood out to her extremities.

  Outside the shed, the snowmo she had driven down remained. But even before she went to look for the key, she knew Guillotte would have taken it, and in fact he had. She would walk the half mile to the station.

  Hallie used neither headlamp nor flashlights, for fear of alerting Guillotte, who had to be moving around somewhere. The cold began to nibble here and there after just a few minutes. She knew it would penetrate a dry suit and diving underwear much more quickly than it would work through all those ECW layers. No time for sauntering. She started trotting. And almost immediately, she stopped. She had gone anaerobic that quickly. She would have to walk, like it or not.

  But there was another cause for concern: she could feel the thick neoprene suit stiffening in cold it was never designed to encounter. The dry suit was designed to function in water down to twenty degrees. It was not designed to function at seventy-two degrees below zero—probably closer to one hundred below, with the wind. Trotting in the suit was impossible, and just walking was becoming hard work. So much resistance was generating body heat, a good thing, but she kept tiring and going anaerobic, which forced to her keep stopping. Each time she started off again, the suit was stiffer, less yielding. She was still a quarter mile from the station when it became completely rigid. It was like being encased in a suit of armor with no joints.

  Seconds passed. Standing still, she felt her body heat dissipate quickly. She knew that the White Death was coming for her. It did not touch her whole body at the same time. Working its way through weaknesses in her thermal layers, it felt like a succession of icy hands being laid on her flesh, one after another, gradually spreading. It would not be long before her whole body was in that grip.

  She looked at the glowing station. People were in there eating, working, walking the corridors, perhaps making love, those few who still had the energy. Light leaking from those windows stopped far short of where she stood in the blackness. Inside the lit roo
ms, no one could see anything outside. Including her.

  58

  GUILLOTTE HAD BEEN BOTH QUICKER AND LUCKIER THAN MERRITT. As soon as he saw Leland grab the tank rack, he sprinted for the door. Flung it open, dove through, hit the snow, and rolled behind the parked snowmos. It took a full minute for the tanks to empty, and it sounded like industrial demolition the whole time.

  When all was quiet, he got to his feet and went back inside. Merritt was moaning, so he knew she was still alive, but from the look of her she would not be for long, and that was fine with him. Gerrin had made her, instead of him, head of the Triage team at Pole, and it had rankled ever since. He had never liked her bossy, supercilious manner, nor even the way she looked. Fat, red, and wrinkled, she’d made him think of a spoiling apple. Dead, she would be one less detail for him to worry about.

  She was even worse to look at now, though, so Guillotte went outside, sat on the snowmo, and tried to think things through. It was a few minutes past six P.M. The station sat links became active once every twelve hours, at roughly six A.M. and six P.M. He had to assume that the comm engineers would have diagnosed and fixed the malfunctions he’d been causing. Could not afford to think otherwise.

  Graeter would not know that he, Guillotte, had killed Durant. Nor would he know everything about Triage, because Leland herself would not have known all of that before she came to the dive shed. She’d seemed genuinely surprised by Merritt’s sanctimonious little speech. But Leland might have told Graeter about Doc and Blaine, and they were not the kind who survived prison. They would say anything to keep their rear ends inviolate.

  Even if they did not give Guillotte up, he knew that Graeter could be watching the video right then. If Leland had not known it was him until she smelled the absinthe on his breath, it meant she had not recognized him in the video. The camera angle or light or both might have been bad. But Graeter was much more familiar with all Polies than Leland, and he might well see that Guillotte was Durant’s killer. If that happened—and Guillotte had no choice but to assume that it would—the station manager would mobilize the security team and go looking for him. And he would talk to McMurdo the instant comms were up again.

  Guillotte understood that the penalty for committing premeditated murder of U.S. government employees in a U.S. government facility could be death. New Zealand was nominally the country with jurisdiction over criminal acts in Antarctica, but the Americans would insist on prosecuting murders in their own facility in the States. Life in prison was the best he could hope for, a needle in the arm more likely. He would rather die by his own hand than suffer either fate. But he did not think it would come to that.

  He pulled the cuff of his mitten back to look at his watch. Nineteen minutes past six. Should be enough time. But only if he moved fast.

  59

  SCREAMING FOR HELP WOULD BE A WASTE OF ENERGY. THE SUIT had locked up just as Hallie’s left foot landed after striding forward. Her right arm had swung to the front, as well, her left to the rear. There she stood like a statue of one frozen in the act of walking, not frozen herself inside the suit but so immobilized that she might as well have been.

  She tried to move her arms, working in all directions, imitating the curl motion of weight lifters, then trying to push back the other way. She could move a half inch within the suit but wasn’t strong enough to crack the thick, multilayered neoprene. Next she flexed her legs, tried bending over at the waist, twisting. Nothing worked.

  She thought how ridiculous it would be to freeze to death here, trapped in a suit that was supposed to be a life-support system. Even worse was the thought of Guillotte running free. There was no telling what he might do.

  For a moment rage took over, and her muscles tensed and struggled against the suit. It was like trying to run in a block of ice and accomplished nothing but a slight wobble side to side. She tried again, and again, but the suit was not going to break or bend.

  She stood, catching her breath, thinking. There is always a way. She just had to puzzle it out. She couldn’t go forward or backward, up or down. Couldn’t bend the suit or break out of it. Yelling for help wouldn’t do any good. She considered urinating, thinking that warm liquid might soften the suit’s lower half. But she knew that there wasn’t enough liquid in any human bladder to do that. She would end up standing in a few inches of frozen piss.

  She remembered reading a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a climber, buried in an avalanche, who produced a turd, waited for it to freeze solid, and used it to dig himself out. But even if she managed that, she wouldn’t be able to reach it inside the suit.

  She was beginning to shiver. Her teeth were chattering. A cold, empty space was opening in her chest.

  This would not be a quick death. She had read accounts, none apocryphal, by stranded mountaineers who froze into comas, thinking right up to the point of unconsciousness that death was certain, then waking to discover that they had been rescued. It would be slow and increasingly painful for a long time; then would come numbness, everything growing weak and dim, and a long, gentle falling away from the last light.

  Her rational brain grasped that. Then, like birds startled from a tree, thoughts and images began to fly from her mind. The lovely, burnt-honey smell of horses. Taps at her father’s funeral. Her mother’s hands, small, but rough and strong. And people she loved, her mother and father, two brothers, best friend Mary Stilwell down in Florida, Don Barnard.

  And Bowman. For all the others she felt sadness but not regret; she had lived with them as fully as she could, knowing that loving and being loved were life’s greatest gifts. But with Bowman, regret did come. So much would be left undone between them: the moment when she might have said, “I love you,” another when they might have exchanged vows, and then all the other possibilities—including even children. She was thirty-one. Still young for a scientist, and certainly not old for a mother.

  One thing left undone was especially troubling. Bowman came from a ranch in Colorado and had grown up horseback. She came from a horse farm in Virginia and had as well. And yet they had never ridden together, had never shared the experience of melding with half a ton of pure beautiful power. Both had recognized how special it would be. They had talked about it so often that it had become a kind of personal idiom with its own definite article: “When are we going to do The Ride?” But they had never made it happen. She had never made it happen.

  She remembered Merritt’s talk about how it became harder and harder to stay away from danger. She knew it was true. She had worked in BSL-4 labs with the most lethal pathogens known to man and had loved every minute of it. Eventually even that had become routine, and she’d asked Barnard to put her in the field, where even greater risks reopened the adrenaline spigot.

  She yelled then, not specific words but a raw and guttural howl. Breath and energy finally ran out, and she fell silent. She looked up, but no lights stirred green and purple around the black bowl of sky, no meteors cut white streaks, and no stars twinkled, as if even they had frozen to death.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and waited for the same fate.

  60

  GRAETER PICKED UP A DART, ALIGNED THE BARREL BETWEEN THE thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, cocked his arm back. Shook his head once and put the dart on his desk. Where the hell was Leland?

  A moment later, his door banged open and a Dragger barged in. At least he thought it was a Dragger, given the grease-smeared overalls and black bunny boots. But it was a Beaker in Dragger’s clothes. And not just any Beaker. It was Hallie Leland.

  “What are you doing in that outfit?” he asked. “In fact, what are you doing here? I was trying to find you.”

  She told him how a gust of wind had rushed across the ice, wobbling her in the frozen suit. How she had shifted her weight to that side, tilting the suit a fraction of an inch more, then shifted the other way, back and forth like pumping on a swing to go higher, until finally she’d felt herself tilting and falling and hitting the ice,
cracking the suit.

  She told him about Fida: “I think Guillotte killed him and left him down there to make it look like a suicide.” Then she recounted what had happened in the dive shed. He stood.

  “I’ll find Guillotte. And I hope the son of a bitch tries to fight.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, gathering up his badge folder and gun, “then I can shoot him a dozen times.”

  61

  DOLAN KNOCKED ON GERRIN’S FRONT DOOR. NO ONE ANSWERED. Taylor had gone around to cover the rear of the house. Dolan pounded with the heel of his fist. Inside it must have sounded like thunder. Anyone would have heard.

  “Well, easy way or hard way,” Dolan said. He had brought a crowbar for just such an eventuality. Motioned for Bowman and Barnard to stand back as he got ready to drive the bar’s straight end between the door and the jamb.

  “Hang on,” Bowman said.

  He stepped to the door and took a stainless steel device from one pocket. Dolan started to say something but stayed quiet and watched. Bowman laid the thing over the door’s lock set and touched a sensor on its side. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then the sound of metal moving against metal and a distinctive click. Bowman repocketed the device. Dolan stared at him.

  “It works with high-end locks and old ones,” Bowman explained. “They have enough steel in the tumblers. Not as messy.”

  “How in hell did you—?” Dolan started.

  “Don’t ask,” Barnard said.

  Dolan glanced at him, nodded. “Copy that.” He keyed his radio, raised Taylor. “We’re in. Hold your position.”