Freezing Point

by Karen Dionne

  The crane swung them around as they cleared the rail and lowered the basket to the deck. A man in a blue watch cap stepped up and offered a hand. Ben recognized Ed Halsey, the first mate.

  Halsey raised two fingers to his forehead. A gesture of respect. Ben’s chest swelled.

  “Captain asked me to assist,” Halsey said. “After you’ve cleaned up, you’re wanted on the bridge.”

  Ben’s chest deflated. So much for his happy sojourn on Cloud Nine. Of course the captain wanted to know what had become of his helicopter and his pilot.

  Ben followed the first mate through an oval door, wincing as he stepped over the high flange. Halsey cranked the handle shut and Ben clattered after him down a flight of steep stairs. They turned left into a narrow corridor, left again, and then right, until at last Halsey opened a stateroom door. He stepped aside, then followed Ben in and opened a closet. “These are my quarters. You’re welcome to anything in here that will fit. If you hang your clothes on the back of the chair, they’ll dry in no time. We’re next to the engine room.”

  Which explained the heat and the noise.

  “If you need anything, I’ll be on the forward deck.” He touched his forehead again, and went out.

  Ben looked over the rows of shirts and pants and selected a pair of tan Dockers and a long-sleeved Oxford. Halsey’s going-ashore clothes, he presumed. He laid them out on the bed, then went through the dresser drawers until he found a belt. He tried on a pair of loafers, then returned them to the closet and set his boots next to the heat to dry. He hung the rest of his things over the chair and stripped to his shorts.

  There was a small sink in one corner. Luxury living, ice-cutter style. Ben turned on both taps to scrub the blood and soot from his face, then ducked his head beneath the faucet.

  He filled a metal cup on a shelf above the sink, and took a long drink. As he put the cup back, he eyed Halsey’s toothbrush, then ran his tongue over his teeth and reached for the toothpaste. In for a penny, in for a pound. Besides, beggars couldn’t be choosers. Or was “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” the more appropriate proverb?

  He toweled off and dressed. The fit wasn’t as bad as he had expected. He sat down on the edge of the bed to turn up the pants cuffs, then closed his eyes. The adrenaline buzz was wearing off quickly, and no wonder. He’d used up a lifetime’s worth during the last twenty-four hours.

  Ten minutes, he told himself as he stretched out on top of the bed. Surely the captain wouldn’t begrudge him that.

  He opened his eyes twenty minutes later, smoothed his shirt, touched up his hair, and stepped into the corridor. No matter what approach the captain took, he decided as he retraced his path and started up the stairs, he wasn’t going to let himself get beat up over what had happened. Cam’s death was a terrible tragedy that would haunt him forever, but it was also an accident. Like most accidents, it could have been prevented if either he or Cam had been gifted with clairvoyance, but they weren’t, and it hadn’t. Recriminations (assuming the captain was planning to indulge) were a dead end. They needed to look forward, not back. As soon as they mustered a team to recover Cam’s body, they needed to get back to the iceberg and to the crew.

  At the top of the stairs, a deckhand pointed him toward the bridge. He knocked on the door, then entered at the captain’s invitation. The first person he saw wasn’t the captain, as he had expected. It was Gillette.

  Chapter 45

  “Ben,” Gillette said.

  “Donald.”

  Silence, while Ben processed the how and why. Donald matched Ben’s restraint, using the silence-as-weapon tactic that now seemed childish in the extreme. Ben wondered that he’d ever found it intimidating.

  He looked at his boss sitting smugly in the first mate’s chair and was filled with disgust. Gillette was absolutely amoral, a man whose conscience had allowed him to destroy a section of the ice shelf that had been in place for centuries without remorse. That the destruction didn’t have immediate and obvious global consequences didn’t make it any less wrong. The ice shelves were supposed to be there; they surrounded the world’s least understood continent for a reason. He clenched his fists, calming himself with thoughts of his upcoming press conference.

  The captain broke the impasse. “If you’d like to talk in private, you can go through there.” He indicated a windowed half door to a glass-enclosed observation room.

  Ben trailed Gillette up a short flight of steps and sat down in a swivel armchair bolted to the floor. He turned the chair around to face the windows—ostensibly to admire an expanse of sky that would have done a Montana rancher proud; in reality an excuse to turn his back on his boss—and waited.

  “You’ve made a hell of a mess,” Gillette said at last.

  Ben swiveled to face him. Gillette was glowering down, brows beetled in a scowl. Too late, Ben remembered Gillette’s second-favorite intimidation tactic. He couldn’t very well stand up after he’d already been seated, and even if he did, Gillette’s height would always give him the advantage. He sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee, adjusting his pants cuff while Donald launched his list of Ben’s sins.

  “One man dead on your watch. Abandoning your job and crew for an unauthorized rescue. Twenty-four hours with no word, forcing me to come clean up your mess. Now here you are, alive and well and responsible for a second man’s death, along with untold destruction of property, including the ship’s helicopter and a scientific research base.”

  Ben picked at a spot of lint on his borrowed trousers. When you put it like that, it sounded bad. He could only imagine how much blacker Gillette would paint Ben’s actions when he presented his case to the board.

  “You’re done,” Gillette said. “Finished. Relieved of duty, as our military friends would say.”

  “I’m fired?”

  “Whether there’s a position for you with the company when you return or not is irrelevant. Right here, right now, I’m in charge. I’ve instructed the captain to get under way immediately. We’ll arrive at the berg later today. When we do, you’ll be staying on the ship.”

  Ben opened his mouth, then shut it. Fine. Let Donald think that he had won. Gillette wouldn’t have believed him anyway if he told him that not more than an hour ago, he’d made up his mind to quit.

  Chapter 46

  With nothing for Ben to do, the minutes slipped by like the ice alongside the bow. He didn’t know how long he had been standing at the rail when Zo joined him on the forward deck. Long enough for the wind to redden his cheeks and his snot to freeze as he shielded his eyes against the sun and admired the bergy bits and growlers the ship passed through. The formations weren’t as impressive as Gillette’s handcrafted berg, but they were awe-inspiring all the same with the morning sun lighting the ice from behind and a fresh breeze off the bow. He rested his elbows on the rail. During his first crossing he’d been so sick, he’d missed all the scenery. It was hard to say why this time he was fine. There were a lot of things about him that had changed.

  He could feel Gillette looking down from the conning tower like a god. No, not a god; a messiah, his hostile take-over disguised as salvation. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around Gillette’s win-at-all-costs mentality. It wasn’t simply a matter of too much testosterone; Gillette’s over-the-top competitiveness was more indicative of a personality disorder or a brain dysfunction. A person could attain responsibility and power and still be mad as Hitler.

  Zo hadn’t spoken to him beyond a greeting, which was fine by him. He appreciated the company of someone who understood the art of silence. He stole a glance. She looked like she’d staggered out of a boxing ring the loser: black eye, swollen nose, angry red scratches along one side of her neck. The ship’s medics had patched her up; there was a bandage across her nose and a row of neat, black stitches along the top of her right ear. But her clothes were a mess—ripped, scorched, and bloodstained. He sized her up. Maybe some of Halsey’s clothes would fit.

  “How’s your husban
d?” he asked.

  She blinked as if she hadn’t realized he was there. “Stable,” she said after a moment. “He lost a lot of blood. The doctor’s working to restore fluids. He’s concerned about infection. The rats really did a number on him.”

  No kidding. It had taken all of his and Ross’s strength to save her husband from being eaten alive. Ben didn’t really think the rats were by nature man-eaters, despite what he had witnessed. Most likely, they were acting out of character because they were freaked out by the fire. Still.

  “He was lucky,” Ben said.

  She arched her eyebrows.

  “I mean—because the rats didn’t . . . well, you know. And because there’s a doctor on board. With medicine . . . and stuff.”

  The cold coming from her shoulder was worse than the wind off the bow. He let the thought trail off. He’d never been fond of folks who tried to spin a ray of sun into a full-blown sunrise, either.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said after they had stood in silence for some minutes more. Several lines of thought had converged as he’d been musing at the rail, and he needed to know if the conclusion they led to was true.

  She shrugged. “Why not.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what Ross said back at the station—that people got sick because of the insulin in the water. I’m wondering what their symptoms were.”

  “You should know.”

  So he had been poisoned. At least now she was willing to admit it. He’d hoped she was a person of integrity, because if he was right, he was going to need her help.

  “Can you be more specific? I was a little out of it at the time.”

  “Sweating, dizziness, headaches; tingling in the hands and feet, drowsiness, mental confusion, personality changes, behavioral abnormalities, inability to concentrate, blurred vision. Then in the final stages, hallucinations and death. Hypoglycemia is extremely subtle. It can have its onset in minutes, but because of the mental confusion that goes along with it, even careful diabetics often don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late. Death from lack of glucose to the brain or cardiac arrest can happen within the hour.”

  Exactly as he had expected. “How come you and Ross didn’t get sick?”

  “I’m diabetic. So’s Ross. Why do you want to know?”

  He wrestled with the wisdom of trusting her, then decided he had no choice. “The iceberg water is contaminated, too.”

  “Really?” Finally, a spark of interest. “What makes you think that?”

  “When one of my men drank the water, he got sick just like you described. Headaches, dizziness, confusion—the works.”

  “Just one?”

  “Possibly one other.” Quentin had drunk two cups the day they turned the satellites on. Hours later, he was dead. Maybe the rats hadn’t killed him at all; maybe they’d only found his body after he’d collapsed from insulin overdose. An autopsy could confirm it.

  “You can’t draw a conclusion from such a small sample. Besides, Ross and I believe the rats are the key.”

  “How so?”

  “The rats harbor a virus that produces an insulin-like compound. The compound acts on human insulin receptors the same way real insulin does. When people drink the water, their bodies react as if they’d been injected with insulin. How sick they get depends on how much water they drink, and how much sugar they eat to counteract it.”

  Eugene’s workstation was always littered with candy wrappers. Quentin, on the other hand, was a health nut.

  “So unless your berg is overrun with rats,” she finished, “I don’t think you have a problem.”

  “But it is. Not overrun, but we do have rats on the berg. I haven’t seen them, but my crew have and one—” He stopped. He didn’t have to describe what had happened to Quentin’s body.

  “Of course,” she said slowly, as if she were thinking out loud to herself. “My research camp was in the area where your berg was broken off. I knew about the rats, of course, but they didn’t bother me—they just hunted out at the ice shelf’s leading edge like they’d probably done for centuries. But when your boss blew up the ice shelf, they were cut off from their food supply. Some of them crossed the peninsula to Raney. The rest must have been trapped on your iceberg.”

  “So you agree our water could be contaminated?”

  She nodded. “All the elements are there. You’d have to test the water to be sure.”

  He thought about his Dummies kits. Talk about sending a boy to do a man’s job.

  “Just how powerful is this compound?” he asked. “How many parts per million would it take to contaminate, oh, say, a tanker full of water?”

  “Try parts per billion. You’d be amazed how little it takes to poison an entire ocean.”

  “Then we’re in trouble. Because right now, there’s a tanker full of contaminated water halfway to L.A.”

  Chapter 47

  Zo stayed at the rail after Ben left and thought about what he’d asked her to do.

  The tanker, he explained, was moving slowly. On a good day, a fully loaded supertanker could make 12 to 15 knots. At over three thousand miles, the trip from the berg to Los Angeles was expected to take weeks—a time frame that had frustrated him at the outset, but that was now going to work in their favor.

  “Their favor,” he had said. She’d caught his use of the plural pronoun right away. Apparently, he was operating under the misperception that confiding his concerns made her his partner.

  The tanker would make port in around ten days, he’d continued, which meant they’d have plenty of time to obtain a water sample and get it tested before the water was discharged into the city’s system.

  The plural pronoun again.

  She didn’t want to partner with him. For one thing, she doubted the situation was as dire as he seemed to think. Governments tended to act responsibly when it came to city services. Surely providing clean, safe drinking water for their inhabitants was high on their priority list. She doubted the iceberg water would be added to the public supply without thorough testing. Then again, most of the standard water-quality tests were designed to detect bacteria, not viruses. The insulin-like compound was even smaller. Conceivably, it could slip through.

  The other reason she didn’t want to work with him went deeper. Ben claimed to have seen the light, even insisting that he’d been about to quit his job when he was fired, but could you really come back so easily from the dark side?

  Regardless, she’d pretended the role of compatriot and agreed to go along with his request, not because she wanted to help him, but because right now, there was nothing on earth she wanted more than a sample of the tainted water—aside from Elliot making a full and speedy recovery, of course. The discovery of the insulin-producing microbe was as potentially world-changing as the disaster Ben had laid at her feet. Somewhere between the time she and Ross discovered the microbe and the destruction of the station, she’d planned to bottle some of the water and bring the samples back for research. That plan had gone up in flames along with the rest of station, but now Ben was offering a second chance. Researching the microbe and publishing her findings wasn’t how she had anticipated making her mark, but discovering a whole new class of diabetes medication was an adequate substitute. She and Ross would have to share credit when they published, but she was all right with that. She might even let him list his name first.

  Ben had explained the layout on top of the berg and what he wanted her to do. It sounded simple enough. All she had to do was contrive a way to get onto the iceberg, get out to the melt zone, and fill a few bottles. Or, if the lake had already reverted back to frozen, chip off a few chunks and stick them in a Ziploc.