In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “He seems to have fallen off the bottom step of the Challenger and hit his head. Got a concussion. It can really screw up your judgment. In fact he hit it hard enough that he started to bleed inside.”

  “Is that the theory?”

  “Theory? What are you—oh, I get it, you’re a scientist. Always a theory. So, multiple working hypotheses, you’ve got to have at least one more. What’s the null hypothesis? He didn’t have an accident? Someone hit him? Dragged his body five miles and dumped it on the ice. Nice way of thinking.”

  Valena stared at her hands.

  Manuel said, “Perhaps there was something else wrong with him. He had a small stroke or something, enough to make him stupid enough to get out of his vehicle during a whiteout. Why? What’s this to you? Listen, I don’t like to be unfriendly, but like I say, it’s been a long—”

  “Valena interrupted. I’m supposed to be heading out to the field with Emmett Vanderzee,” she said.

  Manuel put down his fork and closed his eyes. Cleared his throat. “Oh. Well, I suppose then there’s a connection, in your mind at least. Forgive me, Valena, but I just can’t tell you how tired I am. Today was in fact the worst day in my life since I left Emmett’s camp.”

  “Why?”

  He opened his eyes and glared at her. “I do not wish to lose another man to the ice.”

  “Look, I’m being pushy, I know. But I was hoping you could tell me what happened last year at Emmett’s camp.”

  Manuel bowed his head again. “I’d rather not. Oh please, I’d rather not.”

  “You’re teaching Happy Camp, babysitting fingies instead of going up into the mountains with field parties. Why? Was it that bad?”

  For several moments, Manuel said nothing. Then, in a harsh whisper, “You simply cannot imagine just how bad it was, Valena. It was my job to keep that man alive, but instead I watched him die. I heard him take his last breath.” He picked up his fork and stabbed at his meat. His hand was shaking. He tried to lift it to his lips. He set it down and left it there.

  “So you stayed in the tent with him while Emmett looked for the chute with the Gamow unit?”

  Manuel clenched his teeth. “You think you saw a whiteout this morning? That day was infinitely worse.”

  “Then how did you look for the Gamow bag? Did you tie up together with ropes?”

  “No. Yes! Toward the end we did. As mountaineer, I was in charge, so yes, I had everyone rope up because we were working close to a crevasse field. In places, the surface was sheer ice, and our crampons were of little comfort. If anyone lost their footing and landed on their belly, they’d slide for thousands of feet, accelerating before they hit something. So yes, we were tied in. But that was after the storm had begun to abate. You must understand that no one could do anything while it was blowing. We heard the Herc fly over, we heard the pilot call us over the radio to say he’d made the drop, that it should be right on top of us, but we could not find it.”

  “Major Bentley,” she guessed. “He was the pilot in the Herc.”

  “And he was the pilot with the crew that came and took us out.”

  “How big an object was this they dropped?”

  Manuel shook his head in frustration. “You ask this. Everybody has asked this. ‘A four-foot cube of wood and iron with a big, orange parachute on it and you can’t find the thing,’ they say. And what do I have to tell them in reply? Nothing. We could not find it, I tell them. It was nowhere.”

  “Four feet on a side?”

  “That’s what the loadmaster told me later. He packed the thing on a four-by-four wooden pallet. It was too light, he said, so he put a fifty-five-gallon barrel of fuel on it, to give it weight. And I tell you, it was nowhere to be found. It was almost like they hadn’t dropped it at all.” He made a slashing motion with his hand. He was getting angry.

  Valena decided that it was politic to change the subject slightly. “Who was there? Were you all in the same tent?”

  Manuel stared at the tabletop. “Why are you asking all these questions?”

  “Because I’m supposed to be on a flight out of here Thursday morning. I’ve got less than thirty-six hours to clear Emmett or I go home. I’m supposed to do something called bag drag tomorrow evening. My little clock is ticking down.”

  “I don’t know what I can do to change that.”

  “I’m trying to help my professor, Manny! And yes, I’m trying to help myself. If he returns, I stay. So tell me, please. Who was there? Who was in which tent?”

  Manny looked up again. “So many questions! Okay. Okay, I’ve told this a thousand times to the FBI, but I’ll tell you, too. There were eight in camp. Emmett, me, the … dead man … the cook, the two grad students, Emmett’s assistant, the blaster’s assistant, and the other guy, the gopher. That was it.”

  “The cook, is she here this year?”

  “She’s out at Black Island.”

  “Lindemann’s out in the Dry Valleys.”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to sound patient. “He’s up on a glacier in the Olympus Range. I heard he got on with that crew from the University of Maine.”

  “Why didn’t he stick with Emmett?”

  “How should I know? Your academic politics. I stay out of that.”

  “The blaster’s assistant? What was his name, David?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s around. There are probably a dozen Davids on the roster this year.”

  “That last one. William somebody.”

  “William was a punk kid. I doubt they hired him back.”

  “A punk. What, as in homicidal?”

  Manuel threw up his hands. “As in not very competent. Had to have everything explained to him. What he was doing in Antarctica, I’ll never know.”

  “So, were you all in the same tent while you waited for the drop?”

  “No. We had four Scotts and a cook tent. Most people hung out in the cook tent, because it was warmed by the stove, and it’s the largest—eight feet across and sixteen long. Scotts are tall, but not very big across, as you’ll remember from your training today. You can sleep three people in them, but two is better. I was in the cook tent with Sheila, helping her with the sick man. I think Bob and Dan were in their Scott tent most of the time.”

  “Bob and Dan.”

  “Schwartz and Lindemann. They have first names. Dave was with us most of the time in the cook tent. So was William, eating cookies. They shared a tent with Ted, but Ted had left. Cal Hart—that’s Emmett’s friend—he was in the tent he shared with Emmett, reading Nietzsche. I had a dome tent right next to Sheila’s Scott, but we were both in the cook tent that day. Emmett went from tent to tent, making sure everyone was okay.”

  “How did Emmett get from one tent to the next?”

  “They were close together. It was no more than a hundred feet from one end of the camp to the other. And we’d seen the storm coming, so I had strung ropes so we could find our ways from one tent to the next and to the latrine.”

  “And Emmett went out in the storm looking for the chute?”

  “As soon as he could see his hand in front of his face, yes. He took Cal with him. Safety in numbers. He wanted that man to live! I kept telling the FBI men that, but they believed what they wanted to believe. The chute was gone, I tell you! It probably blew into a crevasse and was immediately covered with blowing snow. I went out and helped as soon as it was safe. We all did. Then it began to blow again. We just weren’t lucky. End of story.”

  More gently, Valena said, “I’m still trying to understand what it was like there, Manny. Since coming here, I’ve learned one thing, and that is that this place is like no other place on earth. Half the time, I feel like I’ve left the planet. I’m on Mars, or the moon. What was the camp like? How high were you? How steep was the terrain? That sort of thing.”

  Manny leaned onto his elbows and ran his hands through his hair. “We were at 10,500 feet. Add to that the effects of the cold and of being five degrees further south than McMurd
o. The higher latitude increases the apparent elevation. Call it 12,000 feet. And the ground is rough. It’s not so much how steep the terrain is, it’s the ice. Crevasses. You just don’t screw around up there. And then here’s the reporter, straight up from sea level. He looked okay for a day, almost two, then down he went.”

  “And everybody’s certain it was altitude sickness.”

  “What else would it be?”

  “Something else, if federal agents are hauling scientists off the ice a year later.”

  Manny shook his head. “The doctors here at the hospital looked at him, and you bet there was an autopsy. His lungs were full of fluid. No big bacterial or viral growths, so it wasn’t an infection. And there were no toxins in his tissues, so you can’t pin it on anything he ate. No punctures, no nothing.”

  “They checked for punctures?”

  “I checked for punctures. We had a medical kit there. All the field crews carry one, very extensive, with some pretty heavy drugs in them, including for pneumonia—and yes, we were administering that drug—and we had it because you never know when somebody’s going to get sick when you can’t get them back out to McMurdo. So yes, I checked him over.”

  “Why?”

  Manny leaned back in his seat and bared his teeth in frustration. “Because there’d been such a commotion.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s no secret that the man fought… argued with Emmett. Nothing physical.”

  “Argued about the science?”

  “About everything. About Emmett’s techniques. About what was for dinner. The man had a real burr up his butt. He chewed at Emmett and a couple of the others, harassed them like there was no tomorrow.”

  Valena sighed. “Apparently there was no tomorrow for him.”

  Manuel squeezed his eyes shut.

  Valena said, “I’m sorry, but I have just a few more questions. The feds: they came down this year and started asking questions. Why? Could you tell anything from what they asked?”

  Manuel shook his head. “Talk to the fellows in the Airlift Wing. The feds arrived on one of their LC-130s. They asked a lot of questions. Then Emmett took them out to the field camp. They were gone six or seven hours, long enough to fly out there, stay a few hours, and come back.” He stared into space past Valena’s shoulder, as if watching the scene unfolding. “And when they came back, that was it. They had Emmett by the sleeve. I watched them come in off the ice. They marched him off to Hut 10. I hear they interrogated him all night and into the next morning. Nobody could believe it was happening. I went to the door of Hut 10 and was told to leave. Early afternoon the next day, they packed him into a Herc again, and were gone.” He swung his gaze to Valena, focused his eyes on hers. “That was Saturday.”

  Valena thought a moment, then asked, “I’m sure there’s something else I should ask you, but I don’t know what it is. I know so little about this place.”

  Manuel looked at her a long time, then said, “Ask yourself why he didn’t have a Gamow bag in camp. Why he had to send for one.”

  “Who, Emmett?”

  “Yes. It’s standard procedure to have one along.” Having said this, Manuel appeared to deflate, as if something that had been stiffening him had finally escaped. Then he said, “You want to know anything else, you’ll have to ask the Air-lift Wing personnel who went into the field with them.”

  Personnel. Plural. Of course, thought Valena. There’s more than just a pilot on those planes, there’s a whole crew! “Who else went out there with Emmett and the investigators?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. There’d be a crew of at least five. Pilot, copilot, flight engineer, navigator, loadmaster. More, maybe. I don’t know that much about the military here. They stay kind of separate.”

  You just have to go talk to them, she thought, but then she recalled the undecipherable look in Hugh’s eyes. Had he actually been giving her information, or had he just been toying with her?

  She looked at the tired mountaineer. “Thank you, Manny. I’ll leave you in peace now.” As she rose from the table, she thought about all the questions she would ask this man and all the other citizens of McMurdo if she was not afraid of being downright rude. People here ask where you’re from and what you’re doing here, but what I’m beginning to wonder is, why are you here and what are you hiding from?

  17

  THE COFFEE HOUSE WAS MADE FROM TWO SMALL QUONset huts connected at right angles. Half buried under a sad-looking bank of dirty, thrice-frozen snow that had been thrown up by the plows, the little watering hole seemed to be holding onto the past as much as to the ground. The corrugated iron arches were old, battered, and painted an unappealing shade of brown. At the point where they joined, a small plywood airlock had been constructed, so long ago that it now sorely needed paint. Valena pushed open the outer door of the airlock and passed within.

  Inside, the atmosphere was comfortingly dim. The structure had no windows, creating the illusion that the sun had actually set, returning her world to low-latitude normalcy. She passed down a short hallway that housed coat hooks and a bulletin board displaying photographs of a number of local women dressed in ball gowns as they carried out their daily routines on the ice; driving Cats, riding snowmobiles, cooking chow for a thousand people or so. The shorter Quonset opened off to her left. It was filled with derelict couches that faced a large-screen TV. Nothing was on, but one couple sat familiarly close on an eight-foot-long divan that featured fuzzy, grass-green upholstery. They had their arms around each other, and if their wineglasses had been any closer together, they could have dispensed with one and simply shared the other.

  Valena turned right into the other Quonset. The inside of its low barrel arch had been paneled with knotty pine, yielding an arched rendition of a hunting cabin, though without the crackling fire, stuffed heads, and frosty windows looking out over pine-dappled landscapes. Into this space had been stuffed a bar, behind which stood a bartender, and a great many small, square tables surrounded by miscellaneous hard-backed and overstuffed chairs, another McMurdan monument to scavenging. Various pairs and groups of people sat around talking, swigging vino, and playing cards or board games. A huge man in canvas overalls played darts with a woman who couldn’t have weighed over ninety pounds.

  Valena looked right and left, searching the room for Major Muller. He wasn’t there. She finally spotted Betty the firefighter sitting with a group of people at a table toward one end of the room.

  Betty raised her sleepy eyes as Valena approached. “Hey, glad you could make it,” she said. She gestured to her left, toward a man in military fatigues. “May I introduce Tractor Larry, who is standing in as protocol officer for Tractor Waylon. That guy with the turquoise eyes next to him is Tractor Matt. Next to him we have…”

  The names began to blur in Valena’s mind. She had met entirely too many people in the past few days. Appellations seemed to descend into a netherworld even as they emerged from Betty’s lips, almost as if she were on television and the sound had been turned off. Even the faces were beginning to merge into one big composite southlander, a hardy soul of intermediate gender who eschewed fashion for warmth, easy care, and fitness. In fact—she realized, now that she thought of it—Antarcticans, while attractive people on the whole, wore no fussy shoes or constraining clothing and almost no jewelry, and she saw not a lick of makeup on any of the women present. She smiled. In a very true sense, she was home. She took a seat next to Tractor Matt, a burly man she had last seen whooping it up in the galley with the man who, with Cupcake, had found the missing Cat driver.

  “May I serve you some wine?” asked the flyboy to her left.

  “Ah, sure. What are we having?”

  “Red, I think.” The man pulled one of three bottles out of the center of the table and poured. As Valena took a sip, another flyboy said, “Got any Georges to send north?”

  “Georges?”

  “One-dollar bills. We’re bringing Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea, and Jefferson south and
sending George home.” He produced some two-dollar bills and one-dollar coins from his pocket. “Even exchange.”

  Valena pulled her wallet out of her back jeans pocket and emptied out most of her folding money, holding back her New Zealand currency and the two US twenties that lurked behind them. “Here’s a five to contribute to the wine money,” she said. “And here are all the ones I have.”

  “Good woman.” The man pounced on the money, swapping her two-dollar bills and dollar coins for the singles. The five he approached differently. Producing a stamp and green-inked stamp pad, he printed little green antique tractor symbols all over it. Then he hit all the singles as well, apparently for good measure. Then he ceremoniously slipped his tractor stamp into a special pouch. A block of wood lay next to his hand. It was about three by four inches, and adorned with large green letters that read MOATS.

  “What does ‘moats’ mean?” asked Valena.

  The man grinned. “It stands for ‘Mother of All Tractor Stamps,’” he said. He turned it over, revealing a very large version of the antique tractor symbol on the other side. “Come to think of it, I’m behind on my job here,” he added, charging the enormous stamp with ink. He examined each of the wine bottles in turn and rolled the tractor onto the labels of those he had not previously hit.

  The man with the stamp raised his voice a bit and addressed the group again. “As president pro tempore in lieu of Tractor Hugh, who could not be with us this evening due to grave and unavoidable duties in the line of duty and so forth, I call everyone’s attention to …”

  Larry said, “Some more new business.”

  “Yeah. Tractor Larry, as the meeting of the Tractor Club is already in session, how do we proceed with the introduction of this new candidate?”

  Larry rubbed his buzz cut as he mulled this question. “I believe that, in emergency situations such as these, we can use the abbreviated form. In any case, we must start with introductions.”