Valena interrupted. “Is it okay if I do this even if I’m about to leave?”
“Leave?” said Matt.
“Uh, yeah. I just got here Saturday evening, but my—uh, Professor Vanderzee had to leave. So they’ve scheduled me to go out on the next flight north.” She glanced at Larry, wondering if he’d be the pilot of the plane that took her away from the ice.
Matt said, “So they aren’t even having you go ahead and do your scientific research?”
“Not unless I can get my professor back,” said Valena. “Or find a job all of a sudden. Anyone have employment for a beaker who’s mislaid her professor?”
“Aw hell,” said Betty. “Most beakers don’t even lay their professors, much less mislay them.”
The crowd broke into cheerful laughter, with hoots of, “Good one, Tractor Betty,” and, “Oooo, it burns!”
The man with the stamp said, “Then we must proceed with speed on two accounts. Okay, let’s go around the table and introduce ourselves to the candidate. Members please state your names to the candidate.”
“Tractor Betty.”
“Tractor Larry.”
“Tractor Matt.” Matt made eye contact more pointedly than most, then hopped up and wove his way between the tables toward the bar, where he leaned an elbow next to a man who was perched on a stool there working on a bottle of white and engaged him in earnest conversation.
Meanwhile, the introductions continued around the table. “Hi, I’m Valena,” she said, when the process ended with her.
Betty said, “What now, Tractor Larry? Hell, I never knew it was so difficult to remember all this crap. Where’s Tractor Hugh when we need him?”
“We ask the candidate the Questions,” said Tractor Larry. “Valena, we must ask you two important questions, which you shall answer as honestly as you can. Are you ready?”
“Sure,” said Valena.
The man with whom Matt was speaking at the bar had twisted around on his stool and was looking at her.
Larry said, “Okay, here’s the first question. What is your name?”
“Valena.”
All present nodded in approval.
“Okay, you are doing well,” said Larry. “Now for the second and more crucial question: Valena, do you like tractors!”
Valena looked from face to face. All now gazed on her with feigned solemnity. Confused, she said, “Oh, sure. I love tractors.”
A great cheer went up from the table, arms flying upward with delight, all faces beaming with happiness.
“Huzzah,” said the protocol officer. “Tractor Betty, you may proceed with the investiture.”
Betty turned her heavy-lidded eyes toward Valena. “Valena, I now pronounce you Tractor Valena. You are a duly invested member of the Tractor Club, and therefore endowed with the rights and privileges thereof, or something like that.”
All raised their glasses, roared, “Tractor Valena,” and took a drink.
Valena asked, “What exactly are my rights and privileges?”
In unison, they announced, “Membership is lifelong, free, and irrevocable!”
“Well, how nice,” said Valena. She felt unaccountably pleased.
Matt resumed his place at the table.
Larry said, “Now the best part. The story.”
Betty said, “Oh, yeah. Okay now, Tractor Valena, we proceed to the best part, the solemn invocation, or some such. Tractor Valena, you may now tell us a story about tractors. What’s the rule on that, Tractor Larry?”
“It can be the truth, a lie, or a story,” said Larry.
“Yeah, that,” said Betty.
“Me?” said Valena.
The assembled broke into cheers.
“Yeah, you,” said Betty. “Give us a tractor story.”
Valena’s mind went blank. She stared from face to face, trying to think of what to say. Her gaze dropped to the Mother of All Tractor Stamps, and the jaunty green tractor reminded her of an ancient one that occupied a special corner in her grandfather’s barn. “My grandfather has a 1929 Case L,” she began.
An appreciative “Oooo” ran around the table. The men performed heavenward looks of spiritual transcendence. Larry held his hands to his heart.
Out of the corner of her eye, Valena could see the man at the bar rise and move toward their table. He was looking at her. To her audience at the table, she said, “Grandpa is proud of that tractor. Sentimental, even. He inherited it from his grandfather along with the farm. He keeps it oiled and fueled, and on very special occasions he drives it. Like in parades, that sort of thing. And sometimes around the near meadow.” An image began to arise in her mind, of brilliant sunshine, the dogs running along behind, grasshoppers scattering …
“A fine man!” said Matt. He looked like a cat who had caught a canary.
“A fine tractor!” said Larry.
“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 i
n 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.
In Cold Pursuit Page 17