As she rolled Flipper slowly along the trail, Valena stared out across the white wilderness. The variation in the patterns the wind carved into the snow and ice was fantastic. Here the surface snow and firn was sculpted into overlapping fish scales the size of her boot, there into waves as big as the Delta. Sastrugi, the Russians had named these endlessly variable sculptures; an alien name for alien forms.
Wee Willy pulled his snow machine to a halt in front of her and waved his arms for her to stop. She pulled up and rolled down the window, catching a blast of scouring wind in her face.
“I been out here for hours. Your turn,” he demanded, pulling down his neck gaiter to speak.
Valena thought for only a second before deciding that she was only too ready to agree. She was enjoying driving the ponderous Flipper but envied the speed and maneuverability of the snow machines. In all her twenty-four years she had never ridden one (“You’ll end up like your ma,” Great Aunt Dilla had always said), and this was a grand way to start. “I’ll be right down,” she replied, and she began the process of layering on clothing to guard against the cold.
As she climbed down out of the cab of the Delta, she told Wee Willy, “I put your hand warmer into the top of your duffel. It had fallen onto the floor, and I was certain you didn’t want it to get dirty.”
Wee Willy had been on a trajectory to trudge past her without making eye contact, but at her words he stopped, turned, and looked at her, his lips slightly parted. He stared for several seconds, then said, “Thanks.” He began to move toward the Delta again, but stopped again, turned to her, and said, “Remember to lift with your legs. It’s heavy.”
“The pike?”
“Yeah. Lift with your legs, then drop it into the snow. That way you don’t hurt your back. And lay it across your lap while you drive to the next flag. If you try and put one end of it down on the running board and you hit a bump, it can fall off into the snow.”
“Thanks.” She took a seat on the snow machine Wee Willy had just vacated.
Hilario called out from the back of the Delta. “How about I take a turn on the snow machines, too?” he asked.
Edith had seen them stop and had looped around to rejoin them. “Dave, you want a turn on the Challenger?” she called out from its cab. “I’ll take a turn on top of the load.”
Dave gave her a thumbs-up, set his machine to idle, and headed for the tractor.
“But first give Valena the ten-second lowdown on driving a snow machine, will ya?”
Dave turned and crossed to Valena’s snow machine. “Just turn the switch on the ignition and give it some gas,” he said. “Should come right on. It’s warm.”
“Thanks,” she said. She sat down quickly on the saddle and fired it up, then zoomed off down the trail, knowing that her haste was a little ridiculous, considering that there were as yet no new flags waiting to be set, but she wanted to show him that she could handle it. To her surprise and pleasure, she felt quite natural on it. Her hips rolled with the changes in the surface and, even as fast as she was going, she could feel the wind pressing at her back. When she thought she had gone about four hundred feet—two flag distances—she stopped the machine and waited.
The Challenger swept past her with Dave at the controls. He waved to her.
The Delta came lumbering down the trail with Wee Willy at the wheel. Edith tossed down a flag, and Valena hopped up and dropped the iron into the snow, lifted it out, and set the bamboo pole into the hole as the Delta continued down the trail. Sitting back down on the saddle with the iron across her lap as Wee Willy had suggested, she throttled up and zoomed off to the next position, where another flag already waited.
Valena continued along the trail, now setting the flags with the pike, now learning to use the hand augur to make a hole where the wind had blown the snow away from the ice. The wind increased incrementally, blowing in a bank of clouds that nibbled at the distant mountain range, gradually devouting it. She hummed as she worked, satisfied by the physical exertion and by proving herself a worthy member of the team.
A quarter hour later, the growing rhythm and harmony of the work were shattered by the sound of the Delta’s engine stuttering and screaming. Valena turned and watched in horror as it wallowed into a soft patch in the trail. Willy gunned the motor and cranked the wheel hard left and right, making things infinitely worse. The huge vehicle flexed wildly on its point of articulation, digging itself deeper and deeper into the snow while Edith collapsed onto the load and hung on for dear life. The wheels spun faster and faster, the frame thrashed, and the entire machine sank down and down into the snow, digging itself in past its mammoth hubcaps.
Hilario whipped his snow machine around and thundered toward the Delta, hollering for him to stop, waving his arms. Wee Willy either could not hear or was not listening, and kept the monstrous beast thrashing. Finally, as the axles began to disappear, he stopped the vehicle, climbed out, shambled twenty feet off the trail, and sat down in the snow. He did not move or speak but instead just sat there, staring off across the ice.
Far down the trail, Dave turned the Challenger around and made a slow approach, ready to smooth the trail once the Delta was freed.
Valena got off her snow machine, walked over to the Delta, and began to kick loose snow away from around the wheels. “Got a shovel?” she asked Edith, who was very slowly climbing down off the load. “I’ve seen this kind of problem before on my grandfather’s farm. Dead of winter, he once got a tractor trailer stuck out in the pasture. We dug away the loose stuff, got a low-angle slope, set the vehicle in granny gear, and drove it on out.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Hilario, producing a shovel from underneath the back seat of the Delta.
They took turns digging.
Wee Willy sat and stared away to the south.
After taking her second turn with the shovel, Edith said, “I’ll be back in a minute. I’m ChapStick dependent, and I left it in my other ball gown.”
Valena asked Hilario, “Why do you guys let him get away with this crap? I don’t see Dave letting him get away with this. For that matter, why am I doing this for him?”
“You? You’re just a show-off. Dave had his fill of Willy long ago. Me, I don’t get excited about Willy ‘cause I figure he got dropped on his head somewhere along the line. And Edith? She’s just shaping her charge. She’s pretty even-tempered, and she knows that no matter how much this may look like a simple job of ramming flags into the snow, each and every moment it’s also a matter of survival. Somebody gets twisted a little too tight out here, sometimes it’s better to give them a chance to cool off.” He laughed. ‘And we all know there’s plenty of cooling off you can do around here.”
“Yeah, but why not send along a stronger team member?”
Hilario laughed again, with an edge this time. “The Boss sent him along as sort of a morale booster. Hah. Total waste of a perfectly good boondoggle, if you ask me. I think he just wanted him out of Mac Town before someone murdered him. Okay, your turn with the shovel again.”
With the snow excavated into a ramp, Valena had the pleasure of driving the Delta out of the rut Wee Willy had made, and Dave got to work with the Challenger and goose filling in the hole. When they were ready to proceed again, Edith took a turn at the wheel of the Delta and put Wee Willy on the top of the load tossing flags, and Valena and Hilario went back at it with the pikes.
The wind continued to rise. Clouds now filled the southern horizon. Streamers of snow wailed past them at an angle to the trail, immediately smoothing the tracks left by their vehicles.
By 1750 hours, they were climbing the lower slopes of Black Island. With relief, Edith made her call to Mac Ops while Dave dropped the goose from the Challenger and Hilario and Valena put the covers on the snow machines. They had set ten miles of flags, and they were a half-hour ahead of deadline. Wee Willy climbed along the side of the cab and heaved himself inside. Hilario climbed into the Challenger with Dave, and Valena joined Edith in the Delta fo
r the ride up the steep pitch of bare rock road that led to the station.
Edith gave Valena a pat on the shoulder. “You’re a real trooper,” she said. “You didn’t have to do anything but drive, but you busted your butt for us all afternoon. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Okay, then, next stop, Black Island Station. Hold onto your hat; the wind here knows no mercy. The food’s amazingly good for a dry camp, and if you don’t mind a little coarse language, the station manager’s a kitten, but the bunkhouse … well, it’s not my fault, so I won’t apologize.”
Valena realized that she was grinning. She was the happiest she had felt in years.
24
IN MCMURDO, TED FINISHED LOCKING UP THE BLASTING equipment for the day and indulged himself in a regal stretch, pulling the front of his Carhartt parka taut. It had been a good day. The afternoon’s blast had gone off text-book perfect, the heavy equipment operators tasked to him had moved the rubble quickly and efficiently, and Wilbur had not pissed him off even once. It was time for a quick shower, a hearty dinner, and a shot or two of good whiskey. The only blemish on the day was the crushing news that the man who had turned up lost on the ice was dead. On second thought, Ted decided, I’ll make that four shots from my secret stash of single malt.
As he started down the hill toward his dormitory, Ted spotted the unmistakable form of Cupcake coming uphill toward him. There was a man next to her, a beaker by the look of him: big red, black wind pants, beard. Cupcake raised an arm and waved to him, the sort of stop-where-you-are motion that says, You’re the guy we’re coming to see. What now! Ted wondered.
“Ted!” Cupcake called out. “Wait!”
Ted hadn’t realized that he had begun sidling toward an escape route until she spoke. “Who’s your friend?” he asked.
“This is the Padre,” she said.
The man stepped forward quickly and offered a gloved hand to be shaken. “Jim Skehan. Glaciologist out of DRI.”
Ted tensed. Having someone offer the answers to McMurdo’s first two questions of acquaintance caught him off guard. It indicated trouble, somehow. Why was it important what the guy did or where he was from? And then the dime dropped and he realized that this man must be a colleague of Emmett Vanderzee’s. What in hell was Cupcake up to now? He waited for her to explain herself.
Ted waited.
Skehan watched him wait. Something about the glaciologist’s face bothered Ted. Skehan’s almost expressionless mug, perhaps, or was it the laser-sharp eyes that floated in that impassiveness?
Cupcake said, “Okay, enough with the alpha dog act, fellas. Woof, woof, now you’re friends.”
“Father Jim?”
“He’s a Jesuit. Get over it. “Father Jim and I have been out to the place where we found Steve,” she said. We found something important out there. We found tracks.”
Ted’s eyes shifted to Cupcake. “After that blow?”
Skehan said, “Even a footprint compacts the snow just a little, moving it from snow toward ice. And more importantly, the layers are disturbed by anything that transits over the snow. Maybe you’d have a hard time finding penguin footprints out there, but anything as heavy as a man, or certainly a vehicle, will leave a trace. Then, unless the wind scours down below the level of compaction, you can still see the tracks. If they get buried, you can cut a small trench to find them.”
“So let me get this straight: You two were able to find the exact place again in all that ice and went at it like a couple of archaeologists, or something.”
Skehan shrugged. “Actually, the helicopter helped us. When it landed and took off to pick up Steve, it blew the newest layers of snow away. The spot wasn’t that hard to find. Dorothy here isn’t exactly a new hand, either.”
Cupcake said, “The point is, we were able to examine the tracks around where Steve was lying.”
Hunger to know what had happened to Steve won out over ego. “All right, what did you see?” he asked.
Cupcake said, “He was near the flagged route that leads out to Cape Evans, but not on it, so the footprints that led up to him had been cut into fresh, uncompacted snow.” She turned to Skehan. “Tell him the rest.”
Skehan said, “We went to the hospital afterward, and they still had Steve’s boots. He had been wearing his own boots, not USAP issue. They had a different tread pattern from the ones we found out there. The pattern we found was exactly the same as FDX—you know, the blue boots.”
“Beaker boots,” said Ted. “Were the tracks bigger, smaller, or the same size as Steve’s?”
“We didn’t get perfect recovery on any of the tracks. What we saw were fragmental. When you walk in stiff-soled boots, you either walk flat-footed or you kind of mash the snow around, rolling off the toe and crushing the rest of your print. And whoever dropped him there took certain pains to step back toward the flag route using the same footsteps, which further disrupted them, and then there were the footprints of the rescuers. But we were still able to find three good prints that tell the story. What we could see seemed bigger than Steve’s boots.”
“And there were marks where Steve’s feet were dragged across the snow,” Cupcake added.
Skehan nodded. “Whoever did it was in a hurry. It was a hasty job. You can just see the little wheels in his head going, ‘I’ve just hit this guy across the head, so what am I going to do with him? I don’t want him waking up, and if I hit him again it sure won’t look like an accident anymore, so what should I do? Let’s see … I’d better let him freeze to death. To make sure that happens, I’ll put him somewhere they won’t find him in time. Now, where’s a good place? It has to look like something he could have done on his own, so dumping him in a blowhole for some Weddell seal isn’t quite the ticket. How about just dumping him near the flag route a couple miles out past the point? No one’s going out there anytime soon, not in this weather, and when they find him, they’ll just think he headed the wrong way in the storm.’”
Ted shook his head. “One little problem: the storm. If nobody else could get out there and back in that weather without getting lost, then how could our killer do it?”
Skehan said, “I’d use GPS. I’ve done it myself in Greenland. You need to have mapped the route beforehand, set your waypoints, but you can do it.”
“We’re pretty far south here, lad. The satellite coverage can be a little sketchy.”
“Maybe I get lucky.”
“Nasty,” said Ted. “I suppose it could work, on a long shot. Then let me ask another question: Why are you two telling me this? Why aren’t you going straight to the Chalet with this?”
“We’ll get around to telling Bellamy,” said Skehan. “But you know the party line over there. They don’t want the publicity. The muzzle he put on Emmett’s arrest was appalling.”
“But once again, why me?”
“Because you were there last year,” said Cupcake. “Or almost. You know the players. We’ve done some figuring, and almost all the other people who were at Emmett’s camp when the man died were in or around McMurdo yesterday when this happened. Calvin, Dave, and William were here. Sheila had come in by helicopter the day before to do her laundry and pick up supplies and was held up by the storm until evening. Bob Schwartz’s flight to WAIS Divide was canceled, so he was here. Manny Roig led the SAR team. Dan Lindemann was supposed to be in the Dry Valleys, but I’m checking on him. The only person who was up at that camp when the man died last year who has a bomb-proof alibi for yesterday is Emmett himself, because he’s locked up in Hawaii.”
Ted said, “And what’s your agenda?”
Skehan said, “Simple: I want Emmett’s name cleared. He’s more than a colleague, he’s a friend, but even putting that aside … okay, I’ll be entirely candid. When Frink attacked Emmett in the Financial News, he attacked all of us. He attacked the whole planet. He distorted the facts. He distorted how science is done. He was just plain wrong. He was selling a story designed to woo readers into believing that sc
ientists who study climate don’t know what they’re doing. He was telling everyone to just sit back and keep comfy and keep burning all the oil and coal they want.”
“It’s that simple?”
Skehan stared him down. “He was supporting the guys who say, ‘I don’t care if greenhouse gasses heat up the atmosphere, because when we build our 120 new coal-fired plants in the United States, and more in China, yet more in India, we make money, so to hell with our grandkids! Let them make money selling ice to cool us back down!’ Of course, there will be no ice left for them to sell, but that’s progress!”
Ted said, “I’m not arguing with you, Skehan, but I was one of the last people to see that man alive. I didn’t see any horns coming out of his head, and he isn’t the one who wrote that article.”
Skehan said, “Do you want any more deaths out here? No. And if we can connect the two deaths, then Emmett’s in the clear, because he wasn’t here for the second one.”
Ted said, “But that doesn’t clear him of the first one. Not really. And what if they aren’t connected? Sounds like you have no concern for who killed Steve. After all, he wasn’t a scientist. He was only support staff. A tradesman. A Carhartt.”
Skehan closed his eyes. “Ted, I don’t know who bit your ass,” he said, keeping his voice soft and slow, “but I’ve worked on this ice five seasons, and two more in Greenland. When one is on the ice, death is always right there waiting for us. “He opened his eyes again.” If we die by mischance, or through sickness, that’s a tragedy that affects us all. But we don’t often die out here, simply because we are a community. We work together, and live almost inside each other’s pockets. It’s a time-honored tradition, a necessity, that dates clear back to Scott and before. I do this work in part for that fellowship and that sense of shared honor, heartless intellectual though I may appear.” He pulled off his right glove and reached out between them, palm up. “And if someone’s out here purposefully causing people to die—out of cowardice, malice, greed, his motive matters not—I want him stopped. Is that good enough for you?”
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