In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “Yeah,” said Neal. “Sam here snored all night. At least we had the heater and all, and the trash novels they put in the survival bags were pretty good once we figured out to read them aloud with proper theatric modifications.”

  “We read parts. Henry played the part of the ingenue. He was a natural.”

  “So you were out here Monday night?” asked Valena.

  “Yeah, that was it. Condition 1. We weren’t expecting it for hours. Caught us with our pants down.”

  “Or our dry suits, as the case may be,” said Sam.

  “Notice anything strange out here Tuesday morning?” asked Valena.

  “No, we just rigged up and took another dive while we waited for the weather to clear.”

  “I saw something strange,” said the dive tender. “I stepped outside the shack a moment to see if the weather was clearing. Seemed to be breaking up in the west first. Anyway, I swear I saw some nut zooming by out there on the flag route. It was still snowing some, just not anywhere near so hard.”

  “What was nutty about that? asked Valena. “Was he going too fast for the visibility?”

  “Well, that, and he was alone,” said the tender. “Going hell-bent on a snow machine.”

  “That is strange. Did you tell anyone about it?”

  The man shook his head. “Nope. Henry here came up with a leak in his suit, so it sort of slipped my mind until just now, when you asked.” He laughed. “Henry’s suit was flooded clear up to his chest. I asked him if he was cold! Tell them, Henry.”

  Henry said, “I told him, ‘My feet are numb, my legs are numb, and when I started to lose the feeling in my penis, I figured it’s time to come up.’”

  They all laughed. Good, cold fun. All in a day’s Antarctic dive.

  “That snow machine,” said Valena. “Which way was it going, and when?”

  The tender said, “When did we dive, boys? About nine a.m.?”

  “Yeah, that was it.”

  “Yeah, so call it 9:30. He was heading south.”

  “Towards McMurdo,” said Valena.

  “I suppose so. I figured he was going to turn around though, because it was still snowing pretty thick over toward Hut Point.”

  “What color parka?”

  “Red. That’s why I could see him. Red parka, black pants, blue boots. Your basic beaker.”

  Valena thought, Not just beakers wear the red parkas. She asked, “How far could you see from here?”

  The dive tender thought for a moment. “Now and then, I could just make out Tent Island, very vaguely. That’s about two kilometers. An hour later, it was all but clear.”

  Sam slid into the dive hole, raised a thumbs-up, and descended out of sight. A boil of bubbles filled the opening in the ice, then subsided. Neal followed, giving a merry wave, and finally Henry.

  Matt said, “Well, that’s the show, I guess. We’d better get going.”

  The tender saw them to the door as they walked out to the Pisten Bully. Dave opened the shotgun door for Valena.

  She stood ten feet from it, trying to decide what to do. The day before, she had ridden for hours with this man alone across the ice, but today, everything was in a jumble. She had been told point-blank not to trust him, but by someone she in turn no longer felt she could trust. And yet someone had ridden past this point heading toward the place where Steve had been found. Could that have been Dave?

  Taking a deep breath, she climbed up over the treads into the shotgun seat. Matt climbed into the passenger compartment.

  Dave climbed into the driver’s seat, buckled up, restarted the vehicle, and turned the vehicle into a vector that would intersect the flag route around Cape Evans.

  Valena said, “Could that man on the snow machine have been Steve Myer?”

  “I don’t think so. Steve was in a Challenger. Or he’d taken one out to the sea ice runway that morning, anyways.”

  “But he didn’t take the Challenger to where you found him?”

  “No, it was pretty near the runway galley.”

  “Where exactly did you find him, Dave?”

  Dave stared out through the windshield. “We passed the place before we got to the seals. Why?”

  “Why’s Cupcake on your case?”

  His voice came out tight and angry. “I do not know.”

  “Did you say no to her once?”

  He let out an ironic chuckle. “Let’s call it more than once. But that don’t separate me from the crowd.”

  Valena didn’t say anything for a while.

  Dave shifted uneasily in his seat. “I have a lot of respect for the Cake, but…” He let the subject drop.

  Valena wanted to change the subject, too. “What would anyone be doing bombing along here in a snow machine by himself in a blizzard?”

  “Wouldn’t I like to know.”

  “You think that man at the dive shack was hallucinating?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see something where you found Steve that fit with that?”

  “It was still blowing. Some of the time I couldn’t see my own feet.”

  Valena said, “I notice that some … tradesmen here wear a big red parka instead of Carhartts.” She forced herself not to look at Dave’s red parka.

  Dave glanced at her. “At Clothing Issue, we’re given our choice,” he said. He drove onward, his face set in silence.

  He knows what I was thinking, thought Valena.

  They came back onto the flagged route and rounded Cape Evans. The route swung toward shore again, leading them up into a shallow cove that held a splendid view of Mount Erebus in its embrace. Dave pulled the Pisten Bully to a stop at the edge of the ice, where it formed a shallow heave against the land, and parked it next to another tracked vehicle that was painted a soft ocher. “This is as close as we can get,” he said, climbing out.

  “To what?”

  “The hut.”

  “There’s another dive hut here?”

  He turned and smiled quizzically. “You are new here. This is the hut Scott lived in the winter before he headed to the pole. His Terra Nova expedition.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Dave’s smile widened into a grin. “Why do you think I took a day off to come with you guys?”

  “Can we go inside?”

  “Let’s find out!” said Matt, who had already climbed out of the passenger compartment and was heading toward the shore.

  Valena tumbled out of her side of the vehicle and skidded across the ice. The wind had blown the snow off the ramp of frozen ocean where the expansion of freezing had shoved it onto the land. It was as slick as glass. Gingerly, she corrected her course to climb the ramp where there was still an armoring of snow.

  Dave moved past Valena and probed the snow. “Here’s a crack,” he said, as his pole jerked down into the snow. “Just follow my footsteps.”

  Valena stepped along behind him, watching his shoulders roll with the effort of finding his footing in the drift. Tucked into a hollow on the land, a roof was visible now. As she walked higher up the drift, she could see the walls below its eaves. It was a much bigger hut, taller, wider, longer. Clearly, Scott had learned from his first attempt at Hut Point and had come back better prepared with a structure that would house him and his men for as long as necessary. Snow had drifted in scoured tongues around the entrance, and as they approached, Valena saw the rusted metal of spare skids for long-gone sledges leaning against its sides, as if still waiting for Scott’s return. “This is magic!” she cried. “And look—the door is open!”

  At the sound of her voice, a man dressed in yellow ECWs stepped out through the doorway. “Greetings,” he said. “Want to come inside?”

  Valena clapped her hands together in delight. “Yes!”

  “Step this way. We were just locking up to head over to Cape Royds, but we can certainly delay a few minutes. Be sure to brush the snow off your boots with that brush in there,” he said. “And don’t step beyond any black lines. Here, you’ll need th
is.” He handed Valena a flashlight.

  She stepped inside and found herself in a vestibule that led to an inner door. An ancient snow shovel rested against the jamb to one side, and beside it, a row of long, wooden skis and a wheelbarrow. Behind her stood a rusted bicycle, crazily bent by some mishap.

  Valena cleaned the snow from her boots and then stepped cautiously toward the inner door, letting her eyes adjust to the lowered light. It had no lock, only a rope pull with a wooden handle. As she reached out to grasp it, she realized that the hand of Sir Robert Falcon Scott had touched it also …

  She pulled. The catch eased. The door swung inward.

  She stepped into a world lost in the age of heroes, when men crossed Antarctic ice on foot, hauling sledges. Inside, it was dim—the only light coming from a few small windows far inside the long room—but Valena did not turn on the flashlight. Instead, she let this world envelop her.

  The trusses of the room arched high above her, with equipment stored in the rafters. A sledge. A ladder. There was a cast-iron stove, and shelves made of packing crates filled with tins and jars of food stores. Mustard, ketchup, cocoa, biscuits, oatmeal. Down the center of the room stood a long table sparsely laid with crockery, and to either side, crude bunk beds.

  I’ve a photograph of men dining here, she realized. A holiday feast, with pennants hanging from these beams. And I’ve seen a picture of the men lying in these bunks.

  Valena moved quietly into the room, almost afraid to breathe. She switched on her light now, letting its thin beam search in among the shadows of the bunks. In the picture of the men lying in these crude beds, their faces were tired and grimed with oil from their food and soot from their lamps. How patient they had looked, as they survived the long winter they must endure before their leader headed toward the pole. Or was that photograph taken as they waited, praying for a return that would not come?

  How they must have suffered!

  Suddenly feeling a strong need for companionship, Valena turned to the door. Matt and Dave had followed her inside and were absorbing the magnificence of the living relic in silence, eyes roaming, mouths agape. The New Zealanders followed close behind them.

  They wandered here and there, leaning carefully over books left open on a table—a headline on an Australian newspaper declared, SPRING HAS COME!—and shaking heads in amazement over the reindeer-hide sleeping bags that rested on the surprisingly short bunks.

  These men were smaller than I am, thought Valena. And yet they endured.

  “This was Scott’s bunk,” said one of the New Zealanders, moving up beside her. ‘And here’s his desk.” A penguin collected for study lay across the table, as fresh as if it had been left the day before.

  In another corner of the room, a set of chemist’s glassware rested on a wooden bench, awaiting the scientist’s return.

  “We should get going,” said one of the archaeologists.

  Valena thought, I don’t want to leave, but I’ve absorbed all I can for now, it’s that overwhelming. After thanking the archaeologists for the incomparable treasure of visiting the inside of the hut, she turned to follow.

  BACK OUT ON THE ICE, DAVE, MATT, AND VALENA climbed back into their Pisten Bully and followed the archaeologists’ Haaglund as it left the flag route from McMurdo behind and continued on a less-traveled track to the north, rounding Barne Glacier, a wall of ice that glowed a neon blue. They were no longer in the Antarctica of jet aircraft and flush toilets but the one of lone huts and little-used trails.

  Valena rode in silence, her world far away, an abstraction.

  Dave broke the quiet. “So you came down here to work with Emmett Vanderzee.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know I was up there last year when it happened.”

  She turned and looked at him. “Yes.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help … You know, I’d hate for you to have to go home.”

  Valena thought, He’s going to make this easy for me. She studied the angles of his profile. He was a fine-looking man, handsome in a gentle, kind sort of way. Unassuming. A comforting presence. “I need to know as much as I can about how it went down,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like … well, like did you hear the plane? That sort of thing.”

  “Sure. It was low overhead. You could hear it even through the wind.”

  “Where were you when you heard it?”

  “In the cook tent. I was keeping the stove going so Emmett and Sheila and Manny could concentrate on the patient. They had him up on the table on top of a couple of camp mats to keep him as warm as possible. I had the stove on a packing crate underneath. I wanted to keep an eye on it so it didn’t melt its way down into the ice and go out, or ignite the tent fabric.”

  “Who else was there with you?”

  Dave thought a moment, conjuring the scene in his head. “Willy was there eating cookies a lot. Bob and Dan were in their tent, and Cal was in the one he shared with Emmett.”

  “You’re sure that they were in those tents, and not somewhere else.”

  “I checked on them when I went to the latrine once. Bob was sleeping, or just lying there with his eyes shut, and Dan was reading. And Cal was alone in his tent. Then the plane came over, and we took a look but the wind got so bad Emmett was on his belly using an ice axe to hold on, so he made us return to the tents until it let up. He went out again after a while but couldn’t find it.”

  “Did Cal go with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when the plane first made its drop, did you have radio contact with the pilots?”

  “Yeah, through Mac Ops, we did. They reported seeing the chute open, but they couldn’t see our tents. And we couldn’t see a damned thing.”

  “You needed the ropes to find your way ten feet from tent to tent.”

  “Right. That or that GPS they had.”

  “Who had?”

  “Emmett and Cal.”

  “I see. So what was it like when Emmett couldn’t find the bundle?”

  Dave shook his head. “He was frantic. He kept pacing up and down in the cook tent, looking out every few minutes to see if it had let up.”

  “Did you tell all this to the feds?”

  He shook his head. “They didn’t ask me.”

  “What? They came down here and arrested Emmett but didn’t speak to all the witnesses?”

  “I hear they talked to Willy once.” He smiled at the thought. “I guess they decided us Fleet Ops guys aren’t too smart.” He chuckled. “Anyways, I suppose they meant to question me, but I was doing my shift at Pegasus, and about then they got their weather window to fly up to the high camp, and…well, that was the last I saw of any of them, including Emmett.” His smile faded. “I wished I had spoken to them, now. Maybe I could have helped.”

  Ice surrounded them on every side.

  “Anything else you need to ask me?” asked Dave.

  “Yeah,” said Valena. “Why did you come here?”

  Dave pondered her question a moment, then, with his usual easy smile, said, “Well, I was at something of a cross-roads,” and left it at that.

  They reached another point of land, one less shrouded with snow or ice. Black volcanic rock protruded everywhere through shallow drifts of snow. The Haaglund drove a short distance up the rocky slope and pulled to a stop. Dave parked the Pisten Bully next to it.

  The landscape was humpy and confusing, a maze of lava flows. They unloaded Valena’s gear and started up a steep hill over knobs of black volcanic rock all knotty with dark crystals the size of Valena’s fingernails. Far away to the left, she could hear a strange chattering noise. “What’s that sound?” she asked.

  “Penguins,” said Matt. “Come on, let’s get your gear stowed, and then if it’s okay with Nat, we can go see the birds.”

  “You need a permit?”

  “You most definitely need a permit,” said Matt. “Nat Lanthrope’s your man, so you’d better smile prettily and convince
him you’re not out to mess with his birds.”

  At the top of the rise, a small valley opened out among the naked rocks, facing north toward the Ross Sea and the Southern Ocean. Endless ice rolled out before them, for the winter’s pack ice had yet to break. It was a landscape of contrasts: white on black, snow and ice on darkest rock. To the south, the slopes of Mount Erebus rose toward a steaming summit, their own private Fujiyama.

  Tucked into the lee of a curl of crumbling rock stood a large tent with a wooden frame. To one side of the entrance stood a large solar collector mounted on a staff with cables running off it into the tent.

  “Ahoy, Nat!” called Matt.

  A young woman stepped out to greet them. “Hey there. Nat’s out taking his afternoon constitutional. I’m Jeannie Powers, Nat’s assistant. I know important things, like where the chocolate bars are hidden.”

  Matt returned to the Pisten Bully to unload the drill. Dave and Jeannie helped Valena pitch her tent on a broad patch of disintegrating lava, fighting a nattering wind that wanted to take it off the cliff onto the pack ice. Jeannie showed them how to scout first the least abrasive rocks to use as dead men inside the tent and, next, rocks of just the right size to hold down the guylines and secure the rain fly.

  “It doesn’t rain here,” said Jeannie, “but you’ll need the fly for the warmth, and to make it just a little bit less bright inside, so you can hope to sleep. The latrine is that drum-and-bucket arrangement up against the side of Nat’s tent. Dry Valley Protocols here, which means liquids in the fifty-five-gallon drum and you-know-what in the bucket. They gave you a pee bottle?”

  Valena produced the quart Nalgene bottle Nancy had given her that morning. It had PEE written in several places around the sides of the bottle and a large letter P boldly emblazoned on its cap. “I guess they want to make sure I don’t confuse it with my water bottle.”

  Jeannie nodded. “You’ll get the hang of it. Superior bladder control is the key to Antarctic survival. That, and good aim.”

  Valena stared at the latrine with concern. The right side of the bucket was up against the bank of lava and the back was to the tent, but the front and left sides faced the view.