by Tim Curran
Not that he’d ever admit to it.
Frye was a working class hardcase from toenail to eyelash, a real terror to workers and managers and beakers alike. Foul-mouthed and evil-tempered and plain intolerant of anybody who had not been on the Ice at least a decade, he would never, ever admit that the whole Kharkov thing spooked him and the Mount Hobb business was bringing it all back in spades.
Never.
4
FRYE STOMPED OUT HIS cigarette, pulled out a bag of Red Man chew and stuffed the rough-cut leaves into his cheek, started working them. “Sometimes I get to thinking about Kharkov. Crazy shit that was.”
“NSF said those people choked to death. Gas. As a good little employee who’s looking forward to his fat little bonus for being such a cooperative rat in the maze, I must believe what is told me, my friend. The NSF is incapable of mistruth.”
“Good boy, Nicky. You suck NSF ass, that’s the way. You’ll go places. It worked for me. Twenty-five years ago I was washing dishes at McMurdo and now look at me. I’ve moved up to sewage.”
Coyle smiled. “Point being, I don’t know what happened at Kharkov. Maybe I don’t want to know anymore than I want to know what happened at Hobb. But the way I see it, we’ll never know the truth, so we’re better off to sweep it all under the rug with the rest.”
“Ain’t you curious, Nicky?”
“Sure, but I know trouble when I see it.”
And it was trouble.
He knew that much. The whole Kharkov business was shady and he had a feeling the Hobb business would be the same. He didn’t like any of it. The winters were long enough without imagining things. Coyle was invited down to the stations every year and that was partly because of his Ice-Time and mostly because he was a damn good cook and station managers fought over him. But it wasn’t because he was a company man or an ass-kisser. He ran the NSF down as much as anyone, he just did it under his breath was all.
You don’t bite the hand that feeds.
“You know what that mother-raper Locke is spouting off about? He says this winter’s gonna be like that one five years ago,” Frye said. “Same spooky shit going on, only it’s starting earlier this time around, he says. That’s what he told me over my eggs this morning . . . and damn good eggs, too, Nicky. Just like that winter when the shit hit the fan at Kharkov, he tells me. We got field camps with scientists out there. That means something big’s going down, Locke says. You know they don’t run field camps, not in the winter. The only time I ever heard of it was that year at Kharkov when that beaker . . . what was his name? Gates? When he found that buried city.”
“Oh, but the company says that didn’t happen either, Frye. No ancient cities. No nothing.”
“What about the stones? Those standing stones?” Frye said, baiting him.
Frye was talking about a series of ancient megaliths similar to those at Stonehenge that had been discovered the autumn before in an upland valley of the Queen Maud Mountains, about fifteen miles west of the Mount Hobb Research Station. There had been some unprecedented melting that had exposed the very tops of the structures. At first, they were thought to be the sheared-off tops of petrified trees. Great stands of fossilized trees from the Permian had been discovered in Antarctica before. But these were not trees. Scientists from Hobb melted the structures out of the ice and suctioned off the meltwater and there, lo and behold, were an intricate series of megaliths. Within days, the images of those standing stones—which apparently had been worked by a very early civilization—were all over the internet and on the covers of hundreds of magazines.
And the debate began.
“They’re still arguing about those stones,” Coyle told him. “Some people are saying it’s a hoax.”
“Could be, Nicky, could be.”
Danny Shin, the geologist that was wintering-over at Clime, told Coyle that the Queen Maud Range had been covered in ice for at least twenty-million years, more likely thirty or forty. That ice was incredibly old. The land beneath had not been exposed since, so whoever built those monuments did it eons before the ancestors of men had even developed. Shin wouldn’t say anymore, but you could pretty much use your imagination.
And people were. Everything from alien astronauts to unknown super civilizations. But the megaliths had not been studied in any detail as yet. That would be coming next summer . . . and then? Who could say?
“That Locke is one crazy sonofabitch,” Frye said.
Coyle laughed. “Locke believes in UFOs and Atlantis and the faces on Mars. He’s nuts.”
“He said those stones are some kind of beacon. Beacon? I says. Sure, they found ‘em in Beacon Valley. He missed the joke. Guy don’t have no sense of humor. Beacon, he says, a beacon. Hell you mean? I says. Beacon, like an antenna or something, he says. Beacon for something, aliens or some shit. I don’t know. Guy talks so fast I can’t understand him sometimes. But he says that’s what happened to those limies at Hobb. They got scooped up by something and taken to Venus or one of them places to get their asses probed. He also says there’s a team up at Kharkov and that they’re drilling down to that lake again.”
Coyle had heard that one, too.
Some kind of hush-hush thing going on.
Kharkov had been a Soviet installation back in the sixties and seventies and then they handed it over to the Americans after they kicked communism to the curb and were trying to cut their budget. They still operated Vostok and a few others, but Kharkov belonged to the Americans now. At least, it had until that crazy business five years ago. It had been abandoned since. Now, maybe, it was up and running again. But why with winter coming on? Things like that made Coyle almost believe some of the rumors circulating.
Twelve years on the Ice and sometimes he felt like he didn’t have a clue, that things were happening in the shadows that he couldn’t even guess at. Or want to.
Frye said, “Locke says it’s gonna be just like that winter five years ago. Field camps. People disappearing. It ain’t gonna be good, says he. Those beakers are stirring things up down here, melting out those standing stones and exploring that lake. It’s been quiet for awhile and now it’s about to get real loud. Least, that’s what Locke is saying.” Frye laughed. “You should’ve seen that little monkeyskull in the lounge this morning, Nicky. He was going on and on about that stuff and I was telling him his mother should’ve kept her legs closed, but everyone else was listening. Even the beakers. Think it was Jesus coming to preach at a tent meeting and not that comic book nerd.”
Coyle didn’t say anymore about it.
Listening to the wind howling around the hut, he felt something sink inside him like a stone. You could try and talk sense and rationalize things as much as you wanted, he knew, but the fact remained: twenty-five people had disappeared into thin air at Hobb and that was just plain disturbing.
“Long freaky winter,” Frye said. “Who knows? Maybe Locke’s right.”
And then, throughout the camp, a siren began to shrill.
5
RIGHT AWAY COYLE THOUGHT it was another drill, but then Hopper, the manager at Clime, came over the intercom: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL! REPEAT! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! MASS CASUALTY TEAMS REPORT TO YOUR STATIONS! REPEAT! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!”
Shit.
Coyle and Frye came bolting out of the shack into the semi-darkness, confused and stumbling, wondering what the hell was going on. The siren was sounding all over camp like an air raid warning. The ANG pilots from the C-130 were outside, wanting to know what was going on. People were scurrying around like ants, slipping on the ice and pouring out of buildings and Jamesway huts and sheds. Everyone was looking for fire or an explosion, some hint that the shit had hit the fan.
But there was nothing.
Everything looked fine.
Then Hopper came back over the loudspeaker saying that a helicopter from nearby Colony Station had crashed out on the ice. He didn’t have any casualty figures or details, only that it had happened and Casualty Teams were being scrambled.<
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It was no drill.
Coyle formed up with his group, began quickly loading medical equipment and stretchers onto one of the Sno-Cats for the journey. As he climbed into the cab with Special Ed—Ed Tavares—the Human Resources guy, and Horn, a mechanic, he saw that Frye’s Sno-Cat was already heading off down the flagged ice road at a good clip.
“Why the hell were they flying a helicopter around?” Coyle wanted to know.
“I’m sure they had their reasons,” Special Ed said, diplomatic as only Special Ed could be. He was leader of the Mass Casualty Team.
Working the shift and bringing the ‘Cat around, Horn just laughed. “Yeah, I just bet they do. Goddamn Colony. Way I’m hearing it, it’s a goddamn freakshow over there. Those boys are up to something, but you just try and find out what.”
“There’s no mystery to Colony Station,” Special Ed said.
But said no more on the subject.
By the end of February, the planes stopped flying. Everything was grounded including helicopters. No Sprytes or Sno-Cats coming in from the deep-field projects. No tourists or journalists or other DVs, distinguished visitors. Nobody but essential personnel. The winds tended to blow and the snow tended to fly and what illumination there was, was grainy more often than not.
This time of year, the sun did not really rise. It hovered over the ice for a few hours casting a dim light before giving up the ghost and sinking from sight. Another week and it would be gone entirely. Not exactly prime flying conditions, particularly for a helicopter.
Outside of the ‘Cat, the world was hazy and white and surreal. Sometimes the winds would gust up to thirty miles an hour and then just drop away and it would look like they were driving through one of those glass paperweights that you shook to make a tiny blizzard. Just suspended snowflakes drifting back down to the frozen hardpack.
The whole way to the crash site everyone was a little on edge and when they got that way, they started picking at each other.
Not Special Ed, of course.
He was the HR guy and he went out of his way to make people happy, which often got him in reams of trouble. Promising this one something and promising someone else the same thing and then having to lie and swindle his way out. It was commonly known he had no backbone and nothing swinging between his legs. He was a company man all the way, always trying to smooth things over between the NSF and the station personnel. He took shit from both ends and tried to keep everyone smiling which was simply impossible.
Coyle knew he meant well, but sometimes it was hard not to think of him as a weasel. All of which had gotten him the name of “Special Ed,” because, boy, he was special, all right.
Right then, Horn was saying how Colony Station was run by the CIA and those spooks were playing around with nukes and germ warfare agents, threatening the whole goddamn continent and the free world in general. They were smuggling Middle Eastern terrorists down there, he said, so they could torture them in private, testing experimental laxatives on them.
All of which made Special Ed bristle because that was dangerous talk and wouldn’t look good in his reports and to a guy like him reports were everything.
“They’re just involved in some delicate research at Colony,” he said. “The station is staffed by some very bright people. I’ve been there. There’s nothing strange about the place.”
“Ah, they’re running black ops out of there. Ask anyone,” Horn said. “Goddamn spooks.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Special Ed said.
Special Ed didn’t like Horn, Coyle knew.
He didn’t like many at Clime. But he put up with them and volunteered as the camp whipping boy just to keep things chugging along.
After one particularly ugly incident the week before when Gut—a.k.a. Natalie Gutman, a lady who was nearly as feminine as her nickname—gave Special Ed the mother of all ass-chewings in the Galley right in front of everyone, Coyle had asked him why he put up with it. Why he let those people treat him like dirt. And Special Ed told him, “I’d rather they took it out on me than on each other.”
Horn was part of the Casualty Team because he was a trained medic. If it hadn’t been for that, Special Ed would have cut his strings a long time ago. But with a guy like Special Ed, necessity and proficiency as Mass Casualty Team leader and putting on a fine productive company face were always far more important than trifling things like pride, dignity, or self-respect.
“Hey, Nicky,” Horn said. “I heard somewhere that the NSF buried all those people from Kharkov right in the ice. That last year, they chopped ‘em out and took ‘em to Colony for dissection or something. You hear that?”
Coyle smiled.
Special Ed just shook his head. The NSF would not be involved in such things. To him, The Program was a virgin in a pristine white confirmation dress with its legs duly crossed. To guys like Horn it was a bagged-out five-dollar whore.
Coyle kept out of it.
He had opinions on Colony Station like everyone else but he wasn’t going to wade in the muddy waters of conspiracy like Locke and his UFO followers. But that didn’t mean he didn’t think there was something damn odd about Colony. It was a restricted area with perimeter guards and everything. And this in Antarctica of all places like maybe it was Area 51 or something and they had to keep people away.
What people?
This was Antarctica for chrissake.
It was weird. Coyle had never been there and he supposed very few actually had. But everyone claimed to know all about it. Colony had only existed for the past two years. Like Clime, which had only been around for three, it was one of the newest American installations. But it was not like Clime. Though it was never admitted publicly, Colony was a military operation with armed guards and motion detectors and this at the bottom of the world. Go figure.
All Coyle knew for sure was that there was a posting on the board at Clime that forbid travel to or anywhere near Colony. And that was not only strange, it plain smelled bad.
And now, apparently, Colony had crashed a chopper.
Coyle didn’t know what they were getting into here. At places like Clime, there were lots of little teams that had been thrown together, trained to deal with everything from fires to fuel spills to outbreaks of contagious diseases. Any problem that could conceivably occur at a remote outpost. The Mass Casualty Team was trained to deal with anything that involved bodies or wounded. That could be anything from a plane crash to a fire to a terrorist attack. Most of the drills were pretty ridiculous and it had been hard to take them seriously, especially with Hopper running around blowing his whistle like a track coach.
No one seemed to know who came up with the scenarios, but they were something, all right: the tanks at the Fuel Depot rupturing, sending millions of gallons of diesel fuel and hi-test rushing at the station itself; the entire base going up in flames as a result of somebody cooking meth in their rooms; and, Coyle’s favorite, the NBC drills where nuclear, biological, or chemical agents had been set loose at the station. This gave everyone a chance to don their Hazmat suits for decon operations. The suits were big and white and puffy, pumped full of air, and very hard to move around in with any grace. Your field of vision was strictly limited. There was nothing funnier than seeing eighteen or twenty people rushing around the compound tripping and bumping into each other, getting angry and pissed-off while Hopper blew his whistle, the lot of them looking like heavily-swaddled toddlers that had just learned to walk or marshmallow-shaped munchkins with absolutely no sense of balance.
Priceless.
But it was all part of the modern Antarctic experience and you had to love it.
Coyle had twelve years Ice-Time and he’d never actually seen a true accident. Nothing that couldn’t be mopped up or swept into the dustbin. He’d seen violence, but that always involved one or two people. But worse things had happened down there on a large scale and more than once.
Back in 1979, a New Zealand flight loaded with over 200 tourists had crashed right
into Mount Erebus. The aircraft broke up on impact, scattering bodies and flaming remains all over the mountainside and down into crevasses. Recovery teams came in from McMurdo and Scott Base and it was a real ugly mess. During the following weeks, charred corpses and limbs and torsos and decapitated heads were gathered up and zipped into plastic bags. Skua gulls—notorious scavengers that haunt the garbage heaps of the stations and eat anything from potato peelings to seal placentas and baby penguins—showed up in numbers for their share of the goodies, pecking through the plastic bags and feasting on what was inside. Something which drove members of the recovery teams into a blind rage.
Coyle had known a guy named Jerry Sherrily who had worked McMurdo back then and been part of the clean-up crew. It had been a nasty business. Remains were stored in the food freezers until they could be flown out. Sherrily said he would never forget the sound of the Skuas eating out of those bags or the sight of one flying over his head with a human hand in its beak. It was high summer at the time and as the bodies came in, they were stacked alongside the strip at Willy Field. The sun glaring down on them made them heat up and the bags kept breaking open as they were off-loaded from choppers, splashing rancid body fluids and gouts of tissue in the faces of the workers.
Coyle had seen some of the films of all that and he was remembering them now. Remembering every grisly detail and wondering just what in the hell he was getting himself into here.