Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  “I’m asking you to think of the contract you have here.”

  “I don’t have a contract here, Mr. Smith.”

  “You’re an American.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tarp leaned away from the window. Idly, he drew a finger through the circle of steam that his breath had left on the window. “You want me to say that I have an implied contract here because of loyalty and because of birth. Do you know why I left the Agency, sir?”

  The other man cleared his throat as if to say something and then seemed to changed his mind. “No,” he said simply.

  “I was fired. I was fired because I was ‘uncontrollable.’ What I couldn’t control was my conviction that we should win a war if we were in one.” Tarp mad more marks in the steam, which he had turned into the Chinese character for hope. The circle shrank and the character disappeared. “I don’t make contracts with the people who fired me anymore. You can tell them that, if you like.” He made it sound kind and gentle.

  The former president changed his position, drummed his fingers on his glass, sighed noisily. “Can I tell them you won’t do anything to actively help the Soviets, other than this one thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Some people think you’re going over.”

  “Some people always think that.”

  “Well … Well. Well, sit down, will you? You make me nervous, standing where I can’t see you like that.” The man was angry, and he was laughing to cover the anger, which showed in his eyes and the redness of his cheeks when Tarp looked at him. “Mr. Smith” shook his head. “They told me what you’d be like. One of the staff people laughed at me when I told him I was coming to see you. You know what he said? He said, ‘Get yourself a rock, Mr. President, and practice squeezing milk out of it, because that’s what it’ll be like.’” He shook his head. He was still angry. “You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with me.”

  “No, sir. I was never good at team sports.”

  “Okay. O-kay! At least we know where we stand. Now, a couple more things.” He was a good manager: finding that his anger was wasted, he put it behind him and went on.

  “The administration wants some distance between itself and, uh, this business, but at one and the same time they want to keep some contact, so … The people across the street hoped you and I could stay in touch.”

  “What our Russian friends call a bomsha.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sort of a nurse.”

  “More like a communications link.”

  Tarp looked at him. “What can I expect from you? Support?”

  The former president shook his head. “Case by case. Nothing out of Operations Division, I was told to say.”

  Tarp nodded. “Information? Analysis?”

  “On a case-by-case basis.”

  They talked for a few more minutes about ways and means of communicating — contacts, fallbacks, ways of working. “Mr. Smith” could not conceal a delight in the mechanics of it all. He had administered a country and he had made great decisions, but he had never been down in the dirt of intelligence work. Now, like the well-bred boy who has finally been allowed to go out and play in the mud with the roughnecks, he was having the time of his life. Just like the movies, Tarp thought. Well, maybe they’ll let me play at being president someday.

  “Mr. Smith” had another Scotch and, only a little tight, went off to his own room at midnight. Tarp was asleep within minutes.

  He went down early the next morning to the New Monroe’s almost hidden dining room and sat alone so that he could mull over what had been said. The Buenos Aires failure still weighed on him like one of those dull, relentless pains of the ear or the neck that seem not quite bad enough to require a doctor but are always too bad to be ignored. Behind that dull ache was a lesser but more threatening one: a feeling of malaise whose source was the suspicion that the basic problem Repin had given him was unsolvable — or that, even if it was solvable, it was too involved and too profoundly soiled for anybody to get out of it clean.

  After breakfast, Tarp went to his bank and sequestered himself with his safe-deposit box. There were three passports in it and three credit cards in the same names; nineteen hundred dollars in several currencies; a thousand in gold; a Browning .38; and a fiat object that was in part a cigarette lighter. He took a Canadian passport and its credit card, three hundred American dollars, and the lighter and closed the box up. In a nearby store he bought a down jacket, a pair of winter hiking boots, a sweater, another turtleneck, and a silk undershirt, all with the credit card; and back at the hotel he put a hundred-dollar bill into the lining of the tweed jacket and gave it to the housekeeper to sew up. He changed into the new clothes, and, when she returned, he handed her the garment bag with the other things.

  “Into storage, please, Mrs. Mims.”

  “Like usual, I assume.”

  “Please.”

  He could go away for a year or twenty. When he came back, the clothes and the money would be waiting. Or he could come back tomorrow.

  One end of the lighter produced a thin jet of propane-fed flame that could be adjusted to a needlepoint that would melt silver solder. A pull at the other end raised a solid block machined to a block below it, in which were two .22 holes and a firing mechanism. Two inches below the holes a small decorative logo pushed forward as the block was pulled up and served as a trigger. Tarp checked it over, tested the flame, looked into the .22 chambers. They were empty. The desk was able to supply him with two .22 shorts, which he inserted before he closed the little weapon up so that it looked like a stainless-steel lighter again.

  “Leaving us?” the clerk said when he went down.

  “For a while.”

  “Everything satisfactory, I hope.”

  “Very.” He put down the Canadian credit card, which had a quite different name on it, but the other man’s beautiful mustache did not so much as twitch.

  “Did you have one egg or two at breakfast?”

  “One.”

  “Ah.” The ends of his mustache climbed his cheeks as he smiled. “I would have overcharged you. Glad I asked.”

  The bill was over a thousand dollars. Eggs were about eighty-nine cents a dozen in the supermarkets.

  Chapter 16

  He flew to Boston and then to Bangor, and there he walked down along the cargo hangars and beyond them to a shed that had pontoon aircraft parked around it, their wings covered with snow. It was hot inside the tiny office and there was a smell of coffee and cigarettes.

  “Billy,” he said to a skinny man in a plaid shirt.

  “Well, well — Mr. Tarp.” He pronounced it a little like tahp and a little like tap. “Kinda early in the year for you.”

  “Ice out, Billy?”

  “No sirree. Plenty of ice still on Moosehead. Could put a twin engine down on Moosehead. Don’t know ’bout your pond.”

  “Want to try it?”

  “Well, now …” He stretched his skinny neck out of the flannel collar and made a face. “I’d rather take the helicopter.”

  “That’s okay with me.”

  “Cost you more.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Be half an hour or so.”

  The little helicopter zoomed in over his woods, and he watched a startled moose begin its awkward, crazy gallop down a hillside. The leafless trees looked like dark lines scratched on the white veneer of snow. Blow-downs made crosshatching, like the shadows in an engraving. Billy put the chopper down in the cleared area below his cabin. When Tarp stepped out, the snow was up to his knees.

  “Want me to come back for you?” Billy shouted.

  “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Tarp ducked under the rotors and ran. The engine blasted and the little machine danced off the snow and swung away over his trees; then it was gone, leaving its smell and the terrible hush of the silenced woods.

  Tarp looked around. He acknowledged a sentimental pleasure. This was home — as much as he had a home. To his
left, his pond was a flat snowscape with a dark tracing of deer prints. His log dock appeared to have dragged itself to the pond’s edge and put its head in, for the far end was buried under the snow. His canoes were stored under a mound of snow and logs nearby; to his right, a line of woods curved from behind the cabin around the clearing to join the woods that ringed the pond in a sweep to the river, three hundred yards away. Across the river was Canada.

  Tarp went up the slope to the cabin. The big window had been shuttered for the winter. The log porch was stacked with firewood. Tarp circled the cabin, but nobody had troubled it; after his first year here, not even meddlers on snowmobiles had come near. He had bought his privacy with two fights, a lawsuit, a large gift to the police retirement fund, and some rifle shots. He bothered nobody; nobody bothered him.

  It was dark inside and cold as a mausoleum. He laid a fire in the wood stove, opened the shutters, and turned on two lights, then went to the roof and swept snow off the solar panels that backed the power company’s line. In half an hour the stove was beginning to give up its slow heat; there was hot coffee on the gas stove; and his computer screen was glowing. Tarp checked the locker where the long guns were, then the wall panel where another .22 pistol was hidden.

  The daylight was fading. He stepped outside to see the last of it on the treetops across the clearing. The surface of the ponds was velvety blue. Nothing stirred. In its lair beyond the edge of the woods, the badger would sleep another two weeks; high in the trees, the squirrels would nestle in the beds of leaves, warming each other.

  He sniffed the air. “Snow coming,” he said aloud. His breath came out like smoke. The cold of night was coming down.

  He awoke before sunrise and enjoyed those moments that first waking in a cold room allows, the luxury of lying in a down-filled bag while just beyond that shell the cold waits. The room was dark. The cabin creaked in a wind, which snuffled at the corners like an animal. The cabin was as tight as logs and six inches of insulation could make it, but when the “Montreal Express” blew, a damped-down stove would not keep it warm all night. He put his head out and felt the fresh shock of cold air on his cheek. He smiled. He was beginning to feel better.

  He slipped out of the bag and stood naked in the dark, feeling the cold like a fluid poured over his body. He pushed three chunks of wood into the stove and opened the damper, and for a few seconds he held his hands over the brightness of the coals before he closed the door.

  By the time the sun was up he was padding around the now warm cabin in stockinged feet, wearing wool-lined khaki pants and a thick sweater. He opened the interior shutters to the light. Pale pink and yellow, the sunlight turned the snow shadows blue and lavender; the rising sun hung in the black trees like a ball of ice. There was cloud between him and the sun. By nine o’clock the first snow would begin to fall.

  He made biscuits in a stovetop oven and ate them with strawberry jam that had been frozen all winter, and Danish butter from a can, and coffee like liqueur. Then he sat at the computer, wiping his fingertips on his pant legs.

  QUERY MODE, he typed.

  ACCESS: BLACK SUN.

  VISUAL PRESENTATION: SOVIET SUBMARINES

  CARIBBEAN AND SOUTH ATLANTIC/ END.

  It gave him a map, white on green, with a column of more or less parallel lines running down to Cuba, then out around the bulge of Brazil and south to a common point east of the Falklands. From there the routes diverged, one cutting east toward the tip of Africa, the other cutting between the Falklands and South Georgia to head close to Tierra del Fuego and the southern islands of Argentina and Chile, and from there into the Pacific.

  DELETE NUCLEAR-POWERED, he typed.

  One line disappeared, but the patterns were the same.

  DELETE DISPLAY/ VISUAL PRESENTATION: SOVIET SUB SUPPLY STATIONS.

  Four areas were lighted — one in the Atlantic well east and north of Florida; one in Cuba itself; one east of the Falkland Islands; one in the Pacific far west of Chile.

  The computer gave him data on number of missions, on submarines actually sighted and identified over the past five years, on routes taken leaving Russia by conventional subs — out of Murmansk and Archangel, some down the White Sea Canal and into the Baltic; some out of Tallinn into the Baltic directly.

  He called up a map of the tip of Argentina that stretched from the Soviet supply point on the northeast to a point equally far west of Tierra del Fuego, which stood at the center. Below the Argentine tip was only open ocean; far toward the upper-right corner were the Falklands; and beyond them was the area worked intermittently by the Soviet submarine supply.

  Where the hell is Antarctica? he thought.

  OPEN VISUAL TIMES TWO.

  The scale halved. Now a curving finger of land beckoned from the bottom of the screen.

  IDENT. He moved a stylus of light toward the finger.

  IDENT FOLLOWS: ANTARCTIC PENINSULA AKA GRAHAM LAND/PALMER LAND/ PRINCIPAL ISLANDS: ELEPHANT/KING GEORGE/SOUTH SHETLAND/BISCOE.

  Tarp rubbed a finger down his jaw. QUERY: LOCATION ICE, he typed.

  SEASONAL OR PERMANENT?

  BOTH: SEGREGATE AND IDENT.

  A thread of light ran around the finger of land. PERMANENT. A series of dots marked another line farther out. SEASONAL.

  QUERY: SEASONAL ICE?

  DEFINED AS DRIFT ICE/ FORMS ANTARCTIC WINTER/ WIDEST EXTENT SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER/ SHRINKS TOWARD PERMANENT OR PACK ICE SUMMER.

  QUERY: NAVIGABLE?

  NO NAVIGATION PACK ICE CONVENTIONAL VESSELS/ DRIFT ICE NAVIGABLE BUT UNPREDICTABLE/ EXAMPLES: N B PALMER YEAR 1820 EXPLORER/ SAILING SHIP/ REACHED PENINSULA FROM FALKLAND ISLANDS/ SCOTT 1910 EXPLORER REACHED MCMURDO SOUND FROM NEW ZEALAND/ AMUNDSEN 1911 EXPLORER REACHED KAINAN BAY FROM

  ENOUGH, Tarp told it sharply. He was thinking.

  QUERY: DEPTH OF DRIFT ICE?

  INSUFFICIENT DATA.

  QUERY: IS DRIFT ICE AREA NAVIGABLE BY SUBMARINE?

  INSUFFICIENT DATA.

  He looked at that unpromising message for a while, and then he looked at a map of Argentina.

  QUERY: SUBMARINE FLEET/ ARGENTINA?

  The answer was not interesting to him until the following message spread across the screen:

  SUBMARINE VESSEL ADMIRAL JORGE CANOSSA COMMISSIONED 1978/ LAUNCHED MURMANSK, USSR, 1963 AS WHISKEY CLASS SOVIET VESSEL SVETAN-LAYOSK/ PURCHASED BY ARGENTINA 1977/ REFITTED MURMANSK 1977-78 FOR MARINE RESEARCH.

  He waited, but nothing more came.

  QUERY: DETAILS ADMIRAL JORGE CANOSSA?

  NO FURTHER DATA.

  He played with the Argentine submarine fleet for a few minutes, but nothing more of interest appeared. The Argentines had a small, conventional undersea navy and had used part of it to try to resupply their troops during the Falklands war. Their subs were a conglomerate of other nations’ secondary vessels — conventional boats from the United States, France, Israel, and the U.S.S.R. There was no indication that Argentine submarines ever made contact with the Soviet subs that plied the area. Still, he found the coincidence of the Argentine marine-research submarine provocative. There was at least an Argentine-Soviet connection there. Could it lead to “Maxudov”?

  What did the Argentinians want a submarine to do marine research for? he wondered.

  QUERY: ARGENTINE SUBMARINE PENETRATION DRIFT ICE/PACK ICE?

  NO DATA.

  The ice fascinated him. It suggested another world, one unexplored and so full of possibilities. Its closeness to Argentina was inescapable. The Argentinians had fought a war over the little duster of rock that they called the Malvinas. Would they extend their ambitions to include Antarctica? And might they, if they did, want nuclear weapons to back a claim? If they did, they would again find themselves in a confrontation with Great Britain, and Tarp wondered how much the British refusal to cooperate in unmasking “Maxudov” might have to do with their apprehensions about Argentina.

  If the Soviets decided to help the Argentinians, he speculated, beginning with some sort of venture in
Antarctica …

  QUERY: SOVIET ACTIVITY ANTARCTICA?

  The screen came alive with a map of the Antarctic. Many lines flowed into it from the perimeter, most of them headed for the Soviet base at Mirnyy. Laboriously, Tarp queried one after the other, got nothing.

  There was one rather short penetration of the drift ice, however, that was well away from the usual Soviet activity and closer to South America. He touched it with the stylus.

  QUERY?

  SOVIET U.S. JOINT SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION/ SOVIET ICEBREAKER MIKHAIL SOMOV/OCTOBER 1981/ PURPOSE: INVESTIGATION OF POLYNYA.

  QUERY: POLYNYA?

  POLYNYA: RUSSIAN NOUN/ MEANING: OPEN WATER SURROUNDED BY ICE/ CAUSE UNKNOWN? HYPOTHESIS: WARM WATER SUB SURFACE.

  QUERY: RESULTS OF SOVIET-U.S. MISSION?

  ENDED NOVEMBER 1981/ ICE/ NO POLYNYA.

  QUERY: LOCATIONS ANTARCTIC POLYNYA?

  POLYNYA SIGHTED 1974, 1975, 1976 LONG DEGREES: ZERO/ LAT DEGREES: SIX TWO/ ESTIMATED SIZE: TWO HUNDRED FIFTY MILES DIAMETER PAREN HIGHLY VARIABLE PAREN/ SUMMER PHENOMENON.

  Tarp called up the map of the tip of South America and the Antarctic finger. The polynya lay seven hundred miles east.

  Tarp got up and stretched and made himself a curious lunch from the foods that had stood in the cabin all winter. He moved around the cabin, eating, looking out the window, looking at his feet, occasionally returning to the computer terminal and asking questions that produced fruitless answers. What he wanted to ask it was its opinion of an idea, but the computer did not give opinions. What he wanted then was Repin or Juana to talk to; and then when he had thought about them for a little, it was Juana that he wanted.

  Tarp shook himself like a dog who has just climbed out of the water. That won’t do. That won’t do at all.

  He went to the computer for facts again and ran Schneider’s name, but got no more than he had learned in Buenos Aires.

  QUERY: KINSELLA, JAIME.

  ALL NEW DATA: BORN JUNE 1947/ MARRIED THREE CHILDREN/ RES BUENOS AIRES ARGENTINA/ ASSISTANT DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR FOREIGN JOURNALISTS, BUREAU OF NEWS AND INFORMATION/ HOLDS CURRENT RANK CAPTAIN ARGENTINE AIR FORCE SPECIALIST INTELLIGENCE/ ACTIVE DUTY 1968-77 INCLUDING AIR INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL, WASHINGTON D C./ NO KNOWN CONNECTIONS POLITICAL GROUPS ARGENTINA BUT INVESTIGATING/ SOURCE: MR. SMITH