by Alton Gansky
A stiff, cold wind pierced Perry.
Okay, think, Perry commanded himself. “How far?” he wondered out loud.
“It can’t be too far. The plane just took off,” Sarah said. Her face was as white as the ice she stood on.
“Farther than you think,” Larimore said. “The C-5 isn’t a fighter jet, but it travels at a good clip.”
“How far?” Perry pressed.
Gleason answered. “Assume three hundred miles per hour . . . that’s five miles a minute. The plane took off—what?—five minutes ago? So it’s maybe twenty-five miles from here.”
“Not so far,” Jack said. “It couldn’t have gotten up to speed yet. Plus much of the distance would be vertical. I’m guessing less than ten miles.”
“I think you’re right, Jack.” Perry turned and jogged toward the supply module next to the Dome. He slid to a stop in front of a wide pair of doors. He fumbled with the latch, his gloves hindering his movement. A moment later, he swung the doors wide and plunged into the dark room. He flipped a switch. Sealed lights overhead sprang to life, bathing the room in white light. In front of Perry was the Antarctic equivalent of a garage. Large tools, two portable generators, and a pair of snowmobiles filled the small space.
“What are you thinking?” Jack’s voice said behind him.
“I’m thinking the same thing you are,” Perry said.
“I figured as much. I’ll take the one on the right.”
Perry and Jack moved forward when Griffin and the others rounded the corner.
“You can’t be serious,” Griffin said. “You can’t go out there. Not that far. Not with your lack of experience.”
“There may be survivors,” Perry said.
“I doubt that,” Griffin said. “I haven’t the slimmest of hopes that such is the case.”
“I do,” Perry said. “Now get out of the way.”
“Hold on,” Larimore said. “You can’t go alone.”
“He’s not,” Jack said. “I’m keeping him company.”
Griffin was furious. “Committing a double suicide won’t help those poor souls out there.”
“This isn’t suicide,” Perry said. “It’s what a man does for his friends and those he’s responsible for.”
“Your friends are gone, Sachs,” Griffin snapped. “Face it.”
Perry turned and marched to the scientist. “Six of those men are down here because I asked them to be. Every one of them has a wife at home, and most have children. I’m going to have to face those families. When I do, I want to be able to say I did everything I could.”
Griffin shook his head. “You won’t be able to say anything because you will be frozen in the ice, dead as dead can be. Don’t you feel the wind? It’s kicking up. It’s a katabatic, a hurricane on ice. It will freeze you then blow your lifeless body across the continent. You won’t survive. Be logical.”
“I am,” Perry said. He returned to the snowmobile and mounted up. “Someone get on the radio. Let McMurdo know what happened, and tell them to send help.”
“I’m going, too,” Larimore stated. “Those snowmobiles are designed to carry two each.”
Perry shook his head and started to object, but the logic was too sound. Two men could do little if there were survivors. Every hand would be helpful. Besides, Larimore had lost as many men as Perry. How could he refuse? He gave a quick nod.
A sound behind Perry made him turn. Jack was hooking a tow-sled, a simple device designed to hold equipment or tools, to the back of Perry’s snowmobile. Always thinking, Jack.
“Sarah, Gwen, gather up blankets, spare parkas, and the med kit.” Perry watched them disappear around the corner.
“I can’t tell you how unwise this is,” Griffin said. “You’ve not seen what the wind can do.”
Perry hadn’t experienced severe winds in the Antarctic, but he had done his research. The katabatic was a downslope wind, moving from the center of the continent out and becoming stronger toward the coast. He hoped they were far enough inland to avoid the worst of it. Wind combined with extreme cold was a two-edged sword cutting twice on the way into its victim. It seemed a horrible way to die.
That thought made Perry more resolute. The image of an injured man lying with just the cold-weather suit to protect him chilled Perry far more than ice-laden wind could.
He pulled the snowmobile out of the equipment garage, dragging the skid-supported trailer behind him. Jack followed suit the moment he had finished attaching his own tow-sled. They stopped just a few yards from the garage, dismounting to help Gwen and Sarah load the requested items.
“We brought what we could,” Gwen said. “I hope it’s enough.”
“It will do,” Perry said. He remounted the snowmobile.
“Oh, all right, all right,” Griffin said. “I’m coming, too.”
Perry looked at him with surprise then turned to see the same expression on Jack’s face. “Griffin, you don’t need—”
“Yes, I do. I have more Antarctic experience than all of you combined. It’s my duty.” Before another objection was raised, he straddled the seat behind Perry and pulled his hood lower. He said something Perry couldn’t make out, but he didn’t ask the scientist to repeat it. Seconds were wasting, and every moment an injured man spent on the ice was another moment closer to death.
Perry gunned the throttle and set his course to the plume of smoke. He just hoped there was someone to rescue.
Chapter 7
The Learjet rolled down the runway with ease then turned its nose skyward, slipping into the night. The yellow lights of Mexico City glistened like jewels spilled on blacktop but soon gave way to the dark of unpopulated desert. The ground below the aircraft receded in feet then in miles as the jet banked south. Overhead, stars blinked as if winking at the speeding craft.
Tia didn’t care for the stars tonight any more than she cared for them any other night. They were burning balls of gas hanging hundreds of light-years away that might or might not even be there. What concerned her was what lay ahead—thousands of miles ahead.
She leaned her head back onto the white leather seat and closed her eyes. She was tired, wearied from the day’s work. That was all the emotion she would allow. Tired or not, it didn’t matter. The goal mattered. The prophecy mattered. Pleasing Eric mattered. Everything else was incidental—including her life.
Still, rest would be welcome, and there was little else for her to do. She inhaled deeply and thanked the gods for the next few hours of near solitude.
Solitude was her friend, her treasure, her lifelong goal. Solitude was sweet, a delicious aloneness that most avoided but that she thrived on. Her world afforded her little of the precious commodity. Even now she was not alone. Two pilots directed the aircraft on its course; two others waited their turn. Five other people were aboard, people who were as dedicated to the prophecy as she, trusted workers whose roots could be traced through centuries and whose dependability had been proven many times. They were people with a single goal and no conscience to hamstring them—people just like her.
The Learjet was full, but not one person would bother her. None dared unless the disturbance was sufficiently important to risk her wrath.
Unlike commercial aircraft, the business jet was equipped with tables, a workstation, and a luxurious office. Tia sat alone in a seating group of four, two seats separated by a maple-and-cherry-wood table from two facing seats.
The phone on the table rang.
What drowsiness circulated in Tia’s head evaporated before the bell sounded again. She snapped it up and said, “Matteo.”
It was Eric. She listened then set the phone down. The conversation lasted less than sixty seconds. Again Tia lay her head back and closed her eyes, keenly aware of the jet’s movement through the clear air. She wondered what it was like to feel one’s aircraft tumble from the sky. She had no way of knowing, but she had learned nearly twenty people had just experienced the sensation.
Of course, they weren’t talki
ng.
Tia had no idea how Eric knew of the crash, but she never asked such questions. She was the second most powerful person in the organization, but there were still things she did not know. Eric was not prone to trust anyone, not even her. Most likely, Eric had another operative involved. He had operatives everywhere.
The smoke rose from the ice as if someone had cracked open a gate to Hell. Perry knew that jet fuel had combined with wood crates, fabric, nylon, plastic, and a hundred other things that terrified him. The plume was black as oil and roiled and folded upon itself like the contents of a witch’s cauldron. Acid churned in his stomach and burned his throat. His heart hammered like a race-car piston, and his neck tightened into a wad of muscles. He had one nearly overpowering desire—to turn around, to avoid seeing what he knew lay before him. Images of the carnage flashed like a strobe in his mind. He fought them back, but they always returned more powerful, more garish, and more horrible.
Perry had seen enough airline accidents on television for him to envision what lay a few miles ahead. Images he had seen on the news that day in 1978 in San Diego and others floated like ashes on the wind in his brain. Lockerbie, Florida, the Iranian airliner shot down by a navy ship, and bodies—bodies on the ground . . . bodies floating on the water.
Perry accelerated. One hope drove him to face what no man would ever want to see—the possibility of a survivor. No matter how badly injured, no matter how slim the chance of life, Perry would do his best to bring him home.
Only the cold and the wind expurgated the images of destruction. Griffin had been right, the wind was picking up, and with it the windchill dropped. Added to that was the “created” wind from Perry’s pushing the snowmobile faster and faster over the ice.
Perry was a man of prayer—spontaneous prayer. His faith had seen him through the best times and the most miserable. He had no formal time each day when he prayed, but his mind was heaven directed always. He was praying now, but there were no fine words, no beautiful phrases. The tragedy had reduced him to the most basic of all prayers, the kind of intercession that was rooted in abysmal despair and grounded in shock. “Dear God . . . dear God . . . dear God . . .” They were just two words, monosyllabic, but they said more than most preachers could intone. It was a plea from the heart, from where soul was stitched to emotion. It was simple; it was needy; and it was genuine.
Perry felt his parka tighten. Griffin, who rode on the seat be-hind him, had once again tightened his grip.
“It does no good if you kill us on the way there,” Griffin shouted over the noise of the gas engine and the roar of the wind.
“Minutes may mean lives,” Perry shouted back. Minutes may mean lives. Did he believe that? Was he so naive as to think anyone could be alive in the inferno that lay ahead?
Perry pressed on, fighting the growing wind, battling his own fear. He turned and saw Jack to his left and less than three feet behind. Jack’s face, covered with goggles, his head encased in the parka hood that had been pulled down tight to prevent its slipping, told Perry that the jovial giant was intent on getting to the site. His jaw was tight, his lips pressed into a tight line, and his chin pressed forward. Perry had seen the look before, and it gave him some comfort. Jack was a jokester, but he was also the bravest man Perry knew.
Behind Jack was Commander Larimore. Perry could see none of his face. Larimore had his head down and pressed into Jack’s back, using the big man as a shield against the unforgiving wind.
Perry’s skull felt as if it were about to split open. His breathing was labored, made all the more difficult by shock and wind so cold it threatened to freeze his lungs solid with every inhalation. He should slow down. He knew that, but images of men in pain lying unprotected on the ice field refused to let Perry go.
Perry stepped up the pace.
The column of smoke widened as they approached. The wind was no one’s slave, not even that of a burning cauldron of jet fuel, and it pushed the noxious mixture around, spreading it like tar on the open air. Perry tried to judge the distance, but the borderless expansion of white made it impossible.
The smoke had taken on a life of its own, its folding, seething billows shaping itself into frightening images. For a moment, Perry thought he saw a gigantic face peering down at them from the top of the column—a devilish face with a wicked sneer. It was as if the fire mocked them, as if it were greedy for four more lives that were willingly giving themselves over to its clutches.
The wind picked up loose ice crystals and began painting the air with sparkling flecks of white, which rode the rising breeze—white diamonds of ice, a black curtain of smoke, and a crystal blue sky.
Easing up on the accelerator, Perry watched as what had been a column of smoke now morphed into an obsidian wall. Black snow joined the ice dust, thickening the air. A moment later Perry realized he was seeing not black snow but soot from the plane fire. The air was cooling the roiling smoke so that if fell back to the surface.
Perry’s gut twisted as he approached the wreckage. He slowed the snowmobile to a crawl and let his eyes survey the destruction.
Pieces of the aircraft were scattered in a long stretch as far as Perry’s eyes could see. Most of the metal was unrecognizable, but some pieces were too large to miss. The tail section lay upside down, half its height driven into the ice. Packing crates lay in splinters. Wire, hydraulic line, cable, and aluminum skin from the fuselage were strewn about. Perry pressed on until he came to a crater in the ice. Fracture striations radiated from the impact point across the ice surface. A wad of sheet metal and titanium ribs filled the crater like the carcass of a prehistoric bird to be dined upon by others.
The fire burned too hot for Perry and the others to approach, but he could see that the impact crater had been enlarged by burning fuel and material. Perry tried not to dwell on the fact that that material included human flesh.
Steam rose from the pit and mingled with the black smoke.
“The smoke is turning gray!” Larimore shouted.
“The water from the melting ice is smothering the fuel,” Griffin said. “In the end, the ice wins. The ice always wins.”
“The debris field has to be a mile long,” Jack said. “Maybe we should split up.”
“Too many hazards,” Perry said. “We stick together. Jack, you and the commander move fifty yards off our flank, and Griffin and I will search closer. We’ll circle the debris field once, then again more slowly. You know what we’re looking for.”
“I know what we’re going to find,” Griffin said.
So did Perry.
The sound of cracking ice and crackling fire was unnerving. The rain of black soot and ice particles made Perry feel as if he were driving a snowmobile on a distant planet’s surreal landscape.
Checking Jack’s position to his right, Perry pressed on. He steered around a jagged piece of fuselage then around a small pool of jet fuel. Twenty feet ahead he saw something he recognized—a chair. Coming up from behind he could see the shoulder straps still in place. Perry stopped the snowmobile and dismounted. With Griffin close behind, he approached the chair and stepped to its front.
Griffin bolted. A moment later, Perry heard him vomiting. Perry closed his eyes and tried to drive away the image of the headless, legless torso strapped to the seat.
Gwen James paced around the Dome’s communication cubicle. Anxiety ran roughshod through her. The sight of burning wreckage in the distance had shaken her to the core, but hearing her brother volunteer to accompany Perry to the site had shaken her more. Griffin was a smart man, an intellectual, and brilliant in his field, but he was no hero.
Worse, Gleason sat at the communication table trying to make contact with the outside world, but nothing was working.
“Is the power on?” Gwen asked.
“Yes,” Gleason said patiently. “It was the first thing I checked.”
“This can’t be right,” Gwen said. “The system was working this morning. How are we going to reach others for help i
f our radio doesn’t work?”
“One thing at a time,” Gleason said. “Why don’t you try one of the walkie-talkies while I work on this?”
“The handhelds aren’t designed to work with that kind of range. You’re just trying to keep me busy.”
Gleason looked up from the communication console and made eye contact with Gwen, and then he looked at Sarah, who stood to one side observing. “What I’m trying to do is contact McMurdo Station. I know the handheld radios won’t reach that far, but they might reach Perry and the others. They may be too far away, they may not. I know only one way to find out.”
“Do you want me to do it?” Sarah asked.
“No, I’ll do it,” Gwen snapped. She felt a moment’s guilt for her rudeness, but patience wasn’t a family virtue. She stepped to a wood rack—a simple plywood board with dowels attached to its surface. The rack held six walkie-talkies. Four were gone, carried by Perry and the others. She snatched up the first one, turned it on, and keyed the mike. “Griffin, this is Gwen. Do you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Griffin, this is Gwen at base. Do you hear me?”
More nothing.
“It’s not on,” Sarah observed.
“Of course it’s on,” Gwen shot back. “I turned it on.”
“There’s no red light,” Sarah added.
Gwen turned her attention to the top of the radio. The power light was dark. She tried the on switch again but the light remained cold. She grabbed the other handheld and activated the power switch. It, too, was dead.
“I don’t like this,” Sarah said. “Something stinks.” She moved toward Gwen and took one of the radios, then pulled the plastic back cover off to reveal the empty battery compartment. She looked at Gwen.
Gwen’s heart flipped. She followed Sarah’s example and stripped off the cover of her walkie-talkie. The battery compartment was empty.
“Could someone have forgotten to put batteries in?” Gwen wondered. That didn’t seem right. Everything on an expedition like this was checked and double-checked.