Cold Flood (Kea Wright Mysteries Book 1)

by RJ Corgan

  “I use an electromagnet,” a gruff voice boomed beside them, its southern drawl thick and syrupy. “Doesn’t leave a trace.”

  Kea turned toward Gary, wondering who the comment had been directed at. Gary stared back.

  Not me, she realized. He’s not looking at me.

  Instead, his gaze was focused somewhere about two feet above their heads. After a moment, he turned back to stare at his feet, and he carried on hiking as if he had never said anything at all.

  Kea exchanged a puzzled look with Nadia, as if to ask, Am I supposed to ignore him?

  Nadia just rolled her eyes. Under her breath, she added, “He does that on conference calls all the time.” She continued walking.

  Kea quickened her pace to keep up with Nadia and away from Gary. She slowed once again when she had caught up with another gaggle of volunteers.

  “This is taking forever,” Cole complained.

  It took another moment for Kea to realize that he was referring to the hike.

  “We can’t camp any closer than Skaftafell, I’m afraid,” Kea explained. “And as for the walk, try to think of it as a way to clear the brain before the real work begins.”

  “Are all the glaciers here retreating so quickly?” Reynard, the young German with wild curly blond hair, had joined their group. A couple of other volunteers were also slowing down to listen.

  “Worse,” Kea answered, happy to return to the safety of lecture-mode, although she kept track of Gary out of the corner of her eye. “Many are practically galloping away. When the ice is retreating upslope, like it is here, it appears to move even faster. As a glacier retreats out of a valley, it can even get beheaded.”

  “Beheaded?” Lexie asked, recorder in hand.

  “When a glacier stagnates, it can melt unevenly. As it retreats, either due to topography or because it’s buried by debris, it may leave the front of the glacier behind.” She pointed to where the lakes lapped against the white and black crust of the ice margin. “That’s where you’d think the glacier begins, but we’re probably standing on ice right now.” She waved her hand at the barren sandy plain that extended around them for kilometers. “The ice may extend nearly two kilometers south of here. We get glimpses when the rivers down cut, eroding away the overlying sediment, and expose the buried ice. Using radio waves, scientists have found buried ice hundreds of years old up to fifty meters beneath our feet.”

  “It’s sad to see them wasting away so fast,” commented Amirah, a middle-aged woman with long black hair. Tucked within her jacket, her tiny chin was ensconced by a silver and gold scarf that set off her dark complexion.

  Kea nodded sympathetically. “On the plus side, the retreat exposes features below, within, and above the ice for us to study. By examining these, we can better understand the internal mechanics of the glaciers, which in turn gives us insight into how landscapes were created during the last ice age.”

  Before they’re all gone.

  Catching up with the rest of the volunteers, they paused for a break. She used the opportunity to pull Marcus aside.

  “Everything all right?” Marcus pulled out his water flask as they walked.

  Aside from you going behind my back and publishing without me?

  She kept walking until she was satisfied that they were out of earshot of the others. “Have you had any interaction with Gary yet?”

  “He’s a little quirky, but he seems okay,” Marcus replied with a shrug. “He talks to himself a lot, but that’s nothing terribly unusual for a volunteer.”

  “True,” she admitted.

  Marcus took a long drink, gulping down the water. “Remember that goth guy from last year? Dressed all in black, said he was a vampire or some nonsense.”

  “Trevor?” She remembered the pale, twenty-something young man from Boston. Harmless, but odd. Definitely odd. “I quite liked him.”

  “Takes all sorts,” Marcus nodded. “But we’ll take all the help we can get.”

  “To be fair,” she reflected, “for a vampire, he was very good with the survey gear.”

  “Of course, you like everyone. Well, there’s hope for old Gary then.” Marcus smiled ingratiatingly. “Just add him to the Watch List,” he added referring to their mental register of people to keep an eye on in the field.

  “Marcus,” Kea shifted on her feet, her boot rocking a large cobble back and forth. He seemed to be up for conversation, but she was unsure where to begin. She didn’t want to reveal her source, so she chose her words carefully. “I was thinking of submitting an article on some of the terrain work we did last season.” She watched him as he paused before taking another drink. “I was going to ask...” She thought she saw his back stiffen, and she felt her courage flee her. She was just too exhausted to confront his treachery directly. Instead, she pivoted. “Would you be interested in collaborating on it?”

  There we go, she thought. Easy out. Just add me to the article. No harm no foul.

  “Yes, well...” Marcus turned toward her, his face contorting into a puzzled frown. “That’s something to think about.”

  Yes, Kea thought. Yes, it is. Come on, Marcus, let’s adult together.

  “To be honest,” Marcus’s lips smeared into a greasy smile, “I’ve always been concerned that the error on your survey points was too far out of range to be useful. But yes, I’ll have another look. It would certainly be good to get back in the publishing business again. It’s so hard to keep up with you these days.”

  Kea found her lips plastered into a pained smile. At that moment, she suddenly understood why it was ill-advised to smile at dogs. Canines bared their teeth before ripping out the throat of their prey. She felt like tearing that insipid grin off his face. A slew of choice swears danced on her tongue, but she was acutely aware of the volunteers wandering nearby. “Do let me know if you change your mind,” she managed to say at last.

  Still gagging on her anger, Kea returned to the group and cast her eyes up to the sky, pleading for the heavens to give her patience.

  When they arrived at the edge of the lake, she joined the graduate students and helped them retrieve the rafts and oars they’d hidden behind a boulder after their previous crossings. She attached the air pump and flicked the switch, watching with satisfaction as the rafts began to inflate.

  Kea moved to a group of volunteers who were peering into the depths of the lake. The surface was steeped a dark brown, its waters thick with sediment. Massive slabs of ice broke the surface every hundred meters or so. Like giant slumbering turtles, they occasionally turned as the melting sun overbalanced their mass.

  “Is there really no other way across?” Lexie asked, skipping a rock on the surface of the lake. Her pebble hopped over the water three times before thwacking into a floating chunk of ice.

  Kea shook her head. “Not really. The rivers and lakes block most of the glacier now. There is one section farther east of here where you might just make it across, but we’d never risk the equipment or all of you.”

  “What’s so dangerous about it?” asked a man with perfectly trimmed dark hair and a playful smile.

  Fernando, she reminded herself. Puerto Rican, in his mid-thirties, polite and judging by his bare ring-finger, single. Fernando, Fernando, fit Fernando. She hoped the mnemonic would work. A recovering introvert, her role as team lead demanded that she be gregarious and engaging. It was exhausting, but necessary.

  “There are a lot of upwellings at the edge of the eastern margin,” she pointed to the mossy green cliffs. “The water there is forced up the slope of the depression. You can even see small fountains spouting up through the ice in some locations. But the ice is thin and very treacherous. Here, the rafts might take longer, but they’re much safer.”

  Observing the two distinct groups milling around the lakeshore, she grew more concerned about the team dynamics. Last night, she and the other leads had discussed the ramifications of going up on the ice with divided – and hostile – teams. They had decided on mixing them up in small
er groups in the hopes of building camaraderie. Looking at them now, she was questioning the wisdom of their decision.

  She surveyed the volunteers again, mentally ticking off names. The group closest to her was team Corvis which included the father-daughter Russian combo, Andrei and Nadia. Andrei, a tall oak of a man with wide shoulders, kept a watchful gaze over his daughter through his wire-rimmed spectacles. Although only eighteen, Nadia was the same height as her father, but with a slender frame, one that Kea had already caught Cole ogling more than once.

  This entire field team seems to be drowning in hormones, Kea reflected. Shaking her head, she toyed with the idea of adding saltpeter to the next shopping run.

  Also on team Corvis was Amirah, who seemed to have more silk scarfs than Kea had underwear and Gary, a data scientist from Alabama. He stood quietly, apart from the group, content to observe.

  A good twenty meters away, standing by the rafts were Jon and Erik, the muscular cousins, who were part of T3. Max, in contrast to the two sports models beside him, was a large man, his girth swathed in folds of fat and carried by a sturdy frame. He waved his hands expressively as he talked, with an air of authority that Marcus could only dream of. While Kea hadn’t had a chance to speak to him yet, she had dug up his form and was unsurprised to see the words ‘VP’ and ‘CEO’, in the Occupation box. Derek and Fernando, also T3, stood at the fringes, keeping their distance from both each other and the rest of the group.

  Zoë waved a bottle of sunblock at Cole, who was patently ignoring her. Zoë was with T3, but as a freelance contractor. Kea wasn’t sure where that placed her, however Cole wasn’t part of either group. For that matter, neither was Lexie. For a reporter, she was far less inquisitive than Kea expected, often remaining silent for long periods, content to take photographs, more interested in landscape shots than people.

  At least, Kea thought, she wasn’t filming everything I say. Yet.

  Bruce sat on a boulder between the two groups, basking in the sun and lustily devouring a muffin. In stark contrast to yesterday, he seemed to be the only one truly enjoying himself.

  Good for you, Kea thought with a smile.

  Once the rafts were fully inflated, and life jackets were handed out, Marcus and Andrei helmed the oars of one boat, while Tony and Fernando manned the other, volunteers sandwiched in between. Kea waited until everyone was across before taking the last raft, now manned by Jon and Erik. The two men seemed to revel in the exercise. Sitting behind Bonnie, Kea couldn’t help but marvel at the outlines of their muscles, visible even through the bunched fabric of their jackets.

  Despite the warmth of the day, wisps of mists scudded across the surface of the water, slipping between the boats and the shifting masses of ice. Erik pointed at the cliffs that soared up to the east a few hundred meters distant. “What is that thing?”

  “Double Embayment.” Kea considered the hundreds of meters of sand and gravel that towered above them. “The main outlet of the 1996 jökulhlaup deposited all of that sediment as the flood tore out the ice and inundated the plain. After the glacial margin retreated, it left behind huge chunks of buried ice, insulated from the melt by the flood deposits. While the rest of the clean ice has melted away and the glacier retreated, anything that was covered by the flood remains elevated, like those cliffs. It’s called inverted topography.”

  “Mountains become valleys, valleys become mountains?” Jon asked.

  “Something like that,” Kea nodded. “The floodwaters poured out of the glacier margin there. It ripped out a canyon of ice hundreds of feet high. When the ice melted away, it left this area where the lake had been, high and dry. There’s still ice buried in those cliffs though, insulated deep under the sediment. Could last for decades or even hundreds of years, depending on how much the climate warms up or if the ice advances back into this region.”

  An echo reminiscent of thunder rumbled down from the mountaintops. The sky above them was clear and blue, not a cloud in sight. Several of the volunteers cringed, no doubt fearing an eruption.

  “What was that?” Bonnie’s eyes darted from peak to peak in fear as the echoes faded away.

  “Icefall.” Kea pointed to the east where the beast of Oræfajökull dwelt among the mountain peaks. Between two peaks, the white frosting of a glacier filled a u-shaped valley, but it stopped abruptly atop a sheer cliff. “That’s the glacier Morsárjökull. See how the middle doesn’t quite reach the valley floor? It has retreated to the point where it can no longer connect downslope to the base of the cliff, but it’s still advancing, as the ice accumulating behind it keeps pushing. As a result, what’s left drops off the edge of the cliff in chunks. What you heard is the sound of the ice blocks falling.”

  Another rumble echoed from Morsárjökull. While they were too far away to see any icefall, the sound of the impact filled the valley. In the ensuing silence, they continued to drift between the icebergs in the lake, awed by the world around them.

  “Well,” Erik said slowly. “It’s not dull.”

  Kea realized that she had been so consumed with inflating the rafts and answering the questions that she’d forgotten to lecture them again on safety and to set aside their rivalry. On the beach opposite, she spied Max watching them, a smug grin on his face. She began to worry that her reluctance to address the excrement incident might escalate into something else.

  “Look out!” Bonnie cried in terror.

  Beside their raft, an iceberg ten meters high lurched sideways. Like a whale emerging from the deep, the berg’s underbelly rose out of the lake, frothy water cascading down its sides. Kea watched helplessly as the nose of the raft lifted out of the water.

  Jon shoved at the rising wall with his oar, while Erik frantically paddled away. Coming to her senses, Kea added her paddle to the fight. With a tremendous yell, Jon shoved once more, launching them away from the rising ice. Paddling furiously, as the glacier shifted once more, they were able to ride the wave out of danger.

  They watched, captivated, as the iceberg completed its rotation, exposing a fresh jagged surface to the sun’s warm light.

  Kea watched the ripples spread out across the lake. “Dull is never a problem here.”

  Chapter 4

  Erik steadied the raft as Kea splashed to the shore. Jon tied a rope to a boulder to serve as an anchor as the other volunteers hopped across the many shallow streams weaving in and out beneath the glacier’s lip. A small group of stragglers took pictures, standing on an unusually flat patch of gravel. She caught sight of a tell-tale jiggle of the sand under their feet.

  “Careful,” Kea cautioned.

  “Gloop ahoy!” Julie cried as she stomped on the gravel and watched the surface quiver like a pudding skin.

  “Gloop?” Nadia gently eased her own foot onto the gravel as if stepping on a landmine.

  Julie pressed the toe of her boot into the ground near Nadia’s foot. Water seeped out of the sand, pooling around the base of her boot.

  “The sediments here are saturated with water,” Julie explained. “So, watch where you step, or you may find yourself getting-”

  Nadia squealed as the sopping sands engulfed her foot, sinking up to her knee. In a panic, the girl flailed her arms to steady herself.

  “—glooped,” Julie finished.

  Andrei moved to his daughter’s side and helped extract her foot from the quicksand. As she pulled her leg out, dollops of sludge and water slid off her boots onto the cobbles.

  “It’s too shallow here to be dangerous,” Julie assured her. She jumped into the gloop and her own feet sank about fifteen centimeters. She pulled out a foot, causing a loud slurping sound, and they all watched as sludge rushed back in to fill the gaping hole.

  “I think that’s enough fooling around,” Marcus frowned. “Once we all reach the next marker, we’ll stop for a quick snack.” He rapped the strange tank strapped to his back with his knuckles and waved everyone on their way. “Let’s go!”

  Kea watched the group drop out of sight as
they crossed the convoluted terrain. Andrei lingered on the periphery, watching as his daughter interacted with the others. He looked, Kea realized, like every other helicopter parent she’d seen on a student’s first day on campus.

  “How’s it going?” Kea grabbed her water bottle and took a long sip.

  “It is amazing,” Andrei waved at the features around him. “The complexity is... refreshing.”

  Kea wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “It’s a challenge certainly, but with geology, there’s always a logical answer." Unlike so many other things in life, she thought as she watched Zoë lecturing Cole. The teenager was pouting about something, once again seeming to completely ignore his mother.

  “To make sense of all this, I think you are all detectives, of a kind.” Andrei’s thin lips pulled back into a smile.

  “There are so many processes at work it can be tricky to sort out.” Kea conceded. “To make things even more complicated, this glacier also surges, which can create landforms similar to floods. Plus, of course, the glacier can come back through again and override all the features completely.”

  Andrei raised an eyebrow. The Russian was no longer watching his daughter, which was a good sign. Kea pressed on, happy to help him focus his attention on something else. Nadia, for her part, seemed oblivious to her father’s scrutiny and appeared to be flirting with Fernando.

  “A surge,” Kea explained, “starts with a rapid increase in velocity of the ice in the upper part of the glacier’s accumulation area, but it may take several months before the wave reaches the front of the glacier.”

  Lexie appeared beside them, taking photographs as Kea demonstrated the contortions of the glacier mechanics by waving her hands and scooting her feet.