In Cold Pursuit
( Valena Walker - 1 )
Sarah Andrews
Sarah Andrews is well known for her popular mystery series featuring forensic geologist Em Hansen. With In Cold Pursuit, she builds on that foundation and introduces a new lead character in this compelling mystery from the last continent.
Valena Walker is a dedicated master’s student in geology headed to Antarctica to study glaciology with the venerable Dr. Emmett Vanderzee. Being on the ice is something she’s dreamed about since she was a little girl. But when she finally arrives at McMurdo, she discovers that her professor has been arrested for murder, and what’s more, that the incident happened a year ago. A newspaper reporter who’d visited Antarctica the previous winter had died from exposure, and though no one was a fan of the guy—he was attempting to contradict Vanderzee’s research—by all accounts, everyone was devastated to lose someone on the ice.
Valena quickly realizes that in order to avoid being shipped north immediately and having her grant canceled, she must embrace the role of detective and work to clear his name—and save herself in the process.
Sarah Andrews received a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation to spend two months on Antarctica to research In Cold Pursuit, and the authenticity of her portrait of this unforgiving land is breathtaking, making for her most compelling novel to date.
Sarah Andrews
IN COLD PURSUIT
To the good people of McMurdo Station, Antarctica—
and some of the bad ones, too
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS MATERIAL IS BASED UPON WORK SUPPORTED BY THE National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0440665. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
My sincerest thanks go to the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs for their support of science education and outreach. It was through NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program that I traveled to the locations depicted in this book to do the research necessary to bring to the page this story and the descriptions of scientific research and discoveries it conveys. In particular, I wish to thank Marilyn Suiter, who first invited me to speak at NSF; Guy Guthridge, who invited me to apply for an AAWP grant; Kim Silverman, who picked up where he left off; Julie Palais, who connected me with glaciology programs; Tom Wagner, who connected me with geology programs; and Dave Bresnehan, who managed McMurdo Station while I was there.
This is not a work of science fiction, which is a genre characterized by “what if?” questions posed by either suspending certain facts of science or by projecting future occurrences based on not-as-yet-invented technology or not-yet-discovered features of nature. Instead, I write fiction about science, which presents fictional characters but actual scientific findings, or events of nature that are within the bounds of what would actually occur at a given location. Thus the scientific research and findings presented in this book are borrowed from current science events, but the scientists have been replaced by fictional characters and situations, and, need I say, no one was actually murdered in the creation of this book.
I am deeply indebted to Kendrick Taylor and Noel Potter for their technical input and for reading complete drafts of this book while it was in preparation. Todd Hinkley of the National Ice Core Library kindly tutored me on the care and interpretation of ice cores, David Ainley vetted the penguin bits, Gary McClanahan corrected the tractor scenes, and a great many others kindly responded to a hail of e-mails, there always being one more detail I needed to get just right. These people include Neal Pollock, Sam Bowser, Matt Huett, Jim Mastro, Ted Scambos, Mark Fahnestock, Ashley Davies, Dorothy Burke, Nicole Bonham Colby, Kristeen Dewys PA-C, Eric Junger, and Maureen Bottrell. Eileen Rodriguez once again corrected my hideous and confused use of Spanish. Richard Alley’s The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future was a key published resource in the growth of my understanding about climate as interpreted from ice cores.
It has been my pleasure to have assisted many fine geologists in honoring James W. Skehan, S.J., Professor Emeritus, Director Emeritus, Weston Observatory, Boston College, by naming a character after him in this book. I thank R. Laurence Davis, Kate L. Gilliam, Helen Greer, Arthur Mekeel Hussey, Noel Potter and Helen Delano, Paul Karabinos, Priscilla Croswell Grew and Edward S. Grew, Christopher Hepburn, and good old Anonymous for contributing considerable funds to the Geological Society of America Foundation to establish this honor.
Before I deployed to Antarctica to research this book, a great many people coached and assisted me in preparing my field plan. Primary among them were Christine Siddoway, Stewart Klipper, and Karl Kreutz. I gleaned essential understandings from research papers presented at West Antarctic Ice Sheet Workshops in 2005 and 2006, which were ably run by Robert Bindschadler of NASA.
Once in McMurdo Station, I received key scientific inspiration and guidance from Kendrick Taylor, Karl Kreutz, Christine Foreman, Douglas MacAyeal, Nelia Dunbar, Phil Kyle, Kathy Licht, and Sam Bowser.
The good people who support McMurdo’s infrastructure were also keys to the success of my visit. Being a part of that great army that travels on its stomach, I wish to thank all the Raytheon Polar Services personnel who worked so hard to serve three incredibly delicious meals per day under the superior guidance of Sally Ayotte. Trevor and Erik had us eat freeze-dried sludge with chocolate bar chasers at survival school, but I thank them as well. I am grateful to the personnel at Berg Field Center who stocked such warm sleeping bags, snug tents, and leak-proof pee bottles, and those at Science Support Center who taught me to drive a Pisten Bully. Thanks go to the fine pilots and personnel of Helo Ops who got me where I needed to go (especially Paul Murphy, who let me use his name, and Melissa, who always had a smile), and the staff at Crary Lab, most especially Micheal Claeys, who sustained me with hugs. Thanks also to Peter Somers, Barb Wood, Jean Pennycook, John Wright, Mariah Cross-land, and Cara Ferrier, and thank you, Warren Dickinson, for showing me around Scott Base. McMurdo runs on the backs of all those who sweep the floors, drive the shuttles, maintain the shops, recycle wastes, generate power, purify water, and process sewage; though your acts may seem humble, they were essential in creating the environment in which research can be done in a forbidding environment. There are perhaps one thousand people I need to thank, such as Holly, who kept my computer running, and the marvelous man whose name I didn’t get who gave me a disc of his favorite photos, so THANKS TO ALL OF YOU!
Field deployment in Antarctica is not undertaken casually, and many people worked hard to keep me safe while they tried to educate me; moreover, they made room and time for me during the incredibly hectic schedules Antarctica squeezes from its researchers. For teaching me about ice on Clarke Glacier, I am indebted to Karl Kreutz, Bruce Williamson, Mike Waszkiewicz, Toby Burdet, and he who prefers not to be named. On Cape Royds, I could not have had better teachers about penguins than David Ainley and Lisa Sheffield, and am indebted for archaeological information about early explorers to Neville Ritchie, Alasdair Knox, Robert Clendon, and Doug Rogan, representing the New Zealand Heritage Trust. In Arena Valley, I wish to thank Jaakko Putkonen, Greg Balco, Daniel Morgan, Bendan O’Donnell, and Nathan Turpen.
Scientific field work was not the only Antarctic field deployment that informed my research. For the great kindness of sending me on a traverse to Black Island Station, I wish to thank Fleet Operations director Gerald Crist; traverse foreman Katrine Jensen; Gary McClanahan, who taught me to drive a Challenger 95 and kept me smiling; Ron Rogers, who taught me to drive a certain Delta named Flipper; and James, who showed me how to hurl flags off the back of F
lipper. At Black Island, I could not have been in better hands than those of station manager Tony Marchetti and cook Jessica Gonya.
The fixed-wing aircraft of Antarctica and their personnel were wonderfully generous with me, taking time to teach me about their aircraft, the navigation and cargo transport thereof, the trapping of nonexistent rodents, and the fine art of inventing fun in the Coffee House (Tractor Club membership being free, life-long and irrevocable). I wish in particular to thank Colonel Ron Smith, USAF JTF / CD Support Forces Antarctica, and Colonel Max Della Pia, Majors Samantha East, Dave Panzera, Mahlon Hull, and Marty Phillips, and Master Sergeant John Rayome of the New York Air National Guard 109th Airlift Wing. I wish also to thank the USAF captain who let me onto the flight deck of the C-17 flying south (name lost with a missing notebook) and Flight Lieutenant Chris Ferguson, Flying Officers Kane Stratford and Leigh Foster, Sergeants Natti Hodges and Steven Knapton, and Squadron Leader Stu Balchin of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, who let me stand in the cockpit flying north rather than die of discomfort in the cargo section of that plane. It was over their shoulders that I watched the long, white cloud of Aotearoa slide over the horizon.
I wish to acknowledge the murder and mayhem in the minds of Rachel Murray, Micheal Claeys, Jean Pennycook, Brendan Stamp, Roger Harvey, Andrew Heister, Deborah Kunze, Charlotte Lees, Robert Lloyd, and Steve Croissant, who provided assistance and input during the Howdunnit Contest I held while in McMurdo to find out how Antarcticans might best kill each other. The winner was Brendan Stamp for his most elegant “Death by Biodigestion,” which involved running the corpse through the sewer system, whence it would be shipped home to Point Magoo, California, unrecognizably as “cake.”
Thank you, tried and true Kelley Ragland for your ace literary input.
Now on the purely personal side, I wish to thank the Girls’ Night Out group—Nancy Saylor, Vicky Hill, Gabbi Shader, and Emi Takacs. You can’t imagine how much your all-white-foods send-off meant to me. And last but in no way least, I thank my husband, Damon, and son, Duncan, for understanding my itch for adventure, and for making their own sandwiches, washing their own clothes, loving me without judgment, and even driving me to the airport so that I could go to Antarctica.
1
AS THE COAST OF ANTARCTICA CAME INTO VIEW FROM the US Air Force C-17, those who had been to the ice before stayed seated, earplugs in place, trying to catch up on the sleep they had lost while crossing from North America to the jumping-off point in New Zealand. The new hands climbed out of the webbing perches that folded down from the naked walls of the fuselage and crowded around the two small portholes in the passenger doors, trying to get a squint at the measureless white world they would inhabit for the coming months.
Valena Walker was more assertive than the rest. Taking advantage of the fact that she was, by some quirk, the only woman on board, she moved to the desk at the bottom of the steps that led up to the flight deck and asked the loadmaster if she could climb up there for a better look. He gave her an appreciative smile, spoke into the microphone on his headset for a moment, then waved her up.
Climbing up the steps was somewhat difficult. As was required of all passengers—pax, in military jargon—traveling to Antarctica, she was dressed in ECWs, extreme cold weather gear. She had slipped out of the giant down parka emblazoned with its US Antarctic Program patch but still wore two layers of polypropylene underwear, thick black wind pants with suspenders, and, most cumbersome of all, giant blue boots. FDXs, they were called, another abbreviation for the growing list of Antarctic speak. The boots were glorified couch cushions with Vibram soles. The thick, insulated fabric and leather toes and heels of the uppers were a fetching royal blue. Inside these voluminous outer layers were two thick felt inner soles and quilted liners, and just to make certain she was warm enough, Clothing Issue had supplied her with extra-thick wool socks. Her feet were damp with sweat. Nothing daunted, she thumped up the steps and presented herself on the flight deck.
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw over the pilots’ shoulders. Beyond the arc of the windshields lay… what? Those were mountains, certainly—they had to be part of the Transantarctic Range, as by her reckoning their flight path was taking them over Victoria Land—but everything was backward. Instead of dark, tree-swathed masses capped by snow, the mountains were bare fins of naked rock sticking up through… ice… which was… incredibly white—no, bluish-white—and… it looked oddly familiar… it looked… like…
It looked like whipped cream! How strange. A whole continent made of pie topping. And beyond the mountains, the whiteness rose and became the horizon, endless, unimaginably vast. The Polar Plateau, a sheet of ice miles thick and as broad as the continental US. Add to that the ice sheet of West Antarctica, and it was seven million cubic miles of ice, too great a number to comprehend. And there were no familiar objects to suggest scale.
Valena turned to the captain. “How high up are we?”
“Thirty-five thousand feet,” he replied.
Six and a half miles. The confectionary swirl of chocolate mountains notched by whipped cream glaciers went on and on, trackless mile after mile—no, think in kilometers now, Valena reminded herself—hundreds, no, thousands of square kilometers spread below her with not the tiniest mark of human passage. Nothing in this alien landscape offered her eye a reliable scale. Nothing lay beneath them but delectable whipped cream ice and chocolate mountain kisses. She saw not a tree, not a road, no cities, no towns, not even a lonely hut, no marks of man, and for that matter, no animals, plants… nothing but ice!
The coastline swung majestically out from under their route, revealing an embayment strewn with another pattern of white and blue, reminiscent of lace, even stranger than the flowing cream topping and edible mountains.
Smiling at her amazement, the captain spoke to her again. “This is Terra Nova Bay. Look at that glacier down there, where it flows into the ocean, see the cliff it forms! Imagine how high that has to be to be visible from way up here.”
Terra Nova, named for the ship Sir Robert Falcon Scott had sailed south for his last great, and fatal, attempt at reaching the South Pole! The very sound of the name shot a thrill through Valena. She had wanted to come here ever since her grandfather had read aloud to her and her cousins from Endurance, the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1916 attempt to cross the continent overland. Something in that story—their joy in adventure and their willingness to release themselves into the void—had filled her heart with longing, and she had followed that urge like a beacon down all the years that had culminated in this day.
“Are those ice floes?” she asked. It was early November, springtime in the southern hemisphere.
“Brash ice, to be specific.” Suddenly, the captain was all business. “It’s time for you to get back to your seat.”
“Will we be landing soon?” Valena asked, hoping to stay just a few minutes longer. “Can we see McMurdo Station from here?”
He shook his head. “It’s still half an hour to the south, but we’re heavy, so we’ll be flying around low and hard to burn off some fuel. Otherwise we can’t land. The sea ice runway is only seventy inches thick.”
“Seventy inches? That’s six feet.”
“We don’t like to take chances.”
“Take your time,” Valena told him. “I’ve come a long way, and I’ve been planning to come to Antarctica for sixteen years. I don’t want my visit to end just as I arrive.”
“Sixteen years? You barely look that old. Younger than my daughter.”
“I am twenty-four,” Valena answered, more stiffly than she had intended. It bugged her that people underestimated her age. She needed every bit of respect she could get to make it in the competitive world of science.
The pilot’s attention lingered on her face, examining each of her features with a look of intellectual abstraction.
He wants to know my heritage, she decided. Everybody asked sooner or later, or looked like they wanted to,
but it never made it any easier for her to take. She wanted to tell him, You’re right, keep looking, I don’t fit in anywhere. But here I am in Antarctica! She stared back at him, willing him to look into her eyes. When he did, he flushed slightly, and the muscles of his cheeks bunched into an uncomfortable smile. Having extracted this price for his curiosity, she thanked him for allowing her on the flight deck and went back downstairs to her seat.
An hour and a half later the jet touched down and rumbled to a stop on the sea ice runway next to Ross Island. Valena was sitting in the seat closest to the passenger door but could not see out through its tiny round window. Antarctica is right out there, she told herself. No longer a dream. I am here at last on the ice.
An enlisted man moved to that door and popped it open. Instantaneously, all moisture on the aircraft shattered into ice as the warm, humid New Zealand air she had been breathing was sucked away into the emptiness of outside. It was as if some cold monster had put its lips to the doorway.
That’s exactly what did happen, Valena thought, her mind reaching out into the frozen white wilderness beyond to take in each and every sensation. But that monster is Antarctica!
She stabbed her arms into the sleeves of the giant red parka that had been issued to her in Christchurch. Instantly, she felt warmth returning to her as the dense surrounding of down cuddled back heat that it gathered from her own fragile flesh. The parka was heavy and bulky, like a wearable sleeping bag. It’s true, she realized. It really is this cold here. And this dry.
Falling into line behind the other passengers, she juggled her duffel bags and stumbled down the steps onto the ice. The ice! “See you on the ice,” her professor had told her, as he’d left Reno two weeks ahead of her. So this was what was meant by that salutation! She staggered around in a drunken pirouette in her loose, toasty warm clothing and voluminous boots, taking in the scene. The ice spread flat and cold and white for miles in every direction except to the north, where the island rose in steep volcanic cones from a chaotic fringe of ice pressure ridges. The thin civilization of McMurdo Station clung like a mass of barnacles to an amphitheater of naked black basalt between the nearest cones. She set down her duffels and reached into one of the array of patch pockets that encrusted the front of her parka, searching for her camera.
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