In Cold Pursuit vw-1

by Sarah Andrews

  When Valena produced a pan of gingerbread that she had baked in the Coleman oven, it was gone in two minutes, but the only formal reaction she got was from the driller who was drawing pictures, who made brief, rapturous eye contact with her as he announced, “I love ginger. You may stay.”

  Dan left the instant dinner was over and did not return. One by one, the other members of Naomi Bosch’s Clark Glacier crew mumbled good nights and stumbled off to bed. Valena brought the melt water back up to a boil and refilled the thermoses, then filled her own water bottle, climbed down inside the sunken latrine to empty her bladder into the pee bottle, emptied that through the funnel into the local fifty-five-gallon drum, and shuffled off down the line of tents to her own.

  Ensconced in her sleeping bag with the warm water bottle up against her belly, she thought long and hard about the day, the week, and her life, and once again about the joys of discovering herself as a scientific colleague. She had never fit in anywhere like she fit here in Antarctica. Dan Lindemann might be sorry she was there, but everything else was so perfect that he was easy to discount.

  Finally, with the bright light of the Antarctic night still shining through her eyelids and a fine rime of ice crystals forming on the inside of the tent from her exhalations, she slipped off into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  39

  SUNDAY MORNING FOUND MCMURDO STATION IN A somber mood. Sunday breakfast, a meal usually frequented only by those who had not found a party the evening before, was mobbed with those who did not feel that they could handle Steve Myer’s memorial service on an empty stomach, and those on the night shift who had stayed up to join them. In anticipation of the hike up Observation Hill to the place chosen for this observance, most had already dumped their trays into the dish room and had returned to the dining hall to drink an extra cup of coffee to help keep them warm. They sat quietly, watching a gathering snow flurry obscure the landscape outside the windows.

  George Bellamy’s voice boomed out over the public address system. “Good morning. This is to announce that the memorial service for Steve Myer, which was to be held on Ob Hill, will be held instead in front of the chapel. This is because it is snowing. Once again—”

  The voice coming over the speaker was drowned in a rising tide of grumbling, growling voices. There was a great scraping of chairs as every person in the room stood up and filed out past the dish room, leaving their coffee cups by an untended window, the dishwashers having already left to get their coats.

  A great tide of red and tan parkas filtered out through the falling snow and flowed toward Observation Hill, funneling now into a file four wide as the slope steepened. The only sound was that of boots crunching through crusted snow into scoria. As the first reached the summit and gathered around Scott’s cross, others began to spill out around the slope below it. They were consumed in a soft, white world that deadened sound, a cocoon of opacity that fell from the sky like frozen tears.

  Father James Skehan stood in front of the cross, eyes closed in prayer, a violet stole draped across the shoulders of his big red parka. A PhD in geology and years working on the glaciers unlocking the secrets of climate had not washed his earlier seminary training from him. He held in his gloved hands his copies of the Rite Book and the Holy Bible. The fine leather of his Bible was soft and frayed from all the years he had carried it with him to his field locations. He opened his eyes, looked out across the multitude, and said, “Let us pray.”

  As Father Skehan led the citizens of McMurdo through the liturgy for the dead, the falling snow thickened, and the world continued to lose its edges. The cadences of the familiar words brought comfort, and in many, released tears.

  At length, Father Skehan turned to the Boss and asked him to say a few words. The Boss reached out a hand for Father Skehan’s Bible and read from it, his strong, paternal voice both soothing and heartbreaking. Then he closed the book and said, “I chose to ask Father Skehan here to offer a Mass because Steve mentioned to me once that he was of the Catholic persuasion. More often he spoke of how this place filled his heart. We come from far places to work here, places where it’s warm and we have family and where you can take long showers, but we always leave a part of ourselves here. I think of how the Greeks might have seen it: they had the myth of Persephone. She’s the girl who ate those seeds from the pomegranate. She was beautiful, body and soul. Everybody loved Persephone, including Hades, the god of the underworld. One day while she was gathering flowers, he abducted her, just split the earth open and swallowed her up.

  “Things got bad on earth after Persephone was abducted. Her mother Demeter grieved her so intensely that the plants ceased to grow. It was so bad in fact that Zeus went down to the underworld and demanded the girl’s return and got it. But she had eaten those seeds, and that bound her to the underworld, where nothing grows, for that many months each year.

  “I’m not a young maiden who gathers flowers and neither was Steve, but I think on Persephone each and every time I come down here. This place gets into your soul. Although nothing grows here, it’s like a passionate fruit of intense flavor, and we return to eat of it year after year. And that’s where we turn that myth inside out. We long for this underworld. We know something about it that few people ever get to know. It is bright and clear, and it sings to us in our dreams, like a mirror in which we can at last see ourselves clearly.

  “I like to think that Steve hears that singing still. Well, that’s all I have to say, except that when we’re done here, we’ve got a barbecue going down by the Heavy Shop, and the first round’s on me!”

  A great roar went up. A few others stepped to the summit to speak: Cupcake as the one who had been coming south the longest, then a few others, and then Father Skehan closed with a final prayer, and the moment fell away as the crowd dispersed into the snow.

  Halfway down the hill, Dave Fitzgerald felt a jab at his ribs, a poke blunted by layers of down and polypropylene. “Hey, why didn’t you say something?” asked Wilbur. “You found him.”

  Dave turned to see whether his workmate was looking on him with kindness or craziness. It was the latter. He sighed. “Just give it a break,” he said, and continued down the hill.

  MAJOR MARILYN WOOD STOOD WITH MAJOR HUGH Muller at the foot of the hill, a tiny knot of camouflage brown and black as a sea of red and tan parkas flowed past them, hoping to spot Valena in the crowd.

  “Did she answer the message you left for her?” asked Major Waylon Bentley as he moved through the crowd to join them.

  “No,” said Hugh. “I put a note on her door in Crary. I’m thinking that she isn’t anywhere in town, but she hasn’t left the ice. Her name never showed up on the pax manifests.”

  “She went off with that traverse to Black Island,” said Waylon. “But she came back, right? You’re sure of it?”

  “I’m sure. I saw her. Then she went walkabout again or something.”

  “Let’s ask Paul here,” said Marilyn, grabbing the arm of the helicopter pilot as he walked by her.

  Paul looked up in surprise, as if he had been woken from a dream.

  Marilyn said, “Any of you guys carry a beaker named Valena anywhere recently?”

  Paul smiled. “In fact I did. Lovely girl. I took her up to Clark Glacier in the Dry Valleys yesterday.”

  “Whew!” said Marilyn.

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Hugh. “Any idea when she’s coming back?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “Whose event is she with?” asked Marilyn.

  “Naomi Bosch. Glaciology. I forget the number.”

  “Did you take anyone else up there?” asked Waylon.

  “Just her.”

  Marilyn asked, “Who else is in that camp?”

  Paul rolled his eyes up in thought. “A couple of drillers and two graduate students.”

  “Names on those students?”

  “The new one I didn’t catch, but Lindemann I remember from other years. A bit of a
sniveler if he doesn’t get the front seat.”

  “Thanks,” said Hugh. With Valena checked off his mental list for the moment, he began scanning the crowd for another face.

  Marilyn shook her head. “There are wheels within wheels with this puzzle.”

  Waylon said, “This guy we’re looking for… did the service record give a photograph of him?”

  Hugh said, “Everyone looks alike in these damned red parkas. Besides, I wouldn’t go by appearances, or the name he’s got on his parka. He’s here on a false passport.”

  “Imagine,” said Waylon. “A dishonorable discharge, right here in Mac Town.”

  “You think this guy knows Valena is on his trail?” said Marilyn.

  “Let’s hope not,” said Hugh, “but assume he does. We’re just going to have to figure out how to reach her before he does, and pray that he’s not Dan Lindemann.”

  40

  ON CLARK GLACIER, NAOMI BOSCH LOOKED OUT THE flap of the cook tent. “It looks like it’s clearing. I was thinking we should ski down to the terminus of the glacier,” she said.

  Twenty minutes later, everyone had bottles of hot water in their packs and rations of chocolate and granola bars in their pockets. The drillers had their skis on first and shot out ahead of them. Dan Lindemann and the other student followed second, and Naomi and Valena brought up the rear.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have better equipment,” said Valena, noticing that Naomi was wearing gear that looked like it must be the latest, greatest thing.

  “Never fear. We do things on the buddy system here. We’ll all swap off. Did you get much out of Dan yesterday?”

  Valena stared at her. “You sent him to talk to me?”

  “I did. He would have hidden in his tent until you left if I’d let him.”

  “Well, he wasn’t all that informative.”

  Naomi took this in. “Then I’ll have another talk with him, let him know that he has a choice: he can help or he can walk home.”

  They skied away across the wide expanse of Clark Glacier, the fresh snowflakes glinting at them like a thousand separate gems. They were soon warmed from the effort and shed parkas into their packs, switching to wind jackets. As they left the center of the saddle, the glacier began to curve downward—the reverse of a ski slope, which has a concave curve toward its base—and the skiing became easier and easier until it was in fact too steep for the equipment Valena was using. Waving for one of the drillers to stay with Valena, Naomi shot away down a half-pipe-shaped chute that descended along one side of the glacier.

  The wind had blown the snow away, revealing blue-green ice. The edges of Valena’s skis were too dull to cut into it, so she took off her skis and began to kick steps in the side of the pipe, working her way down. The others waited at the foot of the glacier, examining it, waving their ski poles as they discussed it.

  She arrived at last, stepping for the first time onto the dry ground for which the Dry Valleys had been named. The surface was a fine trash of ventifacts—stones that had been polished into smooth facets by blowing grit—and broken on a much larger scale by the odd frost-fracture pattern called polygonal ground. Valena was in a world of magic, the coldest dry ground on earth. She wandered out across the patterned ground.

  She knew the simple facts that had rendered these valleys ice-free—at this low elevation and in this location, the ice sublimated away faster than it could accumulate—but still it seemed strange. All but two percent of Antarctica was covered with ice, and the lion’s share of uncovered ground was here.

  The terminus of Clark Glacier was a cliff about a hundred feet high and draped with icicles. Valena wandered closer. She could see layers in the ice, great festoons of strata etched by melting. She was just considering walking even closer to it when an icicle several times her mass detached with a ballistic snap and crashed to the valley floor, scattering chunks of ice like shrapnel.

  “That one almost got you,” someone called from a position well behind her. “You might want to back up.”

  Valena turned. It was Dan Lindemann. “Thanks for the tip,” she said. “Do you have any other key intelligence for me?”

  Lindemann scowled. “Naomi says it’s my turn to babysit you.”

  Valena closed her eyes to blot him temporarily from her world. She had heard this scornful tone a thousand times from cousins and schoolmates who would not accept her, but she refused to let it sting her as it always had. This was her place now, and he could not take it from her. When I open my eyes, she told herself, I shall see only a sad person who cannot sneer his way out of a wet paper bag. She opened her eyes. Dan Lindemann was still looking at her, but his demeanor had shifted from disdain to uncertainty.

  She looked around to see where everyone else was, and to her horror realized that they were already climbing back up the glacier. She wanted to question Lindemann but not be left alone with him in a dangerous place. Hefting her skis onto her shoulder, she led the way.

  Dan put on his skis and shuffled along behind her. “Too bad you don’t have skins for your skis,” he said. He made it sound like a taunt.

  Valena stepped lightly over the snow, following the steps she had kicked coming downward. She had put on both layers of boot liner and had tightened the laces as tight as she could, but it was still tough going.

  “I don’t have anything to tell you,” said Dan, pulling up beside her.

  “That’s too bad,” said Valena evenly. She was becoming interested in the way the snowflakes refracted the light. They were like diamonds, and here and there lay a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire, or richest citrine.

  “Emmett was going down, and if I’d stayed with him, I’d be sitting in Reno right now with Taha. Or I’d be in your shoes.”

  “Mm-hm.” She glanced up the slope. The distance to the others was widening. She picked up her pace.

  “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “I want to know who was where when it happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the Airlift Wing dropped the bundle. Where were you?”

  “I was in the cook tent. We heard it go overhead. But it was blowing and snowing so hard… well, we stayed put.”

  “You stayed put.”

  “No, I followed the ropes down to my tent. The one I shared with Bob. We were together the whole time. Emmett told me later that he and Cal went out right away, but they were nuts.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s it?”

  “Okay, and who was in the cook tent?”

  “Sheila. Morris. Dave.”

  “That’s interesting. You called him by his given name.”

  “Who?”

  “Morris Sweeny. He was a real person to you.”

  “Oh, sure. Kind of an ass, but he was a good writer.”

  “Even if he misrepresented Emmett’s work?”

  “It was Frink who wrote that article, not him, though we had some lively debates about all that. But Morris seemed more intent on… well, like he was looking for something here in Antarctica. Another story. Maybe his own story.”

  They were on the steepest part of the slope now. Valena tilted her head back to look for Naomi. She was just disappearing up over the convex curve of the glacier. “What sort of story?”

  Lindemann said, “I don’t know… human interest, more. He asked a lot of questions about the people he was going to meet in camp.”

  “Who in particular?”

  “He was pretty cagy, didn’t focus on anyone in particular, but asked lots of questions about who had been in the military, or how long they’d been around the university. How well Emmett knew everybody.”

  “And how well did Emmett know you all?”

  Lindemann stopped to take a drink of water from his pack.

  Valena looked upslope. The two drillers had disappeared. Only the second graduate student was still in sight.

  Lindemann started moving again, but he changed the subject. “Like Frink, Morris didn’t get
the science. Just didn’t have a clue about how it’s done. You know how it goes: he thinks a theory is a fact, and thinks the facts are negotiable based on who observed them. Doesn’t understand the scientific method, or what it’s good for and what it’s not. Basically clueless. Educable, perhaps, if you get him away from his neo-con buddies. That’s why Emmett invited him down, or at least, that’s why he said he did.”

  “And was he getting educated?” She looked again uphill. They were alone. She quickened her pace.

  Dan shook his head. “It was kind of a mess. The storm hit just after we got him to the high camp, and then he got sick. It sure put an end to our arguments.”

  “You argued with him?”

  “About the science.”

  “Had you ever met him before?”

  “Huh? No. Why?”

  “Then how do you know so much about him?”

  “I was down in McMurdo when he arrived.”

  “I didn’t know that.” She was sweating from the pace.

  “Yeah. I’d gotten sick, so Emmett left me behind when he went up to the high camp. In fact the only way I got up there at all was because they had the plane scheduled to fly in to pick up some of the fuel barrels that had gotten buried to another site.”

  “I don’t understand. Why drop the barrels and then move them?” She was panting with the effort. She dropped her skis and put them on, hoping the gradient was now shallow enough that she could ski and pick up the pace. She slipped, then the skis caught, and began to surge forward.

  “I don’t know, really. The Airlift Wing had dropped them, and someone needed some over in another camp, so NSF sent in the Otter to pick a couple up. That meant there were two seats for us going in, and Morris push his way into the high camp because there had been such delays and he hated McMurdo. Too many liberals.”