by Tom Clancy
“Looks like a dense ice pack down there,” Nimec said. “That how it is the whole way to the coast?”
“Depends,” Evers said. “In summer months the floes tend to cluster around the mainland in a circular belt, then give way to open water. What you’re seeing’s actually a moderate distribution. The big, flat blocks are tabular bergs that have broken away from the ice shelf. They’re very buoyant, lots of air trapped inside them, which is why they reflect so white. An iceberg with darker blotches and an irregular form is usually a hunk of a glacier that’s migrated from inland and rafting mineral sediment.”
Nimec kept studying the ice-clogged water. “How big is ‘big’?”
“An average tab is from fifty to a hundred fifty feet tall, and between two and four hundred feet long. Take a look out to starboard, though, and you can see one I’d estimate goes up over three hundred feet.”
Nimec spotted the iceberg out the window, surprised by its illusory appearance.
“Wow,” he said. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Bear in mind the visible mass of a berg is maybe a third of what’s below the water. That’s by conservative measure. Sometimes the base is nine times as deep as the upper portion is high.”
“Tip of the iceberg.”
“Exactly,” Evers said. “I’ll tell you something . . . it’s been a little over three years since my Air Guard unit took over Antarctic support ops from the Navy’s Squadron Six. The Ice Pirates. They’d been hauling supplies and personnel to the continent for a half century, got disestablished because of spending cutbacks. About a year later I’m transferred to Cheech from our home base in Schenectady, New York. The twenty-first day of March, 2000. That very day NOAA polar sats pick up the largest iceberg in recorded history calving off the Ross Ice Shelf. A hundred and eighty-three miles long, twenty-three wide. Twice the size of Delaware. And of the previous record holder.”
Nimec released a low whistle. “And you’ve been hoping it was just a coincidence ever since.”
“Rather than figure it was a Western Union express to me from the Man Upstairs?” Evers turned to him again, rolled his eyes heavenward. “Got that right, my friend.”
Nimec smiled, went back to looking out the window. He was still trying to adjust his sense of scale.
Evers noted his expression.
“The sprinkles of white around the bergs are mostly pancake ice mixed in with growlers . . . slabs the size of cars,” he said. “Proportions are deceptive from this altitude in the best of circumstances, and impossible to judge in poor weather. It’s why fog and overcast concern us as much as flying snow. When the sunlight’s refracted between a low cloud ceiling and snow or ice cover on the ground, everything blends together, and there’s no sight horizon.”
“Zero visibility,” Nimec said. “I’ve gotten stuck driving in blizzards more than once. Feels like there’s a white blanket across the windshield.”
At his station, the navigator shifted toward Nimec. The blue laminate name tag on his breast identified him as Lieutenant Halloran.
“It isn’t quite the same,” he said. “Any flier will tell you there’s no worse pain in the ass than getting stuck in a fog whiteout.”
Nimec looked at him, thinking his tone was a bit too purposefully casual.
“If there’s a heavy snow alert, you know to stay wheels-down until the storm passes,” Halloran said. “But say you’re airborne over the ice and hit a fog bank. Around the pole it can happen just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “The way our eyes and brains are wired, we use shadows to judge the distance of things on a uniformly white field—and in a whiteout you lose shadows. So even if the air’s dry under the clouds and you’re able to see an object, the perspective may be false. No, scratch that . . . it will be false. With winter around the bend, you have to be especially careful because the sun’s inclination isn’t very high regardless of the time of day.”
“Meaning it won’t cast much shadow.”
“That’s right. Unless you’re keeping a close check on your instruments—and sometimes even then—you can get disoriented, fly upside down without realizing it, smash into the ground while you think you’re still a mile up. Or drop off the edge of a cliff if you’re on foot. Happened to some of Scott’s men. Around the turn of the last century, wasn’t it, Chief?”
Evers nodded. “The Discovery expedition.”
Halloran looked pleased with himself.
“And isn’t just humans that are affected,” he went on. “You know what a skua is?”
Nimec shook his head.
“Think of a seagull, but smarter, wilder, and mean as the devil. Those birds can dive from midair, snatch a tiny piece of food out of your hand without nicking a finger, swoop in on the tits of a nursing elephant seal to drink her milk. But for all their sharp instincts and reflexes, I once saw hundreds of them, a whole flock, splattered over an area of a quarter mile after a whiteout lifted.”
Nimec gazed out the windows in silence. The transition to clear water was as abrupt as Evers had described. For a while he could see nothing but the thick crowd of bergs floating below him in apparently motionless suspension, and then the plane was past the ice belt and over the open sound.
Looking ahead into the near distance, Nimec was struck by a long, solid border of white that rose up against the calm blue-gray sea and then swept back and away to the furthest range of his vision.
He recalled the briefs he’d studied in preparation for his mission, and instantly knew they were nearing the forward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.
“We enter our final approach pattern in a couple of minutes,” Evers said. “There’ll be an unloading and refueling stop at MacTown. Ought to be fairly short. Then we take off for Cold Corners.”
“I assume it’s back to coach class for me.”
Evers nodded. “Sorry. They do a nice job grooming the ski way at Willy, but it can be bumpy.” He paused. “I’m banking to port in just a second. You might want to take a peek out the right-hand windows before you go aft and buckle up.”
Nimec felt the aircraft tilt gently, and looked.
Below them now, the ice shelf was a continuous sheet of whiteness that gleamed so brightly in the sun it made his eyes smart. A stepped ridge of glaciers sat atop it, extending seaward from the interior like a wide, rough tongue questing for water. At the far end of this glacial wave, two frozen mountain peaks reared thousands of feet above a great hump in the otherwise flat plain of ice. A plume of smoke flowed from the summit of the larger mountain, tailing into the wind.
Evers glanced over his shoulder at Nimec.
“That area where the ice looks like it bulges up is Ross Island. Home to Mount Erebus, his baby brother Mount Terror, and the fifteen hundred Americans at McMurdo Station,” Evers said. “Terror’s the quiet one. As you can tell, Erebus is something of a hothead.”
Nimec kept looking out the window.
“I knew MacTown wasn’t too far from a volcano,” he said. “Didn’t have any idea the volcano was active.”
“You bet it is,” Evers said. “Regular with its tantrums too. Erebus has been in a constant state of eruption for almost three decades now . . . what amounts to a slow boil. It vents six times a day, sometimes with a rumble you can hear for miles. Sends bullets of molten lava and ash over the rim of the crater. The past couple of years those discharges have gotten more intense, and there’ve been some significant seismic tremors on the island.”
Nimec turned to face him.
“Fire and ice,” Nimec said. “I’ve been around a little, seen some unusual places. None of them were anything like this.”
Evers briefly met his gaze.
“Terra Australis Incognita,” Evers said. “ ‘Unknown to the sons of Adam, having nothing which belongs to our race.’ That’s what the legend says about Antarctica on a map by one of those Benedictine monks who tried to keep the gears of civilization turning in the Dark Ages. His name was Lambert of Saint Olmer.”
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p; Nimec grunted. “You know your local history.”
“I read between flights . . . helps me cope with the endless holdups,” Evers said. “You know what, though? Old Lambert was right on. This is a different world. Or may as well be. Nobody will really ever belong here. Not a single one of us.”
“Just visitors, huh,” Nimec said.
“Unwanted visitors.” Evers’s face was serious. “Here’s another piece of information to stuff in your hip pocket. You know the satellite photos I mentioned? Look at any aerial views of the continent and you’ll notice it’s shaped like a giant manta ray.” He paused, shrugged. “Call me crazy, but there are days when I’d swear it’s a reminder. Mother Nature’s way of telling us something important about this place.”
Nimec was still looking at him.
“Namely?” Nimec said.
Evers moved his shoulders up and down again.
“Its sting can be fatal to humans,” he said, and got to work landing the plane in silence.
McMurdo Station (77°84’ S, 166°67’ E)
“Willy” was Williams Field, a prepared airstrip on the fast ice eight miles from McMurdo Station proper. As the Herc taxied to a halt, flight directors in hooded red-issue ECW outfits used hand signals to guide it into position.
A fleet of different vehicles hemmed the fringes of the ski way. Immediately alongside it were bulldozers and other equipment for clearing, raking, and compacting the snow pile. An enormous 4X4 shuttle raised on six-foot-high balloon tires—Ivan the Terrabus, said the lettering on its flank—stood ready to cart deplaned passengers to the station’s main receiving center. There were forklifts for off-loading the cargo pallets, fire trucks in case of a landing emergency, scattered vans, tractors, and motor sleds.
Willy’s operational facilities were identical to those of an ordinary small airfield in so many respects, it almost blunted one’s appreciation of the fact that the whole thing had been constructed on a plate of floating sea ice. It had air-traffic control towers and a considerable number of maintenance and supply buildings with corrugated metal sides. But each of these structures rested on skids, and had been towed from the main field six miles closer to the station, a seven-thousand-foot strip that could be used by aircraft with standard wheeled landing gear until sometime in December, the middle of the polar summer, when the ice runways there began to give in and melt to slush.
Nimec had learned much of this from his files, and seen more with his own eyes upon touchdown. He had adequate time to hear about the rest from Halloran and two other members of the aircrew as they sat together in a heated visitors’ lounge near the apron, sipped passably decent coffee, and watched the Herc being emptied of freight as it took fuel through the lines.
The stop was lasting longer than he’d expected. Almost two hours after the plane’s arrival at McMurdo it remained parked on the ice, the activity around it ongoing without any hint of a letup, its engines running because the minus-50° Fahrenheit temperature was just eight degrees above the danger threshold at which its hydraulics would begin to fail—the rubber hoses, gaskets, and valve seals getting brittle enough to crack, the JP8 fuel that powered the Allisons becoming too viscous to flow freely despite its special cold-weather formulation.
Draining his paper cup, Nimec glanced at his watch, then at the busy airstrip outside the window to his left. He let out a grumbling sound and stretched his arms.
“You have to get in sync,” Halloran said, eyeballing him from across the cafeteria table.
Nimec shook his head, turned his wrist to display the watch’s face.
“I switched to New Zealand time at Christchurch,” he said.
Halloran looked sideways at his fellow Guardsmen. Then all three laughed.
Nimec bristled. “Didn’t realize I said something funny.”
Halloran fought in vain to stifle a chuckle. “Sorry, no offense intended. I meant you should synchronize the clock in here.” He tapped his forehead. “This place, the sun doesn’t rise or set, but kind of crawls around you in a circle like a snail on a basketball hoop for about six months. Then it hibernates for the winter.”
His explanation, such as it was, only made Nimec grumpier.
“I don’t care if the sun balances on the tip of my nose for half the year,” he said. “Things need to get done.”
“Sure. I’m just saying to remember where you are.”
“So your advice is, what, that we check our schedules on arrival?”
Halloran frowned.
“Listen,” he said, motioning his chin toward the window. “You have any idea how long it takes to plot and cut an ice runway?”
Nimec shook his head, shrugging, uncertain whether he cared at that particular moment. He’d spent the better part of his week hurtling through transoceanic airspace, spent much of the week before getting poked, prodded, and pissing into paper cups in an accelerated barrage of medical examinations. He was annoyed by his own crabbiness. And he missed his sweetheart Corvette.
“At least sixty, seventy hours,” Halloran was saying in answer to his own question. “Think about it. The field groomers get through with all their snow-moving and grading, then a storm plasters the area and they’re back to square one. That happens so often—with a vengeance—nobody even thinks to rag. It’s just business as usual.”
“Your point being . . . ?”
“Exactly what it was when we started this conversation,” Halloran said. “Adjust. Don’t try to impose yourself on this place. Even most governments acknowledge it’s ungovernable.”
Nimec looked at him. This place. Nothing at all out of the ordinary about the phrase. But he somehow found Halloran’s repetition of it interesting . . . and hadn’t Evers also used it at least once rather than having named the continent?
“Take things as they come,” Nimec said, putting aside the thought. “Does that sound about right?”
Halloran continued to disregard the obvious pique in his tone.
“About.”
“You have a very Zen attitude for a military man,” Nimec said.
Halloran smiled, touched the circular ANG 139th TAS shoulder patch on the blouse of his flight suit. A nose-on view of a Hercules ski transport against a blue background, with the polar ice caps embroidered in white at the top and bottom, it was designed to be symbolic of a compass: the wings of the plane crossing east and west to the edges of the patch, the tail rudder similarly pointing due north, the skis lowered toward the southern cap.
“Very Zen,” Halloran said to the Guardsman beside him, a fellow lieutenant named Mathews. “Maybe we should have that stitched right here above the plane, make it our official motto. How about it?”
Mathews grinned and told him it sounded like a good idea. Then all three members of the aircrew were laughing again.
Nimec sighed, rapped the table with his fingers, listened to the engines of the plane humming outside the lounge.
Something told him he was at the hard rock bottom of what would be a steep and difficult learning curve.
Cold Corners Research Base (21°88’ S, 144°72’ E)
Topped with fuel, the Herc finally got back under way some three hours after alighting at Williams Field. Its departure commenced with a jarring bounce as its wheels dropped to crack the ice that had melted around its skis from the friction of landing, and then had frozen over again to hold the plane steadily in position. After the wheels were retracted, it was a swift, smooth slide over the ski way to takeoff.
Cold Corners was four hundred odd miles south on the coastline, an aerial sprint of just about an hour. Nimec stuck it out in the webbing of the aft compartment, which he found much less disagreeable now that the bulk of its freight and over half its passengers—including the loud Russians and Australian adrenaline junkies—had gone on to their various destinations. The hold space freed up by their departure also gave Nimec a pretty well unrestricted choice of seating, and he grabbed a spot by a porthole that afforded good bird’s-eye views of both McMurdo and Col
d Corners.
The contrast between them was striking. Seen from above, MacTown resembled an industrial park, or maybe a mining town that had sprung up without systematic planning over a span of many decades. Nimec guessed there were probably between a hundred and two hundred separate structures—multistory barracks-style units, rows of arched canvas Jamesway huts, smaller blue-skinned metal Quonsets, warehouse buildings, and upwards of a dozen massive, rust-blighted steel fuel-storage tanks strung out on the surrounding hillsides. Tucked among them were a couple of appreciably more modern complexes that Sergeant Barry identified as NSF headquarters and the Crary Science and Engineering Center, but Nimec’s overall impression of the station was one of rambling, indiscriminate sprawl and exceeding ugliness.
Very much on the other hand, Cold Corners looked like the working model for a future space colony . . . and by no accident. Roger Gordian’s innovative flair and penchant for cost efficiency made him an almost compulsive multitasker. Cold Corners was envisioned as an all-in-one satellite ground station, new space technology center, and human habitability and performance lab for long-term interplanetary settlements, and the heart of the base was configured of six sleek, linked rectangular pods on jack-able stilts that allowed it to be elevated above the rising snow drifts that eventually inundated most Antarctic stations. In his oversight of the installation’s security analysis, Nimec had stayed abreast of its development from conception to construction, and knew the few outlying buildings included a solar-paneled housing for its supplementary electrical generator, a desalinization plant to convert seawater beneath the ice crust into drinkable water, a garage for the vehicles, a trio of side-by-side satcom radomes, and of course the airfield facility that was its lifeline to civilization. The main energy, environmental-control, and waste-disposal systems were in utility corridors—or utilidors—beneath the permanent ice strata.