by Tom Clancy
The small, cavelike storage depot measured five yards in depth, somewhat less in width. Shielded from wind chill, insulated from outside temperature extremes by the snow and ice cover, its corrugated steel liner was cold enough to patch with frost from the vapor of their exhalations, but still perhaps twenty degrees warmer than ground level.
The leader paused a few feet past the entry, swept his lantern from side to side, and steadied it to his right as his men hastened to pull a large protective covering from over a low wooden platform that spanned the length of the shallow tunnel.
Within moments the covering lay crumpled around the skis and treads of a half-dozen white snowmobiles. Dressed with flared aerodynamic windshields, cargo racks, and saddle bags, the swift, agile little vehicles sat atop the platform in a neat row.
The leader turned to the opposite side of the tunnel and saw a wooden skid stacked with rubber fuel bladders by the bright glow of his lamp. These, he knew, contained a premixture of high-octane gasoline and two-stroke oil formulated for cold-weather running.
He grunted. Ja, gut. Alles ist burzüglich.
Everything was indeed as he’d been told it would be.
Satisfied, he looked back at his men, then used the torch’s bright shafting beam to point toward the snowmobiles. They had a long distance to travel across the ice plate, and no time at all to waste.
“Bring them down and put some fuel in their tanks—hurry!” he said, still speaking Swiss German. “I want to return to the others, unpack the weapons and explosives, and strike out for our target within the hour.”
Cold Corners Base, Antarctica
“Diamond dust,” Megan Breen said. “Something to see, isn’t it?”
Nimec looked where she was pointing. Arcs of iridescent color chased across a glittery veil of ice crystals wavering above the helipad despite a total absence of clouds. In the far distance, sun dogs teased the horizon at opposite sides of a solar halo, the circle’s violet inner rim bleeding away into faint rainbow bands of green, yellow, tangerine, and primary red.
“It’s easy to appreciate,” he said. “Harder to enjoy under the circumstances.”
Megan turned to face him. She was in minimal ECW gear, her parka’s hood down, snow goggles raised above her brow, no balaclava. The comm tech had notified her of the arrivals just ten minutes ago, but she could already hear the choppers rumbling in, and expected to be out of the cold before too long.
“And wood sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets,” she said.
“Nice line. Yours or borrowed?”
“You know I’m not that poetic.”
“Nice anyway,” Nimec said. “What’s the message?”
Megan gave him a shrug.
“Our astronomers and field photographers throw conniptions when diamond dust settles on their optics,” she said. “They spend weeks preparing to observe an event of some sort or another, use the finest equipment available, and a little ice shoots the works. It wastes time, effort, and lots of money. People get upset, accuse each other of negligence, incompetence, all sorts of idiotic things. And naturally I wind up having to referee. It’s worse than a nuisance. But the sky. That’s the other side of it for me.”
Nimec frowned. “This time it isn’t about telescopes,” he said. “It’s about three missing human beings.”
Megan was quiet for several moments.
“I don’t need to be reminded of that,” she said then.
Nimec instantly regretted his snappiness. He studied her features. Her gaze was direct, penetrating, but showed no sign of anger. Somehow that made him even more regretful.
“Guess that wasn’t one of my smartest remarks,” he said.
Another pause. “Probably not.” She took in a slow breath. “Pete . . . one thing I’ve learned from my stay on the ice is that there can be magic secrets in the gloom. Don’t close your eyes to them. They help you learn how to live.”
He was silent. They both were. Colors slipped and tailed through the suspended ice motes overhead. Still out of sight, the two approaching helicopters knocked away at the air.
Nimec supposed he really was on edge. Some of it was a carryover from those tumbling boomerangs aboard the Herc. Some of it was his impatience to get going with his search for Scarborough and the two scientists. But there was more besides, and he knew it involved Annie Caulfield’s imminent landing aboard one of the choppers. The news that Annie was already in Antarctica with the Senatorial delegation had made him feel nothing less than ambushed.
He rubbed his face with a gloved hand, thinking. How had Meg originally alluded to their presence? We’re short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Just a passing comment as she’d tapped a number into her cell phone. It had gone right by Nimec. But when she got around to her promised explanation, he had learned that one of the base’s three chopper pilots was grounded because his bird was in for repairs, that another was on emergency loan to a French station because their only resident pilot had shipped out for civilization due to illness, and that the third had been to assigned to give the distinguished visitors—DVs, as she called them—a lift from Amundsen-Scott station, the first stop on their tour of the continent. It’s the storm that’s being predicted, Pete. Bad weather’s nothing abnormal around here, but once it hits, there’s a chance it can last for days. The Senators pushed up their schedule to get here before it grounded them at the South Pole, and we were obliged to make accommodations, go ahead with our hosting duties. Incidentally, did Gord happen to mention that Annie Caulfield’s been nannying them?
Ambushed, Nimec thought. Why feel that way, though? Why should the prospect of seeing Annie again have so much guilt attached to it? They’d made an effective team in Florida, but that was in connection with the Orion probe. It was a working relationship. Well, mostly. There was that movie afterward. Dinner and a movie. A nice evening. Annie had introduced him to her kids when he’d picked her up . . . Chris and Linda. Nice. But their date, say you wanted to call it that for lack of a better term, their date was collegial. More or less. At best they were casual friends unwinding after a tough shared assignment. And once it was over they’d gone their different ways. Again, more or less.
Nimec wasn’t denying he’d felt an attraction to Annie at the time—who wouldn’t, after all?—but he’d known there had been no sense pursuing anything even if she were the least bit interested in him. Which was itself an unrealistic thought. She’d been widowed only a year or so before. Lost her husband to cancer. She wasn’t ready. Also, he had his responsibilities in San Jose, and Annie had her own at NASA’s Houston space center. Texas. Things wouldn’t have worked out long-distance. Yes, he’d phoned her a few times, just to see how she was doing. And sure, they’d talked about getting together in indefinite terms, the way people often did. But nothing firm was ever discussed. The last time they’d spoken was last October or thereabouts, and it was true she’d mentioned that he was welcome to visit if he had any time off around the holidays, stay in a spare bedroom at her place, but he’d considered it one of those polite gestures rather than a serious invitation. And say he had made the blunder of taking her offer at face value? It would have been asinine. An awful imposition. He’d meant to get back to her anyway, but those weeks before Thanksgiving had turned into hell. Pure hell. With Gord in danger everything else had fallen by the wayside. And there had been so much catching up to do since. . . .
Annie had no reason to be insulted. Why club himself over the head with irrational guilt?
Nimec stood there outside the base, steam coiling from his nose and mouth. His cheeks had started to burn and he made himself stop rubbing them. Five degrees above zero out here, and Meg had described today’s weather conditions as mild, a calm before the storm. Since when was five above mild?
The thump of the copters grew louder. Nimec searched the sky, spotted one of them to the west, flying fast, the UpLink logo becoming visible on its flank. That would be the DVs, he thought. Not the first bird h
e would have liked to see. But the good thing was that he’d get the formalities with those pols out of the way. Plus his foolish nervousness about Annie. His main focus now was making arrangements with Granger. Seeing if he could take him out over Bull Pass ahead of the snow.
The helicopter came in, reduced speed, landed about a hundred feet from him, the downwash of its rotors stirring a cloud of snow off the ground. Then its blades stopped turning, its cabin door slid back, and its passengers came hopping out.
Megan glanced at her wristwatch.
“Right on schedule,” she said. “Special delivery from Washington by way of the Geographic Pole.”
Nimec didn’t comment. There were three Senators in the delegation: Dianne Wertz, Todd Palmer, and Bernard Raines from the Appropriations Committee. Obviously unaware of Meg’s affirmative characterization of the weather, they were wrapped head-to-toe in CDC orange bag garb. Still, it wasn’t hard to tell them apart. A former basketball pro, Palmer towered above the rest, and had reflexively hunched as he emerged from beneath the chopper’s slowing rotors. Wertz would be the one scrambling to keep pace at his side—Nimec had met the Senator from Delaware at an UpLink function, and remembered her as kind of slight. That left Raines to bring up the rear. Almost seventy-five years old, the committee chairman carried himself like a man whose senior rank qualified him as beyond having to match strides with anyone, almost diverting attention from the fact that in many instances he no longer could. The fourth member of the party had stayed back to help him across the snow, a tactful hand on his elbow.
Nimec took a quick glance at Raines’s companion, unwillingly tightening up inside.
Annie.
Megan leaned close, interrupting his thoughts.
“Time to officiate, Pete,” she whispered, and then hurried to greet their visitors.
Nimec followed a step behind her, suddenly aware of the NSF copter clattering toward the landing zone. About a quarter mile away, it would be touching down in minutes.
Megan whizzed through the obligatory formalities.
“Senator Palmer, I’d like you to meet our head of corporate security, Pete Nimec . . . Pete, I’m sure you recognize Senator Todd Palmer . . . Senator Wertz, it’s a great pleasure . . . Chairman Raines, we feel so deeply privileged . . . Annie, I know you and Pete don’t need any introduction. . . .”
Nimec stared as she came close. Hooded, bundled up, Annie nevertheless managed to look fantastic. Fresh. She might have arrived after a half hour’s drive from her home in Houston rather than a long tossing helicopter ride out of South Pole station.
He hesitated.
“Annie, hello—”
“Nice to see you again, Pete,” she said with an entirely pleasant, equally impersonal smile. Then she turned to Raines, escorting him on toward a waiting shuttle. “Sir, I’m sure you’ll be interested in seeing our scientific facilities. . . .”
And that was that. They were gone in a flash.
Nimec watched them climb aboard the balloon-tired vehicle. He didn’t know what he’d expected from Annie. But being left to feel inconsequential wasn’t it.
Confused, he waited as the second chopper made its descent, its skids gently alighting on the plowed, tamped snowfield.
Moments later the pilot jumped from his cockpit and crossed the landing area to where Megan, Wertz, and Palmer were about to start for the shuttle. Megan briefly freed herself from the DVs and led him toward Nimec.
“Pete, this is our friend Russ Granger from MacTown,” she told him. Then she turned to the pilot. “Come on, let’s scoot you out of the cold. Pete’s anxious to discuss a few things about our current search plans. We’re hoping you can fly him into the Valleys as soon as possible.”
Granger smiled and tapped Nimec’s shoulder with a gloved hand. At least he seemed interested in talking to him.
“Whatever I can do to help,” Granger said.
New York City
Of all the types of on-air interviews Rick Woods had to conduct, the scientific stuff was his biggest pain. And these geniuses from NASA, Ketchum and Frye, whom he was guessing might be a little fruity, and whom he knew were duller than Sunday morning sermons, talking about solar flames in endless multisyllabic strings . . .
Flares, Woods thought. The correct term was solar flares. As his twit of a director, Todd Bennett, had already reminded him a dozen times from his seat back in the control room . . .
These space brains on the remote feed from Goddard were making him work his balls off trying to keep things from tanking. The only bigger duds Woods could recall having as guests were the mathematicians who’d come on to discuss chaos theory; their incomprehensible rambling had gotten him dizzy. A flying ant gets gulped by a toad in Guangdong, China, and somehow that causes a gondola with two lovers in it to capsize in Venice, which eventually leads to a fucking earthquake in San Francisco. And then the quarks, leptons, muons, and gluons enter the picture, zipping around in ways that make it impossible to predict whether New Year’s Day would follow Christmas next year. Ridiculous.
“Ketchum’s losing us with the jargon, Rick.” Bennett’s voice was in his earpiece again. “Get him to explain what he means by an X-class flare.”
Woods cleared his throat. Maybe adding some humor to their discussion would pick up the pace.
“Uh, Doctor,” he said. “For average minds like myself, would you explain the difference between X-class and business-class?”
Ketchum nodded from the Maryland sister station’s newsroom, seeming to miss the pun.
“The X classification system measures a flare’s power, and aids our ability to forecast how it will impact on our planet,” he said. “We use a simple numerical table based on X-ray emissions from the region of the sun where the flare occurs.”
Simple my ass, Woods thought. “And this latest one you’ve detected, can you help us understand why we should be concerned about it?”
“Yes,” Ketchum said. “I should first emphasize that we haven’t actually observed a flare, but unusual sunspots and other indicators on the far side of the sun that are distinctive signs of impending flare activity. It would roughly correspond to tracking tropical hurricane seedlings on radar. . . .”
Woods tried to keep his mind from wandering. Even school shootings were easier than this. Distraught as the interviewees might be, you came to know which questions to ask by rote. Can you recall Timmy displaying hostile or antisocial behavior before the tragedy? Resentment toward his classmates? An ethnic group? Is it true none of your school’s teachers or guidance counselors ever asked him about that swastika tattoo on his forehead? And what about reports that he had a habit of firing an illegal M- 16 at neighborhood dogs and cats from his front porch?
Woods suddenly felt indecent, but things got to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate his good luck. This was major-market cable TV, twenty-four-hour news, and he co-anchored the afternoon weekday slot. He would be the first guy to say there weren’t many more enviable gigs in the business. Before landing it, he’d hosted a live entertainment segment for the network, thirty minutes daily right before prime time. Some of that was fun. Meeting famous actors, actresses, and film directors. The Oscars and Grammys. Those awards presentations always gave him a kick. But six years at it was much too long. No one took Hollywood beat reporters seriously. Hard-news people considered you one step above a gossip monger, a paparazzi. The glamor wore thin after a while. The beautiful people started looking uglier and uglier. And when boob-job-and-baby-fat teenaged pop singers treated you like a microphone sock, it could be the absolute pits.
Woods had grown tired of it.
Getting offered the co-anchor post had been a break. A huge break. His predecessor had been old-school, started out his career in print journalism, spent almost twenty years as a political field correspondent. With their cable channel’s daytime numbers trailing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by several percentage points, its programming executives had studied the audience comp and decided they wanted ne
w blood, a face with youth appeal, someone more comfortable engaging in peppy cross talk with Marsie Randall, the female half of their anchor team. Woods was offered the spot on a trial basis, given an ironclad contractual guarantee that he could return to star-chasing if things didn’t work out. Shit, never mind huge, it was the break of a lifetime. He had jumped at it, relocated from the left to right coast. And at the request of his producers, he’d started wearing a pair of glasses with plain lenses over his 20/20 peepers for a brainier look. Now, six months later, ratings for the time period had almost doubled, and he’d re-upped for two more years with a substantial pay increase and built-in elevator clauses that would continue to boost his salary if the Nielsens kept improving.
Overall Rick Woods was pleased. He felt appreciated, gratified, financially stable. But nothing was ever perfect. On this network, one to five P.M. weekdays was early fringe. The demographic was mainly post-boomer housewives with at least a couple of years of college—the ones who stayed away from Mountain Dew and pink polyester stretch pants, and who wanted an alternative to the soaps, courtroom reality shows, and trailer-trash clown antics. They were a tricky audience. Moving targets. You had to strike just the right balance with content, give them something that was not quite a morning magazine format, and not quite Jim Lehrer. Give them infotainment. That meant filling the spaces between lead and breaking stories with background pieces, analysis, talk, a little fluffy human interest to round out the blend.
The science stuff worked its way into the lineup maybe once, twice a week. Woods found it endurable when the stories related to ordinary people’s lives. Child-development studies, medical breakthroughs, home computing, these things he understood. But he hated when his producers got too smart for their own good, booked guests who’d start running off at the mouth with complicated theories . . . or when they bought into one of the stunts NASA regularly pulled to grab attention and justify its existence to taxpayers, such as the big load of crap it was currently dishing out—