Heller looks at him silently. Sympathetically.
“I’m a scientist, an administrator. Not a politician.”
Jesus. Don’t give in so easily to Manafort’s demagoguery. Don’t fold so easily. Fight, Heller thinks. Hang in there.
Hobbes unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk, lifts a thick stack of documents out of it, and then, to Heller’s clear surprise, removes a false bottom of the drawer and gingerly lifts out a Glock automatic and a box of ammunition beneath it.
Heller can tell it’s never been out of that desk drawer. Maybe, in earlier, happier times, even forgotten about. Seeing Hobbes bring it out now, Heller thinks, is a clear indication of the state of things.
Hobbes sets it on the desk, frowns at it.
Shoves the Glock and the box of ammunition across the desk toward Heller.
“No one knows I have it. Take it. I trust you more with it than me. At this point, I’d do something . . . stupid.”
“But even just for personal protection?” Acknowledging the degenerating state of things. “Don’t you want . . .”
Hobbes holds up his hand to stop him. “You’re the professional.” He looks more closely at Heller. “I’ve gotten to know you these last weeks. Who you really are. What you’re really about. You take it. I hope you don’t have to use it. But if you do, you’ll be wiser with it than me.”
Not just a Glock. A Glock no one knows the existence of, and that no one will know Heller has. Heller doesn’t hesitate. He sees all the advantages. Hobbes is right. He grabs the gun, puts it into his belt strap, zips his parka over it, scoops up the ammo box, and pushes it deep into a parka pocket. He only looks back up at Hobbes once the gun is hidden, off the desk, once it has its new owner.
“Hope I don’t have to use it. But I won’t hesitate if I need to. I guess you know that about me too,” says Heller.
Hobbes nods.
“Manny, you’re doing the right thing. You’ve done the right thing all the way.”
“Hasn’t done much good.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t. But we still have to do it.”
Wordlessly after that, Heller gets up.
Exits Hobbes’s office.
Armed.
Frontier justice now in his belt.
Civilization is falling apart.
But the Glock in his belt may be just what Heller needs to restore it.
He doesn’t try to tell Hobbes about Dolan and Pritchard and the broken comm tower.
He’s tempted. He wants to. He feels guilty withholding the information.
But not just yet.
First, he has a deal to offer.
Fix the communications, Dolan. Fix the communications in exchange for my silence. There isn’t enough evidence, it’s inconclusive, contaminated, the prosecution process and jurisdiction are unclear, all of which you know. I can’t get you, Dolan.
That’s the case he’s going to make to Dolan. Which unfortunately may have the power—the persuasiveness—of being true.
He has to act—get communications restored—before civilization on McMurdo degenerates further.
Civilization to their north, it turns out, goes on unimpeded.
It’s civilization at McMurdo that’s now at risk.
He has to get communications back up.
With threat. With force. Right now.
71.
Heller opens the door to the Comm Cave.
They are both at their consoles.
Both exactly where everyone at McMurdo has pictured them.
Diligently, dutifully trying to reach the world.
Looking that way. As if trying to fool Heller once more, one last time.
Dolan avoids looking at him.
Heller senses Pritchard has told him something.
He doesn’t know, of course, exactly what. Exactly how much. Whether he told him they were on the floor together, looking at snakes. Whether he told him he saw the other species at the back.
He sits down behind them. “Don’t let me interrupt. You keep working,” he says, sarcastically. A sarcasm he assumes Dolan can hear, loud and clear, with no static.
“It was you on that recording, wasn’t it, Dolan? That Australian farmer. That was you. Accented, filtered, scratchy, pitched down a little, but you.”
Dolan continues facing the console, expressionless.
“That was Dolan. Wasn’t it, Pritchard?”
Pritchard shifts. Like he wants to answer. He looks over at Dolan, who keeps his eyes on the console. Pritchard stays quiet.
“See, no Australian farmer has ever said the word flashlight,” says Heller.
Dolan and Pritchard are both silent.
“I’d love you to play that recording again for me, but I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me it got erased, aren’t you, Dolan? Because you got nervous when I asked you to play it for me last time. Because you thought you might have screwed up. Because you’re very careful, aren’t you, Dolan?
“Turn around from that console and face me. Slowly. I know you’re not doing anything there. I know your sitting there is bullshit.”
They both turn slowly.
To see Joe Heller pointing a Glock at them.
“I know everything,” he tells them. “I know you’ve cut off all communication, managed to fool the whole station into thinking it’s the end of civilization thanks to a few deft radio tricks, all to cover up a murder, and then another murder, and then a third, trying to cover your tracks, to keep me from getting anywhere. So, you know as well as I do I’ve got no evidence. The bodies are gone and the autopsies missed the real causes of death, and even in the case of Calloway, you’ve probably been smart enough to get rid of the murder weapon. I can sit here pointing this gun at you and hope you confess, but we all know that’s not going to happen. So my only chance for justice here is to just shoot you . . .”
He calmly cocks the Glock, aims it at Dolan.
“And if we were really alone here, if I really was the last cop on the planet, that is exactly what I’d do.” He uncocks it. “But as only the three of us know right now, as soon as the spring thaw comes, new communications equipment will be sent, communications will be restored, flights and supplies will arrive, and I would be on trial for shooting two radio experts in cold blood, on an unproven hunch. Maybe I’d get lighter time for suffering from T3,” Heller says. “The point is, I can’t just shoot you”—he cocks it again—“unless it’s in self-defense. Unless I’m attacked, two on one.” He uncocks it. Cocks it again. Uncocks it. To show them he’s thinking it, feeling it, weighing it both ways, undecided.
“Now even if we do nothing, all three of us know that your charade ends as soon as spring comes. Or as soon as there’s communication. And all three of us know you’ll get more and more desperate as we approach that time.” More desperate and more dangerous. “I can’t have you growing more desperate. Look what you’ve done already.
“So, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to restore communication right now. Obviously, you’d never even had that key out of its envelope when we did that first inspection, when you couldn’t decide which ATV should go first. You’d never even been out there to inspect, so I’m sure you can restore communication from right here. Flip the switches. Now.”
And he lifts the Glock, cocks it, and, as if with no greater thought, as if with the casualness of shifting in his chair or rearranging reports on his desk, puts the gun against Dolan’s forehead.
Against it, so Dolan can feel the barrel’s metal. A cold, Antarctic, anarchic cold.
Cocked, ready to fire, because that is how the gesture will have the most meaning.
It’s so sudden, so unpredictable.
The room goes frozen. Motionless. Breathing stops.
Frozen.
A different kind of frozen from the vast black wasteland around them but directly related to it.
A tableau that holds for five, six, seven seconds. Until Heller uncocks the gun and with
draws it.
The silence holds for five, six, seven seconds more.
Dolan speaks first. Low. Somber. “To restore communication, we have to change some settings here but also go out to the comm tower.”
“That makes no sense. You’re bullshitting me. I saw that you’d never been out to the comm towers when you did this. There was nothing wrong with those comm towers.”
“That was true before,” says Dolan, quietly. “But when you came out with us, we were nervous that you were getting close to the truth, so we changed the settings out there too, in case you figured it out here at the console. Now to get it up and running, we have to restore things here and out there.” He gives a little shrug.
On the one hand, Dolan admits it. Admits the bizarre premeditated interruption of all communication. Will he admit to the murders too?
On the other hand, Heller will have to go back out there with them. Go back out there into the cold and dark, where he still doesn’t know what happened to him, exactly. Go back out into the cold and dark with them one more time.
“Then we’re going to make another little inspection trip of the comm towers. The three of us. And you’re going to flip the switches back, restore communication, and prove it to me—really prove to me it’s working—while we’re still out there. A little victory call to Hobbes, or Simmons or Stanford or whoever you want, to confirm it. Hey, Hobbes, we finally fixed it. We’re heroes. Check for yourself. We’re back online.
“Because if you two don’t prove it to my satisfaction, we’re not coming back in. None of us. You took Trish from me, you bastards. And I’m happy to pay the ultimate personal price for making sure you don’t take anyone else. You know how much I cared about her. The mistake you made is unleashing another killer. One who really doesn’t care what happens to him at this point.”
Of course, that’s no longer true.
No longer true at all.
Because Amy and Ann are suddenly alive, of course.
And now that they are suddenly alive, he wants to live to see them.
These two odd, crazy radio techs have wiped out the world, and now, suddenly, they can save it.
Maybe they believe him about Trish Wong. Maybe they don’t.
It’s Pritchard who speaks next. “You really want to go back out there? When you had such a hard time before? You almost died out there! Dolan saved you.”
Pritchard’s intellectual deficiency becomes clearer with every sentence, every moment, thinks Heller. Dolan stays silent. Dolan seems to know it. Heller stares hard at Dolan. Dolan looks away.
A kid who loves radios and snakes, thinks Heller. Perfect for someone like Dolan.
“No,” admits Heller, “I don’t want to go back out there. But I have to make sure you do it.”
He watches their reactions closely throughout. Watches Pritchard’s blinking acknowledgment. Dolan’s pathological blankness. Just as he would have expected. “The venom and its undetected application to the skin. The little red hypodermic pinprick. Just as cleverly misleading as the Morse code transcriptions and ham radio broadcasts. I know everything.”
“Everything?” says Pritchard. A little wide-eyed, naive looking. But it is, nevertheless, in his way, a pointed question, Heller notices. An unnerving question.
As Pritchard watches, Dolan unscrews a panel, pulls it out, switches some wires and inputs out of the tangle behind it (it looks for a moment like the writhing snakes, thinks Heller), changes a couple more wires, reattaches the panel, then looks up at Pritchard and nods, before turning back to Heller. “Step two is out at the comm towers.”
Dolan suddenly tilts his head a little, quizzically. “I don’t know if a handgun will fire in fifty below,” he says with a shrug. “Do you know?” Ever the technician, thinks Heller. Unfeeling. Psychopathic. Interested in the ballistics. Human disconnection.
“It will,” Heller assures him. “It definitely will. Maybe I’ll have the chance to show you.”
72.
Hypothermia—Signs and symptoms
Symptoms of . . . hypothermia . . . [include] shivering, high blood pressure, fast heart rate, fast respiratory rate . . .
Low body temperature results in shivering becoming more violent. Muscle mis-coordination becomes apparent. Movements are slow and labored, accompanied by a stumbling pace and mild confusion . . .
As the temperature decreases, further physiological systems falter . . . Difficulty speaking, sluggish thinking, and amnesia start to appear; inability to use hands and stumbling are also usually present . . . Below 30° C (86° F) . . . muscle coordination [becomes] very poor, and walking almost impossible, and the person exhibits incoherent/irrational behavior, including terminal burrowing, even stupor . . . Major organs fail. Clinical death occurs.
―Wikipedia
He has not told Hobbes, Bramlett, or anyone that the world still exists. He wants to, of course. He wants to be the bearer of the best news in the world. But he is afraid that if that word gets out to Manafort and his acolytes, they might panic, act quickly, do something forceful and irreversible, since their rise, their “chance,” would so clearly be coming to an end. They might want to control their ending. They have the guns now.
They make the same preparations. Will take the same two ATVs. There’s no risk taking two ATVs that Heller can see. Nobody can escape on one of them. There’s nowhere to go. You’d be heading off to your own demise.
“We have to go to the far tower first,” Dolan says.
“Why’s that?”
“Because the other tower doesn’t really do anything. We told you before. It’s backup. The far tower can operate everything.”
The far tower. Almost a mile away. The tower where he fell. But Heller remembers from previous discussions and explanations that what Dolan says is true. That the two towers are primarily about redundancy. Can Pritchard and Dolan just switch on the lower, closer tower? Will that reestablish communication? Is the far tower really the essential one? It appears to be. Somewhat taller, somewhat newer. But he doesn’t really know.
The wind is howling. The cold is excruciating. Even though Heller has gradually acclimated to Antarctic winter, these are conditions everyone would normally avoid.
Sixty below, on the outside thermometers. “That’s right on the edge of the equipment being functional,” Pritchard observed earlier. “Just so you know.”
“You guys are gonna tell me that every day, aren’t you? Let’s go,” says Heller. “We’re going.”
Showing them he doesn’t care. Showing them he’s willing to die. And take them with him.
Do they believe it? Are they as willing to die too? Do they believe him that he has no case, that they will go unprosecuted?
Pritchard and Dolan have brought the same toolboxes. Heller has inspected them to make sure all the tools in them are appropriate. That there are no extra tools made by Glock or Colt or Smith & Wesson in there.
There’s no discussion, no talk. It was wordless last time too, but this wordlessness has a different feel. They are alert to the wind, to the elements, but they are alert to one another too. They are fighting the wind. Squinting in the dark. Heller is keeping his eyes on both of them.
It is, as always, man against the elements, but there are extra elements this time—elements of unpredictability, of opaque motivation, of watching your back.
On their previous trip out to the tower, all Dolan’s, Pritchard’s, and Heller’s attention had been on the task at hand. For Heller, observing the inspection. For Dolan and Pritchard, fooling him into believing it was one.
This time, Heller is thinking about . . . everything else: his unleashed wrath at what he’s just discovered, his focus on the perpetrators, his continuing speculation on their strange relationship, his sense of Pritchard’s mental deficiency, of being shaped by Dolan, his frustration at no proof (all circumstantial, he doesn’t have the bodies to re-autopsy their skin, exotic poison undetectable—he’s sure that Dolan has researched that, made sure of th
at). He is still shocked, stunned at their audacity and arrogance, still wrapping his mind around it, and he is thinking too, inevitably, of Amy and Ann alive and well, countervailing this literal and figurative darkness. All of it circling inside him, blowing around in his brain. All of it distraction. You’re not supposed to be distracted when you come out into the cold in Antarctic winter. You need all your concentration. All your faculties. That’s Antarctica 101. And he’s violating that rule in a big way. Add to which, there are two of them. And it’s still not clear to him how these two—these two parkas leaning into the cold and wind—relate to each other.
He keeps the Glock at the ready, his gloved hand gripping it, gun and gloved hand zipped inside his parka’s chest pocket. It’s awkward for him, but he knows he has to keep the gun somewhat warm. Because he doesn’t actually know if it will fire at these temperatures. He knows the cutoff for firing is somewhere around this temperature.
In a few minutes, out of the night, in the narrow beam of light from the lead ATV, he sees the far comm tower ahead of them. The struts of its scaffolding are the first thing visible, the metal cross braces completely coated with ice, glistening in the ATV beam’s reflection, a fantasy seeming to float in the light and the sparkling snow dust of the crosswind—fifty miles per hour or so, making it feel even colder, deliriously colder. The floating ice-coated struts of scaffolding are like pieces of a dream. And as the ATVs move closer, Heller notices it doesn’t make the dream element fall away and reality take over—it only makes the sense of a dream stronger, more vibrant and complete.
The dreamlike quality is enhanced too because it’s a dream he has had before. The same ATVs, the same two radio technicians in the same parkas, the same route, a powerful sense of physical déjà vu, and yet everything is different—all the feelings, the stew of anger and astonishment at their stunt and how to prosecute them for the murders, all the knowledge. A dream that he has relived, trying to understand and process exactly what happened to him out here last time. Calloway’s warnings about the hypothermic susceptibility of some people—of how it may even interact with T3, there are no studies yet—are reverberating in his head too.
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