The Storm Was Coming.
Her eyes flicked from one quickly approaching threat to the other. In one direction, the blizzard swept angrily toward them, and in the other, the plane grew larger, carrying men who would do absolutely anything to find them. “What are you thinking?” she asked, afraid she knew the answer.
“I’m thinking we’re screwed.”
“Right.” They already knew that anyway.
Closer now, the wind whipped ice crystals into the air, like sugar spinning into cotton candy. Even through the whistling, she thought she heard the sound of an engine. “What do we do now?”
“We run.” Expression grim, he turned and led her straight into the coming storm.
Also by Adriana Anders
Blank Canvas
Under Her Skin
By Her Touch
In His Hands
Survival Instincts
“Deep Blue” in the Turn the Tide anthology
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Books. Change. Lives.
“Through endurance we conquer.”
—Ernest H. Shackleton
“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.”
—Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters
Whiteout © 2020 by Adriana Anders
“On His Watch” © 2016 by Katie Ruggle
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Kris Keller
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
www.sourcebooks.com
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author: Anders
On His Watch Novella
About the Author: Ruggle
Back Cover
To the scientists and those who support them in the world’s most inhospitable places. You are real-life heroines and heroes.
Chapter 1
Ice Tunnels, Burke-Ruhe Research Station, South Pole
Air whooshed from the dying man’s lungs as he landed on hard-packed ice. He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. Was he conscious?
He shifted and groaned, the sound swallowed up by darkness.
Hurts.
Yes. Yes, conscious, once the wave of pain passed. Barely.
Only one eye opened. The other was swollen shut. It made no difference anyway. The world was pitch-black, the absence of light so complete that he could be in only one place—the tunnels beneath the ice.
Entombed.
Something frantic and animalistic twisted inside his chest at the thought, shoving at the pain, giving him the strength to roll to one side, press a bare hand to the ice, and scoot up to a seated position, his back to the frozen wall.
He wheezed through three inhale-exhales, making an effort not to think of the blood bubbling from his mouth or the way the hole in his chest whistled with every breath. By God, they’d torn him apart.
He’d never met anyone like the men who’d questioned him. They’d beaten every inch of him until his body was nothing but a bag of pulp and splintered bones. They’d broken him so methodically that this decision—to let him die alone and afraid in this underground tunnel—most certainly had to have been purposeful.
Just when he’d accepted that it was over for him, they’d grasped him under the arms and heaved him into this terrifying place, as carelessly as a child chucking a chocolate wrapper in the bin.
He pictured the man who’d led the interrogation and flinched. Pure evil.
“Think I’ll kill you?” the leader had asked, his smile almost tender. He’d leaned close and whispered against his face, “I’d rather count the minutes as you take your last breath. Know you’re suffering while everybody else is up there, partying it up.” The bastard had winked, rubbed gloved knuckles down the side of his face with something like affection, and thrown him in here.
A violent shudder overtook the dying man, rattling his bones and clacking his teeth. He shut his eye and stopped fighting for a few seconds. Fighting hurt so damned much.
He dragged in a lungful of frigid air. It snapped through him as quick as a current, deadening his nerves and easing his pain. A number popped into his brain, as they were wont to do: forty-three below zero. The average yearly temperature in these tunnels.
Thirty seconds. That’s how long it would take for his bare skin to freeze. And frostbite was just the first phase. He’d be gone soon.
If he just stayed here, it wouldn’t hurt anymore. If he didn’t fight the ice’s pull, then that horrible man couldn’t change his mind and return for him, find new ways to torment his shattered body.
He couldn’t feel his feet, which was…good.
A sigh left his mouth—so much simpler than the struggle for deeper breaths, so much less work. Oh,
this was nice. No worrying about frostbite, no bothering to swipe the rime from his beard or wiggle his fingers to get the blood flowing. I’ll stay here. For just a bit.
Can’t! He pried apart flash-frozen lashes, the lassitude briefly fading. Have to warn the others.
He found his gloves in his pockets.
So cold in this place. Where was he again?
Concentrate.
Antarctica. The tunnels. Right.
He’d only been here a few times, but he could envision it, carved from the ice deep under the station. If he could stand and walk, he could find a way out. The way out, since he couldn’t very well climb the emergency ladders in his current state. If they’d even left them for him to find. Perhaps he could open the door, locate someone, warn them, stop those people from doing the terrible things they planned.
His attempt to rise was pitiful, pointless, his muscles no longer functional.
The pain had changed, he realized in a detached sort of way. It didn’t crackle sharply through nerve endings like it had when they’d shot him or beaten him or hacked at his fingers. Now it filled every cell, swamping him, melding with him so that they were almost interchangeable. On some level, he wondered if the deep throbbing was keeping him alive.
Something clanged outside, and fear hit him like a religious experience, set him—an atheist—to praying as only near-death could do.
A laugh tightened his abdominals and shook his chest. Mum would be pleased to know that he had finally found God. There was an odd comfort in that thought. That he wasn’t alone down here.
No, focus. Walking out of here wasn’t an option, but he could leave a message, in the vague hope that someone would open the tunnel door and discover him in the morning, before it was too late.
Slowly, as if wading through thick, near-frozen water, he patted his pockets in search of something, anything… It was all gone. No pens—not that a ballpoint would work in this cold. No phone. Nothing to communicate with at all.
A hard, razor-sharp cough wracked his body, scraping the bottom of his lungs, sending a rush of warm, thick fluid spewing from his mouth.
Blood.
That was it. If he’d been in better shape, he might have laughed at the old sense-memory urge to turn to one of his students and offer up his palm for a high five. Oh, he’d seen the way they looked at him when he did that, knew they thought he was an absolute wanker. A “science geek,” as the Americans called them. But he’d never been one to waste time caring about what people thought.
Look how little it mattered, after all.
Slowly, his limbs robot stiff, he removed one of the gloves he’d just struggled to put on, reached for his wound, dipped an unwieldy finger into his own oozing blood, and felt for a surface. When he tried to slide his finger, it wouldn’t budge. Stuck to the ice. Shit.
He pulled it away, the digit too numb to register the pain of tearing skin.
There had to be something else he could use. He pictured the tunnel, cold and blue-white, its walls shimmering like glittering diamonds.
Slowly, hoping that he’d got his directions right, he worked his way toward the left, the movement scraping, insect-like. A thrill ran through him when his palm thunked lightly against a slab of wood. A storage crate of some sort. Perfect.
Another touch of finger to blood before he pressed it awkwardly to the surface, just stopping himself from wasting time on explanations or articles. He’d add them at the end. Wouldn’t want to leave them with improper punctuation. Perhaps, while he was being fanciful, he’d add a footnote. A bibliography.
The blood kept solidifying on his fingertip, so he wasn’t sure if the C worked or not. And then, because he needed his final thoughts to be good ones, he decided that yes, it had most certainly worked, and so would the next.
He’d just completed the H, with a bit of a flourish, when he heard footsteps. It was them, coming back to kill him after all.
Frantic, he hurried to finish, fingers clumsy with death and that endless frozen dark.
* * *
Field Drilling Site—22 miles from the South Pole
Ford Cooper couldn’t wait for the summer crew to leave.
Given Coop’s general disposition, that would surprise exactly no one at the Burke-Ruhe Research Station. But still, this particular year seemed worse than most.
It might be the recent influx of newbies, sent by the National Science Foundation to replace crew members who’d been struck down by a particularly virulent flu. The new operations manager, in particular, rubbed him the wrong way.
A second—very distinct—possibility was that he was getting grumpier with age.
Or it could be the station’s cook, Angel Smith, whose presence put him on edge like nothing had in years.
Just thinking of her—too loud, too enthusiastic, too fluid with regulations—annoyed him.
Instead of sitting through another meal surrounded by all of that bright, colorful messiness, Coop took his usual approach to anything involving humanity and gave the entire research station a wide berth.
Which meant spending even more time alone on the ice, away from the oppressive heat and noise and constant, unpredictable movements of so-called “civilization.”
Though it felt like just moments, he’d been out here for hours, working at one of his field sites. A storm had come through this week and done some damage to his drill, giving him the perfect excuse to stay out all day. He huffed out a laugh. As if he needed an excuse.
Not that anyone was checking up on him. He worked solo because he liked it.
And possibly because no one wanted to work with him.
He squinted out at the wide, welcoming landscape, trying—and failing—to estimate the time based on the sun’s position. After all these years, the eternal daylight of austral summer still confused his internal clock. He checked the time—after eight.
Though he ached to take advantage of the continued light and stay out here, working, safety dictated that he pack it in for the night.
As he climbed onto the snowmobile, the stiffness of his limbs confirmed that this was the correct choice. On cue, his stomach gurgled. He hadn’t eaten since this morning’s breakfast, which wasn’t all that smart in the land of vanishing calories.
He revved off across the hard-packed ice, directly into a headwind, as usual. Some days were like that: headwind coming out, headwind going back in, as if they followed him purposely. The winds here defied common sense.
He frowned, thinking of a conversation he’d overheard at base between Angel Smith and Pam, the station’s doc. They’d been discussing love languages or some crap. Apparently, there were people who needed gifts in order to feel wanted, while others sought quality time with their loved one or acts of service. Whatever those were.
Coop craved headwinds and bracing chills the way others did human contact. His love song was the crackling of ice underfoot, staccato and sharp as a snare drum, his language the low, melodious roar of a Condition 1 storm blasting over endless white expanses. He’d take the translucence of blue glacial ice over diamonds any day.
Angel Smith, of course, wanted touch.
Which he wouldn’t think about. Instead, he focused on the landscape spread before him. He’d heard it described as lunar, empty, or flat, but it was none of those things. This place was as vital and complex as the ocean, its depths as fascinating as the Mariana Trench. He’d never tire of this view.
Thirty minutes into his ride, something flashed to his right.
Blinking through his dark goggles, Coop eased to a stop and stared across the wind-scoured stretch to the east, where Cortez had set up his research site.
Hadn’t Cortez moved his equipment yesterday? With the coming winter, he’d planned to settle a new site closer to the station.
Coop waited for another movement, his sun- and snow-blinded eyes workin
g hard to focus this late in the day. And then, because Cortez was one of the only people whose company Coop actually enjoyed, he veered off in that direction with an internal Why not? Maybe he had last-minute cleanup to do on the site. In which case, Coop could lend a hand.
Ha! a tiny voice whispered as he cut due east. Anything to avoid her.
He shoved that as far down as it would go. No point in dwelling on the person who turned him—an awkward man at the best of times—into a monosyllabic robot. Angel Smith would be gone by this time tomorrow. Thank God.
Cortez’s site had been right around here. He slowed and swiveled his head a hundred and eighty degrees—noting nothing out of the ordinary.
Wait. There. What was that?
A pennant flag, used by researchers to mark a specific spot or, in some cases, a camp itself, lest a snowstorm cover it up entirely. This one, a reflective silver, was what he’d no doubt spotted. No Cortez, no more research site. Nothing but a lone flag in the middle of the colorless landscape. A glance at the sky confirmed that it was a rare flat white evening—the kind that pilots preferred not to fly in, since there was no way to tell the difference between the ground and the clouds above it. Earth and sky mingled until there was nothing but pale, milky white everywhere.
For one strange, discomposed moment, Coop saw himself, in his red NSF-issued coat, as a solitary drop of blood in the middle of all this vastness. If he wasn’t careful, he’d get soaked up by the ice, by the ground itself. Not eaten so much as absorbed, covered, layered over, forgotten until some enterprising researcher with a drill chose this particular spot to study.
Jesus. Better nip this kind of thinking in the bud. Coop swallowed and shook his head, tried to blink dark spots from his vision. He considered pulling the flag up, and then went very still.
Rather than disappear, one of the dark spots coalesced into a stain on the ice. It didn’t belong there.
Some old instinct kicked in, making him check his surroundings with jittery eyes before getting off the snowmobile and crunching over to look.
About six feet away from the bright red mark, he stopped and stared, unblinking.
It was blood. Had to be, or maybe Cortez’s team had used a dye to test something out here and left some of it behind. But that was unlikely, given how obsessive most scientists were about keeping this continent clean. Coop knew for a fact that Cortez wouldn’t contaminate future research by leaving something, even a thimbleful of blood, behind.
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