Dark Winter (32 page)

Gabriella twisted onto her back, reached up, and snagged the end of his belt, tugging her to him. Her hand brushed his jeans. "Yes, you are."

He let her pull him as if on a bridle. He didn't know this woman! But he wanted her, wanted her badly. It had been a long time.

She reached up to grapple with his pants. He was fearful he was going to simply explode. She was gorgeous, a chocolate candy melting in the dark. He felt himself starting to plunge toward the pool of femininity beneath him.

Then there was a gasp.

He jerked around, Gabriella's hand still at his belt. Abby was in the library doorway, something bright on her cheeks, a tear that glistened in the dim light. She looked wildly from Lewis to Gabriella, taking in the moment.

The other woman looked at the intruder angrily, her knees up, her thighs parted. "We're busy."

Abby gave a low moan. "Why didn't you wait?"

Then she vanished.

"Abby!"

There was a hand on his leg. "Forget her, Jed. She's gone."

But he was jerking away, awkward in his drunkenness, suddenly frantic to break free of this woman holding his leg. He didn't want this!

"Damn you, take me!"

He pushed Gabriella's nude body back down to the couch, his hands marveling despite himself at the smoothness of her skin, every fiber of his being screaming regret. Her hands slipped along his forearm as he pulled away and suddenly she looked despairing at his abandonment, her act broken, her seductiveness punctured, her knees pressed together. "Please…"

"I'm sorry."

"Don't leave me like this…" There was a hollow hopelessness.

"I have to go!"

"I just want…" It was a groan. She was pleading.

But he'd already lurched out of the room in his bare feet, banging down the cold metal stairs and stumbling out the door into the chill of the dome. The snow burned his soles. Like a drowning man, straining for breath, he whirled around looking for Abby. Nothing! Frantic, he made his way to the berthing building where she slept. Everything was terribly wrong.

"Abby!" The call echoed down the corridor. What did he care what people thought?

Her tried her knob but her door was locked. He hammered on its surface.

"Abby!…"

But if she was behind it, she didn't answer his mournful pounding.

Amundsen-Scott base came awake with a collective hangover, wrung out from alcohol, the temperature extremes of the Three Hundred Degree Club, and emotional depletion. Clouds had moved back in, the outside was ink, and the temperature rose to eighty-nine below and settled there. Norse sent a message to Washington, D.C., explaining that Tyson had disappeared and that the base was in the process of recovering its emotional equilibrium. Some of the research would slip for a day or two. In his professional opinion, the survivors could still endure the winter. Personal e-mail and satellite telephone messages were still on hold until the group completed its catharsis.

Their mood was fragile. They needed time.

Lewis lay awake for most of the night and then fell into an exhausted sleep that lasted until early afternoon. He woke feeling wearier than when he'd gone to bed, and he scratched morosely at the frost of the Ice Room. He supposed that with four people gone from the base he could move to an interior berth, but the thought of occupying the space of a dead man seemed ghoulish. He sat on his bunk, euphoria replaced with depression. I have no friends. Norse had undercut him by pursuing Abby. Abby he had betrayed. Poor Gabriella he'd abandoned.

He dressed and went to the galley, dreading meeting either woman. Fortunately, neither was there. He ate a few leftovers without appetite, his mouth like cotton, and then went outside into the dark, hoping to assuage his guilt and regret with the rote labor of collecting data. The cold was bracing, a sharp reminder of where he really was. The surroundings were so black that the meteorology building looked like a hovering spacecraft as he approached it. He climbed the stairs, shed his parka and boots, and duly recorded every decimal point: a robot on assignment. Lewis wished he had the control of a robot. He'd been welcomed into the fold only to drunkenly embarrass himself in front of the person he cared about most. Now that he'd made the club, he'd become a fool.

Why was connection so difficult? He'd learned the superficialities like anyone else: the hearty hellos, the solicitous sympathies, the psychological bargaining of favor and position that made up casual friendship. It was true communion that eluded him. Honesty brought a wary reaction and confession seemed regarded as weakness. Sex seemed the enemy of love. Lewis had hoped that by coming to the Pole he'd find an isolated commune in which barriers would shatter: a forced encounter group in which the environment would encourage people to share their souls. Nothing of the sort had happened. If anything, people seemed to grow thicker shells to protect precious privacy. The nicknames were armor, signaling the role each had been chosen to play through the false dance of winter.

If he couldn't make connection with another human being, he thought, he was going to go crazy.

"Well, Buck, old boy, it's time to find an Exxon station."

The gauge on the Spryte still showed a quarter tank of diesel in reserve but Tyson had been thinking of refueling for the last twenty miles. He'd just been putting off getting out in the cold. The cabin altimeter showed the plateau had swollen to eleven thousand feet here and the thermometer read one hundred and three below zero. Inside the machine it was a relatively cozy sixty-three above, a cocoon of habitability maintained only by the full-blast roaring of the cabin heater. The wind was beginning to pick up, too. Pretty soon it might blow hard enough that he'd be fighting ice on the windshield.

Damn, it was lonely.

Beyond the pool of his headlights he could see nothing.

Tyson checked his GPS again. A compass was so useless down here that he'd thrown the damn thing away, but the satellite readings were faithfully keeping him on track. According to his latitude and longitude beamed from space, he'd come about two hundred miles from the American base and had five hundred to go. Vostok! Better than being lynched by a bunch of polar nutcases, perhaps, but just barely.

Someday they were going to know his innocence. Someday they were going to find the real killer and wish they had big bad Buck Tyson around to help bring him down. But right now he was out on Pluto, the underworld, hoping hard as hell that he could get back someday to the green hills of earth.

He knew Norse didn't give a shit about him. The shrink was just trying to keep the lid on and prevent everyone else from going loco by flushing Mr. Unpopularity away.

And old Buck? He'd have a right jolly time with the Russkies the rest of the winter, eating pickled herring and black bread and counting the seconds until he could get out of collapsing Commie-ville. Get back to clear his name.

"Not until you gas up, Bucky-boy." He stopped the rig, letting the engine idle.

Grunting in the tight cab space, he pulled on his parka and ski gloves and face mask and goggles and pulled the lever on the cab door. It had frozen shut, natch, so he had to pop it with a hard butt of his shoulder. "Ow!" When he stepped down to the metal footrest, the cold squeezed him like a frozen lake. My balls are going to implode. As quickly as he could he slammed the door shut and peered back inside at the cabin thermometer. The interior had plunged fifteen degrees from that brief blast of cold air before steadying. Wouldn't take long to freeze up completely if his dear old diesel stopped chugging. Well, he'd babied that mother for weeks, now. It should tick like a clock.

Tyson dropped to the snow and apprehensively looked around. He couldn't see shit. The only thing visible was a curtain of knee-high blowing snow, rippling at him out of the dark and zipping on, waving goodbye to the lights of the Spryte. Beyond was dark and profound as a cave. Five, six more months of this insanity before the light returned. Jesus, he'd been stupid! Yeah, he'd needed the money, but this place…

He walked to the sled he towed behind, stiff from sitting and awkward from the thick clothes and the cold he involuntarily shrank from. They'd used the sled to drag construction materials on base and Norse had commandeered it for Tyson's escape. It was loaded with fuel in five-gallon jerricans. The mechanic grasped one, feeling the cold of its metal even through his gloves, and tugged. It was like pulling on bedrock. Everything was frozen to everything else.

"Fucking Antarctica."

He trundled back to the Spryte and shoved open its toolbox, kept marginally warm by its proximity to the engine. He took out a ball peen hammer and pointed tire jack and went back to the sled. A few whacks broke the outermost container free enough that he could yank it off. It took more hammer blows to get the metal screw-top loosened, everything clumsy in the cold. Finally he had it off and a fuel spout screwed on. Grunting, he lifted the can and began emptying its contents into the tracked vehicle's gas tank. The process was excruciatingly slow. At this temperature, the fuel was like syrup.

When the can was empty he unscrewed the spout and heaved the empty container away. The garbage would mark his spot, like a bobcat pissing on pine needles. Like that stuff they left on the moon. Puffing, cursing, he went back for the next one.

Christ, it was cold! His lungs were raw, his head aching. Despite the exertion he felt like he was stiffening up. He stopped after fifteen gallons and climbed back into the cab to warm up, letting the ice on his face mask melt before he ripped it down, gasping. He sipped some water to battle dehydration. Cameron had told him once that studies showed everything at the Pole took three times longer to do than normal. Then the asshole asked him to do things three times faster than they reasonably could be done.

"Rest in peace, you sonofabitch." No one deserved a knife in the chest but jeez, he'd been an ineffectual prick. He wondered who murdered him. Half the base would qualify, near as Tyson could tell.

He climbed out again and went back to work. The hammer shattered like glass on the eighth can, its metal brittle from the incredible cold. Tyson wearily got a spare from the toolbox and went back to work. Glug, glug, glug. Terrible task, but this stuff was his lifeblood. Without fuel, he was a dead man.

At forty-five gallons he called it a pit stop. The tank was still slightly shy of full but he couldn't take the cold anymore. He'd drive several more hours, nap, and fill up again. As long as the plateau stayed flat and featureless, he'd be drinking vodka toasts in a few days. Until then, stay calm, stay focused. Stay alive! He climbed back aboard the rumbling Spryte.

Tyson gave himself a few minutes to warm up, savoring the heat of the cab, and finally stopped shivering enough to take off his parka and gloves. He gave the engine a couple of experimental blasts with the throttle, slipped the vehicle into gear, and set out with a lurch. The scattering of empty jerricans slipped away behind to be quietly entombed by the snow.

An hour of dark tedium passed. It was like driving a submarine across lightless mud. Except this was far colder than the deep sea. He was right, his windshield was beginning to ice up, so he turned the defrost higher and beat at the skin with the feeble scritch-scratch of the wipers. Not that there was anything to see!

Then the engine coughed.

Don't scare me like that, you cheap-ass hunk of machinery.

It coughed again.

Tyson chilled. A breakdown out here could be lethal. These diesels liked to run until doomsday, once you got them warmed up. What the hell could be wrong?

The engine began stuttering, as if something were caught in its throat, and he goosed the throttle to clear it. It roared, gagged, clattered wildly. Then, as if drowning on its own phlegm, it guttered out.

"Shit!"

He crawled behind his seat and lifted an access panel. There was nothing obviously wrong. No smoke. The fluids were normal. He checked the oil and there was plenty of that, too. It sounded like there was water or some other contaminant in the fuel.

Had that moron psychologist given him the wrong stuff? Reluctantly, he opened the cab again. The wind had risen, and although the temperature had climbed ten degrees with it, the cold's bite was worse than ever. Tyson was instantly chilled. He slammed the door shut and looked longingly back inside. Again that fifteen-degree drop, but this time there was no heater blowing to maintain cab temperature. Even as he watched, the mercury continued to slowly descend. Have to hurry!

If it was the fuel, the two filters should bleed it out. Maybe they needed to be emptied of water. Maybe they'd iced up. He crawled under the machine with a flashlight to open a panel and check the fuel line, muttering imprecations at every mush-minded beaker he'd ever met. Norse wouldn't know a carburetor from a camshaft, he was sure of it. Shining the light around, he was momentarily puzzled. Where the devil were the filters? It was like he'd never seen this machine before.

Then he looked closer and realized. The filters had been cut out of the line. Excised like a bad appendix. Snip, snip. The breaks had been bridged by tubing.

Dread realization began to descend. Well, well, Doctor Bob. Savior of the Pole. More mechanically savvy than I gave you credit for. And, with a little tune and lube, my judge, jury, and executioner.

If he got going again, he'd turn around and strangle the bastard.

Tyson crawled back out and stood in the wind, trying to think. He had to not just fix things, but fix them fast. He had to get that engine going before he froze.

He boosted himself up on the step and looked back in the cab. It was down to forty degrees. Tyson opened the door, fished out some chewing gum from the console, and shut it again. Then he dropped back to the snow.