Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire (15 page)

The older woman looked from face to face, tallying the confused and anxious women sitting half naked on the benches, and nodded. “All in.”

“Tell them to bundle up in those furs,” Gabriel told her, as he began pulling on one of the flight suits. “You too. You have no idea how cold it is where we’re going.”

Anika looked at Gabriel as if he’d lost his mind but did as he requested.

“Millie,” Gabriel said, tossing him the largest of the suits. The big man was seated sprawled across the floor beside the cockpit. “Put some clothes on.” Gabriel threw the smallest of the flight suits through the open door of the cockpit. “Rue, when are you going to start those engines?”

There was a growling sputter and cough before he finished getting the words out, and looking through the cockpit windows he saw the antique propellers struggling into motion like old men getting out of bed. The stench of thick smoky exhaust was overwhelming.

He returned to the center of the cabin, took one last look around the clearing through the still-open ramp at the back of the plane.

What he saw terrified him. The wind was strong enough now that the trees in its path were bent almost horizontal, the ones that hadn’t already snapped off and been blown away. As he watched, the ground itself began to tremble, then to twist and hump like a living
thing.
This was
minimum
intensity? Good lord—what would have happened to D.C. at the maximum level?

He felt the plane grind into motion along the runway and saw the ramp slowly rise, laboriously drawing shut.

Then, suddenly there was an awful, unnatural sound, like a thick piece of metal being shredded. The surface of the runway seemed to shimmer with the same sort of distortion he’d seen beneath the giant lens of the Untergang machine. Gabriel felt the terrible pressure return, squeezing his skull painfully, and he saw the women around the cabin holding their heads in torment. As the plane’s nose tipped up and its belly left the ground, a hot wave of fire struck them from behind, shoving them violently into the air. Gabriel was thrown against the side of one of the lockers and held on tight to prevent himself from being flung all the way into the cockpit.

“Rue, you okay?” he shouted.

“Don’t talk to me,” she shouted back.

The metal of the plane’s body was screaming from the pressure, the velocity, the heat. Above them, the red dome of ice seemed to glow, the frozen fire coming to life as the furious heat from below began to melt the dome away, layer by layer. In the middle distance, he could see the narrow rift in the ice toward which they flew, and through it the slash of clean, white daylight beyond.

They were rushing toward it at ferocious speed—but they weren’t there yet.

Gabriel pressed his face against the glass of a window and looked down. The ground continued to rapidly drop away beneath them, but that was the least of what he saw.

It was as if the entire valley below was being crumpled
like a used paper napkin in a giant’s hand. The ground seemed to double up and fold in on itself, twisting and crushing everything in a rough spiral pattern radiating outward from the clearing where the machine had been. As Gabriel watched, appalled, the mesmerizing spiral suddenly collapsed inward, and a spout of churning, steaming lava gushed like blood from the torn earth.

“Lava at three o’clock,” he shouted.

“I told you,” Rue shouted back, “don’t talk to me!” The plane suddenly lurched, as she turned the heavy-bodied craft nearly on end and steered it in a sharp turn away from the deadly flow.

Gabriel found himself flung from one side of the plane to the other, his fall softened only from landing on the bodies of half a dozen young women all wrapped up in furs and blankets. He made apologies uselessly—incomprehensibly, to them. At least there didn’t seem to be any new broken bones, though he hated to think what Rue’s maneuver might have done to Millie’s ankle.

Out the nearest window, Gabriel saw the cliffs at the valley’s edges begin to shudder and collapse. Cracks appeared and widened in the ice ceiling above. The ancient plane was vibrating all over as if about to shake itself to pieces.

“Hang on to something,” Rue shouted from the cockpit. “It’s gonna be a tight squeeze.”

There was a deafening crunch as one of the wing tips smashed against the edge of the crack in the ice dome. For a terrible moment, Gabriel was afraid they were going down, but Rue fought with the controls and somehow held the plane steady.

The temperature inside the main cabin suddenly plummeted, dropping a hundred degrees in forty seconds.
It left Gabriel gasping and shivering. The flight suit helped, but only so much; for one thing, his feet were still bare. And Rue couldn’t be doing any better, especially with the wounds she’d endured. He grabbed an armful of skins and raced into the cockpit with them, dumping them on Rue’s shoulders and lap. Freeing one hand at a time from the controls, she pulled them tightly around her.

“Thanks,” she said, her teeth chattering.

“Can I talk to you now?” Gabriel said.

“No,” Rue said. “But you can huddle with me for warmth.”

Gabriel climbed into the seat beneath her and pulled the furs back over them both. She was freezing, but then so was he; together at least they stood a chance.

Glancing back, he saw that the faces of the women in the cabin were pale with shock, their eyes huge and unable to process what was happening, their bodies shivering pitifully with the brutal cold. The little girl was clinging tightly to Millie, her arms too short to protrude from the sleeves of the parka in which he’d zipped her up.

“Anika,” Gabriel said, shouting to be heard over the roar of the engines. “Tell them to huddle together, to hold tight to each other. It’s the only way they’ll survive this flight.” He heard Anika saying something and saw Millie gesturing.

They’d figure it out. They’d have to.

“How much longer till we land?” Gabriel asked Rue. “How far to Pole Station?”

“Which do you want to know?” she said, concentrating on correcting for chop. The turbulence was exceptional.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

“Pole Station is quite a ways off,” she said. “But with that engine gone, we won’t be in the air for long enough to reach it.” She nodded toward the right side of the cockpit, where Gabriel saw that one of the giant propellers was not turning. As he stared, the second one on that side sputtered to a stop.

Rue flipped an old toggle switch on the control panel. Her voice boomed out of a loudspeaker behind them. “Attention passengers, this is your captain speaking. We are beginning our descent into beautiful downtown nowhere.”

She flipped the switch again, tried to look through the iced-over cockpit windows, then gave up and peered at the instruments. “This isn’t the way I wanted to go,” she said. “Frozen solid at the South Pole.”

“Oh?” Gabriel said, forcing a grin onto his trembling lips. “How did you want to go?”

“Heart attack,” she said, “brought on by the biggest orgasm of my life.”

“Well, don’t give up on your dream just yet,” Gabriel said. “If you put this bird down safely, we might still make it.”

“That’s what I love about you, Gabriel,” Rue said. “You’re such a goddamn optimist.”

The plane was wracked with a huge blow, as if they’d been swatted by a tremendous club.

“Hang on, optimist,” Rue muttered, “we’re going down.”

Gabriel had been through some hairy landings in the past, but none of them could compare to the vicious turbulence of this one or the blast of freezing wind that enveloped them as the plane began to come apart at the
seams. They plowed into the snow, wings snapping and propellers flying off in every direction. The passengers in the cabin were thrown and scattered. And Gabriel himself was flung through the air. He saw a heavy metal panel loom before him, jutting from the snow. Then he hit it face-first, and blackness swallowed everything.

When he regained consciousness, he was in a cramped chamber along with Rue, Millie, the two dozen women, and two bearded scientists who kept looking around them with incredulous expressions.

“You mind telling us who the hell you-all are?” the older of the two scientists asked, his voice laced with a tawny Tarheel accent.

Gabriel tried to sit up on the army cot on which he’d been laid out. He gave up after a few attempts.

“That a
Nazi
plane you were flying?” the younger one said.

“Yes,” Gabriel said, his voice hoarse. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, that’s fine with us,” the older scientist said. “We’ve got all the time in the world, don’t we?” And the younger one chuckled and nodded, as though at an inside joke.

“What are you talking about? Where are we?” Gabriel turned his head painfully to look out the frost-coated window on his left and saw just a razor sliver of orange sun hovering above the distant horizon.

“You’re at the South Pole, son,” the older scientist said. “Pole Station. We saw the fire from your engines
and went out to haul you in. You know, we don’t normally get a lot of visitors dropping in out here. Specially not lovely young women dressed in scraps of fur and nothing else.”

“In a Nazi plane,” the younger one muttered. It seemed to be the point he was fixated on.

“Although if we did,” the older one went on, “we might not have such a problem getting staff to sign up for winter-over.”

“Winter-over?” Rue said, suddenly alert. “When’s the last flight out?”

“About two and a half hours ago,” the older scientist said. “There won’t be another flight in or out of here for six months.”

Everyone fell silent.

“So, you see,” the older one said, “we have plenty of time to listen to a long story.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do up here for six months?” Millie said, then checked himself. Gabriel saw him looking at the crowd of women around him. “You think they’ll still expect me to…?”

“To do your duty by them,” Gabriel said. “I don’t see why not.”

Rue caught Gabriel’s gaze and shook her head slowly. “Just so long as you remember where
your
duty lies,” she said. “You and me, we’ve got a little matter of a death wish to explore.”

“Excuse me?” the younger scientist said.

Gabriel closed his eyes.

It was going to be an interesting six months.