Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire (5 page)

There was a long windy minute of awkward silence. The cold was rapidly becoming excruciating, a sensation more of pain than of temperature.

“You idiots are welcome to say out here sunbathing,” Skua said, piping up for the first time. “I’m going in.”

“Come on,” Elaine said. “Let’s get you kids warmed up.”

The inside of the tiny research station looked and smelled like a college dorm. In the main living area there was a random scattering of cheap, questionable furniture. Cartoons and sketches and photos torn from magazines were thumbtacked to the walls. A green lava lamp stood next to a big-screen TV that was hooked up to an Xbox. A heavy funk of armpits and fried food hung in the air alongside a lingering hint of marijuana smoke. Skua had swiftly retired to unseen private quarters, but with the six of them standing there, the narrow room felt like a rush-hour subway car. Taking their parkas off was a major challenge in the cramped space, all awkward elbows and bumping into one another. Millie could barely move without sticking his elbow in someone’s face or cracking his head against one of the metal spines supporting the roof. There was one small couch and a sad, broken-down recliner, meaning even if three of them squeezed onto the couch, two people would still have nowhere to sit. The low curved ceiling just added to the claustrophobia. Gabriel couldn’t imagine living like this for months at a time, especially during the sunless winter, when spending time outside was even less of an option.

Once out of her gear, Elaine revealed herself to be a plump, light-skinned black woman in her early fifties with dreadlocked white hair and a scattering of dark freckles across her round face. Stripped of his bulky down, Nils was less of a Yeti than a gangly stork. His blond thinning hair was pulled back into a wispy ponytail and the goggles were replaced by round, wire-rimmed glasses. He was missing two-thirds of his right ring finger and all of the pinkie. Even though the big Swede had to be close to seven feet tall, he seemed entirely comfortable with the low ceiling, crouching instinctively and gracefully as he moved through the cramped space.

“I’ll mix us up some hot chocolate,” Elaine said. “Nils, why don’t you bring in a couple more chairs from the mess hall?”

The two researchers left the room and Gabriel sat down in the recliner, wondering if this whole expedition really had been a mistake after all. He looked over at Velda, who was standing at the far end of the room with her arms wrapped around herself, her hazel eyes distant. Maybe Michael had been right. He wasn’t always, but he did have a good nose for futility.

When Nils returned with a spindly folding chair under each arm, he motioned for Gabriel to stand.

“It’s Elaine’s week for the recliner,” Nils said apologetically, handing a folding chair out to Gabriel. “We rotate on a weekly basis so that everyone is allowed fair and equal usage. Short-term visitors are not included.” He pointed to a hand-drawn chart on the wall labeled RECLINER SCHEDULE. “You may laugh, but we need these kinds of rules out here. It’s the only way to winter-over without murdering each other.”

Gabriel took the folding chair and looked over at the
schedule. He couldn’t help but notice that Dr. Silver’s name—LAWRENCE—was X’d off each time it appeared. His recliner dates had been redistributed among the other researchers. Gabriel wondered if Velda had noticed this and was struck with an urge to comfort her. But although she stood within arm’s reach, she seemed a thousand miles away.

“Well,” Elaine said, reappearing with six mismatched cups on a plastic tray. “Anyone up for midrats?”

“I could eat,” Nils replied, handing the other folding chair to Millie.

“Midrats?” Millie repeated, and handed the chair off to Velda. There was no way it would support his weight.

“Midnight rations,” Rue explained. “With the shifts up here, there’s four meals a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and midrats.”

“Well, then, yes, ma’am,” Millie said. “I’d sure love a bite.”

Elaine handed around the cocoa and then took her own mug and the tray back into the unseen galley. Gabriel could hear the beep and whir of a micro wave. He shuddered, remembering all the boxes of Tater Tots they had unloaded from Speedo’s plane, but he was hungry and in no position to be finicky.

“We’ll eat and then get a few hours of sleep,” Gabriel said. “How far away is the site where Dr. Silver was last seen?”

“About three hours in the Spryte,” Nils replied, blowing over the rim of his steaming mug before taking a sip. “We should plan to spend no more than four hours at a stretch before returning to base camp, but we must also bring overnight supplies and tents in case we are caught out in bad weather. The reports are all clear for the next
forty-eight but you never know for sure. Better to be prepared than dead.”

“Story of my life,” Gabriel said.

Elaine returned, the tray loaded with micro wave burritos on plastic plates. She handed the plates around. “Eat up,” she said. “Won’t stay warm for long.”

Gabriel wolfed down the food. He’d eaten worse. Of course, he’d survived for a week once in the Peruvian jungle on a diet of rainwater and grubs, so that wasn’t saying much.

“I don’t know about you all,” Elaine said, “but I’m gonna hit the sack. Nils’ll be up for another few hours working in the lab if you need anything but otherwise, you’re free to bed down wherever you can find the space.”

Nils began gathering up the dirty plates. “Velda,” he said. “You can sleep in your father’s bed, if you don’t mind bunking in my room.”

“That’ll be fine,” Velda said. Her face was closed off and unreadable.

“Rue, why don’t you take the couch,” Gabriel said, putting a hand on Millie’s massive shoulder. “You and me are on the floor.”

“I don’t think there’s enough floor for the two of us,” Millie replied, unrolling an extra-large sleeping bag. “You know I love you like a brother, but I don’t particularly want to snuggle.”

“That’s fine,” Gabriel said. “I’ll bed down in the mess hall.”

Gabriel collected his bedroll and headed down a short hallway to the mess. It was barely big enough for the square card table at its center. Gabriel had to fold up the table and lean it against the wall to make room to lie down on the floor.

Once he’d done so, Gabriel discovered that he still felt wide-awake, mind restless and full of unanswered questions. After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, he decided a hot shower would help him relax.

The first door he opened led to a cramped laboratory. It was meat-locker cold and the floor was raw exposed ice. A variety of probes had been sunk deep into the ice and twinkling banks of high-tech machines and top-of-the-line computers compiled, sorted and analyzed the data. Nils sat on a crooked stool in front of a bank of monitors. He wore a thick sweater, muffler and wool watch cap but no parka. His gloves had the tips of the fingers snipped off for easier typing and the pinkie of the right glove had been removed altogether. Although Gabriel was shivering, Nils seemed comfortable in the chill.

Nils was holding a second cup of steaming cocoa in one hand and a silver hip flask in the other. When he looked up and saw Gabriel, he finished pouring a slug of what ever the flask contained into the cocoa and then held the flask out to Gabriel. It proved to be surprisingly excellent bourbon. Gabriel took a swig and gave the flask back to the big Swede.

“Tell me,” Gabriel said. “What do you make of Dr. Silver’s last transmission?”

Nils took a sip of his cocoa, watching the continuous parade of numbers across the screen beside him.

“I was the one who received the transmission,” he finally said. “I tried to respond but there was no reply.” He paused, tapping away at the keyboard for several seconds, his face stoic. “What he claims to have seen is not possible. I believe he is dead.” His expression softened slightly and he looked down into his mug. “Don’t get me wrong—the man was as capable a scientist as
anyone I’ve known, and physically? He was in better shape than most men half his age. Stronger, too.” He shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter how strong you are down here. The ice is stronger.”

Gabriel nodded.

“I understand this is difficult for Velda. I hope seeing the place where he disappeared and confirming that his remains cannot be found, she will be able to let go and finally accept the loss.”

Gabriel nodded, wrapping his arms around his body and stamping his chilly feet.

“I thought I’d take a shower,” he said.

“Down at the other end of the hall,” Nils said, without looking away from his monitors.

“Thanks,” Gabriel said and left the big Swede to his ice and his numbers.

The other end of the dim hallway terminated in two identical doors. No way to know which was the bathroom, so he picked one at random and knocked gently.

“Yes?”

Velda’s voice.

Gabriel pushed open the door to reveal a tiny dorm-like room. Two narrow beds and not much else. Twin footlockers, a small halogen reading lamp burning on one of them. Velda sat on one of the beds, her long legs drawn up beneath her chin like an anxious child. She wasn’t crying, but there had been a flash of vulnerability in her face that quickly submerged when she saw Gabriel enter the room. She unfolded her legs and stood to meet him. Her thick, auburn hair was down around her face

“I was just looking for the…” Gabriel began, hand motioning pointlessly in the direction of the door, but she cut him off.

“Come here,” she said.

She reached out to pull Gabriel into an embrace. Her lips were just inches from his, barely parted and begging for a kiss. Who was he to argue? He gave her what she wanted and she gave it back in spades, her fierce, urgent heat threatening to melt through the polar ice beneath them.

After, they lay entwined and spent in a tangle of blankets, sharing a warm, comfortable silence. Gabriel found himself drifting just on the edge of sleep when Velda spoke, almost too soft to hear.

“I have to know,” Velda said. “I can’t stand not knowing.”

“I understand,” Gabriel replied, reaching down to brush her hair back off her forehead.

He did, too. His own parents had vanished, not in the frozen Antarctic but in the heat of the Mediterranean. They’d been on a speaking tour at the end of 1999 (the theme had been prophecies surrounding the turn of the millennium) when the ship they were traveling on had vanished for three days. When it had appeared again, not a living soul had been on board, just three crew members with their throats cut. Gabriel remembered all too clearly the ache of waiting for news, of not knowing. Every time a body washed up and was identified as one of the other passengers, Gabriel was torn between feeling relieved and feeling resentful that others were being set free to mourn while he and Michael and their sister, Lucy, remained in the purgatory of not knowing. It was a terrible thing to lose hope, but terrible, too, to have it—to carry the burden of hope from day to day, watching as the odds grew slimmer, but being denied the respite of their ever dropping to zero.

In the end, the bodies of Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had never been found. The U.S. government had declared them dead, a verdict Gabriel had reluctantly accepted—he’d certainly never been able to turn up any evidence to the contrary, and he’d tried. But acceptance wasn’t the same as closure. He understood why Velda wanted closure.

“I begged him to come home,” she said. “When I was here last, six months ago—I told him, Papa, you’re seventy-five years old, you gave up teaching ten years ago, why can’t you stop and come home? But he said no. ‘Now more than ever, with global warming…’ ” She threw up her hands. “He felt his expertise was needed. He said he’d never be able to live with himself if he left the problem to others.”

“Maybe he was right,” Gabriel said.

“But now he’s vanished,” Velda said, “and all his expertise with him.” She turned to Gabriel. “It’s more than just not knowing if he’s alive or dead. I can’t help thinking that my father may have made the discovery of a lifetime. Even if…” Her voice caught, and she stared up at the low ceiling, collecting herself. “Even if he didn’t make it,” she said, finally, her voice steady and controlled, “I feel like the world should know about his discovery. It would be his legacy.”

Gabriel nodded, about to say something reassuring, but Velda didn’t let him speak. She pressed her lips to his and seconds later, what ever thoughts he’d been entertaining went out of his head entirely.

“There,” Nils said, pointing across the icy wasteland. “On the left, about ten o’clock.”

Gabriel squinted through the Spryte’s frosty windshield in the direction that Nils was pointing. At first he saw nothing but white, but then, as the noisy vehicle drew closer, he spotted a long, twisting swirl of crimson in the ice, like a bloodstain left by a slaughtered giant. It was a similar shade of red to the bone-fire in the Transdniestrian fortress, actually—as if the brick red flames had somehow been frozen in the ice. The carmine depths even seemed to flash and sparkle as they approached.

“This is the ice that Dr. Silver was sampling when he disappeared,” Nils said, slowing and then stopping the Spryte about a hundred yards from the site. “There are hidden crevasses all over this location, one of which undoubtedly claimed the life of Dr. Silver. These are an anomaly—there are normally no such crevasses found in this area. The rescue team has already explored many of them, but no…” He looked at Velda, then turned away, squinting through the windshield. “No traces of Dr. Silver were found.”

Velda’s lovely face was stoic inside the pale frame of her furlined parka hood.

“We go on foot from here,” Nils said. “It’s not wise to bring the Spryte any closer. We will need to gear up and rope together before we start, just as if this were a glacier climb. I want everyone in harnesses and crampons—and remember to flatten out and anchor with your ice axe if one of us goes down, so that we don’t all get pulled down after.”

Nils opened the door to the Spryte, stepped out onto the ice and promptly disappeared from sight.

“Nils!” Gabriel cried, leaning across the Spryte to the driver’s side to look out the open door.

The moment he shifted his weight, he felt the boxy vehicle shift with him, the driver’s side dipping dramatically as a series of sharp cracks and a long low rumble sounded from beneath them.

“Everyone, shift to the right!” Gabriel said, pushing himself back against the passenger side door. “To the right! Millie, move—we need your weight.” The big man threw himself against the side of the vehicle. “Come on. As far over as you can or this thing is going down and taking us with it.”

For an unbearably tense moment, the Spryte rocked slowly back and forth as if deliberating their fate. No one said a word. The only movement inside the cab came from the swirling clouds of their anxious, steaming breath. Then, slowly, the rocking eased and the vehicle seemed to even out, balanced with the left side only slightly lower than the right. The slant was enough that Gabriel could now see out the open door. The frozen crust that Nils had fallen through now sported a jagged, three-foot-wide crack.

“Nils!” Gabriel called. “Can you hear me?”

For a minute, they heard nothing but the howl of the wind. Then as if from a great distance, a tiny, echoing voice answered.

“I’m alive.” Gabriel saw Velda’s eyes slide shut with relief. “I’m on a…a kind of steep ledge. Very slick…can’t get much of a grip. I suspect I will fall if I shift my weight even slightly.”

“Okay,” Gabriel said, his mind racing. “Okay. Just hang on. We’re going to figure out a way to get you out of there.”

He turned back to where Millie, Velda and Rue were squeezed together in the far right-hand side of the rear seat.

“Listen,” he said. “One of us needs to try and reach the gear in the back. We need to grab the packs and get out of the Spryte before it falls.”

“I’ll do it,” Rue said. “I’m the lightest.”

“Fine,” Gabriel said. “Go.” He pressed his body back against the passenger-side door as Rue carefully began crawling toward the packs behind her. As she closed her fingers around the strap of the closest pack, the Spryte shifted again, tilting precariously. Gabriel leaned back hard to counterbalance it and he saw Millie doing the same, but Rue lost her footing and tumbled against one of the rear doors. She grabbed the frame as the door swung open, barely avoiding falling out and into the crevasse. The pack was not so lucky. It slid past Rue and out the open door.

A moment later, Nils’s voice called up from below. “What was that?”

“Your pack,” Gabriel shouted. “It didn’t happen to land near you by any chance…?”

“No,” Nils said. “Gabriel?” There was a long echoing
pause. “I’m becoming somewhat concerned about my situation.”

“We’re working on it,” Gabriel said. What he didn’t say was that he was becoming somewhat concerned about their situation, too. He could feel the Spryte still gently teetering and could hear the ice beneath them groaning. “All right,” he said, “forget the packs. Everybody out. Rue, you go first, out this side.”

“But Gabriel, if we don’t have any supplies…” she began.

He cut her off. “No time to discuss it, Rue. We may only have seconds—”

But they didn’t even have that.

They all felt it as the lip of the crevasse crumbled beneath the Spryte’s weight. The vehicle tipped forward and smashed through the fragile surface. There was a silent instant where Gabriel felt suspended in midair, like a baseball at the top of its trajectory in that infinitely brief, motionless instant before the descent begins. And then they were plunging into darkness.

Gabriel felt himself thrown sideways, over the back of the driver’s seat. He fell against the others in a tangle of limbs, heard Millie’s grunt as their heads collided. The vehicle glanced off one sheer icy face of the crevasse and then the other before it came to an abrupt stop with a massive grinding crunch. They were tightly wedged between the narrowing walls of ice. The crevasse went on, as they could tell from the sound of chunks of ice continuing to fall into the darkness below—but the truck was too wide to fall any farther.

The faint light filtering down from above showed that the front end of the Spryte was smashed inward as if they had been in a severe head-on crash. If Gabriel had not been thrown into the backseat, he would have
been pinned—or, more likely, crushed to death. The radio below the accordioned dashboard was twisted into useless scrap. The glove box had dropped open, dumping out a miscellany of maps and tools, including a large flashlight. Gabriel grabbed the flashlight and switched it on, driving back the blue gloom and illuminating the pale faces of the huddled team members.

“Everybody okay?” Gabriel asked. “Anyone hurt?”

Before anybody could answer there was a thud and a crash from above. Bits of safety glass rained down around them from a shattered window. Gabriel shone the flashlight upward to reveal a booted leg dangling through the window.

“Nils?” Gabriel said.

“I’m all right,” Nils said, though his voice sounded otherwise, like he was speaking through gritted teeth.

Gabriel helped pull Nils down into the cabin. The big Swede was shaken and sported a bloody bruise on one cheek, but he seemed at least not to have any broken bones.

“You really thought jumping down here from that ledge was a good idea?” Gabriel said.

“I wish I could tell you that I did,” Nils said, “and that this was all part of a clever plan on my part—but really it was the ledge’s decision, not mine.”

“Got it,” Gabriel said. He shone the light upward. It only penetrated so far into the deep blue walls of ice. The sky was barely visible in the distance.

“We’re going to have to try to free up some of the gear from the back and make the climb to the surface,” Gabriel said. “Won’t be easy, but we should be able to get back to the station on foot and then radio to the Pole for help. Nils, do you think you can make it?”

“I’m not sure,” Nils said. “My leg—”

“I can do it,” Velda said. “My father took me on tougher climbs than this when I was a kid.”

Gabriel doubted it. Any father who’d take a child on a climb even half this hard would’ve deserved an arrest for endangerment. But Gabriel appreciated the attitude, and he wasn’t about to turn down an offer for help. “All right. The rest of you stay here in the Spryte till we come back with a rescue team. We’ll go as quickly as we can.”

“Don’t go quickly,” Rue said. “Go safely.”

“That, too,” Gabriel said. “But in this weather, slow’s not safe. Not for any of us.”

Nils reached into his jacket and fished out a poker hand of Hershey bars from an inner pocket. “Before you go. Some calories.”

Gabriel grabbed two of the bars, passed one to Velda. They were rock hard.

“Break it into squares,” Nils said, “and hold each square in your mouth until it’s warm enough to chew.”

Gabriel did as Nils suggested, sucking on the chocolate in the icy blue twilight. In the depths of the crevasse, out of the shrieking wind on the surface, they were cocooned in a churchlike silence. It was tempting to stay here, huddled together for warmth. But it wouldn’t take long for the chocolate to run out, and, shortly after that, the warmth.

“Right,” Gabriel said around the last mouthful of chocolate. “Let’s see if we can free up that gear.”

Velda’s pack came free fairly easily from the rear of the Spryte but the remaining three were stuck fast, clenched in the crumpled metal as if between teeth. Millie was able to reach his pack and unzip it a few inches. He emptied it of a few smaller items through the opening, passed them to Gabriel. The other two packs were hopelessly inaccessible.

Gabriel and Velda strapped themselves into climbing harnesses and Gabriel readied a pick in one hand.

Rue, meanwhile, was poking around the ruined dashboard. “I might be able to get the heat up and running in here,” she said. “But I’m afraid that would melt the ice around us and send us who knows how much farther down.”

“Don’t do it unless you absolutely have to,” Gabriel said.

“We’ll be fine,” Nils said. “Just come back swiftly.”

Gabriel pushed himself up, using the back of the driver’s seat for leverage. He was about to stick his head out through the smashed rear window when Velda said, “Wait, what’s that sound?”

The team was silent, listening. Gabriel heard nothing at first and then a low, distant rumble that grew rapidly louder and louder.

“Oh, no,” Nils said.

“What?” Gabriel said.

His voice was a whisper. “Avalanche.”