In Cold Pursuit (26 page)

“Seems simple enough.”

“Don’t get overconfident. Pay attention all times.”

“Check.”

“Don’t go off the trail. That Challenger’s got treads, you got tires. With this load, you weigh fifteen tons. Especially don’t go off the trail here.” He pointed to the trail ahead of them, where it choked down to a narrows that led between two clusters of flags. Many of the flags were black.

“Big crack in the ice or something?”

“This is where the fuel lines cross from the island out to the ice runway. Don’t go outside this slot or you gonna make yourself very unpopular round here.” They rode up over a concealed bridge and down the other side. The route widened out again. “Okay, now here we got four lanes, closest thing to an Interstate highway on this whole continent. Outer two lanes are for tracked vehicles, inner two are rubber tires, that’s us.”

Training continued as they took a left at the first fork in the route, toward Williams Field—”Willy, they call it; it’s named after this dude who drove a Cat through the ice over by Cape Evans,” Hilario explained—then turned right a mile or two later, heading south toward Pegasus. “The third runway,” said Hilario, “is for landing C-17s after the sea ice gets too soft to take the weight. We gotta resurface it every year, and it’s farther from town, so we use the sea ice as long as we can.”

The flagged trail dropped from four lanes to two. Finally, the turn to Pegasus swung off to the right, the route dropped to one lane, and they were on the Black Island route.

“Nothing beyond here but ice,” said Hilario. “That flagged route to pole heads off down here. That’s it. Nothing else. No man’s land.”

They moved at ten miles per hour. The Challenger ground along ahead of them, carving through snowdrifts, smoothing and compacting the trail. They had now left what Antarctica had in the way of civilization, and the human universe shrank quickly in contrast to the immensity of the ice on which they traveled. As they rode along, Hilario and Valena chatted sporadically, swapping unimportant facts about themselves, such as favorite foods and things to do in leisure time, and commenting on the variations in the crests and hollows the wind had carved into the hard-packed snow that shrouded the ice. Finally, Hilario said, “Time for you to start driving.”

“Where are we?” asked Valena, searching the raw, white scenery for familiar landmarks. Hut Point and McMurdo Station had disappeared behind a rise and clouds had gathered about the towering heights of the Transantarctic Mountains and Mount Erebus. Their world had been consumed by snow and ice.

He pointed to a black smear of ice-dappled volcanic rock in the distance. “That’s Black Island there, and that’s—”

“I mean are we still on the sea ice or are we coming up onto the ice shelf? I saw a map that put the boundary between the two out here somewhere.”

“Well, if you can’t see an edge, then there’s really no difference, now, is there?”

“Yes, there is. A huge difference. The one is ocean water that freezes and breaks up annually. The other is freshwater snow that refroze into ice thousands of miles from here and—”

“Oh, so you’re going to split hairs. Okay, then, we’re on the ice shelf.”

“But where? I was expecting a cliff, or a climb of some sort.”

“What are you, a glaciologist or something?”

“Well, yes, in fact I am.”

“I heard you’re a grantee. So why you in this bucket?”

Valena did not answer. She was thinking,
It’s like McMurdo is one big communal organism, like a sponge or a jellyfish.
The odd experience of being sent through the kitchen by the omelet man returned to mind. Somehow, between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., half of McMurdo had heard about her change of plans, not to mention who she was and what she did here. This was not comforting, especially now that the man named Steve was dead. And how exactly had he died? It occurred to her that he might have been murdered.

She chided herself for thinking this thought, but murder had indeed occurred at Emmett’s camp; there was no doubt of that now. Larry’s information of the evening before had changed all that from speculation to certainty. Emmett himself had been taken into custody as a result, and … and who was she to say that he was innocent?

She hardly knew the man.
Was
Emmett Vanderzee a coldblooded killer? His graduate students from the year before had gone on to other projects. They could have stayed on. Why had they jumped ship? Had they left him because they no longer trusted him? If so, what had changed their minds?

Somebody had prevented the journalist from getting the aid he needed, and that was murder. Had the feds fingered Emmett because he was the only one who had a motive to kill that man or because he was the only one who had had the opportunity? Perhaps one of the graduate students had buried that Gamow unit and had now separated himself from the whole situation by scorning his former professor.
Was
that why Bob Schwartz ran off without answering my questions?

Thus far, she had spoken to only three of the people who’d been present in the camp—Cal Hart, Bob Schwartz, and Manuel Roig—and they had each seemed reticent to talk about the situation.
No, wait, Cal Hart was interrupted by Jim Skehan
, she reminded herself.
But what was Bob’s problem? And was Manuel Roig in fact too exhausted after searching for Steve? Or was the memory of watching a man die in Antarctica too painful to visit? But what if this was a foil, an easy explanation behind which to hide? Did he have a reason to want the journalist dead?
Valena’s brain buzzed with the questions she had not thought to ask these men, such as,
Did you know Sweeny before you went to Emmett’s camp?

She ran down her mental list of possible killers. William the dogsbody was there by accident and was supposedly lazy or incompetent. She had no way of knowing whether he had a motive. David/Dave—the other muscle sent to the high camp—was a blank.

She looked out the window of the Delta, wondering if the David and William who had been present at Emmett’s camp could possibly be the Dave and Wee Willy who were at that moment cutting lazy figure eights in through the drifts beyond the groomed trail.
No, too much of a coincidence
, she decided.
A thousand people work at McMurdo during the season, and David and William are common names.

The cook she was about to meet.
What was she like? A bit cranky, having been alone with a tribe of men at high elevation? Would that make her a killer? And Calvin Hart: what was his story? What did he do for the project?

Cracking into Valena’s silence, Hilario repeated his question in a different form. “So really, what you doing driving out to Black Island?”

Valena blinked. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a little tired. Still jet-lagged, I guess.”

“It takes a while to adjust,” said Hilario. “First time on the ice, it takes at least a week. Dehydration, the endless daylight, all the weird people, eating food that comes out of a can …”

“I like it fine.”

“And you are going to Black Island because…?”

She tried to decide what of substance, if anything, she wanted to tell him. Clearly her story was getting around, but how much of it? “I wanted to see the Ross Ice Shelf,” she said at last. “I’d read so many accounts by the early explorers of how vast it was, and
…
” Her grip on her mind slipped again.
And what?
Deep in her guts she did want to see it, if only a glimpse. Had always wanted to see it. Had longed for it, and for all of Antarctica. She shook her head and closed her eyes. Fatigue was definitely beginning to get the better of her. Fatigue and stress. She needed more sleep.

“Well, what do you think? Seen enough yet?” He fell into his low chuckle again.

It is beautiful
, she wanted to say.
Painfully, astonishingly, joyously, severely beautiful
, but instead she guarded her heart and, from her intellect, said, “I had expected something more dramatic, not that this isn’t pretty awe-inspiring. But I thought there would be a cliff, or at least a steep rise.” She had wanted an edge to cross, past which she could say,
Now I have been to that place that summoned me.

She felt Hilario’s eyes on her. “Any time this month you want to learn to drive this thing,” he said, letting it roll to a stop. “Come on, it won’t bite you. Climb over here.”

They switched places and Valena settled herself behind the wheel, which was about eighteen inches in diameter and mounted almost flat, like that on a bus. Hilario showed her which gear to start out in—second for most purposes, first for soft snow or other questionable conditions. She gave it some gas and the big beast began to move. A smile spread across her face.

Hilario said, “You’re a natural. Time for me to take a few minutes to myself.” He climbed out of the shotgun seat, shoved everything that had been on the backseat onto the floor, and stretched out on it. “Wake me anything happens. Oh, and if I fall asleep or anything, wake me before we stop at KOA so Edith don’t see me snoozing.”

“Right. KOA. So what am I looking for? A campground?”

Hilario’s sardonic laugh filled the cab. “Yeah, that’s right. Only there’s only one campsite. Just keep going until you see something that isn’t ice or rock or flag.”

The faster snow machines flew ahead of them going south along the route. The wind had grown brisk, driving spumes of snow from the crest of every drift, wrapping the snow machine drivers up in a blanket of gauze. Valena would wave to them as they barreled toward her or zinged by going the other direction, running circles around the Delta and the Challenger to stay with the bigger, slower machines. Sometimes it looked like they were chasing each other, and sometimes it appeared that Dave was herding Wee Willy, keeping him from getting lost. The big man seemed bent on finding a snowdrift that would buck his machine into the sky. He would find a big one, take aim, and hit it as hard as he could. Just for shits and grins, as her mother used to say.

A vision of her mother came to mind as she had looked in a photograph Valena had once found in the back of a book at her grandfather’s house: sitting on her Harley, a can of beer resting on one knee, a skimpy tank top, and her huge Hollywood grin. It was the grin that always got people. Brought men to their knees. It was the Harley that had gotten her, late one night in the Snake River Canyon.

Valena drove onward across the ice, giving herself to its mass and dimensions.
I made it, Ma
, she wanted to tell her, but there was no email or conversation where she had gone.

The KOA turned out to be a survival hut, little more than a wooden box on wheels, a way station where a traveler could get in out of the wind. Edith called for a halt for lunch. “Come with me, Valena,” she called as she disappeared behind the structure.

Valena stopped the Delta and joined her. Edith had not had to explain that this was the only place for miles around that they could drop their drawers and pee without being seen by the men.

“Your first dose of Antarctic girl bonding?” asked Edith as they squatted.

Valena smiled. “Yeah. Men sure have the advantage in such circumstances. We expose the full moon. All they got to show is the isthmus of Panama.”

They shared a laugh, then zipped up again and headed back to their rigs.

With all four engines shut down, only the sound of the wind met their ears. They commenced their midday meal. Edith and Dave stood to eat, their paper sacks resting on the running board of the Delta. Valena and Hilario took seats on the two snow machines. Wee Willy sat inside the Delta, eating by himself.

Edith spoke to Valena as she smeared mayonnaise and mustard onto her cheese and bologna sandwich from little plastic packets. “I don’t think you’ve met Dave,” she said.

“Hi,” said Valena, without looking up. She tried to cover her discomfort by putting a glove to her lips and clearing her throat.

“Hi, yourself,” said Dave.

Valena could not read his face with the dark glasses and chewing, but he sounded friendly enough. People stared at her all the time, why had Dave’s stare in the hallway of Building 155 bothered her so much? She turned to Edith. “So how many calories do you think are in one of these flight lunches?” she asked, inventing something to talk about.

Edith laughed. “I calculated that once. Just under two thousand.” She pulled her sack down off the running board and dug through it. “Two big sandwiches, a couple granola bars, juice box, chips, mega-brownie—there’s a weight-loss food—and don’t forget the chocolate bar.”

“You don’t want to get cold,” said Hilario.

Dave said nothing.

“Does NSF have some kind of a deal with Cadbury’s?” asked Valena.

Hilario said, “You mean Raytheon; they do all the ordering. Yeah, must be. Cadbury’s got a factory in New Zealand. Now, I like chocolate fine, “but this peppermint flavor just isn’t my thing.”

“Swap you for a fruits and nuts,” said Edith. “Stick in my teeth.”

Hilario looked at Dave. “What you got, amigo?”

Dave smiled, curling his mustache. “I ain’t swapping. I got the mousse bar.”

Hilario and Edith groaned with envy. “You luck!” said Hilario, heaving himself off the snow machine to make the swap with Edith.

Dave chuckled. “Too bad for you they don’t make jalapeño flavor.”

“You’re a deep thinker,” Hilario said.

“So this is what people do with their time in Antarctica,” said Valena. “You argue over chocolate bars.”

Hilario and Edith both stopped and stared at her. “Like there’s anything more important in life?” said Edith. “I love to eat, and this place is food central.” She shrugged. “Except for the freshies, which are few and far between. You’ll notice there is no lettuce in your sandwich.”

“I was wondering, but now you mention it, that makes sense. And it’s a bit dry.”

“Load on the mayo,” said Edith. “Chowing on flight lunches is an art form.”

Valena noticed that Edith’s sack had become so light that it was beginning to blow along the running board “You’ve emptied that bag already? Woman after my heart.”

Edith grabbed the sack and laughed. “You aren’t doing so bad yourself, honey. That’s what I love about this place. Eat, eat, eat, and you never gain an ounce.”