In Cold Pursuit (27 page)

“Amen on that.”

Edith turned to Wee Willy, who had climbed down out of the cab. “So, how you like traversing?”

Wee Willy shrugged his massive shoulders. “Are we getting overtime for this?”

Dave said, “Ain’t you liking this?”

Wee Willy shrugged again. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“Well, let’s hit it,” said Edith. “We got miles to go before we sleep.”

Valena watched Wee Willy shamble away toward his snow
machine, wondering who in his right mind would come to Antarctica for anything but love.

F
ROM THE
KOA,
THE ROUTE MADE A GRADUAL TURN
toward the west around the south side of Black Island, rising higher onto the ice shelf. Valena knew that the ice was not standing still. It was flowing like putty, but on such an immense scale and so slowly that it took precise measurement with satellite-mounted radar and GPS to read its progress. This ice had been born a thousand miles away or more, perhaps even up on the Antarctic Plateau. It had crept here at speeds of no more than a few hundred meters per year. From space, NASA’s satellites could read flow lines created as it streamed off the continent and onto the Southern Ocean, but from here, all she could see was unbroken whiteness.

As they convoyed along, the world opened up and out, their presence continuing to shrink as the immensity of the Ross Ice Shelf engulfed them. The world shifted to palest blue, and Valena’s heart began to lift.

Twice, she felt the track beneath her wheels grow soft. She sensed this through her skin and muscles even before she heard the engine slow, and she quickly downshifted, easing the spin of the wheels over the soft patch, regaining her traction. The second time this happened, she glanced into the rearview mirror at the tires behind the cab. The surface of the snow immediately in front of them had begun to wrinkle, like a bow wake thrown up by a ponderous black ocean vessel.

Edith’s voice crackled out of the speaker above her head. “Mac Ops, Mac Ops, this is Challenger 286.”

“Go ahead, Challenger.”

“We’re at the edge of the dead zone. Reporting in. Over.”

“Copy that, Edith. What’s your ETA Black Island?”

“Eighteen hundred.”

Valena slid up her sleeve and looked at her watch. It was 12:30. That meant five and a half hours without radio contact.

Mac Ops replied, “I want to hear from you eighteen hundred sharp, or earlier if you can pick up a signal.”

“Roger that. We’ll monitor radio and check in if we hear you. Challenger out.”

“Happy flagging. Mac Ops clear.”

Valena had been watching the flags that marked their route. Many were missing, leaving only the bamboo stake sticking out of the snow. Along one two-or three-mile stretch near the KOA, the flags had been replaced so many times that a veritable forest of bamboo stakes lined the route. Many were splintered or broken off near the surface of the ice. Now the convey had reached a stretch where only one or two feet of flagstaff showed above the snow. Here on the south side of Black Island, the wind blew relentlessly, sweeping the scant accumulation of Antarctic snow into a giant drift.

The Challenger pulled to a halt and the crew chief climbed out, waving the two outriders in from their wanderings.

Valena stopped also. “You awake, Hilario?”

“Yes. Gimme a minute; I got to find out where we are.”

She turned and saw that he had switched on a global positioning system unit and was reading out their position. Pulling a paper copy of an air photograph of the area out of a folder, he marked their position. Valena could see the entire route marked between GPS readings a few miles apart. “Is that so we can keep going in the dark?” she joked.

“We could keep going in a whiteout with this gizmo,” he said. “I done that when I worked up in Greenland one summer. We rode for miles on snowmobiles going only by the GPS and arrived right at the drill site no problem. Then I got off the machine and walked smack into the side of the building.”

“You’re kidding! Wasn’t it dangerous to travel blind like that?”

“These satellite things are really accurate, you know? If the route’s been mapped tight enough, you can do that. I wouldn’t try it where you have crevasses or anything like that, but going over a groomed route like this? Sure.” He completed his documentation, then said, “You’re a good driver, Valena. You downshifted just right in those soft patches.”

“Thanks.”

“So you can continue. I’ll take the first shift up on the load.” He began to put on his outer clothing.

“How do we do this?”

Hilario’s voice was muffled somewhat as he pulled on his neck gaiter and rigged into his parka. “The Challenger leads the way as usual, but you follow slower now. I throw a flag down off the load every two hundred feet.” He swung his right arm like a javelin thrower.

Dave had climbed off his snow machine and was swapping his hood for a watch cap and his goggles for sunglasses with side protection flaps. He came over to the Delta, opened the door behind Hilario, reached under the backseat, pulled out two heavy iron rods with beveled points, dragged both irons over to where the snowmobiles were parked, and leaned one across each saddle.

Hilario said, “They use those pikes to jab holes in the snow so they can stick the poles in. You’ll see. Don’t get too far in front of them.” Pulling the zipper to his chin, he climbed out the door, walked along the running boards and over the boxy fender that covered the wheel on that side, then stepped over the swivel that connected the tractor and trailer parts of the vehicle. Up on top of the load, he loosened the ties on the first bundle of flags and used the bamboo end of one of them to tap the roof of the cab, indicating that Valena could begin.

Valena eased the Delta into first gear and set it rolling. In the side rearview window, she watched the bamboo poles fly out every two hundred feet. Some landed upright in the snow or leaning at an angle; others, fell in places where the snow had blown away, baring the ice underneath, and simply bounced and skittered across the surface.

Dave and Wee Willy leapfrogged along behind her, setting flags turn and turn about, zooming from one position to the next, carrying their steel pikes like lancers at a joust.

As she drove along, Valena reminded herself that Antarctica was a desert. In the interior, annual precipitation averaged less than two inches of water, whatever that taped out to in snowflakes. Even here on the coast, where the snowfall
was highest, it averaged less than eight inches. And yet the wind had rounded it all up and dumped it here, accumulating a thickness of five or six feet in a year. Was Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp like this? Had the wind helped a killer bury the parachute drop?

Valena felt the morning’s nervousness settle about her once again. She struggled to look on the landscape intellectually, as an object from her classes. Here the wind packed the snow hard, transforming it into solid ice in just a few seasons. Images filled her mind from the photomicroscopic slides Emmett Vanderzee had shown in his lecture during spring term. As the snowflakes accumulated in this perpetual deep freeze, they recrystallized into shards of granular snow. The shards then compacted, changing from snow into a more granular substance called firn. As additional snow accumulated on top, increasing the load, firn transitioned into ice, reforming into larger and larger crystals, finally interlocking into the massive ice of glaciers. She had read about this transition, and now she witnessed the result of the process in its immensity. Back home, glaciers were little things that lived in the high valleys of just a few mountain ranges, the exception to the rule. Here, ice was the rule, not the mountains it shrouded, and it formed not just alpine glaciers but huge glaciers and ice streams miles wide that flowed from the gigantic sheets of ice thousands of feet thick. The Ross Ice Shelf was as big as France. It was fed by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a mass half the size of the United States, and also by the East Antarctic Ice Sheet—larger than the whole lower forty-eight states by a considerable margin—which flowed through passes in the Transantarctic Mountains down which the monstrous glaciers flowed—in places, the ice in Antarctica was more than three miles thick. The sheer volume of all that bound-up water was beyond imagining, ninety percent of the world’s ice, seventy percent of the world’s fresh water.

As she rolled Flipper slowly along the trail, Valena stared out across the white wilderness. The variation in the patterns the wind carved into the snow and ice was fantastic. Here the surface snow and firn was sculpted into overlapping fish
scales the size of her boot, there into waves as big as the Delta.
Sastrugi
, the Russians had named these endlessly variable sculptures; an alien name for alien forms.

Wee Willy pulled his snow machine to a halt in front of her and waved his arms for her to stop. She pulled up and rolled down the window, catching a blast of scouring wind in her face.

“I been out here for hours. Your turn,” he demanded, pulling down his neck gaiter to speak.

Valena thought for only a second before deciding that she was only too ready to agree. She was enjoying driving the ponderous Flipper but envied the speed and maneuverability of the snow machines. In all her twenty-four years she had never ridden one (“You’ll end up like your ma,” Great Aunt Dilla had always said), and this was a grand way to start. “I’ll be right down,” she replied, and she began the process of layering on clothing to guard against the cold.

As she climbed down out of the cab of the Delta, she told Wee Willy, “I put your hand warmer into the top of your duffel. It had fallen onto the floor, and I was certain you didn’t want it to get dirty.”

Wee Willy had been on a trajectory to trudge past her without making eye contact, but at her words he stopped, turned, and looked at her, his lips slightly parted. He stared for several seconds, then said, “Thanks.” He began to move toward the Delta again, but stopped again, turned to her, and said, “Remember to lift with your legs. It’s heavy.”

“The pike?”

“Yeah. Lift with your legs, then drop it into the snow. That way you don’t hurt your back. And lay it across your lap while you drive to the next flag. If you try and put one end of it down on the running board and you hit a bump, it can fall off into the snow.”

“Thanks.” She took a seat on the snow machine Wee Willy had just vacated.

Hilario called out from the back of the Delta. “How about I take a turn on the snow machines, too?” he asked.

Edith had seen them stop and had looped around to rejoin
them. “Dave, you want a turn on the Challenger?” she called out from its cab. “I’ll take a turn on top of the load.”

Dave gave her a thumbs-up, set his machine to idle, and headed for the tractor.

“But first give Valena the ten-second lowdown on driving a snow machine, will ya?”

Dave turned and crossed to Valena’s snow machine. “Just turn the switch on the ignition and give it some gas,” he said. “Should come right on. It’s warm.”

“Thanks,” she said. She sat down quickly on the saddle and fired it up, then zoomed off down the trail, knowing that her haste was a little ridiculous, considering that there were as yet no new flags waiting to be set, but she wanted to show him that she could handle it. To her surprise and pleasure, she felt quite natural on it. Her hips rolled with the changes in the surface and, even as fast as she was going, she could feel the wind pressing at her back. When she thought she had gone about four hundred feet—two flag distances—she stopped the machine and waited.

The Challenger swept past her with Dave at the controls. He waved to her.

The Delta came lumbering down the trail with Wee Willy at the wheel. Edith tossed down a flag, and Valena hopped up and dropped the iron into the snow, lifted it out, and set the bamboo pole into the hole as the Delta continued down the trail. Sitting back down on the saddle with the iron across her lap as Wee Willy had suggested, she throttled up and zoomed off to the next position, where another flag already waited.

Valena continued along the trail, now setting the flags with the pike, now learning to use the hand augur to make a hole where the wind had blown the snow away from the ice. The wind increased incrementally, blowing in a bank of clouds that nibbled at the distant mountain range, gradually devouting it. She hummed as she worked, satisfied by the physical exertion and by proving herself a worthy member of the team.

A quarter hour later, the growing rhythm and harmony of the work were shattered by the sound of the Delta’s engine stuttering and screaming. Valena turned and watched in horror
as it wallowed into a soft patch in the trail. Willy gunned the motor and cranked the wheel hard left and right, making things infinitely worse. The huge vehicle flexed wildly on its point of articulation, digging itself deeper and deeper into the snow while Edith collapsed onto the load and hung on for dear life. The wheels spun faster and faster, the frame thrashed, and the entire machine sank down and down into the snow, digging itself in past its mammoth hubcaps.

Hilario whipped his snow machine around and thundered toward the Delta, hollering for him to stop, waving his arms. Wee Willy either could not hear or was not listening, and kept the monstrous beast thrashing. Finally, as the axles began to disappear, he stopped the vehicle, climbed out, shambled twenty feet off the trail, and sat down in the snow. He did not move or speak but instead just sat there, staring off across the ice.

Far down the trail, Dave turned the Challenger around and made a slow approach, ready to smooth the trail once the Delta was freed.

Valena got off her snow machine, walked over to the Delta, and began to kick loose snow away from around the wheels. “Got a shovel?” she asked Edith, who was very slowly climbing down off the load. “I’ve seen this kind of problem before on my grandfather’s farm. Dead of winter, he once got a tractor trailer stuck out in the pasture. We dug away the loose stuff, got a low-angle slope, set the vehicle in granny gear, and drove it on out.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Hilario, producing a shovel from underneath the back seat of the Delta.