In Cold Pursuit (8 page)

Valena nodded, letting him know that she understood, though she wasn’t certain that she did.

Ted said, “So he took his best shot, picked a glacier, and made his climb. Then he was not only fighting the cold, but also the altitude. He crested 10,200 feet. That first attempt was unsuccessful, you’ll recall—only got to eighty-two south.” He threw up his hands. “
Only
eighty-two south? For Christ’s sake, can you imagine the effort that took? They did it on foot, dragging a sledge—just a few miles a day, the conditions were so bad—and with no idea what lay beyond, because no one had been there before. They had to turn back at eighty-two or die. Why? Because they’d dragged their asses up that glacier. It burns up a lot of energy when you keep falling into crevasses, and let me tell you, you can’t always
see them before the snow that’s bridging them falls out from underneath you.”

“They were lucky to be alive,” said Cupcake.

Valena listened intently. She could never have imagined the dimensions of Scott’s undertaking without standing here at the edge of the ice—the barrier, they called it—with the wind buffeting her, her cocoon of down and polypropylene all that stood between her and certain frostbite.
And this is a balmy spring day
, she reminded herself.

Ted said, “Well, that’s how it goes around here. You drum up the money to make a try at a goal—the geographic pole, or some key bit of scientific understanding—and then off you go into all that ice and you do your best. Thing is, you’ll never do it perfectly. You’ll never learn everything you set out to know. You’ll never be perfectly satisfied with yourself, or your accomplishments. But you go, and go again, until you make it or you die trying.”

Cupcake said, “You’re stalling, Ted.”

Valena turned to look at the man. She had to turn her whole body, because the hood of her parka was in the way. She waited.

Ted dropped his gaze. “Your Dr. Vanderzee is a smart man, a driven man. He had questions he wanted answered. He drove really hard to get to them. And now he’s been turned back, short of his goal.”

The use of the past tense was not lost on Valena.
Had
questions.
Wanted
answered.
Drove
hard. As evenly as she could, she said, “I’m here to continue his work.”

Ted nodded. “Good. Good.”

Cupcake said, “Tell her what it was like up there. She needs to know, Ted.”

“Yeah, I’m stalling. That damned newspaper’s been hounding me since last year—nice way to spend my off time, dodging weasels with microphones—and now here we are with federal marshals hauling scientists off the ice. It’s just not good. The next thing we’ll have is some kind of fundamentalist preachers down here telling us the earth is flat.”

Cupcake said, “I missed something in your reasoning,
Ted. How’d you get from the
Financial News
to Bible thumpers?”

Ted set his jaw. “It’s all one ball of wax.” He stared at his boots, kicked at a shard of ice. “And I don’t mean honest, God-fearing people, I mean the jerks who take advantage of them. It’s all a game of opportunism.” He sighed. “Okay, what do you need to know, young lady?”

Valena said, “Who was in the camp when it happened? And why’s the newspaper been hounding you? I mean, there was a certain amount of ruckus on the grapevine at the University, but, well, I suppose Dr. Vanderzee did his best to keep it out of sight.”

Ted nodded. “He’s a gentleman, your Emmett, when nobody’s poking him with sharp sticks. Well, okay, kid, let’s head for somewhere warmer so I can calm myself with a nice, cold beer.”

Cupcake said, “Gotcha covered, Ted. Got a six of Monteith’s Black in the fridge.”

“Lead on, m’lady.”

They walked in silence back up the trail to McMurdo, cut along the top of the bluff toward a row of dormitories, and ducked inside the last one. Cupcake’s room was at the far end of the corridor on the ground floor. Valena surmised that Cupcake must have greater rank than she did, because the room was shared by only two people.

Again, it was like college: all furniture except for the beds had been arranged in a line down the middle of the tiny room to form a barricade, dividing it into two. Cupcake had the far section and had arranged India-print bedspreads to give it the ambiance of a tent. Her mattress was on the floor. Half-burned incense lay about in little stone trays. The effect evoked a Far Eastern bordello.

Cupcake opened a midget refrigerator and pulled out a can of suds for each and settled into a cuddly heap on the mattress with Ted.

Valena grabbed the only chair. More and more, she felt like she had passed through a looking-glass into an obscure form of hell.
It’s like going to college with your mom and dad
and everything you never wanted to know about them
, she decided.

Ted popped the opener on his can and drained half of it in one gulp, sighed, and gave Cupcake a wet kiss on the cheek. “You’re okay, Dorothy.”

“Dorothy?” asked Valena.

Cupcake swatted Ted across the chops. “Damn you! It’s bad enough being called Cupcake without you trot out that old horror. Dickhead!”

Ted kissed her again, going for her lips this time.

Cupcake growled, letting it slide into a purr.

“Should I come back later?” Valena asked.

Ted patted Cupcake on the knee. “She’s got a low kindling point, eh? But go ahead and ask your questions.”

“Who was in Emmett’s camp last year?”

Ted sighed. He used his beer can to count off fingers on the opposite hand. “Vanderzee. Bob Schwartz and Dan Lindemann, the two grad students—the only other grantees—and yeah, they’re down here again this year. Bob’s with a crew from the University of Maine, and Dan … well, I forget, but I’ve seen him.”

“Oh, great! Maybe I can talk to them.”

Cupcake said, “Sure, you can go over to Mac Ops and give Dan a whistle.”

“What’s Mac Ops?”

“The radio relay station. It’s right over there—that building with all the antennas on it, upstairs from the Airlift Wing, next to the weather station. They monitor all frequencies around the clock, and each field camp has to check in at least once out of the twenty-four.”

“How far away is the U Maine field camp?”

“Out in the Dry Valleys somewhere. Under an hour, by helicopter.”

“Can I maybe hitch a ride out there?”

Cupcake laughed sardonically. “No, you can’t. Between NSF building the new South Pole Station and Raytheon trying to make a profit, things have gotten screwed down so tight you can hear their assholes squeak. Used to be you could
hitch a ride anywhere they had an empty seat, but those days are gone.”

Valena said, “Okay, so there were two grad students in Emmett’s camp last year, and of course Emmett himself. That’s three. Who else?”

Ted continued counting on his fingers. “Sheila Tuttle, that’s your cook, an Aussie. She’d be Raytheon. She’s up at Black Island this year. Good place for her. She’s kind of a grouch.”

“There was a cook?”

“Hard work, those high-altitude camps. You need someone looking after the calories. Of course, she had other duties as well. Nobody in a field camp ever finds himself with time on his hands unless it’s storming, and then you just try to catch up on your sleep.” He went back to his count. “I borrowed David from Fleet Ops to help me with the machinery. So he was Raytheon, too. Then there was William what’s-his-name, the dogsbody, also Raytheon.”

“Dogsbody?”

“The Boss sent him along to do some heavy lifting.” He started his counting over again with his thumb. “Manuel Roig, mountaineer; Raytheon. They sent him in with Sweeny to babysit, keep him out of trouble. Hah. Calvin Hart, who was Emmett’s helper, so I guess you can put him on the grantee list. I think he’s out in deep field helping with the drill for the WAIS Divide project.”

Cupcake said, “Oh, yeah, Cal. Wasn’t a scientist or anything, more like a ski bum, but Emmett said he was a good guy to have around. He told me, ‘He’ll do anything I tell him to and he doesn’t complain when it gets cold.’ Contrast that to Schwartz and Lindemann, who are both whiners.”

“That’s eight,” said Valena, making a mental note to keep her complaints to important things, like, My leg just fell off.

“There were nine, aside from me, and like I said, I was gone before it happened, so who did I forget?” He stared at the ceiling, tapping a ninth finger. “Oh yeah, the deceased. Though of course he wasn’t dead when he got there.”

“He had a name,” said Cupcake. “Morris Sweeny.”

Ted gave her a look. “You’d know?”

“Yeah. I’d know.”

Ted put his lips together and whistled. “You don’t miss a chance, do you?”

“Am I missing something?” Valena inquired.

Ted glanced her way. “Our Dorothy’s telling us she played a little Wizard of Oz with the man.”

Cupcake shrugged. “He was okay. Nothing great.”

“So how come Mr. Sweeny died?” Valena asked, steering the discussion away from what either was or was not great about the reporter’s capacities in bed.

Ted took another good guzzle. “The guy arrived on schedule, but Emmett had been delayed getting started and was still out in the mountain camp. Emmett wanted to have him on the ice sheet, out at WAIS Divide, not up at altitude.”

Cupcake cut in again. “I don’t get what that WAIS project is all about. And what’s up with the acronym? Everybody’s got to have a goddamned acronym around here.”

Valena said, “It stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet. They’re setting up to drill a continuous core, or sample, of the ice.”

“I don’t know what you want with all that ice,” said Cupcake.

Without thinking, Valena shifted into science teacher mode. “The ice is made up of snow that fell a long time ago, trapping some air with it. So we collect a core, a long cylinder that goes from the top of the ice sheet to the bottom. Ice has layers, one for every year, just like tree rings. If you know what you’re doing you can read the layers just like you’re reading the pages of old weather reports.

“I was just jerking your chain,” said Cupcake. Don’t you guys have enough cores? The Russians got one at Vostok. I read the newspapers, and I’ve seen Al Gore’s movie. You look at the C
O2
in the core and it gives you the temperature.” She made a horizontal zigzag through the air, mimicking the classic illustration of rises and falls in C
O2
and temperature, then threw the sharp rise onto the end, indicating the spike of
CO2
and corresponding rise in temperature with modern burning of fossil fuels. “So we’re all going to
hell in a handbasket. Why blow a gazillion more dollars drilling another core?”

Valena shook her head in frustration. “Vostok is on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. This continent is huge! Would you look in Cincinnati if you were trying to find out what the climate was like in Las Vegas? We need as much information as you can get from as many places as we can get so we can continue to refine the climate models. We know from Greenland cores that the climate has changed many times, and quickly. Ten degree changes in a time period of as little as ten years. Like as if you moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco or Atlanta to Pittsburgh.”

“Climate changes happen that quickly?” asked Ted.

“Yes. The variables that change climate—like change in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface, or the level of greenhouse gases—build up and up and up, and it looks like not very much is happening, but then the climate system crosses a threshold and bang, it’s a new game, like flicking a switch. The ocean currents flip to a new circulation pattern and ecosystems either adapt or die. If changes like we’ve seen in the cores happen today there will be huge social impact until our water and agricultural system gets back in synch with the new climate.”

“We’d be fighting over every single resource,” said Cupcake.

“Right,” said Valena. It doesn’t help that we’re doing a global-scale experiment by increasing greenhouse gas and altering the thermal balance of the earth. We could be pushing toward one of those thresholds.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then Ted said, “I don’t like being part of that experiment. I mean, good planets are hard to come by.”

Valena said, “And we drill here because this is where most of the ice is, and because it’s important to understand whether global climate changes start in the Arctic or the Antarctic. There are ice core records from Greenland that go back 104,000 years; that’s pretty good, but we can do better here. We want to see how climate changed in the past when
the amount of greenhouse gasses changed, so we need an Antarctic ice core from a place where it snows a lot—like right smack in the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—so we can read the years.”

Ted said, “But why put the WAIS project out on the divide? It has the worst weather in Antarctica. It’s a logistical nightmare to get the drill and all the housing and everything in there.”

Valena said, “The worse the weather, the more snow accumulates, and the more snow, the better we can read the annual bands in the ice, and better we can refine the gas and isotope analyses.”

Cupcake said, “You’re stalling again, Ted. So it was WAIS that the reporter was supposed to see, not the high-elevation camp. But they were still setting up the drill last year at WAIS and building the covering structure. What was he going to do out there?”

Valena said, “It’s a huge project that involves about twenty different PIs. Before you go to the expense of flying in that huge rig and setting up the building that will house all that brainpower, you do some test drilling to make sure the condition of the ice is what you expect. So there would have been drilling last year, just not the big rig yet.”

“But let’s get back to the high camp,” said Cupcake, popping the top on another beer.

Valena, said. “So the guy showed up there instead of WAIS Divide, and he got sick. And you were there working with explosives, Ted?”

“No, Emmett had a drill going getting shallow test cores from that location, but he also wanted to get some bigger block samples, and that’s where the other muscle and I came in. But then suddenly here’s this guy from New York at high altitude, and he hadn’t come up in stages like you’re supposed to. Emmett told him to sit tight and rest, not exert himself until he was acclimated, but he was one of those macho types who just couldn’t stand himself unless he was breaking a sweat. Said he was really fit, shouldn’t be a problem. He’d been in the military, said he could handle it fine. He was a
real piece of work, all cocksure and not listening to reason.” He shook his head. “Things got off to a bad start, lots of arguments.”