Terminal Freeze

Alaska 's Federal Wilderness Zone. Two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. One of the most remote places on Earth. But for a group of scientists sponsored by a major media conglomerate, an expedition to the Zone represents the opportunity of a lifetime to study the effects of global warming.

The expedition changes suddenly on a routine foray into a glacial ice cave, where the group makes an astonishing find: an ancient animal encased in solid ice. It appears to be some kind of giant cat, possibly a saber-toothed tiger. When their discovery is reported back, their parent company quickly plans the ultimate spectacle – the animal will be cut from the ice, thawed, and revealed on live television. Ignoring the dire warnings of a local Eskimo group (and a native legend forecasting doom for anyone who disturbs this mythic creature), the scientists make one more horrifying discovery: the beast is no cat. It's an ancient killing machine. And it may not be dead.

Lincoln Child weaves cutting-edge science, Native American legend, and a stunningly stark landscape into a thrilling novel of suspense, using all the skill and attention to detail that has won him legions of fans.

As
Terminal Freeze
made the long journey from concept to printed reality, many people generously lent their time and expertise. J. Bret Bennington, PhD, of the Department of Geology at Hofstra University, helped me gain a better understanding of paleoecological field-work and principles. Timothy Robbins provided a window onto the nuts-and-bolts details of documentary filmmaking. (I hasten to add that the particular peccadilloes of Terra Prime, Emilio Conti, et al. are completely of my own devising.) William Cors, MD, assisted with several medical aspects of the story. My father, William Child, PhD, former chemistry professor and associate dean of Carleton College, offered invaluable insight into crystalline structures and other chemical matters. Special Agent Douglas Margini once again helped with firearms details. And my cousin Greg Tear listened patiently and offered his usual excellent advice.

I would also like to thank my editor and friend, Jason Kaufman, for as always being an essential guiding light through the composition of this novel, as well as Rob Bloom and the many others at Doubleday for taking such good care of me. Thanks also to my agents, Eric Simonoff and Matthew Snyder, for fighting the good fight. Thanks to Claudia Rülke, Nadine Waddell, and Diane Matson for their various ministrations. An ice-cold Beefeater martini, extra dry, straight up, with a twist, to my writing partner, Doug Preston, for his many years of comradeship. His daughter Aletheia suggested a great twist. And last but most certainly not least, my thanks and gratitude to my family for their love and support.

At dusk, when the stars rose one by one into a frozen sky, Usuguk approached the snowhouse as silently as a fox. There had been a fresh snowfall that morning, and the village elder stared across the gray-white arctic desolation that ran away endlessly on all sides to a bleak and empty ice horizon. Here and there, ribs of dark permafrost jutted out of the snow cover like the bones of prehistoric beasts. The wind was picking up, and ice crystals stung his cheeks and worried at the fur of his parka hood. A scattering of surrounding igloos stood unlit, dark as tombs.

Usuguk paid no attention to any of this. He was aware only of an overwhelming sense of dread, of the rapid pounding of his heart.

As he entered the snowhouse, the small band of women gathered around the moss fire looked up at him quickly, their expressions tense, worried.

“Moktok e inkarrtok,”
he said. “It is time.”

Wordlessly, they gathered up their meager tools with trembling fingers. Bone needles were returned to needle cases; skin scrapers and flensing
ulus
were slipped inside parkas. One woman, who had been chewing sealskin boots to soften them, bundled the boots up carefully in a threadbare cloth. Then they all rose, one after another, and slipped out the rough opening that served as a door. Last to go was Nulathe, her head bowed in fear and shame.

Usuguk watched as the caribou skin fell back over the opening, blotting out the view beyond: the lonely huddle of igloos, the desolate icescape stretching on across the frozen lake toward the failing sun. For a moment he stood, trying to forget the anxiety that had settled over him like a heavy cloak.

Then he turned away. There was much to do-and little time to do it in.

Moving gingerly to the rear of the snowhouse, the shaman drew blankets off the top of a small mound of furs, exposing a box of polished black wood. Carefully, he placed the box before the fire. Next he removed a ceremonial
amauti
,
folded with ritual care, from between the furs. Pulling the hooded parka over his head and placing it aside, he donned the
amauti
,
its intricate fretwork of beaded tassels clattering faintly. Then he seated himself cross-legged before the box.

He sat for a minute, caressing the box with fingers wizened from years of fighting a hostile landscape. Next he opened it and removed one of the objects inside, turning it over and over, feeling its power, listening carefully for anything it might tell him. Then he returned it to the box. He did this with each of the objects in turn. All the while he was aware of the fear within him. It lay deep in his body’s core like undigested blubber. He knew all too well what this thing they had witnessed, this awful portent, meant. It had happened only once before in the living memory of the People, scores of generations ago, although the story-handed down from father to son before the snowhouse fire-remained as portentous as if it had happened yesterday.

Yet, this time, it seemed so frighteningly out of proportion to the transgression that provoked it…

He took a deep breath. They were all counting on him to restore peace, to bring the natural order back into balance. But it was an oppressive task. The People were so diminished that there had been but a tiny handful to pass on to him the old, secret knowledge. And even they were gone now, passed into the spirit world. Of nature’s secret order, only he was left.

Reaching beneath the
amauti
,
he drew out a handful of dried herbs and botanicals, carefully tied together with a slender stalk of arctic balsam. He raised it with both hands, then placed it on the fire. Clouds of gray smoke began to rise, filling the snowhouse with the smell of the ancient forest. Slowly and reverently, he took the objects out of the box and arranged them in a semicircle before the fire: the tusk tip of a rare white walrus, caught and killed by his great-great-great-grandfather. A stone the color of summer sunlight, shaped like the head of a wolverine. A caribou antler, cut ritualistically into twenty-one pieces, decorated in intricate patterns of tiny awl holes, each filled with ochre.

Last of all he withdrew the tiny figure of a man, made of reindeer skin, ivory, and blanket cloth. He laid the figure in the center of the semicircle. Then, putting his palms flat on the floor of the snowhouse and letting his chin sink to his chest, he bent low before it.

“Mighty Kuuk’juag,” he chanted, “Hunter of the Frozen Waste, Protector of the People. Withdraw your rage from us. Walk quietly again in the moonlight. Return to the way of peace.”

He raised himself back to a sitting position. Then he reached out for the first object in the semicircle-the walrus tusk-turning it clockwise to face the small figurine. Hand on the tusk, he half sang, half chanted the atonement prayer, asking Kuuk’juag to soften his heart, to forgive.

The transgression had occurred the previous morning. In the midst of her daily chores, Nulathe had unwittingly brought the sinews of a caribou and the flesh of a seal into contact. She had been tired and sick-this alone could explain such an oversight. But nevertheless the forbidden deed had been done, the ancient rule broken. Now the souls of the dead animals-in spiritual opposition to each other-had been defiled. And Kuuk’juag the Hunter had felt their anger. This explained what Usuguk’s tiny band had witnessed in the frozen wastes the night before.

The prayer lasted ten minutes. Then-slowly, carefully-Usuguk moved his wrinkled hand to the next object and began his chant anew.

It took two hours to complete the ceremony. At last, bowing one final time before the figurine, the old man said a parting blessing, then uncrossed his legs and rose painfully to his feet. If all had gone well-if he had performed the atonement prayer in the proper way of his ancestors-the taint would leave them and the Hunter would withdraw his fury. He walked around the fire, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. And then, kneeling before the box, he began to place the objects back inside, beginning with the small figurine.

As he did so, he heard cries from outside the snowhouse: sobs, shrieks, voices raised in despair and lamentation.

He stood quickly, dread pressing upon his heart. He shrugged into the parka, pulled back the caribou skin, and stepped outside. The women were there, tearing their hair and pointing at the sky.

He looked heavenward and groaned. The fear and dread, which had receded in the calming motions of the ceremony, consumed him with redoubled strength.
They
were back-and worse than the night before. Much worse.

The ceremony had failed.

But now, with a horrible creeping certainty, Usuguk realized something else. This was not the result of anything Nulathe or the others had done. It was not merely the wrath of Kuuk’juag, or some accidental desecration. Only a violation of the most serious of all taboos could cause the kind of spirit fury he now paid witness to. And Usuguk had been warned-as had countless generations before him-what that taboo was.

Not only warned-Usuguk knew. He had
seen…

He looked at the women, who were staring back, wild-eyed with apprehension. “Pack what you need,” he told them. “Tomorrow, we head south. To the mountain.”

“Hey, Evan. Lunch?”

Evan Marshall put the ziplock bag aside and stood up, massaging his lower back. He’d spent the last ninety minutes with his face inches above the ground, collecting samples from the glacial sediment, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. The voice had been Sully’s, and now Marshall made him out: a squat, slightly portly figure in a fur-lined parka, standing, arms crossed, thirty yards up the steep valley. Behind him rose the terminal tongue of the Fear glacier, a rich, mysterious blue riddled with white fracture lines. Large ice boulders lay scattered along its base like so many monstrous diamonds, along with daggerlike shards of ancient lava. Marshall opened his mouth to warn Sully against standing so close: the glacier was as dangerous as it was pretty, since the weather had turned warmer and the ice front was calving off deadly chunks at an unprecedented rate. Then he thought better of it. Gerard Sully was proud of his position as nominal leader and didn’t like being told what to do. Instead, Marshall just shook his head. “I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Sully turned toward Wright Faraday, the party’s evolutionary biologist, who was busying himself a little downslope. “How’s about it, Wright?”

Faraday glanced up, watery blue eyes oddly magnified behind tortoiseshell frames. A digital camera dangled from a heavy strap around his neck. “Not me,” he said with a frown, as if the thought of stopping to eat in the middle of a workday was somehow heretical.

“Starve yourselves if you want to. Just don’t ask me to bring anything back.”

“Not even a Popsicle?” asked Marshall.

Sully smiled thinly. He was about as short as Napoleon, and radiated a combination of egotism and insecurity that Marshall found especially annoying. He’d been able to put up with it back at the university, where Sully was just one arrogant scientist among many, but up here on the ice-with nowhere to escape-it had grown irksome. Perhaps, he reflected, he should be relieved that their expedition had only a few weeks to play out.

“You look tired,” Sully said. “Out walking again last night?”

Marshall nodded.

“You’d better be careful. You might fall into a lava tube and freeze to death.”

“All right, Mom. I’ll be careful.”

“Or run into a polar bear, or something.”

“That’s all right. I’m starved for some good conversation.”

“It’s no joke, you refusing to carry a gun and all.”

Marshall didn’t like the direction this was leading. “Look, if you run into Ang, tell him I’ve got more samples here for transport back to the lab.”

“I’ll do that. He’ll be thrilled.”

Marshall watched the climatologist make his way carefully past them, down the rubble toward the foot of the mountain and their base. He called it “their base,” but of course it belonged to the U.S. government: officially known as the Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation and decommissioned almost fifty years ago, it consisted of a low, gray, sprawling, institutional-looking structure, festooned with radar domes and other detritus of the cold war. Beyond it lay a frigid landscape of permafrost and lava deposits spewed ages ago from the mountain’s guts, gullied and split as if the earth had torn itself apart in geologic agony. In many places, the surface was hidden beneath large snowfields. There were no roads, no other structures, no living things. It was as hostile, as remote, as alien as the moon.

He stretched as he looked out over the forbidding landscape. Even after four weeks on-site, it still seemed hard to believe that anyplace could be so barren. But then the entire scientific expedition had seemed a little unreal from the start. Unreal that a media giant like Terra Prime had picked their grant applications for approval: four scientists from Northern Massachusetts University with nothing in common save an interest in global warming. Unreal that the government had given them clearance to use Fear Base, admittedly at significant expense and with strict limitations. And unreal that the warming trend itself was occurring with such breathtaking, frightening speed.

He turned away with a sigh. His knees hurt from hours of crouching over the terminal moraine, collecting samples. His fingertips and nose were half frozen. And to add insult to injury, the snow had turned to thin freezing sleet that was now slowly seeping through three layers of clothing and settling into the most intimate crevices of his person. But daylight was brief these days, and their expedition’s window was fast closing. He was keenly aware of how little time he had left. There would be plenty of food back in Woburn, Massachusetts, and plenty of time to eat it.

As he turned to retrieve the sample bags, he heard Faraday speak again. “Five years ago, even two, I’d never believe it.
Rain.
”

“It’s not rain, Wright. It’s sleet.”

“Close enough. Rain in the Zone, with winter coming on? Unbelievable.”

The “Zone” was a vast stretch of northeastern Alaska, hard against the Arctic Ocean, sandwiched between the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on one side and the Yukon ’s Ivvavik National Park on the other. It was a tract so cold and desolate that nobody wanted anything to do with it: temperatures struggled to get above zero only a few months out of the year. Years ago, the government branded it the Federal Wilderness Zone and promptly forgot all about it. There were, Marshall reflected, probably no more than two dozen people in all its two million acres: their own scientific team of five, the base’s skeleton crew of four, a small band of Native Americans to the north, and a scattering of backpackers and loners who were too hard-core or eccentric to settle for anything but the most remote. How strange to think there were few people farther north on the planet than their little group.

A sudden, tremendous report, like the crack of a cannon, shook the glacial valley with the violence of an earthquake. The sound echoed across the tundra below them, violating the profound silence, bouncing back and forth like a tennis ball, growing slowly fainter as it receded into endless distance. Above, the face of the glacier had shorn away, tons of ice and snow adding to the frozen rubble lying along its forward edge. Marshall felt his heart lurch uncomfortably in his chest. No matter how many times he heard that sound, its violence always came as a shock.

Faraday pointed toward it. “See? That’s exactly what I mean. A valley glacier like the Fear should taper to a nice, thin ice front, with a minimum of meltwater and a healthy percolation zone. But this one is calving like a tidewater glacier. I’ve been measuring the basal melt-”

“That’s Sully’s job, not yours.”

“-and it’s off the scale.” Faraday shook his head. “Rain, unprecedented melting-and there are other things happening, too. Like the northern lights the last few nights. You notice them?”

“Of course. A single color-it was spectacular. And unusual.”

“Unusual.” Faraday repeated the word thoughtfully.

Marshall did not reply. In his experience, every scientific expedition, even one as small as this, had its Cassandra figure. Wright Faraday-with his prodigious learning, his pessimistic outlook on life, his dark theories and outrageous predictions-played the role expertly. Marshall gave the biologist a covert glance. Despite knowing him casually as a university colleague, and now having spent a month almost continually in his presence, he didn’t really have a good idea what made the man tick.

Still- Marshall thought as he filled and sealed a fresh bag, recorded the sample’s location in a notebook, then measured and photographed the extraction site-Faraday had a point. And that point was one reason he himself was collecting samples at an almost frantic pace. A glacier was a near-perfect place for his kind of research. During its formation, as it accumulated snow, it trapped organic remains: pollen, plant fibers, animal remains. Later, as the glacier retreated, melting slowly away, it gracefully yielded up those secrets once again. This was an ideal gift for a paleoecologist, a treasure trove from the past.

Except there was nothing slow or graceful about this glacier’s retreat. It was falling to pieces with alarming speed-and taking its secrets with it.

As if on cue, there was another ear-shattering explosion from the face of the glacier, another shuddering cascade of ice. Marshall glanced toward the sound, feeling a mixture of irritation and impatience. A much larger section of the glacier’s face had fallen away this time. With a sigh, he bent toward his specimens, then abruptly swiveled back in the direction of the glacier. Among the fractured ice boulders at its base, he could see that part of the mountain face beneath had been exposed by the calving. He squinted at it for a moment. Then he called over to Faraday.

“You’ve got the field glasses, don’t you?”

“Right here.”

Marshall walked toward him. The biologist had pulled the binoculars from a pocket and was holding them out with a heavily gloved hand. Marshall took them, breathed on the eyepieces to warm them, wiped them free of mist, then raised them toward the glacier.

“What is it?” Faraday said, excitement kindling in his voice. “What do you see?”

Marshall licked his lips and stared at what the fallen ice had revealed. “It’s a cave,” he replied.