Terminal Freeze (3 page)

For the two days that followed, a frigid wind blew out of the north, bringing clear skies and bitter temperatures. At 11:00 AM on the third day, Marshall, Sully, and Faraday left the base and walked across the frozen plain that stretched south endlessly from Mount Fear. It was a perfect morning, the sky a dome of arctic blue unblemished by clouds. Beneath their feet, the permafrost was as hard as concrete. The temperature hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit, and, temporarily at least, the glacier had stopped its dreadful cracking and groaning.

Their thoughts were interrupted by a sudden low drone, strangely attenuated by the arctic chill. A speck appeared on the southern horizon. As they watched, it slowly resolved into a helicopter, flying low toward them.

Faraday sniffed with displeasure. “I still think we should have waited a few days. Why did we need to phone it in so quickly?”

“That was the deal,” Sully replied, eyeing the approaching chopper. “If we’d stalled, they’d have known.”

Faraday mumbled something, clearly unconvinced.

Sully frowned at the biologist. “I’ve said it before. Make a deal with the devil, don’t complain about the consequences.”

Nobody replied. Nobody needed to.

Northern Massachusetts University didn’t pretend to be in the first rank of educational institutions. With grant money in short supply, the university had resorted to a relatively new tactic: securing expedition financing from a media conglomerate in return for exclusive rights and access. While global warming wasn’t particularly sexy, it was topical. Terra Prime had bankrolled the team as it had half a dozen others-a group studying native medicines in the Amazon jungle, another excavating the potential grave of King Arthur-in hopes of snagging at least one science documentary worth developing. For weeks now, Marshall had kept his fingers crossed, hoping they could finish up their research and leave without attracting attention. Those hopes were now dashed.

The scientists drew together as the helicopter approached, circled over the camp, then settled onto a relatively level section of ground, rotors beating hard against the air. The passenger door opened and a woman jumped out. She was dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. Long black hair spilled over her collar, dancing lightly in the chopper’s wake. She was slim and perhaps thirty, and as she turned to reach for her luggage, Marshall caught sight of a shapely derriere.

“Nice-looking devil,” he murmured.

Now the woman was hoisting her bags and heading toward them, ducking beneath the rotors. She turned to give the pilot a wave of thanks; he gave a thumbs-up and, goosing the engine, quickly lifted off and banked sharply southward, hurrying back the way he’d come.

The scientists stepped forward to meet her. Sully pulled off his glove and quickly extended his hand. “I’m Gerard Sully,” he said. “Climatologist and team leader. This is Evan Marshall and Wright Faraday.”

The woman shook their hands in turn. Marshall found her grasp brief and professional. “And I’m Kari Ekberg, field producer for Terra Prime. Congratulations on your discovery.”

Sully took one bag, Marshall the other. “Producer?” Sully asked. “So you’re in charge?”

Ekberg laughed. “Hardly. You’ll find that on a set like this, everybody with a clipboard is a producer.”

“Set?” Marshall repeated.

“That’s what it is to us, anyway.” She stopped to look carefully around, as if scouring the landscape for drama.

“You’re a little underdressed for the Federal Wilderness Zone,” Marshall said.

“So I see. I spent most of my life in Savannah. The coldest place I’ve ever been is New York City in February. I’ll have the crew bring me up something from Mountain Hardwear.”

“Underdressed or not, you’re the best-looking thing that’s ever happened to this base,” Sully said.

Ekberg stopped studying the landscape to glance at him, her eyes traveling from head to toe. She didn’t reply, but she smiled slightly, as if in that glance she’d taken the measure of his person.

Sully colored slightly, cleared his throat. “Shall we get back, then? Careful where you step-the ground around here is riddled with old lava tubes.”

He led the way, discussing the morning’s research with Faraday. Ekberg wasn’t in charge, and she apparently wasn’t receptive to his clumsy flirtations; that was sufficient to put an end to his interest. Ekberg and Marshall brought up the rear.

“I was curious about what you said just now,” Marshall said. “Our expedition site being a set.”

“I didn’t mean to sound insensitive. Obviously, to you this is a work environment. It’s just that, on a shoot like this, the clock is everything. We don’t have a lot of time. And besides, I’m sure your group wants us in and out as quickly as possible. That’s my job: to advance the gig.”

“Advance the gig?”

“Scout locations, arrange a schedule. Basically set up a trajectory so that when the producer and talent hit the ground, their path is already prepared.”

Privately, Marshall was surprised by this talk: producer, talent. Like the other scientists, he’d assumed Terra Prime would be sending one person, or two at most: somebody to point the camera, and somebody to stand in front of it now and then. “So you do all the heavy lifting up front, then the big shots come and steal the glory.”

Ekberg laughed: a clear, rich contralto that rang over the permafrost. “I guess that about sums it up.”

They reached the security checkpoint, long since fallen into disuse, and Ekberg stared ahead in unconcealed surprise. “My God. I had no idea how big this place was.”

“What did you expect?” Sully asked. “Igloos and pup tents?”

“Actually, most of the base is underground,” Marshall said as they walked past the perimeter fence and across the apron. “They built it in a natural declivity, brought in prefabbed sections, filled in the excess space with frozen dirt and pumice. The visible structures are for the most part mechanical or technical systems: powerhouse, radar domes, that sort of thing. The architects wanted to minimize its visual footprint. That’s why it was built in the shadow of the only mountain for many miles around.”

“How long since the base was active?”

“A long time,” Marshall replied. “Almost fifty years.”

“My God. So who maintains it? You know, keeps the toilets flushing, that sort of thing?”

“It’s what the government calls a minimal maintenance installation. There’s a tiny detachment of soldiers here to keep things operational, three guys from the Army Corps of Engineers under the command of Gonzalez. That’s Sergeant Gonzalez. They maintain the generators and the electrical grid, cycle the heating systems, change lightbulbs, monitor the level of the water tanks. And at present, babysit us.”

“Fifty years.” Ekberg shook her head. “Guess that’s why they don’t mind renting it out to us.”

Marshall nodded.

“Still, Uncle Sam isn’t exactly a cheap landlord. We’re paying $100,000 more just to house the documentary crew for a week.”

“Cost of living is high up here,” said Sully.

Ekberg looked around again. “The soldiers have to
stay
here?”

“They get rotated out every six months. At least, the three grunts do. The sergeant, Gonzalez-he seems to like it.”

Ekberg shook her head. “Now there’s a man who clearly values his privacy.”

They stepped past the heavy outer doors, through a staging area, down a long weather chamber-lined on both sides with lockers for parkas and snow gear-and then through another set of doors into the base itself. Although Fear Base hadn’t been active for half a century, the military atmosphere remained strong: American flags, steel walls, utilitarian features. Fading posters on the walls listed standing orders and warned against security breaches. A wide corridor ran left and right from the entrance plaza, quickly fading into obscurity: the immediate area was well lit, but the more distant regions contained just the occasional oasis of light. On the far side of the plaza, a man in military uniform sat behind a glass panel, reading a paperback.

Marshall noticed Ekberg’s nose wrinkling. “Sorry about that,” he said with a laugh. “Took me about a week to get used to the smell, too. Who’d have thought an arctic base would smell like a battleship’s bilge? Come on, let’s get you signed in.”

They walked across the plaza to the glass window. “Tad,” Marshall said by way of greeting.

The man behind the panel nodded back. He was tall and youthful, with a buzz cut of carrot-colored hair. He wore the stripe of a private in the engineers’ corps. “Dr. Marshall.”

“This is Kari Ekberg, here in advance of the rest of the documentary team.” Marshall turned to Ekberg. “Tad Phillips.”

Phillips looked the woman over with ill-concealed interest. “We got the word just this morning. Ms. Ekberg, if you’ll sign in, please?” He passed a clipboard out through a slot at the base of the glass panel.

She signed on the indicated line and passed it back. Phillips noted the time and date, then put the clipboard aside. “You’ll give her the orientation, explain the cleared areas?”

“Sure thing,” Marshall said.

Phillips nodded and-after another glance at Ekberg-returned his gaze to the book he’d been reading. Sully led the way to a nearby stairwell and the group began to descend.

“At least it’s warm in here,” Ekberg said.

“The upper levels, anyway,” Sully replied. “The rest is reduced to maintenance only.”

“What did he mean about cleared areas?” she asked.

“This central, five-level section of the base is where the officers lived and much of the monitoring went on,” Marshall said. “We’ve got full access to that-not that any of us have had the time or inclination to do much exploring. We have limited access to the southern wing, where most of the computers and other equipment was stored and maintained. The enlisted men live there; we have clearance to the upper levels. We’re not authorized to enter the northern wing.”

“What’s in that?”

Marshall shrugged. “No idea.”

They emerged onto another corridor, longer and better lit than the one above. Ancient equipment of all kinds had been shoved up against the walls, as if the place had been abandoned in great haste. There were more lockers here, along with official-looking signboards with arrows, providing directions to various installations: RADAR MAPPING, RASP COMMAND POST, RECORDING/MONITORING. Doors with small metal-grilled windows lined both sides of the corridor. They were marked not with names but with series of letters and numbers. “We’ve set up our temporary labs here on B Level,” Sully said, jerking his thumb toward the doors. “Ahead are the galley, the officers’ mess, and a briefing room we’ve converted into a temporary rec area. Around that bend are the bunk rooms. We’ve set up a spare for your use.”

Ekberg murmured her thanks. “I still don’t understand why anyone would need a base like this at all,” she said. “I mean, way up here, so far north.”

“It was part of the original early warning system,” Marshall said. “Ever hear of the Pinetree Line, or the DEW Line?”

Ekberg shook her head.

“Back in 1949 the Soviets tested a working atomic bomb. It drove us crazy: we’d thought we had at least five more years to prepare. Instead, our eggheads suddenly predicted that in a few years the Russians would have enough bombs to cripple the United States. So there was a huge ramping up of troops, aircraft, weaponry-including a crash program to develop a perimeter defense system. The Pacific and Atlantic seaboards were well protected, and it became clear that the main threat would come in as bombers, over the pole. But radar then was very primitive: it couldn’t detect low-flying aircraft, couldn’t detect things over the horizon.”

“So they needed to bring their eyes as close to the threat as possible.”

“Exactly. The military put their heads together and came up with the most likely routes the Russian bombers would take in the event of an attack. They built early warning stations as far north as they could along each route. This is one of them.” Marshall shook his head. “The ironic thing is that by the time it was completed in the late fifties, it was already obsolete. Missiles were replacing aircraft as delivery systems for bombs. We needed a centralized network to address that kind of threat. So a new system called SAGE was put in place and these stations were mothballed.”

They had rounded the corner and started down another barrackslike passage. Sully stopped at one of the doors, turned the knob, and pushed it open, revealing a spartan room with a cot, desk, wardrobe, and mirror. The worst of the dust had been cleared away by Chen earlier that morning. “These are your quarters,” Sully said.

Ekberg glanced inside quickly, then nodded her thanks as Sully and Marshall placed her bags on the cot.

“It’s a long ride up from New York,” Sully said, “and if you’re like us you probably didn’t get much sleep on the way. If you’d care to nap or freshen up, go right ahead. The showers and head are just down the corridor.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’d better get started right away.”

“Get started?” Sully glanced at her in confusion.

Light dawned on Marshall. “You mean, you want to see it.”

“Of course! That’s why I’m here.” She looked around. “That is, if that’s all right with you.”

“I’m afraid it’s not all right,” Sully replied. “There have been several polar bear sightings in recent weeks. And those lava tubes are extremely dangerous. But you’re welcome to observe it from a distance, I suppose.”

Ekberg seemed to consider this. Then she nodded slowly. “Thank you.”

“Evan here will take you up-won’t you, Evan? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some tests I need to complete.” And with that he flashed her a faint smile, nodded to Marshall, then turned and made his way back in the direction of the temporary labs.

“Amazing,” Ekberg said, her words smoking the air. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky such a clear, intense blue.”

They were making their way up the glacial valley in brilliant sunlight. Despite fretful allusions to the pressing nature of his work, Faraday had elected to come along, and he puffed and wheezed as they climbed. He’d been making this climb at least once a day for a month: the fact he still labored at it betrayed all his sedentary years spent in a laboratory. Ekberg, on the other hand, strode forward with the effortlessness of a committed runner. Her eyes darted everywhere, missing nothing. Now and then she would murmur something into a digital recorder. She was wearing Penny Barbour’s spare parka over her leather jacket.

“I know what you mean,” Marshall replied. “I just wish there was more of it.”

“Sorry?”

“The days are growing shorter, fast. We’ve got two, maybe three weeks of viable daylight left. After that, it’ll be white night around here, twenty hours a day. And we’ll be gone.”

“No wonder you’re in a hurry. In any case, Allan’s going to have a field day with that sky.”

“Allan?”

“Allan Fortnum, our DP. Director of photography.” She glanced ahead at the glacier, deep blue framing the sharp azure of the sky. “How did Mount Fear get its name?”

“After Wilberforce Fear, the explorer who discovered it.”

“Did that make him famous?”

“Actually, it killed him. He died of exposure at the base of the caldera.”

“Oh.” And Ekberg murmured something into the recorder. “Caldera. So it’s a volcano?”

“Extinct volcano. It’s quite a bizarre thing, really-the only geologic feature in a thousand square miles of permafrost. People are still arguing about how it formed.”

“Dr. Sully said it was dangerous. What did he mean by that?”

“ Mount Fear is really just a dead cone of prehistoric lava. Weather, and the glacier, have worn it down, made it fragile.” He pointed at the knife-edged ridges of the valley, then at one of the large caves that riddled the base of the mountain. “Lava tubes like that are created when a crust forms over an active magma stream. Over the years they become very brittle and can easily collapse. As a result, the mountain’s like a vast house of cards. We made the discovery in the back of one of those tubes.”

“And the polar bears he mentioned?”

“Cute to look at, but extremely man-aggressive, especially these days, what with habitat shrinkage. When your people get here, make sure they don’t stray beyond the fenced apron unless they’re armed. There’s a store of high-powered rifles at the base.”

They climbed a minute before Ekberg broke the silence again. “You’re a paleoecologist, right?”

“A Quaternary paleoecologist, yes.”

“And what, exactly, are you doing here?”

“Paleoecologists like me reconstruct vanished ecosystems from fossils and other ancient evidence. We try to determine what kinds of creatures roamed the earth, what they ate, how they lived and died. I’m determining what kind of an ecosystem existed here before the advance of the glacier.”

“And now that the glacier’s retreating, the evidence-the samples-are coming to light again.”

“Exactly.”

She looked at Marshall with penetrating, inquisitive eyes. “What kind of samples?”

“Plant traces. Layered mud. Some macro-organic remains like wood.”

“Mud and wood,” Ekberg said.

Marshall laughed. “Not sexy enough for Terra Prime, is it?”

She laughed in return. “What can you do with those?”

“Well, wood and other organics can be radiocarbon-dated to determine how long ago the glacier buried them. Mud samples are processed for pollen, which in turn indicates what kind of plants and trees were dominant prior to the glaciation. See, modern ecologists are stuck analyzing the world as it exists today, which has been hugely impacted by humans over the last hundred centuries. But with the samples, the readings, the observations I make here, I can reconstruct the world as it existed
before
humans became the dominant element.”

“You can recreate the past,” Ekberg said.

“In a way, yes.”

“Sounds pretty sexy to me. And I suppose a glacier’s the perfect place to do this because it would have locked everything into a deep freeze, preserving it like a time capsule.”

“Exactly right,” Marshall said. He was impressed by her ability to quickly size up and understand an unfamiliar discipline. “Not to mention the fact that when the ice melts, it simply releases its contents. No muss, no fuss-and no need for a lot of work with shovels and chisels uncovering fossils and subfossils.”

“A very pragmatic approach. What are subfossils? Really small fossils?”

Marshall had to laugh again. “That’s what paleontologists call fossils less than ten thousand years old.”

“I see.” She turned to the struggling Faraday. “And Dr. Faraday, you’re an evolutionary biologist, right?”

Faraday stopped to catch his breath, and the others halted obligingly. He nodded as he shifted his day pack from one shoulder to the other.

“And that means…?”

“Put simply, I study how species change over time,” Faraday puffed.

“And why are you doing it here, in such an inhospitable place?”

“My research involves the effect of global warming on species development.”

A smile formed on her face. “So you really
are
working on global warming. While Dr. Marshall, here, is simply taking advantage of it.”

Alarm bells rang faintly in Marshall ’s head: Terra Prime had funded their expedition with the understanding it would involve global warming. But Ekberg’s smile was a friendly one, and so he just smiled in return.

They stopped a moment so Ekberg could transcribe a few more notes. Marshall waited, looking out over the horizon. Then he paused. Plucking out his binoculars, he passed them to Ekberg. “Take a look. Out there on the permafrost, to the southwest.”

She peered through the glasses a moment. “Speak of the devil. Two polar bears.” She stared a minute, then passed the binoculars back. “Do we need to turn back?”

“We should be fine up here on the mountain. Normally, one of us would be armed.”

“So why aren’t we?”

“I refuse to carry a weapon. And Wright here is absentminded. Come on, we should get going.”

As they approached the glacier, Marshall looked up a little apprehensively at the glacial wall, but the recent frigid temperatures had arrested its retreat and the ice face looked much the same as it had three days ago when the cave was first exposed.

“That’s the cave,” he said, pointing at the black maw near the base of the glacier.

Ekberg glanced toward it. Although her face betrayed nothing, Marshall knew she must be disappointed not to see inside. He nodded to Faraday. The biologist reached into the pocket of his parka, pulled out a large glossy photograph, and handed it to Ekberg.

“
This
is what we found,” Marshall said. “A print from our video recording.”

She took the photo eagerly. Staring at it, she caught her breath audibly.

“It died with its eyes open,” she breathed.

Nobody answered; nobody needed to.

“My God. What is it?”

“We can’t be sure,” he replied. “As you can see from the photo, the ice is very opaque, and we can only see the eyes, some surrounding fur. But we believe it may be a Smilodon.”

“A
what
?”

“Smilodon. Better known as a saber-toothed tiger.”

“Which is technically incorrect,” Faraday said. “Because the Smilodon descends from a completely different line than the tiger.”

But Ekberg didn’t seem to hear. She was staring at the photo, wide-eyed, digital recorder forgotten for once.

“We think that because of the eyes,” Marshall said. “They resemble very closely the eyes of the big cats-of all cats, for that matter. Note they are predator’s eyes: large, forward-facing. There’s the wide area of iris, the vertical pupils. I’d bet that an autopsy will reveal a layer of tapetum lucidum behind the retina.”

“How long has it been frozen?” she asked.

“Smilodons became extinct about ten thousand years ago,” Marshall said. “Whether due to the advancing ice, loss of habitat or food, or a virus that jumped the species barrier, we don’t know. Given the time this ice cave was covered by the glacier, I’d estimate this was one of the last of its kind to die.”

“We’re not yet sure how it came to be frozen,” Faraday added. His habitual blinking, his wide, watery eyes, gave him the appearance of a startled child. “The creature probably retreated into the cave to avoid an ice storm, and froze there. Perhaps it was wounded, or starving. Or perhaps it simply died of old age. More analysis may give us answers.”

Ekberg had quickly regained her professional composure. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a clean, vertical hole near the carcass about half an inch wide.

“As you can see, there isn’t a clear view,” Marshall said. “This ice is dirty, occluded, full of prehistoric mud. So we had our intern, Ang, bring up a remote imaging device. It sends out sonar pings and measures the echoes produced.”

“Like a fish-finder,” Ekberg said.

“In a way,” Marshall said, amused. “A very high-tech fish-finder. Anyway, due to the condition of the ice, precise measurements aren’t possible, but the body seems to be approximately eight feet long. We estimate its weight in the thousand-pound range.”

“More appropriate for
Smilodon
populator
than
Smilodon
fatalis,
” Faraday intoned.

Ekberg shook her head slowly, eyes still fixed on the photograph. “Amazing,” she said. “Buried under a glacier for thousands of years.”

A brief silence settled over the group. Standing motionless, Marshall began to feel the cold creeping in around the edges of his hood, biting at his fingertips and toes.

“You’ve asked a lot of questions,” he said quietly. “Any objections to answering one?”

Ekberg glanced over at him. “Shoot.”

“We know Terra Prime is planning to make some kind of documentary, but none of us have any idea what kind. We assume you’re going to explain our work here, maybe end it by describing this unusual find. Record the discovery for posterity. Can you give us more details?”

A wry smile formed on her lips. “Actually, it isn’t posterity the network is concerned with.”

“Go on.”

“I’m afraid the details will have to come from Emilio Conti, the executive producer. But I can promise you one thing, Dr. Marshall: he views this as a real feather in his cap, something he’s been working toward his entire professional career.” Her smile deepened. “Your expedition is about to become more famous than in your wildest dreams.”