Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire (4 page)

Gabriel looked out the military plane’s tiny round window as the twinkling lights of Christchurch receded beneath scattered cloud cover. Millie slept with his massive arms crossed and his Saints cap pulled down over his eyes. Velda looked calm and gorgeous, dressed as if ready to shoot a Ralph Lauren ad in Aspen. Only her hands betrayed the anxiety she felt, clenching and unclenching and periodically smoothing her pristine and wrinkle-free trousers. Rue sat directly across from Gabriel, chewing a piece of gum and cleaning the engine oil from under her fingernails with a plastic swizzle stick bearing the logo of the airport bar.

“Ever been to Mactown before?” Rue asked.

“Where?” Gabriel looked away from the window, which now afforded a dull flat view of dark water stretching out forever in every direction.

“McMurdo Station,” Rue said. “You know, the place we’re going.”

Gabriel shook his head. “I’ve been to the North Pole, but never to Antarctica.”

“Well, imagine that,” Rue teased, her dark eyes bright. “This poor little
paulista
has been somewhere
that the brave adventurer Gabriel Hunt has yet to conquer.” She kicked Gabriel’s boot with her toe.

“I’m sure it’s an amazing place,” Gabriel said, looking back out into the darkness. “So much grim, bloody history. The stark, pristine beauty of untouched glaciers. The struggle to triumph over the brutal elements in the last real uncharted wilderness left on earth.”

“Right,” Rue said with an arched eyebrow. “Better get some sleep. You’re going to have more stark, pristine beauty than you know what to do with—twenty-four hours a day of it. Remember, the sun never sets during the Antarctic summer, so…”

“So this will be our last dark night,” Gabriel said.

“Pretty much,” Rue said.

He flicked off the overhead light, closed his eyes and slept.

“So,” Rue said. “What do you say? Is this pristine beauty or what?”

The four of them sat on orange plastic chairs that would not have looked out of place at New York City’s DMV waiting room in 1972. At the far end of the room was a scarred metal desk with nothing on it. The walls were cheap wood paneling and the only decoration was a pair of faded posters, one featuring cute penguins and the other cute seals. Besides a couple of seagulls, this was the only wildlife they’d seen in the eighteen hours since they’d landed at McMurdo airport.

“Christ,” Millie said, shifting his long legs awkwardly in front of his tiny seat. “I feel like I’m in trouble with the sisters back in grade school.”

Outside the charmless metal building, the temperature hovered at 22 degrees below zero, but inside it was
uncomfortably stuffy and overheated. The accumulated snow in their boot treads had rapidly melted into dirty puddles around their feet. In spite of the gurgling, spitting humidifier in one corner of the room, the air was so dry Gabriel could almost feel his lips chapping as they waited. Several attempts to contact Michael on the expensive satellite phone he’d insisted Gabriel bring had resulted in frustrating fifteen-second bursts of asking each other “Can you hear me?” followed by the inevitable loss of signal.

Before Gabriel could come up with a good answer to Rue’s question, a new bureaucrat entered the room. This one was female, but otherwise virtually identical to the two that had spoken to them before. Her sour, constipated expression did not bode well for the expedition.

“I’m Celia Lanke. Executive DP here at McMurdo. Mr…” She looked down at a plastic clipboard and then back up at Gabriel, her gaze baleful. “Hunt. You claim that you’ve already filed your 679-A, but I’m afraid Denver has not been able to confirm that any such filing actually occurred. Because of the urgency of your stated mission, I have requested and received the go-ahead to allow you to refile, but there will be a refiling fee of thirty-five dollars.”

“That’s fine,” Gabriel said.

“Let me finish. Expedited processing can still take up to ten business days and there will be an additional priority processing fee of two hundred dollars. You will also be charged an assessment of fifty dollars per person for room and board while you wait; however, with Offload only two weeks away, we are currently at full boarding capacity. It will be up to you to organize your own sleeping accommodations as best you can.”
She clicked a ballpoint pen and handed the clipboard to Gabriel. “The NSF cannot be expected to babysit private parties, nor can we allow any interference with the scientific research being conducted in our facilities. Any violation of the visitor code of conduct listed on page 27C will result in immediate expulsion of your entire party on the next plane to Christchurch, at your own expense.”

“The expenses are no problem,” Gabriel said. “I’d gladly pay more if it would help. What is a problem is the ten-day delay. Is there any way—”

“Mr. Hunt,” the woman said. “I don’t make the rules, and they don’t let me change them either. Just because you’ve got money doesn’t mean you rule the roost—not down here. The fees are what they are and so is the wait. If you don’t like it, you can take the next plane out. Do we understand each other?”

She left without waiting for a response. Gabriel looked down at the clipboard. The stack of forms to be filled out was over an inch thick.

“Ten days!” Velda said.

A young man in filthy brown coveralls chose that moment to slip in through the back door of the room. He had a big smile and long, wild hair and a six-pack of cheap beer in one hand. He stank of diesel fuel so powerfully it made Gabriel’s head swim.

“Hey, Ruda!” the man cried, pulling Rue into an embrace that lifted her off her feet. “I heard you were back on the ice, but I couldn’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe it either,” Rue said, smiling at Gabriel over the young man’s shoulder.

“Strip Monopoly just isn’t the same without you. You planning to winter-over?”

“No chance, Dusty,” Rue replied, taking a beer and
cracking it open. “Six months with you and Tanner in the dark and I’d be ready to chew my own leg off. I’m just here to help a friend. In and out.”

“Well, that’s the way to help a friend all right,” Dusty said, nudging her with an elbow. He began passing the remaining beers around, shaking everyone’s hand as he went. Only Velda declined the beer. Dusty held his can up in a toast. “Skal!”

“Skal,” Gabriel said. Gabriel wasn’t normally much of a beer drinker—but the way this one went down his parched, bone-dry throat, it tasted like the best he’d ever had.

“Skal,” Rue repeated, sucking foam from the mouth of the can. “Is Speedo still doing Pole run?”

“Of course,” Dusty said. “In fact, he’s got one in about forty minutes, why?”

Rue pulled a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of Moxie soda pop from the messenger bag she wore slung over one hip and passed it to Dusty.

“Ah, you do love me after all,” Dusty said with a huge grin, clutching the bottle to his heart as if it were a teddy bear. “A winter without Moxitinis is like a fat girl with itty bitty titties.”

“I think now would be a good time to file that harassment complaint against Tanner,” Rue said. “Don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” Dusty said. “High time.”

“Just make sure it keeps Lanke occupied for at least, oh, forty minutes?”

“Not a problem,” Dusty said, slipping the bottle into one of the many enormous pockets on his coverall and downing the rest of his beer in one long gulp. “Good luck out there, Ruda.” He headed out toward Lanke’s office.

Rue smiled over at Velda. “Those ten days just flew by, didn’t they?”

Bundled up in extreme weather gear and lugging their equipment like a line of ants at the world’s coldest picnic, Gabriel and the team made their way through icy winds down a narrow runway of smooth snow toward a growling ski-equipped LC-130.

The pilot—Speedo—turned out to be a handsome, weathered sort with merry blue eyes and a troublemak-er’s grin. He was clearly thrilled to be breaking the rules. He helped the team unload three pallets of frozen Tater Tots to make room for their gear and did so with all the glee of a teenager preparing to sneak out after curfew. According to Rue, Speedo had some shadowy, possibly sexual ties to a prominent female senator, and was therefore un-fireable and able to get away with murder up here.

“So,” Millie asked the pilot as they worked together to secure the gear for takeoff. “Why do they call you Speedo?”

“What do you think?” he replied, heading for the cockpit. “I’m the fastest you’ll ever see. Maybe you’d better buckle up, son.”

After he closed the cockpit door, Rue said, “Fast’s got nothing to do with it. I bet him once he wouldn’t run from the Heavy Shop to Crary Lab and back in nothing but bunny boots and his little bathing suit,” she said. “He won the bet. Everyone calls him Speedo ever since.”

“So he isn’t fast?” Millie said.

“I didn’t say that,” Rue said.

The ride to the Pole was choppy and uncomfortable but otherwise uneventful, giving Gabriel and his team
time to gawk out the windows at the awe-inspiring landscape below. It was 10:30 P.M. but the sun shone bright as noon across the towering blue glaciers and curious, surreal formations of windblown ice. At first they saw fat seals huddled together in writhing brown masses the size of football fields and large troops of penguins clustered around the edges of slushy holes in the endless frozen sea, but as they moved inexorably southward, deeper into the cold dead interior of the continent, living things became more scarce and eventually vanished altogether. The plane flew low over soaring white mountain ranges like giant carnivorous teeth and grim, dead valleys with no ice at all, just scattered stone and dry, barren dirt. Eventually the landscape flattened out to an endless stretch of frozen nothing. When they finally spotted the distinctive geodesic dome of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Gabriel felt Velda grip his gloved hand, her long thigh pressing against his as she leaned closer to the window.

Speedo put the big cargo plane down on the ice with a bone-jarring bump and rattle. Velda’s hold on Ga-briel’s hand tightened, then released.

When Gabriel exited the plane, he was not prepared for the raw and brutal power of the wind. It leapt on him like a hungry tiger, tearing at his exposed face and nearly knocking him flat. He had heard that the South Pole was the windiest place on earth, but knowing it and experiencing it were two totally different things.

On the long, frozen airstrip, the team was met by what appeared to be an enormous Yeti. He was taller than Millie, with a long, ice-encrusted yellow beard and featureless black goggles sticking out of the fur hood of a safety-orange parka.

“Velda,” the Yeti cried in a heavy Scandinavian accent.
Gabriel had to strain to hear over the roar of the engines and the howling wind. “We did not know if you would make it.”

“Nils,” Velda shouted back. “It’s good to see you. How is Elaine?”

“She is well.” Nils turned to Millie. “This must be Gabriel Hunt.”

Millie smiled and shook his head.

“Millie Ventrose,” he said, shaking the Yeti’s gloved hand. “That’s Gabriel.”

The Yeti looked over and down. At six feet even, Gabriel rarely felt small, but standing between these two mountains could give any man outside the NBA a complex.

“Pleased to meet you, Nils,” Gabriel said, sticking out a hand.

When Nils took it to shake, Gabriel felt something odd and unbalanced in the other man’s grip. It took him a minute to realize that the last two fingers of the man’s glove were empty.

“This is Rue Aparecido,” Gabriel said, just to have something to say.

“Oh, we know Rue here,” Nils said. “We know her
very
well.”

Rue blew the Yeti a jaunty kiss and went to start unloading their gear.

So, tell me,
Gabriel was suddenly tempted to ask,
has she slept with
everyone
on the team?
But he kept the thought to himself.

“Nils Engen worked with my father at the ComNet research station,” Velda said, leaning close but still shouting to be heard. “He’s been on the ice for fifteen years, ten of them at or near Pole. He’s agreed to be our guide.”

“Good,” Gabriel said, grabbing his pack and slinging it up on his shoulder. “Glad to have you, Nils.”

When they had all gathered their gear and bid Speedo their hollered good-byes, Nils led them past the edge of the dome to a battered Spryte snowcat that looked like a rusty orange shoe box on wide tank treads. The driver was a grim woman in a gray parka that Nils introduced as Skua. She didn’t speak a word for their entire journey.

The Spryte was turtle slow, had no real suspension of any kind and was both horrifically noisy and foul smelling, belching plumes of toxic exhaust that wafted back into the badly insulated cab. The tiny, slot like side windows quickly iced up, making them pretty much useless. The ice over which they traveled was scored with windblown ridges that bounced and rattled their frozen bones. Millie hit his head against the roof so many times he wondered aloud if he shouldn’t have worn a helmet.

Their first view of the research station out the front windshield made it look like a beer can lying discarded and half buried on the featureless ice of the vast Polar Plateau. The only other visible landmark was the distant hump of Pole Station to the east. No mountains, no glaciers, nothing for the eye to focus on but miles and miles of flat white below and flat blue above. The altitude made breathing feel like doing push-ups. The bone-dry wind that came whistling in was even more vicious, full of knives and the promise of frostbite, hypothermia and death. The vast emptiness made Gabriel feel small and fragile, and he thought even men like Nils and Millie must find it humbling.

“Velda!” a tiny, plump figure cried, appearing in the doorway of the beer can as the snowcat slowly ground to a halt. Any human features were buried under layers
of down and goggles, but the voice sounded female. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Elaine,” Velda said, stepping forward to embrace the shorter woman. “How are you managing out here?”

“We’re doing okay,” she replied. “We were supposed to get a new fish in to winter-over, but I guess he failed his pych eval, so it’ll just be the three of us this year.” She paused, then gripped Velda’s gloved hand. “I’m so sorry about your father.”