Ice Reich (47 page)

Except for Hermann Göring, however, all the characters in this novel are imagined. None are meant to represent the actual members of the
Schwabenland
expedition. The history recounted here is solely the author's invention. To the degree possible, however, this novel's descriptions are based on historic accounts of the places, times, people, and mores of the Nazi era.

Those readers familiar with Antarctic history and geography will recognize some sources of the novel's ideas. Atropos Island is inspired by real-life Deception Island, for example. Dry valleys such as the one described do exist. So do leopard seals. The disease depicted is fiction but scientists have recently discovered underground ecosystems of bacteria fed by chemicals and the earth's heat energy. The drug was suggested by the story of penicillin, discovered accidentally in 1928 when mold spores blew through a scientist's window and fell on plates of bacteria. The strain that was developed as an antibiotic in World War II,
Penicillin chrysogenum,
came from a single moldy cantaloupe found by a researcher in a supermarket garbage bin in Peoria, Illinois. Proving again that truth is at least as strange as fiction.

This book would not have been possible without the opportunity to make two visits to Antarctica as a science journalist writing for the
Seattle Times
, under a fellowship program of the National Science Foundation. I am grateful to the
Times,
the NSF, and all the people I met there. They and the southern continent affected me deeply.

Antarctica is an extraordinary place, which tends to have an enormous impact on those who visit it. No continent on earth has quite its combination of hostility and beauty. In the twenty-first century Antarctica is likely to come under heavy pressure from nations eager to exploit its resources. It is imperative this unique place be preserved as the wilderness and research park it is today.

I am in debt to the encouragement of my agent, Kris Dahl, and the patient guidance and support of my editor, Rick Horgan. And I am at a loss to adequately thank my wife, Holly, for her help with this book. She became my collaborator on this novel under difficult circumstances. Across a vast distance we became closer, and I will always be grateful for that.

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GETTING BACK

Everything he knew was useless now.

There was a cold clarity to that realization, a crystallization of hopelessness that in its own odd way was bracing. It was the first coherent thought to penetrate Ethan Flint's panic in some time. He acknowledged, with an acceptance that was calming, that he was probably doomed.

The cries of pursuit were growing closer. The heave of Ethan's chest and pounding of his heart had quieted enough to hear the sound drifting across the desert, its harsh rasping reminding him of the caw of crows. He'd grown up with the urban birds, watching them multiply on songbird eggs until they flew across the endless rooftops like plumes of smoke, and they spoke in a language hard and aggrieved. It was a relative of that sound the fugitive heard now: human calls that were shrill, excited, and without remorse. It was a yipping designed to induce fear and at first Flint's brain had screamed the need to think so urgently that it drowned out every other thought. Now his peril was being more rationally— more grimly— absorbed. He was being hunted, but why? By whom?

The day had climaxed into an oven of punishing heat, the air so dry that Ethan seemed hardly to sweat. He understood this was an illusion. He was parched and rapidly dehydrating, despite his knowledge of how dangerous such a condition could be. There was so much he'd memorized before coming to the desert: the proper salt balance, his necessary caloric intake, the dimensions of a solar still, or how to splint a bone or identify an edible plant or make fire with a lens. He'd sought to be an aboriginal engineer, a wilderness technician. A lot of good it was doing him now! The plane crashed, his friends dead, his carefully chosen gear a growing deadweight. And now this unexpected pursuit. When running for your life you don't have much time to index-search the precepts of
Wilderness Comfort
on disk, he observed wryly. His peril would be funny if it wasn't so damned frightening.

Perhaps it was a bad dream. Certainly Australia seemed unreal. The sand was too red, the sky too blue, the desert brush a vivid, improbable green. Like a children's coloring book. The landscape shimmered and danced, its insubstantiality matching his sense of being trapped in a nightmare. But the pain was real. His head ached and every attempt to rest gave the flies a chance to find him again. Their buzz was as tireless as the sun.

The impossibility of his situation seemed so enormous that he had difficulty processing its logic. He was a sheeter, slang for a computer engineer who matrixed corporate spreadsheets into four-dimensional game theory, and his whole life was built on mathematics. He was an
artist
of the rational, his boss had praised him. A wizard, a master, a lord of the logarithms. Ethan had swaggered through code like Daniel-fucking-Boone. It was all worth squat right now, a fact that seemed cruelly unfair. Shouldn't all his work, all his education, and all his technological expertise give him
some
kind of edge? No. Of course not. Cops, credentials, résumés, diplomas: thousands of miles away. And he'd
asked
for this! Paid a small
fortune
to do it! Enormously funny, really. A tremendous joke on him. Clearly something had gone monstrously wrong— so nonsensically and outrageously wrong that he thirsted not just for water but retribution. Oh, what rank
incompetence
this confirmed among the bastards who'd sent him here! What
lies
they'd told by not telling him enough! If he got home he'd...

What?

Somebody would listen, wouldn't they?

If he got home.

Ethan glanced back. His glimpse of his pursuers produced an instinctive shock of fear. There was an animal wildness about them, a shedding of restraint, that was as unbound and tangled as their hair. He was so disoriented! Drugged for the flight, awakened in wreckage, the harried pilot who unstrapped him displaying none of the cool aplomb he'd come to expect. The aviator had punched out, parachuted down, and moved in anxious jerks, desperate to get away from the wreckage that smoked like a beacon. The plane had broken into two parts, the forward section with his dead friends skidding to the far side of a low rise. Ethan had wanted to go there but the pilot refused. "You don't want to see your friends."

Instead the rattled aviator had unscrewed a tail panel and unbolted an orange-colored electronic box, cursing as he struggled with the tools. Then he brusquely jammed the added weight into Ethan's already-stuffed pack. "This is what's going to keep us from having to walk to the beach," the man had explained gruffly. "If I can get the rest. Wait here." Ethan waited as the pilot trotted toward the nose, and when he'd become bored sitting in the heat and sand and finally trudged up the rise, thinking he was hallucinating a curious murmur of voices, he'd seen a swarm of scavengers who looked like urban groundlings. They'd pinned the pilot against the blackened fuselage like a trapped rabbit, their movements quick, their tone mocking, and their skin brown and hard as bark. "Get
back!
" they'd howled at the pilot. So Flint had run before he'd fully realized he was running, confused by the impression of faded synthetics and wooden spears, wire decorations and ragged hair, a melding of Stone Age and Information Age: 21st Century Huns.

Now he could hear their crowing. Getting closer. Drawing near.

* * *

The address in Daniel's city was in the tower of an anonymous skyscraper cluster forty minutes away by tube. Discreet lettering in the lobby announced the firm's presence on the thirty-third floor. The elevator opened to reveal a number of nondescript small offices: a title company, a financial newsletter, a laser-lift skin clinic. The tour agency door was solid wood, plain, and locked. "Outback Adventure," a tiny sign read in letters slipped into the kind of bracket that could accommodate a rapid turnover of tenants. He glanced at the ceiling. A vid-snake was watching him.

Daniel hesitated, then knocked.

Silence.

He looked at his watch; on time. He tried the knob but it didn't budge. He knocked again. Nothing.

Dammit, it wasn't lunch, but there was no sound from the other side. He eyed the keypad lock and punched some numbers at random without effect, quickly becoming bored. "Hello?" Finally he retreated across the hallway and slid down the wall, sitting expectedly on the floor. He'd wait for the bastards.

With that there was a buzz, a click, and the door swung quietly open. He stood awkwardly and walked over, poking his head through. The inside revealed a small waiting area with ugly plastic molded chairs, a desk, and a pretty receptionist. She smiled. "Close the door behind you."

He stepped through and the door clicked shut.

"Your appointment?"

"To see Mr. Coyle," he said grumpily. "My name is Daniel Dyson."

"Please have a seat, Mr. Dyson." She gestured at the plastic chairs. "I'll inform Mr. Coyle."

"You didn't answer my knock."

"Yes we did. Eventually." She regarded him with quiet amusement.

"You don't want clients to come in?"

"Eight percent of our applicants are turned away by that door and that's for their own good. They wouldn't do well with Outback Adventure, would they?"

He sat while she announced his arrival. The chairs were as uncomfortable as they looked. The brochures on the table featured the same wilderness couple he'd seen on his video wall. There were pictures of empty desert, red-rocked gorges, and bounding kangaroos. The text was spare. "Like primitive life itself, this is a journey with no schedule, no itinerary, and no set destination— except self-realization."

A Zen thing, maybe.

There was a buzz and she looked up at him again, smiling. "Your counselor will see you now." He went through another solid wooden door.

The man who met Daniel reminded him a bit of the brochure Ninja, but without the knives. Elliott Coyle was dark-haired, tanned, and dressed in a charcoal sport coat over a black silk crew shirt and dark pants. He wore black Dura-Flex slippers. A silver pin on his lapel was the only bright point to catch the eye. It showed a kangaroo. That would be something, Daniel thought, to see a wild kangaroo.

There are thousands of them— hundreds of thousands— where you're going." Coyle had followed Daniel's eye.

"How do you know I'm going?"

"I've read your profile, Daniel. You belong there."

"You have a profile?"

"The screening questionnaire, a background check. We don't send just anyone on Outback Adventure. It's too expensive for both of us. So we try to guess— an educated guess, but a guess nonetheless— who truly belongs there. The information we have on you is very promising."

"I'll bet it includes my annual salary, if that's my fee."

Coyle smiled. "Touché."

"Secret passwords, locked doors. Your company doesn't make sense."

He nodded. "You want to know more, of course, which is why I'm here." He stuck out his hand. "Elliott Coyle." The handshake was firm and brisk. "I'm your assigned counselor, the man whose job it is to convince you the experience is worthwhile, to help decide if we should give each other a try, and then guide you through preparation if we come to agreement. I feel it's safe to say that what I'm offering— what
we're
offering— will change your life."

"Who is 'we,' exactly?"

"Outback Adventure is a travel consultant that contracts with the umbrella governing arm of United Corporations. We have exclusive excursion rights to offer wilderness experiences in Australia."

"And Australia is quarantined. Off-limits. Dangerous, last I heard."

"It was. To keep management of the continent controllable, we haven't advertised its change in status. Instead we screen candidates to find the few who can realistically take advantage of what we have to offer. You're in a select group, Daniel."

"So how did you find me?"

"You found us, remember? That's the first requirement. Friends tend to tell like-minded friends. We keep a low profile to discourage the casually curious. We register as an export company. If we didn't take such steps, the screening would become unwieldy. The idea would intrigue more people than you might think."

"So how do I fit?"

"You're also the right age, the right fitness, the right... temperament. We think. The only one who can really answer that is you."

Daniel wanted to digest this for a moment. "If I go, do I get Cave Girl?" he deflected. He solemnly held up a brochure.

Coyle laughed again. "I wouldn't mind time in the Outback with her myself! Alas, she's an actress, Daniel. We're offering wilderness, not Club Pleasure. You'll have to find your own companionship, if you want it." He winked.

"You've got to make a better pitch than that, Mr. Coyle. Especially for a year's god-damned salary. Anyone who would pay that
is
crazy enough to go."

Coyle nodded. "Absolutely right. So why don't you sit back and let me give you the spiel? Then you make up your own mind. No pressure, no sweat. I think you'll be intrigued, at the very least."

The chairs were far more comfortable than the plastic of the waiting room. Daniel sank in one and donned headgear for the presentation, adjusting the fit and sound. A desert panorama opened up again, gloriously empty. The sky was a brilliant blue, dried clear of haze. The sand was a vibrant red. Coyle walked into view. Daniel knew he was simply giving his pitch in front of a blank screen and was being projected onto the head-vid presentation, but the combination was effective. It was as if the two were together in Australia.

"Every school child knows the tragic story of the Australian continent," Coyle began. The scene changed to rangeland being eaten to stubble by hundreds of browsing rabbits. "A virus concocted to control the nation's feral browsers unfortunately mutated and jumped to humans. While Australia was effectively quarantined before the infection could spread, both the targeted animals and most of the continent's human inhabitants, except for a handful of refugees, were wiped out. This was a key factor in passage of the Genetic Engineering Reform Act, of course. Meanwhile, this catastrophe was considered so threatening to the world population at large that the continent was quarantined. The refugees were interned on the Seychelles islands. Australia was permanently blockaded to prevent salvage companies or treasure hunters from landing and running the risk of contracting and spreading the disease. To further discourage such illegal access, all detailed maps, coordinates and geographic information detailing the continent were purged from world databases. To the extent possible, Australia was put out of sight, out of mind, as an emergency measure of public safety. Until now! Because United Corporations turns problems into solutions. Because United Corporations believes that
everyone
can win, all the time." Daniel saw a picture of smiling backpackers winding down a palm-shaded desert canyon. The water pool next to them was turquoise.