In Cold Pursuit (13 page)

“Nothing.” He put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle a little tune.

“Okay, I got you on radar. Get out of here.”

Lansing grinned and disappeared from the doorway.

Deciding on a measured step, Hugh switched to his e-mail screen and typed a few sentences to Major Bentley:

Thinking better of it, he backed up and erased
like a criminal
and typed in
the same.
He smiled. He was rather enjoying this cloak-and-dagger stuff, speaking in code and so forth. Waylon would know what he meant. Waylon had been ready to drop the feds out the cargo door at altitude, the way they’d spoken to the professor up there at the high camp. This was Antarctica, where people depended on each other or went down fast. It was ridiculous to go after them like they did.

Hugh typed,

Hugh thought for only a few tenths of a second before adding,

He signed himself “TH” and hit send. Then he leaned back in his chair, arching his back into a big, much-needed stretch. The tension of that visit to the high camp—and what they’d found there—had bitten holes in his sleep every night since. Something had to give.

A
T TEN MINUTES TO NINE
, V
ALENA SETTLED INTO A SEAT
in a small classroom on the second floor of the Science Support Center. She had time to burn, enough to begin to fidget and replay the conversation with Ted and Cupcake for the hundredth time, the conversation with Taha’s wife for the tenth, and begin to chew on the visits from Bob Schwartz and Cal Hart.

She itched to ask someone whether she would be back from Happy Camp in time to attend the Tractor Club meeting, whatever that was, so that she could meet Major Bentley, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself or in any way seem anything but gung ho about survival training for fear that, considering her status as a short-timer, they would decide that she didn’t need the training.

All she knew about Happy Camp was that she would be required to demonstrate that she could sleep in a tent on the ice and light a camp stove without igniting the tent or herself. She presumed that her ECWs were warm enough that she would in fact survive, but she was yet to be convinced that a sleeping bag and a tent were going to keep her warm enough to actually sleep. Sleeping aside, if it was true that everyone in McMurdo went through this training sooner or later, and she had so far not seen anyone with missing fingers or toes, then it must be that survival training was … well, effective.

Promptly at nine o’clock, two young men came into the room and announced that they were Happy Camper School teachers. One had black hair and eyes and skin that was a burnished mahogany brown everywhere his clothes, hat, and
glacier goggles did not touch. His nose, cheeks, chin, and lower forehead made a rich, dark contrast to the paler skin around his eyes, making him look like a negative image of a raccoon. He said, “Hi, I’m Manny, and this is Dustin.” He gestured toward the other instructor, whose freckled skin seemed more chapped than tanned. “We’re going to have an hour or so of lecture here where it’s warm, and then we’ll be heading out to Snow Mound City.” With that, he picked up a dry marker, approached the erasable board at the front of the room, and launched into a discussion of the five mechanisms of heat loss: conduction (wet clothes), convection (moving air), radiation (keep covered up), evaporation (don’t get so warm that you sweat), and respiration (heat that you exhale is just plain gone). This last was important also because exhaled air was replaced with air that was incredibly dry. It seemed that dehydration was a big problem in Antarctica. (“Drink, drink, drink. Your pee should be clear and copious.”)

Valena dug in her pack for her water bottle and took a swig. She found herself preoccupied with little things, such as what it was going to be like to pee, and what kind of sleeping bag would be issued, and what they might have for lunch. These were all things that Emmett Vanderzee had not thought to explain to her. She had thought that he would show her the ropes. But he was not here.

Her attention wandered to her classmates. Michael from Crary Lab was there but was studiously taking notes, so she checked out various young men in the class. None particularly grabbed her interest, so she got to examining the visual aids, such as a mock-up of a helicopter seat and harness, which they were expected to learn how to exit in a hurry. Her gaze came to rest on a second dry-mark board toward the back of the room. The lecture from a previous class had not been erased. The subject was altitude sickness. Symptoms. Triage. Treatment. Valena wanted to get up and examine it more closely but, again, did not wish to attract attention to herself. Over the next two days, she wanted to be just another face in the crowd, not that poor kid whose professor got hauled off in handcuffs.

Back at the front of the room, Manny was discussing how to recognize hypothermia (“Pay attention if your partner develops the ‘umbles’—fumble, mumble, grumble, stumble”) and the early stages of frostbite (“You’ll get pink and numb, then next comes a white patch. After that, it goes stiff and sounds wooden when you hit it. If it goes beyond that, we’re talking blisters and blackening”), how to keep warm (“You are the furnace, and you need fuel—eat, eat, eat”) but not too warm (“If your goggles steam up, your core temperature is too high: take off a layer”), and so on. The three mechanisms of heat gain were metabolic (eat more than you burn), exercise (both voluntary and involuntary … such as shivering), and radiation (cuddle up to something warm; the old saw about getting naked with
somebody
warm was apparently no longer as popular a solution).

Finally, they were told to exit through the back of the building and load into the Delta.

What’s a Delta?
Valena wondered, until she stepped out through the doorway and got her first view of their over-the-snow transportation. It was another mammoth vehicle with fat rubber tires that loomed taller than she was. This one had a cab that was cantilevered out in front of the front tires, which in turn sat in front of a huge pivot point; the front wheels did not swivel, but instead the whole front end swung to make the vehicle turn. Mounted on the after end of the frame was a big, rear-entry passenger box with a chain ladder hanging below the door to permit awkward entry. They clambered up the ladder and packed in together tightly, Manny cheering the twenty students on with, “Come on, you can cuddle in tighter than that!”

Valena felt a hard shove in her ribs. She turned to recognize Doris, the computer person, trying to cram in closer to her. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

Doris gave her an exasperated look. “I managed to escape this last year, but they’ve finally caught up with me,” she said. “And don’t ask me why I’m in Antarctica if I don’t like the out-of-doors, okay?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Manny had the last few firemen hoist in cardboard boxes
full of flight lunches. “Hold those on your laps. Okay, now when we get there, don’t go opening this door from the inside. We’ll be opening it from outside, and you could take our heads off with it. But if something goes wrong, like we crash or something, there’s an emergency exit in the roof.” He pointed. “Okay, everybody happy?”

Several Happy Campers gave a thumbs-up.

Manny slammed the door.

Suddenly they were twenty people packed as tight as sardines in conditions that were brand new to each of them. Gazes turned inward, and all conversation stopped. Valena heard the muffled sounds of Manny and Dustin climbing into the cab and starting the engine, and a moment later, the whole rig lurched into motion, bouncing and rolling on its giant tires.

They wallowed off toward the east, up around Observation Hill, and down toward Scott Base, the New Zealand research station that lay three miles by road from McMurdo. Valena craned her neck to look through the battered windows, anxious to see whatever she could of this fantastical environment. Ob Hill was formed of more of the black volcanic rock, with bands of reddish scoria. As they came around the far side of the divide that lay between the two research stations, she caught a new view across the ice, looking south toward Minna Bluff. She noted with some dismay that it appeared to be clouding up.
We’ve got two hours to find cover
, thought Valena.
Or create it, out of snow and ice.

Valena listened to discussions that sprang up around her. There were several firefighters aboard, a raft of scientists, and miscellaneous office personnel from McMurdo, all wound up and excited to be getting their basic training in Antarctic survival. The firefighters were all men and looked like they needed a fire to fight. They were twitchy and restive and talked only to each other but immediately proved their worth. “Damn!” one of them cussed. “We’re filling up with fumes.” He pounded on the front of the box for a moment, trying to get the driver’s attention, but soon gave up.

“They can’t hear us,” said another. “They’re in a separate compartment, and they’re probably listening to tunes.”

“Damned surplus equipment,” muttered the first firefighter. He got up and popped the emergency hatch in the roof. The same cold monster that had sucked the warm, humid air out of the C-17 worked its same magic on the fumes.

Valena dug a chocolate bar out of one of the flight lunches.
Eat, eat, eat
, she told herself, peeling away its wrapper.

H
APPY
C
AMP WAS NOT AS GREAT A CHALLENGE FOR
Valena as it was for the few participants who had never braved wilderness camping before. She already knew how to use the tiny stoves and pitch the dome tents, and while she had never camped on snow she had backpacked in the Rocky Mountains and had done her share of skiing. She had wondered why Vanderzee had asked her how many pairs of skis she owned. She had answered three (one pair downhill, one mountaineering, one skating). He had thought that quiver small, and now, as she shoveled snow to build a crude survival igloo, she understood. He had wanted to gage her level of experience with and enthusiasm for snow.

Antarctic snow was a species apart from any of the broad variation of the white stuff she had experienced before, affording a different range of uses. They built their shelter, or “quinzy,” in the style of the inland Inuit of Canada, by shoveling snow into a heap, packing it until it reset into a lightweight version of concrete, and then hollowing it out. To expedite construction, Manny had them make a heap of all the duffels containing their sleeping bags and mats and shovel the snow on top of them. “We’ll punch a hole in the side and pull them out once we’ve got a good shell,” he said.

Valena took the first shift standing on top of the mound and jumping up and down on it to pack the snow tight. To no one in particular, she called out, “I can’t believe that this is going to create a structure that will stand.”

“The snow here is a lot colder and drier than you may be accustomed to,” said Dustin. “It’s strange stuff. It packs hard.”

Getting the first duffel back out from under the heap was an immense challenge, considering that it was weighted down by four other layers of duffels and a tightly packed shell of
snow, but a couple of the firefighters took it as a challenge. When the structure had been emptied, Valena crawled in with a shovel and carved away all excess thickness, smoothing the walls and leaving a flat floor about eight feet in diameter. Then she poked a small air hole through the roof and began to close the hole made to remove the duffels by making a patch out of the snow she had scraped off the inside. It was quiet and snug inside the little arch of snow. The walls were thinner than she had expected, letting light shine right through, which offered a blue glow.

At the same time, Michael dug a tunnel into the wind-packed snow on the downwind side of the hut, under the wall, and up inside it, leaving as much of the floor as possible intact as a platform for sleeping bags. When they were done, there was room for exactly three.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” said Michael.

Valena smiled. “I’m going to call it home.” She rolled out the two layers of thick neoprene and the enormous sleeping bag that the instructors issued to her, choosing the middle space so that if she rolled over in her sleep, she wouldn’t kiss the frozen wall.

The wind had picked up while they were finishing the inside of the quinzy, but she could not hear so much as a whisper while inside. In fact, the only sounds she heard were her own breathing and the sounds of people walking around in the cold snow outside.
It’s less than ten degrees out
, she reckoned, recalling how cold it had to get back home before the snow squeaked like that. She was glad that she had chosen the quinzy. It would keep her warmer than a tent.

Most of the other Happy Campers pitched tents. Some pitched two-man mountain dome tents, but Manny also issued them two Scott tents, which were tall, teepee-shaped rigs designed in the early days of Antarctic exploration. “You can stand up in a Scott tent,” he said, explaining its virtues, “and two or three of you can sleep comfortably on its floor, but given that the fabric’s heavy and the poles are not collapsible, the style would be useless anywhere sledges or helicopters were not available to assist transport. They are, however, stable
in a high wind.” He demonstrated the fine art of pitching the tent, first laying it out on its side with its top pointing into the wind, then hoisting it up and downwind using two of the guylines. A wide skirt around the base was then laden with snow to prevent the wind from turning it into a parachute, and the ends of the guylines were wrapped around bamboo sticks and buried a foot down into the snow.

The snow fascinated Valena. She had grown up in Colorado and Utah, where snow was usually light and fluffy unless it was allowed to sit around city curbs too long, in which case a few cycles of freezing and thawing turned it to ice and slush. This snow had a completely different quality, being born colder and kept frozen. The wind packed it into slabs, which Dustin now demonstrated could be quarried into blocks. This they did, piling them three courses high to form a wall that surrounded the little city of dome tents, connecting the Scott tents to the quinzy. When they had started to build it, Valena had thought it a mere exercise in survival training, but now she realized that it would provide a serious and important part of their comfort in the coming hours as the wind was gusting up to twenty knots now.