In Cold Pursuit (29 page)

Waylon twisted in his chair. “Yeah, the bundle was intact. Medical rig, pallet, fuel drum, and tracking beacon. The chute was buried underneath it, all crumpled up. It was absolutely not the result of a chance trick of the wind. No way.”

Hugh said, “And the beacon had been disabled.”

“Disconnected,” said Waylon.

“You’re sure,” said Marilyn.

“Damn certain sure,” Waylon affirmed. “And here’s the thing: it wasn’t like it had been smashed by chance or yanked apart by an amateur. Whoever did it not only turned it off, but knew how it worked, and he had to know what the thing was in the first place. The wires were neatly disconnected. So it was either ex-military or someone with electronics experience.”

“But how did it all get buried?” asked Hugh. “I mean, all that weighed something. Was it all still rigged together?”

“Yes. The cargo straps were still in place. So you’re right, it was heavy. Wrong Way, did you get into the loadmaster’s records on that?”

Marilyn nodded. “It was rigged to exceed four hundred pounds. And have you ever tried to push a pallet when it was loaded? It’s not like it’s on skis.”

Hugh said, “I’ve looked up the weather records. The wind was blowing from the camp toward the place where it was buried, but we dropped nice and low to minimize drift. Even if we were off in our calculations, someone still had to move that mass three hundred meters at least. So we’re still talking major effort. With apologies to the fairer sex, Marilyn, I think that eliminates the cook.”

“Unless she wasn’t working alone,” Marilyn said.

Waylon scratched his chin. “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, we haven’t considered the conspiracy angle. We keep thinking it was one person acting alone. That rather opens the field.”

They all looked at each other.

“They had a snow machine out there,” said Marilyn.

Waylon pondered this. “Man, I would not like to try to drag a bundle with one of those hogs in that weather. Give me a nice, warm cockpit any day.”

“Right,” said Hugh. “So any way you slice it, we’ve got a defeated bundle. So it comes down to this: which one of them had the technology or the know-how to a) find it in full blizzard conditions, b) bury it, and c) defeat the beacon while he
was at it? Surely that’s got to narrow the field a little, now, doesn’t it?”

Waylon said, “I’m still thinking ex-military.”

‘And trained in navigation,” said Marilyn.

Hugh gave her a grin. “That would be your department. What would it take?”

She thought a while. “Well, if he knew to listen for a beacon, and had the technology for that,
and
had GPS …”

Hugh swatted his knee. “Just a few ‘ands’ there, eh? Surely if we can crack into the records—”

“Which we can’t necessarily do, Hugh.” Waylon said.

“Always the pessimist. Surely
when
we crack into service records, this guy will glow in the dark.”

Waylon shook his head. “Hugh, this isn’t a load of mousetraps this time. We’re talking cutting the chain of command, we’re talking special favors, we’re talking military service and Raytheon personnel documents. That’s not exactly according to Hoyle, my man. Just what do you think is the likelihood of pulling that off? And then you’ve got to figure out how to get the information into the hands of someone who can do something with it. What are you thinking, the colonel’s going to phone the feds and say, ‘We think you got the wrong guy?’ Nice way to make us all very popular.”

Hugh stood up. “I’ve got that all covered,” he said, his eyes bright with excitement. “Remember Doris over in IT? She and I go back a ways. And once we get that information, she can pass it to Valena.”

They all stared at each other awhile.

“Have a heart, Hugh,” said Marilyn. “She’s a nice kid, and perhaps she’d like to live to grow old.”

“You got any better ideas?”

“No.”

“Then let’s get started.”

S
HEILA
T
UTTLE WAITED AT THE AIRLOCK DOOR AT
B
LACK
Island Station to greet the arriving traverse crew. She was blond and heavily freckled and muscular and almost six feet tall and withstood the gale without a parka, but she had to shout to be heard over the wind, her Australian accent twisting around their ears. “Ye’ll want to take your gear out to the bunkhouse now, before it blows any harder.” She gestured toward a smaller structure a hundred meters away that was anchored to the rock by stout cables. “Then get on inside the station here, and we’ll talk about ye dinnah!”

All but Valena and Dave ignored her first instruction and instead headed straight into the station house muttering words like, “Cocoa,” and “Whiskey.” Dave was busy on the back of the Delta setting up the hose to drain the water tank into its counterpart inside the station.

Sheila turned toward Valena. “So this is y’ chance, woman!” she roared. “They’s only eight bunks out there, they’s five of ye, and I got three more already staying there while they dick around with the transmitter. Go on out there and get a lower bunk before these louts double back on ye!”

Valena grabbed her gear and turned to regard the bunkhouse and the hundred yards of wind-scoured volcanic rock that lay between her and it. It was a prefabricated trailer of sorts, an unadorned box made of naked plywood with a few square windows, mounted on a chassis that rode on skids instead of wheels. The cables that held it to the rock were as big around as her arms. Beyond it, through a parting in the ragged
clouds, a short stretch of the ice-encrusted Transantarctic Mountains gleamed coldly in the chill evening sunlight.

On cue, the wind increased its roar and colossal buffeting. In the foreground stood a pair of wind generators. The angle of each generator was governed by a heavy spring that flexed with increasing wind, feathering the blades as the wind grew too strong for the mechanism. The current blow had laid them back within thirty degrees of horizontal. “How hard is it blowing?” yelled Valena.

“Sixty miles per hour,” replied Sheila, at the top of her voice. “If ye so fascinated by meteorology, ye can watch our digital readout in the station house. We like it better than watching TV, and as ye can see by all these satellite dishes here, we’ve got the best reception on the continent. Now, git! I’ll be waiting for ye inside; it en’t a fit day out for idle chitchat.”

Valena staggered off across the ground toward the bunkhouse. She had to adopt an awkwardly broad stance so that she could lean her shoulder into the wind and yet have a leg outboard to catch herself should the gale suddenly slacken and let go of her mass. At the steps to the bunkhouse, she had to brace herself again to heave the door open. She could imagine the people who had delivered the structure to this lone prominence trying to decide which way to mount the door: into the wind, where it would be torn off its hinges, or against it, where it would take Charles Atlas to open it? Or had they not thought at all and merely jammed it in where the ground happened to be level?

Inside, the atmosphere was dim, cold, and oddly suffocating. The small space had four double bunks crammed into it, and each window was covered by a heavy blackout blind, which nevertheless leaked light all around the edges.

“Well, it ain’t much, but it’s got character,” she said out loud. There was something about the noise of the wind in this rawboned domicile that made her want to speak even though no one could hear her.

As Sheila had said, three out of the four bunks had already been claimed, all of them lower. Valena heaved Steve’s sleeping
bag and her backpack onto the fourth, then tested the mattress to see if it was acceptable. It wasn’t much, but she suspected that the others were about the same. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed writings all over the walls, rowdy inscriptions by prior inhabitants. There were several choice limericks extolling the wonders of Black Island Station.

She headed back outside.

The station house was put together in sections, connected by passageways to two geodesic domes, which she assumed held satellite dishes. Valena stepped in through a long, narrow hallway lined with coat hooks, barrels for recyclables, and crude wooden shelves stacked with supplies. From there, she found her way into a large room that was kitchen, dining room, and lounge all in one. Wee Willy had loaded himself into an armchair and was watching an Armed Forces TV program. Hilario was playing cards with a couple of men she hadn’t seen before. Dave and Edith had settled down at the table to share a bottle of Crown Royal with the station manager, a balding man in his fifties with a sweet smile. He greeted Valena with words that added up to “hello” but were studded with an astonishing riff of four-letter words.

Sheila cut across him with a more formal greeting. “Welcome to Black Island Station. Do ye have any special dietary requirements?” she asked.

“No,” answered Valena. “I could eat shoe leather about now and savor it.”

“Not on the menu. We are having pot roast of beef tonight, mac and cheese—homemade sauce, mind ye—and a nice mess of carrots, peas, and onions. For dessert I’ve made a berry pie, but there are cookies left over from lunch if ye prefer.”

“I am in heaven.”

“Nay ye aren’t, but ye can see it from here. Dinnah be served in half an hour. Ye like a wee tour of the facilities while ye waiting?”

“Please.”

Sheila led the way through a tight catacombs of hallways. “That’s the shower room,” she said, pointing into a dark little
room about the size of a locker. “We don’t partake of it often. Not enough water. If ye insist, kindly keep it to a minimum. Get wet quick as ye can, turn off the water, soap up, turn it on again briefly to rinse. Now, down here in this other room, we have the toilets. Ladies’ urinal here, gents’ there. Those are for the liquids. Anything solid, ye want this other option. Let me show you how to tie up the plastic bag when ye’re done, so ye don’t have any excess air to it. It all goes in this reseal-able barrel, which in turn goes out on the Delta with ye. What ye bring here ye takes with ye when ye go. Okay, now for the tour of what this station’s all about.”

Sheila turned left into a room crammed floor to ceiling with wiring. “This is the telecommunications brain for all McMurdo,” she said. “The fellows out there in the living room are adjusting the satellite dish to increase the bandwidth. And now, the pièce de résistance, the most amazing part of this whole mess.” She indicated a laptop computer that sat on a shelf surrounded by hookups. “Ye just punch these two little keys, and it shuts down telecommunications for the whole shebang.”

“The morning after I arrived I couldn’t call out, because the lines were down.”

“Yeah. The blokes weren’t popular for shutting it down during everyone’s day off. Now come along here. Ye’ve got to see the dish. But first, put on this hearing protection. The panels of the geodesic dome get to rattling a bit. When the wind blows, it’s fit to puree ye brain.”

Sheila handed Valena a set of ear protection muffs and led her through another airlock into the larger of the two domes.

Even with the muffs, the auditory channels to Valena’s brain were instantly overwhelmed. The hammering of the wind on the panels of the dome was immense. Overpowering. Concussive. All that and colder than cold.

Valena stopped and stood still a moment, struggling to get her sensory bearings, trying to get a fix on what the noise reminded her of. Thunder wasn’t quite it, nor was the largest drum roll on record or the pounding of eight diesel engines on the biggest drill rig she had ever visited. Standing underneath
a metal bridge as heavy traffic rolled overhead came to mind, but it was infinitely louder than that, and constant, more frenetic, and she was locked up inside it.

She tilted her head backward, staring at the dish the dome protected. It was huge and tipped almost up onto its edge as advertised.

Sheila did not even try to speak to her over the din. After half a minute, she indicated that she had had enough and was going back into the room with all the wiring.

Valena followed quickly. She wanted a moment alone with Sheila to question her without being overheard by the others, and she had let her curiosity about the station burn up most of her chance. “Sheila,” she began, once they had left the rumbling dome and they could hear each other again. “I’ve come here for more than just the tour, which was of course marvelous.”

“Ye want to talk about what it was like last year, up in Emmett’s camp.”

Valena stopped short. “You know?”

“Yes. I’ve had an e-mail today from Jim Skehan. Nice fellah, that Jim. He told me to keep an eye out for ye.”

“I’m stunned.”

“Don’t be. Some days the man of the cloth comes out in him.”

“Man of the—?”

Sheila made a dismissive gesture. “What ye need to know is this: whatever your federal agents say Emmett might have done, that’s a load of horse manure. Emmett hated what had been written about him—he wanted that man sent home alive and with the facts. He was obsessive about it. ‘Make sure ye have the best foods for him,’ he’d tell me. ‘I want him fat and happy, so he’ll change his story from fantasy to facts. This is hard, cold science, and he’s got to be kept alert and comfortable enough to learn, so he can report what is true.’ He’d go on and on, if ye let him.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, it was quite the situation. The man shows up and starts showing the symptoms right quick. Down he goes, and
here comes the storm. Your Emmett, he was in a pickle. Sure, he thought the man was a prize anus, but he wanted to send him home a living and wiser anus. He jumped to that radio and arranged that airdrop so quick the handset was smoking.”

“Then who buried the bundle?”

“Buried it? Is that the story?”

Valena winced, realizing that she had already halfway betrayed the trust of the Airlift Wing. “I’ve heard that rumor,” she said.

“Not possible.”

“Why not?”

“There was a storm on. It must have slid into a crevasse.”

“But was anyone out of your sight long enough to have
pushed
it into a crevasse?”

Sheila fixed a look on Valena that would have fried eggs. “Who would do a thing like that?” she demanded. Then she closed her eyes and sighed with exasperation, and spoke more slowly and distinctly, as if trying to communicate with someone who was mentally impaired. “People were coming and going from tent to tent. We had lines stretched so ye could do that. I didn’t keep track of their comings and goings.”