Pandora's Curse - v4 (17 page)

The early energy that sustained the crew waned as the frigid air sapped their strength. And yet they slogged on. By five in the afternoon the last cold lab was finished. They ate in silence that night after loading two of the dormitories with their personal gear.

The following day was spent storing all the provisions and stocking the laboratories. The work was easier than the previous day’s and the temperature had risen above freezing. The steadily drifting snow turned into a constant drizzle that soaked anyone outside in a matter of moments. The compacted snow became ice as flat and slick as a hockey rink. Mercer’s suggestion to use a Sno-Cat to corrugate the crust with its tracks was met with remarkable success.

At dinner, Werner thanked everyone for their work, praising each one by name for their contribution. He said that Geo-Research would finish the last few chores in the morning, freeing up the others to begin their work. The scientists would arrive by a ski-equipped cargo plane in the afternoon and he asked Igor and Marty for a list of any additional equipment that they felt they needed so it could be put aboard.

“Oh, Igor, I have a communication for you from Dr. Klein.” He handed a piece of paper to the Russian.

Igor read it and grunted.

“Looks like bad news,” Mercer said, stacking the dishes on the table for Ingrid, the cook’s assistant that Marty had bedded aboard the
Njoerd,
to pick up.

“
Da,
she won’t make tomorrow’s flight here. She must wait two days for the first helicopter resupply.”

“What happened to her anyway?”

“I don’t know. Some accident is all I was told.”

“I don’t blame her for wanting to miss the construction party,” Marty Bishop said with a tired sigh.

“I do not think she is shy of work,” Igor defended. “I have not met her, but her application to join my team was impressive. She has climbed the tallest mountains on four continents, including the Vinson Massif, Antarctica’s highest point. And almost made it to the top of Everest. She works as a trauma doctor in Munich’s largest hospital and has published several papers on survivor’s stress. When I contacted her references, all gave her highest marks.”

“Sounds impressive to me,” Ira said.

Igor grinned. “She also sent picture with her application. You want impressive? Wait until you see her.” He bunched his fingers and kissed them away like an Italian. “Beautiful.”

The sled weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had been designed to be towed by a vehicle. When they started their search the third morning, they tried using the Land Cruiser, but the uneven terrain made it too difficult to control. It fell on the men to push the ground-penetrating radar unit, an exhausting task since their search grid was on a long slope. The uphill legs left the men panting and dangerously overheated.

All were thankful that the area wasn’t larger than it was.

Because Camp Decade had been secured to an under-ice mountain, it had remained stable as the glacier flowed around it. The Surveyor’s Society had requested Geo-Research establish their new base within a quarter mile of where Camp Decade lay hidden. On the fourth pass with the sled they found a corner of the base, a discovery met with cheers but they knew that was only part of the battle. Now they had to map the entire facility and locate the main entrance, where they would sink their shaft.

Camp Decade was laid out like a huge letter H. One long leg contained storage areas and a cavernous garage that once had a ramp to the surface. The other leg was designated for crew accommodations and laboratories, with the bulk of the administration area connecting the two segments. There were countless side chambers attached to the complex as well as a long tunnel running from the garage that led to the small nuclear reactor that had powered the facility. The Air Force had assured the Surveyor’s Society that there had never been a single incidence of radiation leakage, and the reactor had been one of the few things removed when the camp was abandoned.

As Mercer watched the monitor attached to the radar set reveal dark shadows thirty-five feet below them, he kept a surreptitious eye on the Geiger counter he had borrowed in Iceland. The unit was an old Victoreen model CDV-700 6A that he had cajoled from Thorsteinn Jonsson, the director of Reykjavik’s small geology museum. He hadn’t seen Jonsson since the volcanologist had hosted the conference that first brought Mercer to Iceland years earlier, and Jonsson had been reluctant to lend out his only counter until Mercer gave him a hundred-dollar “rental fee.”

The photograph of cancer-ravaged Stefansson Rosmunder was too compelling for Mercer to trust the Air Force’s assurances. Before first light, he’d gotten up and walked the entire area, sweeping the ice with the Geiger counter. The machine hadn’t uttered more than a few clicks, which indicated normal background radiation. There was one spot, presumably over where the reactor had once been buried, that sped up the counter but the levels were far below anything dangerous.

He didn’t tell the others what he had done, nor did he reveal the counter as they worked now. He’d seen people panic at just the presence of one of these little machines. To the uninformed, the slow clicks of ambient radiation sounded as dangerous as the tail shake of a rattlesnake. He kept the counter in a pack hanging from the side of the sled and wore the earphones that Thorsteinn had given him. Since he was the only person who knew how to operate the radar unit, no one questioned the extra equipment. If he’d found something, he would have told them immediately, but after completing half of this slower sweep, he felt that the military had told the truth about the site. There was no hazardous radiation anywhere near Camp Decade.

At noon, Mercer downloaded the raw data they had accumulated onto a laptop computer that would create a digital version of the base. Because of the thick ice, the resolution was poor and the images were grainy and blurred, but there was still enough detail for him to pick out individual features. The radar had penetrated through the roof of Camp Decade, so the pictures resembled an X ray. Inside the facility, he could see wall partitions and even furniture. It was eerie because he was the first person to see inside the camp in fifty years.

He was also very relieved. While the facility was anchored to bedrock and protected from glacial pressure by a peak of rock on its upflow side, he had harbored the fear that the entire place had been ground to debris by the shifting ice. The radar scans showed it had had little problem weathering the past five decades.

“All right, let’s wrap this up for now,” Mercer said, shutting off the radar and checking the computer and GPS system that was part of the sledge. “We’ll compare this data with the original drawings done by the engineers who built this place.”

Even without the additional Geo-Research scientists, the mess hall was crowded for lunch, and they had to wait until afterward to clear enough room on one of the tables to spread out their findings. The original drawings had been scanned into the computer, so Mercer brought up the shadowy images recorded this morning and overlaid them with the neat architectural sketches. Instantly, they had the orientation of the base locked down and saw they had only mapped a third of the sprawling complex. Still, it was enough for them to extrapolate the location of the main entrance and determine its GPS coordinates.

Mercer pointed to the spot on the computer screen. “X marks the spot.”

“You sure?”

“Do you think I want to dig two holes out there? With your permission, Marty, we can start tunneling through the snow to reach the base.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Bishop replied. “Why don’t you go out and mark the area over the entrance? Ira, you go get the Sno-Cat with the crane and plow attachments and haul over the plastic sleeves and hotrocks. I’ll tell Werner that we need one of his people for a while.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Mercer agreed.

“How goes your search?” Igor Bulgarin had appeared with Erwin Puhl at his side. Both men had just entered the mess hall and were covered in snow.

“Oh, God!” Ira made his face into a frightened mask. “It’s the Yeti!”

Roaring with laughter, the Russian placed a huge arm on the much shorter Puhl. “And this is my Yetette.”

“We’ve already located the entrance, Igor. We’re going to start digging right now.”

“So quickly?” Bulgarin sobered. “You Americans, I don’t know how you do it.”

“I take it you’re not having any luck finding meteorites?”

He laughed again. “Is success if I find one or two this trip.”

“How’s Koenig’s group coming?” Mercer asked.

“All morning they work to mount the drill tower on one of the trailers to make it potable.”

“Portable,” Erwin corrected. “Beverages are potable.”

“This coffee isn’t.”

“
Da,
portable. Is not going well, I think.” He frowned. “Germans are supposed to be good engineers. These people, bah! Like children with Legos.”

“How about you, Erwin?” Mercer asked. “What’s the weather forecast?”

“That I can’t tell you.” Puhl removed his coat. “But don’t expect the satellite phones or radios to have the best range for a while.”

“Atmospheric interference?”

The scientist nodded. “And it’s just beginning. In another four or five days we can forget about contacting the
Njoerd
except for a few periods of calm when the solar wind dies down.”

“Erwin thinks some communications satellites in orbit are going to be kaput because of radiation,” Igor added.

Marty stood. “Then let’s bust a hump. I want to be able to call my father and tell him we’ve reached the base before this gets worse.”

It took a few minutes to sort out their coats and boots, zip up properly, and secure the Velcro straps around their gloves. It wasn’t cold enough to need face guards, but each man leaving or entering the mess hall had all but a bit of his eyes exposed from under hoods and neck gaiters. Mercer put on his glacier glasses and threw open the door, then leaned into the wind that lifted a dense fog of snow.

Waist-high guide ropes had been strung between the buildings, he noted, to help people during whiteouts. It was not unheard of for someone to become lost during a storm and die just a few yards from camp.

After staking where he wanted to drive the shaft, Mercer studied the snowfield while he waited for the others. Judging the angle of the hill and testing snow in his hands, he realized they could use the ’Cat’s plow to drag away much of the accumulation.

On the wind, he could hear his long-dead grandfather, a quarry foreman from Barre, Vermont. “Never do work yourself that a machine can do for you.” Mercer smiled at the memory. Scraping away much of the surface snow would save them days of backbreaking labor to reach the firn line, where they could employ the hotrocks.

When Ira and Marty arrived with Bernhardt Hoffmann, a young Geo-Research worker, Mercer told them what he wanted to do. By taking thin bites out of the snow, they began digging a trench over the entrance, removing about half a foot of grainy ice with each pass. To keep the slopes gentle, the trench grew to over two hundred yards long. Like a tractor plowing the same part of a field, the ’Cat dug deeper and deeper until the walls of ice flanking the excavation were taller than the vehicle’s roof.

Mercer stopped the work and used a shovel to dig into the walls, testing their strength. While he was more familiar with soils and rock, he was confident that the trench was stable enough to continue for another few vertical feet. He would use some of their stiff sheeting to line the trench for added support before boring with the chemicals.

At one point that afternoon an old Douglas DC-3 cargo plane fitted with skis lumbered over the camp low enough to make Mercer duck unconsciously as he stood on the lip of the trench. The aircraft banked away, sunlight sparking off its windows, before returning upwind. It lined up with the makeshift landing strip Werner Koenig’s people had packed down with the other Sno-Cats. The plane was at least sixty years old and yet roared flawlessly, flaps down, nose pitched high, and dragon’s breaths of snow billowing up in the wake of her radial engines. Her skids hissed against the snow and the pilot had to fight to keep the plane centered as she slowed. It was like a scene in an old movie, Mercer thought, as he watched her pivot for her taxi run back to the camp.

The engines remained at idle as the rear door was thrown open and people began jumping to the ground. They wore the matching Geo-Research snowsuits. They unloaded supplies from the plane with an economy of movement more befitting a well-trained army than a group of scientists. A mound of crates and boxes was stacked on the ice before the door was closed and the plane raced back to the runway. Even as she lifted into the air, two Sno-Cats trundled to the waiting people and the cargo was loaded into the trailers. In all, the plane was on the ground for less than ten minutes.

“They may not be able to fix their drill rig, but they sure can unload an airplane,” Ira said, standing at Mercer’s shoulder.

“I guess,” he replied. “Looks like we get fresh vegetables for dinner and maybe our first mail call.”

“Expecting good news from home?”

Mercer didn’t answer. Something bothered him about what he had just watched, something he couldn’t name. Before he could pull together the thought, another roar shook the site. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned. The mountains that separated the camp from the coast were fifteen or twenty miles away, and yet the air was so clear he could see an avalanche on the flank of one peak begin to build in momentum, a white wave of ice and snow tearing through a narrow valley like a solid wind.

“Look at that!” Marty had a telephoto lens on his video camera.

The avalanche continued to accelerate in undeniable violence as it careened through the valley, its bulk slaloming with each twist in the topography. In seconds, it reached the bottom of the mountain and fanned out onto the snowfield, slowing finally as it expended its gravitational force. A cloud of powder remained suspended above the area.