Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“About the missing Cat driver. Yes. Any news?”

“Not yet. Anything back from Bentley?”

“I was just typing him another e-mail. This is what I got from him this morning.”

Bentley’s message glowed from his screen:

Listen, chucklehead, you weren’t there last year when we loaded that corpsicle onto the bird. It was not pretty. I agree that there was something funny about what we found up there this year, but I vote we leave this one to the proper authorities. What’s over is over. Kick it upstairs to the Colonel and be done with it.

Marilyn said, “By that I take it that he means that you and I are improper authorities.”

Hugh snorted. “Right.” He wrote:

Okay, dipstick, we’ll hold short for takeoff, but let’s keep our engines warm. SAR is at this moment out on the ice looking for a missing somebody. They just found his tractor between the runway and town but he’s not in it. I tell you, the Hughster has a nose that smells rot in all its forms, and ol’ Wrong Way Wood here is flaring a nostril, too. Something is going south down here, bigtime, and when we say “south” down here, we mean SOUTH.

Hugh hit send and leaned back in his chair. “Loadmaster got everything dialed in for emergency takeoff with medical crew?”

Marilyn snorted softly, as if to say, Need you ask?

Hugh said, “I sure don’t like sitting when something like this is going on.”

Marilyn’s face had set like stone, but her words came out light and easy. “What say we get ourselves out to the runway and drink that galley’s coffee for a while? This pot’s almost out.”

AFTER HELPING THE OTHER HAPPY CAMP PARTICIPANTS unload the Delta into the cargo bay at the Science Support Center, Valena went looking for Manuel Roig

“Didn’t you hear?” Dustin asked. “He’s gone off with the search and rescue team.”

Valena wrinkled her brow. “But we’re already rescued.”

“Not you, someone else. You were never in danger. You had food and water and fuel and tents and each other. This guy’s out there alone in the storm in a tractor. Scratch that, without a tractor. They just found the one he’d been driving and he’s not in it.”

“How strange,” Valena said. “Why would he leave his tractor in this weather? I mean, shouldn’t he have stayed inside it and waited for the storm to let up?”

Dustin gave her a look of appraisal. “Go to the head of the class,” he said.

“Then something’s wrong. I mean, really wrong.”

Dustin said nothing.

“What’s his name?”

“Steve Myer. Now, if you’ll excuse me. Class is dismissed. I have to go help with the search myself.”

Valena nodded. As she watched Dustin disappear out into the storm, she ran down her mental list of people who had been with Vanderzee during his previous season on the ice. Steve Myer was not a match.

Em Hansen’s words of caution flashed in Valena’s mind. Waiting for those hours on the ice, unable to see farther than she could have thrown a cinder block, it had begun to come home to her that this was not a safe place. Caution was necessary for even the simplest, most basic things, like staying alive.

Uncertain what to do next, she left the building and walked back along the rutted road that led to Building 155 and her dorm room. Suddenly the banks of melting snow and ice that bordered the path seemed painfully fragile. Life was finite in Antarctica, almost insignificant when opposed to the overwhelming expanse of ice that surrounded her. She had cruised through Happy Camp with arrogance, pleased with herself for having withstood its hardships with such ease, confident that theirs had been a practice situation made uncomfortable for the sake of training. But now a real Antarctican doing a real Antarctic job was missing and presumed in real trouble. A tractor driver. Valena pictured her grandfather on his farm tractor, pulling the potato harvester, caught in a sudden storm.

Grandpa. Being a practical man, he had let her drive the tractor when needed because she drove it well. Through hard work, she had built a place in his life.

Rounding the corner past the McMurdo General Hospital, she humped her duffel up the steps to the entrance into Building 155. She pushed open the door and walked inside.

Life seemed oddly normal within the building. People were walking here and there up and down the hallways, one stepping into the coatroom alcove to fetch a parka, another moving into the computer bay halfway down the main hallway, a third rushing up the steps that led to the galley.

Valena stood at the nexus of the hallways, glazed with fatigue. Blinking to adjust her eyes to the interior light, she glanced around, taking in details of her surroundings. A TV monitor mounted on the wall presented various data, the screen changing every few seconds. It presented local time: 13:32. Military time , she told herself. Subtract twelve; so it’s half past one in the afternoon. Damn, lunch is over. While waiting to be brought in from Happy Camp, she had eaten a couple of helpings of reconstituted freeze-dried crud, but her stomach longed for something more recognizably foodlike, and the idea of sitting on a chair at a table in a heated room while she ate it seemed downright heavenly.

The monitor rolled to a different screen, this one listing the flight schedules for the day, all canceled. Valena closed her eyes and opened them again, correlating this information with her immediate concerns. Flights north have all been bumped forward a day, which means that I won’t be sent home tomorrow!

Smiling with new hope, she headed down the hallway that led to her room with the lovely concept of a hot shower blooming in her imagination. Halfway to the door to the dorm rooms, she noticed a pair of bulletin boards housed behind locking glass doors and stopped to take a look. They appeared to be passenger manifests: southbound flights coming from New Zealand and those going onward to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to the left; northbound to New Zealand to the right. Today’s lists were in place, but marked CANX, which, she reasoned, must be military-abbreviation-ese for canceled.

She spotted her name on the northbound list for the next day’s flight, confirmed that the flight was marked CANX, and let out a sigh of relief. Also on the list she found Calvin Hart’s name. It seemed that everyone working for Emmett Vanderzee was being sent home.

Not surprisingly, the southbound manifest did not list Emmett Vanderzee’s name among the arriving flood of scientists, all of whom must be pacing the streets of Christchurch waiting for the weather to clear. And she realized that Major Bentley would be stuck in New Zealand as well. She would not be questioning him at the Tractor Club meeting tonight. It seemed that every good thing that happened in Antarctica had a bad side as well.

Valena headed down the hallway toward the dormitory rooms and the hot shower and clean underwear that awaited her there. She told herself that, after showering, she would check her e-mails and would find a message from Taha or even one from Emmett, saying that everything had been straightened out and that they would join her just as quickly as they could. She would then celebrate by going to the little store she had spotted near the entrance to the galley and get some postcards to send to her grandpa and the teacher from grade school who had first gotten her interested in science. And then she would take a walk in the wind and the snow.

Taped to her dormitory room door she found a note from an administrator at the Chalet, which read:

We’ve managed to squeeze you onto an LC-130 flight to New Zealand Thursday morning. Sorry for the delay. Please see me in the Chalet for details.