Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

The doctor looked at her watch. “I agree. His blood pressure is dropping, and vital signs are unstable. If we can’t get them under control soon, we’re going to have to take the risk of flying him to the ER in Cheech, or that son of a bitch will have succeeded anyway.”

VALENA SETTLED IN WITH A CUP OF TEA AND WAITED FOR Manuel Roig to come into the galley. The minutes ticked past, and she got herself a second dessert, and then a third. As the hour for the food lines to close neared, the dining assistants came out of the kitchen and began to remove the steel serving tanks from the steam tables, and she began to wonder if she had missed him, but at last she spotted him through the windows, coming out of the hospital. He crossed to Building 155 and a few moments later arrived in the serving area. There he crossed to the wall adjacent to the kitchen doorway and opened a cupboard door, revealing a warming locker. Waiting there for him was a plate loaded with food.

Valena made one more pass back through the food lines, nailed some fine-looking devil’s food cake and a cup of decaf coffee, then headed back toward the corner of the room where she’d seen him sit down. He had his head bowed over his plate as if he was either at prayer or nearly asleep. He didn’t look up when she approached his table, even though there were very few people left in the galley.

For a moment, Valena felt sorry to disturb him, but urgency won out over manners. “Manny?”

He looked up as if suddenly wakened. “Oh! Uh… Valena, right?”

“You’re good.”

“I’m tired. Excuse me, please, it’s been a long day.”

“May I sit down?”

“Of course. I don’t mean to be rude.” He made a tired gesture toward the chair across from him and returned his concentration to his dinner.

“You were out on the search for the man who got lost. I hear he’s in the hospital, beginning his recovery.”

“Yes, we were lucky, gracias a dios.”

“How did he get to where they found him?” she inquired, immediately sorry that she had applied the wrong pronoun. Manuel had said “we” and she had demoted that to “they.”

“Walked, I suppose.”

“How far was it?”

Manuel made a gesture with his fork and looked glassily through the walls of the building and the rocks and ice beyond. “Five, six miles.”

“How far from his tractor?”

“Call it four, four and a half.”

Valena nodded slowly, thinking. “So, how fast do you think a man can walk in a whiteout? Maybe two miles per hour, tops? And how likely do you think it would be that he’d be able to do that in a straight line?”

Manny raised his gaze from his dinner to look at her inquiringly. “Depends on whether he was following the flags. They found him not far from the route. And conditions might have been less severe where he was walking. It cleared to the west before here in McMurdo. We won’t know until he wakes up.”

“So three hours he was walking, minimum. Was he not a very hardy man?”

Manuel’s eyes drew into a squint. “ Why are you asking?”

“Because I think it odd that he would succumb to exposure that quickly. It’s cold here, sure, but I noticed that when the storm came in last night it actually got a little warmer overall. Even with the windchill factor. So a grown man properly dressed for the conditions walks for three hours and suddenly keels over in a coma?”

“He seems to have fallen off the bottom step of the Challenger and hit his head. Got a concussion. It can really screw up your judgment. In fact he hit it hard enough that he started to bleed inside.”

“Is that the theory?”

“Theory? What are you—oh, I get it, you’re a scientist. Always a theory. So, multiple working hypotheses, you’ve got to have at least one more. What’s the null hypothesis? He didn’t have an accident? Someone hit him? Dragged his body five miles and dumped it on the ice. Nice way of thinking.”

Valena stared at her hands.

Manuel said, “Perhaps there was something else wrong with him. He had a small stroke or something, enough to make him stupid enough to get out of his vehicle during a whiteout. Why? What’s this to you? Listen, I don’t like to be unfriendly, but like I say, it’s been a long—”

“Valena interrupted. I’m supposed to be heading out to the field with Emmett Vanderzee,” she said.

Manuel put down his fork and closed his eyes. Cleared his throat. “Oh. Well, I suppose then there’s a connection, in your mind at least. Forgive me, Valena, but I just can’t tell you how tired I am. Today was in fact the worst day in my life since I left Emmett’s camp.”

“Why?”

He opened his eyes and glared at her. “I do not wish to lose another man to the ice.”

“Look, I’m being pushy, I know. But I was hoping you could tell me what happened last year at Emmett’s camp.”

Manuel bowed his head again. “I’d rather not. Oh please, I’d rather not.”

“You’re teaching Happy Camp, babysitting fingies instead of going up into the mountains with field parties. Why? Was it that bad?”

For several moments, Manuel said nothing. Then, in a harsh whisper, “You simply cannot imagine just how bad it was, Valena. It was my job to keep that man alive, but instead I watched him die. I heard him take his last breath.” He picked up his fork and stabbed at his meat. His hand was shaking. He tried to lift it to his lips. He set it down and left it there.

“So you stayed in the tent with him while Emmett looked for the chute with the Gamow unit?”

Manuel clenched his teeth. “You think you saw a whiteout this morning? That day was infinitely worse.”

“Then how did you look for the Gamow bag? Did you tie up together with ropes?”

“No. Yes! Toward the end we did. As mountaineer, I was in charge, so yes, I had everyone rope up because we were working close to a crevasse field. In places, the surface was sheer ice, and our crampons were of little comfort. If anyone lost their footing and landed on their belly, they’d slide for thousands of feet, accelerating before they hit something. So yes, we were tied in. But that was after the storm had begun to abate. You must understand that no one could do anything while it was blowing. We heard the Herc fly over, we heard the pilot call us over the radio to say he’d made the drop, that it should be right on top of us, but we could not find it.”

“Major Bentley,” she guessed. “He was the pilot in the Herc.”

“And he was the pilot with the crew that came and took us out.”

“How big an object was this they dropped?”

Manuel shook his head in frustration. “You ask this. Everybody has asked this. ‘A four-foot cube of wood and iron with a big, orange parachute on it and you can’t find the thing,’ they say. And what do I have to tell them in reply? Nothing. We could not find it, I tell them. It was nowhere.”

“Four feet on a side?”

“That’s what the loadmaster told me later. He packed the thing on a four-by-four wooden pallet. It was too light, he said, so he put a fifty-five-gallon barrel of fuel on it, to give it weight. And I tell you, it was nowhere to be found. It was almost like they hadn’t dropped it at all.” He made a slashing motion with his hand. He was getting angry.

Valena decided that it was politic to change the subject slightly. “Who was there? Were you all in the same tent?”

Manuel stared at the tabletop. “Why are you asking all these questions?”

“Because I’m supposed to be on a flight out of here Thursday morning. I’ve got less than thirty-six hours to clear Emmett or I go home. I’m supposed to do something called bag drag tomorrow evening. My little clock is ticking down.”