Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

The Boss patted her on the shoulder. “Good. You be at Building 17 first thing tomorrow—that’s seven in the a.m.—and have your ECWs with you. You got a sleeping bag?”

Matt said, “She can use mine.”

“There’s one in my office at Crary Lab,” said Valena.

“Great. Matt, you help her get her gear up to 17?”

“Sure thing, Boss.”

“Oh, I’m sure I can handle it,” said Valena. “It’s just a big duffel.”

“Then it’s settled. Make sure to get a good breakfast in you, and you’ll probably want to take it easy on the joy juice this gang is pushing on you. You don’t want to dehydrate out there.”

Appreciative laughter broke out around the table. Matt gave her a wink.

“I’ll be there,” said Valena. “Straight up, sober, and ready to drive.” She was grinning so hard that her face hurt. This is a lot better than driving a 1929 Case , she decided. A whole continent’s worth of better!

VALENA FELT A PSYCHOLOGICAL JOLT WHEN, FIVE MINutes later, she stepped out of the lock into the blinding light of Antarctica. It was almost ten in the evening, but the sun was still well above the mountains.

“Confusing, huh?” said Matt, who came out behind her. He smiled merrily at Valena. “Get some sleep. It’s a long way to Black Island, even if it is only sixty miles.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, but she tarried awhile, taking in the odd sight of nighttime sunlight glinting off far glaciers. “Thanks again, Matt. I really appreciate your sprinkling pixie dust for me.”

“Think nothing of it.” He gave her a wave and headed toward his dorm.

The door opened again, and Larry came out. He marched toward her, saying, “So, Betty says you’re an okay kid.”

“Kid? Well, next to you, I guess.”

“I’m forty. Not quite old enough to be your father, but I mean to make a point here. I have some serious business to discuss.”

“What is serious business?”

“You’ve got to understand something, Valena. When we fly one of those planes somewhere, we’re on mission. It’s our job.”

Valena nodded. “So you have something to tell me, and it does not go beyond me.”

“Right. I’m part of the Wing, so pretty much what I understand is ‘salute and execute.’ We’ve got to have people who will take action without questioning things.”

“I see,” she said, not certain that she did.

Larry moved closer to her and snaked one hand around the small of her back. “We are taking precautions. Anybody sees us talking, they’ll just think I’m hitting on you. Okay?”

Valena tried desperately to relax. “Okay, on my great-great-grandfather’s 1929 Case, you have my word.”

Larry nodded. “That will have to do. So what happens when something strange comes up? Like you’re out there flying your mission and you see something that maybe you weren’t supposed to see, or that you weren’t required to see, maybe, but it’s important.”

“Like when you pick up a corpse that’s supposed to have died of altitude sickness,” said Valena.

“Or something else, like when you fly certain investigators out to the site where that someone died of altitude sickness, and they found something that suggested that maybe there was more to it than all that.”

“Such as?”

Larry put his lips close to her ears. “You never heard this, and if someone puts the thumbscrews on you, you don’t know where the notion came from, right?”

“Why, is this information dangerous?”

“Understand that we’re here because you’re here. The Air-lift Wing flies in support of science in the polar regions. We think what you’re doing is important. We’re not doing this just because we love to fly our planes.” He lifted his chin toward McMurdo. “This whole place is here to get you guys into the field and out again.” He pulled her even closer, and began to whisper. “Last Friday, one of our crews flew certain people out to a certain site to make sure things were as certain people said they were.”

“I see.”

“Okay, so here it is: this crew flew the feds out there. Your professor was along to show them how the camp had been set up. Over the winter, the winds had swept the place clean. It was like nothing had ever been there, except for just a few things.”

“What things? Come on, give,” she said, leaning her body against his.

Larry gave her a smile that didn’t match what he was saying, and ran a hand up one of her sleeves. “The wind blows hard up there,” he whispered, breathing into her ear. “It blew like a banshee all winter, really smoothed the place out again, like no one had ever been there. Except that things were buried there.”

“Buried?”

“Yeah. See, last year when your professor wanted in there, we made several flights. Precautionary. First, we had a mission make a reconnaissance flight, to overfly it to make sure we could land on it. The weather’s hell out there, so it’s seldom clear. Well, for a rekkie flight we need severe clear from ground up to mother sun, so we get the shadows we need. We fly it low and slow with a photographer going click-click-click taking pictures,”—he grabbed her tighter with each click—”and we’re mapping out the snow cover to make sure it will hold our ship when we land. No crevasses. Hopefully no snow swamps.”

“Snow swamps?”

“Really soft snow. Hasn’t been packed hard yet.”

Valena answered his squeezes with a coy pat on his chest.

He grinned. “Right. So we don’t land unless we’re sure we’re not about to snag a ski in some mother-sucking crevasse or bury the whole bird in ten feet of vanilla fudge.”

“Got you.”

“But what ho, the powers that be also wanted to make a fuel depot out of the place. It is strategically located, it would seem, so they schedule not only our mission but also a mission to drop twenty barrels of fuel. That’s AvGas for Twin Otters and MoGas for snowmobiles. Right, so we need severe clear for our rekkie mission, but the air drop can go off under cloud cover. So guess what? Our rekkie gets CANX-ed six days running, but the fuel drop goes off on schedule. So now what do we have?”

“Some kind of a delay?”

Larry put his other hand on her other sleeve and massaged her arms through all the layers of down and polypropylene. “Did I mention the storms up there? Wow. Blew like hell for three days after they dropped those barrels. Then finally we get out there for the rekkie and I can show you photographs of those barrels, or what little was still sticking up through the snow.”

“They got buried?”

“Mother Mary and Jesus, they got buried! We could only see the edges of a few of them sticking out.”

Valena said, “So you are in a zone of accumulation.”

“Where the barrels landed, yes. Your professor was collecting ice about a quarter mile away, where the wind kept scouring the fresh snow away.”

“Zone of ablation.”

“What you said. Right, so when we took your man in last year, Raytheon sent extra personnel to dig up the barrels.”

“Did they find them all?”

He slid one hand from her arm up to her cheek. “It’s a lot of work to dig up a barrel that’s been buried in that much hard-packed snow. You may have noticed that they need a snow saw to quarry blocks of it at Happy Camp.”

Valena nodded.

“Now take it to high elevation.”

“Even more work.”

“Now add weather, repeatedly forcing you to retreat to your tent.”

“Gotcha. So some barrels were left.”

“Seven, to be exact. So this year we took special equipment in to find the rest. Ground-penetrating radar works like a charm in such conditions. Shows us where all the bodies are buried.” He laughed mirthlessly at his own joke. “Right. We wanted to know where they are, so if we ever truly need them, we can retrieve them. So anyway, when we made the flight last week, we took along some special equipment.”