Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

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.”

“Who was with you the most?”

Sheila continued in a tone that told Valena she had answered these questions too many times. “We had the patient in there, to keep him warm. Had the stove running constantly. We had put it down on the floor and laid him out on the preparation table above it to keep him up off the cold, though that only raised him to something right around freezing. I wasn’t paying much attention to who was there and who was not. Emmett was there with him continually, except when he went out.”