Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

The pilot on duty was not the talkative type, which was fine with Valena. Her brain was already in Crary Lab, where she would requisition a microscope just as quickly as she could. The gorgeous ridges and valleys rolled past beneath them as they flew south to pick up another passenger. There were stunning views of volcanic dikes, swarms laid naked along glacier-polished mountain tops. Like a settling leaf, the little craft spiraled down into the steep-sided valley that held the frozen length of Lake Bonney. They barreled out from the edge of the continent out across the ice, passing the big rig run by the ANDRILL project. When they landed at McMurdo, she refused a ride to her dorm, instead heading straight up the hill to the lab, saying that she would be back for her gear.

In Crary, she stopped only an instant at Emmett’s office to check for notes—there were none—then set down her duffel and parka and relocked the door before heading up the ramp in search of a binocular microscope, which she found in the storeroom near the head offices. She peered at the contents of the plastic bags. Instantly, she saw more than she had expected. Not only did the sample from her boots have lithic fragments and phenocrysts, it had tiny little penguin feathers, their short, thick barbules unmistakably belonging to flightless birds.

To identify the phenocrysts, she headed down the hallway and found a young woman from the Erebus team.

“Anorthoclase,” said the vulcanologist as she squinted through the lens. “Yeah, that’s the main feldspar phenocryst you get around here.”

“Do you find it only in the basalts on Cape Royds?” asked Valena hopefully.

“Oh, heck no, it’s pandemic. And to be more specific, those aren’t basalts, they’re phonolites. It’s more alkaline than your basic basalt.”

“Oh. Okay. But I don’t see the anorthoclase phenocrysts here in Mac Town.”

“No, but half the flows on the island have it, though the size of the crystals may vary.”

Valena thanked her, stuffed the samples into her pockets for safekeeping, relocked the door to the office, and headed off to find Jim Skehan. He wasn’t in his office, so she went to the library and looked for e-mail messages. There was one from her friends at the Airlift Wing:

Valena

Edgar Hallowell served during Iraqi Freedom. Went AWOL en route court martial for theft of body armor. No current address.

There was also one from Em Hansen:

Valena

I checked with a friend at the FBI lab, here forwarded. Try to stay warm. Stay out of trouble. Em

The forwarded e-mail from the FBI lab began:

Feldspars and broken antique glass—well how cool is that? Shackleton’s discards would be worth money even if they were Budweiser bottles. In 1907, quality control still wasn’t the big thing in manufacturing processes. There would be a lot of variability—measurable variability—in the composition of those bottles, even within a single bottle. Also, they didn’t have the respect we have today for heavy metals leaching from containers, and there would probably be some interesting trace elements in the bottles too. The light green and brown glass were probably colored by iron oxides (differing oxidation states), and the blue was usually cobalt oxides.

There was a long paragraph on analytical equipment she could use to identify the bottle glass, how large a sample she needed for each, but the lab tech had assured her that that the binocular microscope was as good as it was going to get here in McMurdo. She was going to have to find a lower-tech way of establishing a connection between boot grit and Cape Royds.

She read onward:

Volcanos are as distinctive as people. Each one spews out its own unique output, and each eruption is a little different. Chemically, even the start of an eruption is different than the end. If you had a decent sample and the right reference material, you could tell which volcano produced which ash, and that will tell you where someone/something has been.

Valena pondered this. So petrography as it is practiced at the FBI lab is a little more detailed than a volcanologist can manage here with a hand lens. That’s a relief!

She read on to the closing salutations:

As for the penguin guano, well, the defense community always said that the FBI Lab doesn’t do shit, and in this case they’d be right.

Valena threw back her head and laughed. But her mind was still racing. She had come up dry trying to figure out who had killed the journalist, but if she could nail the penguin egg theft to the man who had been seen riding south along the route from Cape Evans to Hut Point the morning Steve was killed, and if that person had also been at Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp when the journalist was killed, then she might be able to tear a hole in the whole picture, at minimum opening the way for doubt in the minds of the feds. And she thought she knew exactly how to identify that way.

HUGH MULLER STOOD UP FROM HIS TABLE IN THE GALley and scanned the room for any sign of Valena. He unconsciously stood in almost full brace, his major’s leaves flashing on his fatigues.

“She’d be coming through the food lines, wouldn’t she?” said Marilyn.

“Sit down, Hugh,” said Waylon. “You don’t want to draw attention to this.”

Marilyn said, “It may be time to come out into the open with this, Waylon.”

“There’s Matt, I’ll ask him if he’s seen her,” said Hugh. He moved through the crowd to the table where the heavy equipment operator was sitting with a few other men. “Tractor Matt,” he said, making it sound like a social call. “You heard from our newest recruit lately?”

“You mean Tractor Valena?” said Matt. He wasn’t smiling. “I was just talking about her with Father Jim here. Jim, Hugh flew the mission last year to the high camp.”

Skehan stood up and shook Hugh’s hand. “We sent her into the field. She was expected back on a helo this morning, but she has not reported in. I left a note for her, but it’s gone now, and I don’t think it was her that took it down.”

“That’s not good,” said Hugh.

“No, in fact, that’s bad.”

Hugh said, “I left a note for her yesterday. I don’t suppose it was there when you last checked.”

Skehan shook his head. “I put my note up early this morning, well before she was due, and there were no notes waiting for her.”

Hugh leaned closer to the scientist. “I’m going to take a chance here. We military generally keep to ourselves here on the ice, but this is a special case. When that man was killed up in the high camp, it was because our drop bundle was tampered with, and that makes it personal. So I think it’s time we told each other everything we know, and put our heads together on this.”

“Amen, brother.”

Hugh said, “Valena asked us to look into the military record of a man named Edgar Hallowell. There was an Edgar Hallowell who served in Iraq at the beginning of the war. He was suspected of a number of petty thefts, but when he got to stealing body armor, the investigation went onto the fast track. They brought him back to the States for court-martial, but he went AWOL. We were able to obtain a photograph of him. Well, I was the pilot who flew Vanderzee’s event into the high camp last year, and guess what?”

Skehan’s eyes narrowed. “Cal Hart.”

“Got it in one.”

Skehan’s face grew dark with anger. “We do our very best science, and an opportunist threatens to take us down.”

Matt said, “That problem goes all the way to the White House.”

Skehan stood up. “I’m on my way to Bellamy’s office.”

VALENA STOPPED FIRST AT THE POST OFFICE, WHICH WAS housed in one end of a large, white building just down the hill from the Boss’s office in Building 17. At the end of the room, she found a window where stamps were sold and packages weighed. She presented herself to the clerk.