Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

His examination lasted fifteen minutes, during which nobody else spoke. At last, he straightened up and went to wash his hands in the sink. There was no water, so he flicked the excess matter from his hands and wiped them with a towel. Then he paced the length of the hut, turned, walked back.

Suddenly, Glinn went still. He seemed to have come to a decision. He plucked a radio from the table. "Thompson?"

"Yes, sir."

"What's the status on the generator?"

"Britton is bringing it herself; she wouldn't risk her crew. She says Brambell will come as soon as it's safe. The storm is supposed to ease by dawn."

The radio beeped and Glinn switched frequencies. "Found Hill," came Garza's terse voice.

"Yes?"

"He was buried in a snowdrift. Throat cut. Very professional piece of work."

"Thank you, Mr. Garza." Glinn's profile was dully illuminated in the emergency light of the hut. A single bead of sweat stood on his brow.

"And there's a pair of snowshoes hidden in the entrance shack. Like the glove, they're not ours."

"I see. Bring Hill's body to the medical hut, please. We wouldn't want it to freeze before Dr. Brambell arrives; that would be inconvenient."

"So who was this other man?" McFarlane asked.

Instead of answering, Glinn turned away and murmured something in Spanish, just loud enough for McFarlane to catch: "You are not a wise man, mi Comandante. Not a wise man at all."

Isla Desolación,

July 23, 12:05 P.M.

THE STORM eased, and forty-eight hours passed without further incident. Security was beefed up considerably; guard duty was tripled, additional cameras were installed, and a perimeter of motion-detecting sensors was sunk into the snow around the operation.

Meanwhile, work on the sunken roadway proceeded at a breakneck pace. As soon as one section was built, the meteorite and cart were dragged along, inch by inch, to rest only while the capstan was repositioned, a new section of roadway built, and the previous section filled in. Safety precautions around the meteorite had been redoubled.

At last, the excavators reached the interior of the snowfield. Here, sheltered beneath almost two hundred feet of solid ice, the meteorite waited while digging teams cored through the snowfield from both ends.

Eli Glinn stood inside the mouth of the ice tunnel, watching the progress as the great machines worked. All had gone according to plan, despite the two recent deaths. Half a dozen thick hoses snaked out of the hole in the ice, diesel fumes and soot spewing from their ends: a jury-rigged forced-air system to suck exhaust from the tunnel while the heavy machinery carved through the ice. It was beautiful in its way, Glinn thought, one more engineering marvel in a long list since the project had begun. The walls and ceiling of the tunnel were rough-edged and irregular, fractal in their endless knobs and ridges. A million cracks and fissures ran away in crazy spiderwebs across the walls, white against the shockingly deep blue of the ice. Only the floor was even, covered with the omnipresent crushed gravel over which the cart would travel.

A single row of fluorescent lights lit the tunnel. Peering ahead, Glinn could see the meteorite on its cart, a red blob inside an eerie blue tube. The tunnel echoed with the crashing and grinding of unseen machinery. There was a wink of headlights in the distance, then some kind of vehicle made its way around the meteorite and came toward him. It was a train of ore carts, full of glittering blue shards of ice.

The revelation that the meteorite could kill by touch had startled Glinn more than he cared to admit. Despite that he had instituted orders never to touch the rock directly, he had always considered this merely a judicious precaution. He sensed that McFarlane was right: the touch had caused the explosion. There seemed to be no other possible answer. A strategic recalculation had become necessary. It had caused yet another revision in his failure-success analysis — one that required virtually all of EES's computer capacity back in New York to process.

Glinn looked once again at the red rock, sitting like a huge gemstone on its bed of greenheart oak. This was the thing that killed Vallenar's man, killed Rochefort and Evans, killed Masangkay. Strange that it had not killed Lloyd. It was undeniably deadly... but the fact was, they were still ahead of schedule on fatalities. The volcano project had cost fourteen lives, including one meddling government minister who insisted on being where he shouldn't have been. Glinn reminded himself that, despite the strangeness of the rock, despite the problem of the Chilean destroyer, this remained essentially a heavy moving job.

He glanced at his watch. McFarlane and Amira would be on time; they always were. And he could see them now, stepping out of a snowcat at the mouth of the ice tunnel, McFarlane lugging a duffel bag full of instruments. In five minutes they were at Glinn's side. He turned to them. "You've got forty minutes until the tunnel is complete and the meteorite is moved again. Make good use of it."

"We intend to," said Amira.

He watched her pulling gear out of the duffel and setting up instruments, while McFarlane silently took pictures of the rock with a digital camera. She was capable. McFarlane had learned about her reports, as he had expected. This had had the desired effect: it put McFarlane on notice that his behavior was being scrutinized. It also gave Amira an ethical dilemma to occupy herself with, always helpful in distracting her from the thornier moral questions she had a tendency to ask. Moral questions that had no place in a cold-blooded engineering project. McFarlane had taken it better than the profile predicted. A complicated man, and one who had proven himself unusually useful.

Glinn noticed another cat arriving, also with a passenger. Sally Britton stepped out, a long coat of navy blue wool billowing out behind her. Uncharacteristically, there was no officer's cap on her head, and her wheat-colored hair gleamed in the lights of the tunnel. Glinn smiled. He had also been expecting this, ever since the explosion that killed the Chilean spy. Expecting it, even looking forward to it.

As Britton drew near, Glinn turned toward her with a genuinely welcoming smile. He took her hand. "Nice to see you, Captain. What brings you down here?"

Britton looked around, her intelligent green eyes taking in everything. They froze when they saw the meteorite.

"Good God," she said, her step suddenly faltering.

Glinn smiled. "It's always a shock at first sight."

She nodded wordlessly.

"Nothing great can happen in this world, Captain, without some difficulty." Glinn spoke quietly, but with great force. "It's the scientific discovery of the century." Glinn did not particularly care about its value to science; his interest was solely in the engineering aspects. But he was not going to eschew a little drama, if it served his purposes.

Britton continued staring. "They said it was red, but I had no idea..."

The roar of heavy machinery echoed down the ice tunnel as she stared: one minute, then two. At last, with obvious effort, she took a breath, pulled her eyes away, and faced him.

"Two more people have been killed. But what news we've had from you has been slow in coming, and rumors are everywhere. The crew are nervous, and so are my officers. I need to know exactly what happened, and why."

Glinn nodded, waiting.

"That meteorite is not coming on board my ship until I'm convinced it's safe." She said it all at once and then stood firm, her slim, small form planted on the gravel.

Glinn smiled. This was one hundred percent Sally Britton. Every day he admired her more.

"I feel exactly the same way," he said.

She looked at him, off balance, obviously having expected resistance.