Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

He slowed down as he approached, but there was absolutely no sight, or sound, of life within. Perhaps his guess had been mistaken. Lowering his head to duck inside, he had just looked up again- there was another open doorway at the rear, partly blocked by a bunch of hooped barrels-when something whizzed past his cheek and pierced the wall a foot away. The harpoon stuck fast in the wood, the shaft still thrumming beside his ear.

“Don't take another step,” Michael heard, though in the dim confines of the cluttered shop, he still couldn't see his adversary.

“And drop your weapon.”

Michael let the speargun clatter to the brick floor.

There was a huge, freestanding chimneystack made of red bricks-no doubt the forge-and a black iron anvil just in front of it. A figure emerged from behind the chimney. He had doffed the overcoat, and was wearing only a scarlet cavalry uniform, with the sword hanging down at his side and another harpoon already in his hand.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Michael. Michael Wilde.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I've come to find you.”

There was an uneasy pause, filled only by the moaning of the wind that had found its way down the chimney and into the cold forge. There was a faint scent of old, dead coals.

“You must be Lieutenant Copley,” Michael said.

The man looked taken aback but quickly recovered.

“If you know that, then you must have Eleanor.”

“Yes. We do. And she's safe,” Michael assured him. “We're taking good care of her.”

An angry spark lighted in Sinclair's eye, and Michael immediately regretted his choice of words. Surely Sinclair thought no one but he should be charged with that duty.

“She's at the camp,” Michael went on, “at Point Adelie.”

“That's what you call it?”

Sinclair looked, and certainly sounded, like a British aristocrat-someone Michael might have seen in a movie-but there was also a patently mad and unpredictable gleam in his eye. Not that it should have come as such a surprise. Michael just wished he could figure out what he could say that would get him to put down the harpoon.

“We haven't come here to do you any harm,” Michael said. “Far from it. We can help you, in fact.” He wondered if he should keep on talking, or simply shut up.

“How many of you are there?” Sinclair's ragged breath fogged in the air. For the first time, Michael could see what this exertion had cost him; the man was defiant but weak on his feet.

“Four. Just four of us.”

The tip of the harpoon wavered. His eyelids slowly shuttered, then sprang back open again in alarm.

Had he just “refreshed the image,” in Ackerley's words? Michael was reminded, not that he needed to be, of what a dangerous foe he might be facing.

“We're working here at the South Pole,” Michael volunteered. “We're Americans.”

The harpoon declined farther, and Michael could swear he saw the tiniest glint of a smile cross the lieutenant's lips.

“I had a fancy, a long time ago, to see America,” Sinclair said, coughing once or twice. “It seemed ideal. I knew no one there, and no one knew me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw movement in the rear doorway, and Sinclair must have followed his glance. He whirled around, the harpoon raised, and before Michael could do anything more than shout “Stop!” Franklin had barged through the barrels, rifle at the ready.

Sinclair hesitated for just a second, but when the muzzle of the gun came up, he let the harpoon fly. Simultaneously there was a deafening blast from the gun, and chunks of the redbrick chimney exploded in all directions. One of them stung Michael's cheek like a hornet and a smaller bit flew into his eye. He dropped his head to wipe the grit away, and when he looked up again, blearily the harpoon was quivering in the side of a barrel. Franklin was still holding the rifle up, but he was staring down at Sinclair, who was slumped over the anvil, his arms hanging loose and his fingers twitching.

Murphy was just charging in with his own pistol raised, too.

“What did you do?” Michael exclaimed. “What did you do?”

“He threw a harpoon at me!” But even Franklin looked shaken. “I didn't hit him, anyway. I hit the chimney.”

Michael knelt by Sinclair and saw blood seeping from his scalp and matting the blond hair at the back of his head. “What's this then?”

“A ricochet. I was using rubber bullets. It must have ricocheted.”

Murphy crouched on the other side of the anvil, and together they gently lowered Sinclair to the floor, then turned him over onto his back. His eyes were receding into his skull, and his lips were blue. All Michael could think of was how this would affect Eleanor.

“Let's get him back to camp,” Michael said. “We'll need Charlotte to take a look at him, fast.”

Murphy nodded and stood up. “We'll have to tie him up first-”

“He's out cold,” Michael interjected.

“For now,” Murphy shot back. “What if he comes to?” He glanced over at Franklin. “Then we'll load him onto the back of my snowmobile. At the Point, he goes straight into quarantine. Send up a flare so Lawson knows we're here and ready to go.”

As Franklin went outside to shoot off the flare, Michael remembered Ackerley in his own quarantine, laid out on a crate in the meat locker… and how well that had turned out.

“You know the drill,” Murphy said to Michael. “Until further notice, nobody but us needs to know he's there. Got it?”

“I got it.”

“And that goes double for Sleeping Beauty.”

Michael was perfectly willing to keep the secret. What was one more? He was getting to be an old hand at keeping secrets. But he wondered how long it could really be kept. Even if the others at the camp didn't find out about Sinclair, Eleanor might well be another story. For all Michael knew, there was some sort of psychic connection between them. A connection so strong that he would not have been surprised if she was already aware that Sinclair had been found… that he had been injured… and that he was on his way back to her.

December 22, 7:30 p.m.

AS DARRYL TRANSPORTED THE FISH to the aquarium tank, it wriggled so hard in his hands that he nearly lost it.

“Hang on,” he muttered, “hang on,” then he plopped it back into the section of the tank carefully reserved for his previous specimens of Cryothenia hirschii. It swam a bit, nosing around, then settled slowly toward the bottom of the tank, to lie there-virtually motionless and all but transparent-like its companions. If the fish did prove to be an undiscovered species-and Darryl was all but sure that they would-it wouldn't be the most exciting find to a civilian observer. They weren't much to look at. But in the scientific community-where it counted-the discovery would make his name.

Quite apart from their general morphology, their blood alone would launch a thousand lab tests. The antifreeze glycoproteins the blood carried, slightly different from those in the other Antarctic fish he had studied, could one day be used for myriad purposes already under consideration, from deicing airplane wings to insulating deep-sea probes… and who knew what else.

But Darryl's present experiments had an even more bizarre focus. The moment Charlotte Barnes had mentioned that a plasma bag had gone missing from the infirmary, neither of them had doubted for an instant what happened to it. Eleanor Ames had gotten to it. But if she were ever to leave the shelter of Point Adelie to take up residence again in the outside world, she would first have to overcome her dreadful addiction. Darryl was no fool-he knew the kind of media storm she would be the center of, and there would be no way to satisfy, much less keep secret, such an insatiable need.