Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

Success, Darryl thought, as he bent down to inhale the first fumes of this vintage wine… and immediately recoiled.

If he'd been wondering if the wine would still be even remotely drinkable, he would wonder no more. The odor was vile. He gave it a few seconds to dissipate, then, pricked by curiosity, put his nose to the bottle again. It wasn't just a bad aroma-and it wasn't just wine that had long ago turned to vinegar. The scent was something else, and it was something that, to a biologist, was disturbingly familiar. His brow furrowed, and he opened a counter drawer to remove and prepare a clean slide.

“All right, mates,” Calloway was saying in his manufactured Aussie accent, “I want you to listen carefully to what I'm about to say and do exactly what I tell you.”

Suited up once more in the suffocating dive suit, and with Bill Lawson dressed just the same, Michael was not about to argue with anything. He just wanted to get into the water as quickly as possible.

“You've got dual tanks today, but that still gives you a max- max, I say-of ninety minutes. And given the exertion of sawing through submarine ice, probably a fair bit less than that. Any difficulty with the saw, and you come up, pronto! Got that?”

Michael and Lawson nodded.

“That means, any tear in your suit, no matter how small, and you come straight up. Any tear in your skin-anything that leaks blood-and you come up even faster. We've seen leopard seals around the dive hut today, and you know they're not your friends.”

Michael did know-the Weddels were frisky but harmless; their close cousins, distinguishable by their large reptilian heads, were not. A Weddell would play with you, but a leopard, with its immense curving mouth, would bite.

“If you have to, defend yourselves with the ice saws.”

Each of them had been equipped with a fifty-two-inch-long Nils Master ice saw; it wasn't necessarily the most precise ice-cutting instrument, but with its wing-nut design and razor-sharp teeth, angled inward like a shark's, nothing could cut through underwater ice faster.

“Michael, you know where you're going, right? So you'll go down first and lead the way. Bill, you take the net and salvage line and follow.”

Michael was nodding the whole time while he inched in his fins toward the beckoning ice hole. A cool bloom seemed to rise up off it and into the overheated dive hut, and he noted that its diameter had been enlarged.

“That's it then, mates,” Calloway said, slapping Michael on the shoulder to indicate it was time to go. “Masks on, feet in the deep freeze.”

Michael sat at the edge of the hole, then slipped down the icy funnel and into the sea. He didn't have to go in search of the sunken chest; an earlier dive team had already gone down and retrieved it, and he'd seen a team of huskies dragging it back on a sledge toward the base camp. A big guy named Danzig was mushing them, and as he passed Michael, he raised one hand in salute. Word had quickly spread around the compound that Michael had made a pretty unusual find, and even if the ice princess didn't turn up, his stock had definitely risen.

Michael knew that she was going to turn up.

After orienting himself in the water, and waiting for Lawson to take the plunge, Michael turned away from the dive and safety holes and swam off toward the glacier wall that appeared in the distance. Much as he regretted it, he did not have his camera with him; Murphy had forbidden it. “I don't want you mucking around with photography down there,” he'd said. “You have limited time, and if you're right about what you saw”-he still hadn't been willing entirely to concede the point-”you're going to have your hands full helping Bill to cut through all that ice.” With his saw in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Michael propelled himself through the water like a seal, undulating his body and working his fins for all they were worth. Still, it was harder work, and more time-consuming than he thought, just to reach the glacier. It was difficult to gauge distances underwater, and especially so there, where the ice cap cast a pall over everything. Once in a while, a break in the ice might let some direct rays of sunlight penetrate the depths, creating a shaft of gold aimed straight at the black and benthic regions below, but otherwise the ocean water was a very pale and clear blue, like an early-morning sky in summer.

And his glove was leaking-not a lot, not so much to be dangerous, but enough to make things uncomfortable already. The glove was the one noncontiguous part of the suit, and as such, no matter how tightly you tried to seal it, there could be a certain amount of penetration. The linings underneath it absorbed the moisture as it leaked in, eventually bringing it to body temperature, but in the meantime it was a numbingly cold reminder of just what a hostile climate he was traveling in.

He slowed up in the water and turned to make sure Lawson- the ever-cheerful Boy Scout leader-was still with him. He could see his face mask glittering in the water, the sharp tip of his ice saw, and the salvage line playing out behind him; it was tied to his harness and tethered up top to a 200-hp winch behind the dive hut. The line, normally used for dredging up oil barrels and sunken wreckage, had two thousand yards on it and could withstand a couple thousand pounds of weight. Michael turned around again and continued toward the glacier. As it loomed above him, and below, he felt a note of hesitation, even fear, that he had not felt the first time. Then, he had been unaware of what the ice held. Now, he not only knew, but he was there to steal it. The walls of ice seemed more defensive now, like the walls of a fortress erected by some ancient god of sea and ice, and Michael felt like a soldier about to try to breach them.

There was even a low murmur of noise, a crackling and grinding, from the ice itself. He hadn't noticed it before. But the immense glacier was moving, it was always moving, though so slowly it could not be seen, and only seldom heard. Michael drew closer to the wall, and now he knew that the hard part was about to begin. The wall was vast, and finding the body was a question not only of longitude but of latitude. He could roughly gauge the section of wall where he had seen it, but at what depth? He would have to travel both up and down the wall, and that could take time. He motioned at one large area with his arm, and indicated to Lawson that he should begin to scout the glacier there. Michael himself moved thirty yards off, and to orient himself took one long look back at what was called the down line-it extended from the safety hole, far, far away, and there were colored pennants attached to it for better visibility. He tried to recall if this was the angle he'd had on it the day before. But he couldn't remember at all. He had been so shocked that he'd just paddled away backwards, in a burst of bubbles and flapping fins.

What he did remember was the quality of the light, and that, he decided, would be his best clue. The weather today was much like the day before, and the unchanging sunlight-if he could just remember how bright, or dim, it had been when he discovered the body-could steer him in the right direction. The water and the light was not the pristine blue that he was inhabiting now, so he deflated his suit and allowed himself to sink, staying close to the wall, a dozen yards or so. He swept the flashlight across its rough mottled surface in even strokes, back and forth, while looking for anything- a fissure in the rock, an unusual formation-that might trigger a memory. But so far, he saw nothing.

What he did notice was the creeping cold, colder than the water even a little ways off. The iceberg gave off a freezing breath that made him have to wipe his mask with the back of one glove. It also made him wonder what it could possibly be like to be a captive of that ice for decades, even centuries. To be absorbed, suspended, immobilized-like one of Darryl's specimens floating in a jar of formaldehyde-forever. Lifeless, but immaculately preserved. Dead, but not gone.