Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“Don’t play hero,” she said angrily as she began to work on him. “If your feet freeze, call a halt to warm them again. If you get severely frostbitten, we won’t be able to carry you.”

“But our pace is too slow as it is,” Erwin countered through gritted teeth as pain splintered his warming toes. “I won’t be the one to let the others down.”

“You will if we have to leave you,” Anika snapped as she rubbed the blood into his feet.

High above, the clouds that had hidden the sky for two days finally cleared. The night exploded in a dazzling display of northern lights, dancing curtains in an otherworldly light show. On the scientific level, Mercer knew the ribbons of color were a result of the solar wind striking certain molecules in the atmosphere — red for nitrogen, violet for ionized nitrogen, and green for oxygen — but it was the aesthetics of the borealis that made him gape with the others. The aurora was visceral, pulsing and seemingly alive.

They watched the show for five minutes before Mercer realized the wind had died.

The pitaraq is a gravity-driven wind. It starts from south and then there is calm. You have about ten minutes to find shelter. It was Igor Bulgarin’s voice Mercer heard in his head.

“Everybody, find cover! Now!” Mercer was in motion even as he spoke.

Like the previous night when the wind had shifted, their hideouts would be on the wrong side of a ridge when the pitaraq struck. Mercer dumped the food he was cooking, cinched his pack, and lunged over the rocky crest. He tumbled down the other side until he landed in deep snow. Quickly he began to dig, scooping out armfuls of snow in a frantic race. A few seconds later, the others joined him. Mercer didn’t bother to explain his actions. His frenzied digging was enough to galvanize them. They tunneled into the snow, burrowing toward the protection of the rocks. Mercer had no way to judge how deep they needed to be. Even when he heard a gentle whisper of wind whistling across the entrance to his tunnel he continued mining snow, trying to pack it behind him as he dug downward.

He flipped on a flashlight, and glittering snow crystals reflected the light like jewels. For an illusionary moment he felt safely cocooned in the snow’s embrace. His breathing was ragged and his hands felt stiff and frozen. He’d dug his tunnel without his gloves. He donned them, massaging his fingers to get the blood flowing again.

“Can anyone hear me?” His voice was deadened by the weight of snow.

“Yes,” Anika replied. She sounded like she was many yards away but was doubtlessly much closer.

“Can you reach me?”

“Yes, I see your light through the snow.”

That was the last voice Mercer heard for the rest of the night, even when Anika bored her way to him and Ira and Erwin found them a short time later. A few feet over their heads, the millions of tons of air that had been blowing northward to form a massive high-pressure area came back in a screaming fury. The transition from a dead calm to a hurricane-force gale was measured in seconds. Snow and ice that had accumulated for years was whipped away, exposing rock that hadn’t seen the surface in decades, if ever.

The noise was a banshee cry that scraped along nerves like an electric current. Even though they were screened by layers of snow, it was still impossible to speak into the shrieking onslaught. Anika burrowed into Mercer’s arms, her body pressed to him as if he could somehow protect her if the wind found them. Ira was mashed to Mercer’s other side and by the other man’s movements Mercer could tell he was clutching one of the others. Marty was on the far side of Anika, lost in Hilda’s panicked embrace.

No power on earth could sustain the amount of energy the wind carried for very long, and after five minutes Mercer was certain the storm had expended itself. The sound seemed to be fading.

He could just barely hear Anika crying.

Then the true wind hit them. The first gust had merely been the prelude to the actual pitaraq . Driven by its own weight, the collapsing high-pressure front acted like water, pouring across the ice, ripping away everything in its path at a speed approaching a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Torn and tortured, the glacier’s surface came alive with raking barrages of snow and ice and rock. They could feel the ground shudder as large chunks of ice slammed into the wall of rock protecting them. Ice cracked like exploding artillery shells. Mercer pressed his gloves to his head, trying to save his hearing from the sound of ten thousand steam whistles erupting at once.

It went on without letup for an hour. Then two. Then three. Screaming just above them with a rapacious hunger unlike anything they had ever heard. Nestled below the surface, Mercer knew that if the wind found them he’d never know it. They’d be pulled from their burrow and tossed miles before the act could register. It would be a quick way to die, and by the fifth hour he was wondering if death would have been preferable to the relentless fear of surviving the storm.

Slowly, slowly it began to register that he could hear Anika again. She was mumbling, a prayer perhaps, but what mattered was that her voice could be heard above the storm’s screech. Mercer sagged in relief. He pulled her face from where it was buried under his arm. Her eyes were enormous, and yet he could see determination in them.

“The wind’s dying.”

She nodded in understanding, barely able to hear his voice. Her grip relaxed to a hug that in any other circumstance Mercer would have enjoyed. He reached across her and felt for Marty’s hand, giving him a reassuring squeeze before turning so he could speak to Ira.

“Think we can chance digging ourselves out?” the submariner asked before Mercer could pose the same question. “Erwin’s on the other side of me, and it turns out he’s claustrophobic. I don’t want to be here when he regains consciousness.”

“What happened to him?”

“He held on until about an hour ago and then he freaked out. I had to put a choke hold on him.”

Mercer was impressed by the unorthodox cure. “You learn that trick in the Navy?”

In the glare of the flashlight, Ira flashed a wry smile. “Actually I did. The current captain of the attack sub Tallahassee owes his career to me for getting him over his fear of cramped spaces.”

As the pitaraq subsided, Mercer and Ira began to claw at the surface of their den, compressing the fallen snow to the side or beneath themselves as they expanded the burrow. In ten minutes they could kneel upright, and in twenty they could stand, using the hollows where they’d waited out the storm for the waste snow.

“I feel like a goddamn mole,” Ira said.

“You go a few more days without a shower, you’ll smell like one too.” Mercer felt they were almost to the surface. “Any idea about Magnus?”

“I lost track shortly after the storm hit.”

“While I’m digging, see if you can find him.”

“You got it.”

By Mercer’s watch, it was a quarter of three in the morning when the tunnel face collapsed on him. He thrashed against the snow and suddenly found himself free. He stood, quickly shaking snow off himself like a dog after a water retrieve, not realizing how warm the tunnel had become until he tasted the crisp Arctic air once again. In the dim light of a hidden moon he looked around. It appeared as if nothing had changed but the drift that had entombed them was substantially deeper and longer than it had been. Other than that, the snow ripped from the ice had been replaced by identical snow from farther up the coast. Even in the face of such an awesome force as the pitaraq , Greenland remained virtually unchanged.