Lincoln Child - Terminal Freeze

“A very pragmatic approach. What are subfossils? Really small fossils?”

Marshall had to laugh again. “That’s what paleontologists call fossils less than ten thousand years old.”

“I see.” She turned to the struggling Faraday. “And Dr. Faraday, you’re an evolutionary biologist, right?”

Faraday stopped to catch his breath, and the others halted obligingly. He nodded as he shifted his day pack from one shoulder to the other.

“And that means…?”

“Put simply, I study how species change over time,” Faraday puffed.

“And why are you doing it here, in such an inhospitable place?”

“My research involves the effect of global warming on species development.”

A smile formed on her face. “So you really are working on global warming. While Dr. Marshall, here, is simply taking advantage of it.”

Alarm bells rang faintly in Marshall ’s head: Terra Prime had funded their expedition with the understanding it would involve global warming. But Ekberg’s smile was a friendly one, and so he just smiled in return.

They stopped a moment so Ekberg could transcribe a few more notes. Marshall waited, looking out over the horizon. Then he paused. Plucking out his binoculars, he passed them to Ekberg. “Take a look. Out there on the permafrost, to the southwest.”

She peered through the glasses a moment. “Speak of the devil. Two polar bears.” She stared a minute, then passed the binoculars back. “Do we need to turn back?”

“We should be fine up here on the mountain. Normally, one of us would be armed.”

“So why aren’t we?”

“I refuse to carry a weapon. And Wright here is absentminded. Come on, we should get going.”

As they approached the glacier, Marshall looked up a little apprehensively at the glacial wall, but the recent frigid temperatures had arrested its retreat and the ice face looked much the same as it had three days ago when the cave was first exposed.

“That’s the cave,” he said, pointing at the black maw near the base of the glacier.

Ekberg glanced toward it. Although her face betrayed nothing, Marshall knew she must be disappointed not to see inside. He nodded to Faraday. The biologist reached into the pocket of his parka, pulled out a large glossy photograph, and handed it to Ekberg.

“ This is what we found,” Marshall said. “A print from our video recording.”

She took the photo eagerly. Staring at it, she caught her breath audibly.

“It died with its eyes open,” she breathed.

Nobody answered; nobody needed to.

“My God. What is it?”

“We can’t be sure,” he replied. “As you can see from the photo, the ice is very opaque, and we can only see the eyes, some surrounding fur. But we believe it may be a Smilodon.”

“A what ?”

“Smilodon. Better known as a saber-toothed tiger.”

“Which is technically incorrect,” Faraday said. “Because the Smilodon descends from a completely different line than the tiger.”

But Ekberg didn’t seem to hear. She was staring at the photo, wide-eyed, digital recorder forgotten for once.

“We think that because of the eyes,” Marshall said. “They resemble very closely the eyes of the big cats-of all cats, for that matter. Note they are predator’s eyes: large, forward-facing. There’s the wide area of iris, the vertical pupils. I’d bet that an autopsy will reveal a layer of tapetum lucidum behind the retina.”

“How long has it been frozen?” she asked.

“Smilodons became extinct about ten thousand years ago,” Marshall said. “Whether due to the advancing ice, loss of habitat or food, or a virus that jumped the species barrier, we don’t know. Given the time this ice cave was covered by the glacier, I’d estimate this was one of the last of its kind to die.”

“We’re not yet sure how it came to be frozen,” Faraday added. His habitual blinking, his wide, watery eyes, gave him the appearance of a startled child. “The creature probably retreated into the cave to avoid an ice storm, and froze there. Perhaps it was wounded, or starving. Or perhaps it simply died of old age. More analysis may give us answers.”

Ekberg had quickly regained her professional composure. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a clean, vertical hole near the carcass about half an inch wide.

“As you can see, there isn’t a clear view,” Marshall said. “This ice is dirty, occluded, full of prehistoric mud. So we had our intern, Ang, bring up a remote imaging device. It sends out sonar pings and measures the echoes produced.”

“Like a fish-finder,” Ekberg said.

“In a way,” Marshall said, amused. “A very high-tech fish-finder. Anyway, due to the condition of the ice, precise measurements aren’t possible, but the body seems to be approximately eight feet long. We estimate its weight in the thousand-pound range.”

“More appropriate for Smilodon populator than Smilodon fatalis, ” Faraday intoned.

Ekberg shook her head slowly, eyes still fixed on the photograph. “Amazing,” she said. “Buried under a glacier for thousands of years.”

A brief silence settled over the group. Standing motionless, Marshall began to feel the cold creeping in around the edges of his hood, biting at his fingertips and toes.

“You’ve asked a lot of questions,” he said quietly. “Any objections to answering one?”

Ekberg glanced over at him. “Shoot.”

“We know Terra Prime is planning to make some kind of documentary, but none of us have any idea what kind. We assume you’re going to explain our work here, maybe end it by describing this unusual find. Record the discovery for posterity. Can you give us more details?”

A wry smile formed on her lips. “Actually, it isn’t posterity the network is concerned with.”

“Go on.”

“I’m afraid the details will have to come from Emilio Conti, the executive producer. But I can promise you one thing, Dr. Marshall: he views this as a real feather in his cap, something he’s been working toward his entire professional career.” Her smile deepened. “Your expedition is about to become more famous than in your wildest dreams.”

Dawn burst across the Blue Ridge Mountains with a violent explosion of color. The sun, rising over Mount Marshall, infused the autumn sky with brilliant hues normally confined to a painter’s palette: naphthol and cadmium, magenta and vermilion. The sleepy peaks and slopes were furred with the deep greens and blues of oak, hemlock, maple, and hickory trees. The mountains themselves seemed to exhale the chill air, their breath settling in deep blankets of mist that cloaked the dark valleys and crowned the summits with gauzy rings like monks’ tonsures.

Jeremy Logan eased the rental car up to the Front Royal entrance station, paid the park fee, then accelerated gently away. There were faster ways to reach his destination-Skyline Drive was as sinuous as a snake, with a top speed of thirty-five miles per hour-but he was early, and he hadn’t traveled this road since he was a boy, camping with his father. Ahead, the parkway disappeared into a velvet haze, promising a journey of both discovery and nostalgia.

La Bohème was playing on the car stereo-the 1946 Toscanini recording, with Licia Albanese as soprano lead-and he turned it off in order to concentrate on the passing scenery. The Shenandoah Valley Overlook: they’d stopped there, he remembered, for deviledham sandwiches and a few snaps of the Instamatic. Next, Low Gap, Compton Gap, Jenkins Gap: each appeared in his windshield in turn, yielding up-almost reluctantly-their stunning vistas of the Shenandoah River, the freckled hills of the Virginia piedmont. Logan had grown up in the low country of South Carolina, and he remembered how-first seeing these sights through boyish eyes-he’d never imagined there could be so much dramatic scenery crammed into such a relatively small space.