Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

All this, for two weeks, Joe pieced together in secret and kept to himself. He told himself, each time he dialed in to what he came to call Radio Jotunheim, that he would listen just a little longer, accrue another bit of information, and then pass everything he had along to Command. Surely this was what spies generally did? Better to get it all, and then risk discovery in transmitting it, than tip off the Geologist and his friends before he had acquired the full picture. The shocking murder-suicide, which broke new ground for death on the continent, seemed to put a point on things, however, and Joe typed up a careful report that, conscious as ever of his English, he proofread several times. Then he sat in front of the console. While nothing would have pleased him more than to shoot this haughty-sounding, languid Geologist in the head, he had come to identify so strongly with his enemy that, as he prepared to reveal the man's existence to Command, he felt an odd reluctance, as if in doing so he would betray himself.

As he was attempting to make up his mind what to do with his report, the desire for revenge, for a final expiation of guilt and responsibility, that had been the sole animator of Joe's existence since the night of December 6, 1941, received the final impulse it required to doom the German Geologist.

The coming of spring had brought on another whaling season, and with it a fresh campaign of the undersea boats. U- 1421, in particular, had been harassing traffic in Drake Passage, Allied and neutral, at a moment when shortages of the oil rendered from whales could mean the difference between victory and defeat in Europe for either side. Joe had been supplying Command with intercepts from U-1421 for months, as well as providing directional information on the submarine's signals. But the South Atlantic D/F array had, until recently, been incomplete and provisional, and nothing had ever come of Joe's efforts. Tonight, however, as he picked up a burst of chatter on the DAQ huff-duff set that, even in its encrypted state, he could recognize as originating from U-1421, there were two other listening posts tuned in as it made its report. When Joe supplied his readings on the signal from Kelvinator's HF/DF array in its cage atop the north aerial, a triangulation was performed at the Submarine Warfare Center in Washington. The resultant position, latitude and longitude, was supplied to the British navy, at which point an attack team was dispatched from the Falkland Islands. The corvettes and sub hunters found U-1421, chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing remained of it but an oily black squiggle scrawled on the water's surface.

Joe exulted in the sinking of U-1421, and in his role therein. He wallowed in it, even going so far as to permit himself to imagine that it might have been the boat that had sent the Ark of Miriam to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1941.

He trotted down along the tunnel to the Mess Hall and, for the first time in over two weeks, filled and turned on the snow melter, and took a shower. He fixed himself a plate of ham and powdered eggs, and broke out a new parka and pair of mukluks. On his way to the Hangar, he was obliged to pass the door to the Waldorf and the entrance of Dog-town. He shut his eyes and ran past. He did not notice that the dog crates were empty.

The sun, all of it, an entire dull red disk, hung a bare inch above the horizon. He watched it until his cheeks began to feel frostbitten. As it sank slowly back below the Barrier, a lovely salmon-and-violet sunset began to assemble itself. Then, as if to make certain Joe didn't miss the point, the sun rose for a second time, and set once more in a faded but still quite pretty flush of pink and lavender. He knew that this was only an optical illusion, brought on by distortions in the shape of the air, but he accepted it as an omen and an exhortation.

"Shannenhouse," he said. He had gone barreling down the steps without giving the pilot any warning and, as it turned out, had caught him during one of his rare periods of sleep. "Wake up, it's daytime! It's spring! Come on!"

Shannenhouse stumbled out of the plane, which glistened eerily in its tight glossy sheath of seal hides. "The sun?" he said. "Are you sure?"

"You just missed it, but it will be back in twenty hours."

A softness appeared in Shannenhouse's eyes that Joe recognized from their first days on the Ice long ago. "The sun," he said. Then, "What do you want?"

"I want to go kill Jerry."

Shannenhouse pursed his lips. His beard was a foot long now, his smell excoriating, probing, nearly sentient. "All right," he said.

"Can that plane fly or not?"

Joe started around the tail, over to the starboard side of the plane, where he noticed that the hides covering the front part of the fuselage were of a much lighter color and a different texture than those on the port side.

Stacked in a neat pyramid beside the plane, like cargo waiting to be loaded on board, sat the skulls of seventeen dogs.

Wahoo Fleer, their dead CO, had been at Little America with Richard Byrd in '33 and again in '40. When they went through his files, they found detailed plans and orders for transmontane Antarctic flights. In 1940 Captain Fleer himself had flown over part of the territory they would be crossing to kill the Geologist, over the Rockefeller Mountains, over the Edsel Fords, toward the shattered magnificent vacancy of Queen Maud Land. He had made carefully typed lists of the things a man ought to carry with him.

1 ice-chisel

1 pair of snow-shoes

1 roll toilet paper

2 handkerchiefs

The great anxiety of such a flight was the possibility of a forced landing. If they crashed, they would be alone and without hope of rescue at the magnetic center of nothingness itself. They would have to fight their way back to Kelvinator Station on foot, or press on ahead to Jotunheim. Captain Fleer had typed up lists of the emergency gear they would need in such an instance: tents, Primus stove, knives, saws, ax, rope, crampons. Sledges that they would have to drag themselves. Everything had to be considered for the weight it would add to the payload.

Engine muff and blow-torch 4 lbs. 2 reindeer-fur sleeping-bags 18 lbs. Flare gun and eight cartridges 5 lbs.

The precision and order of Captain Fleer's instructions had a settling effect on their minds, as did the return of the sun, and the idea of killing one of the enemy. They resumed each other's company. Shannenhouse came in from the Hangar, and Joe moved his bedroll into the Mess Hall. They said nothing about their descent over the past three months into some ancient mammalian despair. Together they ransacked Wahoo Fleer's desk. They found a decoded tidbit from Command, received the previous autumn, passing along an unconfirmed report that there might or might not be a German installation on the Ice, code-named Jotunheim. They found a copy of the Book of Mormon, and a letter marked "In the Event of My Death," which they felt entitled, but could not bring themselves, to open.

Shannenhouse took a shower. This necessitated the melting of forty-five two-pound blocks of snow, which Joe, grunting and cursing in three languages, cut and shoveled, one by one, into the melter on the Mess Hall's roof, whose zinc maw, like the bell of a gramophone, broadcast the thin reedy voice of the pilot singing "Nearer My God to Thee." They spoke little, but their exchanges were amiable, and over the course of a week they resumed the air of comradely put-uponness that had been universal among the men before the Wayne disaster. It was as if they had forgotten that flying unsupported and alone across one thousand miles of storm-tossed pack and glacier to shoot a lonely German scientist had been their own idea.