Frozen Solid A Novel

18




“SIX MORE DEGREES,” SAID GRAETER, “AND WE WOULDN’T BE OUT here.”

They were standing in front of the station. It was close to one P.M. and pitch-dark.

“Why is that?”

“It’s called Condition One. Eighty and colder, no one egresses.” From his parka he took a plastic bag. “Watch this.” From the bag he took a chicken leg. He poked it with a mitten. “Raw, right? Soft?”

She nodded.

He stood for twenty seconds, then rapped the chicken on a metal stair rail. The leg shattered like a lightbulb. “See?”

“I saw. What is this, fourth-grade science?”

“Showing beats telling. Especially with someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“I detect a certain disdain for authority.”

“ ‘The wisest have the most authority,’ ” she said, quoting.

“Socrates, right? If he was so wise, why’d he drink the Kool-Aid?”

“Plato said the thing about authority. Didn’t they teach philosophy at Annapolis?”

He squinted at her. “How come a microbiologist knows philosophers?”

“Nothing to do with microbiology. I know about authority from my father. He knew about philosophers.”

“An ivory tower family,” Graeter said. “Should have guessed.”

So he didn’t really look at my file, she thought. In any case, he was wrong about her family. She started to correct him, then let it go. She liked him better wrong.

They walked to a row of yellow snowmobiles. Before getting on one, he looked into a red box bolted onto its rear deck, behind the passenger seat. Hallie remembered that there had been one on Bacon’s snowmo, too.

“What’s that?”

“Emergency kit. These snowmos go out to field camps all the time. Some are miles away. Spare lights, first aid, flares, the usual stuff. SORs require operators to check their kits before using the snowmo. Ready?”

Hallie straddled the seat, and the snowmo jumped forward before she could answer.

Hallie understood that she might be going for a ride with Emily’s killer. That she might have been in the Underground with him, too. She had zipped a dive knife into a pocket of her parka. As they drove away from the station, she touched that pocket. With so many layers on her hands, it took a few seconds of fumbling, but then she hit it. The long, sharp knife was there.

After they’d gone a half mile, the headlight illuminated rows of what looked like giant black sausages lined up on the snow. She tapped Graeter on the shoulder, pointed, and he stopped.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Fuel bladders. Two thousand gallons each, hauled on sleds all the way from McMurdo. Eight hundred miles, six weeks in tractor caravans at five miles an hour. Now, there’s some tough people.”

“Can’t fly it in?”

“Burns up more than they bring. Hauling over ice is slower but lots cheaper.”

He turned right, running parallel to the station. From the skin out, Hallie was wearing regular underwear, lightweight long underwear, expedition-weight long underwear, a wool shirt, fleece pants and jacket, insulated coveralls, and the special Antarctic parka they called Big Red. On her feet, three pairs of socks, thermal boot liners, and bulbous white bunny boots. Silk glove liners, fleece gloves, wool mittens, and down-filled overmitts. Fleece neck gaiter, face mask, down-filled, fur-ruffed hood. A Petzl headlamp. And still her toes and fingers were already starting to go numb.

After a few more minutes, Graeter stopped. She glanced back over her shoulder. The station looked very far away.

“Welcome to the Dark Sector,” he said. “They use radio telescopes and neutrino catchers and cosmic ray detectors here. This area extends several miles out from the station limits. It has to be free of light and electromagnetic interference.”

“What’s that?” She was pointing to something that looked like a giant lunar landing module with a tall silver silo on each side. The silos were one hundred feet from the main structure and connected to it by metal tubes extending from near their tops.

“That is Operation IceCube,” Graeter said. “Drillers were sinking shafts a mile deep all around that and putting neutrino sensors down into them. To the left there is the dive shed, where you’ll be working. They built it over the shaft that struck water.”

“Good to know,” she said. “Hey. It is cold.”

“White Death, we call it,” Graeter said. “Sucks heat, not blood. Your brain is the first organ affected. You can be half gone before you know what’s happening.”

A huge Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, sparkling with red and yellow and white lights, came roaring and clanking off to their right, heading for the iceway. In the immaculate air, its headlight beams were like shafts of crystal.

“Bacon,” Graeter said. “Best operator here. Cranky, but she can do surgery with that thing.”

The bulldozer drew abreast of them, about a hundred yards to their right. Hallie saw the operator, visible in the red light from the instrument panel. She started to wave before realizing that Bacon could see only what the headlights illuminated. She kept looking. It was hard to know for sure, but there seemed to be something odd about Bacon’s posture, her torso inclined forward against the seat belt, head down, almost as though she had dozed off.

“Mr. Graeter, I think there’s something wrong with—”

“I see it.” He pulled out his radio, then shoved it back into a pocket. The D9 veered right, heading straight for a line of red danger flags twenty feet away. Bacon’s Cat crushed the wands and kept on going. Graeter sat frozen for an instant, as if he could not believe what he was seeing.

“Hold on!” he shouted to Hallie.

Opening the throttle too quickly, he flooded the motor. He jumped off and yanked the starter, again and again, but it took half a dozen pulls to clear the flooded carburetor and get the engine to fire. By the time they stopped at the line of red wands, Bacon’s Cat was one hundred feet beyond and still moving.

“What’s in there?” Hallie shouted.

“It’s the area over Old Pole. Completely unstable. Do not move!” Graeter yelled. He jumped off and ran into the restricted area. He had gone only ten feet when the D9’s front end broke through the surface. The fracturing ice sounded like rifle shots.

“Jump!” Hallie screamed, but Bacon, still bathed in red light, sat motionless, pitched forward, held in place by her seat belt. Hallie watched in horror as the machine, haloed by its lights, sank deeper into the hole, tilting forward like a ship going down at the bow. Then came a huge, crumpling sound, and the D9 disappeared completely. The ice shook under Hallie’s feet. She heard a rumbling, then more ice fracturing at the bulldozer dropped deeper into the huge crevasse. Big enough to swallow locomotives, Graeter had said.

His headlamp beam danced crazily as he stumbled, turned around, fell to his hands and knees. A fracture line opened between Graeter and Hallie. The ice on which he lay began to tilt, and suddenly he was sliding toward the crevasse that had swallowed Bacon and her machine. Just before he dropped in, another, smaller crack appeared. The glow of his headlamp showed him grabbing its edge with both mittened hands. The whole section of ice swung down beneath him, like a giant trapdoor on hinges, finally stopping just short of dead vertical. All Hallie could see of Graeter was the bright glow of his headlamp showing above the edge of the fracture.

She ran toward him and, fifteen feet from where he held on, dropped to her belly like a baseball player sliding headfirst. Spread-eagled to distribute her weight as widely as possible, she pulled with her hands and pushed with her toes. Her own headlamp showed Graeter’s black mittens—all she could see of him from her prone position.

“Graeter,” she yelled. “Are you secure?”

“Barely.” He sounded breathless but uninjured. “I kicked little holes, but my boot toes could slip out at any time.”

“Do you know how deep it is?”

“No. And I don’t want to look.”

Could be a hundred feet, she thought. Or a thousand.

“I’m going to ease forward until I can grab your wrists.”

“Are you insane? I could pull us both down. You back off and wait until some people get here with ropes.”

“Can’t wait. You’ll lose your grip or the ice will break. They probably don’t even know anything happened. And you have the radio.”

She knew that a proper crevasse rescue involved belays and ropes and pulley haul systems, but there was no time for those niceties here. And what was the option? Let the man hang there until he dropped? She inched forward some more, reached out with her right hand, and gently closed her fingers around his left wrist. Two layers of gloves and mittens did not help, but the base of his thumb and the heel of his hand flared out like small handles, helping her hang on. She repeated the move, clutching his right wrist with her left hand. “Okay. Go ahead and kick new toeholds and try to step up.”

She felt the pull increase on her left hand as he picked up his right boot and began kicking a new cavity. “Good as it’ll get.” He kicked another. “Here goes.”

She felt him stand, slowly and gently, on that precariously poised right boot toe, felt him repeat the motion with his left, and then he had gained a foot. She could visualize the placements: a half-inch of boot sole pressed into the shallow concavities he had kicked. The only thing saving him was the extreme temperature. When it was that cold, friction could not generate enough heat to liquefy the ice’s microsurface. Instead of the slick ice that would have been there at warmer temperatures, this was more like sandpaper.

“Go again,” she said.

She waited, feeling her hands starting to numb. He kicked, again and again, then the agonizingly slow process of putting weight on each toehold and standing. But it was working. She could see his headlamp and most of his face. A crack opened up behind Hallie’s feet, and the ice surface on which she lay lurched, tilting down toward the crevasse. The angle was gentle yet, and she didn’t slide forward, but she knew that their combined motions and weight shifts could trigger a collapse and send them both plunging into the void. There was no time for him to finish coming up as he had been.

“Do you know how to do a mantle?” she asked.

“No.”

“It’s a climbing move. Put the palms of both hands on the edge of the crack right in front of your chest and push yourself up as far as your waist. Then you can flop forward and you’ll be out of there.”

“What the hell” was all he could manage.

She held on to his wrists as he leaned forward far enough to place his forearms and elbows on the sharp edge of the crack, with his palms on the ice right in front of his sternum.

He took a deep breath. “Here goes.”

She felt his forearms clench as he pushed down. Slowly his body rose until his waist was even with the edge of the crevasse and he could go no higher. Gently he folded over, gasping, laying his chest and belly flat on the ice, so that only his legs were still hanging over the side.

Elbow-crawling, he dragged himself forward, an inch at a time. When he moved, Hallie moved with him, wriggling back. Slowly they put distance between themselves and the crevasse edge. Five feet, ten, thirty, a hundred. Both breathless, they stopped and lay on their bellies. Hallie knew that Graeter’s brain was digesting the fact of its continued existence. It was like watching someone wake up from a trance.

Directing his headlamp to one side, to avoid blinding her, he said, “Son of a bitch. Nineteen years in the Navy and I never got that close.” He took a deep breath, exhaled. “Think it’s safe to stand now?”

“Yes.”

They got up and walked back to Graeter’s snowmo, brushing themselves off. Hallie was considering how lucky both of them were. Her own reaction had been instinctive, and she did not regret it. But inside all the layers, she felt her hands shaking, and it was not because of the cold. Before either she or Graeter could speak, two big men wearing black Dragger parkas and tool belts roared up on snowmos.

“What the hell happened?” one asked Graeter.

“Bacon’s machine broke through,” Graeter said. “Is anyone else coming?”

“I don’t know. We were headed to the machine shop when that dozer’s lights just disappeared. We figured it went down.”

“Is that you, Grenier?” Graeter asked.

“Yeah. And Lange. So Bacon is down in the crack?”

“Yes,” Graeter said. He reached for his radio. “Graeter, emergency to comms. Bacon’s Cat went into a crevasse. We need Search and Rescue out here now. Tell them to look for the snowmo lights.”

“Comms copy. Will do.”

“How long will that take?” Hallie asked.

“Fifteen minutes to muster. Thirty to dress and collect gear. Another five to get out here, if the snowmos start right away. Say an hour.”

“Too long.” Hallie was staring at the crevasse.

“Is what it is. There’s a SOR protocol for crevasse rescues.”

“Mr. Graeter. She could be bleeding down there. In shock and pain. We can’t wait that long.”

“We don’t know if she’s alive. And we don’t have a way to get anyone down there.”

There is always a way. She looked at the two Draggers’ tool belts and saw that they both carried big, twenty-four-ounce hammers with long, curved claws.

“We do have a way to get down,” she said. “Give me those hammers. They’ll do in a pinch for ice tools.”

“Negative on that,” Graeter said.

“What?” Hallie wasn’t sure she had heard right.

“I said negative. SAR is gearing up. We’ll wait and do this according to the regulations.”

“You can wait if you want,” Hallie said. She stepped forward, pulled the two hammers out of their metal-loop holsters, and started toward the crevasse.

“Dr. Leland!” Graeter snapped. “I gave you an order. We will wait. Did you hear me? We will wait.”

“You do that,” she said.