Frozen Solid A Novel

58




GUILLOTTE HAD BEEN BOTH QUICKER AND LUCKIER THAN MERRITT. As soon as he saw Leland grab the tank rack, he sprinted for the door. Flung it open, dove through, hit the snow, and rolled behind the parked snowmos. It took a full minute for the tanks to empty, and it sounded like industrial demolition the whole time.

When all was quiet, he got to his feet and went back inside. Merritt was moaning, so he knew she was still alive, but from the look of her she would not be for long, and that was fine with him. Gerrin had made her, instead of him, head of the Triage team at Pole, and it had rankled ever since. He had never liked her bossy, supercilious manner, nor even the way she looked. Fat, red, and wrinkled, she’d made him think of a spoiling apple. Dead, she would be one less detail for him to worry about.

She was even worse to look at now, though, so Guillotte went outside, sat on the snowmo, and tried to think things through. It was a few minutes past six P.M. The station sat links became active once every twelve hours, at roughly six A.M. and six P.M. He had to assume that the comm engineers would have diagnosed and fixed the malfunctions he’d been causing. Could not afford to think otherwise.

Graeter would not know that he, Guillotte, had killed Durant. Nor would he know everything about Triage, because Leland herself would not have known all of that before she came to the dive shed. She’d seemed genuinely surprised by Merritt’s sanctimonious little speech. But Leland might have told Graeter about Doc and Blaine, and they were not the kind who survived prison. They would say anything to keep their rear ends inviolate.

Even if they did not give Guillotte up, he knew that Graeter could be watching the video right then. If Leland had not known it was him until she smelled the absinthe on his breath, it meant she had not recognized him in the video. The camera angle or light or both might have been bad. But Graeter was much more familiar with all Polies than Leland, and he might well see that Guillotte was Durant’s killer. If that happened—and Guillotte had no choice but to assume that it would—the station manager would mobilize the security team and go looking for him. And he would talk to McMurdo the instant comms were up again.

Guillotte understood that the penalty for committing premeditated murder of U.S. government employees in a U.S. government facility could be death. New Zealand was nominally the country with jurisdiction over criminal acts in Antarctica, but the Americans would insist on prosecuting murders in their own facility in the States. Life in prison was the best he could hope for, a needle in the arm more likely. He would rather die by his own hand than suffer either fate. But he did not think it would come to that.

He pulled the cuff of his mitten back to look at his watch. Nineteen minutes past six. Should be enough time. But only if he moved fast.





59




SCREAMING FOR HELP WOULD BE A WASTE OF ENERGY. THE SUIT had locked up just as Hallie’s left foot landed after striding forward. Her right arm had swung to the front, as well, her left to the rear. There she stood like a statue of one frozen in the act of walking, not frozen herself inside the suit but so immobilized that she might as well have been.

She tried to move her arms, working in all directions, imitating the curl motion of weight lifters, then trying to push back the other way. She could move a half inch within the suit but wasn’t strong enough to crack the thick, multilayered neoprene. Next she flexed her legs, tried bending over at the waist, twisting. Nothing worked.

She thought how ridiculous it would be to freeze to death here, trapped in a suit that was supposed to be a life-support system. Even worse was the thought of Guillotte running free. There was no telling what he might do.

For a moment rage took over, and her muscles tensed and struggled against the suit. It was like trying to run in a block of ice and accomplished nothing but a slight wobble side to side. She tried again, and again, but the suit was not going to break or bend.

She stood, catching her breath, thinking. There is always a way. She just had to puzzle it out. She couldn’t go forward or backward, up or down. Couldn’t bend the suit or break out of it. Yelling for help wouldn’t do any good. She considered urinating, thinking that warm liquid might soften the suit’s lower half. But she knew that there wasn’t enough liquid in any human bladder to do that. She would end up standing in a few inches of frozen piss.

She remembered reading a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a climber, buried in an avalanche, who produced a turd, waited for it to freeze solid, and used it to dig himself out. But even if she managed that, she wouldn’t be able to reach it inside the suit.

She was beginning to shiver. Her teeth were chattering. A cold, empty space was opening in her chest.

This would not be a quick death. She had read accounts, none apocryphal, by stranded mountaineers who froze into comas, thinking right up to the point of unconsciousness that death was certain, then waking to discover that they had been rescued. It would be slow and increasingly painful for a long time; then would come numbness, everything growing weak and dim, and a long, gentle falling away from the last light.

Her rational brain grasped that. Then, like birds startled from a tree, thoughts and images began to fly from her mind. The lovely, burnt-honey smell of horses. Taps at her father’s funeral. Her mother’s hands, small, but rough and strong. And people she loved, her mother and father, two brothers, best friend Mary Stilwell down in Florida, Don Barnard.

And Bowman. For all the others she felt sadness but not regret; she had lived with them as fully as she could, knowing that loving and being loved were life’s greatest gifts. But with Bowman, regret did come. So much would be left undone between them: the moment when she might have said, “I love you,” another when they might have exchanged vows, and then all the other possibilities—including even children. She was thirty-one. Still young for a scientist, and certainly not old for a mother.

One thing left undone was especially troubling. Bowman came from a ranch in Colorado and had grown up horseback. She came from a horse farm in Virginia and had as well. And yet they had never ridden together, had never shared the experience of melding with half a ton of pure beautiful power. Both had recognized how special it would be. They had talked about it so often that it had become a kind of personal idiom with its own definite article: “When are we going to do The Ride?” But they had never made it happen. She had never made it happen.

She remembered Merritt’s talk about how it became harder and harder to stay away from danger. She knew it was true. She had worked in BSL-4 labs with the most lethal pathogens known to man and had loved every minute of it. Eventually even that had become routine, and she’d asked Barnard to put her in the field, where even greater risks reopened the adrenaline spigot.

She yelled then, not specific words but a raw and guttural howl. Breath and energy finally ran out, and she fell silent. She looked up, but no lights stirred green and purple around the black bowl of sky, no meteors cut white streaks, and no stars twinkled, as if even they had frozen to death.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and waited for the same fate.





60




GRAETER PICKED UP A DART, ALIGNED THE BARREL BETWEEN THE thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, cocked his arm back. Shook his head once and put the dart on his desk. Where the hell was Leland?

A moment later, his door banged open and a Dragger barged in. At least he thought it was a Dragger, given the grease-smeared overalls and black bunny boots. But it was a Beaker in Dragger’s clothes. And not just any Beaker. It was Hallie Leland.

“What are you doing in that outfit?” he asked. “In fact, what are you doing here? I was trying to find you.”

She told him how a gust of wind had rushed across the ice, wobbling her in the frozen suit. How she had shifted her weight to that side, tilting the suit a fraction of an inch more, then shifted the other way, back and forth like pumping on a swing to go higher, until finally she’d felt herself tilting and falling and hitting the ice, cracking the suit.

She told him about Fida: “I think Guillotte killed him and left him down there to make it look like a suicide.” Then she recounted what had happened in the dive shed. He stood.

“I’ll find Guillotte. And I hope the son of a bitch tries to fight.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, gathering up his badge folder and gun, “then I can shoot him a dozen times.”





61




DOLAN KNOCKED ON GERRIN’S FRONT DOOR. NO ONE ANSWERED. Taylor had gone around to cover the rear of the house. Dolan pounded with the heel of his fist. Inside it must have sounded like thunder. Anyone would have heard.

“Well, easy way or hard way,” Dolan said. He had brought a crowbar for just such an eventuality. Motioned for Bowman and Barnard to stand back as he got ready to drive the bar’s straight end between the door and the jamb.

“Hang on,” Bowman said.

He stepped to the door and took a stainless steel device from one pocket. Dolan started to say something but stayed quiet and watched. Bowman laid the thing over the door’s lock set and touched a sensor on its side. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then the sound of metal moving against metal and a distinctive click. Bowman repocketed the device. Dolan stared at him.

“It works with high-end locks and old ones,” Bowman explained. “They have enough steel in the tumblers. Not as messy.”

“How in hell did you—?” Dolan started.

“Don’t ask,” Barnard said.

Dolan glanced at him, nodded. “Copy that.” He keyed his radio, raised Taylor. “We’re in. Hold your position.”

He drew his service weapon, eased the door open, and stepped inside.

“U.S. Marshals,” he shouted. “We have a warrant to search these premises. Anyone here present yourselves or be subject to arrest for obstructing federal officers.”

No response.

Dolan went to the back door and let Taylor in. Barnard and Bowman waited while the marshals cleared the first floor. They followed them upstairs and waited in the long hall while the marshals looked into every room until only one, at the far end, was left. The door was closed. Dolan motioned for them to approach.

There were no more rooms. The house did not have a basement. Taylor eased the knob around, pushed the door open gently. The two marshals went in first, separating immediately, weapons up.

The red dots of their laser sights centered on the forehead of the small, dark-skinned man sleeping with a pair of noise-canceling headphones on.

Dolan turned on the ceiling lights.

Taylor, beside the bed, prodded the sleeping man’s shoulder. “Dr. Gerrin. Wake up. We have a warrant,” he said.

The man’s eyes opened slowly, went wide at the sight of two big men aiming guns at him. He sat bolt upright. Started to speak, realized he still had the headphones on, yanked them off.

“Dr. David Gerrin, we have a duly authorized warrant to search these premises,” Taylor began.

The man’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly, but no words came.

“You can stop,” Barnard said.

“What?” Dolan and Taylor looked back at him.

“It’s not Gerrin.”





62




THE DIVE SHED WAS STILL LIT, AS HALLIE HAD LEFT IT. MERRITT LAY where she had fallen, her face a stove-in, frozen red mess.

“Like she got hit by a fifty-pound bullet,” Graeter said.

“Must have missed Guillotte,” Hallie said.

“If he’s not here, the son of a bitch must be back in the station.”

They hurried outside, ready to jump on Graeter’s idling snowmo. Both stopped at the same time.

“What is that?” Hallie asked.

“A Cat D9,” he said. “Nothing else sounds like it.”

But it was not a Cat D9 they saw materializing out of the gloom several hundred yards away. It looked, in fact, like the face of an advancing black wave, just visible against the ice. “What the hell is that?” Graeter said. “And who’s running the Cat?”

“Guillotte. Has to be. He’s killed the lights.”

“Why would—” Graeter started to ask. Instead he exclaimed, “That’s a fuel bladder he’s pushing. He’s going to blow up the station.”

“We need to get him off that machine,” Hallie said.

“He’s locked himself into the cab for sure. And that glass is designed to protect operators in rollovers and landslides. Forget bullets. We’ll have to evacuate the station before he reaches it.”

“No phone, no radio comms—remember? The Dark Sector. We can get there, but that still won’t leave enough time to get everybody out.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“I have another idea,” she said.

“What?”

She took the first aid kit from the snowmo’s emergency box and used it like a brick to smash the headlight and taillights.

“We’re going stealth,” she said. “You drive.”