The station manager shrugged. “If necessary. It wasn’t exactly listed in the season’s work agenda.”
“Is that all?”
“Christ, Gerald. Spit it out. What are you asking?”
Keene paused. “Jack, I’ve looked at Jennings’s records. I’ve interviewed her. I called the head of the psych eval team back in Colorado Springs. I reached out to her therapist at home and stopped just short of ringing up her family doctor.”
“Yes?”
“They all agree, she’s a hot mess.”
“None of us are perfect—”
Keene interrupted. “Psychologically speaking, there’s no way in hell Cassandra Jennings is fit for work in Antarctica, never mind Shackleton, never mind a nine-month night at the South Pole.”
Hanratty said nothing.
Keene leaned forward. “She’s not the only one, Jack. The winter-over crew always has a few oddballs in it, which is perfectly fine and understandable. Personality diversity is one of the basic tenets of group success in a confined environment. But there are a dozen people on staff right now who I wouldn’t trust to make it through a rainy weekend at the shore without cracking up, never mind a winter-over at the South Pole.”
Hanratty cleared his throat. “What’s your point?”
“My point is—considering the rigorous standards that every South Pole crew has been subjected to in the past—this can’t be a mistake. Someone at some point knew exactly what Jennings and the other crew members were like and instead of selecting them out , they put them in .” Keene stood and put his hands on the edge of Hanratty’s desk. “Jack, what the fuck is going on?”
CHAPTER TEN
Cass shot a look over her shoulder as she walked, her boots squeaking on the compacted snow of the tunnel floor. Still stinging from her meeting with Keene, replaying the odd and humiliating exchanges in her head, she hadn’t paid attention as she’d clomped down the steps of the Beer Can and into the arches. But the chance that anyone was following her was unlikely in the extreme; deep in the service tunnels, in the middle of the workday, no one was simply wandering around in the sixty-below, wondering if the station’s mechanic was goofing off. And since the VMF was accessed via the tunnels, she was one of only a handful of people who had business under the base, anyway. If she ran into anyone, she was simply on her way to work.
Had there been anyone there, however, they might’ve gotten suspicious when, instead of continuing straight to the base’s garage, she took a sharp turn at the conduit intersection, pulled out a flashlight, and headed straight for the ice tunnels that she’d discouraged a certain senator and his tour group from exploring.
She yanked at the plywood door, stuck after being squeezed and compressed over the years by the sinking ice, stepped through, and closed it behind her gently, then fumbled in the darkness for the switch embedded in the wall. The tunnel flooded with a sterile light. White bouquets of icy peonies and crystalline scales clung to every non-natural surface: off the bulb cages of the lights, along the metal framework, even to the insulated pipes. She stood perfectly still and listened. It was so cold that she had to breathe, painfully, through her mouth or the sound of air passing through her nose would cover the noise of anyone moving in the tunnel. Although the majority of sounds were swallowed by the crushing ice, most people made small sounds along the way simply to keep themselves company.
But those were no guarantees—she’d also come across people in the tunnels before who hadn’t wanted anyone to know they were there. At least she could invent an excuse about conduit inspections. It was a little harder for two amorous meteorologists to come up with a good reason for rolling around in an ice tunnel in the dark. She continued moving. The sleeves of her parka, when they rubbed against the walls, made a noise like a dishrag being torn in two.
Maybe it was her introverted nature, but the ice tunnels were one of the first things she’d set out to explore when she’d finally made it to Shackleton. The thought that there was an entire subterranean complex below the world’s most exclusive research facility gave her a thrill. The small secrets that had been hidden in the tunnels—the shrines, the doors to nowhere, the buried equipment—only added to the mystique.
One of those secrets was coming up at the tunnel’s first turn, and she forced herself to stare straight at the wall as she rounded the bend. It was the first shrine and the one everyone who ever made it into the tunnels knew about.