Michael hated to think what might have happened there. But if Sinclair was free, it couldn’t be good.
Once past the main quad, Michael took a firm grip on the handlebars and gunned the engine. With one hand he had to tighten the hood around his head to keep it from blowing back. Far ahead, he could see the red of Sinclair’s uniform and the blazing orange of the sled, as the dogs raced across the snow and ice. Please, he prayed, let Eleanor’s skin be covered.
Michael could see that Sinclair had harnessed the dogs in pairs instead of fanning them out on wider leads, and he knew that doing so was particularly dangerous under the current conditions. With the dogs bunched together, the weight of the whole sled could cross onto a fragile snow bridge all at once, and if the bridge gave way, the dogs first, then the sled itself, could be dragged straight down into the bottomless crevasse below.
For that matter, Michael could plummet into one, too. That was why he tried to stay on the same path the sled had already taken. But it wasn’t easy. The silvery glare off the terrain was harsh and penetrating, and the scrum of snow and ice thrown up by the front runners of the Arctic Cat kept flying back, sticking to the windshield and coating his goggles.
Even as the distance between them closed, Michael began to wonder what he could do when he did catch up. He racked his brain, wondering what was likely to be in the snowmobile’s emergency compartment. A first-aid kit? Some nylon ropes? A GPS? A flashlight?
And then he remembered the last essential item sure to be there—a flare gun!
Sinclair would never know the difference between that and a real gun.
The sled was turning slightly, toward the coastline, and Michael could see Sinclair’s head turning, aware now that he was being pursued. Though the sun glinted off his goggles and golden epaulettes, and the scarlet flaps of his jacket whipped out behind him like a fox’s tail, the black ski mask made him look less like a soldier than a burglar on the run.
The sled was rounding a coal-black nunatak, and the danger there was even greater, especially as Sinclair wouldn’t be aware of it. Crevasses often formed around the base of such rocky outcroppings, and increased in number and depth as the glacier field approached the sea. Sinclair was continuing to bear toward the water, no doubt because it made navigating easier. In Antarctica, it was as hard to judge distances as it was direction—there was seldom any landmark to rely on, everything looked the same for hundreds of miles sometimes, and the sun, which on that date was very nearly straight overhead, offered no help either. Your shadow clung as close to your heels as an obedient dog.
Michael was torn between quickly overtaking the sled—and forcing a confrontation on the unstable ice—or waiting until he had reached the solid soil of Stromviken. But that was Sinclair’s stomping ground, and who knew what other advantages he might be able to call upon once he got there?
The sled was slowing down a bit, because it had to. Michael could see the chunky blocks of a serac field rising up from the ground, like the tines of a giant fork sticking up from the earth. The dogs were snaking their way through the obstacle course, and Sinclair was bent far forward over the handlebars, urging them on.
Michael wiped the snow and ice from his goggles and lowered his head below the windshield. Wispy white clouds were draped like muslin across the sky, muting the sunlight and dropping the temperature another few degrees; Michael pegged it at about thirty below zero. The snowmobile was rapidly closing in on the sled. He was near enough that he could see Sinclair’s sword slapping at his side and Eleanor’s head, tightly bound in a hood, poking up from the shell.
Sinclair, hearing the roar of the Arctic Cat, turned again and shouted something Michael could not hear, though he doubted it was an offer of surrender. If there was one thing he knew about Sinclair, it was that the man’s will was indomitable.