There was a cry from the crow’s nest, carried down to them on the wind, which was picked up and echoed by several of the naval officers on deck. Sinclair and Hatch quickly got up and went to the starboard rail; the men who could stand were jostling for elbow room as a hazy mist over the water dissipated, revealing the rolling shoreline of the Crimea, and a flotilla of British ships that had already arrived and anchored there. As the Henry Wilson furled its top-gallants and royal sails, and glided into the tranquil waters, Sinclair could hear the occasional bugle call in the distance and see the glitter of weaponry on the beach; the disembarkation had already begun, and Sinclair felt a quickening of his own blood. From what he could discern on the cliffs above, the Crimea was a land of vast, gently undulating steppes, devoid of trees or shrub, and consequently ideal for cavalry maneuvers. He longed to bring Ajax up out of the hold and let him graze on the pastures there and run free on the seemingly serene hills.
It was only when the ship grew closer, and the anchor chains were loosed, that Sinclair noticed something else, something bobbing about in the waters of the bay. At first he took it for some form of aquatic life—were there seals here? or dolphins?—until one of the shapes, sinking and rising like a buoy, was drawn toward the bow of the Henry Wilson. As he watched, it slowly made its way along the length of the ship, caught in the swirls and eddies, bumping against the wooden hull, then spinning away. And he saw suddenly that it was the head and shoulders of a soldier in his sodden red tunic. The lifeless head lolled from one shoulder to the other, the cheeks were hollow, the glassy eyes stared. And then it was gone, past the stern, moving out to sea.
But there were many others, bobbing about like hideous red apples in a barrel.
A sailor standing at the rail next to Sinclair crossed himself. “It’s the cholera,” he muttered. “They’re too dangerous to bury, or burn.”
Sinclair turned to Hatch, whose teeth were firmly clenched on his pipe.
“But…this?” Sinclair asked.
Hatch took the pipe from his lips. “They’re weighted down before they’re thrown overboard,” Hatch said, “and they’re meant to sink. But sometimes the weights aren’t enough.”
“And they do swell up,” said the sailor in a sober voice. “That’s when they come back, some of ’em, for a last look about.”
Sinclair looked out over the busy harbor, where ships and transports were being unloaded and troops ferried to shore in white rowboats, where flags rippled in the ocean breeze and bayonets glistened in the bright sunlight…and then down again at the terrible flotsam rising and falling on the whitecapped waves.
“What’s the name of this place?” he said, sure he would never forget it, and the sailor chuckled mirthlessly.
Touching a finger to his brow before turning away, the man said, “It’s called Calamita Bay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
December 11, 1 p.m.
BETTY SNODGRASS AND TINA GUSTAFSON were sometimes thought to be sisters. Both were “big-boned gals,” as they often joked with each other, with blond hair and wide-open faces. They’d met at the University of Idaho’s renowned Glaciological and Arctic Sciences Institute, and that was probably the first place, though certainly not the last, where they’d been dubbed the ice queens. Glaciology was generally considered the toughest, most rigorous, most hard-core specialty in all the earth sciences, and that was undoubtedly what had interested them both in pursuing it. They wanted nothing wimpy, or soft, or feminine; they wanted something that required sheer physical stamina and guts. If you wanted to be a glaciologist, you weren’t going to be spending much time on the beaches of Cozumel.
And they’d gotten what they wished for.
At Point Adélie, they lived a spartan life in the great outdoors, drilling core samples, storing them in their underground deep freeze—kept at a steady 20 degrees below zero—or, if they needed the compressed ice to relax a bit, in the core bin, before analyzing the samples for isotopes and gases that would indicate changes in the earth’s atmosphere over time. And along the way, they’d become expert ice carvers—the best, they liked to think, in the business. Betty sometimes kidded Tina that if things didn’t work out in glaciology, they could always make a living doing ice sculptures for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
With Michael’s find they had their work cut out for them. The massive ice block chopped out of the underwater glacier stood upright, midway between the stack of cylindrical ice cores ranged on the rack and the wooden crate, marked PLASMA, that housed Ollie, the baby skua. To provide a windbreak, there was a sheet metal fence, about six feet high, all around the pen. But that was it—no roof, no floor, just the gray sky above and the frozen tundra below.
From force of habit, Betty and Tina had put on bright white “clean suits” over their cold-weather gear—ice cores were notoriously easy to contaminate—although they didn’t have such fears about the specimen before them. That ice had already been compromised in a hundred different ways, from the saws that had cut it out of the iceberg to the dive hut where it had been hauled up out of the depths. And anyway, if you were looking to date it, you were going to get much better evidence from the body inside; even now, with several inches of ice still needing to be cut away from the front, Betty could see the vague shape and style of the clothing the woman wore—and it reminded her of various Masterpiece Theater series she used to watch as a girl. She thought she could even detect the dull glow of an ivory brooch on the woman’s breast.