Blood and Ice

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

December 7, 8 a.m.

The first thing in the morning, as soon as he was dressed and before he'd even had his coffee, Michael checked on his baby skua, whom he'd named Ollie, after another unfortunate orphan, Oliver Twist.

It hadn't been easy deciding what to do with him (or her, as there was really no easy way to determine its gender at that point). But adult skuas were devious birds, and had a nasty way of preying on the weak-he'd seen a pair of them work to distract a penguin mother from her brood, just long enough for one of them to snap up a chick, drag it away, and rip it, screeching, limb from limb. They just might do the same with Ollie if the bird didn't grow a bit and get its wings.

But after consultation with several of the others at the base, including Darryl, Charlotte, and the two glaciologists Betty and Tina, it was decided that the best place for Ollie was in a protected environment, but still somewhere outdoors.

“If you raise him in here, he'll never be able to fend for himself,” Betty had said, and Tina had vigorously agreed. To Michael, with their blond hair braided into coils atop their heads, they looked like a pair of Valkyries.

“But if you kept him in the core bin behind our lab,” Tina had suggested, “he could have the best of both worlds.”

The core bin was a rough enclosure behind the glaciology module, where the ice cylinders that they had not yet had time to cut up and analyze were stacked like logs on a graduated metal rack.

“I just unloaded a crate of frozen plasma,” Charlotte said, “and we could use the empty box to give the little guy some cover.”

It was sounding more and more like a grammar-school class working together on a biology project.

Charlotte retrieved the crate and they tucked it into a corner of the enclosure, then Darryl went next door and brought back some dried herring strips he used to feed his own living menagerie. Even though he-she? — was clearly starving, the baby bird didn't immediately take the food. He seemed to be waiting for the bigger bird to descend from somewhere and peck him away. He'd already been programmed, as it were, to die.

“I think we're all standing too close,” Darryl said, and Charlotte agreed.

“Just leave the strips near the crate, and let's go in,” she said, with a shiver.

They had all gone back to their separate rooms, fallen into the uneasy sleep of people with no day or night to mark their time, and in the morning Michael had immediately gone to check on his ward.

The herring strips were gone, but had Ollie been the one to eat them? Looking around the frozen ground, where wisps of snow skidded around like wispy white feathers, he couldn't see Ollie either. He lifted his dark green eyeshades away from his face, knelt down, and peered into the back of the crate. Charlotte had left some of the wood shavings, used to cushion the plasma bags, inside the box, but snow and ice had already blown into it, too. He was just about to give up when he saw something black and shiny as a pebble tucked into the far corner. It was the bird's tiny unblinking eye, and now that he looked more carefully, he could make out the tiny gray-and-white fluff ball of its body. Curled up, the bird looked like a dirty snowball.

“Morning, Ollie.”

The bird stared at him, with neither fear nor recognition of any kind.

“You like the herring?’

Not surprisingly, Michael got no reply. He took out of his pocket two strips of bacon that he'd smuggled out of the kitchen on his way to the core bin. “I hope you're not keeping kosher,” he said, leaving the bacon just inside the crate. He saw Ollie's eyes flick, for just an instant, to the food. Then Michael stood up and headed back to the commons for his own breakfast. It was dive day, and he knew it would be important to fuel up before taking what the grunts and beakers alike referred to as “the polar plunge.”

Darryl was already halfway through a stack of blueberry pancakes, smothered in maple syrup, and a pile of veggie sausages, when Michael sat down. Lawson was sitting across the table. Contrary to any fears Hirsch might have had, his vegetarian status had done nothing to undermine him among even the grunts. In fact, nobody had turned a hair. As Michael had quickly learned, eccentricities of any sort were as common in the Antarctic, and as blithely accepted, as penguins squawking. People came to pole-Michael always had to remind himself to say it that way-to do their own thing. In the real world, they'd already been cast as loners, oddballs, and kooks, only down here nobody cared. Everybody had his own quirks to deal with, and being a vegetarian didn't even rate on that scale.

“The first year that you come down here,” Lawson confided, speaking for the government personnel, “you do it for the experience.”

Michael could buy that.

“The second year,” he went on, “you do it for the money.”

“And the third year,” he said, grinning, “you do it because you're no longer fit for anything else.”

There was some uneasy laughter, except for one of the grunts, Franklin, the ragtime piano player, who swiveled toward them and said, “Five years, man, I've come down here for five years in a row. What the hell's that make me?”

“Beyond repair,” Lawson said, and they all laughed, including Franklin. The put-down was the lingua franca of base life.

After powering through his own breakfast, though with a lot less coffee than usual-”You really don't want to have to pee once you get into a dry suit,” Lawson had advised him-Michael went back to collect his camera gear. He sealed up his Olympus D-220L in its watertight Ikelite housing, made sure it had a brand-new battery, and said a silent prayer to the god of technical fuckups. Hundreds of feet under the polar ice cap was no place for even a minor glitch to crop up.

Like just about anything in the Antarctic, a dive was a complicated production. The day before, Murphy had sent a work crew out onto the ice with a huge auger, mounted on the back of a tracked vehicle, to bore two holes through the ice. The first hole, which would be covered by the rudimentary dive hut, was the hole the divers would use to get in and out of the water. The second hole, maybe fifty yards away, was the safety hole, just in case anything from shifting ice to aggressive Weddell seals made the first one temporarily inoperable. (Weddell seals could get very territorial about a nicely drilled breathing hole.)

Murphy also insisted, den mother that he was, that anyone diving get a once-over from Dr. Barnes first. Michael had to prop himself up on the edge of her examining table, let her examine his throat and nasal passages, clear out his ears, take his blood pressure. It was odd, having to let someone whom he'd come to regard as simply a friend treat him suddenly in a professional capacity. He just hoped she wouldn't have to give him the hernia test, by holding his testicles and having him cough.

She didn't. Nor did she seem the least bit uncomfortable in this different role. Charlotte, he discovered, could put on the dispassionate face of the physician and go about her duties in a purely clinical manner. Not that it stopped her, when the exam was done and she had declared him fit as a fiddle, from asking, “You sure you want to do this?”

“Absolutely.”

She was taking her stethoscope off and slipping it into a drawer. “Going under that ice, in a face mask and all that gear… you don't have any claustrophobia?”

From something in her voice, he suddenly had the thought that she was talking about herself, not him.

“No. Do you?”

She tilted her head to one side, without looking him in the eye, and he thought back to the snow-school night, when they had had to sleep in the hand-carved domes.

“How'd you make it through the igloo training?” he asked.

“Darryl didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That boy can keep a secret,” she said appreciatively. “I never did go inside.”

Michael was puzzled. “Tell me, please, that you did not go back to camp, by yourself.” He was appalled at the thought of such recklessness.

“Nope. I slept in eighteen layers, inside the sleeping bag, with just my feet inside the tunnel. I was afraid if I wedged any more of me in there, Darryl might suffocate inside.”

Once he knew about her phobia, and how she'd toughed it out without ever letting on, he admired her even more.

And Darryl, too, for being able to keep her secret.

“I'll be on the walkie-talkie all day,” Charlotte said, “if you need anything out there.”

He expected no less.

“Now you and Darryl be careful, and watch what you're doing. And don't you let Darryl boss you around too much.”

“I'll tell him you said so.” Then he started piling on all the outdoor gear again and left the infirmary for the dive site.

To get there, he had to board a Spryte-a humble cross between a tractor and a Hummer, which in turn dragged a Nansen sledge weighted down with some of the extra diving equipment. Darryl sat beside him, looking like a kid on his way to Disneyland. Their caravan made slow progress on the ice, and it was about ten minutes before Michael saw the prefab dive hut, built along the lines of a garden shed, sitting out in the middle of nowhere, with a black-and-white flag flying. The hut itself was an improbable pink, like a pale summer rose, and a couple of the base personnel were piling up fresh snow all around its foundation to keep out any wind; its floor actually rested on cinder blocks a foot or so above the ice.

Darryl craned his neck out the side of the Spryte as they approached, and his fingers drummed nervously on his knees. They would have to undress, then suit up for the dive inside the hut, because once you were encased in all the waterproof gear, you would pretty much suffocate from the heat unless you were quickly able to immerse yourself in the ocean; the open water itself, regardless of the depth or season, kept to a fairly steady 33 degrees Fahrenheit.

It looked like Franklin, whose handlebar moustache was all you could see poking out from under the furry hood, who waved them to a halt.

“Nice day for a swim,” he said, jerking open the cranky door of the Spryte. Darryl tumbled out first, slipping on the slick ice, and Michael followed, as Franklin started to off-load some of the gear from the sledge. They went straight into the hut, which felt like walking into a kiln after being outside. Space heaters were mounted on metal brackets, and an impressive rack of gear hung from cluttered racks along all four walls.

But most noticeable was the round hole, maybe six feet in diameter, sitting like a big Jacuzzi in the center of the floor. A steel grid had been placed over its top to prevent any accidental or premature entries, but Michael couldn't help but gaze down into it, into the deep blue water, frazzled with shimmering ice platelets, that awaited him below.

Calloway, a wry fellow with a pronounced Australian accent, said, “G'day mates, I'll be your divemaster for today's activities.” From what Michael had heard from Lawson and others, Calloway wasn't really an Aussie, but had adopted the persona as a ploy to get girls, many years ago, and somewhere along the way had forgotten to give it up. “Now, let's strip down to our skivvies and get started. There's a lot to do.”

That turned out to be the understatement of the year; Michael had dived many times before, and was used to the lengthy process of suiting up, but this outdid anything he'd ever been through before. Under Calloway's expert instruction, he and Darryl first put on expedition-weight polypro long underwear, and over that a Po-lartec thermal jumpsuit. On their feet, they wore the U.S. Antarctic program's own issue socks, and Thinsulate nylon shell booties. Darryl, at that point, looked suspiciously like a red-haired elf.

Calloway next handed them each a light purple dry-suit undergarment to haul on over all the underclothes.

“Bit warm in here, eh?” Calloway said, flapping open the front of his flannel shirt.

“You can say that again,” Michael agreed.

“Bit warm in here, eh?” Calloway dutifully repeated.

Michael had had to get used to the sophomoric sense of humor that prevailed at Point Adelie, or, in his experience, at any remote camp where men tended to congregate.

Next up was the dry suit itself, which Calloway held up like a fashion designer showing off his latest creation. “State of the art, mates. TLS Trilaminate. Much lighter than the compressed neo-prene jobs, and it won't retain the surface moisture either.”

It was hard to imagine, as Michael struggled into yet another layer, to believe that it was lighter than anything else. He was already feeling like the Michelin man, and this was before they got to what would surely be the most constricting step of all-the protection of the head and face.

Calloway was digging in a duffel bag Franklin had brought in, then extracting two black Henderson ice caps-full-face hoods that left room only around the eyes and lips; a thin strip of neoprene ran above the mouth aperture. Pulling the balaclava on, Michael felt like a burglar. And over it, he knew, would come the attached latex hood. Calloway had to help him drag the hood over the top of his head, and down to the top of the orange dry suit, where it snapped closed like a suction cup, effectively turning him into a big human sausage in a complete orange casing.

“Can you turn that down?” Darryl said, lifting one bulky arm toward the nearest heater. “I'm dying.”

“No problem, mate, shoulda done it sooner.” He flicked off both heaters. “A few more minutes, and you oughta be out of here,” he said, encouragingly. He helped both men on with their mountaineering glove liners, then their three-fingered rubber dry gloves, followed by their weight harnesses (without being weighted down properly, Michael knew, a diver could bob upside down until he drowned). Finally, he hoisted onto each of their hard-shell backpacks a ScubaPro ninety-five-cubic-foot, steel oxygen tank with twin regulators. Michael could barely move.

“Any last words,” Calloway said, “before the face masks go on?”

“Hurry,” Darryl gasped.

“Remember-no dawdling down there. You've got one hour, maximum.”

He was referring, Michael knew, both to their air supply and to a human being's ability, even under all the gear, to withstand the extreme temperatures.

“The nets and traps are already down?” Darryl asked, as he wrestled his wide rubber fins over his booties and onto his feet.

“Sent ‘em down myself, not two hours ago, tied to the lines from the safety hole. Good luck with the fishing.”

“Before we forget,” Michael said, “I'll need that.”

He gestured at the underwater camera that had been all but forgotten in the heap of discarded clothes.

“Right you are,” Calloway said, retrieving it. “If you see any mermaids, get me a snap.”

With that, their face masks were fitted snugly into place, their regulators tested for oxygen flow, and Darryl got a clap on the back from Calloway. While Michael was stepping into his own fins and attaching the flashlight to his waist belt, Darryl lifted the safety grate away from the dive hole, and he was already gone when Michael turned back around. Calloway gave Michael his own clap on the back, a thumbs-up sign, then he followed suit, feetfirst, down the rabbit hole.

The ice cap there was about eight feet thick, and the auger had cut a hole that was wider at the top than the bottom. It was a lot like sliding down a funnel, and Michael felt his feet break through a thin scrim of icy crystals that had already recongealed since Darryl's dive. He plunged through, surrounded by a cloud of sparkling ice and bubbles, and it took a few seconds for the water to clear enough for him to see.

He was hanging suspended about a dozen feet below the dive hole, in a blue world that seemed as lacking in limits as it did in dimensions. He could see, it seemed, forever, and he knew it was because the waters, particularly at that time of the year, were as free of plankton, or any particulate matter, as any on the globe. The sunlight only dimly illuminated the ice cap, which made the safety hole above stand out like a beacon radiating sunbeams downward. A trio of long lines, with plastic pennants on them, hung down from the lip of the hole and into the unseen depths.

And though he had braced himself for the shock of the icy water, Michael was pleasantly surprised. The gear that had left him feeling unbearably clumsy and hot up top was quite comfortable down below. The water not only made it easier to move, but it cooled the outer layers, and he felt himself positively relieved to be in the Antarctic Sea; no wonder Darryl had ducked in so quickly. But he also suspected that what felt cooling at the moment would be chilling soon, and frigid before the hour was up.

Glancing down, he could see Darryl's fins already propelling him downward toward the benthic regions. Clearly, Hirsch was not about to waste any of the time he had. The waters themselves were undisturbed and almost entirely free of any currents or tides that could, in some seas, stealthily move a diver far from his starting point. It was a great blue quiet kingdom, in which all Michael could hear at first was the intrusive clattering of his own regulator.

The seafloor sloped away from the area where the dive hut had been erected, and Michael began to follow its gradual descent. Glaciers had scoured the bottom, leaving massive striations in their wake, and dropping boulders that had been picked up miles away and strewn there like marbles. As he came closer to the floor, he could begin to see the myriad life-forms that populated even that seemingly barren landscape. The mud bore the telltale spirals and squiggles of mollusks and crustaceans, sea urchins and brittle stars; limpets clung like pale streamers to the algae-covered sides of the rocks, while starfish-some of them heaped atop each other- silently prospected for clams in the ooze. A sea spider, big as Michael's hand with the fingers spread, stood on a pointed pair of its eight legs, aware of his approach. Michael hovered in the water, raised his camera and took several shots. The creature appeared to have almost no body, just a rust-colored head and neck with two pairs of eyes; the segmented posterior sections were so reduced that they melded into the long legs. But Michael knew that the sea spider's proboscis was a deadly device, which it employed to probe the sediment for its sponge and coral prey. Once it had pierced its quarry, the proboscis then sucked up the fluids and flesh of its victims in one long and lethal kiss. As Michael swam by, the sea spider was buffeted by the wave from his fins, and toppled over in slow, underwater motion. As he turned, he could see it indignantly scrambling to its spiky feet again, ready to impale any unfortunate passerby.

Darryl was below, with a net in one hand and his other hand on a rock the size of a basketball. When Michael came closer, Darryl indicated, with a tilt of his head and a gesture, that he wanted Michael to tip the rock over. Michael let the camera dangle from his neck while he used both hands to push the rock first one way, then the other. When it finally rolled over, a swarm of tiny amphipods, the size of a fingernail, their antennae waving and their many legs pumping, scurried out, many of them landing in the net, which Darryl expertly turned inside out before transferring them to a transparent Ziploc bag. Darryl gave Michael a thumbs-up-as much as could be done, given the thickness of the gloves-then waved good-bye and Michael took the hint. Darryl really didn't want any extra commotion around him while he was trying to collect his samples and make his observations.

Nor did Michael want to be so encumbered. He had his own job to do, his own discoveries to make. He loitered above a clump of what looked like worms, each a yard long, as they writhed atop some nearly consumed carrion, and took some more photos that he would later on ask Darryl to explicate. The light was beginning to fade as he swam farther below the surface and the seafloor gradually yielded to a field of icy pressure ridges, like a gigantic sheet of crumpled white paper. From one side, a dark shape suddenly flashed into view, and as Michael peered through his face mask he saw a pair of big nacreous eyes, surrounded by a brush of long black whiskers, looking back at him.

It was one of the Weddell seals, the deepest-diving mammal apart from the minke whale in these waters, and he knew it would do him no harm. As he lifted his camera, the nictitating membrane that protected the cornea contracted, and the whiskers extended out like an opened fan. Ready for your close-up, Michael thought as he clicked off a series of shots.

The seal, five or six feet long, flicked one of its flippers and shot past him, looking back the whole while. It loitered then, as if waiting for this strange new acquaintance to catch up, before sailing off again.

Okay, Michael thought, I'm game. These, he thought, could be some terrific, and even amusing, shots for his article. He used his fins to take off after it, and the seal-a young one if he was any judge, with a sleek, undamaged coat and white unbroken teeth-retreated farther into the depths. Michael's oxygen tank hissed and burbled as he followed the seal around a rotten berg the size of a cabin cruiser, then over a rocky outcropping matted with brown and red algae.

The sea was truly opening up beneath him, and he sensed that if he wasn't careful, he would go too far. He clung to his vision of the sloping floor, and in the gloomy light provided by a break in the ice above, he saw something that looked entirely out of place. It was rectangular, too neatly so, and even encrusted with ice, it looked like a trunk of some kind. The seal spun in a lazy circle around it, almost as if it had been leading him here all along.

Oh my God, Michael thought, sunken treasure? It can't be. Not here. Not at the South Pole.

He worked his fins and rapidly drew near. Even with all the exertion, he was beginning to feel the cold seeping through the many layers of his clothing. He stopped just above it, waving his arms lazily in the freezing water. And under all the ice, under the clinging limpets and sea urchins and starfish that festooned its sides-one of the ivory-colored starfish had even spread itself out on top like a skeletal hand-he could see that it was definitely a trunk, and that its lid had fallen open. By instinct, he took out his camera and reeled off half a dozen shots.

The seal did a quick arabesque above him.

Michael went deeper, until he could actually look inside the trunk; a frozen cascade of ice spilled out, like crystal coins, but mixed in with them he could detect a hint of something darker. Plum-colored. Glistening.

He swept his gaze from left to right, scanning the seafloor. To one side, the sea descended to a bottomless black, to the other he saw-perhaps a few hundred yards off-a sheer wall of ice that clearly went from high above the cap to a depth he could never approach. Between his present location and the looming glacier, he saw something else, also plum-colored, covered with an icy sheen, but lying on the seabed. He took the flashlight off of his harness belt and aimed the beam in its direction.

It was a bottle… it had to be. A wine bottle.

Michael swam down, and with his three-fingered glove brushed the sediment away from its neck. An urchin, attached to its base, opened and closed its mouth-a mouth was really all it was-thinking that something edible might be in reach. Michael used the tip of the flashlight to scrape it off. Ice coated the bottle from top to bottom, but under it he could see a scrap of what once had been a label, altogether illegible. He tried to prize the bottle from the seafloor, but it was not about to be plucked so easily. He would have to use both hands. He carefully balanced the flashlight between two chunks of ice moored to the bottom, inadvertently disturbing a scale worm that looked like a broken rubber band several feet long- and that then undulated off in search of calmer quarters-before trying again. To loosen the grip of the mud and ice, he had to rock the bottle carefully-the last thing he wanted to do was break an artifact that might have survived for God knows how many years. Eventually, it broke free-he felt exactly as if he had just won a delicate tug-of-war with the ocean floor-and he turned it all around in his hands, admiring it.

Before he suddenly spotted one more, a dozen yards off, even closer to the glacial wall.

Perhaps he had found a treasure trove! Thoughts of fortune certainly crossed his mind-how couldn't they? — but more than that, it was the scoop! Wait till Gillespie back in Tacoma got a load of this! A photojournalist, on assignment from Eco-Travel Magazine, discovering a sunken chest hundreds of feet below the Antarctic ice cap. From there on in, Michael would be able to write his own ticket.

He stuck the bottle in a mesh bag attached to his harness, and sailed closer to the ice cliff. The seal seemed to hold off, drifting along on his back and looking at him down the length of his own sleek belly.

The closer he got to the glacier, the colder the water suddenly got; it reminded Michael of the impossibly cold katabatic winds that rushed down the sides of glaciers on land and gusted across the polar plains. He shivered in his suit, and glanced at the diving watch clamped to the outside of his wrist. He would have to turn around soon, very soon, and come back later.

The second bottle was wedged beneath a rock, and he decided to leave it where it was. His regulator hissed, and he realized that he had not been breathing normally-the excitement had been getting to him, and he'd not been paying attention. The slanted wall of the massive glacier rose above him like a sheer white cliff-not so different from one that he'd encountered on a tragic day in the Cascades-and fell away forever under his feet. Its walls were gouged and scarred, like a fighter who'd been in the ring far too many times. He ran his hand across it, feeling, even through the thick glove, the rough and ancient power of it, a mountain of ice that could slowly but inexorably demolish anything in its path.

And then his breath did stop-entirely.

Beneath his fingers, he saw… a face.

He shoved himself away, in shock and confusion, a cloud of air bubbles trailing away.

With his arms and legs treading water, he stayed in place. The Weddell seal came back to play, but Michael paid no attention to it.

He could not have seen what he knew he had just seen. He looked around for Darryl, but all he could make out was an orange speck in the far distance, tending to a trap that was being hauled up the line to the safety hole.

He turned back toward the glacier, his heart hammering in his chest-he had to get a grip, or he'd do something stupid and wind up drowning before he ever got to tell anyone about what he'd found-and turned the flashlight on the mottled ice.

From there, he could see very little.

But when he allowed himself to move closer, he saw again something emerging from under the mask of ice… and when he went closer still, he could see it even more plainly.

A frozen face, with a crown of auburn hair, and a chain-an iron chain? — wrapped around its throat. There was a smudge of blue and black under the ice, where her clothes must be, and quite possibly some other form nestled close behind the one he was looking at. But it was all too difficult to discern or separate out in the dim glacial waters.

He brushed the ice gently-reverently now-with his glove, and put his face mask closer to the wall.

In the beam of the flashlight, he looked into the ice, where, like Sleeping Beauty imprisoned in an icy fortress, he saw a young woman's face, staring out… but not in repose.

Nothing like it.

Her eyes were open, wide open-eyes so green that even here he was stunned by their brilliance-and so was her mouth, in a final scream. A violent shiver racked his body and a warning alarm sounded from his oxygen tank. He drifted back, barely able to accept what was happening, until he was far enough away that the ice clouded over and its terrible treasure was again concealed.