Eternity Base

Chapter 2

The National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis consists of seventeen acres of paper hidden underground with an eight-story office building housing other federal agencies above it. Papers tucked away in the building range from old social security records to the original plans for Fat Man, the first nuclear bomb. The U.S. government runs on paper, and the National Personnel Records Center is the temporary storage place and clearinghouse for every imaginable type of government record.

Unclassified records are in folders placed inside cardboard boxes, which are stacked on rows and rows of shelves. The secure “vault” contains all the classified records. Every scrap of paper produced by the numerous organizations, and every piece of paper relating to any person who ever worked for the government, are kept in the Records Center. Personnel records are normally kept for fifty-six years, organizational records for twenty-five unless marked for longer keeping. Once that time limit is up, files marked as permanent records are moved to final storage in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Nonpermanent records are held until the time limit stamped on them, at which time they are reviewed for either destruction or movement to the Archives.

At the moment, it was organizational records that held the attention of Sammy Pintella. Actually, it would be fairer to say they occupied the time but not the interest of Sammy. Her tall, slender form was perched on the edge of a metal folding chair next to a line of rollers. She sported short red hair, cut almost punk style, and a freckled complexion. Her expression betrayed supreme boredom with her job.

A cardboard box of army unit histories would come rolling down to her every thirty seconds. She would look in and quickly scan the contents under the bright glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, making sure the material matched the computer printout she had taped to the edge of the platform. She had a good memory and referred to the printout only every dozen or so cartons. Satisfied that the box held what the printout said, she’d send the box on its way to the other end of the conveyer, where a pimply faced college freshman would remove the box and place it on a pallet. Once the pallet was full, it would be taken by forklift to the loading dock. When enough pallets accumulated, a tractor trailer would be filled and sent to the National Archives.

Sammy had been at it for almost two hours now and had finished six cart loads. She enjoyed working alone and she didn’t talk to the men who brought the carts or took away the pallets. The Records Center was a giant library of tempting unknowns to her. She could get lost in the stacks for hours on end, looking through various files, reading the stories of people and organizations that the tides of time had swept away or carried on to different places. The assembly line work bored her but had to be gotten out of the way so she could disappear back into the stacks tomorrow.

Two divorces, no children, and thirty-six years on the planet gave Sammy a different attitude from the college students who worked part-time in the unclassified stacks. This job was her sole means of support, and she was glad to do it in a place where she could be alone most of the time. Getting paid to deal with the records of people she’d never meet and places she’d never go suited her just fine.

She flipped open the lid on the next box and was so benumbed by the endless, bland file folders that she almost pushed it on to oblivion. But in the back she spotted the edges of some black and white photos stuffed into one of the folders. That was unusual: typically the histories were dry recitations of the barest facts — just enough to satisfy the army regulation requirements. Curious, Sammy reached in to pull the file. That brief halt caused the first disruption of the afternoon as the next box crashed into the one in front of her.

“Hold it!” Sammy yelled down to the front end worker. “Take a break.”

The slider shrugged, sat down on the edge of his cart, and pulled out a dog-eared paperback to read. The man on the other end took the time to restack his boxes, preparing the pallet for the forklift.

Sammy opened the folder and laid out the photos on the conveyer belt. The twelve photos showed a desolate winter landscape and bundled-up men working on some sort of structure dug into the snow. Several photos obviously had been posed seriously; in others the men were goofing off for the camera.

Sammy picked up one photo. About forty men were gathered around a crude sign drawn on cardboard: B COMPANY ETERNITY BASE. Behind the men, all that could be seen rising above the snow was a metal shaft with a door in the center. Farther in the background, three massive mountains rose from the ice-covered landscape, blotting out most of the horizon.

Sammy flipped the picture over. The date was printed on the bottom edge: 17 NOVEMBER 1971. She retrieved the folder and looked at the faded label: 67TH ENGINEERS. UNIT HISTORY 1971. LT. FREELY, HISTORIAN.

She turned it back to the front. Eternity Base. Sammy frowned. She’d never heard of such a place. After working here for eighteen years, ever since graduating high school, she thought she’d seen just about every type of army record that existed and was more familiar with army terms, units, and bases than most generals. She checked the rest of the folders in the box, but they were just the normal histories of other army units in 1971, none of them appearing particularly interesting or containing pictures. Sammy put the folder to the side.

“All right. Let’s finish this off.” She slid the box down the line.

As the second hand hit twelve, aligning with the minute hand, the workers at the Records Center broke from the chains of the job. They moved for the stairs, to spread out into the city of St. Louis until eight the next morning when they’d be drawn back by the siren call of the time clock. Sammy stayed behind. She had nowhere in particular to go other than her apartment to stare into the aquarium sitting on a stand beside her bed. She figured the fish would be all right for a while without her. She often stayed late, thumbing through interesting files and finishing the tasks that never seemed to get done in the required eight-hour workday.

Her supervisor, Brad Tollander, a history Ph.D. who ran this section of the Records Center, stopped by her desk as he headed out. “What are you working on, Sam?”

Sammy and Brad were the two old-timers of the Center. They’d come in together just after the famous fire that had badly damaged the top floor of the building. They’d been here when many of the eighteen wheelers filled with records had driven up to the loading dock. They’d helped unload carton after carton, year after year. Between the two of them they knew where almost every record was.

Despite the recent valiant attempt to list everything on a computer database, there was no substitute for the years of knowledge in their two heads. Sammy often wondered what would happen when they both retired. There would be records sitting in boxes that no one knew were in the stacks. Computers were fine, but some things just couldn’t be quantified into the little sections on the database.

Sammy shrugged. “Just going through some of the unit histories we cleared today. A few looked kind of interesting.”

Brad nodded. Reading files was one of the perks of the job. “All right. I’ll see you in the morning.” He trudged up the stairs.

Sammy turned back to the computer screen. As soon as the door swished shut behind her supervisor, she punched into the unclassified database, accessing armed forces installations. She started with the army. It took her ten minutes to determine that there was no listing for Eternity Base. She moved on to the air force and then the navy, with similar results. On the off chance the marines might not have told its mother branch, she checked the corps records too. Nothing. That meant that this one file folder of photos was the only mention in the entire Records Center of such an installation. Or at least in the unclassified records, she reminded herself.

Sammy had put the photos in time sequence earlier, and she noticed that the dates on the back had spanned four months — from late August through December 1971. Judging from the pictures, Eternity Base was some sort of structure constructed under the snow cover in a cold-weather area. That led Sammy to her second avenue of investigation. She accessed the database on Alaska and tried cross-referencing. Again she drew a blank.

She wondered if Eternity Base might be part of the Defense Early Warning (DEW) line constructed across northern Canada — maybe even in Greenland. Her fingers flitted over the keys of the computer as she checked that, but no cross-reference showed up there either.

Sammy then took a different route. She turned off the computer and moved into the stacks. She went directly to the section that held army organizational records — every army unit’s record, from battalion level on up. Finding the section that held the engineer units, Sammy followed the number of the battalions as they went up. She pulled the cardboard box labeled 67TH ENGINEERS, 1970–1974.

Kneeling on the floor, she tugged out the thick folder for 1971. It was bulging with copies of orders, promotions, citations, operations plans, and the various other forms of paperwork that army units churned out in the course of business. Sammy slowly peeled through the pages and stopped at a stamped set of orders. The orders deployed the 67th Engineer Battalion (Heavy Construction) from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to Vietnam on 20 June 1971.

It didn’t take a Ph.D. to know that Eternity Base wasn’t in Vietnam. She continued through the rest of the folder, looking for a set of orders detaching B Company from the battalion for the Eternity Base operation. Such orders would list the destination, but there were none to be found. As far as she could tell, the 67th Engineers had been attached to the III Corps Tactical Zone, doing various construction jobs throughout the area until redeployment to the United States on 18 May 1972. The unit had been disbanded in early 1974 during the big drawdown in forces after the war.

Sammy ran a hand through her short hair as she considered the puzzle. She knew the army paperwork system very well, and it was unheard of for an entire company to disappear for four months and not leave a paper trail. Why was Eternity Base so important that it could pull an engineer company out of a war zone for four months?

After another thirty minutes of going over the 67th’s records for 1971 in more detail, Sammy still could find no hint of where B Company had gone. All references to that unit simply ended in August and reappeared at the end of December. Another person might have been frustrated, but Sammy was intrigued. This was a challenge. She slid the folder back into the box and replaced it on the shelf. Then she wandered out among the twelve-foot stacks, slowly making her way to her next destination, on the far side: the TDY records.

TDY is military jargon for Temporary Duty, and every time any army element — from the individual on up — was assigned away from the parent unit, a set of TDY orders had to be cut authorizing it. Since B Company had obviously been separated from the 67th Engineer Battalion, Sammy felt reasonably confident that a set of orders would be there, listing where the unit had gone.

She narrowed her search to the folder containing all TDY orders for III Corps, Vietnam, July-August 1971. Finally she found a mention of the phantom company. A single sheet of wrinkled paper — Department of Defense Form 1610—detached B Company, 67th Engineer Battalion, from III Corps, effective 18 August 1971, to the operational control (OPCON) of MACV-SOG.

Sammy’s eyebrows raised at the last term, and her pulse rate quickened. She knew very well that MACV-SOG stood for Military Assistance Command Vietnam — Studies and Observation Group. What had MACV-SOG wanted with an engineer battalion? Despite the innocuous name, Sammy knew that SOG had run Special Forces cross-border missions throughout the war, along with many other classified operations. Some of the records for that unit were in the vault, requiring a top secret Q clearance to even take a look.

Checking SOG records was out of the question. Sammy looked at the rest of the orders. There was no termination date in the appropriate block. It just read: UNTIL MISSION COMPLETION. Destination was listed as CHI LANG, VIETNAM.

Sammy shook her head. She didn’t care what the orders said; those pictures had not been taken in Vietnam. So where had B Company really gone? She replaced the orders, put the box back on the shelf, and headed for her desk. Her mind was clicking along, sorting all the data she had sifted through today, as she pulled on her leather jacket and headed up the stairs. She used her access card to open the door and stepped out into the lobby.

The guard casually looked her up and down as she left. His interest was not sexual. Not only were there numerous classified documents in the vault, but the personnel records were not for public dissemination. Nothing came in or out that wasn’t authorized. The previous year, one of the part-timers had been fired for trying to take Elvis’s army medical chest X-rays. Sammy wondered how American taxpayers would feel if they knew that Elvis’s X-rays were now locked in a classified vault along with the original plans for the first atomic bomb.

She swung open the glass door and walked across the parking lot. Straddling a Yamaha motorcycle, Sammy put on her helmet. The engine roared to life and she cruised out of the lot, the cool fall air knifing into her despite the leather jacket. She cut through the back streets of St. Louis, eventually arriving home. She rented an apartment on the top floor of a garage behind a family house; it was small and cheap and, most importantly for her, it was quiet. She’d lived there for four years now. Sammy parked the bike and bounced up the stairs.

The first sight to greet her eyes as she locked the door behind her was the flashing red light on the answering machine. Sammy turned on the small electric heater and stood next to it for a few seconds, trying to get the chill out of her bones. She reached over and tapped the message button on the machine.

“Hey, big sister, it’s me. I’ve got the late shift tonight — midnight to four A.M. Turn me on if you’re still up. Gotta go. Bye.”

The double beep sounded, indicating no more messages. Sammy put a pot of water on the stove and turned the heat on high. While waiting for it to boil, she stepped over to one of the many bookcases that lined the walls of her one-room apartment. This particular bookcase held row upon row of nonfiction — everything Sammy could find or order about the war in Vietnam. The book she wanted sat in the center at eye level: Green Berets at War by Shelby Stanton.

She checked the index. There were five references to Chi Lang. The last one was what she was looking for. Chi Lang had been a post on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border where Special Forces troops had launched classified reconnaissance missions. According to Stanton’s research, the post had been shut down on 23 September 1971 due to extreme Vietcong pressure.

Had B Company been used to close out Chi Lang? Sammy immediately dismissed that thought. There was no snow at Chi Lang, and it certainly wasn’t Eternity Base. So why then the orders? For the first time that day, Sammy felt a tremor of unease. More than twenty-five years ago, someone had gone through quite a bit of trouble to hide the whereabouts of B Company, 67th Engineers, for four months. If it hadn’t been for some lieutenant with a camera and one roll of film, there would have been no anomalies in the unit history and the whole thing would have disappeared into the Archives in Washington, most likely never to surface again.

Before returning the book to the shelf, Sammy turned to a well- marked place in the back. Appendix A was titled SPECIAL FORCES PERSONNEL MISSING IN ACTION. Eighty-one names were listed in alphabetical order along with a one-paragraph description of the circumstances surrounding each incident. The entries weren’t numbered; Sammy knew there were eighty-one because she had counted them one day and the number had stayed in her mind. Thirteen pages in from the first name she stopped. She knew the words by heart, but still she read:

Sammy slowly put down the book and blinked the sudden tears out of her eyes. She looked up to the next higher shelf. A photo of a grinning young man astride an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle sat next to a photo of the same man wearing tiger-striped fatigues and sporting a green beret.

Sammy shifted her gaze to the clock. It was almost seven. Five hours until her sister, Conner, came on the TV as anchorperson for the Satellite News Network (SSN). Sammy decided to set her alarm so she could wake up and catch the first hour of Conner’s broadcast. Her sister had moved up to the front desk only last week, and Sammy had watched her twice so far. It was strange for Sammy to see Conner on national satellite TV, even if it was the graveyard shift. Conner certainly was on a different life track, but Sammy felt no jealousy for her sister. Sammy believed that experiences shaped your life, and her experiences had been much different from Conner’s.

She thought of a line she had once read: “It’s not the sins of the father but rather the grief of the mother that is so damaging.” Sammy disliked the word damaging because of its implications, but she did agree that their mother had been greatly affected by their father’s actions and even more by his disappearance.

Their dad had wanted sons and had accepted the births of his daughters with a certain resignation. Their mother had initially acquiesced to his attempts to defeminize Samantha and Constance, the most immediate result being the adoption of the nicknames Sammy and Conner.

As the elder, Sammy had spent more time with their father, and her idolization had found an outlet in dungarees and tree climbing. She’d shied away from their mother’s desire to slow her down and clean her up; as a consequence, their mother’s hopes for a ladylike daughter had fallen on Conner.

Sammy had spent time with their dad whenever he was home. She remembered living in the trailer court outside of Fort Bragg among the other enlisted families in the 1960s. He’d taken her out to the woods camping. He’d also taught her martial arts — a practice their mother had rolled her eyes at and curtailed every time dad went overseas.

While Conner was spending her afternoon at ballet class, Sammy was catching tadpoles and playing war. She’d learned the pleasures of solitude, and her present position could be seen as a direct result of that. Conner, on the other hand, had taken a different path; her position as newswoman had had early seeds.

The age difference between them had loomed large when their dad was reported as missing in action. Sammy was devastated. She had been close to him; to Conner he was a distant symbol.

The four years between them had become an unbridgeable gap when Sammy got her driver’s license. That was the year Sammy discovered that living and moving fast were inexplicably entwined. She had climbed into the ‘64 Mustang and never really looked back at the twelve-year-old girl dressed in taffeta and lace, tap-dancing to a tune Sammy would never understand. That summer Sammy, always a bright student, rejected the idea of college in favor of the Records Center. She’d had her own demons to exorcise, and the Records Center had beckoned with a possible solution.

Sammy had avoided her mother; she filled her days with work and her nights with men who would never be her father. When she finally realized that no man was better than the wrong man, she attained an uneasy peace with herself. She knew she could take care of herself — her dad had taught her that early on. Once she understood what was causing the many bad relationships, she stopped them like snapping her fingers.

Conner was tough too, but in a different way. She was driven to succeed, but Sammy wasn’t sure her sister knew where that drive was taking her or if it would make her happy. Sammy was sure Conner would figure herself out eventually; it would just take time. She also knew she shouldn’t judge her sister, since she herself was still struggling with an old ghost — one that the mention of the acronyms MACV-SOG and MIA had sparked in her today.

Sammy turned away from the memory-laden bookshelf, grabbed a package of instant noodles from the cabinet above the stove, and poured the contents into the boiling water.

It had come to Sammy in the midst of watching Conner’s first hour stint on the news, early in the morning with only the reflection from the small bulb on top of the aquarium mixing with the flickering glow of the TV. The organizational records of the 67th Engineers might not have yielded the information on where B Company had truly gone, but there was another avenue to pursue, albeit a more risky one. Watching her sister’s discourse on the latest pathetic world situation, Sammy had made up her mind to pursue that route.

Now, back at work, she was following through on her decision. She went to the aisle where the files for the 67th Engineers were located, pulled the 1610 TDY order, and flipped it over. More than forty names were listed on the back — the men of B Company. Sammy copied the names of the four officers onto an index card and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

So far she had done little more than scratch at the surface, using unclassified data that was simply lying on the shelves and stored in the computer. Now, for the first time, she was stepping over the line. She had seen other workers do it for various reasons, mostly checking out personnel records of someone they knew; although forbidden by the rules of the Center, this usually was unofficially tolerated.

After her first year here, Sammy had asked Brad to help her pull all the classified information on her father’s last mission. What they’d found had agreed on the surface with Stanton’s book, but the records were sketchy, which had bothered her. She discovered that her dad had been on a four-man special reconnaissance team named Utah, composed of two Americans and two indigenous personnel. She found out the name of the other American on the team, only to learn that he’d been reported as missing in action more than two months prior to her own father’s disappearance. There was no explanation on the records for this time difference, nor had there been any reply from the Pentagon to her many letters.

That kind of gap in the records didn’t surprise Sammy anymore. She had found more than enough documents that disagreed with the commonly accepted view of many of the events of modern history. And there was the fire that had destroyed the top two floors of the Records Center in 1973. It had burned the personnel records for those men involved in the government’s nuclear testing in the late ‘40s and ‘50s and also the records for those troops exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. The destruction of the records was convenient when the government was faced with numerous lawsuits involving ailments claimed to result from those two government actions.

Over the years, Sammy had kept quiet about several discrepancies that might have embarrassed the government. The link between Eternity Base and MACV-SOG was beginning to get under her skin, however. There were too many facts that just didn’t fit, and it was too similar to her father’s case.

She had finally given up trying to find the “truth” concerning her father’s disappearance when she’d realized how anxious it made her mother. Whether her mother’s desire to keep the past buried was an attempt to avoid personal pain or to protect the pride of her new husband, Sammy was never sure. Sammy had even managed to forgive her mother for the ultimate betrayal — having her father declared legally dead so she could marry Nelson Young, M.D. That was the same year Sammy left home, so her stepfather had never assumed much of a role in her life.

Conner, on the other hand, had been only twelve and had accepted Nelson Young with love and exuberance to fill the gap created by her father’s two tours of duty in Vietnam. Nelson, in turn, gave her his name and a fine education. He’d made the same offer to Sammy, but she had turned down the latter because she thought it was a package deal. Sammy now knew that Nelson would never have insisted she take his name in exchange for his love and support, but she also realized that there was more to it: she hadn’t wanted his fathering and had let him know it. It was a decision she had made out of youth and pride and loyalty, and although she now knew it had been the wrong decision, she didn’t regret it.

Sammy pushed her chair away from her desk, clearing her mind of memories and focusing on the present. She left the Records Center and took the elevator. She was sure Brad wouldn’t miss her. He knew she put in more than her required forty hours a week, and he didn’t begrudge her the flexibility to take care of personal business once in a while.

The seventh and eighth floors of the building now housed RC-PAC; the Reserve Component-Personnel Administration Center. Entering the foyer on the seventh floor, Sammy pulled her ID card out of her wallet and showed it to the guard at the desk. She was waved through into the hallway where secure doors stretched off in either direction. Sammy’s access card wouldn’t work on these doors, so she picked up one of the phones hanging on the wall and dialed.

“RC-PAC. Tomkins here.”

‘Tom, this is Sammy.”

“Hey, how you doing, wild woman?”

“I’m in the hall.”

“I’ll be right out.”

She hung up the phone and waited. Soon a set of doors whisked open and a short, balding man stepped out. His face broke into a wide smile as he walked up to Sammy. Handing her a visitor’s pass, he guided her into the room.

“What brings you to my part of town? Misplaced some social security records?”

Sammy waited until the doors shut before answering. She’d worked with Tomkins dozens of times in the past; RC-PAC transferred the records of military personnel over to the Records Center every fiscal quarter when the designated individuals were no longer to be held in the reserve files.

“I need to check on a couple of people.”

Tomkins gave her a curious glance. “What for?”

Sammy sighed. “That damn computer. We’ve got some gaps in the database and Brad wanted me to check it out.” It was weak, but she also knew Tomkins would do just about anything for her on the off chance she might finally agree to date him. She hoped it didn’t come to that. He was one of those men who needed female attention like a leaky raft needed air: Sammy knew she could pump him up every day, but he would never be strong enough to float on his own. She had long ago learned the bitter lesson that people who couldn’t stand on their own made miserable partners in life, dragging you down with them.

“So how’re the fish?” Sammy had invited Tomkins to her apartment once for a small party for some of her coworkers, an invitation he had made much too significant.

“Still breathing.”

“Uh-huh.” He led her into a larger room — an above-surface, miniaturized version of the Records Center. All the records for military personnel no longer on active duty, but who were or had been part of the reserves — either in a reserve unit or the IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) — were kept at RC-PAC. “OK. What do you need?”

Sammy pulled out the index card. “I need whatever you have on these folks.”

Tomkins looked over the names. “Army, eh? All right.” He led her to his desk. “Take a seat.” He punched into his computer for a few seconds, then the printer whirred. He grabbed the printout. “I’ll be right back.”

Sammy licked her lips nervously as he disappeared into the labyrinth of records. She remembered when two of her fellow workers had unearthed information on Ferdinand Marcos in the Records Center. At a party one of them casually mentioned what they’d found to a reporter for the New York Times. Once the media got hold of the information, the publicity train had run down the tracks. Marcos’s fabricated history of being a resistance fighter in the Philippines during World War II had gone up in smoke. That had been fine for the media, but the two workers were no longer employees of the government.

“I’ve got 201 files for the first two.” He handed them over and disappeared again.

Sammy opened up Capt. Louis Townsend’s record. He had been the commander of B Company from April 1971 through January 1972. His Officer Efficiency Report (OER) for the time period of Eternity Base made no mention of the base and made it sound as if he had been in Vietnam his entire tour of duty. He even had a Bronze Star for the Vietnam tour. The citation read:

For numerous heavy construction engineering assignments under adverse conditions in hostile territory.

She looked at the other file. It was Lieutenant Freely’s — the picture taker. His record held no hint of Eternity Base either. Tomkins returned with the other two lieutenants’ records and Sammy went through them. Nothing in either one referred to Eternity Base or cold weather or held even the slightest indication that the men had been deployed out of Vietnam for four months in 1971.

Tomkins was sitting on the other side of the desk, pretending to look at his computer screen. When Sammy closed the last file, he raised an eyebrow. “Find what you needed?”

Sammy shook her head. “No.”

“Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help you find it.”

Sammy closed her eyes and thought furiously. “How about medical records?” Medical records for military personnel were considered government property; when an individual went off active duty, the entire folder for his career time was sent to St. Louis.

Tomkins stood up. “Yeah, we got the active duty ones for those people. You want all four?”

While he was gone, Sammy wrote on her index card the last known addresses for the four officers. She had just finished when Tompkins returned. She found what she was looking for in the second folder: Lieutenant Freely’s. The entry was hand written on a diagnostic form dated 19 November 1971:

SM suffering from severe frostbite, second and third digits, left hand.

The consulting physician’s name was typed at the bottom of the page: Doctor John Reynolds, Major, U.S. Air Force. She had two more pieces of the puzzle, although it wasn’t clear where they fit:

Freely hadn’t gotten frostbite in Vietnam. And why had he been treated by an air force doctor and not an army medic?

“Do you have any records on an air force major — name John Reynolds? He was a doctor. Social security number 185-35-9375.”

Tomkins typed for a few seconds and then looked up. “Nope. You have it all. He got out of service in ‘75. Died in ‘83.”

With these new items, Sammy took her leave quickly, short-circuiting Tomkins’s attempts to make conversation. She already knew the next thing she had to check.

“Want to go to lunch?” Brad stopped by her desk.

“No thanks,” Sammy answered.

Brad didn’t leave right away. He perched on the edge. “Are you all right?”

Sammy looked up in surprise. “Of course.”

Brad shook his head. “I don’t know. You’ve been acting a little weird lately. Are you sure everything’s OK?”

Sammy gave what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Everything’s fine, Brad. Just a little tired, that’s all. I watched my sister on the news late last night and didn’t get much sleep.”

“How’s she doing?”

This time the smile was true. “She looked really good.”

Brad stood. “Well, when you talk to her again, give her my best wishes. She seems to really be on the way up.”

That was an accurate way to describe Conner, Sammy reflected. When Brad was out of sight, she headed into the stacks. Unerringly she went to the correct shelf. Doctor Reynolds’s 201 file was in a box containing those of other former air force officers who had died in 1983. Sitting down cross-legged on the concrete floor, Sammy opened the file and started reading, going from his medical school and commissioning through his various tours of duties. The man’s professional life was open before her.

From late 1968 through 1970, Reynolds was stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. As 1971 began the doctor was still in Maryland. Then she found what she was searching for. In May 1971, Maj. John Reynolds, M.D., USAF, was given a set of TDY orders assigning him to a place called McMurdo Station for six months.

Sammy had heard of McMurdo Station. She frowned in thought for a few seconds, then it came to her. McMurdo was the United States’ primary research station on the seventh continent. Eternity Base was in Antarctica.