Blood and Ice

CHAPTER NINETEEN

December 9, 5 p.m.

AS MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPECTED, news of the amazing underwater discovery had threatened to sweep through the camp like wildfire, so Murphy-notified by walkie-talkie from the dive hut- had immediately imposed an executive order. Michael heard him barking instructions at Calloway to admit no one else onto the ice, or anywhere near the hut. He also ordered everyone in earshot to zip their lips until further notice.

“Wait for Danzig and the dogs to get there,” he said before signing off.

By the time the ice block was safely stowed on the back of a sledge, Danzig and his dog team had pulled to a stop fifty yards off. The huskies lay down on the snow and ice and watched the proceedings warily.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Danzig said, striding up to the sledge and marveling openly at the thing-the frozen woman-contained in the ice. He paced slowly around the ponderous block, and Michael could tell he was already making some quick calculations about how best to transport it.

“That there, mates,” Calloway said, “is the weirdest thing I've ever seen come up, and let me tell you, I've seen plenty of weird stuff.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Franklin, who'd been assisting on the dive.

Michael could barely believe they'd done it. He had hastily taken off his diving gear, wrapped himself in more layers of dry clothing than ever before, and was sipping from a thermos of hot tea; still, he had the occasional shiver, and he knew he was suffering from a touch of the predictable hypothermia.

Lawson asked Danzig if they should call for a Spryte, or if he thought his dogs could pull the block back to camp.

Danzig, who always wore a good-luck charm of walrus teeth around his neck, laid one huge hand on the ice and with the other rubbed his chin. “Once we get it started, we can do it,” he declared. There was little that Danzig thought his dogs couldn't do, and he was always looking for ways to prove that modern technology had nothing on the reliable, old-fashioned methods that had been good enough for Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott.

While Danzig took care of unhooking his dogs from the one sledge and attaching them to the other, Michael rubbed his wrist, where the dry-suit seal had leaked. It ached the way a bad sprain would. Franklin and Calloway were still gawking at the woman in the ice-and when one of them laughed, and made some coarse joke about waking Sleeping Beauty with a kiss she'd never forget- Michael took a tarp from the dogsled and threw it over the ice. Franklin looked at him oddly for stopping the show, but as Michael secured the tarp with a couple of pitons, Danzig glanced at him knowingly, and asked, “Did the chief tell you anything about where he wanted to put her?” He sounded vaguely like a funeral director asking a family member about the recently deceased.

“Not a word.” For Michael, it was strange even to be asked. He wasn't a scientist, and he wasn't even one of the grunts. He occupied some middle ground, some ill-defined territory, and yet he had already come to be regarded as the rightful advocate for the woman retrieved from the deep.

“Well, she shouldn't be moved directly inside,” Danzig said, thinking out loud, “because if the thaw was too rapid, it might do some damage.”

Yes, Michael could see the wisdom of that.

“So it might be a good idea to keep her in the core bin, behind the glaciology lab. Betty and Tina could even use some of their tools to cut away the excess ice.”

“Sure,” Michael said, “that sounds fine.” He was glad to have someone there who was thinking more clearly than he was.

There was a commotion among the dogs, and Danzig hollered, “Hey!” and moved off to put a stop to it. The huskies were a rambunctious lot-Michael had already seen them in action more than once-but usually they obeyed any command as soon as it was given. Only this time, several of them were struggling at their leads, backing away from the block of ice, and their pack leader, Ko-diak-a massive dog with eyes like big blue marbles-was actually barking and snarling. Danzig was using a firm but even voice, coupled with hand signals, to quiet the dogs down, but even he looked surprised at the rebellion.

“Kodiak!” Danzig finally shouted, repeatedly shaking the dog's lead. “Down!”

The dog stayed on his feet, barking madly.

“Down! Kodiak-down!”

Danzig had to put a hand on the dog's squirming neck and press him toward the ice. Once down, he held him there, impressing his authority. The other dogs, though still whining, gradually took the cue and quieted down. Danzig unsnarled some of the harnesses and leads, then stepped onto the back of the sledge, and shouted, “Hike!”

The dogs jerked forward to get the sledge sliding, but not with their customary exuberance, and the sledge hardly budged. Two or three of them were still trying to look behind them, as if afraid of something coming up close behind, and Danzig had to snap the reins and shout his orders again and again.

Michael wondered if the load was simply too great.

“Hike! Hike!” Danzig shouted, and the dogs again leapt forward, this time getting the runners sliding on the ice. As the sledge gained momentum, it went more smoothly, until the dozen huskies were racing in unison, and the slab of ice, with its frozen cargo, was on its way back toward the base. While Calloway closed up the dive hut, Michael hitched a ride on Franklin's snowmobile, and they followed the barking dogs back to camp.

No matter how long Michael stood there, head down, the hot water running off his scalp and down his body, he felt like there was still some part of him, deep inside, that still harbored another shiver or two. When the steam in the shower room had achieved epic proportions and he could hardly see his hand in front of his face, he shut off the water and rubbed himself down briskly with the fresh towels that were always in abundant supply. He had to take special care with his shoulder, the one he had dislocated in the Cascades. It still gave him trouble from time to time, and diving in such heavy gear, in frigid waters, hadn't helped. He used the towel to wipe clear a section of the fogged mirror, then disentangled some of his long black hair. He'd taken care of nearly everything before leaving Tacoma, but getting a haircut had slipped his mind. So it was looking more shaggy than usual. He could, he supposed, get it cut-one of the base personnel doubled as a barber-but it didn't seem like anyone else at Point Adelie cared a whole lot about personal appearance. Betty and Tina stomped around in men's clothes, with their blond hair hastily gathered into loose clumps, and most of the men looked like they'd just stepped out of a cave. Nearly all of them had beards, moustaches, even long woolly sideburns that hadn't been seen since the Civil War. Ponytails were popular too, especially among the balding beakers like Ackerley the botanist who was so seldom seen outside his lab that he had earned the nickname “Spook.” As for Danzig, in addition to his necklace of walrus teeth, he wore a bracelet of bones and a pair of pants he'd made himself out of reindeer hide. Michael was reminded of a joke he'd heard from a single woman he'd met in a bar when he was on assignment in Alaska: “The odds are good,” she'd said, surveying all the men, “but the goods are odd.”

Before heading over to the commons-man, could he use a hot meal about now-he ducked into the SAT-phone room and called his editor, on his home line. In the background, he could hear a basketball game on TV, but when Gillespie knew it was Michael, and not some phone solicitor, the game went off immediately and he said, “You okay? Everything okay?”

Michael took a second to savor what he was about to tell him, then said, “Better than okay. Are you sitting down?”

“No, and now I don't plan to. What?”

And then Michael told him, in as calm and deliberate a manner as possible-he didn't want Gillespie thinking he'd gone off his rocker at the South Pole-that they had found a body, maybe even two, frozen in an iceberg, and that, furthermore, they had recovered them. Gillespie had remained silent the whole time that Michael had been talking and he stayed silent now, too. Michael had to finally say, “Are you there?”

“You're not joking?”

“Not joking.”

“This is for real?”

Michael heard a timer go off on a microwave.

“Totally. And did I mention that I'm the one who made the discovery?”

It sounded like Gillespie had dropped the phone on a counter. Michael could dimly make out, through the static, a series of whoops and hollers. When Gillespie picked up the receiver again, he said, “Oh my God. This is phenomenal. And you've got photos?”

“Yes, and I'll get more.”

“Michael, I'm telling you, if this is for real-”

“It is,” Michael assured him. “I saw the girl with my own eyes.”

“Then this is going to get us a national magazine award! If we handle this right, we could triple our subscription base. You could go on Sixty Minutes. You could get a book deal, and maybe even sell some movie rights.”

He went on for another minute or so, during which time the reception occasionally broke down, and Michael had to wait patiently for it to return. But when the line cleared, and he could explain that the phone was operational only for certain hours every day and that someone else was waiting to use it, Gillespie let him go; it sounded like he needed a stiff drink, anyway. And Michael was going to keel over if he didn't get to the commons.

Once there, he filled his plate with chili con carne, steam coming off it, and corn bread, and sat down with Charlotte Barnes. She nodded approvingly at his plate, and said, “Follow that up with some hot cherry cobbler.”

“I just might,” Michael said, digging in at last. “I haven't seen Darryl all day. I hope he's not sulking because you wouldn't let him dive today.”

“No, I think he got over that pretty quick. He's been holed up in his lab.”

Michael picked up a piece of corn bread, slathered it with chili, and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

“I do want you to raise your core temperature,” Charlotte said, “but please don't make me do the Heimlich maneuver. It's really pretty gross.”

Michael slowed down, and when he had finished chewing and swallowing, he said, nonchalantly, “So, have you heard about the dive today?” He wasn't sure if Murphy had included her in the inner circle yet and didn't want to give anything away.

Charlotte sipped her coffee, and nodded. “As chief medical officer at the base, he thought I should know… everything.”

“I'm glad he did,” Michael said, relieved, “but I don't think there's much you'll be able to do for her.”

“He wasn't worried about her,” Charlotte said. “He was worried about you. He was afraid you might want to talk to me about it and I'd think you'd flipped out.”

“I haven't, have I?” Michael said, and Charlotte shrugged.

“Too soon to tell. But you still think there's two of them? One in front and one in back?”

“I couldn't tell for sure-it could be her cloak, or maybe just some kind of shadow or occlusion in the ice. We left a thick slab of ice in back, just to be on the safe side, so once Betty and Tina have carved away some of the excess, we'll finally know one way or the other.”

Behind Charlotte, Michael saw a hand wildly waving. He tilted to one side and saw Darryl, with his own tray in hand, making his way across the commons. He plopped himself down on the bench next to Charlotte, and said to Michael in a conspiratorial tone, “Congratulations! I just visited Sleeping Beauty in the core bin, and I can report that she is resting quite peacefully.”

Michael felt a vague discomfort-not only at the jocularity, but at the very notion of her being asleep. He couldn't forget that Kristin's parents thought she, too, was simply sleeping.

“But you know,” Darryl said, as he spread a whole bowl's worth of grated parmesan over a plate of spaghetti, “once Betty and Tina have done what they can do with the trimming, the best way to preserve the specimen would be to move it to the marine biology lab.” He said it so casually that Michael could tell he'd been thinking about it long and hard.

“Why?” Michael asked.

Darryl shrugged, again too offhandedly “It needs to be thawed slowly, and ideally in local seawater. Otherwise, you could inflict some damage, or it could disintegrate. I could empty out the aquarium tank-those cod aren't even my experiment-and lift the partitions. Then we'd be able to get the whole block of ice, or whatever remains of it, into a cool bath. We could melt it down very slowly, under controlled laboratory conditions.”

Michael looked at Charlotte for her expert opinion-after all, at least she was a doctor-but she seemed as much at sea as he was. “But why are you asking me, anyway?” Michael finally said. “Shouldn't all this be Murphy O'Connor's call?”

“He just runs the place,” Darryl replied, “and generally tries to stay clear of all the scientific issues. And like it or not,” Darryl said, raising a forkful of hanging spaghetti, “you're Prince Charming in this scenario. How do you think we should bring her back? With a kiss?”

It was hard for Michael to think of himself as Prince Charming in this, or any, scenario, but he was starting to feel that if anyone was going to protect Sleeping Beauty's interests, whatever those might be, it might just as well be him.

“If you think that's what's best,” Michael said, “I guess I do, too.”

Darryl, a bit of spaghetti dangling from his lip, looked very pleased. “Good call,” he said, sucking up the loose strand. “Especially in view of what I'm going to show you both after dinner.”

Michael and Charlotte exchanged a look.

“I haven't told anyone else yet,” he added, “and I'm not sure if I plan to. We'll see.”

With the mystery sufficiently deepened, Michael and Charlotte simply had to wait for Darryl to finish his meal. Michael filled the time with cherry cobbler, as did Charlotte, who followed hers with a decaf cappuccino. “Six months from now,” she said, pouring a sugar packet into her cup, “they're gonna have to fly in a cargo plane just to carry my fat ass back to civilization.”

Later, in the marine lab, Darryl flew around the place setting things up while Michael and Charlotte stripped off their parkas and gloves. Even the short trips from one module to another required protection from the elements; thirty seconds outside and exposed skin could be frost-nipped.

Darryl dragged two more stools over to the counter, where a microscope with a dual eyepiece and a video monitor stood. “I've got to say one thing for the National Science Foundation,” he said. “They don't skimp. This microscope, for instance, is an Olympus CX, with fiber-optic technology. The video monitor's got five-hundred-line resolution.” He gazed at the equipment with genuine fondness. “I wish I had this kind of setup back home.”

Charlotte, who could barely stifle a yawn, exchanged a look with Michael, and Darryl must have caught it. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he produced the wine bottle, the cork sticking up from the top, and said, “Dr. Barnes, perhaps you would care to do the honors.”

Twisting the cork back out, she said, “I hope you're not planning to drink this stuff.”

“Not after you've seen what I have.”

With another flourish, he handed her a clean pipette and said, “Could I ask you to remove a few drops of the liquid from inside this bottle?”

Both Michael and Charlotte wrinkled their noses at the smell from the bottle, but she did as she was asked.

“Now, leave a drop on one end of this slide.”

The moment she had let one drop of the viscous fluid touch the slide, Darryl expertly drew another slide across it, leaving a deep purple smear that was thicker at one end and thinner at the other. Then he took an eye dropper and let several drops of alcohol fall on top of it. “In case you were wondering,” he said to Michael while closely attending to his work, “we're fixing the smear.” He glanced up at Charlotte. “Remind you of med school?”

“That was too long ago,” she said.

He continued to narrate the proceedings as he let the slide dry, then applied something called Giemsa stain. “Without the stain,” he explained, “many of the features would be impossible to see.”

“Features of what?” Charlotte asked, a note of irritation creeping into her voice. “Merlot? Cabernet sauvignon?”

“You'll see,” Darryl said.

Even Michael was getting antsy. It had been a very long day, his wrist still ached from the cold, and all he wanted to do was get into bed with the covers over his head. He needed time to process what he had done, and what he had seen, and he knew that he was starting to make some unhealthy connections between Kristin back home and the so-called Sleeping Beauty here. He knew it, but he still couldn't stop it. Maybe all he needed was a solid eight hours in the sack.

But Darryl was still chattering away, about stains and smears and something else, called Canada balsam, and Michael finally had to interrupt the flow long enough to say, “Okay, Darryl, enough with the hocus-pocus. You ready yet?”

“Not really. If this were being done by the book, we'd first let it set overnight.”

“Fine,” Michael said, starting to get up, “then we'll come back tomorrow.”

“No, no, wait.” Darryl mounted the slide under the microscope, and after examining it himself and adjusting the focus several times, he got up off his stool and invited Charlotte to have a look. Wearily, she moved over, bent her head down, then stayed very still.

Darryl appeared gratified.

She fiddled with the focus knob again, then finally leaned back, a puzzled look on her face.

“If I didn't know better,” she began, but Darryl put up a hand to stop her.

“Let Michael have a look first.”

Michael now assumed the center seat, and when he looked down through the binocular eyepiece, he saw a pink, particle-filled field; most of the field was dotted with free-floating circles. Some of the circles were round and fairly uniform in size and shape, though slightly depressed in the middle, like cushions that had been sat on. Others were larger, grainier, and more misshapen. Michael was no scientist, but for this you didn't have to be.

“Okay,” he said, “it's blood.” He looked up from the microscope. “You put blood in the wine bottle. Why?”

“Oy” Darryl exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “You were underwater too long. I didn't put anything in the wine bottle. Or on the slide. That's why I had you two come here and do the experiment for yourself. To see what I saw. That wine bottle, as you call it, is filled with blood. And I'll bet that the others that came up in that trunk are filled with it, too.”

Neither Michael nor Charlotte knew what to say.

“The perfect little circles you saw,” Darryl went on, “are red blood cells-erythrocytes. The bigger ones are leukocytes, or white cells. Some of the tiny matter you see between them is what we call neutrophils.”

“Those are a kind of phagocyte, right?” Charlotte said. “They eat bacteria and die.”

“Exactly-med school is coming back to you, I see.”

“Don't be a smart aleck.”

“But there are a lot more neutrophils than there ought to be,” Darryl added.

He let that sink in, but when no one jumped to the next step, he said, “Which means that before this blood ever went into the bottle, it was tainted.”

“How? By what?” Michael asked.

“Offhand,” Darryl said, “I'd say it came from seriously sick or injured people. People with wounds, perhaps, that were seeping pus.”

Suddenly Michael understood the especially putrid odor from the bottle-the “wine” wasn't only ancient blood, it was polluted ancient blood. But why would it ever have been bottled up and transported, like treasure, in a chest?

“Forgive me,” Charlotte said, “but it's been a long day. What are you suggesting, Darryl? That some ship, from God knows when, was carrying a cargo of bad blood, all neatly packed away in trunks, to the South Pole?”

“It's unlikely the ship was actually heading for Antarctica,” Darryl said. “It was probably driven off course, and who knows how long the ice has been moving the debris southward? Ice moves, you know.”

“But why?” Michael asked. “What possible use could there have been for it, anywhere?”

Darryl scratched his head, leaving a tuft of red hair sticking out on one side. “You've got me there. Bad blood is of no use to anyone, unless it was being used in some sort of inoculation experiment.”

“Aboard ship?” Michael said.

“Hundreds of years ago?” Charlotte chimed in.

Darryl threw up his hands in surrender. “Don't look at me, kids! I don't have the answers, either. But I do find it hard to believe that the bottle, the trunk, and the body-or bodies, if it comes to that- aren't all connected somehow.”

“I'll give you that,” Michael said. “Otherwise, it would be just about the most amazing coincidence in maritime history.”

Charlotte looked to be in agreement, too.

“And once we're able to do so,” Darryl said, “I think it would be worth seeing if I could draw a viable blood sample from Sleeping Beauty.”

“To prove what?” Michael asked.

Darryl shrugged. “A match?”

“With what?” Michael said, in some exasperation; he felt like he wasn't following. “With diseased blood from a bottle? Are you saying she was saving her own old blood in bottles, as a keepsake?”

“Or is it something else?” Charlotte put in. “Are you suggesting that she was keeping a ready supply of this stuff on hand for some weird medicinal purpose?”

“Sometimes, in science,” Darryl said, looking from one to the other and trying to calm the waters, “you know just what you're looking for, and you know where to find it. Other times, you don't know, but you just keep turning things up and following every lead.”

“Sounds like some strange leads to me,” Michael said, feeling oddly defensive about the whole thing.

“Can't argue with you there,” Darryl admitted.

Charlotte blew out a breath and headed for her coat and gloves. “I'm going to bed,” she said, “and I'd advise both of you to do the same.”

But Michael suddenly felt almost too weary to get up. He stayed where he was, studying the mysterious black bottle.

“Michael,” Charlotte said, as she zipped up her coat, “get some sleep. Doctor's orders.” Turning to Darryl, she said, “And you, put a cork in it.”

Darryl gestured at the bottle.

“You know what I mean.”