Blood and Ice

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 Adelie, 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.

She tried not to look into her eyes as she worked the hand drill, the saw, and the pick. It was too unnerving.

Tina was working on the back of the block, using the same tools, and as usual, they were talking about something else entirely-the recent changes in the NFL-when Tina stopped and said, “They were right.”

“About what?” Betty shaved another slice of ice away.

“There is a second person in the ice. I can see him now.” Betty came around back, and she could see him, too. His head was pressed against the back of the woman's, and the same iron chain was wrapped around his neck; he had a pale moustache, and appeared to be wearing a uniform of some kind. Betty and Tina looked at each other, and Betty said, “Maybe we should stop.”

“Why?”

“This might be bigger than we can handle, down here. It might be the kind of thing that ought to be sent up to, say, the NSF labs in D.C. Or even back to the U. of Idaho.”

“What-and miss our chance to make history?”

Michael, laden down with gear-cameras, a tripod, a couple of lights-didn't have a hand free to bang on the sheet-metal panel that served as a gate to the core bin, so he had to simply kick it with his foot. He'd heard Betty and Tina talking behind it-one of them had just said something about history-and when Betty pulled it back, he said, “Sorry I didn't call ahead.”

“That's okay. We love company.”

“Living company,” Tina added, portentously.

But Michael was so intent on his first task that he failed to pick up the hint. Instead, he laid a few things on the ground, then immediately went to the crate in the corner of the pen. He got down on his knees and looked inside-Ollie was so used to him by then that he actually got to his feet and waddled forward. Michael removed the strips of bacon he had just taken from the commons and held one out. Ollie cocked his fluffy gray head-he was looking more like a gull every day-studied it for a moment, then took a quick peck.

“Whoa, you almost got my finger there.” Michael placed the other strips at the edge of the box, then stood up. But when he saw the apprehensive looks on Betty and Tina's faces, he stopped and said, “Don't look so worried-skuas can eat anything.”

Betty said, “It's not that.”

And then he followed Tina's gaze, toward the block of ice. “Holy smokes,” he said, stepping closer. “I was right.”

The man was still buried in the ice-if she was Sleeping Beauty, then had this been her true Prince Charming?-and Michael had the immediate impression that the man had been a soldier; there was a hint of gold braid around the chest area.

And he also experienced the oddest feeling-a sense of comfort, that she had not been alone all this time.

“Don't make another cut,” he said. “I need to make a photo record of this stage in the process.”

He quickly assembled some lights and mounted them around the block. It was a bitterly cold and gray day and the lights suddenly turned the ice into a glittering beacon.

“Betty and I were just talking,” Tina ventured, “and we were thinking that something as extraordinary as this maybe ought to be kept intact.”

Michael was so busy figuring out his game plan-what would be the best way to capture the image of what lay inside the ice?- that he didn't acknowledge her words. The play of light and shadows, not to mention the problems with reflections off the ice, was going to be murder. But that was part of the challenge. He lifted his green goggles up on top of his woolen hat and took a light reading.

“Michael,” Betty said, “maybe we should slow down and think this through.”

“Think what through?” Michael said.

“The process of extracting these bodies. This job might require extensive lab facilities-and, say, X-ray and MRI capabilities-that we don't have down here.”

“Darryl's convinced that he's got all the equipment and facilities he needs,” Michael said, though he was given pause. Was he rushing headlong into this? Inflicting damage to what could prove to be a truly miraculous discovery?

“It isn't just a question of removing them safely,” Tina added. “That's easy. It's preserving them afterwards that's hard.”

Wouldn't Darryl know what to do? And wasn't the whole Antarctic basically just a vast deep freeze? Even if the bodies were taken from the ice, couldn't they be kept sufficiently cold to keep them from deteriorating?

Whatever the answers to those questions were, right then he had work to do. The find wasn't just a boon to Eco-Travel- it was also the sort of thing that national magazine awards were made of. He had to pay attention and not muck it up. Before backing off, Joe Gillespie, his editor, had actually given him grief that he'd come back without any pictures from his tragic misadventure in the Cascades. Sometimes Michael suspected that the scoop was all that counted with Gillespie.

Once Michael had decided on the right cameras and equipment, he took a series of shots through the ice-first of the man, whose face was still largely concealed, then of the woman. Capturing the quality of the ice, without losing too much to the reflections and refractions, made the work extremely tricky, but Michael liked that. The good stuff was always the hardest to get. At his behest, Betty and Tina went back to work and he took a couple of dozen shots of them, as they shaved or cut away more of the ice, and one or two of Ollie, who'd waddled over to see if the ice shavings littering the ground were edible.

The wind was really picking up, and the sheet-metal fence, though firmly planted, was rattling so loudly it was hard to talk over it. Michael had to shout at Tina and Betty just to get them to move to the right or the left, into the light or out of a shadow, and he quickly sensed he was making them uncomfortable. The ice queens weren't the kind of people, he suspected, who relished publicity or having their pictures taken. “Just one more,” he said to Betty, “with the hand drill about six inches higher.” It was obscuring the face of Sleeping Beauty.

Betty obliged, holding the drill in place while Michael hastily adjusted a light that the wind had blown out of position. The full illumination was falling on the ice, and he moved closer to pick up as much detail in the shot as possible. Whether it was from the extra wattage, or the work that Betty had been doing all morning, the face of the woman came into fuller view than ever before. Michael could see the auburn hair caught beneath the rusted chain, the glimmer of a white pin, and the emerald gleam in her eyes. Her expression was the one he remembered from the second time he'd found her underwater, and he marveled that he could have thought it had changed. Funny, what tricks the memory could play on you. He ran off a couple of shots, but his own shadow was falling into the frame, and he had to lower his shoulder and move a few inches to one side. He focused another shot, and even as he did so, he could swear that something had changed again. He had a great eye for detail-his photography teachers had always remarked on it, and so did his editors-and he knew that something in the image was different. Something tiny, something ephemeral. But as he shifted position again, he saw it happen-he saw the pupils of her eyes contract.

He lowered the camera, then looked at the digital images he had just recorded. Back and forth, from one to the other. And though the change was infinitesimal, he could still swear it was there.

“Found you!” he heard Darryl call out, over the windy rattling of the metal fence. “You've got a call on the SAT phone-someone named Karen! They're holding it for you.” Darryl took in the work that Betty and Tina had done on the ice block. “Wow! You've made a lot of progress.”

Michael nodded, and said, “Leave everything just the way it is. I'm coming back.”

“I don't think you should leave the lights on,” Betty said.

She was right. Michael tucked his camera back inside his anorak, then, before heading for the administration module, flicked them off. The block of ice instantly went from a shimmering pillar to a somber monolith.