Blood and Ice

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

December 13, 12:10 p.m.

RIDING IN A DOGSLED was actually much more comfortable than Michael would have imagined. The cargo shell of the sled was a hard, molded polymer plastic, much like a kayak, but you rode a few inches above its bottom, cradled in a sort of hammock. Even when the dogs ran over a rough patch in the ice, or hit a bump, you were cushioned by all the cold-weather gear you had on. The snow and ice whizzed past on either side, as Danzig, standing straight on the runners behind Michael's head, shouted encouragement to the dogs-the last dogs, as Michael had learned from Murphy back at the base, in the entire Antarctic.

“Dogs have been banned,” Murphy'd explained. “They were passing on distemper to the seals. This is the last team still in operation, and the only way we could grandfather them in was by claiming they were part of a long-term study.” He'd rolled his eyes. “You have no idea of the paperwork, but Danzig wouldn't let it go. They're the last dogs at the South Pole, and Danzig's the last of the mushers.”

Even from his less-than-ideal vantage point, Michael could see how perfectly the pack ran together, pulling at the harness, following Kodiak's lead. He was amazed at the speed and the power they could muster. At times, they just seemed a blur of gray-and-white fur, bobbing and heaving like the painted horses on a carousel, and the sled seemed to soar behind them. Even without Danzig's occasional cry of “Haw!” for left, or “Gee!” for right, the dogs knew exactly where they were going-they were heading for the old Norwegian whaling station, about three miles down the coast; Danzig made this their regular exercise run. He had suggested Michael might want to come along-”while your Sleeping Beauty melts”-to photograph the abandoned outpost. Michael had decided to take him up on the offer. He'd visited the marine biology lab earlier in the day, but there was nothing much new to photograph, and Darryl had assured him it would be another day or two before any big change occurred.

“Better safe than sorry,” Darryl had said of the slow process, and Michael agreed.

But watching ice melt, he'd discovered, was about as interesting as watching grass grow.

The last time Michael had tried to make this trip to Stromviken, he'd been drowned in a thick fog that made taking photos impossible. Today, in contrast, it was bitterly cold-twenty-five below zero-but clear. And the light-the constant, unyielding light-gave the air a strange, pellucid quality. Things that were far away could look much closer than they were, and up close things could look like they were almost under a magnifying glass. The Antarctic air and light made taking pictures-crisp, clear, and properly exposed pictures-even more of an intellectual challenge than ever.

Michael's arms were folded over his chest, with his camera nestled under his parka.

“How do you like it?” Danzig shouted, leaning down toward him, his walrus-tooth necklace brushing the top of Michael's hood.

“Sure beats the bus!”

Danzig patted him on the shoulder and leaned back again. He could never show off his dogs enough.

But it was difficult for Michael to see much, especially straight ahead, so the first intimation he had of the old whaling station was off to his right-the rusting hulk of a Norwegian steamboat, beached on the rocky shoreline. The pier beside it had long since collapsed, crushed by the ebb and flow of the ice. At its bow, pointing inland rather than out to sea, was the harpoon gun-a Norwegian invention-which had once fired a lacerating spear about six feet long, and loaded, in later years, with explosives. The fleeing whale, hit between the shoulder blades if the gunner was good, would dive for cover, only to have the bomb detonate inside it, ripping apart its heart and lungs.

That was if the creature was lucky. If the gunner was off, or the strike wasn't lethal, the battle could go on for hours, as the whale breached, bleeding and spouting, and more harpoons were launched. A massive winch, pulling on the cables, provided a further drag, and as the animal-first humpbacks, then right whales, and finally, as even those began to disappear, the more difficult to catch rorquals-grew weaker, it was gradually reeled in, like a shark, until it could be gaffed with sharpened hooks and stabbed to death at will.

This particular whaling station had operated, off and on, since the 1890s, until finally closing down in 1958 and leaving everything, from locomotives to firewood, behind. Supplies that were worth bringing in were too difficult and costly to bother taking out again. Not that the Norwegians even then had entirely given up whaling; like Japan and Iceland, they continued to assert their customary prerogative to hunt whales, and when this was mentioned in passing over dinner one night in the commons, Charlotte had thrown down her fork in disgust and said, “That's it-I'm getting rid of every Norwegian thing I own.” Darryl had asked her what that would entail and on reflection she said, “I guess I'll have to throw out this reindeer sweater.”

“Don't be too hasty,” Michael said, plucking out the label and laughing. “See? It's made in China.”

Charlotte had breathed a sigh of relief. “It is awfully warm.”

As the dogs pulled the sled up a slight, icy rise, Michael got his first crystal-clear look at the camp, which, hard as it was to believe, was even drearier than Point Adelie. From the jetty where the boats pulled in with their catch-sometimes as many as twenty at a time, often pumped up with air to keep the carcasses afloat- wide ramps led to a crazy quilt of half-buried railroad tracks; a locomotive, gone black and red with rust, hauled the dead or dying whales to the flensing pan. That was the broad yard where the whalers took out their sharpened flensing knives and began to slice the blubber and tongues away in great, bloody strips. The tongues especially, huge and ridged with muscles, contained hundreds of gallons of oil.

It was there, now, that Danzig called out to the dogs, while pulling back on the reins; as he nimbly dismounted from the runners, the sled ground to a halt. The sudden cessation of the whooshing of the blades left what seemed a curious silence, until Michael listened again and heard the polar wind rattling the corrugated steel walls of the storehouses and moaning through the timbers of the wood-and-brick structures that had long preceded the metal ones. He clambered out of his berth in the sled, with Danzig giving him a hand, and stood up on the frozen mud of the yard. On all sides, and up the hill, he was surrounded by ramshackle buildings of obscure purpose, and he thought, not surprisingly, of a ghost town he had once photographed in the Southwest.

But this felt worse somehow. This felt like a killing ground, and he knew that the tundra he was standing on had once been ankle deep in blood and guts. The blackened rails rose, like a roller-coaster track, straight into the dilapidated building a few hundred yards up the hill; mechanized carts had carried the desirable parts of the whale into the processing facilities, while the rest of the bones and offal had been shunted off to the guano pits and the reeking shoreline, where clouds of birds, shrieking with delight, had descended upon the still-steaming piles.

As Michael fumbled to collect his tripod and waterproof equipment bag-it was too cold to take off his gloves for more than a few seconds-Danzig set the snow hook, like the emergency brake on a car, to keep the dogs from dragging away the sled. Then, for extra security, he tied the snub line to an iron skip wagon, missing two wheels and upturned on the frozen earth. Kodiak, watching him closely with his marble-blue eyes, sat back on his haunches, waiting.

“I'm going to give them their snack now,” Danzig said. “This is their favorite part of the trip.”

A couple of the wheel dogs, the ones who ran closest to the sled, pranced in place, already licking their chops as Danzig pulled a stiff burlap sack from the handlebars.

“I'll pass,” Michael said, as Danzig took out several knotted ropes of beef jerky.

Danzig laughed and said, “Don't say I didn't offer.”

Picking his way across the rusted tracks and over the icy, wind-scoured earth, accompanied only by the yips of the pack and the cawing of some skuas-drawn no doubt by the dogs and the jerky-Michael thought that this might well be the most desolate place he had ever seen.

The ice block slowly continued to disintegrate in the tank, until small chunks were breaking off, much sooner than might have been expected… almost as if something inside the block were exerting pressure from within. One jagged piece, the size of a baseball, broke off the bottom of the block, just below the spot where the toe of the man's boot could now be seen, and floated free. It drifted on the water, until it got closer to the PVC pipe that was draining the water from the tank and keeping it level; there, it was sucked into the mouth of the hose, where it stubbornly lodged.

Gradually, the water in the tank, replenished by the other pipe, rose, but as it did, it ran up into the topmost fissures and invisible brine channels, like blood rushing to fill untraceable veins and capillaries. An ear, put to the ice, would have heard a sound like static, as the ice crackled and crumbled… and a sound, too, of something else. Of scratching. Like nails on glass.

The beach at Stromviken was not like any other Michael had ever surveyed. It was a massive boneyard, covered with gigantic skulls and spines and gaping jaws, all bleached to a dull white by the punishing wind and the austral sun. Some were the remains of whales that had been slaughtered at Stromviken, others were the residue of whales that had been butchered at sea by so-called factory ships, their carcasses thrown back into the ocean and eventually washed up here. Lying among the bones and rocks, sunning themselves in the cold glare, was a handful of elephant seals, who paid no attention to the man in the bulky parka and green goggles, pointing the camera in their direction

… just as they had paid no attention to the men who had come there years before, who had then gone about slaughtering them as indiscriminately as the whales.

But unlike the whales, the elephant seals, with their trunklike noses and brown bloodshot eyes, had been easy to catch and kill. On land, they were clumsy and moved slowly. Sealers had only to walk right up to them, punch them on the nose, and when the animals reared back on their flippers in surprise, thrust a lance several times through their heart. Sometimes it would take the better part of an hour for the animal to bleed out, but once the bulls were rounded up and killed, the sealers could move on methodically to slaughtering the cows, still protecting their young, and then, if they weren't too small to bother with, the cubs. The skinning was the hard part; it took four or five men to properly flay a fully grown elephant seal, then to separate the thick yellow blubber from the flesh beneath. Most of the seals, hunted nearly to extinction, yielded one or two barrels of oil apiece when the boiling was done.

Although Michael knew they posed no threat to him, he approached them warily, not wanting to cause any undue disturbance. He wanted shots of the seals at leisure, not in alarm, and besides that, the creatures did smell pretty awful. The main bull, distinguishable only because of his enormous size, was molting, his shed hair and skin spread around him like a fouled carpet, and the cows, belching loudly, weren't much better. He stepped up onto a low-lying ventifact-a stone carved into a strange shape, almost like a top hat in this case, by centuries of wind-and framed his first shot. But it was hard enough to stand erect in the unceasing wind without trying to hold a camera steady; he would have to set up a tripod and do it the right way.

As he dug around in his bag, the bull seal roared, and Michael could smell its breath, reeking of dead fish. “Jesus, have you ever heard of mouthwash?” Michael said, as he set the tripod down on a relatively level patch of the rocky beach.

Water from the aquarium began to seep over the edge of the tank and drip onto the concrete floor, where it ran in rivulets toward the floor drains. The marine biology lab, like all the modules, was raised above the ground on cinder blocks, and the water simply coursed down some steel funnels and out onto the icy land below.

The block of ice was now no thicker than a deck of cards in some places, its prisoners obscurely visible within. The first spot entirely to give way was at the bottom, where the chunk had fallen off and blocked the PVC pipe. The toe of a black leather boot protruded from it now, glistening like onyx.

The melting continued, and a crevice appeared right down the center of the block; the bodies locked inside were like the flaw in a diamond, a strange imperfection in a giant crystal… and when the crevice widened and suddenly split, it was as if the ice itself were rejecting them. The halves of the ice block fell away on either side, and the seawater washed over the bodies of the soldier and the girl like a baptism. They were exposed to the air, bathed in the lavender light of the lab, and for several seconds they simply lay still, side by side, bobbing on the ice.

The flaking chain yoked around their throats and shoulders held them together until, corroded by the centuries of ice and saltwater, it disintegrated and slipped to the bottom of the tank.

Sinclair was the first to draw a breath. Half air and half water, it made him cough.

Then Eleanor coughed, too, and an uncontrollable shiver ran the length of her body.

What little ice was still supporting them began to give way, and Sinclair's boots searched for the bottom of the tank… and found it.

He stumbled, swaying like a drunkard, to his feet, and quickly took hold of Eleanor's cold hand. Dripping wet, he raised her up from the chunks of floating ice. Her eyes were dull and unfocused, her long brown hair plastered to her cheek and forehead.

Where, he wondered, are we?

They were standing in a vat of some kind, filled with salt water up to their knees, in a place he could find no words for. No one else was there; the only living things he could see were strange creatures swimming in glass jars-jars that gave off a pale purple light and a soft hissing sound.

He looked at Eleanor. She raised her hand slowly, as if she had never done so before, and her fingers instinctively went to touch the ivory brooch on her bosom.

He sloshed to the rim of the tank, then over it. He helped her down onto the floor, water sluicing down all around them.

“What is this place?” she asked, trembling, as he gathered her into his arms.

Sinclair didn't know. For her sake, he hoped it was Heaven. But from his own experience, he feared it was Hell.