Cold War

TWELVE

A storm was coming, and the Petrels and Skuas were its outriders, brawling up from the bare sea cliffs in wild sprays of gray-white wings.

Above their Bellany Island rock colonies a moist, restless warm front from New Zealand had bumped against the outer bounds of an Antarctic air mass. Cold and dry, heavy as the breath of a slumbering frost giant, it presented a resistant barrier.

In collision, the two fronts took on a clockwise rotation, generating great eddies of wind around a central area of low pressure. Rising above the dense mass of cold air, the buoyant warm flow pulled its moisture higher into the atmosphere to be cooled and condensed into radiating bands of clouds.

As the fronts continued to spin in conflict, their winds gained speed and intensity, sucking up more water vapor from the low-pressure trough, pushing the clouds further toward its edges, evolving into a potent cyclonic cell that whirled southward across the Antarctic Circle, racing over archipelagoes, open sea, and pack ice toward the continental landmass.

A storm was coming.

Streaming from their bleak slopes, the rousted seabirds were first to know its aggressive force.

Soon many others would as well.

They tramped over the snow berm ferrying a pair of cargo-laden banana sleds toward the first of their widely separated destinations.

The team consisted of ten men. Their parkas, wind pants, and duffels were white. White too were the ski bags they carried over their shoulders on padded nylon web slings, their lightweight fiberglass sleds, and the canvas tarpaulins over the large, sealed crates that had been left at the drop-off point some three quarters of a mile back. This was a heavily crevassed area, and Granger had refused to land his helicopter any closer to the depot.

At the rear of the small column, two men hauled their freight of equipment on sturdy polyfiber tow cords, harnesses buckled around their chests and waists.

They marched along the north side of the trench with a kind of slow wariness, the lead walker probing the un-tracked snow ahead with a telescopic avalanche pole, its shaft locked at its maximum six-foot extension. Far from any known camp, their chances of being detected by ground or aerial recon were slight. Their clothes and equipment were furthermore designed to blend with the terrain, and the sun’s prolonged descent toward austral winter had butted it increasingly low toward the horizon, leaving no appreciable shadows to betray their movement.

The wind blew hard and cold. They moved on toward their goal, their leader repeatedly thrusting his probe into the rumpled snow, locating a masked drop, and then steering them around it. The depot’s location had been programmed into their GPS units, and they would reach it soon enough if they stuck close to the berm line. Their main interest right now was getting safely past the crevasse field, past those fissures waiting beneath the snow, their open, icy mouths filled with darkness. Often hidden under fragile snow bridges — corniced drifts that sweep across their openings and become obliterated from sight as surrounding accumulations overspread their peaks — they might be a few feet in depth, or two hundred feet. One did not learn which until the misstep was already taken and the bottom fell out from underfoot.

After a while the lead man stopped, planted his avalanche pole in the snow, and slipped his binoculars from their case. Beside him along the slope, the others stood with the crampons of their mountaineer boots biting into the hardpack. The dry wind nagged at them, flapping the ruffs of their parkas, clotting the fibers of their balaclavas with their own frozen breath. Out beyond the opposite embankment, sastrugi flowed away northward in wild, swirling patterns.

Glasses held up to his eyes, the team leader looked carefully down into the trench. The entrance hatch was buried in snow, but he could see the reflective strip at the top of its marker wand projecting above a nearby drift.

He signaled to his men, and all but the load carriers began preparing for their run. They zipped open their ski bags, extracted their boards and poles, mounted rigid alpine touring bindings onto the skis, and slipped their booted feet into them.

The leader moved to the edge of the depression on his skis. Behind him, the carriers unharnessed. There would be no need for their assistance below; better they rested here and stayed with the sleds and crates.

“Gehen Meir!” he ordered in throaty Schwyzerdüsch. Then he leaned into the fall line, bent low at the knees, pushed off with his sticks, and went slicing downhill.

The rest whipped after him, poles swung out and back, powder flying from the tails of their skis in wide sweeping sprays. The floor of the trench came upon them in a rush, and they wedged their tips and edges to check their descent, turning parallel to the grade, plowing snow into the air as they braked.

Near the marker wand down at the base of the slope, the leader inspected a high undulation in the surface cover, gave his men a confirmatory nod, and crouched to remove his skis. They quickly followed suit, then got to work digging at the mound with foldable snow shovels from their duffels.

Soon they had exposed most of a circular stainless-steel hatch, its frame almost flush with the rock of the hillside. There was no lock. Intruder prevention depended on effective concealment rather than access control, for mechanical rods and electromagnetics were prone to climatic damage and might very well fail to release.

It took fifteen minutes before the manhole-sized entry hatch was completely dug out. The leader stood to one side and waved for a couple of the men to pull it open. Then he took an electric krypton lantern out of his bag and strode through the passageway, the lantern held forward, the rest of the group filing in at his heels.

The small, cavelike storage depot measured five yards in depth, somewhat less in width. Shielded from wind chill, insulated from outside temperature extremes by the snow and ice cover, its corrugated steel liner was cold enough to patch with frost from the vapor of their exhalations, but still perhaps twenty degrees warmer than ground level.

The leader paused a few feet past the entry, swept his lantern from side to side, and steadied it to his right as his men hastened to pull a large protective covering from over a low wooden platform that spanned the length of the shallow tunnel.

Within moments the covering lay crumpled around the skis and treads of a half-dozen white snowmobiles. Dressed with flared aerodynamic windshields, cargo racks, and saddle bags, the swift, agile little vehicles sat atop the platform in a neat row.

The leader turned to the opposite side of the tunnel and saw a wooden skid stacked with rubber fuel bladders by the bright glow of his lamp. These, he knew, contained a premixture of high-octane gasoline and two-stroke oil formulated for cold-weather running.

He grunted. Ja, gut. Alles ist burzüglich.

Everything was indeed as he’d been told it would be.

Satisfied, he looked back at his men, then used the torch’s bright shafting beam to point toward the snowmobiles. They had a long distance to travel across the ice plate, and no time at all to waste.

“Bring them down and put some fuel in their tanks—hurry!” he said, still speaking Swiss German. “I want to return to the others, unpack the weapons and explosives, and strike out for our target within the hour.”

“Diamond dust,” Megan Breen said. “Something to see, isn’t it?”

Nimec looked where she was pointing. Arcs of iridescent color chased across a glittery veil of ice crystals wavering above the helipad despite a total absence of clouds. In the far distance, sun dogs teased the horizon at opposite sides of a solar halo, the circle’s violet inner rim bleeding away into faint rainbow bands of green, yellow, tangerine, and primary red.

“It’s easy to appreciate,” he said. “Harder to enjoy under the circumstances.”

Megan turned to face him. She was in minimal ECW gear, her parka’s hood down, snow goggles raised above her brow, no balaclava. The comm tech had notified her of the arrivals just ten minutes ago, but she could already hear the choppers rumbling in, and expected to be out of the cold before too long.

“And wood sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets,” she said.

“Nice line. Yours or borrowed?”

“You know I’m not that poetic.”

“Nice anyway,” Nimec said. “What’s the message?”

Megan gave him a shrug.

“Our astronomers and field photographers throw conniptions when diamond dust settles on their optics,” she said. “They spend weeks preparing to observe an event of some sort or another, use the finest equipment available, and a little ice shoots the works. It wastes time, effort, and lots of money. People get upset, accuse each other of negligence, incompetence, all sorts of idiotic things. And naturally I wind up having to referee. It’s worse than a nuisance. But the sky. That’s the other side of it for me.”

Nimec frowned. “This time it isn’t about telescopes,” he said. “It’s about three missing human beings.”

Megan was quiet for several moments.

“I don’t need to be reminded of that,” she said then.

Nimec instantly regretted his snappiness. He studied her features. Her gaze was direct, penetrating, but showed no sign of anger. Somehow that made him even more regretful.

“Guess that wasn’t one of my smartest remarks,” he said.

Another pause. “Probably not.” She took in a slow breath. “Pete… one thing I’ve learned from my stay on the ice is that there can be magic secrets in the gloom. Don’t close your eyes to them. They help you learn how to live.”

He was silent. They both were. Colors slipped and tailed through the suspended ice motes overhead. Still out of sight, the two approaching helicopters knocked away at the air.

Nimec supposed he really was on edge. Some of it was a carryover from those tumbling boomerangs aboard the Herc. Some of it was his impatience to get going with his search for Scarborough and the two scientists. But there was more besides, and he knew it involved Annie Caulfield’s imminent landing aboard one of the choppers. The news that Annie was already in Antarctica with the Senatorial delegation had made him feel nothing less than ambushed.

He rubbed his face with a gloved hand, thinking. How had Meg originally alluded to their presence? We’re short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Just a passing comment as she’d tapped a number into her cell phone. It had gone right by Nimec. But when she got around to her promised explanation, he had learned that one of the base’s three chopper pilots was grounded because his bird was in for repairs, that another was on emergency loan to a French station because their only resident pilot had shipped out for civilization due to illness, and that the third had been to assigned to give the distinguished visitors — DVs, as she called them — a lift from Amundsen-Scott station, the first stop on their tour of the continent. It’s the storm that’s being predicted, Pete. Bad weather’s nothing abnormal around here, but once it hits, there’s a chance it can last for days. The Senators pushed up their schedule to get here before it grounded them at the South Pole, and we were obliged to make accommodations, go ahead with our hosting duties. Incidentally, did Gord happen to mention that Annie Caulfield’s been nannying them?

Ambushed, Nimec thought. Why feel that way, though? Why should the prospect of seeing Annie again have so much guilt attached to it? They’d made an effective team in Florida, but that was in connection with the Orion probe. It was a working relationship. Well, mostly. There was that movie afterward. Dinner and a movie. A nice evening. Annie had introduced him to her kids when he’d picked her up… Chris and Linda. Nice. But their date, say you wanted to call it that for lack of a better term, their date was collegial. More or less. At best they were casual friends unwinding after a tough shared assignment. And once it was over they’d gone their different ways. Again, more or less.

Nimec wasn’t denying he’d felt an attraction to Annie at the time — who wouldn’t, after all? — but he’d known there had been no sense pursuing anything even if she were the least bit interested in him. Which was itself an unrealistic thought. She’d been widowed only a year or so before. Lost her husband to cancer. She wasn’t ready. Also, he had his responsibilities in San Jose, and Annie had her own at NASA’s Houston space center. Texas. Things wouldn’t have worked out long-distance. Yes, he’d phoned her a few times, just to see how she was doing. And sure, they’d talked about getting together in indefinite terms, the way people often did. But nothing firm was ever discussed. The last time they’d spoken was last October or thereabouts, and it was true she’d mentioned that he was welcome to visit if he had any time off around the holidays, stay in a spare bedroom at her place, but he’d considered it one of those polite gestures rather than a serious invitation. And say he had made the blunder of taking her offer at face value? It would have been asinine. An awful imposition. He’d meant to get back to her anyway, but those weeks before Thanksgiving had turned into hell. Pure hell. With Gord in danger everything else had fallen by the wayside. And there had been so much catching up to do since…

Annie had no reason to be insulted. Why club himself over the head with irrational guilt?

Nimec stood there outside the base, steam coiling from his nose and mouth. His cheeks had started to burn and he made himself stop rubbing them. Five degrees above zero out here, and Meg had described today’s weather conditions as mild, a calm before the storm. Since when was five above mild?

The thump of the copters grew louder. Nimec searched the sky, spotted one of them to the west, flying fast, the UpLink logo becoming visible on its flank. That would be the DVs, he thought. Not the first bird he would have liked to see. But the good thing was that he’d get the formalities with those pols out of the way. Plus his foolish nervousness about Annie. His main focus now was making arrangements with Granger. Seeing if he could take him out over Bull Pass ahead of the snow.

The helicopter came in, reduced speed, landed about a hundred feet from him, the downwash of its rotors stirring a cloud of snow off the ground. Then its blades stopped turning, its cabin door slid back, and its passengers came hopping out.

Megan glanced at her wristwatch.

“Right on schedule,” she said. “Special delivery from Washington by way of the Geographic Pole.”

Nimec didn’t comment. There were three Senators in the delegation: Dianne Wertz, Todd Palmer, and Bernard Raines from the Appropriations Committee. Obviously unaware of Meg’s affirmative characterization of the weather, they were wrapped head-to-toe in CDC orange bag garb. Still, it wasn’t hard to tell them apart. A former basketball pro, Palmer towered above the rest, and had reflexively hunched as he emerged from beneath the chopper’s slowing rotors. Wertz would be the one scrambling to keep pace at his side — Nimec had met the Senator from Delaware at an UpLink function, and remembered her as kind of slight. That left Raines to bring up the rear. Almost seventy-five years old, the committee chairman carried himself like a man whose senior rank qualified him as beyond having to match strides with anyone, almost diverting attention from the fact that in many instances he no longer could. The fourth member of the party had stayed back to help him across the snow, a tactful hand on his elbow.

Nimec took a quick glance at Raines’s companion, unwillingly tightening up inside.

Annie.

Megan leaned close, interrupting his thoughts.

“Time to officiate, Pete,” she whispered, and then hurried to greet their visitors.

Nimec followed a step behind her, suddenly aware of the NSF copter clattering toward the landing zone. About a quarter mile away, it would be touching down in minutes.

Megan whizzed through the obligatory formalities.

“Senator Palmer, I’d like you to meet our head of corporate security, Pete Nimec… Pete, I’m sure you recognize Senator Todd Palmer… Senator Wertz, it’s a great pleasure… Chairman Raines, we feel so deeply privileged… Annie, I know you and Pete don’t need any introduction… ”

Nimec stared as she came close. Hooded, bundled up, Annie nevertheless managed to look fantastic. Fresh. She might have arrived after a half hour’s drive from her home in Houston rather than a long tossing helicopter ride out of South Pole station.

He hesitated.

“Annie, hello—”

“Nice to see you again, Pete,” she said with an entirely pleasant, equally impersonal smile. Then she turned to Raines, escorting him on toward a waiting shuttle. “Sir, I’m sure you’ll be interested in seeing our scientific facilities… ”

And that was that. They were gone in a flash.

Nimec watched them climb aboard the balloon-tired vehicle. He didn’t know what he’d expected from Annie. But being left to feel inconsequential wasn’t it.

Confused, he waited as the second chopper made its descent, its skids gently alighting on the plowed, tamped snowfield.

Moments later the pilot jumped from his cockpit and crossed the landing area to where Megan, Wertz, and Palmer were about to start for the shuttle. Megan briefly freed herself from the DVs and led him toward Nimec.

“Pete, this is our friend Russ Granger from MacTown,” she told him. Then she turned to the pilot. “Come on, let’s scoot you out of the cold. Pete’s anxious to discuss a few things about our current search plans. We’re hoping you can fly him into the Valleys as soon as possible.”

Granger smiled and tapped Nimec’s shoulder with a gloved hand. At least he seemed interested in talking to him.

“Whatever I can do to help,” Granger said.

Of all the types of on-air interviews Rick Woods had to conduct, the scientific stuff was his biggest pain. And these geniuses from NASA, Ketchum and Frye, whom he was guessing might be a little fruity, and whom he knew were duller than Sunday morning sermons, talking about solar flames in endless multisyllabic strings…

Flares, Woods thought. The correct term was solar flares. As his twit of a director, Todd Bennett, had already reminded him a dozen times from his seat back in the control room…

These space brains on the remote feed from Goddard were making him work his balls off trying to keep things from tanking. The only bigger duds Woods could recall having as guests were the mathematicians who’d come on to discuss chaos theory; their incomprehensible rambling had gotten him dizzy. A flying ant gets gulped by a toad in Guangdong, China, and somehow that causes a gondola with two lovers in it to capsize in Venice, which eventually leads to a fucking earthquake in San Francisco. And then the quarks, leptons, muons, and gluons enter the picture, zipping around in ways that make it impossible to predict whether New Year’s Day would follow Christmas next year. Ridiculous.

“Ketchum’s losing us with the jargon, Rick.” Bennett’s voice was in his earpiece again. “Get him to explain what he means by an X-class flare.”

Woods cleared his throat. Maybe adding some humor to their discussion would pick up the pace.

“Uh, Doctor,” he said. “For average minds like myself, would you explain the difference between X-class and business-class?”

Ketchum nodded from the Maryland sister station’s newsroom, seeming to miss the pun.

“The X classification system measures a flare’s power, and aids our ability to forecast how it will impact on our planet,” he said. “We use a simple numerical table based on X-ray emissions from the region of the sun where the flare occurs.”

Simple my ass, Woods thought. “And this latest one you’ve detected, can you help us understand why we should be concerned about it?”

“Yes,” Ketchum said. “I should first emphasize that we haven’t actually observed a flare, but unusual sunspots and other indicators on the far side of the sun that are distinctive signs of impending flare activity. It would roughly correspond to tracking tropical hurricane seedlings on radar… ”

Woods tried to keep his mind from wandering. Even school shootings were easier than this. Distraught as the interviewees might be, you came to know which questions to ask by rote. Can you recall Timmy displaying hostile or antisocial behavior before the tragedy? Resentment toward his classmates? An ethnic group? Is it true none of your school’s teachers or guidance counselors ever asked him about that swastika tattoo on his forehead? And what about reports that he had a habit of firing an illegal M- 16 at neighborhood dogs and cats from his front porch?

Woods suddenly felt indecent, but things got to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate his good luck. This was major-market cable TV, twenty-four-hour news, and he co-anchored the afternoon weekday slot. He would be the first guy to say there weren’t many more enviable gigs in the business. Before landing it, he’d hosted a live entertainment segment for the network, thirty minutes daily right before prime time. Some of that was fun. Meeting famous actors, actresses, and film directors. The Oscars and Grammys. Those awards presentations always gave him a kick. But six years at it was much too long. No one took Hollywood beat reporters seriously. Hard-news people considered you one step above a gossip monger, a paparazzi. The glamor wore thin after a while. The beautiful people started looking uglier and uglier. And when boob-job-and-baby-fat teenaged pop singers treated you like a microphone sock, it could be the absolute pits.

Woods had grown tired of it.

Getting offered the co-anchor post had been a break. A huge break. His predecessor had been old-school, started out his career in print journalism, spent almost twenty years as a political field correspondent. With their cable channel’s daytime numbers trailing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by several percentage points, its programming executives had studied the audience comp and decided they wanted new blood, a face with youth appeal, someone more comfortable engaging in peppy cross talk with Marsie Randall, the female half of their anchor team. Woods was offered the spot on a trial basis, given an ironclad contractual guarantee that he could return to star-chasing if things didn’t work out. Shit, never mind huge, it was the break of a lifetime. He had jumped at it, relocated from the left to right coast. And at the request of his producers, he’d started wearing a pair of glasses with plain lenses over his 20/20 peepers for a brainier look. Now, six months later, ratings for the time period had almost doubled, and he’d re-upped for two more years with a substantial pay increase and built-in elevator clauses that would continue to boost his salary if the Nielsens kept improving.

Overall Rick Woods was pleased. He felt appreciated, gratified, financially stable. But nothing was ever perfect. On this network, one to five P.M. weekdays was early fringe. The demographic was mainly post-boomer housewives with at least a couple of years of college — the ones who stayed away from Mountain Dew and pink polyester stretch pants, and who wanted an alternative to the soaps, courtroom reality shows, and trailer-trash clown antics. They were a tricky audience. Moving targets. You had to strike just the right balance with content, give them something that was not quite a morning magazine format, and not quite Jim Lehrer. Give them infotainment. That meant filling the spaces between lead and breaking stories with background pieces, analysis, talk, a little fluffy human interest to round out the blend.

The science stuff worked its way into the lineup maybe once, twice a week. Woods found it endurable when the stories related to ordinary people’s lives. Child-development studies, medical breakthroughs, home computing, these things he understood. But he hated when his producers got too smart for their own good, booked guests who’d start running off at the mouth with complicated theories… or when they bought into one of the stunts NASA regularly pulled to grab attention and justify its existence to taxpayers, such as the big load of crap it was currently dishing out—

“Rick, pay attention!” Bennett yipped over their IFB line. “Ketchum’s got a bad case of eye bounce, makes him look evasive. Bring in the young one, try to nail him down on the flare’s severity. Ask what consequences it will have for earth.”

None, Woods felt like telling him. Nugatory, Todd. This segment’s not only pointless, it’s duller than dead air.

“Dr. Frye, let’s bring you into the conversation,” he said. “To use your colleague’s weather analogy, the solar storm system that’s brewing would be exactly how severe…?”

“I think Jonathan was trying to explain that we can’t be exact at this stage,” Frye said. “My belief is we’re going to experience a series of X-20’s or higher, which would be very energetic. Putting it in perspective, a flare that’s categorized below an X-9 generally has few noticeable implications for us. As its power climbs the scale, though, increasing geomagnetic disturbances may result… ”

“And can you please tell our viewers around the world how they should expect these, uh, X-20 solar flames—”

“Flares!” Bennett said.

“—solar flares to affect them?”

“Again, it’s tough to be certain. We can only look back at what’s happened in the past, and use that as the basis for informed guesses,” Frye said. “About thirty years back, a group of flares in the X-15 range interrupted satellite transmissions, and resulted in serious power-line voltage swings in at least two of our Western and Midwestern states. It also caused the explosion of a 230,000-volt transformer in British Columbia—”

“Well, thirty years is a long time,” Woods said, wanting to be quick with his follow-up. “I’d assume that with, ah, modern technologies we won’t have to worry too much about the lights going out nowadays.”

“Unfortunately, it’s just the opposite. In the nineteen-seventies power companies hadn’t really computerized their operations. Very few computers were used by private or government offices. The Internet didn’t exist. There were no PCs. No public wireless-telephone networks. But society’s become dependent on sophisticated electronics over the past three decades. It’s integral to our economy. Our national security. While some equipment’s been shielded against high-level discharges of cosmic radiation, we can find plenty of room for improvement. As a NASA employee I’m concerned about the sensitive equipment on our orbital platforms, and more fundamentally about the exposure of astronauts aboard the International Space Station to harmful dosages of radiation. I’ve also wondered about the vulnerability of satellite communications linking us to the more remote parts of the globe. Parts of the Far East, for example. Or the poles…”

Where the polar bears would have to make do without their fucking cell phones and downloadable porn, Woods thought. Christ Almighty. This guy was going to start a mass panic if he went on with his horseshit about cosmic rays.

“It sounds as if you’re scripting a Doomsday scenario, which of course isn’t the case,” he said. “We should pause to reassure everyone that there’s little risk of solar flames producing the whole range of disturbances you mention—”

“Flares!” The director yowled again. “They’re called flares!”

Woods was getting aggravated. If Bennett wanted to be such a goddamn stickler for terminology, he could come out of the control room and finish the interview himself.

“By the way,” Woods said. “Aren’t solar flares accompanied by flames?”

Frye looked a bit thrown by the seeming non sequitur. “Well, sure, they’d be associated with eruptions of flaming gases in the heliosphere—”

“Thanks for making that clear, Dr. Frye,” he said.

“And fuck you for being a spiteful prick, Mr. Woods,” Bennett said out of sight.

“Returning to the point I raised a moment ago,” Woods said. “Is it fair to state that you gentlemen don’t, foresee any, uh—”

He faltered, unable to think of the word. This happened to him sometimes. Mostly when he was doing the science stuff, which was another reason he despised it. The word just got stuck in traffic somewhere between his brain and mouth. Goddamn. Goddamn. Where was Bennett when you needed him, why was he letting him dangle here, what the hell was the word…?

“Catastrophes, you spiteful, unappreciative prick,” Bennett said.

Woods fought back a sigh of relief.

“Catastrophes over the horizon,” he resumed, “but are rather just sketching out the problems that should be addressed as our knowledge of flares increases? Giving us some, uh…”

“Cautionary advice,” Bennett said.

“Cautionary advice, that is?”

This time it was Ketchum who answered. “Yes and no. We’re certainly not trying to scare anyone watching your program. But it does look as if there’s an impressive event in store for us, and we should all do our best to prepare. That’s why we’ve come on your program to talk about it.”

“I see… and, uh, when did you say it’s going to happen?”

“Richard and I think we’re looking at a window of somewhere within the next two to three weeks, but we don’t have enough data to tell you precisely,” Ketchum replied. “That’s another area where my meteorological comparison might be useful. Storm systems stall or pick up speed, change course, collide with other building low-pressure centers… as complex as the variables can be when we’re trying to forecast movement in our own atmosphere, it’s important to remember much less is understood about the sun’s.”

Woods noticed his cue blinker. Thirty seconds until the commercial. Thank God. He was still recovering from his momentary bobble of the tongue. And had a sick feeling that Ketchum was about to start in about flying ants and Chinese toads.

“Okay,” Bennett said. “Ask them something personal, then cut to the break.”

Woods paused a tick. Did these flat tires even have personalities?

“Ah, gentlemen, our conversation’s been fascinating, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more from you in the days to come,” he said. “We’re running low on time, but in our last few moments, could you, uh, talk a little about how you earned your unusual nicknames at Goddard… Ketchup and Fries, is it?”

Both men nodded, smiling.

Ketchum said, “I’ll defer to Richard on that.”

Frye said, “I think somebody just cooked them up because we get along well as a team.”

Woods smiled back at them, wondered again if they were gay.

“Well, that’s it, fellows, thank you for coming together this afternoon,” he said.

“Any time,” Ketchum said.

“Our pleasure,” Frye said.

I bet, Woods thought.

And that was finally a wrap.

They had made camp in a saddle between two immense glaciers, pitching their dome tents against the eastern slope, camouflaging their snowmobiles with the drop taken from the storage depot.

Perched on a lower ledge, a group of skuas had watched them with black unblinking eyes.

Five hours later the birds still had not moved. The team leader glanced at them as he emerged from his tent, stepping through its door flap into the cold.

They merely stared back.

He zipped the flap shut and strode away from the ledge in his insulated boots, then stopped with his binoculars raised to the southwestern sky.

He did not like what he saw. A fleet of saucer-shaped lenticular clouds had appeared in the distance, climbing over the polar plateau on a turbulent wave of air. Their bases were shaded deep blue, their curved foaming tops a lighter grayish color.

He angled the glasses toward the ground. Far down the narrow cleft through which his men had ridden, the world was vague, without contrast, its outlines melting into hazy softness.

He rubbed the steam from his breath off their lenses, but nothing changed.

Soft, he thought. Too soft.

He didn’t like it at all. Before leaving his tent, he had checked the latest meteorological data on his rugged handheld field computer, accessing it over the terminal’s wireless Internet connection, comparing the information from several portal sites — base forecasts, infrared maps from orbiting hemispheric satellites, NOAA synoptic charts, scattered automatic weather stations. Updated at intervals of between ten and thirty minutes, the readings were consistently ominous. A severe gale was whipping toward the coast of Victoria Land, accreting momentum as it neared the Ross Sea and ice shelf. McMurdo had already assigned it a Condition II classification: winds in excess of 50 knots, a chill factor of at least minus-60F, visibility no better than a quarter of a mile, and perhaps as low as a hundred yards.

Affairs were about to pass largely out of his control, but he would press on with the mission regardless. It was his responsibility, no more, no less.

He lowered his binoculars and started back toward the tents. Though he’d raised his neck gaiter to the bridge of his nose, the crescent birthmark on his cheek already burned from the extreme cold. It was a constant bother to him here, as it had been during his alpine training with the Stern unit of the Swiss Militärpolizei. For a man who had spent most of his life in places where warmth was scarce, this was an absurdity of sorts, a strange and uncommon jest that matched the rareness of his stigma. Yet he had long since come to abide it. In the Jura Mountain farming village of his boyhood, he had suffered merciless slashes of pain throughout the endless winter stretches. Only his shame over the freak blemish to his appearance had brought a harsher sting.

Kind des Mondes, his mother had called him as far back as he could remember. A child of the moon. It had not been a name kindly used. There had been precious little kindness in any of his mother’s words, but he had finally taught himself that didn’t matter. Emotions always betrayed. Better to steel the backbone and toughen the gut than be distracted by them.

At his orders now, the men were quick to break camp and stow their bedrolls and folded tents aboard their snowmobiles. The gathering of birds continued to study them from their perch, barely curious, simply watching because of their nearness. He looked at the creatures as he waited, lifted a chunk of ice off the ground, and suddenly snapped it at them with a hard overhand throw.

It struck the ledge with a crack, breaking to pieces. The birds jumped and fluttered in surprise, scolded him indignantly, but did not take flight.

He gave them a slight nod of appreciation.

“Eine gute Gesellschaft,” he said, turning from the ledge.

They had been good enough company in their way.

Minutes later he mounted his snowmobile, throttled up its engine, and went speeding on across the ice toward his goal, the rest of his band traveling close behind him.

“What I need is to get down low into the pass,” Nimec was saying. Soon after returning to base from the helipad, he’d steered Russ Granger to a partitioned workstation where a downscaled, black-and-white version of Megan’s Dry Valley contour map was spread across the desk, circles drawn with colored pencils substituting for the pins she’d used to mark its key sites. “I want to see it with my own eyes.”

Granger nodded from the chair beside him.

“Understood,” he said. “I can take us pretty far in at its wider sections.”

Nimec’s forefinger bull’s-eyed the circle indicating the coordinates of Scout IV’s final transmission, and the presumable outer limit of the recovery team’s search area. “What about here?”

Granger shook his head.

“Your map doesn’t convey how rough it is around the notch,” he said. That much was absolutely true. “The terrain’s bad enough. But our real problem is katabatic wind pouring straight down the notch’s lee sides. The lower it gets, the harder gravity presses on it, and the faster it blows. You fly near ground level, it’s suicidal. Like riding a toy raft through heavy rapids.”

“What’s the best you can do, as far as that goes?”

Granger traced a path with his hand. “We’ll swing around the notch, dip into Wright Valley just to its south.”

Nimec thought a moment, then grunted his acceptance.

“A couple of things, though,” Granger said. “It’s obvious we have to work around this storm that’s on the way. I don’t think it’ll be bad enough to force evacs out of any NSF field camps. But I’ll have to make some trips over to them, check that the personnel are stockpiled to last it out.”

“Any reason why I can’t come along? We could shoot right over Bull Pass after your last hop.”

Granger had anticipated the question. He pretended to think through an answer that had been readied well beforehand.

“It’d be fine with me,” he said. “But we’d need to head out together right away, so I can have time for everything. Figure you’d be gone from here at least twenty-four hours. It’s either that or wait until the blow’s over—”

Nimec waved an abortive hand in the air.

“Then we go now,” he said. “Otherwise, we could be talking about a holdup of almost a week. We couldn’t afford that kind of delay under any circumstances. But the bad weather puts us in a vise. If our people are still alive out there, they need to be pulled out.”

Granger nodded again. That was definitely what he’d figured the UpLink security chief would say. It was also very much what he had wanted Nimec to say. The sooner they were up and out of Cold Corners, the better. He couldn’t know precisely when the sabotage squad would show, or how their progress would be affected by the storm. He was, however, positive that Burkhart wouldn’t quit on his mission. It just wasn’t in his hardwiring.

“Okay,” Nimec said. “You mentioned there was something else on your mind.”

“Right.” Granger set for his payoff pitch. “Say we visit all the field camps and maybe have to deliver some canned food, meds, equipment, and so on. It would mean a few refuelings at Marble Point, plus back-and-forth loops to McMurdo for the requested supplies. That gives us a full slate right off the top. And like you said, we’re cutting it close. Working against the storm.”

“The bottom line being…?”

“I can promise we’ll get to Bull Pass. But that twenty-four-hour timetable was just a guess. Depending on how many resupply drops I have to make, and when the blow hits, we might wind up having to stick around MacTown a few days before I can bring you back here. And I want to make sure you don’t have any problems with that.”

Nimec was quietly thoughtful. Megan had told him that Annie Caulfield and her small bundle of Senators had opted to cut their stay at Cold Corners to a few hours, overnight at the longest, and arrange for a return to Cheech before they found themselves snowbound. Meaning it was almost certain that he wouldn’t have the chance to see Annie again before she departed. Which was likely for the best anyway.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I’ve got no problem at all.”