Cold War

SEVEN

Pete Nimec felt a hand touch his shoulder, and came awake at once. In his home, always within quick reach of a weapon, he could succeed at something more than light sleep. Now he straightened up with a start that jostled his sling seat on its rail.

He blinked away scraps of a horrendous dream brought on by fatigue: Gordian dead on a concrete floor, the killer who’d butchered four of Tom Ricci’s men in the Ontario raid standing over him.

In his dream, the killer had again done his bloody work like a precision machine, but the savage pride in his eyes was all too human.

Nimec tried to imagine how Ricci had been affected by Ontario, imagine what private anguish it had left him to wrestle down in the depths of night.

He took a breath to relax and settled into the canvas webbing of his seat. Master Sergeant Barry, a loadmaster with the Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing — and more specifically, its flying component, the 139th Tactical Squadron — stood before him in the cabin of the Hercules ski bird. He was mouthing words Nimec couldn’t hear.

Nimec held up a finger to indicate he needed a second, then popped out the foam earplugs he was given at the Clothing Distribution Center in Christchurch.

The ceaseless noise and vibration of the engines throbbed into his auditory canals.

Barry leaned forward, cranking his voice above the racket. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Nimec. Captain Evers is a huge booster of UpLink International, and he’d like to show you the view from the flight deck. This close to touchdown it’s really impressive.”

Nimec was relieved. He’d been ready to learn they’d boomeranged again. Air travel from New Zealand to Antarctica took eight hours by turboprop, slightly under that if you caught a nice tailwind. The previous day a heavy fog over the continent had forced his flight to double back just short of the point of safe return — about sixty degrees south, two thirds of the way there — resulting in seven wasted hours in the sky. The day before that one wasn’t quite as bad; his plane had returned to Cheech only an hour out.

Nimec looked up at the young loadie. The Herc’s cargo hold was a crude, bare space designed for maximum tonnage rather than comfort, windowless except for a few small portholes at the front and rear. He felt as if he’d gotten stuffed into the barrel of a rumbling cement mixer.

“Tell me the deck’s got soundproofing,” he said. “Please.”

“New acoustical panels, sir—”

“Lead the way.”

Nimec rose stiffly in his cold-weather gear. The red wind parka, jump suit, goggles, mittens, bunny boots, and thermal undergarments were his own, as were the extras in his packs. At the terminal prior to departure, loaners had been issued to passengers whose clothing and equipment hadn’t met the emergency survival specs mandated by the CDC under the United States Antarctic Program’s rule book.

The same guidelines had required Nimec to be physically qualified before leaving San Jose. This meant a complete medical checkup, which included bending over an examining table for a latex-gloved finger probe, that truest and most humbling of equalizers. He’d also needed to visit the dentist, who’d replaced a loose filling and informed him he was charmed to have already gotten his wisdom teeth yanked, since no one could be PQ’d with any still rooted in his mouth. Because medical facilities on the continent were thinly spread — and pharmaceutical stores limited — a minor health problem like an impacted molar or gum infection could easily become the sort of crisis that required an evac in perilous weather. It was a dreaded scenario that USAP took great pains to avoid.

As Barry led him to the forward bulkhead, Nimec saw that several of the twenty-five men and women who shared the hold with him were stretched out against the supply pallets jamming the aisle, their duffels and bedrolls tossed loosely atop the wooden planks. The majority were American researchers and support workers traveling to MacTown. There were also some drillers headed for Scott-Edmondson at the Pole, an Italian biological team on their way to Terra Nova Station, and a group of boisterous Russians hitching a partial ride to Vostok, located deep in the continent’s interior at the coldest spot on earth… which seemed curiously appropriate given their national origin. The rest were extreme skiers from Australia who’d somehow arranged for slots aboard the flight and had occupied five consecutive seats to his right at takeoff.

Out to make the first traverse of some polar mountain range, the Aussies annoyed Nimec despite their attempts to hobnob. He had trouble with people who took frivolous risks with life, as if its loss could be recouped like money gambled away at a casino. He understood the competitive impulses that drove them, but had seen too many men and women put themselves in jeopardy — and sometimes die unlauded — for better reasons than seeking thrills and trophies.

Barry ushered him into the cockpit and then ducked out the bulkhead door. Occupied by a pilot, copilot, flight engineer, and navigator, the compartment was lined with analog display consoles that showed the true age of the plane, although they’d been gussied with some racked digital avionics. As promised, its sound insulation dampened the roar of the Allisons, and the field of view offered by the front and side windows was magnificent.

The pilot turned from his instrument panel to glance at Nimec.

“Greetings,” he said. “I’m Captain Rich Evers. Enjoy the scenery, we’ve got ideal approach conditions.”

“Thanks,” Nimec said. “I appreciate the invite.”

The pilot nodded, turned back to his panel.

“Wouldn’t want you to think I’m trying to sway anybody about my niece’s job ap with your company… it’d be at that new satellite radio station UpLink just launched,” he said innocently. “Her name’s Patricia Miller, super kid, graduated college with honors. A communications major. Her friends call her Trish.”

Nimec looked at the back of his head.

“Trish.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sure she’ll get a square evaluation.”

Evers nodded again.

Nimec moved to a window as they descended through wisps of scattered, patchy clouds. Soon the ocean came into sight beneath the Herc’s nose, its calm ice-speckled surface resembling a glass tabletop covered with flaked and broken sugar cubes.

“Looks like a dense ice pack down there,” Nimec said. “That how it is the whole way to the coast?”

“Depends,” Evers said. “In summer months the floes tend to cluster around the mainland in a circular belt, then give way to open water. What you’re seeing’s actually a moderate distribution. The big, flat blocks are tabular bergs that have broken away from the ice shelf. They’re very buoyant, lots of air trapped inside them, which is why they reflect so white. An iceberg with darker blotches and an irregular form is usually a hunk of a glacier that’s migrated from inland and rafting mineral sediment.”

Nimec kept studying the ice-clogged water. “How big is ‘big’?”

“An average tab is from fifty to a hundred fifty feet tall, and between two and four hundred feet long. Take a look out to starboard, though, and you can see one I’d estimate goes up over three hundred feet.”

Nimec spotted the iceberg out the window, surprised by its illusory appearance.

“Wow,” he said. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Bear in mind the visible mass of a berg is maybe a third of what’s below the water. That’s by conservative measure. Sometimes the base is nine times as deep as the upper portion is high.”

“Tip of the iceberg.”

“Exactly,” Evers said. “I’ll tell you something… it’s been a little over three years since my Air Guard unit took over Antarctic support ops from the Navy’s Squadron Six. The Ice Pirates. They’d been hauling supplies and personnel to the continent for a half century, got disestablished because of spending cutbacks. About a year later I’m transferred to Cheech from our home base in Schenectady, New York. The twenty-first day of March, 2000. That very day NOAA polar sats pick up the largest iceberg in recorded history calving off the Ross Ice Shelf. A hundred and eighty-three miles long, twenty-three wide. Twice the size of Delaware. And of the previous record holder.”

Nimec released a low whistle. “And you’ve been hoping it was just a coincidence ever since.”

“Rather than figure it was a Western Union express to me from the Man Upstairs?” Evers turned to him again, rolled his eyes heavenward. “Got that right, my friend.”

Nimec smiled, went back to looking out the window. He was still trying to adjust his sense of scale.

Evers noted his expression.

“The sprinkles of white around the bergs are mostly pancake ice mixed in with growlers… slabs the size of cars,” he said. “Proportions are deceptive from this altitude in the best of circumstances, and impossible to judge in poor weather. It’s why fog and overcast concern us as much as flying snow. When the sunlight’s refracted between a low cloud ceiling and snow or ice cover on the ground, everything blends together, and there’s no sight horizon.”

“Zero visibility,” Nimec said. “I’ve gotten stuck driving in blizzards more than once. Feels like there’s a white blanket across the windshield.”

At his station, the navigator shifted toward Nimec. The blue laminate name tag on his breast identified him as Lieutenant Halloran.

“It isn’t quite the same,” he said. “Any flier will tell you there’s no worse pain in the ass than getting stuck in a fog whiteout.”

Nimec looked at him, thinking his tone was a bit too purposefully casual.

“If there’s a heavy snow alert, you know to stay wheels-down until the storm passes,” Halloran said. “But say you’re airborne over the ice and hit a fog bank. Around the pole it can happen just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “The way our eyes and brains are wired, we use shadows to judge the distance of things on a uniformly white field — and in a whiteout you lose shadows. So even if the air’s dry under the clouds and you’re able to see an object, the perspective may be false. No, scratch that… it will be false. With winter around the bend, you have to be especially careful because the sun’s inclination isn’t very high regardless of the time of day.”

“Meaning it won’t cast much shadow.”

“That’s right. Unless you’re keeping a close check on your instruments — and sometimes even then — you can get disoriented, fly upside down without realizing it, smash into the ground while you think you’re still a mile up. Or drop off the edge of a cliff if you’re on foot. Happened to some of Scott’s men. Around the turn of the last century, wasn’t it, Chief?”

Evers nodded. “The Discovery expedition.”

Halloran looked pleased with himself.

“And isn’t just humans that are affected,” he went on. “You know what a skua is?”

Nimec shook his head.

“Think of a seagull, but smarter, wilder, and mean as the devil. Those birds can dive from midair, snatch a tiny piece of food out of your hand without nicking a finger, swoop in on the tits of a nursing elephant seal to drink her milk. But for all their sharp instincts and reflexes, I once saw hundreds of them, a whole flock, splattered over an area of a quarter mile after a whiteout lifted.”

Nimec gazed out the windows in silence. The transition to clear water was as abrupt as Evers had described. For a while he could see nothing but the thick crowd of bergs floating below him in apparently motionless suspension, and then the plane was past the ice belt and over the open sound.

Looking ahead into the near distance, Nimec was struck by a long, solid border of white that rose up against the calm blue-gray sea and then swept back and away to the furthest range of his vision.

He recalled the briefs he’d studied in preparation for his mission, and instantly knew they were nearing the forward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

“We enter our final approach pattern in a couple of minutes,” Evers said. “There’ll be an unloading and refueling stop at MacTown. Ought to be fairly short. Then we take off for Cold Corners.”

“I assume it’s back to coach class for me.”

Evers nodded. “Sorry. They do a nice job grooming the ski way at Willy, but it can be bumpy.” He paused. “I’m banking to port in just a second. You might want to take a peek out the right-hand windows before you go aft and buckle up.”

Nimec felt the aircraft tilt gently, and looked.

Below them now, the ice shelf was a continuous sheet of whiteness that gleamed so brightly in the sun it made his eyes smart. A stepped ridge of glaciers sat atop it, extending seaward from the interior like a wide, rough tongue questing for water. At the far end of this glacial wave, two frozen mountain peaks reared thousands of feet above a great hump in the otherwise flat plain of ice. A plume of smoke flowed from the summit of the larger mountain, tailing into the wind.

Evers glanced over his shoulder at Nimec.

“That area where the ice looks like it bulges up is Ross Island. Home to Mount Erebus, his baby brother Mount Terror, and the fifteen hundred Americans at McMurdo Station,” Evers said. “Terror’s the quiet one. As you can tell, Erebus is something of a hothead.”

Nimec kept looking out the window.

“I knew MacTown wasn’t too far from a volcano,” he said. “Didn’t have any idea the volcano was active.”

“You bet it is,” Evers said. “Regular with its tantrums too. Erebus has been in a constant state of eruption for almost three decades now… what amounts to a slow boil. It vents six times a day, sometimes with a rumble you can hear for miles. Sends bullets of molten lava and ash over the rim of the crater. The past couple of years those discharges have gotten more intense, and there’ve been some significant seismic tremors on the island.”

Nimec turned to face him.

“Fire and ice,” Nimec said. “I’ve been around a little, seen some unusual places. None of them were anything like this.”

Evers briefly met his gaze.

“Terra Australis Incognita,” Evers said. “ ‘Unknown to the sons of Adam, having nothing which belongs to our race.’ That’s what the legend says about Antarctica on a map by one of those Benedictine monks who tried to keep the gears of civilization turning in the Dark Ages. His name was Lambert of Saint Olmer.”

Nimec grunted. “You know your local history.”

“I read between flights… helps me cope with the endless holdups,” Evers said. “You know what, though? Old Lambert was right on. This is a different world. Or may as well be. Nobody will really ever belong here. Not a single one of us.”

“Just visitors, huh,” Nimec said.

“Unwanted visitors.” Evers’s face was serious. “Here’s another piece of information to stuff in your hip pocket. You know the satellite photos I mentioned? Look at any aerial views of the continent and you’ll notice it’s shaped like a giant manta ray.” He paused, shrugged. “Call me crazy, but there are days when I’d swear it’s a reminder. Mother Nature’s way of telling us something important about this place.”

Nimec was still looking at him.

“Namely?” Nimec said.

Evers moved his shoulders up and down again.

“Its sting can be fatal to humans,” he said, and got to work landing the plane in silence.

“Willy” was Williams Field, a prepared airstrip on the fast ice eight miles from McMurdo Station proper. As the Herc taxied to a halt, flight directors in hooded red-issue ECW outfits used hand signals to guide it into position.

A fleet of different vehicles hemmed the fringes of the ski way. Immediately alongside it were bulldozers and other equipment for clearing, raking, and compacting the snow pile. An enormous 4X4 shuttle raised on six-foot-high balloon tires — Ivan the Terrabus, said the lettering on its flank — stood ready to cart deplaned passengers to the station’s main receiving center. There were forklifts for off-loading the cargo pallets, fire trucks in case of a landing emergency, scattered vans, tractors, and motor sleds.

Willy’s operational facilities were identical to those of an ordinary small airfield in so many respects, it almost blunted one’s appreciation of the fact that the whole thing had been constructed on a plate of floating sea ice. It had air-traffic control towers and a considerable number of maintenance and supply buildings with corrugated metal sides. But each of these structures rested on skids, and had been towed from the main field six miles closer to the station, a seven-thousand-foot strip that could be used by aircraft with standard wheeled landing gear until sometime in December, the middle of the polar summer, when the ice runways there began to give in and melt to slush.

Nimec had learned much of this from his files, and seen more with his own eyes upon touchdown. He had adequate time to hear about the rest from Halloran and two other members of the aircrew as they sat together in a heated visitors’ lounge near the apron, sipped passably decent coffee, and watched the Herc being emptied of freight as it took fuel through the lines.

The stop was lasting longer than he’d expected. Almost two hours after the plane’s arrival at McMurdo it remained parked on the ice, the activity around it ongoing without any hint of a letup, its engines running because the minus-50° Fahrenheit temperature was just eight degrees above the danger threshold at which its hydraulics would begin to fail — the rubber hoses, gaskets, and valve seals getting brittle enough to crack, the JP8 fuel that powered the Allisons becoming too viscous to flow freely despite its special cold-weather formulation.

Draining his paper cup, Nimec glanced at his watch, then at the busy airstrip outside the window to his left. He let out a grumbling sound and stretched his arms.

“You have to get in sync,” Halloran said, eyeballing him from across the cafeteria table.

Nimec shook his head, turned his wrist to display the watch’s face.

“I switched to New Zealand time at Christchurch,” he said.

Halloran looked sideways at his fellow Guardsmen. Then all three laughed.

Nimec bristled. “Didn’t realize I said something funny.”

Halloran fought in vain to stifle a chuckle. “Sorry, no offense intended. I meant you should synchronize the clock in here.” He tapped his forehead. “This place, the sun doesn’t rise or set, but kind of crawls around you in a circle like a snail on a basketball hoop for about six months. Then it hibernates for the winter.”

His explanation, such as it was, only made Nimec grumpier.

“I don’t care if the sun balances on the tip of my nose for half the year,” he said. “Things need to get done.”

“Sure. I’m just saying to remember where you are.”

“So your advice is, what, that we check our schedules on arrival?”

Halloran frowned.

“Listen,” he said, motioning his chin toward the window. “You have any idea how long it takes to plot and cut an ice runway?”

Nimec shook his head, shrugging, uncertain whether he cared at that particular moment. He’d spent the better part of his week hurtling through transoceanic airspace, spent much of the week before getting poked, prodded, and pissing into paper cups in an accelerated barrage of medical examinations. He was annoyed by his own crabbiness. And he missed his sweetheart Corvette.

“At least sixty, seventy hours,” Halloran was saying in answer to his own question. “Think about it. The field groomers get through with all their snow-moving and grading, then a storm plasters the area and they’re back to square one. That happens so often — with a vengeance — nobody even thinks to rag. It’s just business as usual.”

“Your point being…?”

“Exactly what it was when we started this conversation,” Halloran said. “Adjust. Don’t try to impose yourself on this place. Even most governments acknowledge it’s ungovernable.”

Nimec looked at him. This place. Nothing at all out of the ordinary about the phrase. But he somehow found Halloran’s repetition of it interesting… and hadn’t Evers also used it at least once rather than having named the continent?

“Take things as they come,” Nimec said, putting aside the thought. “Does that sound about right?”

Halloran continued to disregard the obvious pique in his tone.

“About.”

“You have a very Zen attitude for a military man,” Nimec said.

Halloran smiled, touched the circular ANG 139th TAS shoulder patch on the blouse of his flight suit. A nose-on view of a Hercules ski transport against a blue background, with the polar ice caps embroidered in white at the top and bottom, it was designed to be symbolic of a compass: the wings of the plane crossing east and west to the edges of the patch, the tail rudder similarly pointing due north, the skis lowered toward the southern cap.

“Very Zen,” Halloran said to the Guardsman beside him, a fellow lieutenant named Mathews. “Maybe we should have that stitched right here above the plane, make it our official motto. How about it?”

Mathews grinned and told him it sounded like a good idea. Then all three members of the aircrew were laughing again.

Nimec sighed, rapped the table with his fingers, listened to the engines of the plane humming outside the lounge.

Something told him he was at the hard rock bottom of what would be a steep and difficult learning curve.

Topped with fuel, the Herc finally got back under way some three hours after alighting at Williams Field. Its departure commenced with a jarring bounce as its wheels dropped to crack the ice that had melted around its skis from the friction of landing, and then had frozen over again to hold the plane steadily in position. After the wheels were retracted, it was a swift, smooth slide over the ski way to takeoff.

Cold Corners was four hundred odd miles south on the coastline, an aerial sprint of just about an hour. Nimec stuck it out in the webbing of the aft compartment, which he found much less disagreeable now that the bulk of its freight and over half its passengers — including the loud Russians and Australian adrenaline junkies — had gone on to their various destinations. The hold space freed up by their departure also gave Nimec a pretty well unrestricted choice of seating, and he grabbed a spot by a porthole that afforded good bird’s-eye views of both McMurdo and Cold Corners.

The contrast between them was striking. Seen from above, MacTown resembled an industrial park, or maybe a mining town that had sprung up without systematic planning over a span of many decades. Nimec guessed there were probably between a hundred and two hundred separate structures — multistory barracks-style units, rows of arched canvas Jamesway huts, smaller blue-skinned metal Quonsets, warehouse buildings, and upwards of a dozen massive, rust-blighted steel fuel-storage tanks strung out on the surrounding hillsides. Tucked among them were a couple of appreciably more modern complexes that Sergeant Barry identified as NSF headquarters and the Crary Science and Engineering Center, but Nimec’s overall impression of the station was one of rambling, indiscriminate sprawl and exceeding ugliness.

Very much on the other hand, Cold Corners looked like the working model for a future space colony… and by no accident. Roger Gordian’s innovative flair and penchant for cost efficiency made him an almost compulsive multitasker. Cold Corners was envisioned as an all-in-one satellite ground station, new space technology center, and human habitability and performance lab for long-term interplanetary settlements, and the heart of the base was configured of six sleek, linked rectangular pods on jack-able stilts that allowed it to be elevated above the rising snow drifts that eventually inundated most Antarctic stations. In his oversight of the installation’s security analysis, Nimec had stayed abreast of its development from conception to construction, and knew the few outlying buildings included a solar-paneled housing for its supplementary electrical generator, a desalinization plant to convert seawater beneath the ice crust into drinkable water, a garage for the vehicles, a trio of side-by-side satcom radomes, and of course the airfield facility that was its lifeline to civilization. The main energy, environmental-control, and waste-disposal systems were in utility corridors — or utilidors — beneath the permanent ice strata.

Minutes after Sergeant Barry announced the Herc was coming up on Cold Corners, Nimec felt its skis deploy with a thump. Then it made a sharp left turn, and the level white spread of the airfield swelled into his window.

On the ground at last, Nimec unbuckled, zipped into his parka, shouldered his bags, and went about exchanging farewells with the airmen.

The wind was staggering as he descended the exit ramp to the field. A downscaled version of Willy, it had a more modest complement of personnel shuttles and freight haulers waiting to meet the plane. Also present was a small welcoming committee clad in the ubiquitous cardinal-red survival gear. It seemed colder here than at McMurdo, and the party’s members wore full rubber face masks that rendered them indistinguishable from each other. Nimec saw somebody he guessed was its leader step toward the plane ahead of the rest.

Nimec had taken about two steps toward the shuttle bus when that same person rushed over and swept him into a tight, eager embrace.

“Pete.” A woman’s voice through the mask, muffled but familiar. And close against his face. “God, I’ve missed you something awful.”

Nimec’s surprise dissolved in a flash of happiness. He smiled openly for the first time in hours, ignoring the raw sting of the wind on his lips.

“Same here, Meg,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.