Dark Winter

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Thin blue shadows bobbed ahead of the search party like anxious children, their silhouettes running ahead to get to the buried ruin. Lewis felt more hesitant. He was curious about the abandoned Navy base but he'd also been warned it was utterly dark and cheerlessly cold. The truth was, he was mildly claustrophobic. He didn't relish looking for a dead body down there.

The e-mailed message that Adams had found had been deleted from Moss's computer but Abby, who had some hacker skills, had been able to retrieve it from the encrusted history of his hard disk. If you want your meteorite back, meet me in the old base at midnight. Unsigned, of course, and dating from the evening before Mickey disappeared. She was trying to retrace its point of origin now.

Meanwhile, the elongated penumbra of their own bodies stopped at a womblike slit in the snow, its lips widened as if recently penetrated. Someone had passed this way not long before. The edges of the tiny entry glowed a cobalt blue that sank into the ink of a catacomb. It seemed the kind of hole that could close up behind you, not letting you out.

"It's the only place we haven't looked," Cameron said in response to the unspoken reluctance of the others. Everyone was tired and hungover. The cold worsened their headaches.

"Why in hell would a thief lead Mickey here?" Pulaski wondered aloud.

"Cheese to a mouse," suggested Geller, who'd pulled down his gaiter to bite on a candy bar. His beard began to grow ice crystals as he chewed.

"Which implies a trap," the cook said.

"Or an exchange," said Cameron.

Let's get on with it, then, Lewis thought. He was tired and uneasy and the half-mile walk from the dome had left him sweaty and cold. He wanted to crawl into bed. But volunteering to help this time seemed another way to get loose of the albatross of suspicion.

"This opening goes down to the old meteorology room at one end at the old base," Cameron said. "Stay tight and watch your step. The timbers are starting to buckle from the weight of the snow." He was carrying rope, an ice ax, and a small field shovel.

"Why'd they build it down there, anyway?" Geller asked dubiously, looking at the hole.

"They didn't. The snow just piled up around it. Eventually it buries everything."

"You don't even have to dig your own grave down here," Pulaski said.

"And a hundred thousand years from now the ice will have flowed enough to spit everything back out into the ocean," Cameron replied. "Sewage. Garbage. Remains."

"Won't want to be around when that iceberg melts out," Geller said.

They crawled through the opening, switched on flashlights, opened a hatch, and descended. Cones of illumination danced down old wooden stairs to a snow-dusted plywood floor. The wood was too frozen to exhibit any signs of decay. When they got to the bottom the four of them almost filled the low room, its ceiling bending ominously from the weight of snow above. Cameron let his beam play across the walls. There was a table with an abandoned military radio, its clunkiness suggesting decades of antiquity. A gray metal office chair. Another table with old meteorological charts. There was no decay and no dust, just a patina of frost. The air was utterly still and heavy with an ancient, undisturbed cold, somehow more cloying and penetrating than the brisker air outside. While the temperature was a constant fifty-five below zero, it felt colder.

"Well, I don't like this," Geller announced. "Would Mickey really come down here?"

"Moss once lived here, remember?" Cameron said. "He helped build it."

"Built a meat-locker morgue."

"It was different with the heat on."

Lewis played his flashlight along the floor, trying to ignore his claustrophobia. "Boot prints." His light slid along to a dark doorway. "Lots of them, going both directions."

"Doesn't mean anything," Cameron said. "There's no wind, and no fresh snowfall except what seeps through. Come down here and your prints last as long as on the moon. Until someone else walks over them, like us."

They went through the door to another room. There were crates and old cardboard boxes, empty. A few polar visitors had scrawled or scratched names on the walls. Nothing had decayed in the cold.

The men shuffled ahead, the gloom swallowing where they'd been and obscuring what lay ahead. Doorways appeared like the lids of pits, yawning a deeper darkness. Examination with the flashlights showed them to be merely old rooms, empty of any life. Walls canted crazily from the strain of the snow above.

"If these lights go out, we're in shit city," Geller said. "This place is like a maze."

"Exactly," Cameron said. "So don't wander off."

"Except maybe it would go faster if we split up."

"No splitting up," said Pulaski. "Mickey got into trouble because he was alone."

"I thought you was Rambo," Geller said. "One-man army."

"Rambo is horseshit. In the Army the idea is to get there first with the most, and most means you don't split up. Warriors who want to do their own thing are called dead heroes."

"Tyson says you have to look after yourself."

"Tyson's a butthead. You look after yourself by looking after each other."

They came into the galley. It was as if the old base had been suddenly evacuated, not shut down. There were dirty glasses, open beer cans and bottles, and a spill of old forks on the floor. Tables and chairs were askew. In the kitchen an abandoned refrigerator hung open to reveal a cascade of forgotten, frozen hot dogs. A bulletin board had meeting notices and cartoons from a quarter century before. Their lights flickered over an old bar, revealing the charms of a laminated Miss November. Geller studied her with a historian's interest. "They plasticized her," he said. "Look, she was before pubic hair."

"Did they pack or flee?" Lewis asked as he looked around. "Some of this is crap from people who sneak down here to party," Cameron explained. "Nobody stays too long because it's too damn cold. It's just something to say you've done it, like sleeping in a haunted house. But yeah, the Navy pretty much just walked away."

"Why didn't they move their stuff?" Geller asked.

"Move it where? It was old and there's no place to store it. Cost a fortune to fly it out. So this has become a repository, like Scott's Hut at McMurdo. A thousand years from now some archaeologist is going to come down here and find those hot dogs."

"Not exactly King Tut," Pulaski said.

"But it's history. Just like the dome is history. That's what we're doing down here, making history."

"The way Mickey Moss is history," Pulaski said.

"Let's hope there's still a chance." Cameron lifted his head and shouted, "Mickey!" The call echoed away into the darkness, seeming to shake the old base as it did so. Somewhere a wall creaked in reply.

"Jesus, don't do that," Geller said. "You'll bring the whole place down on us."

"We gotta try."

They went into the next room, an old barracks. The bunks and mattresses were free of mold because of the cold. Not even bacteria could live here. The beds held frozen impressions as if bodies had vacated only hours before. Lewis felt like the place was inhabited by ghosts. He was freezing up from their slow pace.

"Are we near the end?"

"Halfway."

The ceiling on the garage and powerhouse had mostly collapsed, the trusses and plywood snapped and crumpled across an old generator. Cameron played his flashlight across the wreckage, looking for a clue. There was none.

They went on through a connecting corridor to the other half of the base, a gap of snow having been left between the two to help contain any fire. The short passageway was lit by a faint gray crepuscular light that penetrated the snow from the surface.

A beam creaked as they edged past.

There was an old recreation room with abandoned ping-pong table and bookcases. In a storage center were steel and paper drums, lined like sentries, their frozen dregs unknowable. The science room had been mostly gutted of equipment except for a lab bench. Calendars were dated 1974. Discarded trash was heaped in corners.

The last room was a small astronomical observatory. The clump of their boots on plywood was uncomfortably loud.

"They launched weather balloons here and took sightings of the stars," Cameron said. "End of the line."

"That's it, then," Pulaski said. "No Mickey."

"Where do those stairs go?" Geller asked, pointing to a set leading upward.

"Out, I hope. This is the other entrance to the base. We might have to dig a little if it's drifted." Cameron glanced around the barren room, clearly frustrated. "I can't think where else to look."

Lewis let his flashlight play about. Its beam was already dimming. "What's that?"

There was a small plywood door behind the stairs, its edge opened a crack. The snow at its foot was heavily scuffed.

"I think it's an old tunnel that goes out to pits used for earthquake and geomagnetic research. Probably collapsed."

"Except the door's been recently opened," Lewis said. He walked over and pointed. There were fresh splinters of yellow wood around the faded gray.

"Bingo," Geller said.

The door had frozen back in place and Cameron used his ice ax to once more pry it free. A tunnel just five feet high and three broad led into darkness. The wood ceiling bulged downward as if pregnant. The walls looked ready to implode. But patches of snow on its plywood floor showed a welter of tracks and scuff marks.

"Gawd," Pulaski said doubtfully. "Mickey would go in there?" "Somebody did," Cameron said. "Not too long ago, either, I'm guessing. I think we'd better rope up. Who wants to lead?"

No one spoke up.

"Okay, I will." He peered down the tunnel uncertainly.

"I'll go last," Lewis said. "With the other light." The cold was stiffening his muscles and he didn't want to stoop-walk into that dark corridor. Last in, first out. The snow was pressing down like earth on a coffin. "I'll take the ice ax; I've used one before. If you fall, I'll brake you."

They moved in a half crouch, their boots echoing in the stillness. At one point the squeeze of the ice was so great that they dropped to a crawl, then stood again. Still a confusion of tracks went on. The two flashlights continued to dim. Lewis realized he was sweating and that made him shiver. His heart was hammering. It was impossible to see what was ahead.

"Shit!"

It was Cameron. There was a crack of breaking wood and his light disappeared. The rope jerked taut, yanking the men to the floor and dragging them forward in a terrifying slither. Lewis frantically dug with the ax and it scraped along the plywood with a squeal. Then it caught on a joint between two sheets of wood and he jammed it down past the plywood into the ice. Their slide was arrested.

They were stretched like beads on their rope, their waists painfully squeezed.

"Rod! You all right?"

"I'm hanging in some damn pit! Can you back us up?"

"Pulaski and I can brace ourselves against the plywood walls," Geller grunted. "You pull on the ax, Lewis."

Slowly the three men who had escaped the fall began to retreat, hauling the station manager back up as they did so. Cameron got to the lip of the hole and worked his way over broken plywood to the top. They rested a moment, panting.

Lewis had the only light. "What happened to yours?" he asked, shining it on Cameron.

"Dropped it."

The station manager crawled to the edge of the pit and looked down. Lewis joined him. The fallen flashlight was still glowing feebly fifty feet below where the old study excavation hole ended, the pit's icy sides marked by meter sticks installed four decades before. The hole had been roofed over with boards and plywood, but someone's weight had broken through before them. Cameron had simply stepped too close and slid down the sagging wood into thin air.

"Ah, Jesus," the station manager now breathed.

A man was down there, curled in a fetal position in the cone of fading light. They had found Mickey Moss.

It took them an hour to lift the astronomer out. Pulaski had done some rock climbing in the military so they lowered him to the bottom of the pit to attach a line around the stiff corpse. Then he shimmied back up and they hauled, cursing when Moss's rock-hard limbs caught momentarily on the uneven edges of the broken wood. The scientist was heavy. Finally they got him up and over the edge of the pit.

They sat back, gasping. Moss's parka-clad body seemed to fill the tunnel.

Cameron dug out a water bottle he kept unfrozen by strapping it to his torso and passed it around. The water was actually lukewarm. "To Mickey. Drink all you can. Working in the cold is how you get dehydrated in Antarctica."

Lewis drank and shuddered. "I need to keep moving."

"We all do. My hands and feet are numb. I think we can sled Mickey from here."

They dragged the body unceremoniously, finding it skidded well. When they came through the door back into the stairwell they lifted Moss more gently, like pallbearers, and carried him to the aluminum-roofed observatory above. A ladder led to a wooden trapdoor, which they pried until it fell down, swinging on its old hinge. There was a roof of snow over the entrance, softly blue, and the men looked at the color eagerly. A few twists of Cameron's shovel and the snow cascaded down in a flush of gray light. They lifted and pushed Mickey's body up and surfaced, gasping as if emerging from underwater. The hole they'd come from looked pitch-black. Cameron reached down and pulled the trapdoor shut.

"That's enough of that."

Lewis looked at the horizon. Clouds were moving in, obscuring the low sun. The day was hardly more than a gloomy twilight and yet brilliant after the darkness below.

"Mickey didn't get the cheese," Geller said, panting. "No meteorite. No jillion bucks. Was the pit a trap?"

The station manager wearily got to his knees and examined the body. The astronomer's eyes and mouth were open, and they could imagine him bellowing for help. One leg was twisted unnaturally, as if broken. "Or an accident. It would be easy enough to just fall. I did." He looked at Lewis. "You were smart not to take point, fingie."

"I don't like dark places."

Cameron said nothing.

"It's weird," Pulaski said. "He could have been lured, pushed, dragged, whatever."

Geller lay back, blowing. "Not dragged. Too much work."

"Well, somebody shut the door behind him, right?"

"He could have done it himself. Or it swung shut. Who knows?"

"Can we just get back?" Lewis asked.

Cameron rocked Moss this way and that, looking for anything that could tell a story. "If anyone was aware of the dangers of the old base it was Mickey."

"We've got to get back or I'm going to freeze," Lewis insisted. His torso was beginning to tremble. He'd never felt such cold.

"I know." Cameron glanced at Lewis speculatively and stayed at a kneel, his hands searching. Moss's outer pocket held the usual gloves. Then the station manager yanked hard on the parka zipper, breaking a sheen on ice, and reached inside to a polar fleece pullover. There was something flat in a zippered pocket.

He pulled out a photograph and looked at it in mystification, not showing it to the others. Then he tucked it inside his own clothes and took out his field radio, calling Comms.

"This is Ice Pick," he radioed. "Harrison there?"

Clyde Skinner, their radioman, took a few minutes to fetch the astronomer.

"Adams."

"You guys traced that e-mail yet?" Cameron asked.

"Dixon did," Adams said, his voice crackling. "Is Lewis with you?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll tell you later."

Cameron looked at the fingie. "No. Tell me now."

There was a hesitation. "The message came from one of the computers in Clean Air. Jed Lewis's password."

The quartet absorbed this. Then: "Roger that. Out." The station manager put the radio away.

Everyone looked at Lewis.

"If I sent Mickey that message, would I do it from my own machine?" he asked. "My own password?"

No one replied.

"Come on!"

"Did you send Mickey that message?"

"No! No." The others looked grim and tired. "Look, this is crazy."

"It sure is," Geller said.

I'm being set up, Lewis thought, his heart hammering with new paranoia. "So who was that picture of?" he asked, pointing.

"Nobody."

"Hey, if someone's sending e-mail on my account, I get to see what else is turning up."

Cameron considered and then slowly took it out. The others frowned.

Mickey Moss had been carrying a picture of the one person who knew all their passwords, who could read all their mail. A picture of Abby Dixon, next to his heart.

Fatal Confidence

Going down a new route is always harder than going up. It's risky to lean out far enough to properly see, and gravity conspires to short-circuit your decision making. People bunch up, hesitating and sliding, and inadvertently kick stuff down on each other. If the kids hadn't been a pack of scared-silly sheep, with implicit trust in our decision making, we'd never have gotten them started down the wall at all. Kressler kept telling everyone it wouldn't be bad after we got to Fat Boy. They were frightened enough to believe him. Once started, the students gasping in anxiety and their limbs trembling as they clutched the wall, it seemed even worse to have to go back up. Yet each step we took, each foot we descended, sank us deeper into the trap we were digging for ourselves.

Fat Boy didn't exactly help the mood. His pleas and moans and bitchy impatience were enough to put experienced climbers on edge, let alone a bunch of shaky kids. Then he cursed and whined at the rocks and snow that seventeen clumsy people inevitably knocked down toward him, hugging himself to the cliff wall and expressing all varieties of self-pity. I wouldn't have blamed his classmates a bit for pitching the blob off the ledge once we got down to him. But instead there were shouts of greeting and reconciliation and hugs and a hurried half-assed setting of his broken leg, Fat Boy roaring in pain. For a moment of excited triumph we were all united again, one for all and all for one, plucky and indomitable: in other words, so thoroughly deluded that I could have written the overblown feature story about our insane little victory all by myself.

Except we were squeezed onto a ledge that was like an overloaded, open-walled elevator going nowhere, cliffs below and cliffs above, and the clouds were blotting out the surrounding peaks. It was getting colder.

Kressler and Fleming were hearty as hell, of course. Everyone was doing great, way to go, jolly good, pip pip, and any other kind of bullshit nonsense that popped into their heads. Me myself and I, however, happened to take a tiny peek over the edge of our view terrace and didn't see Kressler's easy way down at all. There was, in fact, a several-hundred-yard drop down a soft-rock cliff before another ledge led sideways to a point where we might sidehill on snow again- assuming we didn't trigger an avalanche. How we were going to get two hundred and twenty pounds of blubber boy and fourteen other amateur climbers down this way, however, was not at all clear to me and, it turned out, not at all clear to our would-be department chairman.

Kressler, we now learned, had never been here at all. He'd just read that it was climbable.

Jesus. Oh, what a pack of veritable Einsteins we were.

Let me tell you something about Cascade volcanoes. You go up the right way, at the right time and season, and most of the way it's a steady snow slog to the top, exhausting but not terribly technical. Really dumb people have done it, and have the snapshots to prove it. Get fancy about it, however, and you can face some of the most treacherous climbing in the world. The mountains are hot inside, active and full of steam, and the steam leaches out through the lava rock of their cones and turns their geology into a kind of Swiss cheese, crumbling and unreliable. The mountains are weak and have an alarming tendency to break, slump, or slide with no warning. The rock is about as firm as hardened snot, in other words, breaking off with pops and bangs with each rise of the spring sun, spitting out pitons and breaking loose hand-holds for anyone optimistic enough to try it. Skill can very quickly be trumped by bad luck. It was dawning on me that all our luck this day seemed exceedingly bad indeed.

I suggested we go back up and regain the normal route.

The kids wouldn't hear of it. Kressler had scared the shit out of them getting them down this far, and the idea of going back up the mountain when a storm was swirling in struck everybody but me as absolutely insane. I started arguing, me against the other two, and a debate in front of weeping Fat Boy and tired, shivering sophomores was probably not the brightest thing we could have done. Kressler was furious I'd even raised the question. He needed confidence and the group was losing it.

My two esteemed colleagues finally announced that they would show us the way while I babysat the classroom. Climb down to that beckoning snowfield and scramble back up, setting ropes, driving belay points, and generally building a super freeway for the rest of us doubters so we could get the hell out of here before we found ourselves in whiteout conditions.

There was long, doubting silence. They were all waiting for me to speak. Well, go for it, I finally told them. Oh Pioneers! Yep, you fellows go right ahead. I'll just bundle up with the coeds here and you all call when you're ready. Oh, and hurry it up, will you?

Didn't say that, of course. Just gave my in-the-face-of-adversity nod and said I'd try to fashion some kind of sling to lower Fat Boy. What choice did I have, as the lone voice of reason? I was being dragged down with them, doomed by the Original Sin of Fat Boy's unroping, and if we by some chance actually survived I'd sure as hell demand my share of glory for trailing along.

Idiots.

The doughty pair started down off the ledge. It was rock climbing, for which we were neither equipped nor prepared. We had stiff boots for crampons, not rock shoes, and the two instructors were weighted with too many ropes and carabiners and pitons because they wanted to fashion a near-ladder for the class. Even in the best of conditions it would have been difficult to descend that route. Now the sky was spitting snow. Fat Boy was groaning in discomfort, many of the others were snuffling, and when Fleming's head disappeared below the edge I have to confess that even I felt terribly alone.

If they'd made it, of course, everything would have been very different.

I crawled over to watch their progress. The wind was rising and nothing was audible, but I could see them slowly picking their way down. The more they descended the more they hesitated, and I could tell the descent was looking more and more impossible. Once Kressler stopped and looked back up at me for the longest time, as if realizing he was in over his head.

Come back up, you moron, I thought to him as hard as I could. I really did.

But he didn't hear my mental message, or chose to ignore it. A few hundred more yards and his mistakes could be transformed to rescue, the second-guessing transformed to a good war story. His chairmanship might be secure. Can you imagine any goal more pathetic? So they kept going, fixing a line, and for one brief minute I began to concede they just might show me up. Get down, get the kids down, even get Fat Boy down. And they would have, too, if they were descending a wall with any kind of structural integrity.

But Wallace Wall is as unreliable as a lover's promise. One minute they were bolted to it, making our route, and the next moment a foothold gave way and Fleming, who was highest, slipped, fell, and bounced, hanging on his rope from a piton, suspended in terror, his ice ax sparkling as it whirled away downward. There was an awful pause, Kressler roaring instructions, and then the pitons popped off the steam-riddled rock like buttons in a Fat Boy squat. Ping, ping, ping! The rope curled out in space in a lazy arc, bright red against the foggy depths beyond, and then Fleming fell past Kressler and plucked him off his perch as neatly as you'd pick a grape.

They went screaming.

The students shrieked, too, an anguished wail that signaled their own sudden realization of mortality and doom. The instructors tumbled in a gray dawn light, orbiting each other in an embrace of line, and then hit rocks, ice, glacier, snow, setting off a small avalanche to accompany themselves and sliding down in their very own slurry of debris, the rope snapping. They settled out individually finally to lie still some infinity of distance below us, their broken profiles looking like discarded dolls.

They were dead.

The keening from my little mob of survivors was as mournful as the bitter wind. Snow was spitting at us, visibility failing, and we were trapped on a shelf of rock with about as much square footage as a king-sized bed. The easy route down had been exposed for the fraud it was, and our leaders for fools.

So now they clutched, pleaded, wept.

And turned to me.