Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

Chapter 24

Raising his feet off the ground, Gabriel swung by the arm holding the bone wedged into the wall. At the top of the swing, he reached up and planted the second piece of bone about six inches higher than the first. Hauling himself up on the second piece, he pulled the first piece free and swung up to plant it higher. Then he repeated the process. Again and again he pulled out the bones and drove them in higher, sometimes as much as a foot above his previous handhold and other times only a few inches. There were times when he failed to drive the end of the bone into the wall at all and swung back away, returning a moment later for another attempt. His arms were already aching although he’d barely climbed five feet, but he kept on going, scanning the rock wall for cracks and crevices that might admit the bones—and that would hold his weight.

By the time he had made it halfway up the sheer face, his arms and chest were trembling from the effort and he was barely able to pull himself up inch by excruciating inch. Only thoughts of Millie waiting below with his broken ankle and Rue being forced at spear point to work on the plane—and Velda, half mad with grief, with the lives of millions in her hands—kept Gabriel pressing on. He didn’t look down and barely looked up, concentrating instead on the wall directly in front of him: the next crack, the next handhold. Twelve feet became fifteen; fifteen became twenty. He was less than three feet from the lip when the stones supporting his latest handhold began to crumble.

It began with a faint rain of grit and dirt on his arm; then the terrible feeling of the bone in his hand coming loose. The stone below his fist had a crack running down its face, and as he watched it slowly widened.

Desperately, Gabriel swung the bone in his other hand and jabbed it into the wall just as he lost his grip on the first. It slipped from his hand and plummeted end over end to the bottom of the pit. As he swung reflexively out of the way of a small avalanche of stones, he heard Millie’s voice from far below. “You okay?”

“I’ve been better,” Gabriel called back. He held tight to the one remaining bone. This one remained embedded, but at a bad angle—tilted slightly downward and looking as if it were seconds from coming loose.

He looked up. He was close—so close. But still more than an arm’s length away. He planted his toes against the rock, scrabbling for any sort of hold at all, and swung his free arm up. It caught nothing. No handhold, nothing to grab onto.

He tried again, aiming this time for the crumbling ledge where the stones had come loose. It was dodgy at best, unlikely to support his weight for long, but it was the best hope he had.

He reached it, caught hold. His fingers bit down fiercely, clamping onto the stone. It did feel loose, unstable—but he held tight and shifted until he felt the balance settle, and when it felt about as good as it was likely to get, Gabriel yanked the sole remaining bone free.

He swung by his fingertips twenty-three feet above the ground, holding onto this unsteady bit of rock, his heart racing. He could picture Millie looking up at him, holding his breath in fear, maybe holding his arms out to catch him if he fell, though the impact would surely shatter the already fractured bones of his ankle, maybe crippling him for life.

There was a happy prospect—Millie walking with a cane for the rest of his life, and all because of him. Gabriel forced the image out of his mind and swung his arm up, up, as high as he could, and stabbed the bone savagely into the space beneath one of the stones at the pit’s edge. He didn’t let himself swing back. Instead, he clenched the muscles of his abdomen and with an enormous effort swung his legs up. For an instant he hung sideways, like a gymnast on a pommel horse, then he managed to hook one ankle over the lip. He paused for breath in that awkward, stretched out position and then carefully worked his knee up over the edge, then got his other leg up beside the first. It took almost as great an effort to unlock his grip from around the bone clenched tightly in his fist, but he did, and wrenched himself up and over till he was lying flat on his back, looking up at the underside of the crimson dome of ice.

For several seconds, all he could do was lie there and breathe, trying to bring his heartbeat back down to something resembling its normal pace and hoping no one decided to show up and jam a spear into him while he lay there gasping like a gaffed bass. He slowly rolled over and raised himself to his hands and knees, adrenaline pulsing in his aching limbs and readying him for yet another fight. But nothing happened. There weren’t any guards around, only two old women and one young girl, the one he’d seen when they’d entered the village; she sat alone, working on stringing a long necklace of seedpods and bone beads. The two old women sat side by side about ten feet away from her, next to what looked like a crude well, and were concentrating on grinding some sort of wild grain. One was cracking open the thick outer husks and placing the softer grains into a hole in the ground while the other was lifting and dropping a heavy wooden post to crush the grains to flour. None of the three were paying any attention to him. Gabriel was about to slip away and quietly hunt for something that might help him get Millie out of the pit, but the sight of the old woman cracking the husks made him do a double take. The implement she was using—it was the butt of a gun. Not just any gun, either. Gabriel’s Colt.

“Hey!” he said. All three of the women looked up at the specter before them, a nearly naked man covered with rock dust and streaks of mud and angry red scrapes and swollen bite marks. The two older women fled like startled pigeons, the wooden post and gun left lying where they’d fallen from their hands.

The young girl stood unmoving, gaping at him wideeyed. The paralysis was only momentary, though. When Gabriel took a step toward her, open hands held out in a nonthreatening display, she bolted, too, leaving him alone in the center of the village.

Where was everyone else? Were they all guarding Rue? Or were some in the tall central building, watching unwittingly while Velda turned their god machine against innocents in their ancestors’ homeland?

Gabriel walked over to the primitive grain mill and picked up his Colt. It didn’t seem obviously worse for wear, other than a dusty coating of cracked hull fragments clinging to the grip. It was an antique that had once belonged to one of the Old West lawmen, either Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson; it had been through worse. He brushed it off and slipped it under the waistband of his bark kilt. The gun wasn’t loaded, but its familiar weight still felt reassuring.

The structure next to the grain mill was indeed a well, and Gabriel swiftly hauled up the large hollow gourd that served as a bucket, greedily sucking down massive gulps of the cold, clean water. Then he filled the gourd again and untied the sturdy rope from the wooden post from which it hung. He brought the gourd to the edge of the pit and set it down while he anchored the rope to one of the support poles of a nearby hut. The rope was damp but seemed flexible and strong. He hoped it would hold Millie’s considerable weight.

“Hey, Millie,” he called, lifting the water-filled gourd and carefully lowering it into the pit. “Room service.”

Gabriel saw Millie pull himself up on his good leg and reach for the lowering gourd. When it landed in his hands, he drank deeply, emptying it in a single gulp.

“Damn,” he said. “It ain’t Abita, but it’ll do.” He gripped the rope and gave it an experimental yank. “This anchored?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “Do you need me to rig some kind of pulley system to get you up or do you think you can make the climb?”

“My arms ain’t broke,” he replied and immediately started climbing, fist over massive fist.

In thirty seconds, Millie was up, sitting on the lip of the pit, bathed in sweat, teeth clenched tight from his obvious pain.

” We’ve got a choice,” Gabriel said. “We can go in there—” Gabriel nodded toward the tall central building “—and deal with Velda, or we can see if we can spot the plane first.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying to have an escape route planned out before you go in somewhere,” Millie said, wincing as he got to his feet.

“True enough.” Gabriel walked to the tallest nearby tree. “You stay put, rest that ankle.” He jumped and grabbed hold of a low-hanging branch, chinned himself on it and got one leg up and over. From there he was able to make his way up, a branch at a time, to the upper regions of the tree. When he neared the top, he could see the plane. It was in a slightly different location than the first time they’d seen it and was surrounded by what looked like nearly the entirety of the village’s ablebodied population. Everyone wanted to see what Rue was doing with the Father Bird, apparently—or maybe all hands had been needed in order to move it.

Either way, the plane had been moved and uncovered; the encroaching vines and brush had been cleared away, revealing not just the plane but also a makeshift runway before it. The plane itself was a curious-looking antique, with far too many wheels along its belly and four huge propellers lined up in a row along the wings, two on either side of the cage-style cockpit. The long skinny tail ended in a broad, H-shaped fin that was decorated with a pair of black swastikas outlined in white. The body was battered and rusted but looked intact. Gabriel was pretty sure that he was looking at an Arado Ar 232 transport aircraft. Built to transport heavy cargo, including vehicles, it would have been an obvious choice to carry the bulky Untergang device. But why had a plane equipped with wheels rather than skis been chosen for an Antarctic mission? Could the Nazis have somehow known in advance about this warm tropical anomaly? How, when even modern satellite imaging had been unable to detect it? And if they had, why was there no record of the discovery found among Nazi papers at the war’s end?

Gabriel had no answers to these questions. And he knew there was no time for pondering them, not now. The plane had been moved, the runway cleared. And as he watched, he saw two of the propellers cough into motion, slowly at first, then faster. A moment later, they cut out—but in Rue’s hands they’d be going again, he knew that. And then the other two would. With Rue working on it, that plane was going to take off, with or without them on board.

And that meant there was no time to spare.