Antarctica

11 Extreme Weather Event

red rock white ice

X opened the door and shouted back at the approaching stranger. A tall woman hauling an injured man on a kind of travois, lashed together from ski poles and climbing rope. Feeling amazed without knowing why, X looked closer. It was Val. His heart leaped: “Hey!” he cried. She looked over at him, saw he was on the hovercraft, and pulled wearily over to the dock. X crossed the broad section of paneling he had made into a gangplank, and helped her to get the stricken man on board. Trouble on her trek, and without helo support from Mac. The tenuous nature of their presence on the ice, something he had thought about a lot during the snowmobile ride to Roberts, came home to him again. They had thought they were out there surviving on their own, when really they had been totally dependent on outside support.

“X, is that you?” she said, staring at him from behind ski mask and sunglasses.

“Yeah.”

He helped her get the man over the side of the hovercraft and inside. They got the man on his back on the floor. She croaked “Water,” and pulled off her mask; she looked grimmer than he had ever seen her, by many magnitudes. “Any doctors with you?”

“No.” He went back to the stove and poured her a mug of warm water, then brought it to her. “We’re barely here ourselves.”

“Uh.” She took a sip of water, looked out a window at the station. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure. We’re the only ones here. We just got here ourselves a little while ago, and found the place like this.”

“It was blown up,” Wade said from stoveside, somewhat unnecessarily in X’s opinion, as there were not any competing explanations.

Val looked in at Wade, again surprised. “Wade! Jeez, what is this? I thought you were at the Pole.”

“I was.”

“Uh huh,” she said. She held the mug to the stricken man’s lips. Distracted by him, on conversational automatic pilot, she said, “And how was that?”

“It was interesting.”

Val didn’t hear him. She couldn’t get water into the man; he was out. She looked up at X. “But then you both ended up here?”

“The drilling camp we were at was also blown up,” X explained. “And when we got here we found this one as you see it. We presume there’s been a terrorist attack on the oil camps.”

“You presume?” Val said.

“We haven’t been able to establish radio contact with anyone.”

“Oh really! We haven’t either.”

“What happened to you?” Wade asked.

“We lost our sledge. An ice block fell on it. So we came here. I would have waited for search and rescue if I could have made coms, but I couldn’t. It was weird.”

“Where were you again?” Wade asked.

“Top of the Axel Heiberg.”

“How far away is that?”

“Hundred k or so.”

The men stared at her.

“I’ve got four more clients out there following me,” she said.

“I’ll go help them in,” X said.

“Thanks.”

As X put on his boots and outdoor gear, Wade explained in his deadpan style what had happened to the three of them since their trip out to see the Hillary Weasel; that felt to X like it had happened a few weeks ago, though in reality it had been the previous day. “We assume the people in these two camps got warned somehow, and managed to get out. Or were taken out. Or whatever, because there was no one at either place—you know, no bodies, no one wandering around.”

“What about the radios here?” Val asked, her face serious as she digested the implications of Wade’s story.

“There’s only the one on board here, I think. We haven’t tried it yet.”

“What about emergency bags?”

“I’ve found a couple,” Carlos said as he came in the room, dragging one across the floor behind him. “And there’s a radio on board. But I don’t think it’s the radios.”

“I know. But we only had our phones, and I wanted to try something stronger.”

“Me too.”

He and Val started discussing the base and its resources. With the main complex destroyed, these were limited indeed; so far, two emergency bags, for nine people. That would feed them for a few days, and Carlos said there was some food in the hovercraft. In the ordinary course of things that would be enough to hold them until they were rescued by Mac Town; but obviously they were not in the ordinary course of things.

X left them discussing it and went out into the cold. He cramponed up the ice slope to the plateau proper, then waved at the four stragglers coming in. The first of them, a small Oriental man not wearing a ski mask, smiled, and then frowned as he saw the station. “Oh my! More trouble I see!”

“Yes. We’re in the hovercraft there, it’s still okay.”

“Hovercraft, okay. Hot chocolate?”

“Sure, go on in. I’ll wait for the others.”

“I also. They will soon join us. Doing very well.”

Actually they looked wasted to X, but they were happy to have made it, and though shocked at the sight of the burned station, they got down the slope to the hovercraft without difficulties. Over the gangplank, into the hovercraft’s interior, which felt nice and cozy after the outside, though it was probably only ten or twenty degrees warmer, at the most. But it was shelter.

Inside it was loud for a while as introductions and explanations filled the air. Only slowly did the new arrivals grasp that their troubles were not yet over; and even then their main feeling was pleasure at having successfully crossed seventy miles of the polar cap in a single push. X went back to the stove, and mixed mug after mug of hot cocoa for the new arrivals, observing as he did that this session alone would use up nearly half the hot chocolate they had. Val said thanks as he handed her the last mug, but other than that she was focused on the hurt man. Carlos was checking the man out with a perhaps illusory paramedic competence; it wasn’t something X knew anything about. He resolved to take a first-aid course the next chance he got. He wanted to comfort Val somehow (impress her somehow), but could not think what he might do; there was nothing he could do for the stricken man, who, he suddenly realized, was probably Val’s latest romantic interest. Oh well.

He went down the passageway behind the passenger compartment, and started rummaging through the cabinets in the wall, which were packed with boxes, mostly containing machine parts and the like. “I think this guy is just cold now,” he heard Carlos say to Val. “Even a bad concussion shouldn’t leave him comatose like this, and you say it wasn’t a bad concussion anyway.”

“I didn’t think so,” Val said.

“Well, hypothermia will do this to you. How long were you pulling him?”

“Four hours or so, I guess. I had his suit on full heat.”

“But it’s been cloudy. That’s a long time to be doing nothing out here. Let’s get a core temperature and start warming him up.”

“How?”

“The hovercraft should have a body bag in it.”

X had just found this item in one of the passageway cabinets, and now brought it into the passenger compartment. He had only seen one deployed once, in an ASL demonstration in Christchurch, but Carlos said “Yeah, here we go,” and took the package from X and pulled it apart quickly, unfolding what looked like a sleeping bag made of bubblewrap. It worked, as X recalled, in a manner similar to the antiquated handwarmers that some old iceheads still carried around in their Carhartts in Mac Town; the act of getting a person inside the bag twisted it enough to break all the internal pockets in the bubble-wrap fabric, and that mixed some chemicals contained in separate pockets, starting chemical reactions that generated heat. After that the person was inside a sleeping bag that emanated heat like a lukewarm bath, which was all that a hypothermic person could handle. “Here, cut his clothes off first,” Carlos ordered, working with a massive pair of scissors he found in one of the e-bags. As he worked he said, “It’s very dangerous to reheat a hypothermic person too fast, they get what is called rewarming shock. All their closed capillaries reopen at once, and the sudden drop in blood pressure causes the heart to fail.” With what X regarded as questionable gusto he went on to tell them a story about being on a ship in his youth which had rescued six Argentinian sailors out of the sea off Tierra del Fuego; the crew had dried them off, fed them hot food and drinks in the cabin, and watched all six keel over dead. But he trailed off as he stared at the little computerdoc console embedded in the bag. “Eighty-six degrees? What is this, Fahrenheit?” He pushed buttons. “Ah yes. Thirty degrees. Well, that is hypothermia all right. But I have seen worse.” The man in the bag looked like a sleeping movie star. Playing Lazarus, hopefully. Carlos was pointing out the sophisticated thermostatting that the bag was capable of, with its array of thermometers, rheostats, dampers and supplementary heaters, when he interrupted himself and said, “Oh, my. Look at this. He was injured, eh?”

“Well, his hand was cut,” Val said. “And he banged his head, I think. He seemed okay right after the accident, but later he lost it.”

“Yes, but look at his collarbone. See that bend? I think he must have broken this collarbone too.”

X glanced at Val; her eyes were round.

“He didn’t say anything about that,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“He must not have been using ski poles?”

“Well, no, mostly he was. Other times he was letting them hang at his sides. I thought he was just tired. God damn it—why didn’t he say anything?”

Carlos shrugged. “Well, hopefully he’ll be okay. A broken collarbone isn’t so bad, and if he was doing okay for a while after he hit the ice, it couldn’t be that bad. We’ll see. Looks like he’s just sleeping now. We’ll try to give him some hot liquids as soon as we can.”

After that there was little they could do for the man, and Val and Carlos took charge of ransacking the hovercraft, to inventory what they had. X resisted the tendency to sink into client status with the rest of the group, and joined them in the search. He had only spent a few days at the station, but he remembered it well enough to go back out into the cold, on a quick search for anything that might have survived the blast and fire in the main complex.

No luck. The fire had been comprehensive. He returned gratefully to the protection of the hovercraft, blowing into his fists to reheat his hands. It was still nearly as cold inside as out, but shelter from the wind made all the difference, and the hovercraft’s cabin was warming a bit. Inside it Val’s clients were still sitting on the benches, eating and drinking without pause. Val and Carlos were fiddling with the hovercraft’s radio. “Misery Peak is right in the way,” Carlos was saying. “No way we get a good connection.”

“Misery Peak, Dismal Bluff,” Val said, reading a map. “The people who named this area sound like they were as bad off as us.”

“No, those were just the names of their dogs.”

“Ah.”

“Can’t radio waves bounce off the, the ionosphere?” X asked.

“Not down here. We’re at the end of the magnet, so to say. The radio waves just shoot right up the lines.”

“Uh huh.”

“But we might hit a repeater. Worth a try, that’s for sure. This is a lot more powerful radio than the one we tried before.”

The radio had a handset like a telephone’s, connected to the big console by a typical handset cord. Carlos picked up this handset and pushed the button on it that would allow him to transmit, and a piercing high buzz filled the air. Carlos let off on the button and the noise ceased; tried it again, and got the same result. “Shit. There’s something wrong with the radio.”

He pushed in the handset cord’s clips at both ends, banged the handset against the console, slapped the dashboard containing it. Still the earshattering buzz when he tried to transmit. “Ouch. I suppose the force of the explosion might have damaged something. Well, let’s see if it transmits anyway.” He pushed the button while covering the earpiece with his other hand, which muffled the high buzz somewhat, and said loudly into the transmitter, “Mac Coms, this is Roberts Station, Mac Coms, this is Roberts Station, do you read me, over?”

After a few seconds of loud static, they heard a faint voice under the noise, a sound which brought them all on point like bird dogs:

“Kkkkk Roberts Station this is Mac Coms kkkkkkkk very broken kkkkkkkkkkkk repeat, can you kkkkkkkkkkkk.”

“That’s Randi,” Val said. “Tell her that T-023 is here too.”

“Okay.” Carlos pushed the button again, and through the muffled whine shouted, “Mac Coms, we read you, this is Roberts Station and T-023, over!”

More static. Then: “Kkkkkk you say T-023 kkkkkkkkkkkkk thought you said you were Roberts Station, over.”

Carlos shouted “Yes, Mac Coms, this is Roberts Station, and we have T-023 with us! We need a medevac for T-023 at Roberts Station, over!”

“Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk do you need a medevac, over?”

Carlos spared time to roll his eyes. He was in a better mood, X saw, now that they had established contact; and so was Val.

“Yes, Mac Coms, we need a medevac. Repeat, we need a medevac, over!”

“Kkkkkkk most of Antarctica needs a medevac, Roberts!” Even through the static X could tell Randi too was glad to have made contact. “What’s the nature of your problem? Where’s Val? What’s T-023 doing at Roberts anyway? Over.”

Carlos shouted, “T-023 walked here, Mac Coms. Roberts Station is wrecked, it burned down. Same with Mohn Basin Camp. They were both bombed. We have nine people, one suffering hypothermia, and very little food. Can you help us, over?”

“Kkkkkkkkkk lost helo and we are arranging evacuation. Many camps have been damaged, repeat kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk SAR is booked and we do not have full helo or coms kkkkkkkkkkkkk get down to Shackleton on your own, over?”

“Randi, repeat, we have a hypothermia case here, over.”

“Well warm him up for Christ’s sake! Over.”

“He’s injured as well, Randi. When can you get us a medevac, over?”

“Kkkkkkk yourself to Shackleton Camp, over?”

Carlos and Val stared at each other. Finally Val took the handset and pressed the button, and through the howl said loudly, “Randi, this is Val! I don’t think we can make our way on foot to Shackleton Camp! We’ve already had to walk from the Axel Heiberg, and people are walked out. We need a lift, over!”

“Didn’t read that, Val. You are very broken up, can you kkkkkkkkkk.”

Val clicked in, shouted, “We need a lift out! Over!”

“Lots of people feel left out right now, Val, but the SAR is overwhelmed! We’ve had twenty-two calls for help, and everyone else is calling in trying to find out what happened to coms kkkkkkkkkkkkk six or seven parties. We’re only just now back on the air, and still waiting for fuel resupply! We’re glad to hear from you, but if you can’t get to Shackleton Camp you’re going to have to sit tight for a few days, maybe more, over!”

Val and Carlos looked at each other. Val shouted, “Okay, Randi, we read you! What happened to McMurdo, over?”

“Kkkkkkk trouble reading you, Val, and I’ve got a call in from kkkkkk schedule next coms for nineteen hundred hours, do you kkkkkkkkk.”

“We read you, Randi, sked coms nineteen hundred, we’ll talk to you then, over!”

“Nineteen hundred, over and out.”

Carlos turned off the radio, took a deep breath and let it out. “What a noise that thing makes!”

But despite the frustration and the earsplitting noise, the call had done them all a lot of good. Even bad news was better than no news at all; the absence of contact had been oppressive, even frightening. Now they were back in contact, with another scheduled coms to look forward to. And the idea that they were not the only ones in Antarctica suffering problems was comforting too, X saw. Misery loves miserable company; and there they were, right under Misery Peak.

So when Jim said, “What are we going to do? How are we going to get to Shackleton Camp?”

Carlos just waved a hand and said, “Let’s not worry about that yet. First let’s get a big hot meal inside us, and I’ll finish finding out exactly what we have here. Then we can decide what comes next. Also we might learn more from our next coms, although,” he glanced at the radio and frowned, “we will see.”

Wade and Ta Shu and Elspeth dug into the e-bags and got two more Coleman stoves set up on the broad shelf running down the side of the cabin, boiling water for stew and more hot drinks. “We will eat hoosh,” Carlos declared. “We will eat hoosh, like Shackleton and Scott!”

“Like Amundsen,” Ta Shu corrected. “We are Footsteps of Amundsen expedition.”

“Fine. Norwegian hoosh. Chunks of reindeer,” cackling as he inspected the antique package labels of the food in the e-bags. Watching him it occurred to X that Carlos was happy not only to be back in contact with McMurdo, but also to have heard that his had not been the only operation in Antarctica targetted for attack. Now he didn’t have to take it so personally. Although even when he had been taking it personally, at no point had he seemed to feel that they themselves were in terrible trouble being out here alone. For X, and he suspected for most of the rest of them, it was like being marooned, a kind of protracted death sentence. But for Carlos this was home—dangerous, but not terrifying. It was nice to have him there.

Val had gone into the little storeroom behind the passenger compartment to check on her hurt client, and X followed her to see if there was anything he could do. When he got to the doorway she was leaning over the man’s handsome head, her own tilted to listen to his breathing, a look of deep concern on her face. She looked up at X and he stopped, raised a hand: “Sorry,” he said softly, “didn’t mean to intrude.”

“You aren’t,” she said quietly.

“So,” X said. “He, he means a lot to you,” gesturing at the man.

“What?” she said. Then she understood him, and looked so surprised that X knew immediately that his suppositions had been wrong. And indeed she was staring at him now as if he were completely insane. X raised his other hand so that both were up, palms out, as if to ward off a blow.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean …”

“Oh X,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re such a …” She couldn’t find the word.

X ducked his head, sighed. It was true.

“How’s he doing?” he said, to change the subject.

She looked back down at the man. “It looks like he’s just sleeping now. The thermometers show his core temperature is about ninety-four. Anyway the bag is just barely heating him now.”

Carlos appeared behind X. “How is he?” He came in and looked at the console’s numbers. “That’s good. Slow and steady rise. Pulse and blood pressure okay.” He stared at the man’s face. “Hello! Hello!” He shook his head. “Still out. Well, come on,” gesturing at the other room, “hot drinks, and dinner is on the table soon.”

After their meal Carlos and X geared up again, and went out and made a really thorough search through the wrecked station. They found no further food supplies. “Hmm, hmm,” Carlos muttered as they returned to the hovercraft. “At Bernardo O’Higgins we always kept a big cache of food and supplies buried out in the snow, in case of fires in the winter. Here I should have done the same. I was thinking more about Mohn Basin, I must admit. And it is hard to believe that the transport system could break down this badly for so long, in this day and age. In the future we will have to remember.”

“What about now?” X asked.

“Well, what do we have. Four, no five e-bags … nine people …” He thought about it while they hurried across the gangplank to the shelter of the hovercraft. “We should probably get ourselves down to Shackleton Camp.”

“That’s a long walk.”

“Beats starving. Besides, we may not have to walk.”

“What do you mean?”

Carlos pounded the side of the hovercraft.

“Do you really know how to drive it?”

“Yeah sure. I think so.” A broad grin for X, a slap on the shoulder; then they were back inside, which, though it was around zero Fahrenheit, still felt distinctly warm and comfy. It would be nice to get to Shackleton Camp without having to leave such a refuge, that was for sure.

“I think we should try the hovercraft,” Carlos said to the others when they were settled back in the cabin, downing another mug of hot lemonade. “It’s fully fueled, and that’s more than enough to get us down to Shackleton.”

“Do you know how to pilot it?” Val asked.

“Yes. I have watched them pilot it many times, and copiloted, and it is not difficult. It does take two people, but I can tell X how to do the copiloting, and do the main piloting myself.”

“X?”

“X has seen it piloted too, so he has the most familiarity with how it works. Right?”

X nodded. “The copilot just operates the lifters and the outriggers. Most of the trip he doesn’t do anything at all.”

Val looked dubious; the rest of her group looked hopeful. “How much food do we have here?” she asked.

“We have five e-bags,” Carlos said. “With nine people, that’s enough for a week, maybe ten days if we go hungry. It’s not bad, but it sounds like we are not high priority in McMurdo. It might not be enough.”

“We could wait and see,” Wade said, “and when we only had a day or two left, go on down.”

“Yes, we could. But by that time Shackleton Camp may have been evacuated. Then we would be low priority again. I would rather do something now. And also, you have this man who is warmed up but not really conscious yet. I don’t know what that means, but …”

Val nodded to herself.

“It would be good to get him to McMurdo soon,” Jim said.

“Yes it would,” Val agreed.

Jorge and Elspeth seemed willing. Ta Shu merely watched them, as if it were not his call to make.

“We should get down there,” Val finally told her group.

“I don’t think we can walk it,” Elspeth said.

“No. But we have the hovercraft.”

She looked at each of them in turn, and they nodded their comprehension. They had already been through a lot, X saw, and they trusted Val.

“Tell you what,” Carlos said, “I’ll start up the hovercraft, and we’ll take it for a trial run right here outside the dock, make sure we know what we’re doing. If it looks good to you, we can go for it.”

So X and Carlos went forward to the controls, and sat in the two pilots’ seats, and looked around at the intimidating banks of control consoles. At that moment it looked to X like the inside of an airplane cockpit. He had watched Geraldo and German pilot the craft to Mohn and back, but that, he saw now, was not enough.

As they went over the controls together it became clear to X that they had an unspoken agreement not to discuss the many banks of toggles, switches, gauges and dials of which they were completely ignorant. They focused instead on the few things they knew which were crucial for running the thing: ignition, steering wheel, thrust throttles, lifter controls, outrigger deployment toggles. X nodded as Carlos named everything. The lifters and outriggers were the copilot’s only responsibilities. They seemed manageable.

The two men grinned nervously at each other. “No problem,” Carlos declared.

“Let’s see,” X said.

Carlos turned on the engines. Muffled roar from behind and below, vibration all through the metal of the craft. They waited while the engines warmed up. This hovercraft was old, X saw, looking at the finger-polished tops of the toggles. A Hake 1500a. At some time in its life, no doubt its stint at Corrosion Corner, the outriggers had been added to give the craft more resistance to side winds and small inclines. By and large the craft was intended for flat surfaces only, like water or sea ice; in strong winds, or traversing any kind of slope, it tended to sideslip pretty badly, floating as it was on its own air cushion, with little or no contact with the ground. The enterprising engineers who had reworked the craft had therefore welded and bolted booms onto the sides, with a hydraulic system to lower them down onto the ice or raise them again. At the ends of the booms hung what looked to be snowmobiles stripped to their functional essence; when the booms were lowered and the snowmobiles’ engines turned on, their tracks would engage the ice and do their best to haul the whole craft in that direction, which gave the hovercraft some traction to that side. X had seen them deployed, and the system worked pretty well, helping the hovercraft to glide up and down the gentle undulations of the polar ice without sideslipping into basins on the side.

Carlos had traveled with Geraldo and German on a route they had worked out down the steeper sections of the Zaneveld Glacier’s descent to Shackleton Camp, and now he found their maps marking the route in the craft’s computer, which X saw was a later addition, stuck on the dashboard and plugged in.

“Okay, try the lift fans.”

X found that the levers controlling these were extremely stiff, and had to be shoved up by main force; but when he did that the air intakes in the roof aft of them buzzed, the fan engines whined, the skirts that held in the air bellied out to their full extension, and the body of the hovercraft rose up off the ice, with only a single thump of the metal tub.

When they were fully lifted, Carlos gave the thruster of the propeller fan a push forward. That engine proved to run several thousand rpm faster for every centimeter he moved the thruster, so that the craft jerked and slid forward over the ice, tilting down a tiny bit.

“Jeez,” X said, “who did the ergonomics on these controls?”

“An idiot,” Carlos said. “Where are Geraldo and German? Goddamned Argentinians …”

“I thought they were Chilean.”

“Well, now they are Argentinians.”

Carlos turned the steering wheel gently. In this case the control was less sensitive; it took nearly a full revolution of the wheel to get the craft to change direction even slightly.

“A total idiot. Still, we can do it. See, we are going in a circle. Here, better slow down,” knocking the thruster level back down to idle.

“What about brakes?” X asked.

“No brakes. If you really want to brake, you turn the craft around and hit the thrusters, and that slows it down.”

“Great.”

“Well, how are you going to have brakes when you aren’t touching the ground? I suppose deploying both the outriggers would slow you down.”

X shook his head.

“It’s all right,” Carlos said. “We can turn around and go down the steepest sections backwards.”

“Uh huh.”

It was sounding pretty tenuous to X, but on the other hand Carlos was now driving them around the ice offshore from Roberts in big swooping glides, just as if he knew exactly what he was doing.

Val came up behind them. “Looks like you have this thing in hand.”

“No problem,” Carlos and X said in concert.

“It looks like Jack is coming to a bit.”

“Good, good! And it’s almost time for sked coms with McMurdo. We can tell them what we’re doing. And remind me to ask about German and Geraldo and the rest of them.”

They brought the craft back in to the dock, X muscled down the lift fan lever, and the tub thumped hard down onto the ice.

Carlos stood. “Let’s get ready quick, and get going while the engines are still warm.”

They went to the back of the cabin. The injured trekker, Jack, had been awakened by the sounds of the hovercraft’s test run. Ta Shu and Jim were crouched at his sides, getting hot liquids into him; the others crowded in the doorway to see how he was, X at the back. Between sips Val and Carlos asked him questions. He was a bit groggy, and could not remember the accident in which he had been hurt; but he did remember much of the walk here, he said, with a brief glance at Val that X could not interpret. His shoulder hurt, he said, but otherwise he was fine. X got the impression that he was pissed off, but unwilling to talk about it. Something had happened out there on the ice. Val did not seem at all comfortable with him, which was in marked contrast to her behavior with her other clients.

“Okay,” Carlos said when Jack was done drinking. “Time to try Randi again.”

He went to the radio and turned it on, then wrapped a fist around the shrieking earpiece and started the call. “McMurdo, this is Roberts Station! Roberts Station at nineteen hundred scheduled coms, over!”

Reception was if anything worse than last time. But then Randi’s voice was cutting through. “Kkkkkkkkkkkkk got you, Roberts! How’s it kkkkkkkkkkver?”

Carlos managed to make most of a status report, and Randi told them a bit more about what had happened. As far as they could gather through the static, one or all of McMurdo’s big fuel tanks had been contaminated somehow. “The Navy’s flying in some fuel and there’s a tanker on the way, but meanwhile the guys are filtering the shit out of what’s left, and we’re burning it as fast as they clean it. Really too bad Ron isn’t still here to work on the filtering. So search and rescue activities are still being conducted on a need basis, over.”

“Triage,” Wade commented.

Carlos waved him quiet. “Randi, does that mean you will not be able to collect us by helo, over?”

“No helo ops at Shackleton Camp at this time, T-023! Their fuel is wrecked. Do you still need a medevac?”

“Well, he has a broken collarbone.”

“Kkkkkkkkk down the list. You should get down to Shackleton Camp if you can. We plan to fly a Herc there tomorrow and evacuate everyone there. Apparently a lot of the Roberts crew ended up there, did you know that, Roberts? Roberts Station and the Mohn station too.”

“Hey!” X and Carlos said, giving each other a brief hug.

“—to Shackleton, or hang tight at Roberts, and wait for us to get to you.”

“We don’t have the food to wait long,” Carlos said into the screeching, reaching over Jorge to shake hands with Wade as well.

“Then get yourselves to Shackkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

“Okay, okay,” Carlos said, “but who did all this, do you know, over?”

“Did not read you, Roberts, can you repeat, over?”

“Who did all this!”

“Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

“Mac Coms, this is Roberts, do you read me?”

“Roberts, are you there, repeat, Roberts, do you read me, over?”

“Yes, Mac Coms, roger, roger, we read you!”

“We read you too, Roberts, over!”

“Repeat—who did all this!”

“No information on that, Roberts. We assume saboteurs of some sort, but kkkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

“How illuminating,” Carlos said, shaking his head and staring at the handset. “Randi, listen! We are planning to take the hovercraft to Shackleton! Can you give us weather forecasting please, over!”

“Kkkkkkkkk would you like weather forecasting, Roberts?”

“Yes, Randi, yes! Affirmative, roger, over!”

“Roberts, repeat message, I say, would you like weather forecasting here, over!”

“Yes, Mac Coms! Yes! Yes! Roger! Affirmative! Roger ro-ger ro-ger!”

“I can’t read you guys anymore, but I’m gonna switch you over to weather forecasting, Roberts. Listen are you aware that there is something wrong with your radio, over?”

Carlos waved the handset in the air over his head, eyes bugging out. Then he shouted into it, “Roger, Mac Corns, we are aware of that! Over!”

“Listen Roberts, can you call back in half an hour? Weather is out to lunch right now, and I’m getting a kkkkkkkkkkkk.”

“Roger, Mac Coms! We will try to call back in half an hour, but we are going to leave for Shackleton now! Over!”

“Excuse me, Roberts, what did you say, over?”

“We will STAND BY and call back in HALF AN HOUR. Over.”

“Roberts, I’m not reading you anymore. Please stand by, over.”

“Okay, God damn it! Roger! We will stand by!” Carlos began to laugh maniacally.

“Kkkkkkkkkkkkk what?”

“No, what’s on second!” Carlos shouted. “Who’s on first!”

“What?”

“No! What’s on second! Who’s on first!”

“What? Oh! Oh, ha ha ha! Very funny, Roberts! Tell you what, you keep on doing your Abbott and Costello by yourself, I gotta go attend to the Three Stooges now! Call back in half an hour, God damn it, over and out!”

Carlos slammed the radio off and shook the handpiece like he wanted to smash it to pieces, still laughing. “Ah, ha ha ha! We used to laugh ourselves sick at that when we were kids. It was the best English lesson we ever had. I don’t know’s on third!” he shouted at the handset.

He looked around at the others. “Come on, let’s go. Shackleton Camp here we come.”

Wade was helping Carlos and X and the others to secure everything in the hovercraft for the trip down to Shackleton Camp when his wrist phone beeped. He jumped as if shot, and ran up the short set of stairs to the aft cabin to get some quiet and reduce interference, then clicked the receive button.

“Hello!”

“Wade, Wade, is that you?”

“It’s me, Phil! Where are you?”

“Never mind where I am Wade, where are you! What’s going on down there?”

“Well, let’s see, there’s been an attack on the oil camp I was visiting, and we’re now at the oil group’s base camp on Roberts Massif, top of the Shackleton Glacier, and that base has also been destroyed, so we’re about to take a hovercraft down to NSF’s Shackleton Glacier Camp, to be flown back to McMurdo.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No Phil, listen, what have you heard, what’s happening?”

“Well I don’t have the full story yet, I got a call from John and he told me that satellite communications to Antarctica had been interrupted and there were no reports coming out, but clearly something was wrong, and at that point I started calling you and got no reply! I got no reply!”

“I know.”

“But now I’m calling you using a Pentagon code I got, they must have some satellites of their own up there that are a little bit more reliable, but they don’t like to share them. I had to get John to contact Andy right in the Pentagon to get the codes, but it seems like they’re working pretty well.”

“Better than our radio contact with McMurdo, that’s for sure. Could you patch me in to McMurdo, do you think?”

“Sure, I can try. Just a second.”

The line went dead.

“Hey!” Wade said, punching Phil’s button on his phone. No answer. The same blank he had gotten since the moment they saw the smoke rise over Mohn Station. “God damn it.”

“What’s wrong?” It was Val, up to see what had happened.

“I just had a talk on the phone with Phil Chase. He was using a military satellite link, and said he would patch me to McMurdo.”

“Must not have worked. We’re almost ready to go here.” She leaned against the seat back next to him, let out a deep breath.

“You must be tired,” Wade said.

“No, not tired exactly.”

“Worried about your group. That guy who’s sick.” She nodded, then shook her head. “I knew there was something wrong with him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He had a broken collarbone and he didn’t tell me.”

“Some people are like that. He may not have known exactly what was wrong, anyway. If he was stunned.”

“Maybe not,” she said somberly, thinking it over.

“Over in the Dry Valleys, it looked like he was going to be a …”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“So did it come to anything, I mean get difficult? Was he mad at you?”

“Maybe.”

“Well. So he might have been punishing you. But that’s his problem, really. Nothing you can do about that.”

“No, I know. But I don’t want him to die on me.”

Wade risked putting a hand to her arm, very gently. “Carlos seemed to think he was just shook up, and cold. We’ll get him down to Shackleton Camp and back to McMurdo, and he’ll be okay. Besides he’s too convinced of his own importance to let himself die, right?”

A small smile. She glanced at him. They went downstairs to the passenger compartment. “Keep trying to get your senator,” Val reminded him.

“Oh yeah,” Wade said, staring at his wrist phone. “I’ll set it on repeat call. It’ll try for me once a minute.”

white sky

blue ice

They got the hovercraft off with only that same minor thump of the tub; X suspected a weak lift fan at the left rear, though Carlos gave him a dubious glance, as if he might be doing something wrong with the lifters. Whatever; they were up and moving over the ice, and there was no reason to look back.

At first the hovercraft was dreamlike in its smoothness, and X and Carlos grinned at each other. Then they left the flattened road out to Mohn camp and ventured onto the sastrugi-covered white firn of the virgin glacier. Out here the craft rocked a little, this way then that, as air blew out from under the skirt at different points depending on what kind of deformations they were floating over. Nevertheless it was a pretty smooth ride compared to say a snowmobile, and as Carlos cautiously notched up the prop throttle they found that the faster they went, the smoother it got. Soon they roared smoothly over the ice, first outward from Fluted Peak, then around Roberts Massif on its east side.

As X had noted from the air on his journey in, the massif stuck in the head of the Shackleton Glacier and nearly plugged it; it was like a rock island in the midst of rapids falling out of a lake into a river. The narrow gap on the west side, between Misery Peak and Dismal Buttress, was shattered blue ice from wall to wall, entirely unpassable. So their only choice was to go around the eastern side of Roberts, where a wider ice stream called the Zaneveld Glacier made a smooth curving drop into a confluence with the western stream and the Shackleton proper. The Zaneveld was also crevassed pretty heavily in places, but there were smooth unbroken ramps that descended from one level section to the next, and Carlos said Geraldo and German had taken the hovercraft up and down the route they had worked out several times.

As they moved away from Roberts, out to a kind of ice causeway running smoothly between two crevassed sinks, they noted that the hovercraft moved somewhat like a plane in flight, in that it was frequently struck on the side by the wind, so that the bow of the craft yawed and was not always pointed exactly the same way that the craft was moving, skidding along at a bit of an angle. And as usual the wind was strong out here, beginning its katabatic drop down the glacier to the sea. The leeway they were sustaining from the force of this wind was blowing them into a crevasse sink on their right, not to any great extent, but Carlos turned left a bit more to counteract it. This did little but increase their yaw to that side.

“Try the left outrigger,” he said, stroking his beard.

“Okay.”

X pushed down the toggle. When the little snowmobile hit the ice and X squeezed its throttle, shredded ice shot out from its back end toward the hovercraft, and immediately they could see that they had some resistance to their leeway.

“That’s enough,” Carlos said, and X held the throttle at that point. After a bit: “Okay, we’re past that one. Wind should be directly behind us now. Pull the outrigger.”

“Left outrigger up,” X said, enjoying their imitation of copilot procedures.

Then the craft’s pulse radar began to ping, loud and fast. Carlos looked over at the radar screen: crevasses ahead, on the last section of their ramp between the sinks. “Damn.” He looked at Geraldo’s map again. “Ah yes. That’s why they made this turn, see here? We have to go down right against the shoreline of the massif. That’s blue ice without a break. At its side it curves down to the rock, so we can’t get too close and slide over that curve. We ride down on the flat stuff.”

So he slowed the craft, and brought it back in toward Roberts. X saw what he meant; there against the shore was a broad band of turquoise ice, very smooth and unbroken, as if these were calm shallows where the glacier did not move as quickly as it did out in the middle of the stream. The only complication was that the mass of the glacier was considerably higher than the rock of the shoreline, bulking over it in a way that added to the surreal quality of the view: the drop from the glacier to the shore was a smooth blue curve, like a wave bulging up ready to crest. Wind ablation of the grounded ice, Carlos said. If they got onto that slope they would slip sideways and crash down onto the rock.

But as Carlos had said, the level creamy blue ice above the curve was wide enough to travel on. And so they proceeded down the glacier, looking left and down at the shoreline of Roberts, the red of the shattered dolerite very pronounced against the blue of the ice. On their right a nasty shear zone broke the ice into a million glittering blue shards. So they could not shade far either right or left; but they had their road down.

They hummed along. On their left appeared a little side stream of ice separating Roberts Massif proper from an outlying island of rock called Everett Nunatak. After that they came to an overlook and could see down the broad expanse of the Zaneveld. From above their route was clear; they could glide down between two of the many parallel rubble lines marking the surface of the glacier, the rubble composed of boulders and pebbles that had fallen off or been ripped away from Roberts, and conveyed out gradually to the center of the ice, revealing the slow-motion currents by the way they were lined along the surface.

Val came up to the bridge. “This manual I found says the hovercraft should not be taken onto slopes more than three degrees off horizontal.”

Carlos shook his head. “The manual was not written for Antarctica.”

“This hovercraft wasn’t made for Antarctica.”

“True. But it does fine. We go down backwards, we have the outriggers. We take a line and cleave to it.”

“Uh huh,” Val said dubiously.

Yet it seemed to X that Carlos was right to be sanguine. Majestically they floated down the Zaneveld, over flat ice next to one of the main rubble lines, shooting over small cracks and rocks that would have eaten a snowmobile; floating down a slight incline, effortless and smooth. Carlos and X were sitting back, feeling quite pleased with themselves as Val peered suspiciously over their shoulders.

Then the ice tilted downward just slightly more than it had been before, and suddenly the hovercraft was like a ball in a gravity well demonstration, speeding up distinctly, and what was worse, sliding off to the right. With a brief clatter the craft ran directly over the nearest rubble line, and then it was flying downslope—the true downslope—right toward a gnarly shear zone underlying Wiest Bluff, on the other shore of the Zaneveld.

Carlos sat forward and turned the craft to the left, and it responded, swivelling on its axis; but they merely continued sideways in the same direction they had been going before. “Left outrigger,” he said tersely.

X brought it down onto the ice, and squeezed the snowmobile accelerator to full throttle. “How about going down backwards, like you said?” he suggested.

“Yes yes,” Carlos snapped, spinning the steering wheel.

“What about brakes?” Val asked.

“No brakes.”

“No brakes!”

“It’s like a boat. You cut the engines and it slows.”

“Except on a slope like this!”

“We have to turn around. Bring the outrigger up.”

Carlos spun the steering wheel harder left, and the craft came around so they were going backward, more or less, but still sliding down toward Wiest Bluff, never changing the overall direction of the craft’s movement at all. “Right outrigger now.”

X dropped the right outrigger. Then for a moment the craft was facing true uphill, and they were sliding down backward, and Carlos shoved up the prop fan’s speed; but X’s outrigger tracks caught the ice at that same moment, and the craft swung around and began sliding sideways again. Carlos cursed and turned the steering wheel the other way, but it took a while to stop their spin momentum, and when he got it going the other way it spun right past the backward position again.

“I’m going to try bringing the tub down into contact,” X said nervously, thinking it would act as a brake. He put his weight on the stiff lifters.

“Don’t,” Carlos said. “The ice is too rough.” As he spoke the craft began to chatter and jounce horribly underneath them.

X hastily yanked the lifters back up.

“What about in a smooth patch?” he asked.

“That was a smooth patch.”

“Oh. Well, what about when we’re over snow.”

“Sure.”

But the glacier was gleaming blue ice for as far as they could see in all directions: like a giant racing spill-way, with all its waves and turbulence frozen in place for them to observe as they slid farther down into it.

“When I get it straight backwards put both outriggers down,” Carlos said. “Then if we turn left accelerate the left one, right if we drift right. I’ll do the same with the steering.”

“Okay.”

“Then if we slow down enough, bring the tub down fast.”

“Okay.”

“God damn, you guys,” Val said, looking downslope. “You’re headed for a crevasse field.”

“We know that.”

Carlos began to spin the steering wheel again. He was getting the hang of it, and after a bit he held the craft going directly backward down the slope, long enough for X to engage both outriggers on the ice and set them running, which gave them a bit more stability. Unfortunately the slope of the ice grew even steeper at this point, and they crunched over a set of rubble lines and the right outrigger snowmobile snapped off and went spinning out of sight, boom and all. The hovercraft too was spinning again, dropping from time to time as they flew over crevasses at terrifying angles, hitting the tub then billowing up again on the skirts; if they hit one of those lengthwise they would shoot right down into it and be swallowed. Carlos struggled to get them oriented backward again. Out the front window they could see back up the glittering blue flood they had so far descended, all completely still and yet receding away from them at great speed. It was a steep slope. “We’re still headed for that crevasse field,” Val said. Behind them the whoops and hollers from the passenger cabin had been replaced by dead silence.

Carlos looked over his shoulder and then spun the steering wheel to the right. “Full left outrigger,” he said to X. “We need to go hard left.” He shoved the prop fan throttle to full power and took the steering wheel in both hands, standing before it with his head swiveling around in an attempt to see all directions at once. And then they were jetting sideways across the slope of the ice, sliding downhill still but making tremendous progress across the slope as well. If they went into a spin now they would be doomed to slip down into the crevasse field and crash. X ran the left outrigger motor faster or slower depending on the craft’s yaw, and Carlos did the same with the steering wheel, and suddenly it seemed as if they were two parts of a mind that actually knew what it was doing, shooting a traverse across the Zaneveld Glacier like an Everglades fan boat going full speed, jiggling their controls minutely, absolutely locked onto the scene rushing at them, the glacier surface here a smoothly curving drop, with some small crevasses straight ahead; they flew right over them; to their right and below, a veritable Manhattan of blue seracs was flashing by. They were rounding Wiest Bluff at about ninety miles an hour.

But then as they rounded the great turn, another chaos of blue ice reared up directly before them, across all the glacier they could see. Without a word Carlos brought the hovercraft around so that it was facing uphill again, and X stabilized as much as he could with just a single outrigger; they were still working together with perfect coordination, and the craft held its rear to their destination and with the fan at full power slowed, slowed, slowed; but the shear zone was coming up at them so fast that Val hissed. X leaped onto the lift fan throttles and muscled them down with all his strength, and the skirts puffed out and collapsed and the tub slammed down onto the ice, and they were all thrown about as in a giant earthquake, Carlos and X holding on hard to try to keep the craft pointed uphill. They slowed, slowed, slowed. Then with a huge metallic crash the craft fell backward into the first crevasse of the shear zone and smashed to a halt, tilted up at about forty-five degrees.

X pushed himself off the floor. Carlos had already leaped back to the controls to kill the engines. The craft remained tilted up at the sky. The rear of the hovercraft was stuck down in a crevasse, which fortunately for them was both narrow and shallow. Not that they would ever get the craft out; but at least they had not fallen all the way into an abyss. Carlos and X and Val looked at each other, white-faced and round-eyed.

“Everyone all right back there?” Val called to the others.

Moans, curses. “What the fuck was that!” Jack said.

“Glad to hear you’re feeling better,” Val said.

“We are fine!” Ta Shu called up. “This is a good place!”

More curses.

“Let’s get off this thing before it falls all the way in,” Val said. “It’s back to walking for us.”

No one could object. The hovercraft was obviously out of commission. And it had, as Val pointed out when they staggered back to the cabin door, gotten them down the steepest section of the glacier. “We’re only about twenty miles from Shackleton Camp, and it’s only a few hundred meters lower than we are here. Easy sailing all the way! It’s going to be fine! We’re almost there.”

“If you had missed this crack we would have been there in about half an hour,” Jack said.

Val’s jaw clenched so hard that X could see all the muscles on that side of her face bulge out. Carlos and X merely looked at each other. They shook hands. “Let’s get going,” Carlos said.

white sky

white ice

Val ran around at full speed until they all stood on the ice beside the tilted hovercraft: nine people encased in full extreme weather gear, crampons on their boots, two of them pulling banana sleds piled with equipment and bags. They had skis and ski poles tied to the sleds, but they were on bare ice here, and crampons were mandatory. High thin clouds covered the sky, and down the broad glacier, between its cliff-sided mountain walls, a bloom of thick cumulus cloud sat right on the ice. It was windy, although fortunately the wind was from above, and so would be behind them as they walked. It was cold. No one looked happy.

Val surveyed the group one more time before starting out. “We’ll walk down to Shackleton Camp and take breaks every hour on the way,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”

No response. Jack had not said a word since they had climbed off the hovercraft back into the frigid blast. Probably they should have been hauling him in one of the banana sleds right from the start, but he had refused to cooperate, and the sled was there if needed; and anyway it was a good sign that he was still well enough to be himself. All the clients looked weary and tense, she thought, except for Ta Shu, who was wandering away from the rest and turning in slow circles, talking rapidly in Chinese. The others were huddled around her. Wade and X stood beside each other, watching her like a little Greek chorus. Wade had not gotten any further calls, either in or out. He seemed resigned to whatever happened next, pinched by the wind but resolute. X stoical as always. At least those two were fresh compared to her clients, who had already walked farther than their ordinary strength would have taken them. To tack on twenty more miles was a hard thing. But they needed to get Jack to the med clinic in McMurdo, and they were still very short on food. So there was no choice but to walk the remainder of the way.

Val took off, hauling the banana sled and keeping her pace down so that she would not get too far ahead of the rest. Carlos pulled the other sled; between the two of them they had everything they thought they might use on the hike.

Despite the sleds, the other seven were much slower than she and Carlos. Her clients were stiff and exhausted; and Wade and X not very good on the nobbled blue ice. Jim walked next to Jack, giving him something to grab onto if he slipped. A man who had hidden the fact that he had a broken collarbone, the fool. If he had known. Val sighed and shook her head. Lots of climbers were heavily psyched to do the hero thing, they knew all the great injury stories, Doug Scott getting off the Ogre with two broken legs, Joe Simpson smashed like a doll and crawling back to his partner in Patagonia; the stories were endless; but why not tell your companions you were hurt? What did that accomplish, except perhaps to make them feel guilty afterward for wondering why you were going so slow? Which was stupid. She was not going to feel guilty. It was so stupid that, combined with his periods of unconsciousness, she had to worry again about how hard he had been hit in the crevasse. Get stunned and go silent, like a hurt animal. It happened. Sad in a way.

But she was pulling too far ahead again, even ahead of Carlos. She waited while the others staggered to her. The worst part was the wind. Back in the world they said (way too often) It’s not the heat it’s the humidity. And in Antarctica they said just as frequently It’s not the cold it’s the wind. And it was just as true. On a windless day the proper clothing made it possible to withstand the coldest temperatures Antarctica had to offer—even to overheat in them. But with even the slightest breeze that warmth was ripped out and flung away. Even the best of the new spacesuit gear was not much shield against its bitter power. And if a wind rose to gale force, it became unbearable. You simply couldn’t face it.

Unfortunately, she could see that that kind of a wind was very possibly approaching them from downglacier. It was like being in a train wreck in slow motion; the wind was behind them, strong but at their backs, so that they could hunch over and endure it, and in some ways it even helped a little, pushing their legs forward as they lifted them; a wind at one’s back was not such a bad thing, no matter how cold. But despite this katabatic wind, the cumulus cloud lying on the glacier down near the NSF camp was coming their way, in what appeared to be utter defiance of the laws of physics. “God damn it,” Val said to herself as she watched it come. Something different was going on down there, of course; the cloud was impelled by some other wind, a northerly coming off the Ross Sea it looked like, pushing up and under the katabatic. Or whatever. Storms in Antarctica could do almost anything. In the ordinary course of things she would have been checking satellite photos on her wrist to see what was up, maybe calling Mac Coms for a detailed weather report, and if the forecast was bad she would probably be ordering her group to stop and put up their tents. As it was, she continued to watch the cloud come at them, hoping it would slow down, swearing at its apparent ability to move against the wind. “God damn it. There is a curse on this trip.”

She took a look back. Getting too far ahead again. Carlos was behind her, hauling the other banana sled. Then X and Wade. Behind them Ta Shu, still looking around every few steps, still talking to his distant audience, or presumably taping a talk. Then Jorge and Elspeth, obviously wasted; and Jim hanging back with Jack, who was holding his right elbow with his left hand. All eight moving in slow motion, as far as Val was concerned. The wind was getting gusty, hard buffets interspersed with dead air. She found it hard not to feel for Jack, who was certainly a jerk, but whose collarbone must have hurt with every misstep on the ice. He was definitely angry at Val for spurring him on, back on Mohn Basin. And X was angry at her too for that matter, for the Mac Town stuff. Of course. There really was a curse on this trip.

Wade was holding his wrist to his mouth and shouting into it, in yet another fruitless attempt to reach the world; or maybe he had heard a ring and was trying to respond. Then he slipped, and hastily started using that ski pole again. Anyway there would be no help for them from the outside now, no matter if he made contact or not. Val took off again, very chilled, happy to stop facing the wind. The glacier here was nearly flat, only a slight tilt downhill. The blue ice was dimpled as usual, but other than that easy going. A rubble line of black and rust-colored rocks paralleled them to the left. The black cliffs walling the glacier on both sides had clearly been shaved smooth by earlier higher versions of the glacier, which must have run a thousand feet higher by the looks of it, for the cliffs were shaved that high, right to the feet of ramparts which then jumped up, scaling to peaks in the sky far above them. It was not as tight and deep a canyon as the Axel Heiberg’s, but something about the vast breadth of it was even more impressive; as if they were ants. Everything was enormous. Shackleton Field Camp was about seventeen miles ahead of them, down where the McGregor Glacier poured into the Shackleton, in a giant confluence under Mount Wade. But all that was invisible under the massed clouds rolling up the canyon, except for Mount Wade lofting high over all—white snow over white cloud. Storm coming.

This group was not going to be able to hike in a storm of any severity. Despite herself Val recalled Krakauer’s searing account of the notorious Everest debacle, ten people killed in a single day, and mostly because the guides had gotten a bit overconfident; they had been taking complete amateurs to the top of Everest for hefty fees, and had dealt with all kinds of problems shepherding them up and down, including hauling comatose ones from the peak all the way back down the mountain, so that they thought they had all possible situations in hand; but had never been on the summit ridge in a storm. And so when the inevitable happened and a storm struck on summit day most of the clients had died, and the lead guide had stayed high on the peak trying to save one of them and had died too. Near the end his base camp had patched his radio link into their satellite phone so that he had been able to have a final talk with his pregnant wife back in New Zealand. An early example of the total com age’s mixed blessings.

When Val had read Krakauer’s account, early in her guiding career, she had vowed never to make the same sort of mistakes. And she hadn’t, at least so far. She had never guided on the eight-thousand-meter peaks, or on any other radically dangerous climbs or tours. Other guides were still taking amateur clients up Everest, of course, and people were still dying up there on a regular basis; these days the southeast ridge resembled a cemetery cracked down the middle and thrust into the stratosphere, the bodies (a couple hundred now) spilling down both sides of the slope. But she had refused all such work. She had only taken on competent clients, she had never pushed the outside of the envelope when she was with clients, she had paid very respectful attention to the weather. In Antarctica you had to. She had sat out storms many many times, sometimes for up to two weeks straight, resisting all pleas to forge on from the (mostly bored) clients. And so on. She had been a safe guide!

But here she was. There really did seem to be a curse on this trip, a malignant combination of problems. Well, that was what had struck down Hall’s group on Everest too. But here there was the added factor, unprecedented as far as she knew, of human sabotage. From what Carlos and X and Wade had said, it sounded like the saboteurs had tried to destroy the oil camps without causing any loss of life. But if anything went even slightly wrong down here, then the danger from the cold was immediate.

The wind stopped. Val stopped too. It shifted onto her left cheek, like a slap to the head; went dead, though the howl of it was all around them; then hit her again from the right. Then it struck her full in the face, the hardest blow of all. And suddenly they were hiking into the wind instead of away from it.

Val cursed into her ski mask. Already her sunglasses were icing up, and even at their lightest coloration their polarization dimmed the world to various shades of brilliant or dull gray. Still she could see quite clearly that the cloud that had been coming up the glacier was now upon them.

She took a sharp turn to the left, toward the rubble line, looking back and waving to make sure that everyone was following. She had almost left it too late, she saw, in her desire to get down to Shackleton Camp before the storm hit. Carlos had grasped the situation, and was actually running for the rubble. Bad weather changed everything. On a windless sunny day they could have marched down to Shackleton in style. But not today.

Then they were fully in the cloud. The wind shrieked. Visibility dropped to a few score yards—not a classic whiteout by any means, but a blizzard. The ice dust that composed the cloud was driven horizontally into them, it was like having an industrial sand-blaster shot into one’s face. Val’s clothes plastered against her, the wind penetrating right through the fabric. What she could see in the cloud was a kind of rapidly fluctuating bubble which appeared lit from below, as the glacier seemed brighter than the dark cloud rushing by. Her face hurt, and she had to drive each leg forward to take steps. Buffets of wind struck like blows from an invisible heavyweight. The noise of the shriek was incredibly loud, like jet engines on all sides, krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrr.

But she reached the rubble line. She turned and waved to the others. They staggered in one by one. She went back to help Jim help Jack over the remaining fifty yards or so, fighting to keep her balance. Jack was hunched, and couldn’t throw his right arm over her shoulder. She walked on the windward side of him with an arm around his waist, trying to protect him from the blasts. Any injury would be bound to hurt in this frigid wind, and a collarbone was much too close to the center of things. The noise was like a fleet of jet engines, it was too loud to talk.

They reached the rubble line and Val got Jack sitting down in the lee of a boulder that was a foot or two taller than she was. As good a start for their shelter as any she could see at a quick glance, and so she made her way around to the others, and using hand signals got them all to move to the huddled Jack. The rubble line was a big collection of rocks, from chunky boulders to pebbles and sand, all piled in a surprisingly well-defined line on the ice, resting in a shallow depression. Startling features at first sight, they were often found many kilometers away from the rock banks that fed them; they were something like the lines of debris that collected around the eddies in a stream, Val wasn’t clear on the dynamics, but she seemed to recall they marked the quickest-moving parts of the ice. And as befitted one of the largest glaciers on Earth, this rubble line was big too, a kind of pebble road studded with boulders and dolmens.

Val bent over and picked up the biggest boulder she thought she could lift, given the body-blows from the wind, and gestured at X to do the same. She started filling a gap between the tall boulder and a chest-high one nearby, while at the same time clearing all large rocks out of the space on the lee side of them. Carlos saw the plan and pulled his banana sled over to the gap, tipping it on its side to form a windscreen at the bottom of the wall. X hopped around propping it in position with rocks, moving fast, in X overdrive. He could lift rocks none of the others would even think to try. As they lifted and set rocks he and Val banged into each other hard, and they grabbed each other to keep from going down. He looked at her as if asking a question, but masked by sunglasses and clothing they could see nothing of each other’s face, and the roar of the wind made it impossible to talk. They might as well have been on opposite sides of the glacier. She felt stuffed with energy, and went for another rock, mute in the howl of the storm, which if anything was louder here than it had been out on the glacier; shrieking over the rocks, no doubt. They were all cut off from each other. Nine strangers in a storm. Windchill factor must have been a hundred below; it dropped exponentially with the speed of the wind. Too windy to put up any tents. But the rock wall was growing. Had to be careful, though, as the wind would quickly throw any loosely placed rocks down on their heads. The stacking had to be right. It was something to concentrate on, something with which to distract herself; and it was the only thing she could do at this moment to improve the situation. So she set about building the best rock wall she could. X was a big help, it was amazing what heavy rocks he could lift. Carlos and Wade too were helping, as was Ta Shu. Jorge and Elspeth and Jim were getting sleeping bags off the banana sled and out of their stuff sacks, dropping big slabby rocks on them as they pulled them out so that they wouldn’t blow away. The wall was thigh-high now, and beginning to help; though it was still insanely loud, behind Jack’s rock there was some shelter from the blast, and more with each row they managed to stack on the one below, and each foot of curving extension to the sides. The work kept them not warm but at least functional, and there was an endless supply of rocks to choose from. A U-shaped wall to start with, then perhaps a full oval later, to ensure that any more reversals of wind didn’t take them from the rear. After that they might be able to set up one of the tents inside the rock wall and get even more shelter, enough to light a stove. It was actually looking pretty good, Val thought; if it hadn’t been for Jack, huddled at the foot of the largest boulder, she would have considered the situation to be somewhat in hand, given the circumstances. Jim and Jorge were pulling a sleeping bag up over Jack’s legs and torso. When the wall was finished they would all be able to get into bags. They would be all right. Except they didn’t have enough food or stove fuel to wait out a storm of any great length. Hopefully coms would come back and they could get a report on the weather. So odd to have all this happen in the mute solitude of the storm’s roar. And the light was odd too, fluctuating rapidly as thinner or thicker clouds shot overhead; despite all it was a well-lit scene, the sun wheeling about somewhere overhead though it was the middle of the night, Val thought; but it didn’t matter. The flickering made it like being inside an antique film. X put his face against her ear: “It’s good shelter!”

She nodded to show she had heard. She appreciated the gesture. The others were now sitting in the lee of the rock wall, clustered around Jack to give him more warmth; he looked like he was sinking into hypothermia again, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was, lying there with a broken collarbone, cut hand, lost blood; in shock, and maybe concussed as well. He was in trouble.

Which meant she could not rest. The shelter didn’t matter; she had to get to Shackleton Camp, bring back a snowmobile and sled to carry Jack to real shelter, and at least the first aid that the people at Shackleton Camp would be able to provide. Something. To do it she needed a bit of a break in the storm, she judged. And she would need a GPS position to come back to. And perhaps a companion, for safety’s sake; Carlos, though Carlos should probably stay here to take care of the others. X, then. The truth was she didn’t know what to do. The obvious thing was to stay put, but with a failing client on her hands, she wasn’t going to do that. And they were short of food and fuel anyway. Storms here could last over a week. Something more would have to be done. And she had walked in storms like this before, she had climbed in storms like this for that matter; tough work, but not impossible if you kept your head.

She crouched down to have a shouted consultation with the others. She got X’s attention and he crouched next to her. Ta Shu was still moving about the others, adding rocks to the wall; suddenly they looked to Val like a little huddled pile of bodies, with Ta Shu building a memorial cairn.

white cloud

X kept adding rocks to their rock wall until he could find no good candidates for stable stacking in the immediate area. The work had warmed him, although the rocks themselves had been cold, and heavy enough to crush his gloves’ insulation, so that his hands were frozen insensible, and tired. Val gestured him to her and he crouched next to her. She was getting into a sleeping bag next to Wade, and gestured for X to do the same. He struggled into a sleeping bag much too small for him, lay against the rock wall next to Val.

Down on the pebbles it was remarkably calm. Given the insulating power of their clothing, and the warm red masses of their sleeping bags, and the shelter of this nifty windbreak they had built, X supposed he should have been as comfy as if he were at home in bed; in actuality it was nothing like that, as each howling buffet of wind jolted through him in a kind of mental electrocution. He couldn’t get used to these slaps of wind; they were so hard and distinct they seemed not like wind but the concussions from great explosions, any one of which could knock their wall over. Little lulls, moments of relative calm, and then WHAM, another shock to the system.

Val was crawling around in her bag, having shouted conversations with Carlos, then Wade. She seemed calm and deliberate, her posture relaxed; she did not seem appalled at the power of the wind, just dealing with it. X however was appalled. He had never been in any Condition One in Mac Town that had been anything like as strong as this wind. He hadn’t known they got this strong.

Val crawled over to him and sat beside him, leaned into him, one arm around him, and shouted in his ear. “I may have to go down to Shackleton Camp! To get help for Jack!” She gestured at Jack. “I’m worried about him!”

“What about the storm!” X shouted in her ear.

She shook her head, shouted “It might last a long time! Too long!”

“But can you walk in this!” X shouted, amazed at the very idea.

“If you wear crampons—and lie flat during the worst parts—you can do it! No problem! This stuff we’re wearing is like a spacesuit!”

X pulled his head away and stared at her. No problem? Was she kidding?

She was not kidding. She was a mountaineer, and what they thought to do out in the wild boggled the imagination. His heart began to pound hard in his chest. Carlos was the best candidate to accompany her on such a hike. But no doubt she wanted Carlos to stay and care for the people left behind. He leaned over and got her ear. “I’ll go with you!”

Now it was her turn to pull back and look at him. Sunglasses, mask; who knew what she was thinking. She caught his ear:

“I’ll be going fast!”

He nodded that he understood.

She said: “Carlos is cooking us a meal.”

So he was. Against and partly under the banana sled the stove was burning, the blue flames wavering somewhat, but burning fiercely nevertheless. That they had in this stupendous howl and rush created a pocket of air still enough to allow the stove to burn was amazing to him.

“Wade got a GPS fix! He says the system is coming back. His senator has reached him on a military satellite system we can use too. So as soon as we’re done eating we should go!”

He nodded that he understood. He realized he was going to do it. His heart was still pounding hard.

Then flickering dark shapes appeared overhead, like killer whales flying horizontally through the storm. X leaped to his feet, astonished, and the wind blew him right out of their shelter and down onto the ground. He pushed up to his knees; yes; blimps were flashing by overhead, colored like the clouds but still undeniably there, sweeping past over them. Harpoons on lines shot down and stuck the ice in little explosions. The blimps swung around on these anchor lines and were pulled right down onto the glacier next to the rubble line, at which point more harpoons shot down, holding the blimps fast to the ice. Three in a row, vibrating in the wind. They had big tail sections at the backs of the bags, containing fans in round housings. Stubby wings protruded from the taut sides of the bags, and underneath the bags narrow gondolas rested right on the ice. Doors in the gondola were shoved open against the wind, and out jumped three people on tethers, dressed in photovoltaic bodysuits much like the trekkers’.

“Want a lift?” the first person to reach them shouted. Sounded like a southern accent. A short young woman.

Everyone in the rock shelter was standing; even Jack had lifted his head up to stare. Clearly the woman’s question was rhetorical. Val and Jim got Jack onto the free banana sled and carried him to the nearest blimp and got him into the gondola. Jim followed him in, then Ta Shu.

“Three in each blimp!” the woman shouted. “We’ll meet up there!” She gestured beyond the rubble line and said something else X couldn’t make out.

Val looked at X, as if to ask him what they should do, and despite everything his heart warmed. He gestured in reply; what other choice did they have? She nodded and went back to retrieve some of their gear. X joined her, and as they leaned over the banana sled in their wall she shouted, “Who are they?”

“I don’t know!” X shouted. “But it reminds me of when my SPOT train was robbed!”

She stared at him, taken aback. “That’s not good!”

“No, but—” He didn’t know what else to say. “They seem to be rescuing us!”

“True!”

They stared at each other.

They returned to their visitors and helped Carlos and Jorge and Elspeth into the second blimp. Then Wade and Val wedged into the back seats of the third blimp’s gondola compartment, which reminded X of a Squirrel helicopter’s insides, the two front seats looking out big curved windows, the back seats jammed against the back wall of the cabin, with storage underneath for their stuff. X sat in the front seat next to the pilot. She was checking dials and flicking toggles, talking into a headset intercom. She pushed a button and the blimp began to vibrate madly as they rose off the ice on its anchor lines; then she pushed another button and the harpoons must have exploded free or been cut away, because all of a sudden they were off on the wind, spinning up and away, inside the cloud itself, the light flickering from dark gray to spun-glass whiteness and everything in between, changing instant by instant. The noise was terrific at first; then it got a bit quieter, and the ride smoother.

Their pilot watched screens before her, giving her data in various false color images that X couldn’t interpret. Powerful motors whirred behind them, and between their noise and the howl of the wind it was still too loud to say anything. The pilot indicated headsets hanging from hooks in the ceiling of the gondola, however, just like in a Squirrel, and X put on his set, and over the now-muffled roar heard Val saying “—you taking us?”

The pilot pointed forward. “Bennett’s Other Platform.” Her voice was clear over the headset, and she definitely had a southern accent. X pulled a folded topographic map out of the open compartment before him and studied it. Bennett Platform was a triangular plateau of bare rock overlooking Shackleton Glacier, across the ice from the Shackleton Camp, underneath a Mount Black. But Bennett’s Other Platform? The pilot did not elucidate, and neither Val nor Wade nor X wanted to bother her any more, as she suddenly seemed completely absorbed in the workings of the blimp, which was tossing wildly in some extra turbulence of the storm. She muttered to herself as she flew with both hands and both feet, looking out the windows more than at her screens, though they could see nothing but mist.

“Isn’t this dangerous?” X inquired.

The pilot looked at him briefly. “What, this? What could happen?” A high sweet laugh. Then she was talking to the blimp again, or the clouds: “Ah come on. Y’all stop it. This is ridiculous. Quit it. No way.” And so on.

“Where are you from?” X asked during a lull in this monologue.

“Mobile, Alabama.”

“No,” X said. “I mean down here.”

The pilot shrugged. Then she became preoccupied by another hard smack of wind. “Give me a break. I mean to tell you. No way.” After a prolonged struggle with the controls she said, “Okay. Here we are. Come on, you beast. Behave yourself for our guests here.”

“Can you give medical attention to the man in the other blimp?” Val asked.

“Sure. That’s why we came out in this kind of wind. It looked like you needed help.”

Below them black rock appeared through the rushing clouds, startling X so much that he jumped back in his seat.

“Don’t worry!” the pilot said, and laughed again.

white white

black

white white

X worried. It was frightening to be so close to rock in such a volatile craft. But their pilot merely coaxed the blimp around into the wind, and then began to wrestle the controls to force the thing downward, or so it seemed. Suddenly an orange pole poked up out of the cloud at them, and the pilot broke into the same muttered argument she had had before as she dropped the blimp down behind this mooring mast. She manipulated controls right in front of X, and a metal arm appeared under them, and a claw like an artificial hand clamped on the mast. “Gotcha!”

After that they descended slowly. The rear of the blimp attached to something else, it seemed to X by the reduced bouncing of the craft; and then they were suspended tautly some ten feet off the flat black rock, frozen mist shooting past on all sides. The pilot reached across X and opened the door. “Out we go!” she shouted, and X unbuckled his seat belt and took off his headset, and made his way down a swinging ladder, the metal rods cold through his mitts and gloves. When he stood on the ground again he found his knees were trembling. He helped Wade and Val down, then the pilot climbed down halfway and let the door slam above her. She jumped down beside them and gestured forward. “Come on in!”