Eleanor.
God helps no one, but if he could find the strength to harness the dogs and provision the sled, he could help himself. He could take matters into his own hands. He lifted the chalice and drained its last drops.
Michael, not surprisingly, was the first to arrive at the flagpole, the rendezvous spot for the search party. Standing by his snowmobile, he stomped his feet on the ground to keep the blood flowing. Someone had wrapped a long chain of red-and-green tinsel around and around the flagpole; it had become pretty much soldered to the metal, and Michael doubted anyone would ever be able to get it off. It would forever be Christmas at Point Adelie.
He glanced up at the sky; even through his sunglasses, it was a hard, blazing blue, the color of Easter eggs he'd painted as a kid. A bird shot across his field of vision-a dirty gray bird-and wheeled in the sky, then returned to swoop down at his head. He ducked fast, and heard it squawking as it came back for another pass. He held his gloved hand up above his head, remembering that the birds always dived for the highest point of their target, but it was only when it swooped by again that he realized there was no nest anywhere near here-at least none that he could see-and no carrion that the bird could have been claiming for itself. He quickly wiped the ice crystals from his glasses to get a better look at the whirring bird. Could it, by any chance, be Ollie?
It was flitting in a wide circle around the top of the flagpole, where Old Glory flapped listlessly in the cold breeze, then landed atop the administration module. Michael dug into his pocket, and found a rock-hard granola bar. Skuas, he knew, weren't too particular. With his gloved fingers, he fumbled to remove the wrapper, as the bird watched him intently. He held it up for inspection, then tossed it onto the ground a few feet away. These birds were scavengers and they knew enough not to miss a chance; in a second, it was zooming off the roof and plopping down with its beak already open. With a couple of quick pecks, it had broken the bar into several pieces, and one or two had already gone down the hatch. Michael studied him, hoping to see anything that might tell him if it was Ollie or not. The bird gulped down the last of the granola bar, and Michael crouched to get a better look.
“Ollie?” he said. “Is that you?”
The bird's beady black eyes regarded him impassively, but he didn't fly away. When Michael put out his gloved hand-not, he knew, the smartest thing to do with omnivorous skuas-the bird took one hopping step closer, pecked gently at his palm, then waited there.
“I'll be damned,” Michael said. And though he would have been hard put to say why, he felt a lump form in his throat. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the little runt had managed to survive, after all… or that it was one of the few things Michael had touched that had. He flashed, oddly enough, on Kristin lying in her hospital bed… and then on the funeral he had not been able to attend. In his mind's eye, he saw a bunch of sunflowers-big and yellow-surrounding a coffin. The bird pecked at his hand again, and he wished he had something else in his pockets to give it.
“All out,” he said, standing up again with his empty hands extended.
The skua strutted around the immediate ground, then gave up the hunt and shot back into the air like a rocket. Michael watched it skim the quad, then disappear in the direction of the dive hut. Several other birds gathered in the sky to join it, and Michael felt, stupidly, like a parent whose kid had just been accepted on the playground by his classmates.
There was an increasing roar from the concourse behind the administration module, followed by the sight of Murphy, Lawson, and Franklin, all riding their own machines. They reminded Michael of a posse, especially when he noticed that they were armed. Murphy had his gun in its holster, and the barrel of Franklin's rifle stuck out of the cargo compartment.
“I thought this was a search party,” Michael said, “not a SWAT team.”
The chief gave him a look that said, Grow up. “Weren't you ever in the Boy Scouts? Be prepared.” He pulled out a speargun from his own cargo bay and tossed it to him. Lawson, Michael noticed, was carrying one, too. “When we get to Stromviken,” Murphy announced over the idling engines, “Franklin and I will sweep in from the ocean side, you and Bill here will head straight into the yards.” Then, before lowering the visor on his helmet, he said, “And watch where you're going. I lost one beaker in a crevasse last year and I don't feel like losing anybody else.” The visor dropped, and a second later he took off across the ice with a deafening roar.
Franklin sat down on his own Arctic Cat and said, “Best if you follow in a single file. That way you can be sure the ground ahead is solid.”
Lawson followed. The snowmobiles were powerful machines, well over five hundred pounds each, with raised mountain-style handlebars. Michael snapped down the hood of his helmet, with its oversized eye port and antifog screen, and settled himself on the seat. He twisted the throttle, harder than he should have, and the four-stroke engine growled. The tracks bit into the snow and the front skis lifted, and he shot forward in Lawson's wake. The machine he rode was nothing like the snowmobile he'd owned when he was growing up-one of the early Ski-Doos. On the Cat he could feel the massive horsepower rumbling under him. Not to mention the heavy-duty suspension; he was used to feeling every bump in the ice and every rough patch of rugged ground, but on this it was as if he were flying across the snowfield on a magic carpet.
That, he knew, was the danger of it. Already he could see Murphy and Franklin and Lawson peeling in a straight line across the vast white field, but a crevasse could still appear out of nowhere, at any moment, and swallow any one of them whole. In snow school, right after he'd arrived at Point Adelie, Michael had gotten the full rundown from Lawson, and though he didn't necessarily remember the exact differences between a marginal crevasse, a longitudinal crevasse, and a bergschrund, he did remember that they were often camouflaged by the previous year's snowfall. A fragile white bridge was formed across the top-a bridge that could hold for one man and suddenly give way under the next, revealing a jagged, blue-walled canyon of ice a hundred feet deep. At the bottom, where the air was supercooled to forty degrees below, lay a bed of frozen salt water. Very few people who fell into a crevasse ever emerged alive… or, for that matter, at all.
Michael tried to follow in the tracks laid down by the others, but it wasn't always easy to see them. There was a steady glare off the snow, and an occasional sharp stab of light off a slab of wind-polished ice. He hunkered down on the seat in order to let the windshield cut the blast of frigid air coming at him. The helmet helped, too; padded at the cheek and chin, it had a wraparound neck roll that muffled the engine noise, along with vents that sucked the heat and moisture out of the face shield. It reminded Michael of the deep-sea diving gear he'd worn when freeing Eleanor from the glacier.
Eleanor… Sleeping Beauty… who'd metamorphosed, in his companions’ minds, into the Bride of Dracula. How long her living presence could be kept a secret at Point Adelie was an open question… and how long she could be kept there at all was an even more daunting one. Michael's NSF pass had only nine days left to run, and he knew that as soon as the next supply plane landed-it was scheduled for New Year's Eve-he was going to have to go back on it. But what would happen to Eleanor then? Who would look out for her? Who would she tell her story to? Who, above all, would she trust? Michael had every confidence in Charlotte, but Charlotte had a job to do-she was the medical officer for the whole base, and she couldn't be expected to be a nursemaid. And Darryl-well, Darryl wasn't exactly the kind of guy who would dote on her, especially if there were fish to be dissected and hematology studies to be done. And what if Sinclair Copley never turned up? Lawson had made it sound pretty unlikely. More and more, Michael thought, Eleanor would again be abandoned, isolated and lonely in a prison not much bigger than that block of ice.
Unless…
The snowmobile hit a mogul, soaring above the ground, then thumping back, its rear briefly fishtailing
Concentrate, he told himself, or you'll break your neck and all bets will be off. He shook his helmet to loosen some snow from the visor and gripped the handlebars more tightly. But his thoughts went right back where they'd been… to the coming day, not far off, when he would have to leave the Point… and Eleanor.
But what if-and he marveled that he hadn't considered the idea before (or had he?)-what if she were to go back with him? What if she, too, were to board that supply plane? The thought was so crazy he could barely believe he was entertaining it. But Murphy if it came to that, would be nothing but relieved to see her go- and, as chief of operations, he could use his considerable leverage over the few others on the base who knew about her at all to buy their silence; he could make their life there as easy, or as difficult, as he liked. Still… how could Michael engineer such a thing? How could he get someone like Eleanor-and had there ever been anyone else like Eleanor? — all the way back to the States? Someone who had never seen an airplane, or an automobile, or for that matter a CD player? Who had no citizenship-unless Queen Victoria was around to confirm it-and certainly no passport to prove it?
