Not both at the same time. He had to do something quickly.
“Nan, the kitchen!” he shouted.
As the killer jerked her head toward his wife, Gorrie twisted around and sprung at Plower. The gun went off near his face, but he heard it as if from a vast distance away, muffled by his surging adrenaline. She was stronger than he’d guessed, far stronger, and the bulk at her chest had come from a special vest; he felt the hard panel with the first punch. He slammed his skull against her chin, felt a sharp pang at the back of his neck, pushed himself against her with everything he had, hoping Nan had the sense to run and save herself.
She didn’t. But it was quite likely the smash she gave the American with the hammer from their tool drawer was the blow that rendered her unconscious.
TWELVE
A storm was coming, and the Petrels and Skuas were its outriders, brawling up from the bare sea cliffs in wild sprays of gray-white wings.
Above their Bellany Island rock colonies a moist, restless warm front from New Zealand had bumped against the outer bounds of an Antarctic air mass. Cold and dry, heavy as the breath of a slumbering frost giant, it presented a resistant barrier.
In collision, the two fronts took on a clockwise rotation, generating great eddies of wind around a central area of low pressure. Rising above the dense mass of cold air, the buoyant warm flow pulled its moisture higher into the atmosphere to be cooled and condensed into radiating bands of clouds.
As the fronts continued to spin in conflict, their winds gained speed and intensity, sucking up more water vapor from the low-pressure trough, pushing the clouds further toward its edges, evolving into a potent cyclonic cell that whirled southward across the Antarctic Circle, racing over archipelagoes, open sea, and pack ice toward the continental landmass.
A storm was coming.
Streaming from their bleak slopes, the rousted seabirds were first to know its aggressive force.
Soon many others would as well.
They tramped over the snow berm ferrying a pair of cargo-laden banana sleds toward the first of their widely separated destinations.
The team consisted of ten men. Their parkas, wind pants, and duffels were white. White too were the ski bags they carried over their shoulders on padded nylon web slings, their lightweight fiberglass sleds, and the canvas tarpaulins over the large, sealed crates that had been left at the drop-off point some three quarters of a mile back. This was a heavily crevassed area, and Granger had refused to land his helicopter any closer to the depot.
At the rear of the small column, two men hauled their freight of equipment on sturdy polyfiber tow cords, harnesses buckled around their chests and waists.
They marched along the north side of the trench with a kind of slow wariness, the lead walker probing the un-tracked snow ahead with a telescopic avalanche pole, its shaft locked at its maximum six-foot extension. Far from any known camp, their chances of being detected by ground or aerial recon were slight. Their clothes and equipment were furthermore designed to blend with the terrain, and the sun’s prolonged descent toward austral winter had butted it increasingly low toward the horizon, leaving no appreciable shadows to betray their movement.
The wind blew hard and cold. They moved on toward their goal, their leader repeatedly thrusting his probe into the rumpled snow, locating a masked drop, and then steering them around it. The depot’s location had been programmed into their GPS units, and they would reach it soon enough if they stuck close to the berm line. Their main interest right now was getting safely past the crevasse field, past those fissures waiting beneath the snow, their open, icy mouths filled with darkness. Often hidden under fragile snow bridges — corniced drifts that sweep across their openings and become obliterated from sight as surrounding accumulations overspread their peaks — they might be a few feet in depth, or two hundred feet. One did not learn which until the misstep was already taken and the bottom fell out from underfoot.
After a while the lead man stopped, planted his avalanche pole in the snow, and slipped his binoculars from their case. Beside him along the slope, the others stood with the crampons of their mountaineer boots biting into the hardpack. The dry wind nagged at them, flapping the ruffs of their parkas, clotting the fibers of their balaclavas with their own frozen breath. Out beyond the opposite embankment, sastrugi flowed away northward in wild, swirling patterns.
Glasses held up to his eyes, the team leader looked carefully down into the trench. The entrance hatch was buried in snow, but he could see the reflective strip at the top of its marker wand projecting above a nearby drift.
He signaled to his men, and all but the load carriers began preparing for their run. They zipped open their ski bags, extracted their boards and poles, mounted rigid alpine touring bindings onto the skis, and slipped their booted feet into them.
The leader moved to the edge of the depression on his skis. Behind him, the carriers unharnessed. There would be no need for their assistance below; better they rested here and stayed with the sleds and crates.
The rest whipped after him, poles swung out and back, powder flying from the tails of their skis in wide sweeping sprays. The floor of the trench came upon them in a rush, and they wedged their tips and edges to check their descent, turning parallel to the grade, plowing snow into the air as they braked.
Near the marker wand down at the base of the slope, the leader inspected a high undulation in the surface cover, gave his men a confirmatory nod, and crouched to remove his skis. They quickly followed suit, then got to work digging at the mound with foldable snow shovels from their duffels.
Soon they had exposed most of a circular stainless-steel hatch, its frame almost flush with the rock of the hillside. There was no lock. Intruder prevention depended on effective concealment rather than access control, for mechanical rods and electromagnetics were prone to climatic damage and might very well fail to release.
It took fifteen minutes before the manhole-sized entry hatch was completely dug out. The leader stood to one side and waved for a couple of the men to pull it open. Then he took an electric krypton lantern out of his bag and strode through the passageway, the lantern held forward, the rest of the group filing in at his heels.
The small, cavelike storage depot measured five yards in depth, somewhat less in width. Shielded from wind chill, insulated from outside temperature extremes by the snow and ice cover, its corrugated steel liner was cold enough to patch with frost from the vapor of their exhalations, but still perhaps twenty degrees warmer than ground level.
The leader paused a few feet past the entry, swept his lantern from side to side, and steadied it to his right as his men hastened to pull a large protective covering from over a low wooden platform that spanned the length of the shallow tunnel.
Within moments the covering lay crumpled around the skis and treads of a half-dozen white snowmobiles. Dressed with flared aerodynamic windshields, cargo racks, and saddle bags, the swift, agile little vehicles sat atop the platform in a neat row.
The leader turned to the opposite side of the tunnel and saw a wooden skid stacked with rubber fuel bladders by the bright glow of his lamp. These, he knew, contained a premixture of high-octane gasoline and two-stroke oil formulated for cold-weather running.
He grunted.
Everything was indeed as he’d been told it would be.
Satisfied, he looked back at his men, then used the torch’s bright shafting beam to point toward the snowmobiles. They had a long distance to travel across the ice plate, and no time at all to waste.
“Bring them down and put some fuel in their tanks—
