were consistently ominous. A severe gale was whipping toward the coast of Victoria Land, accreting momentum as it neared the Ross Sea and ice shelf. McMurdo had already assigned it a Condition II classification: winds in excess of 50 knots, a chill factor of at least minus-60F, visibility no better than a quarter of a mile, and perhaps as low as a hundred yards.
Affairs were about to pass largely out of his control, but he would press on with the mission regardless. It was his responsibility, no more, no less.
He lowered his binoculars and started back toward the tents. Though he’d raised his neck gaiter to the bridge of his nose, the crescent birthmark on his cheek already burned from the extreme cold. It was a constant bother to him here, as it had been during his alpine training with the Stern unit of the Swiss Militarpolizei. For a man who had spent most of his life in places where warmth was scarce, this was an absurdity of sorts, a strange and uncommon jest that matched the rareness of his stigma. Yet he had long since come to abide it. In the Jura Mountain farming village of his boyhood, he had suffered merciless slashes of pain throughout the endless winter stretches. Only his shame over the freak blemish to his appearance had brought a harsher sting.
At his orders now, the men were quick to break camp and stow their bedrolls and folded tents aboard their snowmobiles. The gathering of birds continued to study them from their perch, barely curious, simply watching because of their nearness. He looked at the creatures as he waited, lifted a chunk of ice off the ground, and suddenly snapped it at them with a hard overhand throw.
It struck the ledge with a crack, breaking to pieces. The birds jumped and fluttered in surprise, scolded him indignantly, but did not take flight.
He gave them a slight nod of appreciation.
They had been good enough company in their way.
Minutes later he mounted his snowmobile, throttled up its engine, and went speeding on across the ice toward his goal, the rest of his band traveling close behind him.
“What I need is to get down low into the pass,” Nimec was saying. Soon after returning to base from the helipad, he’d steered Russ Granger to a partitioned workstation where a downscaled, black-and-white version of Megan’s Dry Valley contour map was spread across the desk, circles drawn with colored pencils substituting for the pins she’d used to mark its key sites. “I want to see it with my own eyes.”
Granger nodded from the chair beside him.
“Understood,” he said. “I can take us pretty far in at its wider sections.”
Nimec’s forefinger bull’s-eyed the circle indicating the coordinates of Scout IV’s final transmission, and the presumable outer limit of the recovery team’s search area. “What about here?”
Granger shook his head.
“Your map doesn’t convey how rough it is around the notch,” he said. That much was absolutely true. “The terrain’s bad enough. But our real problem is katabatic wind pouring straight down the notch’s lee sides. The lower it gets, the harder gravity presses on it, and the faster it blows. You fly near ground level, it’s suicidal. Like riding a toy raft through heavy rapids.”
“What’s the best you can do, as far as that goes?”
Granger traced a path with his hand. “We’ll swing around the notch, dip into Wright Valley just to its south.”
Nimec thought a moment, then grunted his acceptance.
“A couple of things, though,” Granger said. “It’s obvious we have to work around this storm that’s on the way. I don’t think it’ll be bad enough to force evacs out of any NSF field camps. But I’ll have to make some trips over to them, check that the personnel are stockpiled to last it out.”
“Any reason why I can’t come along? We could shoot right over Bull Pass after your last hop.”
Granger had anticipated the question. He pretended to think through an answer that had been readied well beforehand.
“It’d be fine with me,” he said. “But we’d need to head out together right away, so I can have time for everything. Figure you’d be gone from here at least twenty-four hours. It’s either that or wait until the blow’s over —”
Nimec waved an abortive hand in the air.
“Then we go now,” he said. “Otherwise, we could be talking about a holdup of almost a week. We couldn’t afford that kind of delay under any circumstances. But the bad weather puts us in a vise. If our people are still alive out there, they need to be pulled out.”
Granger nodded again. That was definitely what he’d figured the UpLink security chief would say. It was also very much what he had
“Okay,” Nimec said. “You mentioned there was something else on your mind.”
“Right.” Granger set for his payoff pitch. “Say we visit all the field camps and maybe have to deliver some canned food, meds, equipment, and so on. It would mean a few refuelings at Marble Point, plus back-and-forth loops to McMurdo for the requested supplies. That gives us a full slate right off the top. And like you said, we’re cutting it close. Working against the storm.”
“The bottom line being…?”
“I can promise we’ll get to Bull Pass. But that twenty-four-hour timetable was just a guess. Depending on how many resupply drops I have to make, and when the blow hits, we might wind up having to stick around MacTown a few days before I can bring you back here. And I want to make sure you don’t have any problems with that.”
Nimec was quietly thoughtful. Megan had told him that Annie Caulfield and her small bundle of Senators had opted to cut their stay at Cold Corners to a few hours, overnight at the longest, and arrange for a return to Cheech before they found themselves snowbound. Meaning it was almost certain that he wouldn’t have the chance to see Annie again before she departed. Which was likely for the best anyway.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I’ve got no problem at all.”
THIRTEEN
The squawk came over their headsets just as Granger was about to release the chopper’s main rotor brake.
“Abort takeoff, Macbird,” the comm tech radioed over the base freq. “I say again, it’s all fliers down. Over.”
Nimec looked at Granger from the passenger’s seat.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked.
Granger shrugged uncertainly, pushed his helmet microphone’s “talk” button. At the edge of the landing zone, a flight director was slicing his right hand across his neck in a throat-cutting motion. Granger watched him through the Plexiglas windscreen and felt a sudden crick of tension in his back.
“Rob, we got clearance from you not three minutes ago,” he said into his mouthpiece.
“I know,” the comm tech said. “And I’m sorry. This is an all-points travel advisory out of your home nest. NOAA synoptics show the storm’s accelerated on a north-easterly track. Present movement has it heading straight toward us over the Ross Shelf, and McMurdo says there’s been more strengthening to the system. We’re looking at a possible upgrade from Condition II. Over.”
