measured to a rigorous standard of time and accuracy.
In his elite unit, Burkhart’s skills had leaped above the highest bar. It was as if he were born possessing them. But he’d accepted recognition from his superiors and comrades with indifference. His competitiveness came from old angers of the soul, and he’d worn his decorations as emblems of a secret spite. For the child of the moon, every medal pinned to his chest was a reminder of some beautiful shining face that had once looked scornfully at him under the sun, left further in the past as he flogged himself toward new levels of accomplishment.
At last, though, it was restlessness as much as anything else that had sent him along the path of the mercenary. His prowess had seemed wasted against cardboard soldiers. What pluck was there in mock combat against an enemy that bled red dye? Games had not demanded enough of him. And so he had moved on to find a profitable and satisfying alternative.
Since then Burkhart had only improved upon his innate abilities, refining his tactical know-how, his situational adaptability. He had actualized a vision of his own potential, made it hard as steel, and found a kind of chambered peace within it.
Now Burkhart took a sinuous curve around a glacial edge and urged his bike over a series of jarring bumps into the downhill channel he had reconnoitered before the storm. A final glissading run, his flaps threshing up a wake of powder, gravity squeezing the ribs around his heart, and then he was on a smooth flat field of ice, headed across the basin between the mountains and frozen shore.
Dimly visible through the snow, just a handful of miles seaward, lay the UpLink base.
“Pete.”
Nimec turned his head from the window in the empty corridor. It was oval and not much larger than a porthole, its fixed pane reinforced with a shatter-resistant polymer coating. He had stood there alone staring at the thick pulsing snow outside, listening to the freight-train roar of the wind, once pressing his hand against the glass to feel its buffet. He could see neither land nor sky, only the close, incursive whiteness.
“Meg,” he said. He had not noticed her approaching. “Figured I’d take a look at the thousand-pound giant.”
“And maybe stare him down?”
“Maybe.”
She stood beside him awhile.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” she said. “Ron Waylon told me he’d taken you on the grand tour, then left you at your workstation after you two went poking around the utilidors.”
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t exactly. Just had a hunch you might be where everyone else wasn’t, and wandered around until I hit the spot.”
“It would’ve been faster and easier to have me paged.”
“But absent the intimate touch for which we strive at this lodge.”
Nimec looked at her another moment, then moved his somber eyes back to the window.
“I know what you’re thinking and feeling, Pete,” she said.
“Never occurred to me you didn’t.”
“One thing to keep in mind is that the storm won’t reach the Valleys. None of them do. The mountains form a barrier. And any snow that does get over them is dried by the katabatic effect before it hits the ground.”
He kept staring out the window.
“Our people have been missing eleven days,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Maybe no one’s been able to get to Bull Pass on foot since they were lost. Or obviously down in a chopper. But the boss told me MacTown sent out pilots in Twin Ospreys. And we’ve used Hawkeye III. State-of-the-art satellite recon that can practically image a mole on somebody’s chin.”
“Pete, you know air and orbital sat searches are hampered by the terrain no matter how sophisticated the tech. There are recesses, cliff overhangs… too many blind spots.”
Nimec turned to her again.
“Eleven days,” he said. “And counting. We have to be honest. Let’s believe they found food and water caches. Give them that. How long before they’d all succumb to the cold? When do we stop talking rescue, and admit anything we do is about recovering bodies?”
Another silence.
“I won’t offer false encouragement,” Megan said. “Not to you or myself. But neither will I stop hoping. You’d have to know Scar. He’d try to find places where they could shelter, and the same ground features that make hunting for his group difficult might very well provide it.”
Nimec didn’t reply. He was conscious of the wind barreling outside.
Megan studied his face.
“There’s more on your mind,” she said.
He waited a moment, then nodded.
“Working with Tom Ricci these past couple of years… I suppose the way he thinks outside the box has started to rub off on me. Something about the rover disappearing, and then those people who went looking for it, makes me suspicious. Or maybe that’s going too far, using too strong a word. It makes me
“You’ve been straight enough,” Megan said. “I never disregard your instincts, Pete. We need to talk more about this.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s late, and I want to sit on my thoughts a little longer, give them a chance to work themselves out.” He paused. “That’s why I waited to bring them up.”
Megan looked at him. The blowing wind and snow slammed aggressively against the window.
“I’m supposed to meet Annie for drinks,” she said. “You can join us if you like. It might make the waiting easier. For you and me.”
Nimec was quiet.
“Better not,” he said then. “Don’t think I’d be very good company.”
She stood looking at him a few seconds, nodded.
“We’ll be at the bar if you change your mind. You know where it is?”
“I can find it.”
She nodded again, and started away down the silent corridor.
“Meg?”
She paused, half turned toward Nimec.
“I almost forgot to mention you run one hell of a lodge,” he said.
Megan smiled warmly at him.
“Appreciated,” she said.
Burkhart heard a cannonade in the southern distance: long rolling rumbles, a bellowy roar, then a rending crash. Someone less familiar with Antarctica might have mistaken the din for thunder, but that was an infrequent occurrence on the continent. Instead he knew it to be a berg calving from the ice sheet, its great tortured mass breaking off into the sea, the stresses of its division accelerated by the storm.
As the sounds continued rocketing across the sky, he set his full attention on the dome some eighty or ninety feet up ahead. His men waited at his sides, snow whipping around them, their snowmobiles left a short distance back. The vehicles would have made this final stretch of ground easier to cross, and Burkhart was convinced the wind would have muted the buzzing of their engines even if they had ridden straight into the center of the compound. Still, he’d taken no chances and ordered his group to dismount.
Given a choice, Burkhart would have vastly preferred the storm’s assault had not coincided with their mission. But he had refused to be stopped by caprices of the weather, and decided what couldn’t be helped might be turned
