Zero Hour

tired him, and Ivy Leaguedom was outside his realm. All he could say was that guys strutting around in sequins and hose wouldn’t have gone down too well in the South Philly pool parlor where he’d gotten his uncommon version of an education, flashing a cue stick like Paul Newman’s fictional Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler… absent the Hollywood-idol good looks.

He watched Megan work away in her gloves, pushing tempo. Left hook, right cross, uppercut. Jab, cross, jab. She stood flat-footed while attacking the bag, feinting, bobbing, feeling no need to practice her one-two shuffle for what was mainly a strength and stamina drill.

It was now six-thirty A.M. on Monday morning, and the sun had yet to rise outside the windows of the upper-level rec/training course in Nimec’s triplex condo, where Megan had arrived exactly half an hour earlier for the first of her regular twice-a-week sessions. Besides the fully equipped gym with its regulation fight ring, this floor- wide modular facility contained a martial arts dojo, a state-of-the-art computerized shooting range, and, not of the least importance to Nimec, a reproduction of the sordid old pool hall of his memories, accurate to its grimy light fixtures and cigarette burns on the baize.

Pleased by the solid thumping impact of Megan’s blows against his body, Nimec glanced at the mirrored wall to their right to check her stance.

“You still have to keep those elbows in closer to your sides, set up quicker for the comeback,” he said. “But there’s more snap to your punches. You’re committing better.”

“Being the best Megan I can be,” she said with a flicker of eye contact.

“Those words unintentional, too?”

“Nope,” she said. Cross, hook, cross. “But you wondered what’s on my mind this morning, and that’s it.”

Nimec braced the bag against himself.

“Oh,” he said. “Wanting to be the best’s a good thing.”

Her lips pulling tight across her teeth, the muscles of her neck standing out, Megan slammed in an explosive overhand right that wobbled Nimec back a little. Then she paused in her tank top and workout shorts and gave him a long look, wiping perspiration off her forehead with her arm.

“Quit the knucklehead act, Pete, you know what I mean,” she said, breathing hard. “We’ve come pretty far from where we were, haven’t we?”

“With our plans.”

“Promises.”

Nimec looked at her, nodded.

“So far,” he said, “so good.”

She smiled at him. He smiled back. And they held an easy silence for a while, attuned to each other’s thoughts, sharing a single recollection, these old friends whose unbreakable bond of trust had been forged through painful trial and costly triumph, who had together stood against more dangers than they wished to count, who would lay down their lives for each other without a moment’s hesitation.

It had been back in Antarctica, a world removed from where they were now in more ways than could be quantified merely in terms of time, distance, or even environment. An inexpressibly alien world. They’d stood outside Cold Corners, the UpLink research station on the ice where Megan had served as base commander, a few days after Nimec and his makeshift rescue team had freed two of its personnel, Alan Scarborough and Shevaun Bradley, from their hostage-takers in a subterranean network of outlawed uranium mines and rad dumps. In the wake of a cosmic disturbance, the southern aurora had been putting on a spectacular display, the heavens awash with color in the polar nightfall.

It was, as Megan put it to him, the solar storm’s last hurrah. And although forty-eight hours remained before Nimec would wing back to civilization aboard an LC-130 Hercules transport, leaving Megan behind for the duration of her winter-over stint, it was also when they had exchanged their true farewells, aware their remaining time together would be consumed by operational matters. There had been some preliminary banter, some gazing at the aurora overhead — the lights cascading in sheets of red and orange, wheeling like purple daisies, taking soaring, curling plunges through the atmosphere in peacock-green combers.

“So,” Megan had asked. This just moments after she’d informed him of having phoned the airbase in New Zealand to confirm his pickup. “What’s first for Pete Nimec when he gets home?”

“A call of his own,” he’d said. “And then a ride in his hot Corvette.”

“That call… would it be to a certain lady astronaut in Houston?”

The lady in question was Annie Caulfield. Once bitten by a failed marriage, twice shy of opening himself to another emotional entanglement, Nimec had foolishly let her slip away from him after the budding weeks of their relationship, and would almost surely never have gotten a second chance were it not for Megan’s intervention… a bit of artful romantic splicing that she dismissed to this day as having been unintentional, or at least blown out of all proportion.

Standing there layered in extreme-cold-weather garb, Nimec had given her a slow affirmative nod, and then jokingly wondered aloud why she hadn’t had any follow-up questions about his car. She’d just shrugged him off and told him she had limited areas of interest, or words to that effect, as if the question of his contacting Annie had been something tangential she’d just happened to wonder about on the spot.

“Okay,” he’d said, steam puffing from his nose and mouth. “Your turn. What’s next for Megan Breen?”

“A very dark and cold Antarctic winter,” she said. “After which she expects to turn the reins of Cold Corners over to her second in command, and resume practicing her fisticuffs with a certain trusted fight guru and best pal in San Jose.”

Nimec had kept staring up at the wondrous display in the sky.

“Six more months here for you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Seems like a long time.”

“Time enough to make myself the best Megan Breen I can be.”

“Sounds like an army recruitment commercial.”

“A line that works is a line that works, so why feel obliged to be original?”

Nimec had smiled under his balaclava and put his arm around her shoulder. Megan had put her arm around his waist. And they had stood with their eyes raised to the sky as the magical lights had soared defiantly through the falling gloom.

That was over a year and a half ago.

Since then Nimec and Annie had become husband and wife, and Megan had succeeded Roger Gordian as chief executive officer of UpLink International at the urging of no lesser personage than Gordian himself, these transitions unfolding, if not quite in an eye-blink, then faster than either of them would have ever supposed… had they been able to imagine them occurring at all.

Now Nimec realized he was still holding the heavy bag in his gym. He let go of it, stepped out from behind, and looked at Megan.

“Things’ve changed a lot,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “We’ve changed.”

“You like it where you are?”

Megan looked thoughtful.

“I’m not Gord. I can’t try to be. But I’m proud to have his confidence,” she said. “Every day’s another challenge, and if it wasn’t for Antarctica, I’m not sure I’d be prepared. But being there taught me patience. I think it helped teach me how to lead.” She smiled. “Those polies were characters. Especially the longtimers. You know what I mean, Pete.”

He smiled a little, too.

“Yeah,” he said, remembering. “I do.”

Megan hesitated.

“Volunteering to live in a freezer box for a year or more isn’t for your ordinary man or woman,” she said. “Re-upping for a second tour, or returning for several… you need to be a bird of a different color. It shames me to admit it, but my first impression when I got to Cold Corners was that I’d been shipped off to oversee a colony of two hundred misfits and rejects. That sense of things didn’t last long, though. It couldn’t. They showed too much heart. Too much goodness. I found them to be an inspiring bunch. True, courageous, resourceful, selfless.”