Pandora's curse

He flipped on a flashlight, and glittering snow crystals reflected the light like jewels. For an illusionary moment he felt safely cocooned in the snow’s embrace. His breathing was ragged and his hands felt stiff and frozen. He’d dug his tunnel without his gloves. He donned them, massaging his fingers to get the blood flowing again.

“Can anyone hear me?” His voice was deadened by the weight of snow.

“Yes,” Anika replied. She sounded like she was many yards away but was doubtlessly much closer.

“Can you reach me?”

“Yes, I see your light through the snow.”

That was the last voice Mercer heard for the rest of the night, even when Anika bored her way to him and Ira and Erwin found them a short time later. A few feet over their heads, the millions of tons of air that had been blowing northward to form a massive high-pressure area came back in a screaming fury. The transition from a dead calm to a hurricane-force gale was measured in seconds. Snow and ice that had accumulated for years was whipped away, exposing rock that hadn’t seen the surface in decades, if ever.

The noise was a banshee cry that scraped along nerves like an electric current. Even though they were screened by layers of snow, it was still impossible to speak into the shrieking onslaught. Anika burrowed into Mercer’s arms, her body pressed to him as if he could somehow protect her if the wind found them. Ira was mashed to Mercer’s other side and by the other man’s movements Mercer could tell he was clutching one of the others. Marty was on the far side of Anika, lost in Hilda’s panicked embrace.

No power on earth could sustain the amount of energy the wind carried for very long, and after five minutes Mercer was certain the storm had expended itself. The sound seemed to be fading.

He could just barely hear Anika crying.

Then the true wind hit them. The first gust had merely been the prelude to the actual pitaraq. Driven by its own weight, the collapsing high-pressure front acted like water, pouring across the ice, ripping away everything in its path at a speed approaching a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Torn and tortured, the glacier’s surface came alive with raking barrages of snow and ice and rock. They could feel the ground shudder as large chunks of ice slammed into the wall of rock protecting them. Ice cracked like exploding artillery shells. Mercer pressed his gloves to his head, trying to save his hearing from the sound of ten thousand steam whistles erupting at once.

It went on without letup for an hour. Then two. Then three. Screaming just above them with a rapacious hunger unlike anything they had ever heard. Nestled below the surface, Mercer knew that if the wind found them he’d never know it. They’d be pulled from their burrow and tossed miles before the act could register. It would be a quick way to die, and by the fifth hour he was wondering if death would have been preferable to the relentless fear of surviving the storm.

Slowly, slowly it began to register that he could hear Anika again. She was mumbling, a prayer perhaps, but what mattered was that her voice could be heard above the storm’s screech. Mercer sagged in relief. He pulled her face from where it was buried under his arm. Her eyes were enormous, and yet he could see determination in them.

“The wind’s dying.”

She nodded in understanding, barely able to hear his voice. Her grip relaxed to a hug that in any other circumstance Mercer would have enjoyed. He reached across her and felt for Marty’s hand, giving him a reassuring squeeze before turning so he could speak to Ira.

“Think we can chance digging ourselves out?” the submariner asked before Mercer could pose the same question. “Erwin’s on the other side of me, and it turns out he’s claustrophobic. I don’t want to be here when he regains consciousness.”

“What happened to him?”

“He held on until about an hour ago and then he freaked out. I had to put a choke hold on him.”

Mercer was impressed by the unorthodox cure. “You learn that trick in the Navy?”

In the glare of the flashlight, Ira flashed a wry smile. “Actually I did. The current captain of the attack sub Tallahassee owes his career to me for getting him over his fear of cramped spaces.”

As the pitaraq subsided, Mercer and Ira began to claw at the surface of their den, compressing the fallen snow to the side or beneath themselves as they expanded the burrow. In ten minutes they could kneel upright, and in twenty they could stand, using the hollows where they’d waited out the storm for the waste snow.

“I feel like a goddamn mole,” Ira said.

“You go a few more days without a shower, you’ll smell like one too.” Mercer felt they were almost to the surface. “Any idea about Magnus?”

“I lost track shortly after the storm hit.”

“While I’m digging, see if you can find him.”

“You got it.”

By Mercer’s watch, it was a quarter of three in the morning when the tunnel face collapsed on him. He thrashed against the snow and suddenly found himself free. He stood, quickly shaking snow off himself like a dog after a water retrieve, not realizing how warm the tunnel had become until he tasted the crisp Arctic air once again. In the dim light of a hidden moon he looked around. It appeared as if nothing had changed but the drift that had entombed them was substantially deeper and longer than it had been. Other than that, the snow ripped from the ice had been replaced by identical snow from farther up the coast. Even in the face of such an awesome force as the pitaraq, Greenland remained virtually unchanged.

Erwin was the next to emerge, clawing his way out like a monster in a 1950s B movie, and then came the others. Marty was the last to crawl out of the hole. While Mercer dug, they had spent the past hour in a vain search for Magnus. Mercer feared the worst.

A hundred yards south was another outcropping of rock similar to the one that had protected them. Its windward side was cleaned of all traces of snow. Mercer fished a pair of binoculars from his pack, but there wasn’t enough light to discern details on the ridge’s shadowed face. He told Ira to reorganize the remaining gear and started out, swimming through the snow as much as walking. Twenty yards from the crest he saw what remained of the pilot.

The pitaraq had plucked Magnus from his tunnel like a raptor snatched its prey and slammed him into the rock. The wind had acted like a sandblaster, stripping him nearly naked and ripping away much of his skin so that frozen blood pooled around the crumpled body. From a distance, Mercer could see that the pilot’s skull had been flattened by the collision.

Returning to the tunnel entrance, where the others had gathered, Mercer told them that the pilot had been killed by the storm. They slept for the remainder of the night in the tunnel, and this time Mercer didn’t make any excuses for Anika not to rest in his arms. It felt too right not to let it happen. He drifted off with the memory of her lips on his cheek and her whispered “You saved six of us. Don’t think about the one you didn’t.” She knew he would take Magnus’s death personally.

They emerged from their underground shelter when the sky was still a shimmering canopy of stars. By the looks on their faces, many of them had already come to grips with Magnus’s loss. Rather than dwell on their failure, they took strength from knowing the icy island had thrown the worst it had at them and they had survived. They had another twelve miles to cover.

Just before they started out again, Marty took Mercer aside, his face a mask of shame. “I lost the satellite phone,” he mumbled. “I was testing to see if I could get a signal when the wind hit us. I managed to keep my backpack, but the phone… I’m sorry.”

Mercer remained silent. There was nothing he could do or say to change what had happened. They had just lost their only means of communication, and the odyssey facing them had become doubly difficult. It was no longer enough to evade Rath until he abandoned his search for the Pandora cavern. Now they would have to trek back to civilization again.

Once Anika had navigated them back to their original course, the pain-racked journey continued. Without cloud cover, the temperature dropped dramatically, and every breath was like inhaling acid. It froze tender lung tissue and caused nosebleeds if air was drawn through unprotected nostrils. Mercer had to continuously rotate his scarf when the fleece became clogged with frozen mucus and condensation.

“Where’s that global warming we were promised?” Ira grumbled at lunch.