Hesitantly they walked toward the wreckage. Thankfully, there were no bodies in sight; strange but true; the main building and machine shops were smashed open to their inspection, and it appeared they must have been empty when they were blown apart, for there was no sign of anyone.
Despite this good news Carlos hopped in a rage beside what remained of the main building, literally shaking his fist, cursing violently, “Hijo de puta” and so forth—the most sulfurous Spanish Wade had ever heard. X walked around saying, “Where is everybody? Where is everybody? There’s no one here. That’s very weird. How could there be no one here? Where did they all go? Oh God, I hope they’re not under the wall—” He went to his knees, looked under one of the larger fragments of the main building.
He stood again. The three of them looked at each other. There was no one there. It seemed to Wade that the buildings must have been deserted at the moment of impact. Perhaps people had had time to run? But then where were they now?
“It’s very weird there’s no one here,” X said to Wade. “It’s like when I was ripped off on the SPOT train. Some kind of, I dunno. Some kind of group out here.”
“The ones who dug out Hillary’s Weasel?” Wade wondered. “Or the ones salvaging the old Pole station?”
X stopped pacing. “There are people salvaging the old Pole station?”
“Yes.”
“I thought they still used that for storage.”
“Not the old Pole station. The old old Pole station.”
X stared at him. “Wow,” he said.
The three of them wandered together to the downed drilling rig, none of them willing to get very far from the other two. At the foot of the collapsed structure was a mass of blasted and melted metal, distorted shapes under the fallen superstructure. No sign of methane hydrate leakage, of course. No doubt the explosion had capped the hole down there somewhere. Carlos cursed some more. “This never would have happened, never never never, it was safe, we made it safe, everything was backed up, nothing could go wrong, they had to blow it up to make this happen, those hijos de putas,” hopping in place, weeping, shouting, roaring. “I live here, I born here, this is my country I know how to take care of it, I kill these people these terrorists, I kill them kill them kill them!”
Wade and X nodded, neutral but sympathetic.
“How are we going to get home?” X asked.
“Home?” Wade said.
“McMurdo. Or even Roberts.”
“Call in a helo,” Wade said. “Or that hovercraft you mentioned.”
X nodded. “But what if the same thing happened to Roberts?”
Wade felt himself blinking in the frigid cold. He hadn’t thought of that.
X shrugged. “Could have happened.”
Wade tapped Chase’s phone number on his wrist. Might as well get help from the top.
But there was no connection. Quickly he tapped through his other regular numbers, the operator, everything. All connections were down. He felt a little shiver that had nothing to do with the cold, that was not corporeal at all. A metaphysical shudder, an informational shudder. The shutdown of one of his senses.
“The phones aren’t working,” he said to the others.
Carlos ended his muttering abruptly. “Really?”
He hurried to his Skidoo and took a briefcase-sized radio from the box behind the seat. He set it on the seat and strung out the antenna lines in a broad V, then plugged together several of the miniature colored plugs that appeared every couple of feet in the antenna wire. He turned on the control console and began calling out.
First Roberts; static only. Then McMurdo directly.
Again, nothing but static.
“Madre.” Carlos looked at X and Wade. “They seem to have put out Mac Town radio. And the satellites.”
He moved the antenna lines so that the broad V they made faced a different direction, changed some plugs, tried again on a different channel. “Ah. At least that sounds like the usual static. But the peninsula is too far for this thing. I can almost hear them, but they will not hear us.” Nevertheless he tried transmitting again, in Spanish then English. No response.
The three men looked at each other, their ski masks and sunglasses hiding their expressions. To Wade the snowmobiles now looked like fat motorbikes, their spare gas cannisters like gallon milk containers from the grocery store. Really inadequate to the task. Carlos was doing calculations on his wrist. “If we load the Skidoos to their maximum, we will have enough fuel to get to Roberts. Or if we run out we’ll be just a few kilometers away, and we can walk on in.”
He looked at the other two.
X shrugged. “Let’s get going.”
He and Carlos took short shovels from their Skidoo boxes and went to a spot in the snow at some distance from the camp. Here Carlos had a cache of emergency gear, buried for use in case of a station fire. “I was in a Jamesway once that caught fire and burned to the ice in seven minutes. Seven minutes! If we hadn’t had kitchen knives under our beds to cut through the wall, we wouldn’t have made it. But once you get out, you need something else to replace the shelter, or you die of cold rather than hot. I guess that’s an improvement, fucking bastards.”
In the wreckage X found one of the little hand pumps they used to transfer fuel from fifty-five-gallon steel drums into the vehicles and Skidoos. He brought it over and stuck one hose in a fuel cannister Carlos had pulled from the buried cache, the other into the gas tanks of the snowmobiles, and cranked the pump handle until the cannister was empty. Meanwhile Carlos strapped onto the Skidoos tent, stove, food bags, skis, crampons and so on.
“Nice to have this stuff,” Wade observed.
Carlos nodded. “This is the fourth time I’ve had to use an emergency bag. Every time it reminds you never to forget.”
Before they left Carlos tried the radio one last time. Again no answers, on any band. Lots of static. “What is going on?” he exclaimed.
The other two took this as a rhetorical question and pulled on their bear claws, Wade checking his watch one last time before he did. It was three hours since they had seen the explosion; Wade would have guessed forty-five minutes. They pull-started the Skidoos, and took one last look back at the camp; but behind masks and sunglasses Wade could see nothing of the others’ expressions.
Off they went on the snowmobiles.
cobalt sky
turquoise ice
Back in the sunlight Val had everyone follow her up the rest of the ramp, which—of course—widened and levelled off and became as easy as anyone could have asked, until they were up on the white mass of firn-covered ice just to the south of the Hansen Shoulder; on the polar cap, in other words. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.
She had the others sit down on rocks that had fallen off the Shoulder onto the ice, and walked a few meters away and got on the wrist to call Mac Town and get an SAR started. It was embarrassing, but there was no way out of it.
She punched the channel codes and waited, angry, worried, and ashamed. She ought not to have let it come to this. Accidents happened, of course. But it was her job to make sure no accident could hurt them very much. She ought not to have let Jack coerce her into taking the Amundsen route, given the changed nature of the glacier’s head. She ought not to have ventured under that ice block. Both had been stupid; now it, along with the South Georgia disaster, would be what got her into the thin history of Antarctica, which like the history of climbing was just a list of expeditions, with special attention given to firsts and fiascos. Stupid!