“Kkkkkkkkk would you like weather forecasting, Roberts?”
“Yes, Randi, yes! Affirmative, roger, over!”
“Roberts, repeat message, I say, would you like weather forecasting here, over!”
“Yes, Mac Coms! Yes! Yes! Roger! Affirmative! Roger ro-ger ro-ger!”
“I can’t read you guys anymore, but I’m gonna switch you over to weather forecasting, Roberts. Listen are you aware that there is something wrong with your radio, over?”
Carlos waved the handset in the air over his head, eyes bugging out. Then he shouted into it, “Roger, Mac Corns, we are aware of that! Over!”
“Listen Roberts, can you call back in half an hour? Weather is out to lunch right now, and I’m getting a kkkkkkkkkkkk.”
“Roger, Mac Coms! We will try to call back in half an hour, but we are going to leave for Shackleton now! Over!”
“Excuse me, Roberts, what did you say, over?”
“We will STAND BY and call back in HALF AN HOUR. Over.”
“Roberts, I’m not reading you anymore. Please stand by, over.”
“Okay, God damn it! Roger! We will stand by!” Carlos began to laugh maniacally.
“Kkkkkkkkkkkkk what?”
“No, what’s on second!” Carlos shouted. “Who’s on first!”
“What?”
“No! What’s on second! Who’s on first!”
“What? Oh! Oh, ha ha ha! Very funny, Roberts! Tell you what, you keep on doing your Abbott and Costello by yourself, I gotta go attend to the Three Stooges now! Call back in half an hour, God damn it, over and out!”
Carlos slammed the radio off and shook the handpiece like he wanted to smash it to pieces, still laughing. “Ah, ha ha ha! We used to laugh ourselves sick at that when we were kids. It was the best English lesson we ever had. I don’t know’s on third!” he shouted at the handset.
He looked around at the others. “Come on, let’s go. Shackleton Camp here we come.”
Wade was helping Carlos and X and the others to secure everything in the hovercraft for the trip down to Shackleton Camp when his wrist phone beeped. He jumped as if shot, and ran up the short set of stairs to the aft cabin to get some quiet and reduce interference, then clicked the receive button.
“Hello!”
“Wade, Wade, is that you?”
“It’s me, Phil! Where are you?”
“Never mind where I am Wade, where are you! What’s going on down there?”
“Well, let’s see, there’s been an attack on the oil camp I was visiting, and we’re now at the oil group’s base camp on Roberts Massif, top of the Shackleton Glacier, and that base has also been destroyed, so we’re about to take a hovercraft down to NSF’s Shackleton Glacier Camp, to be flown back to McMurdo.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No Phil, listen, what have you heard, what’s happening?”
“Well I don’t have the full story yet, I got a call from John and he told me that satellite communications to Antarctica had been interrupted and there were no reports coming out, but clearly something was wrong, and at that point I started calling you and got no reply! I got no reply!”
“I know.”
“But now I’m calling you using a Pentagon code I got, they must have some satellites of their own up there that are a little bit more reliable, but they don’t like to share them. I had to get John to contact Andy right in the Pentagon to get the codes, but it seems like they’re working pretty well.”
“Better than our radio contact with McMurdo, that’s for sure. Could you patch me in to McMurdo, do you think?”
“Sure, I can try. Just a second.”
The line went dead.
“Hey!” Wade said, punching Phil’s button on his phone. No answer. The same blank he had gotten since the moment they saw the smoke rise over Mohn Station. “God damn it.”
“What’s wrong?” It was Val, up to see what had happened.
“I just had a talk on the phone with Phil Chase. He was using a military satellite link, and said he would patch me to McMurdo.”
“Must not have worked. We’re almost ready to go here.” She leaned against the seat back next to him, let out a deep breath.
“You must be tired,” Wade said.
“No, not tired exactly.”
“Worried about your group. That guy who’s sick.” She nodded, then shook her head. “I knew there was something wrong with him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He had a broken collarbone and he didn’t tell me.”
“Some people are like that. He may not have known exactly what was wrong, anyway. If he was stunned.”
“Maybe not,” she said somberly, thinking it over.
“Over in the Dry Valleys, it looked like he was going to be a …”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“So did it come to anything, I mean get difficult? Was he mad at you?”
“Maybe.”
“Well. So he might have been punishing you. But that’s his problem, really. Nothing you can do about that.”
“No, I know. But I don’t want him to die on me.”
Wade risked putting a hand to her arm, very gently. “Carlos seemed to think he was just shook up, and cold. We’ll get him down to Shackleton Camp and back to McMurdo, and he’ll be okay. Besides he’s too convinced of his own importance to let himself die, right?”
A small smile. She glanced at him. They went downstairs to the passenger compartment. “Keep trying to get your senator,” Val reminded him.
“Oh yeah,” Wade said, staring at his wrist phone. “I’ll set it on repeat call. It’ll try for me once a minute.”
white sky
blue ice
They got the hovercraft off with only that same minor thump of the tub; X suspected a weak lift fan at the left rear, though Carlos gave him a dubious glance, as if he might be doing something wrong with the lifters. Whatever; they were up and moving over the ice, and there was no reason to look back.
At first the hovercraft was dreamlike in its smoothness, and X and Carlos grinned at each other. Then they left the flattened road out to Mohn camp and ventured onto the sastrugi-covered white firn of the virgin glacier. Out here the craft rocked a little, this way then that, as air blew out from under the skirt at different points depending on what kind of deformations they were floating over. Nevertheless it was a pretty smooth ride compared to say a snowmobile, and as Carlos cautiously notched up the prop throttle they found that the faster they went, the smoother it got. Soon they roared smoothly over the ice, first outward from Fluted Peak, then around Roberts Massif on its east side.
As X had noted from the air on his journey in, the massif stuck in the head of the Shackleton Glacier and nearly plugged it; it was like a rock island in the midst of rapids falling out of a lake into a river. The narrow gap on the west side, between Misery Peak and Dismal Buttress, was shattered blue ice from wall to wall, entirely unpassable. So their only choice was to go around the eastern side of Roberts, where a wider ice stream called the Zaneveld Glacier made a smooth curving drop into a confluence with the western stream and the Shackleton proper. The Zaneveld was also crevassed pretty heavily in places, but there were smooth unbroken ramps that descended from one level section to the next, and Carlos said Geraldo and German had taken the hovercraft up and down the route they had worked out several times.
As they moved away from Roberts, out to a kind of ice causeway running smoothly between two crevassed sinks, they noted that the hovercraft moved somewhat like a plane in flight, in that it was frequently struck on the side by the wind, so that the bow of the craft yawed and was not always pointed exactly the same way that the craft was moving, skidding along at a bit of an angle. And as usual the wind was strong out here, beginning its katabatic drop down the glacier to the sea. The leeway they were sustaining from the force of this wind was blowing them into a crevasse sink on their right, not to any great extent, but Carlos turned left a bit more to counteract it. This did little but increase their yaw to that side.