Both men nodded, smiling.
Ketchum said, “I’ll defer to Richard on that.”
Frye said, “I think somebody just cooked them up because we get along well as a team.”
Woods smiled back at them, wondered again if they were gay.
“Well, that’s it, fellows, thank you for coming together this afternoon,” he said.
“Any time,” Ketchum said.
“Our pleasure,” Frye said.
I bet, Woods thought.
And that was finally a wrap.
They had made camp in a saddle between two immense glaciers, pitching their dome tents against the eastern slope, camouflaging their snowmobiles with the drop taken from the storage depot.
Perched on a lower ledge, a group of skuas had watched them with black unblinking eyes.
Five hours later the birds still had not moved. The team leader glanced at them as he emerged from his tent, stepping through its door flap into the cold.
They merely stared back.
He zipped the flap shut and strode away from the ledge in his insulated boots, then stopped with his binoculars raised to the southwestern sky.
He did not like what he saw. A fleet of saucer-shaped lenticular clouds had appeared in the distance, climbing over the polar plateau on a turbulent wave of air. Their bases were shaded deep blue, their curved foaming tops a lighter grayish color.
He angled the glasses toward the ground. Far down the narrow cleft through which his men had ridden, the world was vague, without contrast, its outlines melting into hazy softness.
He rubbed the steam from his breath off their lenses, but nothing changed.
Soft, he thought. Too soft.
He didn’t like it at all. Before leaving his tent, he had checked the latest meteorological data on his rugged handheld field computer, accessing it over the terminal’s wireless Internet connection, comparing the information from several portal sites — base forecasts, infrared maps from orbiting hemispheric satellites, NOAA synoptic charts, scattered automatic weather stations. Updated at intervals of between ten and thirty minutes, the readings were consistently ominous. A severe gale was whipping toward the coast of Victoria Land, accreting momentum as it neared the Ross Sea and ice shelf. McMurdo had already assigned it a Condition II classification: winds in excess of 50 knots, a chill factor of at least minus-60F, visibility no better than a quarter of a mile, and perhaps as low as a hundred yards.
Affairs were about to pass largely out of his control, but he would press on with the mission regardless. It was his responsibility, no more, no less.
He lowered his binoculars and started back toward the tents. Though he’d raised his neck gaiter to the bridge of his nose, the crescent birthmark on his cheek already burned from the extreme cold. It was a constant bother to him here, as it had been during his alpine training with the Stern unit of the Swiss Militärpolizei. For a man who had spent most of his life in places where warmth was scarce, this was an absurdity of sorts, a strange and uncommon jest that matched the rareness of his stigma. Yet he had long since come to abide it. In the Jura Mountain farming village of his boyhood, he had suffered merciless slashes of pain throughout the endless winter stretches. Only his shame over the freak blemish to his appearance had brought a harsher sting.
Kind des Mondes, his mother had called him as far back as he could remember. A child of the moon. It had not been a name kindly used. There had been precious little kindness in any of his mother’s words, but he had finally taught himself that didn’t matter. Emotions always betrayed. Better to steel the backbone and toughen the gut than be distracted by them.
At his orders now, the men were quick to break camp and stow their bedrolls and folded tents aboard their snowmobiles. The gathering of birds continued to study them from their perch, barely curious, simply watching because of their nearness. He looked at the creatures as he waited, lifted a chunk of ice off the ground, and suddenly snapped it at them with a hard overhand throw.
It struck the ledge with a crack, breaking to pieces. The birds jumped and fluttered in surprise, scolded him indignantly, but did not take flight.
He gave them a slight nod of appreciation.
“Eine gute Gesellschaft,” he said, turning from the ledge.
They had been good enough company in their way.
Minutes later he mounted his snowmobile, throttled up its engine, and went speeding on across the ice toward his goal, the rest of his band traveling close behind him.
“What I need is to get down low into the pass,” Nimec was saying. Soon after returning to base from the helipad, he’d steered Russ Granger to a partitioned workstation where a downscaled, black-and-white version of Megan’s Dry Valley contour map was spread across the desk, circles drawn with colored pencils substituting for the pins she’d used to mark its key sites. “I want to see it with my own eyes.”
Granger nodded from the chair beside him.
“Understood,” he said. “I can take us pretty far in at its wider sections.”
Nimec’s forefinger bull’s-eyed the circle indicating the coordinates of Scout IV’s final transmission, and the presumable outer limit of the recovery team’s search area. “What about here?”
Granger shook his head.
“Your map doesn’t convey how rough it is around the notch,” he said. That much was absolutely true. “The terrain’s bad enough. But our real problem is katabatic wind pouring straight down the notch’s lee sides. The lower it gets, the harder gravity presses on it, and the faster it blows. You fly near ground level, it’s suicidal. Like riding a toy raft through heavy rapids.”
“What’s the best you can do, as far as that goes?”
Granger traced a path with his hand. “We’ll swing around the notch, dip into Wright Valley just to its south.”
Nimec thought a moment, then grunted his acceptance.
“A couple of things, though,” Granger said. “It’s obvious we have to work around this storm that’s on the way. I don’t think it’ll be bad enough to force evacs out of any NSF field camps. But I’ll have to make some trips over to them, check that the personnel are stockpiled to last it out.”
“Any reason why I can’t come along? We could shoot right over Bull Pass after your last hop.”
Granger had anticipated the question. He pretended to think through an answer that had been readied well beforehand.
“It’d be fine with me,” he said. “But we’d need to head out together right away, so I can have time for everything. Figure you’d be gone from here at least twenty-four hours. It’s either that or wait until the blow’s over—”
Nimec waved an abortive hand in the air.
“Then we go now,” he said. “Otherwise, we could be talking about a holdup of almost a week. We couldn’t afford that kind of delay under any circumstances. But the bad weather puts us in a vise. If our people are still alive out there, they need to be pulled out.”
Granger nodded again. That was definitely what he’d figured the UpLink security chief would say. It was also very much what he had wanted Nimec to say. The sooner they were up and out of Cold Corners, the better. He couldn’t know precisely when the sabotage squad would show, or how their progress would be affected by the storm. He was, however, positive that Burkhart wouldn’t quit on his mission. It just wasn’t in his hardwiring.