“There should be an autopsy and a medical examiner’s report by now,” Bowman said.
“I thought so, too. So I called a man at my own level over there. Director of Antarctic Programs. He didn’t know how she’d died, either. I explained my interest and asked if he could look into it. Very nice fellow. He agreed. I made an appointment to see him tomorrow.”
“He wouldn’t just send a copy of whatever he found?”
Barnard chuckled. “He’s a bureaucrat. The normal response to such a request would be to forget about it for a week or two, then hand it off to some subordinate. Bureaucrats learn never to do anything too quickly, because it will be expected of them next time.”
“So what happens now?”
“It’s like fencing. Can be fun if you understand the rules and weapons. I pointed out that since neither of us knew what happened, it would be better to meet in person. Possible discretion required, et cetera. Slow response is one thing; no response is another.”
“You put him in a corner.”
“I figured if he was blowing smoke about getting the information, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to meet. This gives him a little incentive to really find something.”
“Keep that kind of thing up and I might have to recruit you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. But my ops days are over.”
Bowman’s expression hardened. “I don’t like this.”
“Me, neither. Less and less, in fact.”
“Hallie’s supposed to fly out of there before the station shuts down for winterover, right?” Bowman asked.
“Yes. After the last flight, it’s totally isolated for eight solid months.”
“So if anything happened and she missed that flight …”
“It would be a long winter. For all of us.”
Bowman stood. “Thanks for bringing me in, Don. I’ll look for that report.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Let me know when you get through to her. I’ll keep trying, myself.”
Barnard had been worried not to hear from Hallie but shocked to learn that Bowman hadn’t, either. He knew that the two had grown close over the past year, and he knew, as well, that neither was the kind who did that easily. He had watched the relationship change Hallie, rounding edges, softening points. He wasn’t sure she’d noticed the evolution herself. Barnard loved Hallie, but that did not keep him from seeing her as she was: an excellent scientist and a lovely young woman, but one who had grown up with two older brothers in an Army family. A colleague of Barnard’s had once commented on the “porcupine suit” she sometimes wore.
Barnard stared out a window. Now that he and Bowman had talked, Barnard was feeling the edge of an old dread that rarely visited him these days but slept always in some deep place, ready to wake at the right disturbance. It had come back with him from Vietnam, where night after night he had led soldiers even younger than himself out into the black jungle, knowing with absolute certainty that on this patrol, or the next, or the next, some of them would not come back alive.
18
“Six more degrees,” said Graeter, “and we wouldn’t be out here.”
They were standing in front of the station. It was close to one P.M. and pitch-dark.
“Why is that?”
“It’s called Condition One. Eighty and colder, no one egresses.” From his parka he took a plastic bag. “Watch this.” From the bag he took a chicken leg. He poked it with a mitten. “Raw, right? Soft?”
She nodded.
He stood for twenty seconds, then rapped the chicken on a metal stair rail. The leg shattered like a lightbulb. “See?”
“I saw. What is this, fourth-grade science?”
“Showing beats telling. Especially with someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
“I detect a certain disdain for authority.”
“ ‘The wisest have the most authority,’ ” she said, quoting.
“Socrates, right? If he was so wise, why’d he drink the Kool-Aid?”
“Plato said the thing about authority. Didn’t they teach philosophy at Annapolis?”
He squinted at her. “How come a microbiologist knows philosophers?”
“Nothing to do with microbiology. I know about authority from my father. He knew about philosophers.”
“An ivory tower family,” Graeter said. “Should have guessed.”
So he didn’t really look at my file, she thought. In any case, he was wrong about her family. She started to correct him, then let it go. She liked him better wrong.
They walked to a row of yellow snowmobiles. Before getting on one, he looked into a red box bolted onto its rear deck, behind the passenger seat. Hallie remembered that there had been one on Bacon’s snowmo, too.
“What’s that?”
“Emergency kit. These snowmos go out to field camps all the time. Some are miles away. Spare lights, first aid, flares, the usual stuff. SORs require operators to check their kits before using the snowmo. Ready?”
Hallie straddled the seat, and the snowmo jumped forward before she could answer.
Hallie understood that she might be going for a ride with Emily’s killer. That she might have been in the Underground with him, too. She had zipped a dive knife into a pocket of her parka. As they drove away from the station, she touched that pocket. With so many layers on her hands, it took a few seconds of fumbling, but then she hit it. The long, sharp knife was there.
After they’d gone a half mile, the headlight illuminated rows of what looked like giant black sausages lined up on the snow. She tapped Graeter on the shoulder, pointed, and he stopped.
“What are those?” she asked.
“Fuel bladders. Two thousand gallons each, hauled on sleds all the way from McMurdo. Eight hundred miles, six weeks in tractor caravans at five miles an hour. Now, there’s some tough people.”
“Can’t fly it in?”
“Burns up more than they bring. Hauling over ice is slower but lots cheaper.”
He turned right, running parallel to the station. From the skin out, Hallie was wearing regular underwear, lightweight long underwear, expedition-weight long underwear, a wool shirt, fleece pants and jacket, insulated coveralls, and the special Antarctic parka they called Big Red. On her feet, three pairs of socks, thermal boot liners, and bulbous white bunny boots. Silk glove liners, fleece gloves, wool mittens, and down-filled overmitts. Fleece neck gaiter, face mask, down-filled, fur-ruffed hood. A Petzl headlamp. And still her toes and fingers were already starting to go numb.
After a few more minutes, Graeter stopped. She glanced back over her shoulder. The station looked very far away.
“Welcome to the Dark Sector,” he said. “They use radio telescopes and neutrino catchers and cosmic ray detectors here. This area extends several miles out from the station limits. It has to be free of light and electromagnetic interference.”
“What’s that?” She was pointing to something that looked like a giant lunar landing module with a tall silver silo on each side. The silos were one hundred feet from the main structure and connected to it by metal tubes extending from near their tops.
“That is Operation IceCube,” Graeter said. “Drillers were sinking shafts a mile deep all around that and putting neutrino sensors down into them. To the left there is the dive shed, where you’ll be working. They built it over the shaft that struck water.”
“Good to know,” she said. “Hey. It is cold.”
“White Death, we call it,” Graeter said. “Sucks heat, not blood. Your brain is the first organ affected. You can be half gone before you know what’s happening.”
A huge Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, sparkling with red and yellow and white lights, came roaring and clanking off to their right, heading for the iceway. In the immaculate air, its headlight beams were like shafts of crystal.