She had removed her tinted goggles and her eyes met Mercer’s as the group began to pair off. The invitation was there but she had a duty to her patient. “Magnus, you’re with me.”
The pilot was ashen from the ordeal but managed a cocky grin. “I knew breaking my arm would have a benefit.”
Anika spoke to Hilda, and the chef began expanding her burrow so it would have room for the three of them together. She then whispered to Mercer, “I’ll make sure she doesn’t sneak over to you while you’re asleep.”
Even with the added snow insulation, the night was miserably cold. If not for their deep exhaustion, none of them would have slept. Sometime after midnight, the wind reversed directions and quickly stripped the snow cover from their dens. They scrambled to dig new ones on the other side of the low ridge. This time they hollowed out one large chamber and slept in a tight, uncomfortable ball.
At daybreak, it took several minutes to tunnel back to the surface through the two additional feet of snow that had accumulated above them. They continued onward after a meager breakfast of protein bars and snow melted on their single stove. The wind was driving at their backs. Behind them, their footprints vanished like a jetliner’s dissipating contrail, scoured away by the relentless gusts. Hour after hour they marched north, mindlessly following the person in front of them. It was a demonstration of faith in Anika as their navigator and in Mercer as their leader.
That was why he pushed himself the hardest, taking point when the snow became deeper or the trail more difficult. The responsibility was a weight the others didn’t carry, and for him it was far heavier than the overloaded pack on his shoulders.
At eleven they came across the first really tough terrain. The ice was broken with pressure ridges that had to be climbed and long crevasses measuring at least fifteen feet deep. While some could be jumped, others had to be crossed by descending into the glacier and climbing up the other side, with ropes slung to assist Magnus. Most polar expeditions carried lightweight ladders to cross such formations but Mercer and the others didn’t have the luxury. Their pace was cut in half.
Yet no one complained openly. Their frustration and pain were evident in every movement, but no one said they’d had enough. These five men and two women, strangers until a few days ago, were willing to suffer indescribable agony and deprivation for one another because the others were willing to do it for them.
Surrounded by ice and bitter cold, few of them expected the raging thirst they felt. Not only were they sweating from the exertion, dangerous in itself, but every breath expended precious fluids because the air was desert dry, devoid of all but a trace of humidity. They kept canteens close to their bodies to prevent them from freezing, and still they had to stop every couple of hours to boil snow to replenish them. When they found shelter that evening, an hour later than the first night on the ice, Mercer estimated they hadn’t yet covered the second third of their trip.
Erwin Puhl seemed to be suffering the most from the exposure. The wind had found a chink in his face mask so the tops of his cheeks were showing frostbite. When Anika had him remove his boots, several toes were an unnatural pale white.
“Don’t play hero,” she said angrily as she began to work on him. “If your feet freeze, call a halt to warm them again. If you get severely frostbitten, we won’t be able to carry you.”
“But our pace is too slow as it is,” Erwin countered through gritted teeth as pain splintered his warming toes. “I won’t be the one to let the others down.”
“You will if we have to leave you,” Anika snapped as she rubbed the blood into his feet.
High above, the clouds that had hidden the sky for two days finally cleared. The night exploded in a dazzling display of northern lights, dancing curtains in an otherworldly light show. On the scientific level, Mercer knew the ribbons of color were a result of the solar wind striking certain molecules in the atmosphere — red for nitrogen, violet for ionized nitrogen, and green for oxygen — but it was the aesthetics of the borealis that made him gape with the others. The aurora was visceral, pulsing and seemingly alive.
They watched the show for five minutes before Mercer realized the wind had died.
The pitaraq is a gravity-driven wind. It starts from south and then there is calm. You have about ten minutes to find shelter. It was Igor Bulgarin’s voice Mercer heard in his head.
“Everybody, find cover! Now!” Mercer was in motion even as he spoke.
Like the previous night when the wind had shifted, their hideouts would be on the wrong side of a ridge when the pitaraq struck. Mercer dumped the food he was cooking, cinched his pack, and lunged over the rocky crest. He tumbled down the other side until he landed in deep snow. Quickly he began to dig, scooping out armfuls of snow in a frantic race. A few seconds later, the others joined him. Mercer didn’t bother to explain his actions. His frenzied digging was enough to galvanize them. They tunneled into the snow, burrowing toward the protection of the rocks. Mercer had no way to judge how deep they needed to be. Even when he heard a gentle whisper of wind whistling across the entrance to his tunnel he continued mining snow, trying to pack it behind him as he dug downward.
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.