The pitaraq had plucked Magnus from his tunnel like a raptor snatched its prey and slammed him into the rock. The wind had acted like a sandblaster, stripping him nearly naked and ripping away much of his skin so that frozen blood pooled around the crumpled body. From a distance, Mercer could see that the pilot’s skull had been flattened by the collision.
Returning to the tunnel entrance, where the others had gathered, Mercer told them that the pilot had been killed by the storm. They slept for the remainder of the night in the tunnel, and this time Mercer didn’t make any excuses for Anika not to rest in his arms. It felt too right not to let it happen. He drifted off with the memory of her lips on his cheek and her whispered “You saved six of us. Don’t think about the one you didn’t.” She knew he would take Magnus’s death personally.
They emerged from their underground shelter when the sky was still a shimmering canopy of stars. By the looks on their faces, many of them had already come to grips with Magnus’s loss. Rather than dwell on their failure, they took strength from knowing the icy island had thrown the worst it had at them and they had survived. They had another twelve miles to cover.
Just before they started out again, Marty took Mercer aside, his face a mask of shame. “I lost the satellite phone,” he mumbled. “I was testing to see if I could get a signal when the wind hit us. I managed to keep my backpack, but the phone… I’m sorry.”
Mercer remained silent. There was nothing he could do or say to change what had happened. They had just lost their only means of communication, and the odyssey facing them had become doubly difficult. It was no longer enough to evade Rath until he abandoned his search for the Pandora cavern. Now they would have to trek back to civilization again.
Once Anika had navigated them back to their original course, the pain-racked journey continued. Without cloud cover, the temperature dropped dramatically, and every breath was like inhaling acid. It froze tender lung tissue and caused nosebleeds if air was drawn through unprotected nostrils. Mercer had to continuously rotate his scarf when the fleece became clogged with frozen mucus and condensation.
“Where’s that global warming we were promised?” Ira grumbled at lunch.
The terrain eased some, quickening their pace, but it took its toll. Legs that seemed fresh following a break began aching after only a few steps and they constantly had to adjust their clothing as frigid air found tiny entrances, piercing right to the flesh before they could recover themselves. Urinating was done only when absolutely necessary. The women suffered the most during the act but the men made a bigger deal out of it. Ira had the best line when he described the process as making a “dickcicle.”
His humor and positive outlook helped keep the exhaustion at bay.
At four that afternoon, Mercer’s estimate put the air shaft a half mile ahead. He could see that their march had led them to the mountains thrusting through the glacier at the head of the fjord he’d seen from the cockpit of the DC-3. The mountains — bald round hills really — were a thousand feet high and had been so ravaged by glacial movement that their domed sides were riven with scars. He was looking to the west, toward the interior of Greenland, to survey the surroundings, when he suddenly dropped flat to the snow, screaming at the others to do the same.
If the sky hadn’t been free of clouds, he never would have seen the distant speck. It was the rotor-stat plying its way serenely northward. Knowing the clarity of polar optics, he guessed the dirigible was five miles away.
“Bury yourselves!” Like a beached seal, Mercer paddled snow onto his back, struggling to camouflage his red parka and green pack. His heart pounded painfully, and he took a bite of snow to moisten his dry mouth. Jesus, that was close.
He peered over his shoulder and saw the team had followed him without question. In seconds they were nothing more than six innocuous-looking lumps in the snow. He couldn’t chance reaching for his binoculars because the sun’s reflection off the lens would flash like a beacon. Since the airship was continuing past his estimated position for the air shaft, Mercer’s earlier opinion that Rath didn’t have its exact location was true. They were moving their secondary base too far north. This would buy Mercer the time they desperately needed.
“Be thankful the weather has been so rotten,” he said when the airship vanished around a promontory. “It’s delayed them as much as it has us.”
“How much time do you think we have?” Anika asked, brushing snow off his back.
“I don’t know,” Mercer replied absently, watching the spot where the rotor-stat had disappeared. “Not as much as I’d like.”
“Figure they’ll bring three Sno-Cats up here and at least one building,” Ira said. “Four round-trips, six hours flight time, an hour loading. That’s a little over twenty-four hours if they fly around the clock.”
“Or half that if they’d already moved stuff before the pitaraq,” Mercer added.
With a renewed urgency, they continued walking. Mercer had the point and pushed at a brutal pace. His legs burned from the strain of clearing a path for his people, and yet he maintained a gait not much slower than a trot. He kept watch for the rotor-stat and studied the rock formations as he moved. The mountains were like a string of beads impeding the glacier from reaching the sea, and as they rounded one more in the long line, a wicked smile split Mercer’s chapped lips.
“Anika, you still have that map?”
“Yes.”
“Take a look at it and tell me what you see above the X.”
“Looks like the profile of a face. A face with a big nose.”
“Kind of like the one on the side of that mountain up there?” Mercer pointed at a natural design cut into the stone by aeons of erosion. It looked remarkably like a human face in profile. The lips were out of proportion, but the nose was unmistakable, as were the deep-set eyes. The formation loomed like a sentinel high above the ice.
“My God,” she breathed.
“The last piece of the puzzle.” Mercer grinned. “I wondered about that drawing when I first saw it. Now I get it. It was the laborer’s way of telling us exactly where to look.”
“With a little imagination you can even think the face up there is Jewish.”
“If you’re referring to the nose, that’s an ugly stereotype.”
“I’m Jewish. It’s okay. You ought to see the beak on my grandfather.” She smiled up at him. “You think the air shaft is beneath the face?”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Before Mercer let them proceed, he spent a few minutes with the Geiger counter checking for radiation. As they followed far behind him, he kept his eyes on the monitor, fearful that the counter would peg over at any second. So far it was giving just faint chirps of background radiation.
A hundred yards from the near-vertical mountain, the Geiger began to tick a little more rapidly. Mercer held up his hand to halt the others and paused to see how far the readings would go. The level was slightly higher than he’d encountered in the C-97 but a few weeks’ worth of exposure would be below the danger level provided no one got X-rayed for a while.
There were certain fears Mercer couldn’t purge from his brain, and radiation was one of them. He hated it. It reminded him of firedamp gas in coal mines, invisible in its touch and insidious in its death. There was no defense except avoidance.