By 87F, I knew from the reading, even oxygen was being sent from the outer surface of the bodies into the interior. The three victims were convulsing with shivers. Any air or warmth would be fleeing to the core.
The father clapped his hands over his ears. He was probably trying to block out his jackhammering heartbeat.
The woman moaning, pleading. Let my son out, at least!
Tears streamed down the kid’s face, as he lifted both shaking arms to his parents. They could not help him. Fat, happy doctor took notes. Skinny doctor spoke to the boy, with a kind expression, as if reassuring him, as if any minute he’d give the kid a lollipop. Doctor with the limp just watched, left elbow cupped in right palm, right hand stroking chin. Hmm. Very interesting.
The soldiers remained expressionless, on the side.
At eighty-five degrees, freezing victims start to think they’re hot, not cold, as I now felt, lying in the snow. I had to get my parka off. I was burning up. But my fingers refused to grip the zipper head.
Someone was looking down at me. I gazed up. At an eighty-five degree body temperature, I knew, people dying of cold actively hallucinate.
The stranger said, in Jens’s voice, “I found your snowmobile, Joe. I gassed it up. Thanks for the loan.”
He added, “Feeling chilly, guy? Wish me luck. Off to Canada!”
The stranger — or hallucination, more likely — was gone.
TWENTY-THREE
Major Edward Nakamura, USMC, sat on the right-hand front seat of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter as it raced south by southwest out of Barrow. It flew low. The aurora borealis had ended and a thick cloud cover had returned. The lights of the copter shone in an arc below, sweeping across a white blanket of unrolling, undulating tundra. Major Nakamura tried to batten down the rage and fear and consider what he needed to do.
I hope that Joe is at that cabin.
But the whole attempt to get there had the heavy feeling of too late. Five heavily armed Rangers rode behind. Add Nakamura, that made six. He settled back and felt the fury as a knotting in his neck and jaw, and a line of tension that made his back into a steel rod. His teeth hurt. His eyes throbbed. He could not stop flashing back to the way that General Homza’s adjutant, Major Garreau, had refused to listen when Eddie had burst into headquarters, trying to reach the general.
“Your friend just attacked two Rangers,” Garreau had said.
“Just let me talk to General Homza for a minute! He’ll explain! We made a deal!”
“The general is busy. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a mass escape underway.”
Homza was out on the ice, Garreau said. Homza was personally watching the last few yards of open space closed up out there. Homza was directing his field commanders. And after that he was talking to Washington, discussing the situation with the secretary of defense himself.
“You’ll see him when he’s free,” Garreau said.
And then, when Homza had finally walked in, exhausted, and spotted Nakamura in the glass room, he’d raised his eyes inquiringly at the adjutant, cocked his head to listen to Eddie’s tale, and as it came out Homza had slumped and looked blank for some moments, turned to the adjutant and said, simply, “Give him what he needs.”
Eddie thinking, I need to take back the last hour that you just wasted. That’s what I need.
Why had Homza kept the arrangement with Joe and Eddie secret? Maybe he wanted credit. Maybe he was playing it safe.
Ten miles to go, Eddie Nakamura thought, eyeing the odometer, calculating distance backward since they’d lifted off from Barrow Airport, less than a half hour ago.
If Joe isn’t there, if I figured this wrong, if I misread what he was telling me, I have no idea where he is.
The pilot said, pointing, “Should be ahead!”
There would be no lights to announce the place. They flew by instrument. The spotlights swept over snow and for a moment some animal was there, scurrying away, wolverine, looked like, nature’s mass of warm-blooded fury, a fierce creature but one that knew when to run, not fight, knew when to play it smart against bad odds.
Eddie flashed to Homza’s face again, a quick flick to that countenance which, up until Eddie told the story, passed along Joe’s claims, had always seemed so sure. Eddie had seen the animation go out of it as the weight of realization hit. Homza probably knowing that he’d blown it. Knowing, if Joe was right, if Jens Erik was who they wanted, that many of the general’s steps until now had been blunders; the arrest of Valley Girl, the marginalization of Joe, the failure to realize a basic fact of the Arctic, that ice freezes, and then to not have enough troops to handle things when it did…
Game over, General, for you.
The pilot said, “That cabin has to be here. Where is it? We’re here, but everything looks like everything else. Wait! There.” He pointed.
And there it was, in the floodlights, a burned-out wreck of what had been some dilapidated shack. A wooden hut. An escape for researchers. Lake number nine’s shelter, now a smashed-up mass of barely smoking charcoal, hissing as the last embers were smothered up by blowing snow.
“I don’t see anyone,” the voice in Eddie’s earphone said.
“Circle.”
“I don’t see tracks.”
“You wouldn’t, in this wind. Circle, I said.”
The copter tilted and veered and they began a search pattern. Eddie’s heart beat loud and hard in his throat. Eddie heard the chatter of talk between the pilot and Barrow, and more talk coming in from Rangers out at sea, on ice, manning the new oceanside barrier. No one else could escape from Barrow anymore.
Big deal. At least eighty people did.
Now he was startled to spot the wreckage of a small plane, also burned, by the lakeside. He frowned, considered ordering the chopper to touch down, so they could continue looking for Joe on foot. If a plane was here, this was definitely where Joe had been heading.
The pilot said, “I don’t think anyone’s here.”
“Then who burned this place?”
“I don’t know. Whoever did it is gone.”
“Keep circling,” Eddie ordered. “I see smoke down there. This is fresh. Shut up and look for my friend.”
They saw the body two minutes later. It was a mound half buried in blowing snow, an hourglass-shaped lump of white that ended in something dark, like fabric, the half-removed snowsuit. Eddie was the first one out of the chopper. He kept his sidearm out. He knelt by Joe’s side.
“Uno?”
No movement. No breathing. No rise and fall of chest. No warmth.
“Oh, man. Uno!”
Eddie thumped on the chest to get the heart moving. He thumped hard. He couldn’t figure out why the thermal suit was unzipped. And the hands. No gloves. Hypothermia victims get confused and take off their clothes. Eddie unzipped the jumpsuit further, tore off his balaclava, lowered his ear to the bone-white chest, above Joe’s heart. Eddie listening. Eddie sitting up and spitting out an order that the Rangers stop making noise, crunching around in the snow.
He’s dead.
No, wait.
Do I hear something? Or do I just want to hear it?
Faintly, faintly, he heard it.
“Get him back! Get him in the chopper! Now, now now!!!”
The half-hour trip seemed like it took a month. Ranjay was waiting at the hospital, where they landed. Ranjay telling Eddie to stand back, let him get close. Ranjay saying, as they wheeled Joe in, that friends do not operate on friends. That friends make mistakes when they do. That doctors should never work on good friends.