I said, “Major Pettit?”
“I had a guy there all the time.”
“One guard?” I accused, which was unfair, because one should be enough. But I wasn’t going to apologize, especially not to the man sleeping with my ex-wife.
“Yes, sir. One.”
Del Grazo’s mouth was a tight line of fury. “We’ll ask the captain to question everyone who worked in the hangar.”
Eddie shook his head. “Anyone could put on a suit and look like he belonged to that crew.”
“Or she belonged,” added Dr. Vleska.
Major Pettit looked around at the faces around us: Karen’s stiff, Sachs’s tense, the driver’s fearful, me trying to stay bland, as if I maintained hearty confidence. Eddie just voiced what we were all probably thinking.
“Is the person who did it on the ship? Or with us now?”
“Get ready to walk,” I said.
Lieutenant Del Grazo radioed back, asking Captain DeBlieu to order a review of all security tapes made over the past few days of the helicopter hangar.
“Maybe we’ll see something.”
Eddie said morosely, “Yeah, twenty people dressed exactly the same, with no faces, and who is to say it even happened then? Maybe it happened in Fairbanks. Or Barrow.”
“Everybody out,” I said.
With the hatch open, snow blew in. Outside, we helped the Marines unload sleds, piled on the medical supplies, explosives, and propane — heat — for any survivors.
“Stay close. Pay close attention to the person in front of you. Obey Clinton or Dr. Vleska, whoever is leading at that point. Lieutenant Del Grazo, can you stay in contact with the ship while we’re outside?”
“Do my best.”
We started into the maelstrom. The Arktos — our magic carpet — disappeared. Clinton knelt and peered down and adjusted course and slid north, cutting diagonally across wind lines in the snow.
I looked behind me at the straggling, jagged line: the Marines, Karen, Eddie, Andrew.
Who’s the spy? I thought.
What will you do next?
ELEVEN
Plant your pole, push and glide; that’s the way you’re taught to do it. But it was impossible in this shrieking violence, especially when we hauled Kevlar sleds on which were piled up to — depending on the hauler — two hundred pounds of supplies.
Three steps and glide became two, then one, then we were stepping forward as if through heavy water. The rubbly plain became a field piled with close-packed ice boulders. The sky tilted sideways as, linked to the sled like a horse, I pulled it into a gap, and there it stuck. Pettit materialized beside me, reached wordlessly to help me.
“Together, Colonel. One… two… pull!”
The group was roped together like a slave caravan. The ice went spongy suddenly, and I saw Clinton’s shoulders drop, felt a sickening lurch as the surface gave way. I was falling, expecting to feel seawater, but I’d merely dropped into a small ice ravine. Shaken, still standing, I stepped out, slid back, pushed forward, and froze as I heard a vast rumble beneath me. Then came a long cracking sound above the screech of wind, as if solid rock were tearing apart down there. As if sped-up plate tectonics ripped at granite seams. It was the sort of sound that sent coal miners scrambling for exits.
The echo stopped. I never thought I’d be happy just to hear a screaming wind.
Clinton slogged away into the dark, a half-visible figure in my yellow headlamp beam.
We carried salt pills against cramps, burn salves, and medicines. We carried military rations that self-heated if you tore open the pouch. There were tents, if we had to stop. There were vaccinations and aerosols. There were hydration packets. There were waterproof blankets. There were splints, hazmat suits, goggles, chemical sample kits.
How much time passed? An hour? Two? The cold wind elongated each second. I felt the sled working against my upper arms and thighs. The wind lessened; was it stopping finally? No, no, it was only teasing, and it sped up again.
Suddenly Major Pettit pushed past me up to Clinton and the forms came together in the semidarkness, and from Pettit’s angry hand gestures, I gathered he was shouting. His gloved hand jabbing left. Clinton’s parka hood shaking back and forth, no! When I skied up to them, they were arguing over Pettit’s ice-rimmed compass, which he wielded — shaking it — like a prosecutor producing exhibit A.
“You’re going the wrong way!”
Clinton calmly knelt, traced a gloved finger along the almost invisible line of a wavelike snow, sastrugi.
Pettit shook his head. “That’s east, not north.”
The earth was a monumental tuning fork. The hideous tearing noises started up again. I felt the ice shuddering and rumbling, a metal animal. Clinton’s face was before me, eyes oval, features hidden by the black balaclava, lips white, nose white. Clinton assured me, “It’s just moving down there, but not breaking up. Still, we’ll circle around that flat area ahead.”
“But that will slow us.”
“If we don’t, we’ll fall in.”
Our ski trails filled with blowing granules. Karen moved easily, head down, bulling forward. Eddie slipped but kept up. Pettit traveled up and down the line, making sure his men kept going, like every line of sailors which had disappeared into the polar void for the last five hundred years.
Peter Del Grazo materialized beside me, having conferred with Pettit. “It’s Clinton, Colonel. He’s taking us the wrong way!”
His eyes were fierce in his balaclava, and his voice, that Brooklyn accent, had lost all trace of the good humor marking it previously. “He goes where he wants on the ship. He doesn’t report to anyone. He could just ski off.”
Ice rime hung from his balaclava, his breath was white brume, his anorak matted crystal.
“Get back in place,” I said.
How far can the fucking submarine be?
We stopped for a ten-minute rest on the protected lee side of a huge ice column, a lone formation like a sandstone form in Utah, a tower that shielded us slightly from direct wind. Someone produced cocoa. My fingertips were losing feeling. We sat shoulder to shoulder for warmth and inside my mitten liners I imagined skin turning solid, blood crystalizing, fingers as blood sausages, legs as statues unable to move.
Andrew Sachs had done surprisingly well, I thought. He’d not complained. He’d shut up. I’d been surprised at his acuity on skis, at his hidden resources, his ability to pull a sled. He sat off to the side, alone. One of the Marines suffered from the freezing together of his lips. His frosting breath puffed out from both sides of his mouth, and his fitful breathing resembled that of a horse.
The man wordlessly endured the ripping apart of his lips. Karen Vleska advised him to keep his mouth open as he walked, and to turn away from the wind, to keep the running blood from freezing his lips together again.
Del Grazo pulled the radio from his sled, tried for a fix on the submarine, looked up, and nodded happily.
“Hey, he was right, Colonel! It’s still ahead.”
Clinton switched off with Karen, who took the lead for a while, and then they switched back. He probed ahead with his long ice gaff.
“Weak ice.”
Gingerly moving, he played out rope. His form grew dimmer and I thought, This is what Pettit predicted. He’ll uncouple. He’ll ski away. He’s leaving us.
The form was coming back.
“There’s a way through, but just a small one. If we go fast, we can ski right over the water.”
“Ski into water?” Eddie gasped.