Frozen Solid: A Novel Page 10

  Elbow-crawling, he dragged himself forward, an inch at a time. When he moved, Hallie moved with him, wriggling back. Slowly they put distance between themselves and the crevasse edge. Five feet, ten, thirty, a hundred. Both breathless, they stopped and lay on their bellies. Hallie knew that Graeter’s brain was digesting the fact of its continued existence. It was like watching someone wake up from a trance.

  Directing his headlamp to one side, to avoid blinding her, he said, “Son of a bitch. Nineteen years in the Navy and I never got that close.” He took a deep breath, exhaled. “Think it’s safe to stand now?”

  “Yes.”

  They got up and walked back to Graeter’s snowmo, brushing themselves off. Hallie was considering how lucky both of them were. Her own reaction had been instinctive, and she did not regret it. But inside all the layers, she felt her hands shaking, and it was not because of the cold. Before either she or Graeter could speak, two big men wearing black Dragger parkas and tool belts roared up on snowmos.

  “What the hell happened?” one asked Graeter.

  “Bacon’s machine broke through,” Graeter said. “Is anyone else coming?”

  “I don’t know. We were headed to the machine shop when that dozer’s lights just disappeared. We figured it went down.”

  “Is that you, Grenier?” Graeter asked.

  “Yeah. And Lange. So Bacon is down in the crack?”

  “Yes,” Graeter said. He reached for his radio. “Graeter, emergency to comms. Bacon’s Cat went into a crevasse. We need Search and Rescue out here now. Tell them to look for the snowmo lights.”

  “Comms copy. Will do.”

  “How long will that take?” Hallie asked.

  “Fifteen minutes to muster. Thirty to dress and collect gear. Another five to get out here, if the snowmos start right away. Say an hour.”

  “Too long.” Hallie was staring at the crevasse.

  “Is what it is. There’s a SOR protocol for crevasse rescues.”

  “Mr. Graeter. She could be bleeding down there. In shock and pain. We can’t wait that long.”

  “We don’t know if she’s alive. And we don’t have a way to get anyone down there.”

  There is always a way. She looked at the two Draggers’ tool belts and saw that they both carried big, twenty-four-ounce hammers with long, curved claws.

  “We do have a way to get down,” she said. “Give me those hammers. They’ll do in a pinch for ice tools.”

  “Negative on that,” Graeter said.

  “What?” Hallie wasn’t sure she had heard right.

  “I said negative. SAR is gearing up. We’ll wait and do this according to the regulations.”

  “You can wait if you want,” Hallie said. She stepped forward, pulled the two hammers out of their metal-loop holsters, and started toward the crevasse.

  “Dr. Leland!” Graeter snapped. “I gave you an order. We will wait. Did you hear me? We will wait.”

  “You do that,” she said.

  19

  HALLIE WALKED TO WITHIN FIFTY FEET OF THE EDGE OF THE CREVASSE. She got down on her stomach, feet toward the abyss, and started inching backward. At the edge she dug the claws of both hammers into the surface, using them like the picks of ice tools, and lowered herself down.

  The ice wall fell at about a seventy-degree angle. A romp with proper ice tools and twelve-point crampons. With the hammers and bunny boots, doable, but delicate.

  “Rockie!” she yelled.

  No answer.

  She kept down-climbing, punching one tool lower, than the other, kicking toeholds with her boots. After forty feet her forearms were on fire and she was gasping for breath, but it was working.

  She smelled diesel fuel, looked over her shoulder, and her headlamp beam caught machine twenty feet lower. It had come to rest where the crevasse’s walls converged. She heard Bacon’s radio crackling and nearly shuddered with joy; in her haste she hadn’t asked for one. Graeter probably wouldn’t have given it to her, anyway.

  Hallie descended to the Cat and stepped onto its track, near the front of the machine. She walked back toward Rockie, who was still held in place by her seat belt, bent forward at the waist, arms hanging between her knees. There was frozen blood on Rockie’s face mask, and more on the Cat’s deck and dashboard.

  “Rockie.”

  No response.

  With gloves and mittens on she could not feel for a pulse, but she could see that Rockie was still breathing.

  The radio crackled again.

  “Graeter. Can you copy me down there?”

  Hallie unzipped one of Bacon’s pockets and found the radio. “This is Leland. I’m on the dozer. Rockie is alive, but injured and unconscious. I don’t know how badly. Can you drop a litter down here?”

  There was a silence. When Graeter spoke, he sounded very angry. “No. The goddamned thing broke.”

  “You only have one?”

  “They both broke. Cracked like window glass. It’s too cold for fiberglass.”

  She thought for a minute. “Lower one end of a good rope down here. Eleven-mil or bigger. Keep lowering until I tell you to stop.”

  As Hallie probed the darkness with her light, she saw holes in the crevasse wall. They reminded her of the mouths of small caves, but with angles and lines. No straight lines in nature, as the saying went. Odd, finding them down here. At some point, flowing water must have bored them, as it bored much more slowly through stone to make terrestrial caves. But … neat lines? Then she thought: Old Pole. They must be part of the buried complex. She briefly considered trying to carry Bacon out that way, then decided there were too many unknowns. A rescue hoist would be better.

  A few minutes later she grabbed the end of a rope. She waited for about twenty extra feet to come, then radioed for them to stop. “Don’t do anything until I call again,” she added.

  Hallie folded the rope back on itself to make a ten-foot doubled length. Then she tied a double figure-eight knot, called “bunny ears” by climbers because of the two single loops at the knot’s end. She dressed the knot so that each loop was big enough to fit under their arms. She worked the rope over Rockie’s shoulders, down past her hands, and pulled it up under her armpits. She unfastened Rockie’s seat belt, then put the other loop on herself, making sure that the rope was secure under her own arms as well.

  After a final check of the rope and loops, she keyed the radio.

  “We’re both on rope. You need to bring us up very slowly and very smoothly.”

  “Copy that,” Graeter said. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then Hallie felt the rope grow taut, and was thankful for all the layers of clothing, which prevented it from cutting painfully into her armpits. She and Bacon were lifted away from the D9 and rose slowly up through the crevasse.

  Hallie held Bacon facing away, keeping her own back to the crevasse wall, acting as a cushion between the unconscious woman and the ice. She knew that this was not the best way to bring up someone who might have suffered spinal injuries, but there was no choice. It seemed to take a long time, but finally they were approaching the lip of the crevasse. Hallie radioed their position and had the haulers slow down even more. This was going to be the hardest part. She had them raise her and Bacon in small increments until she could hook her butt over the lip. Then, holding the inert woman against herself with one arm, she radioed the haulers to bring them on back.

  They came across the ice smoothly, Hallie on her back, Bacon lying between her legs and against her chest. When they were out of the danger zone, Search and Rescue team members stabilized Bacon with a cervical collar and eased her onto a backboard. A big Pisten-Bully snowcat, like those used at ski areas, had traveled out. The SARs loaded Bacon onto the machine’s back deck, and it headed toward the station.

  Hallie turned to the two Draggers, Grenier and Lange. “I’m sorry about your hammers, guys. Didn’t have enough hands to bring them up.”

  “Hell with the hammers. They’re NASI’s,” Grenier said. “You’re a B
eaker, right?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Microbiologist.”

  “A Beaker,” Lange said.

  “A Beaker,” Grenier said.

  They looked at each other.

  “Goddamn,” Lange said.

  “Son of a bitch,” Grenier said.

  Then they stepped forward, slapped her on the shoulder, said, “Good job,” and headed to their snowmos, looking back as if still having trouble believing.

  It felt good. She was tired from the crevasse work but sparking with adrenaline and the elation of having saved another human.

  Graeter stood off to one side. The face mask kept her from seeing anything but his eyes. Hell hath no fury, she thought, like a martinet disobeyed. Her roster request would have to wait.

  He came toward her and planted his feet, and she braced herself for a tirade. Or worse. She moved one hand toward the right pocket of her Big Red.

  “You should not have come on that cracked ice to help me. And you should not have gone down into the crevasse for Bacon.”

  The elation drained away, leaving exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and cold. She opened her mouth to reply, but he held up one finger, then lowered it to point directly at her.

  “I’m glad you did. I owe you. We owe you.”

  Overhead, the southern lights flared green and purple. He turned on his heel and motioned for her to follow.

  20

  BACK IN HER ROOM, HALLIE SLUMPED IN THE DESK CHAIR. THINGS were happening too fast. Emily’s killing. Two dead women. Graeter’s close call. Bacon’s closer call. Even so, the hardest thing of all was one that had not happened: she still had told no one about the murder. Could not tell anyone.

  She checked for email, found none, used the room phone.

  “Agnes, Hallie. I’m still not getting any email. Is yours working?”

  “On and off,” Merritt said. “Apparently there was a solar event yesterday. Medium-sized coronal mass ejection. It’s been really screwing up comms. I wouldn’t worry too much. Things usually settle down in a couple of days.”

  In a couple of days I’ll be out of here, she thought, but she said only, “Thanks.”

  She wondered about sharing the secret with Graeter. She would not even be considering it if she had not caught, out on the ice, a glimpse of something human beneath his spiky carapace. But you didn’t have your life saved every day, and it might have been nothing more than adrenaline and endorphin intoxication. She would wait.

  She had to meet with the one they called Fido, and that was becoming more urgent with each hour that brought her closer to the dive. She called comms and asked them to page him.

  She fetched herself a cup of chlorinated coffee and sat at a table by one of the windows to wait. Because it was light inside and so dark outside, she could see nothing through the glass. Leaning back, she gazed up at the strings of lights. More appeared to have burned out since her first visit to the galley. It was hard not to put her arms on the table and fall asleep right there, like napping in elementary school.

  A man at a nearby table was eating a hamburger and French fries, washing the food down with gulps of milk. She watched him chewing. Listened to him chewing. And chewing and chewing, mouth mostly open, making sounds like horses walking in mud. Finally he swallowed, took another bite, and started chewing again, jaws working away beneath glazed eyes. She felt herself getting mad, understood, dimly, that the Pole was wearing her down already, eroding her patience. She felt like getting up and smacking both of the man’s bulging cheeks between clapping hands to make him swallow.

  He must have felt her staring, because he glanced up suddenly and stopped chewing. They looked at each other for several seconds. He turned away first and closed his mouth. Her anger drained, and she felt both guilty and stupid.

  It was not a big leap from those feelings to Bowman. At once the biggest and the most gentle man she had ever known. And the fiercest, when he had to be. The previous year, she had seen him, armed only with two knives, kill three Mexican narcotraficantes carrying AK-47s. They had been taking her to a jungle camp where torture, rape, and eventual death would have been her certain fate.

  So what would she and Wil have done if she had been pregnant? What kind of father would Bowman make? For that matter, what kind of mother would she? Hallie thought him probably better suited temperamentally for parenting. He was patient, good-hearted, and gentle—with her, at least. Having grown up on a ranch, he loved horses with a passion matching her own.

  During their year together, they had visited friends with small children. She’d worried that they would be afraid of the giant Bowman. But when he got down on the floor they climbed all over him, draped themselves around his neck, hung from those long arms. Like dogs and horses, she thought, picking up something adults had lost the ability to sense.

  A man who resembled a street person wandered into the galley. He was vacant-eyed and shambling, his face a mask of dark stubble, in a stained shirt and green Dickies work pants. He had the chocolate complexion of an East Indian. She waved him over, stood.

  “Dr. Muktapadhay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Hallie Leland. I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

  They shook hands, and his felt to Hallie like an assembly of bird bones. “You had me paged,” he said.

  “Twenty minutes ago,” she said. “I tried your room earlier, but you weren’t there. The lab was locked.”

  “You were lucky I heard it.”

  “Sorry?” she asked.

  He dropped into a chair, put his hands in his lap, stared.

  “Would you like some coffee? Something to eat?” she asked.

  She could almost hear gears scraping in his brain. “No coffee. It hurts my stomach.” His voice was hoarse—Pole throat—and too much time elapsed between his words.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Look, can we dispense with formalities? I’m Hallie. Is it okay if I call you Fido?”

  “No! Please do not use that term.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought that was your first name. I heard other—”

  “My name is Fida.” Feeda. “Fido is my Pole name, and I despise it. Some people think I look like … Goofy.”

  “The cartoon dog?”

  He glared at her.

  She had to admit there was a resemblance. The man had large, ovoid eyes, slightly buck front teeth, and the angles of his face slanted toward the end of a long, muzzle-like nose.

  “Look.” He held up a hand. “I have four fingers.”

  She understood that he was differentiating himself from three-fingered cartoon characters.

  “I am sorry, Fida. Did I get it right that time?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “So I assume you know why I’m here.”

  “To replace Emily.”

  “To help retrieve biomatter from the cryopeg, actually.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m with CDC, not NSF, but I have the same skill sets that Emily did, and I could come here on short notice. No notice, to be honest.”

  “Short notice,” he repeated. The outburst about his name had kindled some attention, but now he had gone off again to some other place in his head, staring past Hallie’s shoulder.

  “I’ll need a briefing on your work. We have to get this dive done before I fly out for winterover.”

  “We can talk later. I am very tired.”

  “I’d also like to talk about Emily,” she said.

  That brought him back. “I do not want to talk about Emily.”

  “I can understand that. But let me explain. Emily and I were good friends at one time. So her death causes me pain, too.”

  He looked at her more closely, nodded. “But not here.”

  “You mean, in the galley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not?”

  “Come on. We will go someplace else.”

  He was already shambling away, and she had no choice but to follow.

  His room smelled like spoili
ng food and dirty laundry. The bunk mattress was bare, and a wadded parka served for a pillow. Snickers wrappers and Pepsi cans littered the floor.

  “I am sorry for the way this place looks,” Fida said. “I just cannot seem to get around to cleaning. I am not spending much time here these days, anyway.” He shoved books and papers off his desk chair. “You can sit here.”

  She did, and he approached as though he were going to kiss her, but at the last minute put his lips close to her ear and whispered, “Do you have your cellphone?” Then he put an index finger over his mouth and extended the other hand palm up.

  Hallie gave him the phone. He powered it down, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and stowed it in a steel toolbox.

  “Why did you do that?” She was whispering, too.

  “We can speak now,” he said in a normal voice, slumping against the bunk frame.

  She had actually thought her cellphone would be useless here but had been told that NSF had installed a special system for the Polies’ convenience. They’d given her a Pole chip on arriving. She would turn it back in when she left.

  “You think my phone is bugged?”

  “You can install a program just by calling. It can record audio, take pictures, even video. Without you knowing. And send those to someone.”

  “Nobody has called me.”

  “I tried to call you twice. Sent you an email, too.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t get calls from you. Or from back home. No emails, either. I should have by now.”

  “Possibly there is something wrong with your phone.”

  “And my terminal, too?”

  “I do not want you to think … never mind.” His eyes went out of focus, came back. “I am sorry. What is your name again?”

  “Hallie Leland. I knew Emily very well at one time. We worked together at a CDC lab.”

  “Emily did not call me Fido.” He peered at Hallie. “Now I remember. She was very fond of you. She did climbing and things with you.”

  “Lots of things. On one climb she saved my life. I wouldn’t be here if not for her.”