“Then we’ll have to ration what food we have.” Gray turned next to Karen as she sank to a seat, her face wan and tired. “About what happened . . . those munitions that blew off that chunk of ice must have been buried for some time. How could that be?”
“I can only hazard a guess. The bombs could’ve been drilled into place and frozen over long before the station arrived.”
“Is that possible?”
“It wouldn’t be that hard,” she speculated. “We shifted Halley VI closer to the sea about three months ago, so the climate scientists could complete their study of the accelerating thaw of the continent’s ice sheets. Our move had been mapped out and scheduled a full year in advance, including picking the coordinates for our new location.”
Gray considered this. “So somebody with such foreknowledge could’ve easily laid this trap, ready to destroy the station at a whim.”
“Yes, but it still doesn’t explain why.”
“Perhaps it has something to do with Professor Harrington’s research. Your station acts as the gateway to Queen Maud Land, where the professor’s group set up shop. If somebody wanted to suddenly isolate that secret site, getting rid of Halley VI would be an important first step.”
She looked even more ashen.
He asked, “Do you have any idea what Harrington was working on?”
Karen shook her head. “No, but that doesn’t mean rumors didn’t spread about what was going on out there. Stories ranged from the discovery of a lost Nazi base to the secret testing of nuclear weapons—which was done in this region by your own country, I might add, back in 1958. But all of this is wild conjecture at best.”
Still, whatever the truth was, it was clearly worth killing over.
And likely still is.
He glanced to one of the triangular windows. “We’ll need to post lookouts. All sides of the module. And at least one person patrolling outside, watching the skies.”
Karen stood from the table. “I’ll begin arranging shifts.”
“One other thing,” Jason said before she left. He pointed to a figure in oil-stained coveralls. “Carl says he can stay with the John Deere.”
The man nodded. He must be the tractor driver.
“Its cabin is heated,” Jason added. “Carl can tweak our position to keep the module under the fog flowing down from the coast. It should help hide us.”
Gray admitted it was a solid plan. But how long could they hold out?
And more worrisome: Who would find them first?
11:43 P.M.
As midnight approached, Jason pulled into his parka and gathered his gloves, scarf, and goggles. He was scheduled for the first shift of the new day. They changed patrols on the hour, to avoid anyone standing watch for too long out in the frigid weather.
While he had taken a nap in preparation for his shift, he felt far from rested, nagged by worries.
And I’m certainly not looking forward to the next sixty cold minutes.
Once suited up, he headed to the hatch. He found Joe Kowalski leaning against the frame. He had the smoldering stub of cigar between his back molars, looking like he’d been chewing on it for a while.
“Shouldn’t you be catching some shut-eye?” Jason asked. Sigma’s demolitions expert was scheduled to relieve him at 1 A.M.
“Couldn’t sleep.” He took out his cigar and pointed its glowing tip at Jason. “You be careful out there. From what I hear, Crowe’s got big hopes for you. Don’t go getting yourself killed.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“That’s just the thing, planning’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the unexpected that’ll bite you in the ass every time. Blindside the hell out of you.”
Jason nodded, recognizing the practical wisdom buried behind those gruff words. He stepped to move past Kowalski, when he noted a small photo clutched in the man’s thick fingers. Before Jason could get more than a glimpse of the woman in the picture, Kowalski tucked the photo away.
As Jason hauled open the door, he wondered if the man’s warning was less about the dangers of a mission and more about the pitfalls of a romantic life.
But such thoughts vanished as the cold struck him like a hard slap to the face. The wind came close to shoving him off the high deck. He half slid his way to the ladder and climbed down. He found one of the researchers sheltered on the leeward side of one of the giant ski towers.
The man crossed, patted Jason on the shoulder, and with a voice quavering from the bitter cold said, “All quiet. If you get too frozen, hop into Carl’s cab to warm up.”
With those few words, the researcher headed up the ladder and toward the promise of a warm bed.
Jason checked his watch.
Only fifty-nine minutes to go.
He slowly paced the station, staying out of the wind as much as possible. He studied the skies, searching for any telltale lights of an approaching plane. All remained dark out there; not even the stars were visible through the ice fog rolling across the shelf from the distant coast. The only light came from the south, a slight yellow glow, marking the John Deere’s location. He used its position like a compass as he made his rounds.
After a while, the howl of the wind seemed to fill his head, rattling around inside his skull. His eyes began to play tricks on him, seeing phantom lights in the gloom. He blinked or rubbed them away.
As he circled yet again, he considered hopping into the tractor’s cabin—not for the warmth, but to escape the monotony of the darkness and the perpetual howl of the katabatic winds. He moved out from under the hulking module and stepped toward that patch of yellow light, only to have a vague glow catch his eyes to the far left, to the west.
He tried blinking away that dull light, only to have it become two eyes shining out of the gloom. Through the roaring in his head, a lower grumbling intruded—accompanied a moment later by the crunch of ice.
It took him another half breath to realize it wasn’t a trick of the night, but something huge, barreling through the winds toward the lone module.
Jason hauled out his radio and brought it to his lips. “I’ve got movement out here. On the ice. A big vehicle approaching from the west.”
“Copy that,” the lookout inside said. The man shouted to others inside the station before returning to the radio. “I’m seeing it now, too!”
Jason moved behind the cover of one of the ski supports, the radio still at his lips. “Tell Carl to douse his lights out there!”
After another couple of seconds, that island of warm light extinguished. The only illumination now came from those twin beams of light that rapidly grew larger and brighter. Jason estimated that what approached was the size of a tank. This particular guess was heightened by the sound of treads grinding across ice.