The Winter Over(7)

The business of getting Larkin’s body back to base, of recruiting Jennings to help, had been foolish. And waiting to tell the rest of the staff about Larkin and the circumstances in which they found her—that was just stupid. Maybe Hanratty had some kind of larger plan, but sitting on information that radioactive was precisely how rumors got started.

Not that Taylor had anything against rumors, per se. Scuttlebutt was fine, as long as you were the one controlling it, or at least out in front of it. Ignore it and gossip took on a life of its own, no longer yours to use. He’d learned that from a lifetime of pushing and pulling people in directions they didn’t want to go. His knack for manipulation had been honed doing six years of dirty work around the world for TransAnt and, after four months at Shackleton, he didn’t see any reason the same approach shouldn’t work at the South Pole.

He hawked and leaned forward to launch one over the rail—and caught himself just before he spat in his mask. Damn it . His bad humor wasn’t going to go away with a cup of coffee and a sit-down by a heater; he needed to be in motion, he needed action . He stomped down the steps to the ice field, setting his sights on the little group, and double-timed it over. The fuelies were crowding around the truck’s engine, not the tank in the back or the lines on the side, so there was something wrong with the truck and not the equipment on it. He might as well find out what they were doing.

As he got closer, a tingle of satisfaction trickled down to his nuts. One of the fuelies was Dave Boychuck, an ice-head left over from the National Science Foundation days. The two of them had nearly come to blows on a host of issues already, with the foreman obstinately sticking to the way things had always been done and Taylor insisting he follow TransAnt’s protocols, from wearing the company-issued shirt to tagging in and out. It was all petty shit, really. The brass at TransAnt had mandated minimum change during the takeover of Shackleton. But some, like Boychuck, resisted change the whole way, which made Taylor’s job a frequent pain in the ass.

It would be his absolute pleasure to return the favor.




“Aw, hell,” Jeremy swore, his voice muffled by a scarf.

Dave looked up from the engine. “What?”

“Taylor. Heading our way.”

Dave straightened and squinted into the glare bouncing off the ice, shading his eyes with one hand and rubbing his thick beard with the other. There was no way to do good work on an engine wearing a ski mask—you couldn’t see anything in the shadow of the hood—so his goggles were high on his head or dangling under his chin by the strap half the time. All he saw now was an indistinct shape striding toward them from base, but the shape’s cocksure walk told him Jeremy was right.

Dave growled something unintelligible. Normally, he wouldn’t mind locking horns with Shackleton’s new chief of security—Chief of security? Security for what? There was nothing to steal and nowhere to take it —but squeezing three flights out on the last day of summer had pushed his crew and his equipment to the edge. His boys could handle it, but Antarctica wasn’t kind to mechanical devices and half their time had been spent doing field repairs instead of moving fuel. After a hard summer’s work, everything was ready to fall apart, although just as often the culprit was the most obvious: it was too damn cold. Engines of all kinds simply up and quit when it was forty below and colder. Whatever the reason, you couldn’t tell that to a Herc pilot with an ETD of twenty minutes. You just had to get it working.

“Looks like he’s got a burr under his blanket.”

“Like I give a damn.” Dave went back to tinkering under the hood of the truck.

Taylor strode up to them, eyeing each of them until they looked away. “What’s the problem here? That Herc’s got to take off within the hour.”

“Engine’s frozen,” one of the other fuelies said.

“I can see that.” Taylor’s voice was scornful. “What’s the plan?”

“It’s the South freaking Pole, man,” Jeremy said. “We have to wait for the NGH to come from the garage so we can heat ’er up.”

“And when is it going to show?”

“It’ll happen when it happens, Taylor,” Dave said, not bothering to raise his head. “Things freeze. We thaw ’em out. Nothing gets done in between.”

Taylor ducked his head under the hood across from Dave. “I don’t need back talk, Boychuck, I need answers. What am I supposed to tell Hanratty when the fuel isn’t off that plane and the next one is coming in for a landing?”

Dave shrugged. “You want the gas out so bad, put your lips on the hose and suck it out yourself.”

Jeremy guffawed and the other two fuelies turned away to look into the distance, shoulders shaking.

Taylor yelled an obscenity, Dave tossed his wrench down and straightened to his full six foot four, and the pissing contest escalated until the other fuelies moved forward to separate the two before Dave took a swing at the chief of security. Taylor stormed off toward a group of flight techs and pilots in a hail of curses.

“That guy’s a bag of dicks without a handle,” Jeremy said.

“No argument there.” Dave shook himself. “Forget him. The real question is when is that NGH going to get here? Sam left for the garage twenty minutes ago.”

“Busy day today,” one of the others said. “NGH might’ve gotten swiped by someone else.”