The Winter Over(88)

He gave a grunt of satisfaction as his fingers wrapped around the strap of the bag and pulled it close. Holding the penlight between his teeth, he clawed through the contents. The first-aid kits were less than useless: bandages and zinc oxide tape and sterilization pads weren’t going to help him solve a multiple compound fracture. He looked skeptically at a bivy sack and foil space blanket wondering just how long they could keep him alive, but he tucked them nearby anyway. A repair kit—rivets, extra nylon webbing, and a sewing kit—had him laughing so hard he started to cry.

At the bottom, his hand wrapped around the blocky dimensions of a Saber field radio, the first truly useful thing he’d found so far. With trembling fingers, he turned it on, grinning like a skull when the yellow face of the channel display lit up.

Hugging it against his body to keep the batteries warm and alive as long as possible, Taylor began hailing on every channel, making a call once a minute up and down the dial. Time passed, but he refused to look at his watch. Time was irrelevant. His calls transformed from understandable English into gibbering moans. Shivering set in after the first half hour and he had trouble flicking the channel dial. For the first time since leaving Shackleton, he realized he truly might die.

When he could no longer feel his feet or his fingertips, he decided it was time. He could strip off his coat and let the cold take him, but the pain from his ribs was now on a whole new level—did he want to lie here for hours, waiting for hypothermia to set in while screaming in pain?

Carefully setting the radio down beside him, he scooted his back up against the wall of the crevasse and got comfortable. He reached under his coat and pulled out the pistol. Then, croaking out a “Sorry, Jack,” he put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Beside him, the Saber crackled and spat, barely audible in the soft wind of the crevasse.

“Zdravstvuj? Zdravstvuj? Hello? Is anyone there? ”





CHAPTER FORTY-SIX


Cass staggered down the tunnel, her mind enclosed in a hard shell, as removed from her own existence as though she were watching her body propel itself along a preconfigured track laid out on the ground. Behind, the track led from her berth, through the base, down the tunnels, and out into the cold. Nothing she could do would change the direction of the track. Vaguely, she hoped that meant nothing that got in her way would do so, either.

Looking at the shattered pieces of her shortwave lying on the floor of the hut, her emotions had circled the drain. She might escape Shackleton and whoever had engineered the murder of most of its crew, but without external aid, she would still die. Never forget. Antarctica wants to kill you .

She had stared at the pieces of the sabotaged radio until her teeth started to chatter. Then, as though planning to return later, she’d carefully stowed the shortwave away and left. She averted her gaze from the corpse in the corner as she moved to the hatchway and slipped down the ladder to the ice tunnel below.

Vox or no Vox, Orlova was her only hope now. She needed to leave the base, and quickly. For that, she needed transportation and supplies. The VMF and warehouse could provide both.

If they were still there. Rolling black smoke stained the ceiling and the petroleum stink had grown so bad that she had to double up her scarf and press it hard to her mouth and nose to breathe. She had forcefully kept her mind away from thinking about the source of the gas smell, but her engineering mind provided the answer anyway: unless a Hercules had landed on the strip outside Shackleton and spontaneously combusted, either the fuel depot for the base or the petrol tanks in the VMF had been sabotaged. Nothing else within a thousand miles of the South Pole had enough fuel to send fumes all the way to the Beer Can and beyond.

If the fuel depot had been tampered with, that would explain the power failure and would also confirm that Shackleton was doomed. If it was the VMF, her plans for escape were gone. Living or dying depended on the answer.

She hadn’t gone a hundred feet down the tunnel when she got it. Smoke spilled down the side artery to her garage in great clouds, blackening the walls and ceiling. The acrid stench of petroleum joined with the fresh-tar odor of burning tires and the chemical stink of evaporated solvents. Cass pushed down the hall anyway, even dropping to her hands and knees to try and slip beneath the smog of smoke and fumes, but she was turned back, choking and gagging, before she’d gotten halfway down the corridor. Residual heat had begun to melt the ice forty or fifty feet away from the entrance, and the walls and floor were slick with water.

Back in the main corridor, she crawled up to a wall and sat with her back against it, staring blankly at the ice opposite her. Almost immediately, the chill started seeping through her coat. She didn’t care.

Trekking overland on a snowmobile or a snowcat in the middle of an Antarctic winter would normally be considered suicidal, but—in light of the living hell that Shackleton had become—the term had lost any meaning. With enough fuel and maybe an emergency kit or an MRE or three under the seat, a snowcat would give you even odds of surviving long enough to get to Orlova. A snowmobile, open to the elements, would be a shot in the dark, though still better than freezing to death or waiting to be killed and having your body parts propped up in a shrine.

But with a fire hot enough to melt the walls fifty feet away, there was nothing with a track or a wheel or a tire left whole in the VMF. And that meant there was just one way to escape: a thirty-mile trek alone, on foot, during winter, in the darkest night. Something no one had attempted in the hundred-year history of Antarctica. Because it wasn’t possible.