Reckoning (20 page)

The crowd, which had unwillingly begun to disperse,
swarmed back with ear-splitting yells when they saw this. Their leaders had no time to talk to the women now. They demanded
Islamic justice for this traitor to the Ayatollah and worked up the mob into a seething fury.

The three zealots danced with excitement at the window of the upstairs room. They pushed and shook their captive in response
to the denunciations being shouted up at him. The mob screamed that he be handed over to them for trial by the mullahs at
their special court. The three zealots held back and let the frenzy of the mob’s demands build.

As a climax to the howls and curses, two grabbed Abdel by his arms and the third pushed him in the back. They ran him at the
large rectangle of glass in the window and released him at the last moment so he went flying through it.

The crowd saw the object of their hatred descend on them through the air in a shower of sharp glass fragments. His body thumped
down on some of them and shards of glass cut others. They screamed with rage at this and vented their fury on him, punching
him, kicking him, tearing the hair from his head…

They half-dragged and half-carried the low traitor through the streets to the mullahs’ court. When they got there, they beat
and kicked him again when they discovered he had already died.

Richard Dartley changed planes in Paris without leaving the terminal and made it through the customs
at Dulles International Airport before he collapsed.

“Nothing serious, I don’t need a doctor,” he told two men who helped him to his feet. “Just help me to that seat over there
and I’ll rest awhile.”

After maybe twenty minutes, he had strength enough to find a quarter and make a phone call. Charley Woodgate came to get him.
Next day Charley took him to a research physician at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The doc was a specialist in complex organ
poisons and was willing to stick to the medical aspects and forget the legal. Dartley was a find for him. He knew quite a
bit about Amazonian Indian poisons, but one by African pygmies was a rare treat.

The wounds made by the arrowheads were healing nicely, and this man removed the stitches put in by the African doctors. But
he had no cure for the aftereffects of the poison. He said Dartley’s liver and kidneys would flush that out of his system,
given time. Dartley quit going to see him when he heard that.

Time was something Dartley didn’t have. But right now he did not have the strength to do much. Herbert Malleson brought the
news to the farmhouse that Abdel Saleh was dead.

“It’s about time,” Malleson said. “As we agreed, I had a sweet girl here in Washington mention Abdel to that under-secretary
at the Greek Embassy who’s known to be sympathetic to Arafat Palestinians. She explained how Abdel spelling his name out in
dead Americans was a ploy to take command of the Revolutionary Guards. Abdel expected the Ayatollah to give him this
as a reward. Which, I think, is a reasonable explanation for what he was up to. Then I had a friend in New York mention Abdel
to a Pakistani delegate to the United Nations. So Teheran had it coming from two directions. But I’m afraid his death has
come too late to countermand orders for the tenth man on the list. My bet is that the assassin is on his way, ready to kill
Harrison Murdoch, with no knowledge that his master is now dead. He probably never even knew he was working for Abdel Saleh.”

Dartley struggled to his feet for some more exercise rounds of the farmhouse kitchen. “I have no time,” he muttered, scratching
the beard he was growing in anticipation of the Antarctic cold.

A week passed before, Dartley headed for New Zealand. Even then, Charley Woodgate tried to stop him from going, pointing out
that he was only slowly getting over his attacks of dizziness. From Washington he flew to Los Angeles and there boarded an
Air New Zealand flight to Auckland, with a stopover in Honolulu. He took a local flight from the North Island to Christchurch
on the South Island. When he arrived he was relieved to hear he had a sixteen-hour wait for his flight to Antarctica. He spent
fourteen of those sixteen hours asleep in a hotel room, after collecting his gear at USARP.

USARP stood for the United States Antarctic Research Program. A friendly prod from Global Hydrocarbons got him the status
of “visiting professor.” Dartley had no idea what he was supposed to be a professor of.
He’d think of something when he got there. He was outfitted with a bright red parka, down vest, lined pants, mukluks and white
rubber bunny boots, insulated jumpsuit, gloves, wool shirts, long johns, and a balaclava. The stuff he had on in the North
Sea was a bikini in comparison to this.

Dartley had been scheduled to take a flight more than a week ago. Having missed that, it had taken a lot of influence to get
him on this one. Malleson had set things up so that he would have met Harrison Murdoch as he came off an extended field trip
in the Antarctic mountains. Murdoch was scheduled to remain for six weeks at the McMurdo Sound base before returning to the
United States. He had been there for a week now, with another five to go. In any other case, it would have been reasonable
to assume that the assassin would wait for him to come back to the U.S. But Abdel Saleh had been in a big hurry to spell out
his name for the Ayatollah. Dartley had to assume that Dockrell would try to hit Murdoch down in the snow and ice. He sure
hadn’t let the isolation of North Sea oil rigs stop him.

The U.S. Navy transport plane, a ski-equipped Hercules C-120, took an uncomfortable seven hours from Christchurch, New Zealand,
to the U.S. Antarctic base at McMurdo Sound. Dartley got in on a Sunday afternoon, which was party time. A few of the men
in the dormitory to which he had been assigned brought him along to an outdoor party at around zero degrees. Some of the biologists
had fish left over from their
researches. They had marinated them in soy sauce, wine and spices for fifteen hours and cooked them over laboratory hot plates.
Bottles of California wine were stuck in the snow, getting a nice chill. There were even women at the party—however, because
of all the heavy clothes, only their faces and voices identified them.

Antarctica was Navy territory. Half the men at McMurdo were Navy and time spent here counted as days at sea. A quarter of
the rest worked for civilian companies, and the other quarter were all scientists sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
There were some of all three groups at the party, and Dartley started talking with them.

McMurdo Station itself was kind of a disappointment—it was a town of maybe a hundred green box houses and canvas-covered huts.
Almost a thousand people were here during the summer months, counting the constant flow of visitors. This made security impossible
from Dartley’s point of view, for the same reason as at the flotel on the Brent field. Incoming people’s credentials could
only be checked to a certain extent. Dartley had got in. So could Dockrell.

The buildings nestled on the ground beneath Erebus, a twelve-thousand-foot active volcano. Another volcano, named Terror,
stood across the flat ice. Fifty miles away across the ice, the Royal Society Range raised its jagged beautiful peaks up into
the sky. Dartley spotted what looked like a crashed passenger plane.

“That’s a mirage,” one man told him. “Look back in a while and it won’t be there.”

It wasn’t. The plane was a Super Constellation which crashed in 1970 some distance away, and often appeared like this as a
mirage close to the base. Dartley was told that the most spectacular mirage was a second Royal Society Range floating just
above the peaks of the real one.

“I’m looking for Harrison Murdoch,” Dartley told one man.

“Navy?”

“No, he’s a researcher. Been here about a week. He’s a paleontologist.”

“Fossils, right?”

“Yes.”

The man pointed. “Ask him over there. That’s his line of work.”

Like most of the men who were not in the Navy, this man wore a beard and sunglasses. He was talking to three other men in
beards and sunglasses, which made them all look very much alike in their identical red parkas.

“Harrison Murdoch? Yeah, he’s here. Strange kind of dude. He has nothing to do with the rest of us. I hear he doesn’t like
it at McMurdo and is trying to get out.”

Dartley moaned silently to himself. It sounded like he had drawn another difficult one.

Another man said, “He worked for years in oil, making big money, before he came to research. The U.S. Geological Survey doesn’t
pay like the oil companies do. You don’t see too many crossovers, not in the direction of research anyway. He may be defensive
and
feel we look down on him or something. Hell, I asked him if he’d found any new trilobites this summer and he turned on me
like I was a Russian spy trying to buy atom secrets.”

They all laughed at this.

“You a paleontologist?” the first man asked.

“No, no, I’m into systems,” Dartley said and moved along.

Harrison Murdoch wasn’t as bad as Dartley expected him to be. He had the usual beard and sunglasses; Dartley himself now looked
like the rest of them too. Murdoch was a big active man, who always liked to be up and doing things.

“Only part of my work is in the field,” he explained to Dartley. “I go out to make observations and collect specimens. Then
I have to hit the books to make sense out of what I’ve found. I have my observations and specimens. Now I need my lab and
a big library. There’s nothing in McMurdo for me. I was sent here by some mistake. The rest of my field team went home.”

“The mistake was yours,” Dartley pointed out. “I’ve seen the paperwork. You specially asked to come to McMurdo.”

Murdoch snorted. “It must’ve sounded like a good idea then. I don’t want to be stuck here for another five
weeks. They said I might get a flight in a week or so. Someone is bound to cancel out or they’ll have room on a cargo plane.”

Dartley said, “Then I’ll be left behind. I’m not scheduled to leave until you do.”

Murdoch grinned. “I’ll lie low until you get to me. I understand what happened with the others. I’m scared witless. You won’t
have a hard time from me.”

“Some of the paleontologists here don’t seem to find you too friendly.”

“I don’t know these college guys,” Murdoch said. “I’ve been in the oil business. I’m older than most of them and maybe I know
more because I don’t spend half my time teaching, like they do. But until you came along, here I was with a bunch of strangers
with a good chance of one of them wanting to kill me. I’d be crazy to be friendly!”

Dartley laughed. “One said you seemed to think he was spying on your work.”

“Not really. The researchers here are interested in fossils from the zoological point of view. They’re trying to figure out
exactly when ancient reptiles and amphibians lived here. As you know, about 225 million years ago, all the continents, including
Antarctica, formed one giant land mass. Those are not my interests. I’m primarily a geologist. I want to know about rock.
I use the fossils to tell me which rock layer is older or younger than another. That’s my only interest in them. I don’t have
much to talk about with them.”

* * *

No one wanted to leave Antarctica without being able to say they had been to the South Pole. However, the U.S. base there
was tiny—with about forty-five people in summer and only sixteen or seventeen for the nine-month winter there. Everyone wanted
to go there on a day trip. Nice place to visit but not to stay.

They rode with seven others on a cargo plane which landed on skis and kept its props turning while on the ground to keep them
from freezing in place. It was twenty below zero and a strong wind across the desolate ice made the air painful on the face
and like ice water to breathe.

A red-and-white pole, like an old-fashioned barber’s pole, marked the official position of the South Pole, with a circle of
international flags stuck in the ice around. People were standing next to it, getting their picture taken. Dartley was told
that a simple bamboo pole about seventy yards away represented the real position of the South Pole. The trouble was that the
ice beneath them, although three miles thick, was continually drifting, moving the red-and-white pole farther from its believed
location. Even down here they were conning the tourists.

A blue dome, half the area of a football field, protected three box-like buildings beneath it. The wind had drifted snow up
over part of it. Three hundred and sixty degrees all around, there was nothing to be seen but snow.

Dartley and Murdoch looked over the lab and living quarters. They were told about the psychological
problems people have—entombed there for the nine-month winter, with no way out, no matter what happens. They were told about
one man confronting another in the lab with a ketchup-spattered meat cleaver, shouting, “Aha! You’re the last one!” It was
only a joke, but he was never forgiven for it.

However, on August 17, 1979, when the temperature dipped to 71 degrees below zero in a blinding blizzard, one man ran amok
for real. Glass shattered and blood flowed as he attacked his “persecutors” and his “rival” for the love of the one woman
there. They got him under control before anyone was badly hurt, and then they settled down to wait for another three months.