Terminal Freeze (28 page)

“Mr. Fortnum? It’s Penny. How are you back there?”

This time, the response was slow to come. “We’re cold now. Very cold.”

“Hold on,” she said into the handset. “We’re only-” she glanced over at Carradine.

“Twenty miles,” the trucker muttered. “If we make it.”

“Twenty miles,” she said, then replaced the handset onto the CB unit. “We have to make it. How’s the petrol?”

“Left tank drained awful fast.” Carradine tapped the instrument panel. “Says we’ve got enough for another ten.”

“Even if it runs out, we can walk the other ten miles.”

“In that?” He pointed out over the steering wheel into the wasteland of the Zone. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but cold as they are already, those in the back wouldn’t last two hundred yards.”

Barbour glanced out through the windshield. A red smudge of dawn smeared the horizon line. The storm was quickly abating: the wind had died to almost nothing, and the surrounding landscape was now coated in a fresh mantle of powdery snow. But as the storm receded, the temperature had plummeted. The instrument panel read minus twenty-two degrees.

The truck shook roughly and she grabbed the stabilizer bar. Twenty miles. At current speed, that meant over half an hour.

She glanced at the GPS device mounted on the dashboard. She was used to seeing the unit in her own car, always bristling with streets, highways, and landmarks as she drove around Lexington, Woburn, and the greater Boston area. But the GPS in Carradine’s truck was utterly blank: a screen as white and featureless as the snow outside, with only a compass heading and latitude-longitude reading to indicate they were moving at all.

“You look tired,” Carradine said. “Why don’t you rest?”

“You must be joking,” she replied. And yet this tense and seemingly endless vigil-on the heels of so many sleepless hours at Fear Base-had exhausted her. She closed her eyes to rest them, just for a moment. And when she opened them again, everything was different. The sky was a little brighter, the snow around them sparkling with sunlight. The sound of the truck had changed, too: the RPMs were lower, the speed dropping noticeably.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“How’s the fuel?”

Carradine glanced at the instrumentation. “We’re on fumes.”

The truck was still slowing. And now, glancing again at the GPS, Barbour noticed it was, in fact, displaying something: a band of unrelieved blue, filling the top half of the screen.

“That’s not another-” she began, then stopped.

“Yup. Gunner Lake.”

Fear-which had ebbed to a dull sense of anxiety-surged afresh. “I thought you said we were only going to cross one lake!”

“I did. But we don’t have the gas to detour around this one anymore.”

Barbour didn’t reply. She swallowed, licked her lips. Her mouth felt very dry.

“Don’t worry. Gunner Lake is broad, but it ain’t wide.”

She looked at him. “Why had you planned to go around it, then?”

Carradine hesitated briefly. “The lake’s only about forty feet deep. It’s littered with big rocks, glacial erratics, and the like. In these conditions, with the snow cover, sometimes they can be hard to see. If we hit one by mistake…”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

She glanced out through the windshield. The lake was clearly visible just ahead. Carradine worked his way down the gears as they approached the shore.

“Aren’t you going to stop?” she said. “Test the ice depth with your power auger?”

“No time,” the trucker replied. “No gas.”

They crept out onto the ice. Once again, Barbour squeezed the stabilizer bar with all her might at the sensation of ice flexing under their weight; again, she felt the tension rise as the dreadful crackling began once more, spreading out from beneath the wheels in all directions. A few rocks were clearly visible, poking above the snow cover like fangs, their black tops shining in the morning sun. Others were hidden beneath drifts. The retreating wind had tucked and piled the snow into fantastic shapes: ridges and peaks and miniature buttes. Carradine made his way across the surface, threading the truck carefully between the rocks and snow formations. Barbour kept glancing from the GPS to the frozen lake and back again, willing the display to update, to show white once again.

Three minutes passed, then five. The crackling grew louder, fractures forking away before them in spastic lines. The engine hic-cupped; Carradine feathered it and the RPMs returned to normal. Barbour could guess what would happen if they ran out of gas while on the ice.

“Nearly there,” the trucker said, as if reading her thoughts.

A low ridge of snow appeared directly ahead, perhaps forty yards wide, scooped and scalloped by the wind until it resembled a cresting wave. “That’s got to be pure snow,” Carradine said. “Can’t risk veering around it, might spin out again. We’ll plow straight through, clear the path for the trailer. Hang on.”

Barbour was already hanging on with a grip that could not possibly be tightened. She held her breath as Carradine aimed the truck directly at the snow ridge. As it shuddered under the impact, Carradine goosed the throttle, maintaining speed.

Suddenly, the front of the truck kicked violently into the air. Barbour was thrown forward, her head almost impacting the dashboard despite the seat belt. “Christ!” Carradine said, turning the wheel to the left. “Must have been a boulder hidden under that ridge!”

There was a second impact as the rear right wheels of the cab went over the boulder. The truck rose, then fell heavily onto the ice. There was a sound like the retort of a cannon and the big vehicle suddenly slowed. Barbour felt herself pressed back against the seat.

“We’re going down in the rear!” the trucker yelled. “Get on the horn-tell everyone in the trailer to move forward, now!”

Barbour fumbled for the CB handset, dropped it, picked it up again. “Fortnum, we’ve broken through the ice. Get everybody to the front of the trailer. Hurry.”

She replaced the handset as Carradine frantically gunned the diesel. The truck strained forward, listing to the rear, splitting the frozen surface, the back end of the trailer literally forcing its way through the spreading ice. Barbour felt them tilt back still farther, the angle increasing. “No!” she heard herself crying out. “God, no!”

Carradine shifted gears and jammed the accelerator to the floor. There was another crack, almost as loud as the first, and with a shriek of effort the truck shook itself free of the hole in the ice and shot forward. Quickly, Carradine throttled back, careful not to lose control on the slick surface. Barbour slumped in her seat, almost overcome by relief.

“They don’t get any closer than that,” Carradine said. He glanced at the gasoline indicator. “Tank’s bone dry now. I can’t imagine what we’re running on.”

Barbour looked at the GPS indicator. And now at last she saw a white line of dry land a quarter mile directly ahead.

Clearing the last set of rocks, the truck roared up onto the shore and accelerated. Carradine fetched a huge, shuddering breath, plucking his floral shirt away from his skinny frame and fanning himself with it. Then he sat up, pointed ahead. “Look!”

Barbour peered through the windshield. In the distance, where the sky met the horizon, she made out a low cluster of black shapes, a blinking red light.

“Is that-” she began.

The trucker nodded, grinning hugely. “ Arctic Village.”

Quickly, she picked up the CB handset. “Barbour to Fortnum. We made it. Arctic Village is just ahead.”

And as she replaced the handset she thought she could hear-floating forward, over the grinding of the diesel-the sound of cheers.

The day was as clear and bright as crystal, as if the elements-ashamed of their ferocity-were eager to atone for the storm. The air was absolutely still, without a breath of wind, and if Marshall looked away from the base-toward the broad icepack and the perfect dome of sky above it-he could almost imagine that, in this remote and wild place, nature had a palette of only two colors: white and blue.

The morning had seen a steady procession of comings and goings: medevac and morgue choppers, a confusion of military helicopters, and one small plane full of men in dark suits that, for some reason, had made Marshall very uneasy. Now he stood with Faraday, Logan, and Ekberg on the apron before the base entrance. They had gathered to say their farewells to Usuguk, who was about to make the journey back to his empty village.

“You sure you don’t want a ride?” Marshall asked.

The Tunit shook his head. “My people have a saying: the journey is its own destination.”

“A Japanese poet wrote something very similar,” said Logan.

“Thank you again,” Marshall said. “For agreeing to come despite everything. For sharing your knowledge and your insight.” He put out his hand to shake, but instead of taking it Usuguk reached out and clasped Marshall ’s arms.

“May you find the peace which you seek,” he said. Then he nodded to the others, picked up the small duffel of water and supplies they had prepared for him, drew the fur-fringed hood around his face, and turned away.

They watched, not speaking, as the old man made his way north across the snow. Marshall wondered if the women would return to the village, or if Usuguk would live out the rest of his life alone, in monkish solitude. Somehow, he knew the man would accept either outcome with stoic philosophy.

“Are you searching for peace?” Ekberg asked him.

Marshall thought a moment. “Yes. I guess I am.”

“I suppose we all are,” she replied. She hesitated. “Well, I’d better get back. The Blackpool representative and insurance people will be here after lunch. I’ve got a lot to do before then.”

“I’ll look in on you later,” Marshall said.

She smiled. “You do that.” Then she turned and slipped through the doors into the staging area.

Logan glanced after her. “Is that a relationship you plan to pursue?”

“If I can find an excuse,” Marshall replied happily.

“There’s always an excuse.” Logan glanced at his watch. “Well, I guess I’m next to leave. My helicopter is due any minute.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Marshall said. “You could have waited a day, saved yourself some money.”

“I got a call from my office. Something’s come up.”

“Another spook hunt?”

“Something like that. Besides, the black-ops types who did all the interrogating this morning know where I live. I doubt I’ve heard the last of them.” He paused. “What did you tell them?”

“Exactly what happened, as best I could remember,” Marshall replied. “But it seemed every answer I gave just spawned more questions, so in the end I basically shut up.”

“Did they believe you?”

“I think so. With all of us as eyewitnesses I don’t see why they wouldn’t.” He looked at Logan. “Don’t you think?”

“I think it would have helped if there was a carcass.”

“Yes, that is strange. Certainly left plenty of blood behind. I’d have sworn up and down it was stone dead, its skull the way it was.”

“It must have crawled off to die,” said Faraday. “Just like the first one.”

“You know what Usuguk would say about that,” Marshall replied. He looked toward the horizon, where the Tunit was already dwindling to a brown speck between the broad smears of white and blue.

“I’m damned glad it died,” Logan said, “but I still don’t understand the mechanics. How the sound waves killed it, I mean.”

“Without a corpse we can’t be sure,” Marshall answered. “But I knew that high frequencies irritated it. A pure sine wave, without harmonics, seemed even more painful.”

“But don’t most sounds produce harmonics?”

“That’s right,” said Faraday. “So-called ‘imperfect’ instruments, like a violin or oboe-or a human voice-all do. It’s ironic, because those harmonics are what make sounds rich and complex.”

“But certain sine waves don’t,” Marshall said. “I had the machine produce a series of waves that would reinforce the fundamental tone. I hoped that if we found a sound sufficiently painful, we could drive it from the base.”

“It had a much greater effect than that,” said Logan.

Marshall nodded. “It’s interesting. Fish and whales have internal air bladders, which can be disrupted by sonar. Some scientists believe dinosaurs had organs in their brains for making incredibly loud, trumpeting noises that could be heard miles away. I wouldn’t be surprised if this creature had some similar organ or cavity in its skull-for mating, or communication, or something else. I believe these high frequencies triggered a sympathetic resonance within that organ, and ultimately caused it to burst.”

“I’m a historian, not a physicist,” said Logan. “I’ve never heard of sympathetic resonance.”

“Think of glass shattering when a soprano sings a high note. There’s a natural frequency at which that glass vibrates. If the soprano keeps singing the same note, it keeps adding energy to the glass. At some point the glass can’t dissipate the energy quickly enough and it breaks.” Marshall glanced back toward the base. “In this case, I guess we’ll never know.”

“A pity.” Logan turned to Faraday. “And what did you tell our uniformed interrogators?”

Faraday looked back with his perpetually startled expression. “I tried to explain it from a purely biological perspective. How the two creatures were frozen separately during a single event: an atmospheric inversion causing a downdraft of super-cooled ice, flash-freezing the animals before ice could form in their bloodstreams, keeping them alive in suspended animation. I explained how the ice melted: its unique composition, ice-fifteen, that melts a few degrees below zero centigrade. I explained the second causal agent: the opposite phenomenon to a terminal freeze, a downdraft of unusually warm air that helped revive the creature-and how both events could have triggered the bizarre crimson northern lights that upset Usuguk. I gave them the example of the Beresovka mammoth as a precedent.”

“What did you say about the creature itself?” Logan asked.

“I told them about the Callisto Effect. How the creature could well have been a genetic mutation, or perhaps something as simple as an unknown species. And I told them about the creature’s hyper-developed white blood cell line, how it would promote healing that was almost instant. How beneath the fur it had a chitinous exoskeleton, but scaled almost like a snake, allowing for rapid and flexible movement-and the deflection of bullets. And its unique neurological makeup: even high doses of electricity didn’t disrupt its nervous system or stop its heart. Yet, ironically, sound-of a certain amplitude and frequency-was lethal: aided, perhaps, by weakness brought on due to starvation.”

“So that explains everything,” said Logan.

“Everything-and nothing,” Faraday added.

Logan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Because everything I just told you-except for the blood work-is mere theory and speculation. The fact is, strange types of ice, like ice-fifteen, require a great deal of pressure to form. The fact is, the creature survived being frozen in ice-whatever kind of ice-for thousands of years. It was transcendentally strong. It was impervious to even high doses of electricity…” Faraday shrugged.

Marshall looked at him thoughtfully. The biologist had just constructed a plausible explanation to everything-and then, quickly, pulled the rug out from under it. “Maybe Usuguk was right, after all,” he said.

The two men looked at him.

“Are you serious?” asked Faraday.

“Of course-partly, anyway. I’m a scientist, but I’d be the first to admit science can’t explain everything. We’re a long way from civilization. This is the top of the world. A different set of rules is in place here, rules we don’t have the least idea about. This isn’t man’s environment-but the men who are here have seen a lot more than we have, and we should listen to them. If any land could be called the land of the spirits, wouldn’t it be here-this strange, sacred, distant spot? Do you really think the way the northern lights winked out just when the creature died was utter coincidence?”

The question hung in the cold air, unanswered. In the silence that followed, Marshall heard the distant whap-whap of helicopter blades.

“That would be my ride,” Logan murmured. He hoisted the duffel at his feet.

“What about you?” Marshall asked.

“What about me?” Logan slung his laptop over his shoulder. “If either of you are ever in New Haven, look me up.”

“That’s not an answer. Which theory do you subscribe to-the scientific or the spiritual?”

Logan looked at him for a moment, eyes narrowing slightly. Instead of answering, he asked a question of his own. “Where did you grow up, Dr. Marshall?”

This was the last thing Marshall expected to hear. “ Rapid City, South Dakota.”

“Have any pets?”

“Sure. Three dachshunds.”

“Ever go on long driving trips as a kid?”

Marshall nodded, mystified. “Practically every summer.”

“Ever lose any of those dachshunds at a roadside rest stop?”

“No.”

“I did,” said Logan. “Barkley, my Irish setter. I loved that dog more than just about anything. He ran off at a picnic ground in the middle of Oklahoma nowhere. My family looked for three hours. Never found him. Finally, we had to leave. I was inconsolable.”

The helicopter was landing now outside the security perimeter, beating up diaphanous skeins of powdery snow. Marshall looked at Logan, frowning. “I don’t understand what losing a pet has to do with-”

All of a sudden Logan ’s implication hit home. Marshall blinked in surprise as the light dawned. “Except that the travelers you’re talking about were from much farther away than Rapid City, South Dakota.”

Logan nodded. “Much, much farther.”

Marshall shook his head. “Is that what you believe?”

“I’m an enigmalogist. It’s my job to exercise my imagination. As your friend Faraday here said-mere theory and speculation.” He grinned, shook their hands in turn, then walked toward the waiting helicopter. As the pilot opened the passenger door, he turned back.

“It’s a hell of a speculation, though-isn’t it?” he called over the whine of the engine. Then he clambered in and closed the door. The helicopter rose; wheeled over the Fear glacier-blue against the blue of the sky-and then turned sharply south, toward civilization, away from the land of the spirits.