Dark Winter (27 page)

He didn't reply. Was the idiot playing hide and seek?

No, there he was again, popping up and dipping down. A nonsense pattern. Was he circling around each tank? He was going to make her walk all the way, she could tell. Sighing, she went on, deeper and deeper into the cold gloom. She could hear the tinkle of her frozen exhalations crystallizing and falling away behind her.

"Bloody silly Yank."

Then a thought occurred to her. She stopped, her blood thumping in her ears, and considered her situation again with sudden doubt. What if the figure at the end of the archway wasn't Cameron at all? What if it was somebody like that Lewis, who always seemed to turn up in the wrong places? Or Tyson, growling like a wounded bear? Here she was alone, in this dark, spooky place, with no weapon, no escort…

Nervously she reached inside her parka and pulled out the whistle she'd kept since finding Harrison Adams, the fingie Lewis standing there with broken heat tape in his hands as if he'd snipped it himself. She'd had nightmares about that one.

"Rod?" Her call was quiet, but still it echoed away.

Cautiously she moved ahead again, waiting for the elusive stranger to reappear. There! She stopped and he stopped, as if freezing. My God, who was it? Why wouldn't he approach? "Who's there!" Her weak challenge echoed away.

You can't run, she told herself. Not if you're going to live here for seven more sinister, slogging, dome-slug months. She edged ahead, cautious now, her whistle in one mitten. The figure moved upward and then slipped down and away. Damn, that was unprofessional! You didn't duck around like a silly jack-in-the-box! Not after all that had happened!

She was almost to the end and left the illumination of the last light, the archway like a receding cave. Her eyes were adjusting and she could make out dark shapes. The tanks sat in their trim, mute line, these farthest ones already empty. And yet she saw no one. No movement. She stopped, perplexed and frightened.

"Rod?"

This was weird.

Dana turned to retreat, her skin prickling under her parka. Something was wrong, she could sense it, and she felt a growing dread at being here. It was time to go back to the galley. Cameron was a lost cause, a supervisor who had no business supervising. Her data could wait. Global atmospheric circulation could wait. She'd spend the winter watching bloody videos if she had to, and try to pick up the pieces back in Auckland.

She strode back purposefully, fighting the impulse to break into a clumsy run. And then there he was again, somehow having circled around her, rising up in front of her in the distance, elusive and ill-formed…

She stopped. He stopped.

And suddenly it dawned on her.

"My shadow!" She glanced upward. As she passed under each light, the shadow of her form appeared and faded on the tanks ahead. Her elusive fugitive was her own advancing form. She'd been frightened of herself.

She laughed, the sound sharp and relieved. "Silly goose."

Her heartbeat began to slow, her sweat to cool her. She shivered again. Enough of this nonsense: Back to the galley! To hell with tea, she was ready for a tumbler of single malt! She walked again, quickly now, her boots banging as if she were on the boardwalk of a pioneer town, deciding firmly that her days of searching for her wayward station manager were over. Enough craziness! If Cameron wanted some research progress to show for the winter, he could damn well start working more effectively with the scientists. And if not…

She stopped again. There was something odd about the snow between two of the tanks, she realized.

Dana peered closer into the dimness. Coming this way, the shadows cast by the light made apparent what had failed to draw her eye in the opposite direction. The snow was heavily trampled, sprayed as if kicked. There was a geometric regularity down there in the scuffed area, she saw: a white curve against the dark paint of a tank. The curve of… a boot. A white bunny boot.

She glanced quickly around. No one there.

"Rod?"

Just leave it. Send someone else. But no, they'd think her a girlish fool.

Her pulse racing again, she climbed over the railing and down from the catwalk and walked unsteadily toward the boot. She could see a leg now, its black nylon windpants extending into shadow, and then another leg, knee up. The figure was on its back. My God.

She stopped, dizzy with fear. Why, why, why was she the one to stumble on these troubles? The whole winter was terribly unfair. She breathed a moment, closing her eyes, gathering her courage. Then she opened them again. The snow was blotchy and as she came near she realized that between the tanks it was colored red. Bright red.

Shaking now, she stepped in the gap, leaning unsteadily against one of the tanks. It was Cameron, sprawled on his back, his parka hood off, and his eyes screwed shut with pain. He'd frozen that way. He lay as if on a red disk, a platter of congealed blood. His parka was soaked with it, and a wisp of steam came from a ragged tear in his chest.

Rod hadn't been dead very long.

Feeling her gorge rise, she leaned closer. It appeared to be the kind of wound a sharp weapon would make. Something like a knife: a big knife. Cameron's mouth was open as if hollering as he went down, and so something was stuffed in it as if to cut the noise. A cloth, perhaps, to gag him. Smother him.

She knelt, reaching. But what had seemed like a cloth crumbled in a shockingly familiar manner and, trembling, she pulled a piece out and backed into the light where she could see what had been crammed down the station manager's throat.

It was a piece of rye toast. Exactly the same kind she had tacked to Buck Tyson's door.

Dana turned and threw up.

The most important thing is to stay calm."

Robert Norse was magnificently calm, an inspiration, a pillar, an anchor. He was their nucleus and everyone else in the galley an excited, buzzing electron. The group was threatening to fly apart and the psychologist was the station's magnetic center. Norse hadn't been voted to leadership in the wake of Cameron's death and yet he'd quietly assumed it, with the backing of Nancy Hodge- her own authority established by her brisk, no-nonsense willingness to take charge of the station manager's bloody corpse. Norse's accession made a kind of sense. As a psychologist he was their odd duck, their voyeur, but he was also free of the everyday scientific allegiances and rivalries that might have made any other leader unacceptable to at least part of the group. He was a beaker and yet he wasn't. He conveyed sympathy and yet had a detachment that seemed to make him unflappable. Now the psychologist's eyes swept the room like a hose, trying to extinguish the panic that smoldered there. It was not just murder, but murder within a family: There was an incestuous nature to the stabbing that struck at the group's social core. Tyson! By going after their station manager it was if the mechanic had vandalized their church, violated their taboos. He'd struck at the station's head and heart. It would be all Norse could do to keep the group from lynching him.

"We'll calm down when that murderous bastard is out of here," Geller heatedly replied. There was a growl of assent. Fear was close to turning the winter-overs into a mob.

Norse held up his hands. "Please. I understand your emotion. I understand your fear. But our choices aren't easy. We don't have a jail cell, we don't have a police force, and there's a limit to what we can do."

"We don't have a gun and we don't have a good lock and we don't have a sheriff," Geller added. "What we've got is a psycho built like Hulk Hogan hiding somewhere on station and not even a cap pistol to defend ourselves with. We're in one hell of a fix, Doc."

"Is there any weapon on station at all?" Norse asked.

"Closest we come is the flare gun Rod used to try to signal Harrison. It might hurt if fired into your eye but short of that…"

"That's something, though. Let's start with that. Where is it?"

"With the emergency stuff in the fire closet," said Hank Anderson, the carpenter who helped coordinate fire teams. "It ain't much."

"Well, I don't want Tyson to have it, either. Can you get it, please, and deliver it here?"

"How about the fire axes?" Geller asked.

Norse shrugged. "Yes. Let's bring them to the galley, too, until this is sorted out."

Anderson nodded and left.

"Okay," Norse went on, "I've contacted the National Science Foundation about our situation down here and I've asked Abby- at their request- to hold off on other e-mail or communication to the outside world for a while. We're going to keep this in-family."

"No!" Gabriella protested. "I want to talk to my friends!" There was a rolling murmur of support and anxiety. Nothing was more important than their electronic link.

The psychologist nodded again. He never disagreed. "You're right. Communication is what we need above all else. That's why we're talking now. And we'll reestablish contact to the outside world as soon as we can. But this is an explosive situation and people are trying to get a handle on it. We've got some circumstantial evidence, a volatile mechanic who's disappeared, and laws that say he's innocent until proven guilty. The folks back in D.C. need some time to sort this out and consider what our options are." He hesitated. "It was Rod's idea after Adams was found to ask them to send help down, like the FBI agents that went into McMurdo a few years back to pick up that cook who flew off the handle. I'll confess I talked him out of it as premature. I thought it would hurt his career. Maybe I was wrong. But even then it was too late to get a plane to actually land. It's winter, the runway is shut down, and the Guard crews who fly are long gone. It's dangerous to fly. It makes no sense to risk more lives if there's any other alternative."

"There is no alternative!" Dana Andrews shouted.

"Yes, let's open the damn runway!" astronomer Carl Mendoza agreed. "Get out the bulldozers! We'll figure them out without Buck. Plow without Buck. Put flame pots and flares out without Buck. We have to ship Tyson out of here before we lose the whole winter."

Norse kept nodding. "Absolutely. We're going to look at every possibility. But right now NSF is asking us for three things. First, no panic. Okay? No panic. We have to keep a clear head. Second, no yelling to the world over satellite. And third, no rashness, nothing that will stain the reputation of the station in the future. Think! This is what you trained for. This is what you're paid for. Keeping things together, keeping it going. Okay? Can we lower the temperature here?" He waited for a response.

"Chill out," Hiro Sakura finally said. "It is easy to do at the South Pole." There was strained laughter at his thickly accented observation, a slight release of tension.

Norse smiled slightly, gratified at the help. "Okay. Now, what do we know? Dana found Rod's body with a stab wound. Someone had put toast on Buck's door, and the same kind of toast was in Rod's mouth. And Tyson's disappeared. It looks bad, but that doesn't mean we can be certain he's a murderer."

"Bullshit," said Pulaski. "We're certain he's a slug-eating, shower-hogging, work-shirking sonofabitch who's deliberately tried to scare the crap out of just about everyone in this room! Why not a murderer?"

"The bastard had it in for Rod from the beginning," added Mendoza. "He did nothing but complain and threaten. We all saw them almost get into a fistfight. He had it in for Harrison, too, and he was out the day Adams died. Him and Lewis."

"We all know Buck carried a chip on his shoulder," Norse cautioned. "We don't know he snapped."

"We have Mickey's death as well," Pulaski reminded. "Tyson didn't like him, either."

"Yes," Nancy Hodge chimed in. "Which could mean that Rod learned something about those deaths that the killer didn't want discovered. He panics, they fight…" She shrugged. "It could happen."

"It did happen." Alexi Molotov stood up. "Listen, Doctor Bob, I appreciate your efforts to keep things as, what you say, sensible. We are scientists, that is how it should be. But we have had three deaths. Three deaths! In our tiny group! And now this angry mechanic who makes knives is hiding somewhere and we have no weapons and maybe no chance of help from the outside world." He looked at them expectantly.

"What are you saying, Alexi?" Norse asked quietly.

"That we hunt him down before he hunts us. Like the Russian wolf."

"Hunt him down?"

"String him up," Geller said, only half jokingly. "First tree we find."

"No, we are not executioners," Molotov said. "Let your authorities investigate when they can, but you are right, it will not be until spring. In the meantime, he has to be quarantined, confined, so the rest of us feel safe."

"Like Lewis was."

"Like Lewis still should be," Dana said. Lewis wasn't there, having been ordered to stay out at Clear Air for his own safety. "I don't trust him, either. He's the one who started all this."

"That's unfair," Abby said, coming to his defense. "He's just new."

"You're sweet on him, Ice Cream, but he gives the rest of us the willies. Besides, where was he when Cameron died? I heard he was on the squawk box setting up a meeting with our dead leader."

"Yes," Molotov said. "He radioed. We heard it."

"Right," Abby retorted. "And if he was going to knife him, would he broadcast a rendezvous?" She was angry. "Where were you, Dana? In the arch with the victim, as I understand it. Maybe you killed him, and made it look like Tyson."

"That is so completely out of bounds…"

"Enough!" Norse raised his hands. "Enough, enough, enough. Let's deal with Mr. Lewis later. He stays in Clean Air until we sort this out."

"How can we sort it out when he's never here to defend himself?" Abby protested.

Norse ignored her. "We think we have our killer, so let's not go off the deep end pointing fingers at others. The problem is Buck. The issue is Buck. Where can we keep him when we catch him?"