Frozen Solid: A Novel (2 page)

“That sounded bad,” Hallie said. “Bronchitis?”

“Pole cold. Don’t worry, you’ll get it. So
are
you a winterover?”

The woman got on the snowmobile and motioned for Hallie to sit behind her. The wind had picked up. “Does it always blow like this?” Hallie asked.

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“What I meant, it’s usually stronger.”

Before she gunned the engine, the woman peered over her shoulder at Hallie. “I
got
it. You’re replacing that Beaker who died, right? What’s-her-name.”

“Her name was Emily Durant,” Hallie said.

“
WELCOME TO ARSE,
”
THE BARREL-SHAPED WOMAN ANNOUNCED.
“
STANDS FOR
—”

“I got it. ASRS. Amundsen-Scott Research Station.” Hallie had regained her breath. “It looks like a Motel 6 on stilts.”

They were standing beside the parked snowmo at the bottom of the yellow stairs that rose to the station’s main entrance.

“Wind blows underneath, stops snow buildup. Otherwise, five years, we’re buried. Just like Old Pole.”

“Everything happens here? Living, research, all of it?”

“Now it does. Summer people are gone. Beakers are finishing up projects. And there’s a skeleton crew of Draggers.”

“Beakers? Draggers?”

“Pole slang. Scientists are Beakers. Support workers are Draggers like me. As in ‘knuckle draggers.’ ”

Inside, they shoved Hallie’s bags against a wall, peeled off outer layers. The other woman was five inches shorter and a good bit heavier than Hallie, who stood five-ten and weighed 135. She wore her brown hair in a crew cut. Her cheeks were pitted with old acne scars, and she had a kicked dog’s wary look. She peered at Hallie,
took in the short, almost white-blond hair, high cheekbones, large, turquoise-blue eyes, and whistled softly. “Gonna have your hands full with boy Polies. And some of the girls. So you know.”

“What’s your name?” Hallie asked.

“Rockie Bacon.”

“Rockie?”

“As in Rochelle. What’s yours?”

“Hallie Leland.” She was peering, nose wrinkled, down a long, dim corridor. “Clean, well-lighted place you have here.”

“Energy conservation. Just enough light for safety. Motion sensors turn them on and off as you move along.”

“I was being ironic,” Hallie said.

“Gathered that. I’ve read the story. Faulkner, right?”

Hallie’s nose kept her from setting Bacon straight about contemporary American fiction. “What
is
that reek?”

“Eau de Pole,” Bacon chuckled. “Diesel fumes, disinfectant, burned grease, and unwashed bodies. You’re here just for five days?”

“Why is the floor vibrating?”

“So you’re one of those.”

“What kind of those?”

“Who answer questions with questions. It’s irritating.”

“Is it?” Hallie could keep the grin off her face, but not out of her eyes.

“Fungees.” Bacon scowled.

“What’s a fungee?”

“Fucking new guy. Or girl.”

Bacon’s cough had sounded bad outside. It was worse inside, without the face mask and the covering noise of wind. She was flushed, her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose ran.

“Picornavirus heaven,” Hallie said. “Everybody sealed in like lab mice, passing germs back and forth.”

“You a doctor?”

“Microbiologist. Where’s the cafeteria? I need water and coffee.”

——

The U.S. Navy dug the first South Pole station out of solid virgin ice in 1957. Buried thirty feet deep now, that original facility, called “Old Pole,” still survived. So did some vestiges of naval tradition. Thus the current station’s cafeteria was a galley. By any name, it was like the dining hall in a big high school or penitentiary, one open rectangle redolent of fresh floor wax and old grease, crammed with scarred green tables and chairs, and buzzing at lunchtime. The kitchen and serving line were in back. In a fit of festivity, somebody had once strung multicolored Christmas lights from the ceiling. Most were burned out now, and their wires hung like thick green cobwebs.

“How’s South Pole food?” Hallie was in line with Bacon.

“Ever been in prison?”

Before Hallie could say, “Not yet,” a red-haired woman in a lab coat stood up too quickly, knocking her chair over backward. She was clamping a wad of paper napkins to her face, trying to stanch a bad nosebleed. Blood quickly soaked the makeshift compress, ran down the skin of her hands and pale wrists, and dropped in radish-sized spots onto her white lab coat.

For a few moments, nothing more happened. Then the woman’s eyes bulged and her chest convulsed. She coughed out a thick, red stream. Took a step, stumbled, mouth thrown open, blood spewing. She staggered, knocking over chairs. Grabbed for a table. Blood kept pouring out, splashing the front of her lab coat, splattering tabletops, the floor. People scrambled away.

She fell over backward. Her head hit the floor with a sharp crack. A PA system boomed:

“Code blue in the galley. Code blue in the galley. EMTs to the galley. Repeat, code blue in the galley.”

“Somebody called comms,” Bacon said.

A heavy man in black coveralls knelt beside the woman. He put his face close to feel for breath, shook his head, and began performing chest compressions. Another man knelt by her head with a mask-style ventilator, but there was too much blood flowing to use it.

Two EMTs in blue jumpsuits burst into the galley. They suctioned the woman’s airway, then went to work with a ventilator bag and
defibrillator. After ten minutes and four sets of shocks, the instrument’s computerized voice droned, “Victim not responding.”

The EMTs rocked back on their heels. “She’s gone,” one said.

Hallie had seen victims on mountains and in caves badly hurt, drowned, and, several times, killed and disarticulated by long falls, but she had never seen so much blood. The woman lay completely surrounded by an oval, dark red pool. The two men and the EMTs looked like battle casualties.

The big room had been absolutely silent while the EMTs worked. Now it became even louder than before. When she’d entered, Hallie had seen dozens of faces, each one distinct. Now they all looked very much alike, reshaped by horror. Someone—she couldn’t tell whether man or woman—was sobbing softly off to one side.

“What the
hell
happened here?” Hallie turned to see a tall man dressed in pressed khakis. She was struck by the pallor of his skin and how his clothes hung off his knobby frame. His voice was raspy. Heavy smoker or bad sore throat, she thought. Maybe both.

“I was sitting close.” A woman in the onlooking circle, red-faced, close to tears. One hand was clasping a table edge, the other at the base of her throat. “Harriet stood up all of a sudden. I thought it was Polarrhea. But then she started vomiting blood. I never saw so much blood. Look at it.”

“She wasn’t vomiting,” one of the EMTs said. “No foreign matter there. Just blood.”

“Some kind of hemorrhage,” the other EMT said. He, like everyone else in the room, was still staring at the woman on the floor. Her skin was now almost as white as her lab coat. The smell of her fresh blood overwhelmed the wax and grease and everything else. Hallie’s stomach heaved. With the initial shock wearing off, she felt stunned, sorry for the woman, and, she was honest enough to admit, afraid.

The man in khakis keyed a radio and spoke: “Comms, Graeter. Get Doc and the biohazard team to the galley.” He had a bud in his right ear, so only he could hear the other side. He spoke again: “There’s blood. A lot. One female down. Harriet Lanahan.” To the EMTs he said, “You help them with the body when they get here. Doc
will need to see it and take photographs. After, secure it in the morgue. I’ll get a flyout as soon as possible.”

He turned on the crowd of onlookers. Hallie saw anger in the abrupt move and heard it in his voice. Maybe it’s the default condition here, she thought. “I want witness statements in my email by thirteen hundred hours.”

“What if we didn’t see anything?” someone called.

“Then say that in your email, for Christ’s sake. I may talk to some of you later. Listen up: paging response has been shit-sloppy. If you hear your name, I’d better see you in my office pronto or learn a good reason why not. Now let’s clear this area. The bio team will be here soon.”

Hallie started to follow Bacon and the others out, but a hand landed on her shoulder. She turned to see the man in khakis.

“You’re Leland?” he asked.

“I just got here. I was going to see you after—”

He looked as if she had said something offensive. “Zack Graeter. Follow me.”

“
WAIT ONE,
”
SAID GRAETER.

His desk was a massive steel relic from the 1950s that occupied practically half of the office. He turned away and began jabbing his computer’s keyboard with two long, stiff index fingers.

She decided to give nice a try. “My grandfather had a Buick about the size of that desk.”

He didn’t look up. There was no other chair and not much to see. The smudged, lima bean–green walls were bare except for a gray metal cabinet hanging behind him and an eight-by-ten color photograph of a woman thumbtacked to the wall opposite him. Throwing darts were stuck in and around the photo, which looked like it had been blasted with No. 8 birdshot. He stopped typing and turned back to her.

“Your ETA was tomorrow.” He made no effort to stand and shake hands, causing Hallie to wonder if he was protecting her from germs or just rude.

He
looked
rude, if such a thing were possible. There was not much more to him than muscle strung over bone and wrapped in white skin. Steel-wool hair, high forehead, cheekbones like golf balls. A
thin, hard mouth cast in a downward curve. His khaki pants and shirt were crisp, his black shoes and brass belt buckle polished to a sheen.

I’ll eat that skinny little tie, thought Hallie, if he’s not ex-Navy.

“McMurdo had a flight with space. I figured an extra day would be valuable, with winterover so close. But—”

He waved off the explanation. “I don’t like unscheduled arrivals. I can’t give you the safety tour today.”

A woman just bled out and we’re talking about schedules?
“What happened back there?”

“In the galley?” he asked.

“Unless somebody died in another place that I’m not aware of.”

That got more of his attention. “It looked to me like Dr. Harriet Lanahan suffered a fatal hemorrhage. She was a glaciologist. From the U.K. But Merritt does the Beakers.”

She waited.

He waited longer.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“If you know more than that, please enlighten me.”

“It’s what I don’t know that’s bothering me. First, how could it have happened? And second, I’m struck by your
sang
 … by your lack of concern.”

“I know what
sangfroid
means, Ms. Leland. Annapolis isn’t Harvard, but it’s not a goddamned community college. First, we won’t know how it could have happened until the medical examiner in Christchurch performs an autopsy and issues his report. Second, that wasn’t my first fatality.” He fixed her with what was obviously meant to be a commanding glare. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the South Pole. It is very easy to die here.”

She folded her arms, looked around for some clue to this strange man, but saw only the dirty green walls, punctured photograph, and that cabinet.

He sighed, raised beat-up hands. “Would you prefer it if I cried and beat my breast? Tore out some hair?”

Talking with him was like striking flint to steel. But this was terra
incognita, after all, the manager and the station and the South Pole. The whole
continent
, for that matter. Until she understood everything better, she would do her best to be civil. “Had the woman been sick? Was there any warning that this might have happened? A precondition, maybe? There’s a doctor here, right?”

“Why all the questions? You didn’t even know her.”

“First, she’s a human being. Second, I’m a field investigator for CDC. Pathogens are what I do. Third, once the word gets out, reporters will be asking questions. It would be nice if my boss had some answers. Yours might be wanting some, too, I’d bet.”

In his eyes she saw a new flicker—amusement or irritation, maybe both. “If she had been sick, Agnes Merritt would know. She’s the chief scientist. Lanahan was a Beaker and worked for her. If there had been some precondition, Doc might have known.” He hoisted his eyebrows, pointed one bony finger. “For the record, I don’t give a fiddlefuck about bosses, and my job description does not include grief counselor. I won’t bore you with the details of my workload, but with winterover four point five days away I am well and truly—excuse my French—
fucked
, and you are keeping me from getting unfucked.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But if you recall, it was you who asked me to come in here.”

“And if
you
recall, it was not to talk about Dr. Lanahan.”

“What happened to your hands?” They were painful to look at, red and cracked, oozing.

“Pole hands. Basically zero humidity here. Skin takes a beating.”

Pole throat, Pole cold, Pole hands, she thought. What’s next? Pole brain, probably.

“It looks painful.”

“At first. Then the nerves die.”

“Good thing you don’t play piano.”

“Actually, I do. Just not allegro anymore.”

She tried to imagine him banging out show tunes at cocktail parties. The image wouldn’t gel. “That happens to everybody?”

“Pretty much. You don’t look so good yourself, Ms. Leland. Maybe you should think about catching the next flight out.”

IT WAS EARLY MONDAY MORNING. DON BARNARD, WHO HAD NEVER
been a late sleeper, was sitting with coffee in the study of his Silver Spring home. He was a big man, twenty pounds heavier than in his days playing tight end for the University of Virginia thirty-five years earlier. His hair and mustache were both white and the skin of his face was heavily creased from squinting in the bright sun while sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. His wife, Lucianne, was still in bed.