In Cold Pursuit (23 page)

Valena began to tremble. Just when things were looking up, they came crashing down.

“Hey,” said Michael. “You look like your puppy died.”

The trembling was getting worse. She could feel her lips begin to go. “I n-need a sleeping bag,” she said.

Michael stepped toward her and put his arms around her, scooping her up into a great, warm hug. “There,” he said. “There.”

The tenderness of that hug unhinged her and she leaned against him, fighting tears. “I’m just so—I don’t know what to do!”

Michael ran his hands down her back, stroking her like a kitten. He said, “Surely there’s another sleeping bag to be had in this great expanse of ice. When do you need it?”

“Seven tomorrow morning. I—I’m supposed to help drive some equipment up to Black Island.” With that, she remembered that there was another person whom she could call on for help. Matt.
Tractor Matt. Because membership is free, lifelong, and irrevocable …
Her tears immediately began to subside. She straightened up, wiped her cheeks with her sleeve, and said, “How can I get in touch with Matt?”

“I don’t know. Matt who?”

“I don’t know his last name.”

Michael let his hands drop from her shoulders. “Come with me.”

Valena followed him up to the library at the top of the lab and watched as he sat down at one of the computers there. He woke up the screen and clicked quickly through a menu that brought him around to what looked like a phone list. “Matt with two t’s, right?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, that’s the standard spelling.” He typed the name and clicked the mouse. “Okay, we have three Matts in McMurdo just now. Not bad, out of twelve hundred people, a third of which are women. One’s a cook. Looks like the second is in the carpenter’s shop. And number three is Fleet Ops. What’s your guess?”

“He had a khaki parka.”

“That rules out the kitchen. You’ve described a tradesman, so he’s either a carpenter or a heavy equipment operator. What else do you know about him? Who introduced him to you?”

“He—” The wheels inside Valena’s mind were finally turning again. “Wait, he knew the Boss, who’s in charge of the people who are driving out to Black Island. Is that Fleet Ops?”

“Bingo. Here’s his number.” Michael pulled a pen out of his pocket, wrote the number on the palm of his hand, got up, crossed to a telephone, and dialed. When the call was answered, he said, “Excuse me, but I got a young lady here in search of a sleeping bag. Can you help her?” Grinning, he handed the phone to Valena.

“Yes, is this Tractor Matt? Oh, thanks. Yeah, I thought I could get the one out of the lab, but no dice. Can I still borrow yours? Hey, thanks. Yeah, just drop it off at Building 17, and I’ll get it there. You’re a champ.”

After hanging up the phone, Valena turned to Michael and threw her arms around him, mashing a huge squeeze on him. “Thank you, Michael.”

“Hey!” said another male voice from somewhere behind her. “I hear love blooms even in this cold excuse for a continent, but so quickly!”

Valena jerked clear of Michael and turned. It was James Skehan. He didn’t look as big without his ECWs, but that did not abate the embarrassment she felt. It cut like a hot knife clear down to her socks. “We were just—what business is it of yours?” she demanded.

Skehan held his hands up in mock defense. “Whoa! I
didn’t mean to step on any tender toes here. Just being sociable. So how goes the detective work?”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw Manny Roig an hour ago at Gallagher’s, and he was telling folks all the questions you were asking. Sure sounds like a Sherlock Holmes job to me.”

Valena felt the blood go out of her face. This was bad. She glanced from Skehan to Michael.

Michael had adjusted his face into a mask of pleasant civility. She realized too late that she was asking an employee of Raytheon to defend her to an NSF grantee, and a very powerful one, at that. Would Skehan, or Roig, or anyone else for that matter go to George Bellamy and report her before she could leave McMurdo Station in the morning?

Skehan’s beard hid most of his expression, and his eyes were equally opaque.

“I think I’ll get some sleep,” said Valena, as she hurried toward the door.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, V
ALENA DODGED DOWN THE
hallway and into the galley exactly as the food lines opened. She carried a day pack that held her essential little yellow notebook, her camera, a water bottle, hat, gloves, and a change of skivvies. Everything else needed for the Black Island traverse she already wore on her body, from two layers of polypropylene underwear right out to her blue FDX boots, wind pants, and big red parka. She quickly filled her water bottle with orange juice, then hurried around the room grabbing anything and everything that would fit in her pockets without soaking through them. She did not want to chance running into George Bellamy or anyone else.

The man standing behind the omelet griddle watched her run past. “Hey, what’s the hurry? Can I fry you some eggs this morning?” he inquired.

“Me?” she asked, stuffing a corn muffin into her mouth.

“You look like an owl in a searchlight factory. Going out into the field?”

“How’d you—”

“You’ve got your big red on. People usually leave them on the coat hooks out in the hall.”

“Oh. I’m …” She looked over her shoulder. A few people had come into the lines behind her and were moving slowly past the homemade granola.

The man said, “I know that look. I had a daughter once, and she got to looking like you do each time some boy she didn’t want to meet up with was chasing her. Come here.”

Valena stepped toward the griddle.

Lowering his voice, he said, “You that young thing who’s going to Black Island with Fleet Ops?”

“I—”

“Just tell me what you want on your eggs. Thing is, you don’t want an omelet, because that stuff that’s already whipped up is made from a box. These eggs over here are still in the shell. See? Now, here …” He pointed at a row of small stainless steel bins with his spatula. “These are toppings you can have. What you say is, ‘Give me three
fresh
eggs with,’ well, whatever you want on them. Then you put this thing on”—he handed her a paper chef’s hat—”and you head through that door into the kitchen. Back beyond that big, gruff guy who’s baking bread—don’t mind him, his face broke like that ten years ago—you’ll find a little office or two, nice and private. Young ladies need good nutrition and a place to sit down so they can hope to digest it. Okay? I’ll make your eggs up and send them along to you. Now, what do you want on it?”

Valena managed a faltering smile. “I’ll take cheese, black olives, and mushrooms, please.”

“Good enough. When you’re done eating, the folks back there will hand you a box of flight lunches to take up the hill to the Boss. Anything else you need?”

“No, sir, I think that’ll do it.”

“Git.”

Valena got.

At a quarter to seven, she left Building 155 by the dock door beyond the kitchen carrying the box of flight lunches. Turning her face away from the sea ice, she climbed the hill that led up to Building 17. The call to adventure rose in her heart, and it was time to get the hell out of McMurdo. The place was making her crazy with its strange mixture of kind people and frontier-town haggardness. And if the Boss had any trouble making his need of her free assistance stick with the NSF, it would be to her advantage—and his—if she could not be located in McMurdo.

It was a bright, cloudless day with little wind. She could see why the Boss wanted to take advantage of the weather to
get his crew out to the telecommunications station. She turned and walked backward up the hill so that she could look out across McMurdo Sound. Black Island seemed to float above the glistening ice, a vague slash of distant volcanic rubble rising from the frozen sea. Sixty miles was a long way to go on a tractor.
I’m going to drive a Challenger!
she told herself.

Turning back around, she continued her climb with a big, fat smile on her face. Presently, she heard the crunching foot-falls of another pedestrian on the road. Glancing nervously over her shoulder, she saw a woman carrying an orange duffel. She was a freckled kind of pretty, her cherry-glossed lips a contrast above the collar of her Carhartt jacket, which was streaked with grease and grime. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey yourself.”

The woman grinned, snapping a mouthful of gum. “You must be Valena. I’m Edith.”

“Edith?”

“Yeah, I’m your crew foreman. You’re replacing Steve, right?”

“Right.” Valena’s mouth sagged open. It simply had not occurred to her that her crew would have a foreman, much less a good-looking girly woman.

“I’m starting you out in the Delta with one of the guys,” said Edith, “but then you can take your turn on the snow machines if you like. We’ll also have a Challenger, but that will be pulling a goose—that’s a sort of plow thing on skis—so with apologies I’m not going to let you learn how to drive it while we’re off the main routes because if you screw up we’re stuck. You can drive it on the way back tomorrow, after we get off the soft stuff. Dave will be driving it. He’ll teach you.”

“Dave.”
There was a David on Ted’s list
, thought Valena.
Manny called him Dave.

“Yeah, he’s our Cat skinner.”

“Not a blaster.”

“Dave? No, he drives a Cat. The blasters are part of another outfit.”

“That’s a common name.”

“You’d be amazed how many Daves we have this year.
Some years we’ll have only one Dave and thirteen Alistairs. Anyway, then we got Wee Willy and Hilario. So the Boss says you’ve driven heavy equipment during a potato harvest.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Aces.” They had arrived at a small prefabricated building. “Okay, here we are: Home sweet Building 17. You can load those lunches straight into the cab of the Delta.”

Valena turned. Instead of a passenger box on the back, this Delta had a flatbed on which had been loaded a huge PVC water barrel, several large wooden packing crates, and a heap of bamboo poles tipped with bright nylon flags. There was a short person on top of the load dressed in Carhartts. He was wrangling a water hose into the barrel to fill it.
This will be either Dave, Wee Willy, or Hilario
, she presumed.

She got the box of sack lunches up into the Delta, taking a moment to look the machine over more carefully than she had when she had been a mere passenger on her way to Happy Camp. Its wheels were almost as tall as she was. It had a huge engine mounted behind the front axle and the cab, which was a six-foot cube cantilevered out in front, hanging about shoulder height above the ground. Unconcerned with aerodynamics, its designers had simply constructed a metal box with square corners, giving the cab the appearance of having been added as an afterthought, like a brick left sitting on a board. It had two doors on each side, with the handles set at the bottom so that she could hope to reach them from the ground. Access to the cab was up metal ladders, the bottom rungs suspended from metal chains. The whole mess had once been red but was now faded to a soft rose, and the forward doors had been embellished with a lovely cartoon of a leaping porpoise above lyric yellow lettering that read
FLIPPER.
Somehow this did not inspire confidence.

She reached up and yanked open the forward door and shoved the box of lunches and her backpack in onto the floor, then climbed up the ladder to the running board. From there she could maneuver the lunches and her pack onto the backseat, which was already heaped with other peoples’ duffels. The windshield and other windows were flat slabs of glass,
and the dashboard was olive drab metal with placards listing the vehicle’s weight, which was eleven tons. Long windshield wipers hung on pivots from the tops of the windows. The whole thing looked like a stage set for a World War II film about the mud-ridden life of the GI.

Valena climbed down and gave the door a healthy slam.

At the sound, the short man on the flatbed turned and saw her. “Oh, hey, you’re the new Steve,” he called. “We’re all filled up. Have to fill this thing at the last minute, as it would freeze if we left it overnight. Let me screw this lid on and we’ll get on our way. Oh, and I put Steve’s sleeping bag into the cab for you. It’s behind the driver’s seat.”

“Thanks.”

Half a minute later, he had climbed down and was standing on the ground in front of her, pulling his gloves off and stuffing them into his pockets. He was short and swarthy and had coal black hair, dark brown eyes, and wide cheekbones.

“Are you Hilario?” Valena inquired, pronouncing the name with the Spanish accent she had learned from friends in Colorado.

He gave her a look of appraisal. “Latina?”

“No se,”
she replied.
I don’t know.

Hilario tipped his head and stared at her. “You don’t
know?”

“I was adopted.”

Hilario flashed a row of even, white, teeth. “Aw, screw it then, you’re Latina.
Chica
fine as you I claim for
todos los Latinos.”
He threw a hand over his head like a bullfighter.

“Well, thank you,” said Valena.

The door to Building 17 opened and the Boss stepped out. “Hilario, come in here, please. And get Edith, will you? Dave and Willy are already in here.”

“Sure, Boss.” He turned and called to the crew chief.

“Does he want me in there, too?” asked Valena.

Hilario shook his head. “Don’t sound like it.” He disappeared into the building, with Edith close on his heels.

Valena stood in the door yard and waited. Time was ticking
past. She wanted to get moving. She burned to get out onto the ice. She itched to speak with Sheila Tuttle. And she wanted desperately to step beyond the reach of George Bellamy. Something was wrong, she could feel it in her gut. When he had stepped outside the door, the Boss had not looked as jolly as he had the night before. In fact, he had looked upset. Had he been told he could not have Valena’s help? Did that mean that the traverse to Black Island was scratched until Steve could recover?

What was taking them so long? Were they talking about her? Were they changing their minds, deciding that she wasn’t up to the task?