Dark Winter (18 page)

"Where?" Everyone was curious.

"Where even Mickey Moss had no business being."

"Where?"

"The abandoned base."

Thin blue shadows bobbed ahead of the search party like anxious children, their silhouettes running ahead to get to the buried ruin. Lewis felt more hesitant. He was curious about the abandoned Navy base but he'd also been warned it was utterly dark and cheerlessly cold. The truth was, he was mildly claustrophobic. He didn't relish looking for a dead body down there.

The e-mailed message that Adams had found had been deleted from Moss's computer but Abby, who had some hacker skills, had been able to retrieve it from the encrusted history of his hard disk. If you want your meteorite back, meet me in the old base at midnight. Unsigned, of course, and dating from the evening before Mickey disappeared. She was trying to retrace its point of origin now.

Meanwhile, the elongated penumbra of their own bodies stopped at a womblike slit in the snow, its lips widened as if recently penetrated. Someone had passed this way not long before. The edges of the tiny entry glowed a cobalt blue that sank into the ink of a catacomb. It seemed the kind of hole that could close up behind you, not letting you out.

"It's the only place we haven't looked," Cameron said in response to the unspoken reluctance of the others. Everyone was tired and hungover. The cold worsened their headaches.

"Why in hell would a thief lead Mickey here?" Pulaski wondered aloud.

"Cheese to a mouse," suggested Geller, who'd pulled down his gaiter to bite on a candy bar. His beard began to grow ice crystals as he chewed.

"Which implies a trap," the cook said.

"Or an exchange," said Cameron.

Let's get on with it, then, Lewis thought. He was tired and uneasy and the half-mile walk from the dome had left him sweaty and cold. He wanted to crawl into bed. But volunteering to help this time seemed another way to get loose of the albatross of suspicion.

"This opening goes down to the old meteorology room at one end at the old base," Cameron said. "Stay tight and watch your step. The timbers are starting to buckle from the weight of the snow." He was carrying rope, an ice ax, and a small field shovel.

"Why'd they build it down there, anyway?" Geller asked dubiously, looking at the hole.

"They didn't. The snow just piled up around it. Eventually it buries everything."

"You don't even have to dig your own grave down here," Pulaski said.

"And a hundred thousand years from now the ice will have flowed enough to spit everything back out into the ocean," Cameron replied. "Sewage. Garbage. Remains."

"Won't want to be around when that iceberg melts out," Geller said.

They crawled through the opening, switched on flashlights, opened a hatch, and descended. Cones of illumination danced down old wooden stairs to a snow-dusted plywood floor. The wood was too frozen to exhibit any signs of decay. When they got to the bottom the four of them almost filled the low room, its ceiling bending ominously from the weight of snow above. Cameron let his beam play across the walls. There was a table with an abandoned military radio, its clunkiness suggesting decades of antiquity. A gray metal office chair. Another table with old meteorological charts. There was no decay and no dust, just a patina of frost. The air was utterly still and heavy with an ancient, undisturbed cold, somehow more cloying and penetrating than the brisker air outside. While the temperature was a constant fifty-five below zero, it felt colder.

"Well, I don't like this," Geller announced. "Would Mickey really come down here?"

"Moss once lived here, remember?" Cameron said. "He helped build it."

"Built a meat-locker morgue."

"It was different with the heat on."

Lewis played his flashlight along the floor, trying to ignore his claustrophobia. "Boot prints." His light slid along to a dark doorway. "Lots of them, going both directions."

"Doesn't mean anything," Cameron said. "There's no wind, and no fresh snowfall except what seeps through. Come down here and your prints last as long as on the moon. Until someone else walks over them, like us."

They went through the door to another room. There were crates and old cardboard boxes, empty. A few polar visitors had scrawled or scratched names on the walls. Nothing had decayed in the cold.

The men shuffled ahead, the gloom swallowing where they'd been and obscuring what lay ahead. Doorways appeared like the lids of pits, yawning a deeper darkness. Examination with the flashlights showed them to be merely old rooms, empty of any life. Walls canted crazily from the strain of the snow above.

"If these lights go out, we're in shit city," Geller said. "This place is like a maze."

"Exactly," Cameron said. "So don't wander off."

"Except maybe it would go faster if we split up."

"No splitting up," said Pulaski. "Mickey got into trouble because he was alone."

"I thought you was Rambo," Geller said. "One-man army."

"Rambo is horseshit. In the Army the idea is to get there first with the most, and most means you don't split up. Warriors who want to do their own thing are called dead heroes."

"Tyson says you have to look after yourself."

"Tyson's a butthead. You look after yourself by looking after each other."

They came into the galley. It was as if the old base had been suddenly evacuated, not shut down. There were dirty glasses, open beer cans and bottles, and a spill of old forks on the floor. Tables and chairs were askew. In the kitchen an abandoned refrigerator hung open to reveal a cascade of forgotten, frozen hot dogs. A bulletin board had meeting notices and cartoons from a quarter century before. Their lights flickered over an old bar, revealing the charms of a laminated Miss November. Geller studied her with a historian's interest. "They plasticized her," he said. "Look, she was before pubic hair."

"Did they pack or flee?" Lewis asked as he looked around. "Some of this is crap from people who sneak down here to party," Cameron explained. "Nobody stays too long because it's too damn cold. It's just something to say you've done it, like sleeping in a haunted house. But yeah, the Navy pretty much just walked away."

"Why didn't they move their stuff?" Geller asked.

"Move it where? It was old and there's no place to store it. Cost a fortune to fly it out. So this has become a repository, like Scott's Hut at McMurdo. A thousand years from now some archaeologist is going to come down here and find those hot dogs."

"Not exactly King Tut," Pulaski said.

"But it's history. Just like the dome is history. That's what we're doing down here, making history."

"The way Mickey Moss is history," Pulaski said.

"Let's hope there's still a chance." Cameron lifted his head and shouted, "Mickey!" The call echoed away into the darkness, seeming to shake the old base as it did so. Somewhere a wall creaked in reply.

"Jesus, don't do that," Geller said. "You'll bring the whole place down on us."

"We gotta try."

They went into the next room, an old barracks. The bunks and mattresses were free of mold because of the cold. Not even bacteria could live here. The beds held frozen impressions as if bodies had vacated only hours before. Lewis felt like the place was inhabited by ghosts. He was freezing up from their slow pace.

"Are we near the end?"

"Halfway."

The ceiling on the garage and powerhouse had mostly collapsed, the trusses and plywood snapped and crumpled across an old generator. Cameron played his flashlight across the wreckage, looking for a clue. There was none.

They went on through a connecting corridor to the other half of the base, a gap of snow having been left between the two to help contain any fire. The short passageway was lit by a faint gray crepuscular light that penetrated the snow from the surface.

A beam creaked as they edged past.

There was an old recreation room with abandoned ping-pong table and bookcases. In a storage center were steel and paper drums, lined like sentries, their frozen dregs unknowable. The science room had been mostly gutted of equipment except for a lab bench. Calendars were dated 1974. Discarded trash was heaped in corners.

The last room was a small astronomical observatory. The clump of their boots on plywood was uncomfortably loud.

"They launched weather balloons here and took sightings of the stars," Cameron said. "End of the line."

"That's it, then," Pulaski said. "No Mickey."

"Where do those stairs go?" Geller asked, pointing to a set leading upward.

"Out, I hope. This is the other entrance to the base. We might have to dig a little if it's drifted." Cameron glanced around the barren room, clearly frustrated. "I can't think where else to look."

Lewis let his flashlight play about. Its beam was already dimming. "What's that?"

There was a small plywood door behind the stairs, its edge opened a crack. The snow at its foot was heavily scuffed.

"I think it's an old tunnel that goes out to pits used for earthquake and geomagnetic research. Probably collapsed."

"Except the door's been recently opened," Lewis said. He walked over and pointed. There were fresh splinters of yellow wood around the faded gray.

"Bingo," Geller said.

The door had frozen back in place and Cameron used his ice ax to once more pry it free. A tunnel just five feet high and three broad led into darkness. The wood ceiling bulged downward as if pregnant. The walls looked ready to implode. But patches of snow on its plywood floor showed a welter of tracks and scuff marks.

"Gawd," Pulaski said doubtfully. "Mickey would go in there?" "Somebody did," Cameron said. "Not too long ago, either, I'm guessing. I think we'd better rope up. Who wants to lead?"

No one spoke up.

"Okay, I will." He peered down the tunnel uncertainly.

"I'll go last," Lewis said. "With the other light." The cold was stiffening his muscles and he didn't want to stoop-walk into that dark corridor. Last in, first out. The snow was pressing down like earth on a coffin. "I'll take the ice ax; I've used one before. If you fall, I'll brake you."

They moved in a half crouch, their boots echoing in the stillness. At one point the squeeze of the ice was so great that they dropped to a crawl, then stood again. Still a confusion of tracks went on. The two flashlights continued to dim. Lewis realized he was sweating and that made him shiver. His heart was hammering. It was impossible to see what was ahead.

"Shit!"

It was Cameron. There was a crack of breaking wood and his light disappeared. The rope jerked taut, yanking the men to the floor and dragging them forward in a terrifying slither. Lewis frantically dug with the ax and it scraped along the plywood with a squeal. Then it caught on a joint between two sheets of wood and he jammed it down past the plywood into the ice. Their slide was arrested.

They were stretched like beads on their rope, their waists painfully squeezed.

"Rod! You all right?"

"I'm hanging in some damn pit! Can you back us up?"

"Pulaski and I can brace ourselves against the plywood walls," Geller grunted. "You pull on the ax, Lewis."

Slowly the three men who had escaped the fall began to retreat, hauling the station manager back up as they did so. Cameron got to the lip of the hole and worked his way over broken plywood to the top. They rested a moment, panting.

Lewis had the only light. "What happened to yours?" he asked, shining it on Cameron.

"Dropped it."

The station manager crawled to the edge of the pit and looked down. Lewis joined him. The fallen flashlight was still glowing feebly fifty feet below where the old study excavation hole ended, the pit's icy sides marked by meter sticks installed four decades before. The hole had been roofed over with boards and plywood, but someone's weight had broken through before them. Cameron had simply stepped too close and slid down the sagging wood into thin air.

"Ah, Jesus," the station manager now breathed.

A man was down there, curled in a fetal position in the cone of fading light. They had found Mickey Moss.

It took them an hour to lift the astronomer out. Pulaski had done some rock climbing in the military so they lowered him to the bottom of the pit to attach a line around the stiff corpse. Then he shimmied back up and they hauled, cursing when Moss's rock-hard limbs caught momentarily on the uneven edges of the broken wood. The scientist was heavy. Finally they got him up and over the edge of the pit.

They sat back, gasping. Moss's parka-clad body seemed to fill the tunnel.

Cameron dug out a water bottle he kept unfrozen by strapping it to his torso and passed it around. The water was actually lukewarm. "To Mickey. Drink all you can. Working in the cold is how you get dehydrated in Antarctica."

Lewis drank and shuddered. "I need to keep moving."

"We all do. My hands and feet are numb. I think we can sled Mickey from here."

They dragged the body unceremoniously, finding it skidded well. When they came through the door back into the stairwell they lifted Moss more gently, like pallbearers, and carried him to the aluminum-roofed observatory above. A ladder led to a wooden trapdoor, which they pried until it fell down, swinging on its old hinge. There was a roof of snow over the entrance, softly blue, and the men looked at the color eagerly. A few twists of Cameron's shovel and the snow cascaded down in a flush of gray light. They lifted and pushed Mickey's body up and surfaced, gasping as if emerging from underwater. The hole they'd come from looked pitch-black. Cameron reached down and pulled the trapdoor shut.

"That's enough of that."

Lewis looked at the horizon. Clouds were moving in, obscuring the low sun. The day was hardly more than a gloomy twilight and yet brilliant after the darkness below.