Part 12 (2/2)

28.

”Tell me again why I'm doing this,” Cutchen said.

”For the good of humanity,” Hayes told him. ”What more reason do you need?”

Maybe Cutchen needed some rea.s.surance here, some encouragement, but Hayes didn't really have a lot to offer up in that department. Why were they going up to Vradaz Outpost, the abandoned Russian camp? Even he wasn't sure, not really. But something bad, something truly terrible had happened there and he felt it was important that they find out what. Maybe they'd find nothing but a snowed-in empty camp, but Hayes was thinking there had to be evidence of what came down. If even some of what Nikolai Kolich said was true, then the outpost had undergone pretty much the same sort of s.h.i.+t that Kharkhov Station was currently undergoing.

Hayes could remember very well what Kolich had said.

Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.

And didn't that just sound familiar?

”Storm's picking up pretty good out there,” Sharkey said.

Hayes worked the stick of the SnoCat, pressing in the clutch, and bringing it up to high gear as they came over a rise and moved across a barren ice plain. He figured they'd make Vradaz in thirty or forty minutes if the storm didn't swallow them alive. They were plunging through Condition Two weather, sheets of wind-driven snow blasting the SnoCat and making it tremble. It was dark out, of course, and the only lights came from the 'Cat itself. All you could see in the high beams was the white, uneven tundra broken occasionally by k.n.o.bs of black rock and the swirling, blowing snow.

”You're not going to get us lost are you?” Cutchen said.

”No, I don't think so. I have a roll of kite twine on the back of the 'Cat and I tied the other end to Targa House.” He glanced out his window at the huge rectangular mirror out there. ”s.h.i.+t . . . must have run out of string.”

”Ha, ha, you so funny,” Cutchen said.

”Relax. GPS knows the way and I took a bearing on Vradaz before we left. If we get lost, the beacon from Kharkhov will bring us back home.”

”If worse comes to worse,” Sharkey said, ”we can gather up some wood and start a signal fire.”

”Boy, you guys are good. I'll book you in Vegas when we get back . . . unless we don't get back.” Cutchen thought about that a moment. ”You think these Old Ones have much of a sense of humor, Hayes?”

”Yeah, I think they do. Look-it all the gags they've pulled on us. They're some really silly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, you get to know 'em.”

The SnoCat began to jump and lurch as it pa.s.sed over a field of sastrugi, frozen ridges of snow and ice that looked like waves heading ash.o.r.e at a beach. Except these never moved and they were tough as granite. But the SnoCat handled them just fine, jarring and bouncing, but handling it better on its twin sets of caterpillar tracks than an ordinary wheeled vehicle would have.

Hayes swung the 'Cat around a glacial valley, the storm getting worse, beginning to howl and screech, filling its lungs full of frost and white death and letting it back out in a wild, whipping tempest. The cab of the 'Cat was warm even without their ECW's on, but outside? They wouldn't have lasted long. Hayes had followed the ice road that Gates and his people had flagged for some thirty miles before the GPS told him it was time to trail blaze. It was dangerous work on an Antarctic night, but he had plotted a course on the contour map so he didn't drive them into a fissure or crevice. It was lumpy and b.u.mpy rolling over serrated ice ridges and steering around weathered black outcroppings of stone, but they were going to make it.

Hayes had already decided that.

He just wasn't giving much thought to whether or not they'd make it back again.

One heartbreak at a time.

The wastelands to either side were dead white with canopies of ice that jutted like mountain peaks. You caught them out of the glare of the lights and out of the corner of your eye, they looked like monuments and gravestones sometimes. The landscape became very hilly as they approached the Dominion Range, full of sudden gullies and ice-pilings, horns of wind-blasted rock rising up like church spires. Rough, dangerous country. The Dominion Range was located along the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the ma.s.sive Beardmore and Mill Glaciers came together. Had it been daylight, Hayes knew, they would have been able to see the rugged cones of the Transantarctic Mountains rising before them.

The SnoCat plodded along, plowing through waist-high drift and over ridges of ice. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept pus.h.i.+ng from the high elevations, threatening to bury them at times.

”Hey! You see that!” Cutchen said, almost choking on his words.

Sharkey tensed next to him and Hayes tried to swallow. ”What? What did you see?”

”I . . . well, I saw a shape . . . I thought I saw a shape,” Cutchen said. ”Off to the right. It pa.s.sed right by us . . . then I lost it in the snow.”

”Probably some rocks,” Sharkey pointed out.

”No, it was moving . . . I think it was moving away from us.” Cutchen let that hang a moment, then added, ”I thought I saw eyes reflected.”

”Eyes?” Hayes said. ”How many?”

Sharkey crossed her arms almost defiantly. ”Stop it. Both of you.”

”Just a shape,” Cutchen said. ”That's all.”

Hayes was going to tell him he was crazy, that there was nothing moving out there but them, but the spit had dried up in his mouth. It felt like something was spinning a web at the base of his spine, a chill stealthily creeping up his back.

”It was probably nothing,” Cutchen said like he was trying to convince himself of the fact.

Ten minutes pa.s.sed while Hayes hoped they'd see nothing else. He checked the GPS. ”Okay, we should be right on top of Vradaz . . . gotta be right in this area somewhere.”

But it was dead winter in Antarctica, the perpetual night billowing and consuming like black satin. Hayes downs.h.i.+fted the 'Cat and cranked up the headlights, put the spots on. Shafts of light cut across the glacial plane, making it no more than twenty or thirty feet before they reflected back the blizzard. It looked and sounded like a sandstorm out there.

They kept going, Hayes bringing the 'Cat around in a loose circle, staying within the perimeters of the GPS field. Cutchen splayed the spots around. The snowfall died down a bit and they could see a huge ice barrier just beyond them that must have been seventy or eighty feet high.

”There,” Cutchen said. ”There's something over there.”

He was right.

A cl.u.s.ter of irregular shapes thrust from the snow, right at the foot of the barrier. Hayes could see what might have been roofs, an aerial, the rusted sheet metal of a wall blown clean of drift. Much of it was lost beneath an ice fall. The glaciers were pus.h.i.+ng that barrier down from the mountains, a few feet a year. Sooner or later, Vradaz Outpost would be crushed beneath it.

Hayes pulled the SnoCat in closer, pus.h.i.+ng through the night. Waves of snow like breakers at sea were spread across what must have been the compound at one time, gathering here at the foot of the ice barrier.

”A few more weeks and the camp would have been buried,” Cutchen said. ”I think we should have waited.”

Hayes pulled the 'Cat to a stop and killed the engine. Suddenly then, there was only that immense and eerie stillness, that ominous sense of desertion and lifelessness all abandoned camps seemed to have. The wind was blowing and that great ice barrier was cracking and popping.

They sat there in the cab, waiting, thinking.

Hayes didn't know about the others, but the sight of Vradaz entombed in snow and ice made something in his belly stir like gravy. There was a tenseness to his limbs, a tightening of his ligaments and a quickness to his pulse. He found himself involuntarily reaching out for Sharkey's hand just as she reached for his and for Cutchen's. And there they sat, in that windy darkness, listening to the snow glance off the winds.h.i.+eld and pepper the sides of the SnoCat. n.o.body was moving. They were barely breathing.

Like standing outside a haunted house on a chill October night, Hayes found himself thinking. Listening to the leaves blow and the shutters creak and wondering if we have the b.a.l.l.s to see this through.

”Okay, I've had enough,” Cutchen said. ”Either we do this or turn around. I say we turn around. The brochure clearly said this place had a pool. I don't see any pool.”

Hayes broke his grip with Sharkey's gloved hands. ”I suppose we can't sit here like this being all girly.”

He opened his door and the cold blasted in.

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