Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire gh-4 Read online

  Gabriel nodded.

  “I understand this is difficult for Velda. I hope seeing the place where he disappeared and confirming that his remains cannot be found, she will be able to let go and finally accept the loss.”

  Gabriel nodded, wrapping his arms around his body and stamping his chilly feet.

  “I thought I’d take a shower,” he said.

  “Down at the other end of the hall,” Nils said, without looking away from his monitors.

  “Thanks,” Gabriel said and left the big Swede to his ice and his numbers.

  The other end of the dim hallway terminated in two identical doors. No way to know which was the bathroom, so he picked one at random and knocked gently.

  “Yes?”

  Velda’s voice.

  Gabriel pushed open the door to reveal a tiny dorm-like room. Two narrow beds and not much else. Twin footlockers, a small halogen reading lamp burning on one of them. Velda sat on one of the beds, her long legs drawn up beneath her chin like an anxious child. She wasn’t crying, but there had been a flash of vulnerability in her face that quickly submerged when she saw Gabriel enter the room. She unfolded her legs and stood to meet him. Her thick, auburn hair was down around her face

  “I was just looking for the…” Gabriel began, hand motioning pointlessly in the direction of the door, but she cut him off.

  “Come here,” she said.

  She reached out to pull Gabriel into an embrace. Her lips were just inches from his, barely parted and begging for a kiss. Who was he to argue? He gave her what she wanted and she gave it back in spades, her fierce, urgent heat threatening to melt through the polar ice beneath them.

  After, they lay entwined and spent in a tangle of blankets, sharing a warm, comfortable silence. Gabriel found himself drifting just on the edge of sleep when Velda spoke, almost too soft to hear.

  “I have to know,” Velda said. “I can’t stand not knowing.”

  “I understand,” Gabriel replied, reaching down to brush her hair back off her forehead.

  He did, too. His own parents had vanished, not in the frozen Antarctic but in the heat of the Mediterranean. They’d been on a speaking tour at the end of 1999 (the theme had been prophecies surrounding the turn of the millennium) when the ship they were traveling on had vanished for three days. When it had appeared again, not a living soul had been on board, just three crew members with their throats cut. Gabriel remembered all too clearly the ache of waiting for news, of not knowing. Every time a body washed up and was identified as one of the other passengers, Gabriel was torn between feeling relieved and feeling resentful that others were being set free to mourn while he and Michael and their sister, Lucy, remained in the purgatory of not knowing. It was a terrible thing to lose hope, but terrible, too, to have it—to carry the burden of hope from day to day, watching as the odds grew slimmer, but being denied the respite of their ever dropping to zero.

  In the end, the bodies of Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had never been found. The U.S. government had declared them dead, a verdict Gabriel had reluctantly accepted—he’d certainly never been able to turn up any evidence to the contrary, and he’d tried. But acceptance wasn’t the same as closure. He understood why Velda wanted closure.

  “I begged him to come home,” she said. “When I was here last, six months ago—I told him, Papa, you’re seventy-five years old, you gave up teaching ten years ago, why can’t you stop and come home? But he said no. ‘Now more than ever, with global warming…’ ” She threw up her hands. “He felt his expertise was needed. He said he’d never be able to live with himself if he left the problem to others.”

  “Maybe he was right,” Gabriel said.

  “But now he’s vanished,” Velda said, “and all his expertise with him.” She turned to Gabriel. “It’s more than just not knowing if he’s alive or dead. I can’t help thinking that my father may have made the discovery of a lifetime. Even if…” Her voice caught, and she stared up at the low ceiling, collecting herself. “Even if he didn’t make it,” she said, finally, her voice steady and controlled, “I feel like the world should know about his discovery. It would be his legacy.”

  Gabriel nodded, about to say something reassuring, but Velda didn’t let him speak. She pressed her lips to his and seconds later, what ever thoughts he’d been entertaining went out of his head entirely.

  Chapter 9

  “There,” Nils said, pointing across the icy wasteland. “On the left, about ten o’clock.”

  Gabriel squinted through the Spryte’s frosty windshield in the direction that Nils was pointing. At first he saw nothing but white, but then, as the noisy vehicle drew closer, he spotted a long, twisting swirl of crimson in the ice, like a bloodstain left by a slaughtered giant. It was a similar shade of red to the bone-fire in the Transdniestrian fortress, actually—as if the brick red flames had somehow been frozen in the ice. The carmine depths even seemed to flash and sparkle as they approached.

  “This is the ice that Dr. Silver was sampling when he disappeared,” Nils said, slowing and then stopping the Spryte about a hundred yards from the site. “There are hidden crevasses all over this location, one of which undoubtedly claimed the life of Dr. Silver. These are an anomaly—there are normally no such crevasses found in this area. The rescue team has already explored many of them, but no…” He looked at Velda, then turned away, squinting through the windshield. “No traces of Dr. Silver were found.”

  Velda’s lovely face was stoic inside the pale frame of her furlined parka hood.

  “We go on foot from here,” Nils said. “It’s not wise to bring the Spryte any closer. We will need to gear up and rope together before we start, just as if this were a glacier climb. I want everyone in harnesses and crampons—and remember to flatten out and anchor with your ice axe if one of us goes down, so that we don’t all get pulled down after.”

  Nils opened the door to the Spryte, stepped out onto the ice and promptly disappeared from sight.

  “Nils!” Gabriel cried, leaning across the Spryte to the driver’s side to look out the open door.

  The moment he shifted his weight, he felt the boxy vehicle shift with him, the driver’s side dipping dramatically as a series of sharp cracks and a long low rumble sounded from beneath them.

  “Everyone, shift to the right!” Gabriel said, pushing himself back against the passenger side door. “To the right! Millie, move—we need your weight.” The big man threw himself against the side of the vehicle. “Come on. As far over as you can or this thing is going down and taking us with it.”

  For an unbearably tense moment, the Spryte rocked slowly back and forth as if deliberating their fate. No one said a word. The only movement inside the cab came from the swirling clouds of their anxious, steaming breath. Then, slowly, the rocking eased and the vehicle seemed to even out, balanced with the left side only slightly lower than the right. The slant was enough that Gabriel could now see out the open door. The frozen crust that Nils had fallen through now sported a jagged, three-foot-wide crack.

  “Nils!” Gabriel called. “Can you hear me?”

  For a minute, they heard nothing but the howl of the wind. Then as if from a great distance, a tiny, echoing voice answered.

  “I’m alive.” Gabriel saw Velda’s eyes slide shut with relief. “I’m on a…a kind of steep ledge. Very slick…can’t get much of a grip. I suspect I will fall if I shift my weight even slightly.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel said, his mind racing. “Okay. Just hang on. We’re going to figure out a way to get you out of there.”

  He turned back to where Millie, Velda and Rue were squeezed together in the far right-hand side of the rear seat.

  “Listen,” he said. “One of us needs to try and reach the gear in the back. We need to grab the packs and get out of the Spryte before it falls.”

  “I’ll do it,” Rue said. “I’m the lightest.”

  “Fine,” Gabriel said. “Go.” He pressed his body back against the passenger-side door as Rue car
efully began crawling toward the packs behind her. As she closed her fingers around the strap of the closest pack, the Spryte shifted again, tilting precariously. Gabriel leaned back hard to counterbalance it and he saw Millie doing the same, but Rue lost her footing and tumbled against one of the rear doors. She grabbed the frame as the door swung open, barely avoiding falling out and into the crevasse. The pack was not so lucky. It slid past Rue and out the open door.

  A moment later, Nils’s voice called up from below. “What was that?”

  “Your pack,” Gabriel shouted. “It didn’t happen to land near you by any chance…?”

  “No,” Nils said. “Gabriel?” There was a long echoing pause. “I’m becoming somewhat concerned about my situation.”

  “We’re working on it,” Gabriel said. What he didn’t say was that he was becoming somewhat concerned about their situation, too. He could feel the Spryte still gently teetering and could hear the ice beneath them groaning. “All right,” he said, “forget the packs. Everybody out. Rue, you go first, out this side.”

  “But Gabriel, if we don’t have any supplies…” she began.

  He cut her off. “No time to discuss it, Rue. We may only have seconds—”

  But they didn’t even have that.

  They all felt it as the lip of the crevasse crumbled beneath the Spryte’s weight. The vehicle tipped forward and smashed through the fragile surface. There was a silent instant where Gabriel felt suspended in midair, like a baseball at the top of its trajectory in that infinitely brief, motionless instant before the descent begins. And then they were plunging into darkness.

  Gabriel felt himself thrown sideways, over the back of the driver’s seat. He fell against the others in a tangle of limbs, heard Millie’s grunt as their heads collided. The vehicle glanced off one sheer icy face of the crevasse and then the other before it came to an abrupt stop with a massive grinding crunch. They were tightly wedged between the narrowing walls of ice. The crevasse went on, as they could tell from the sound of chunks of ice continuing to fall into the darkness below—but the truck was too wide to fall any farther.

  The faint light filtering down from above showed that the front end of the Spryte was smashed inward as if they had been in a severe head-on crash. If Gabriel had not been thrown into the backseat, he would have been pinned—or, more likely, crushed to death. The radio below the accordioned dashboard was twisted into useless scrap. The glove box had dropped open, dumping out a miscellany of maps and tools, including a large flashlight. Gabriel grabbed the flashlight and switched it on, driving back the blue gloom and illuminating the pale faces of the huddled team members.

  “Everybody okay?” Gabriel asked. “Anyone hurt?”

  Before anybody could answer there was a thud and a crash from above. Bits of safety glass rained down around them from a shattered window. Gabriel shone the flashlight upward to reveal a booted leg dangling through the window.

  “Nils?” Gabriel said.

  “I’m all right,” Nils said, though his voice sounded otherwise, like he was speaking through gritted teeth.

  Gabriel helped pull Nils down into the cabin. The big Swede was shaken and sported a bloody bruise on one cheek, but he seemed at least not to have any broken bones.

  “You really thought jumping down here from that ledge was a good idea?” Gabriel said.

  “I wish I could tell you that I did,” Nils said, “and that this was all part of a clever plan on my part—but really it was the ledge’s decision, not mine.”

  “Got it,” Gabriel said. He shone the light upward. It only penetrated so far into the deep blue walls of ice. The sky was barely visible in the distance.

  “We’re going to have to try to free up some of the gear from the back and make the climb to the surface,” Gabriel said. “Won’t be easy, but we should be able to get back to the station on foot and then radio to the Pole for help. Nils, do you think you can make it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nils said. “My leg—”

  “I can do it,” Velda said. “My father took me on tougher climbs than this when I was a kid.”

  Gabriel doubted it. Any father who’d take a child on a climb even half this hard would’ve deserved an arrest for endangerment. But Gabriel appreciated the attitude, and he wasn’t about to turn down an offer for help. “All right. The rest of you stay here in the Spryte till we come back with a rescue team. We’ll go as quickly as we can.”

  “Don’t go quickly,” Rue said. “Go safely.”

  “That, too,” Gabriel said. “But in this weather, slow’s not safe. Not for any of us.”

  Nils reached into his jacket and fished out a poker hand of Hershey bars from an inner pocket. “Before you go. Some calories.”

  Gabriel grabbed two of the bars, passed one to Velda. They were rock hard.

  “Break it into squares,” Nils said, “and hold each square in your mouth until it’s warm enough to chew.”

  Gabriel did as Nils suggested, sucking on the chocolate in the icy blue twilight. In the depths of the crevasse, out of the shrieking wind on the surface, they were cocooned in a churchlike silence. It was tempting to stay here, huddled together for warmth. But it wouldn’t take long for the chocolate to run out, and, shortly after that, the warmth.

  “Right,” Gabriel said around the last mouthful of chocolate. “Let’s see if we can free up that gear.”

  Velda’s pack came free fairly easily from the rear of the Spryte but the remaining three were stuck fast, clenched in the crumpled metal as if between teeth. Millie was able to reach his pack and unzip it a few inches. He emptied it of a few smaller items through the opening, passed them to Gabriel. The other two packs were hopelessly inaccessible.

  Gabriel and Velda strapped themselves into climbing harnesses and Gabriel readied a pick in one hand.

  Rue, meanwhile, was poking around the ruined dashboard. “I might be able to get the heat up and running in here,” she said. “But I’m afraid that would melt the ice around us and send us who knows how much farther down.”

  “Don’t do it unless you absolutely have to,” Gabriel said.

  “We’ll be fine,” Nils said. “Just come back swiftly.”

  Gabriel pushed himself up, using the back of the driver’s seat for leverage. He was about to stick his head out through the smashed rear window when Velda said, “Wait, what’s that sound?”

  The team was silent, listening. Gabriel heard nothing at first and then a low, distant rumble that grew rapidly louder and louder.

  “Oh, no,” Nils said.

  “What?” Gabriel said.

  His voice was a whisper. “Avalanche.”

  Chapter 10

  Before Gabriel could react, a crushing wave of jagged ice slammed into the Spryte with the impact of a speeding train, wedging the vehicle down deeper into the crevasse and blotting out the pale, distant sun. Several smaller chunks of ice smashed down through the broken window before one too large to fit sealed it up completely.

  The rumbling grew fainter and more muffled as more and more ice piled up on top of the Spryte. Eventually it ceased. The Spryte’s battered steel hull groaned and creaked in protest against the added weight.

  “Jesus,” Millie said softly.

  “All right,” Gabriel said. “Change of plans.” He shone the flashlight down through the front windshield, revealing the outlines of a narrow black chasm below them. “If we can’t go up, we have to go down. We’ll rappel down to the bottom, see if there isn’t a way up and around the piled-up ice.”

  “If there is a bottom,” Rue said.

  “Spoken like a true optimist,” Millie muttered.

  “Tie a rope to the frame of the Spryte,” Nils said. “Those without harnesses can just slide down.”

  “Good idea.” Gabriel tossed a length of neon green rope to Velda, who swiftly knotted it to the frame. Gabriel made his way down to the windshield and with one swift kick knocked the glass from its frame. He listened to its fall. One second, two…then the
crash as it splintered against the ice. There was a bottom.

  Velda came down beside him, aiming the flashlight through the windshield. “Here,” she said, “hold this,” and handed him the light. “I’ll go first.”

  Normally, Gabriel might have insisted that he be the first one down, out of some atavistic sense of chivalry or propriety. But he owed it to Rue and Millie to get them down safely—he’d dragged them into this, after all. “Okay,” he said. “Just be careful.”

  Velda leaned forward awkwardly from her crouch and planted a kiss on Gabriel’s chin. She found his lips with her second attempt. “I’m always careful.” Then she was gone, making her way down the rope into the blackness.

  Half a minute passed in silence. Then they heard Vel-da’s voice. “I’m down!”

  “Is it stable?” Gabriel called.

  “Yes.” Another long moment of silence. “Can you send down the light?”

  Gabriel hauled up the rope, tied it tightly around the shaft of the flashlight, and without turning it off began lowering it. They watched the yellow cone of light reflecting off the ice walls, bright at first and then fainter and fainter as it descended. Eventually the line was fully paid out. “Hang on,” Velda called, “keep it steady…got it.” She was far enough below them that they could only see the faintest glow. Her voice, when it next came, was quieter, as if she’d gone some distance away. “There’s a…a passageway, a narrow one. It looks like it could lead into another crevasse.”

  “Any sign of a way back up to the surface?” Gabriel called.

  “Not yet.”