Hard Line - Pamela Clare Page 0,6
in. “Let’s move!”
He was the first one out, his lips curving into a smile at the sight of the wide-open ice-scape that surrounded them, a stiff breeze hitting him in the face, making the skin around his eyes tingle and burn.
Jones gasped. “Holy shit!”
Segal coughed, a reaction to the cold. “The Viking wasn’t kidding.”
The ground crew was already unloading the pallets and refueling the plane. Then four men walked by, carrying something between them.
A body bag.
Thor watched over his shoulder as they carried it on board, buckled it into a row of seats, then stood around it for a moment in silence.
What had happened? An accident, perhaps?
People who worked in Antarctica were given thorough medical exams before coming down to ensure that no one had underlying medical conditions.
“Let’s get the hell indoors.” Segal hurried by, his boots squeaking on the ice, Jones behind him.
But Thor hung back, the skin around his eyes already numb. This C-130 had rockets that fired to help it take off at altitude, where the air was otherwise too thin for a plane of its size. He didn’t want to miss that.
The ground crew finished unloading the pallets, and the fuelies disconnected the hose, shouting to one another over the thrum of the propellers. Then the doors closed, and the plane taxied toward the skiway, accelerating until it skimmed over the ice. Then the rockets fired, blazing orange in the darkness, the extra boost of speed giving the plane the lift it needed to get airborne.
“Godspeed.” Thor watched the C-130 disappear into the starlit sky, then turned toward the station, catching up with the others.
Amundsen-Scott Station was a long building with thick, steel posts that elevated it off the ice. The ground crew drove by with the pallets, while Thor followed Segal and Jones up a sheltered stairway to the first floor. They passed through two sets of thick steel doors and found themselves at the end of a long hallway, where a handful of people milled around, more out of curiosity than to welcome them.
Thor removed his mask, goggles, hat, and gloves. The others did the same.
“Damn, look at these guys.” A kid filmed them with his smartphone. “We’re screwed. They’re going to take all the women.”
“No one comes to Antarctica for the women, Jason.” A man whose dark hair and beard were shot through with gray confiscated the kid’s phone, deleted the footage, and slipped the device into his pocket. “I told you to stop filming people without consent.”
“What about my phone?”
The man ignored him, faced Thor, and held out a hand. “I’m Steve Hardin, winter site manager here at Amundsen-Scott. Welcome to the South Pole. I’ll show you to your berths and give you a tour of the station.”
Samantha willed herself to concentrate as she did the last calibrations to set up the SPT for the next thirty-six hours of surveys. She’d had trouble focusing all day, her mind numb, her motions wooden. But she couldn’t afford to make a mistake. If she caused an instrument to malfunction, it could halt research until November when the first plane of the summer season arrived. As she was unlikely to get another grant to return here, that would be catastrophic.
She’d never lost anyone close to her apart from a grandfather she didn’t remember. The whole thing seemed unreal. Some part of her kept expecting Patty to walk through the door in her red parka, a smile on her face, to tell Samantha this was just a bad dream. But that wasn’t going to happen.
Patty was dead.
Last night, Samantha had written an email to George and Karen, Patty’s parents, offering her condolences. But nothing she’d written had felt adequate. Nothing could express the fullness of her grief. It had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done.
Tears blurred her vision, forcing her to stop. “Damn it.”
She wiped the tears away, fought for control of her emotions. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t fall apart. She had to do her work plus Patty’s now. They’d fought so hard to get this research grant. It had meant everything to both of them.
Pull it together.
She drew a few deep breaths, then got on with her adjustments and set the telescope to scan. It would make ten or eleven scans of a particular area of space before she repeated this process. The observations were transmitted to the SPT computers, which automatically saved and processed the data.
Her radio squawked.
“Sam, Sam, this is Steve.”
She reached for it. “Hey, Steve. Samantha here.”
“We’re