Pete Johnson helped Claude to his feet. The Frenchman was rubber-legged but evidently uninjured. Pete didn’t even have weak knees; perhaps he was every bit as indestructible as he appeared to be.
Both snowmobiles were upright and undamaged. The headlights blazed into the vast polar night but revealed little in the seething sea of windblown snow.
High on adrenaline, Harry briefly felt like a boy again, flushed with excitement, pumped up by the danger, exhilarated by the very fact of having survived.
Then he thought of Rita, and his blood ran colder than it would have if he’d been naked in the merciless polar wind. The temporary camp had been established in the lee of a large pressure ridge, shadowed by a high wall of ice. Ordinarily, that was the best place for it. But with all the shaking that they had just been through, the ridge might have broken apart…
The lost boy faded into the past, where he belonged, became just a memory among other memories of Indiana fields and tattered issues of National Geographic and summer nights spent staring at the stars and at far horizons.
Get moving, he thought, awash in a fear far greater than that which he had felt for himself only moments ago. Get packed, get moving, get to her.
He hurried to the other men. “Anyone hurt?”
“Just a little rattled,” Claude said. He was a man who not only refused to surrender to adversity but was actually buoyed by it. With a brighter smile than he’d managed all day, he said, “Quite a ride!”
Pete glanced at Harry. “What about you?”
“Fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
When Harry touched his upper lip, bright chips of frozen blood like fragments of rubies adhered to his glove. “Nosebleed. It’s already stopped.”
“Always a sure cure for nosebleed,” Pete said.
“What’s that?”
“Ice on the back of the neck.”
“You should be abandoned here for that one.”
“Let’s get packed and moving.”
“They may be in serious trouble at camp,” Harry said, and he felt his stomach turn over again when he considered the possibility that he might have lost Rita.
“My thoughts exactly.”
The wind pummeled them as they worked. The falling snow was fine and thick. The blizzard was racing in on them with surprising speed, and in unspoken recognition of the growing danger, they moved with a quiet urgency.
As Harry was strapping down the last of the instruments in the second snowmobile’s cargo trailer, Pete called to him. He wiped his goggles and went to the other machine.
Even in the uncertain light, Harry could see the worry in Pete’s eyes. “What is it?”
“During that shaking, I gues…did the snowmobiles do a lot of moving around?”
“Hell, yes, they bounced up and down as if the ice was a damn trampoline.”
“Just up and down?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Not sideways at all?”
“What?”
“Well, I mean, is it possible they slid around, sort of swiveled around?”
Harry turned his back on the wind and leaned closer to Pete. “I was holding tight to one of them. It didn’t turn. But what’s that have to do with anything?”
“Bear with me. What direction were the snowmobiles facing before the tsunami?”
“East.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Me too. I remember east.”
“Toward the temporary camp.”
Their breath collected in the sheltered space between them, and Pete waved a hand through the crystals to disperse them. He bit his lower lip. “Then am I losing my mind or what?”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing…” He tapped the Plexiglas face of the snowmobile’s compass, which was fixed to the hood in front of the windshield.
Harry read the compass. According to the needle, the snowmobile was facing due south, a ninety-degree change from where it had stood before the ice was shaken by the seismic waves.
“That’s not all,” Johnson said. “When we parked here, I know damned well the wind was hitting this snowmobile from behind and maybe even slightly to my left. I remember how it was hammering the back of the sled.”
“I remember too.”
“Now it’s blowing across the flank, from my right side when I’m behind the handlebars. That’s a damned big difference. But blizzard winds are steady. They don’t change ninety degrees in a few minutes. They just don’t, Harry. They just don’t ever.”