At seven-thirty in the morning, while Gunvald had been shaving, with the bad dreams still fresh in his mind, the seismograph had recorded a third tremor: Richter 5.2.
His breakfast had consisted of a single cup of black coffee. No appetite.
At eleven o’clock the fourth quake had struck only two hundred miles due south: 4.4 on the Richter scale.
He had not been cheered to see that each event was less powerful than the one that preceded it. Perhaps the earth was conserving its energy for a single gigantic blow.
The fifth tremor had hit at 11:50. The epicenter was approximately one hundred ten miles due south. Much closer than any previous tremor, essentially on their doorstep. Richter 4.2.
He’d called the temporary camp, and Rita Carpenter had assured him that the expedition would leave the edge of the icecap by two o’clock.
“The weather will be a problem,” Gunvald worried.
“It’s snowing here, but we thought it was a local squall.”
“I’m afraid not. The storm is shifting course and picking up speed. We’ll have heavy snow this afternoon.”
“We’ll surely be back at Edgeway by four o’clock,” she said. “Maybe sooner.”
At twelve minutes past noon another slippage had occurred in the subsea crust, one hundred miles south: 4.5 on the Richter scale.
Now, at twelve-thirty, when Harry and the others were probably planting the final package of explosives, Gunvald Larsson was biting so hard on his pipe that, with only the slightest additional pressure, he could have snapped the stem in two.
12:30
Almost six miles from Edgeway Station, the temporary camp stood on a flat section of ice in the lee of a pressure ridge, sheltered from the pressing wind.
Three inflatable, quilted, rubberized nylon igloos were arranged in a semicircle approximately five yards from that fifty-foot-high ridge of ice. Two snowmobiles were parked in front of the structures. Each igloo was twelve feet in diameter and eight feet high at the center point. They were firmly anchored with long-shanked, threaded pitons and had cushiony floors of lightweight, foil-clad insulation blankets. Small space heaters powered by diesel fuel kept the interior air at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The accommodations weren’t either spacious or cozy, but they were temporary, to be used only while the team planted the sixty packages of explosives.
A hundred yards to the south, on a plateau that was five or six feet above the camp, a six-foot steel pipe rose from the ice. Fixed to it were a thermometer, a barometer, and an anemometer.
With one gloved hand, Rita Carpenter brushed snow from the goggles that protected her eyes and then from the faces of the three instruments on the pole. Forced to use a flashlight in the steadily deepening gloom, she read the temperature, the atmospheric pressure, and the wind velocity. She didn’t like what she saw. The storm had not been expected to reach them until at least six o’clock that night, but it was bearing down hard and was liable to be on them in full force before they had finished their work and completed the return journey to Edgeway Station.
Awkwardly negotiating the forty-five-degree slope between the plateau and the lower plain, Rita started back toward the temporary camp. She could move only awkwardly because she was wearing full survival gear: knitted thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, felt boots, fleece-lined outer boots, thin woolen trousers and shirt, quilted thermal nylon suit, a fur-lined coat, a knitted mask that covered her face from chin to goggles, a fur-lined hood that laced under chin, and gloves. In this cruel weather, body heat had to be maintained at the cost of easy mobility; awkwardness, clumsiness, and discomfort were the burdens of survival.
Though Rita was warm enough, the bitter-cold wind and the barren landscape chilled her emotionally. By choice, both she and Harry had spent a large portion of their professional lives in the Arctic and Antarctic; however, she did not share Harry’s love of the vast open spaces, the monochromatic vistas, the immense curve of sky, and the primal storms. In fact, she’d driven herself to return repeatedly to those polar regions primarily because she was afraid of them.
Since the winter when she was six years old, Rita had stubbornly refused to surrender to any fear, ever again, no matter how justified surrender might be…