The wind groaned, the snow churned around her, and the ice stretched out of sight as it had since time immemorial–but gradually her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rate. She stopped shaking. The terror passed.
She’d won again.
When at last Rita entered the igloo, Franz was on his knees, packing instruments into a carton. He had taken off his outer boots, coat, and gloves. He dared not work up a sweat, because it would chill his skin, even inside his thermal suit, and leach precious heat from him when he went outdoors. He glanced up at her, nodded, and continued packing.
He possessed a certain animal magnetism, and Rita could see why she had been drawn to him when she was younger. Thick blond hair, deep-set dark eyes, Nordic features. He was only five nine, just an inch taller than she, but at forty-five he was as muscular and as trim as a boy.
“Wind is up to twenty-four miles,” she said, pushing back her hood and removing her goggles. “Air temp’s down to ten degrees Fahrenheit and falling.”
“With the wind-chill factor, it’ll be minus twenty or worse by the time we break camp.” He didn’t look up. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“We’ll make it back all right.”
“In zero visibility?”
“It won’t get that bad so fast.”
“You don’t know polar weather like I do, no matter how much of it you’ve seen. Take another look outside, Rita. This front’s pushing in a lot faster than predicted. We could find ourselves in a total whiteout.”
“Honestly, Franz, your gloomy Teutonic nature?“
A thunderlike sound rolled beneath them, and a tremor passed through the icecap. The rumble was augmented by a high-pitched, nearly inaudible squeal as dozens of ice strata moved against one another.
Rita stumbled but kept her balance, as though lurching down the aisle of a moving train.
The rumble quickly faded away.
Blessed stillness returned.
Franz finally met her eyes. He cleared his throat. “Larsson’s much-heralded big quake?”
“No. Too small. Major movement on this fault chain would be much larger than that, much bigger all down the line. That little shake would hardly have registered on the Richter scale.”
“A preliminary tremor?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“When can we expect the main event?”
She shrugged. “Maybe never. Maybe tonight. Maybe a minute from now.”
Grimacing, he continued packing instruments into the waterproof carton. “And you were talking about my gloomy nature…”
12:45
Pinned by cones of light from two snowmobiles, Roger Breskin and George Lin finished anchoring the radio transmitter to the ice with four two-foot-long belaying pins, and then ran a systems check on the equipment. Their long shadows were as strange and distorted as those of savages hunched over an idol, and the eerie song of the wind might have been the voice of the violent god to whom they prayed.
Even the murky glow of the winter twilight had now been frozen out of the sky. Without the snowmobile headlamps, visibility would drop to ten yards.
The wind had been brisk and refreshing that morning, but as it gathered speed, it had become an increasingly deadly enemy. A strong gale in those latitudes could press a chill through layer upon layer of thermal clothing. Already the fine snow was being driven so hard that it appeared to be sheeting past them on a course parallel to the icecap, as if falling horizontally out of the west rather than out of the sky, destined never to touch ground. Every few minutes they were forced to scrape their goggles and break the crust of snow off the knitted masks that covered the lower half of their faces.
Standing behind the amber headlights, Brian Dougherty averted his face from the wind. Flexing his fingers and toes to ward off the cold, he wondered why he had come to this godforsaken terminus. He didn’t belong here. No one belonged here. He had never before seen a place so barren; even great deserts were not a lifeless as the icecap. Every aspect of the landscape was a blunt reminder that all of life was nothing but a prelude to inevitable and eternal death, and sometimes the Arctic so sensitized him that in the faces of the other members of the expedition he could see the skulls beneath the skin.