Polar vortex, p.23
Polar Vortex, page 23
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“We dig in here for the night,” Otto yelled over the noise of the wind.
I let Lilly slide off my back and knelt to turn and block a gust of crystalline snow. I checked my watch. Eight p.m. Ten hours of slogging torture and we were only five miles closer to the little dot on Howard’s screen.
His phone’s battery was in the red. Maybe ten percent left.
A biting wind sprang in the last hour as the first stars pierced the sky. It was too dark to continue walking safely even with the headlamps, but we had a bigger problem: what looked like a hundred-foot-wide chasm of oily black in front of us.
No end to it within visual range, but in the light-sucking darkness we couldn’t see much more than a hundred feet.
Otto stopped us at a wide ridge with a depression this side away from the wind. He dropped to his knees and with one of the shovels began to dig. Roman joined in and hacked away huge chunks of packed snow and tossed them behind us and around us.
We did our best to cut away a cubby hole big enough for the eight of us and spread the blankets across the raw ice at the bottom. Bjorn volunteered to take the puppy into his suit and I pulled Lilly close. Liz took Jang. The rest crowded around in a tight knot while Otto piled snow and ice chips against the survival suits.
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“Mitch, hey, Mitch.”
I roused from my almost-slumber and looked up through the opening of my suit.
Otto shone his headlamp into his mitt to reduce the glare. “You awake?” he whispered. Thick plumes of white vapor from his mouth as he spoke.
I nodded, doing my best not to groan as I shifted position.
Quiet. No wind. Lilly in my arms, her breathing regular and soft but wheezing slightly. I had had my face tucked down and could smell myself—we hadn’t had a chance to change clothes before putting on the survival suits, and a week of sweat and grime was now trapped inside this shell.
My tongue felt pasted with sawdust. The blissful semi-conscious dozing replaced with a blooming headache and desperate thirst and sharp stab of fear in the pit of my stomach. Or hunger. That might be hunger, too.
“How are your feet?” Otto squatted in front of me.
“Fine.”
“Fine how?”
“Can’t feel them.”
“Let me see one. Quick.”
I shifted the hood of my suit sideways. Everyone seemed to be sleeping. I let go of Lilly into the knot of Liz and Jang and Bjorn and edged my backside a foot or two toward Otto. “Do we have to?”
“Unzip and let me have a look.”
Without the wind it felt warmer. I awkwardly pulled the long transverse zip down the front of my suit—it went from the neck all the way halfway down the right leg for easy entry and exit. The cold rushed in right away.
“Can we make this quick?” I said and pulled my right leg out.
It was encased in two layers of sweat pants with an under-layer of jeans. Otto fixed his headlamp around his head and unwrapped the four layers of sodden socks.
He muttered a curse and began rubbing my foot with something. I still couldn’t see.
“What?” I said.
He had a dirty white towel around my foot. “We gotta dry this off.”
“Why?”
For a second he pulled the cloth away. In the harsh light of his headlamp my foot looked distended. Gray and brown, the toes dark. He continued rubbing then got out something from his pocket. “I got a few extra pairs of socks,” he said.
He repeated this with my left foot.
By the time he was finished I was shivering cold again before I zipped my suit back up.
“That’s the trench foot?”
“Made worse by the cold. Wet and frostbite don’t make for good feet.” He glanced at the knot of the others almost buried under the ice and snow beside the ridge. “We gotta get moving.”
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Can it wait?”
“Josh said the hijackers were looking for something in the First Class cabin. Maybe that hundred million dollars’ worth of diamonds? Howard’s digital stuff? Liz’s biological package that might be used as a weapon. I don’t know—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Did you know?”
“I suspected, but that doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Do you think a 777 could be hacked?” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Maybe Howard had something to do with this? Turning off the transponders, getting off the radar. You need technical skills for that. What are the chances of him being on this flight, along with those diamonds, Roman the billionaire, Liz’s thing?”
“Where we’re heading is one of the listening posts for NATO’s North Warning System.”
“Alert?”
“Think about that name for a second.”
I did. “Ah.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd we crashed less than two hundred miles from a NATO listening post and nobody came to find us?”
The hairs on my neck prickled. “What are you saying now?”
“I’m saying I don’t think any of this is a coincidence, but it doesn’t matter. We’re committed now. Your brother-in-law, Josh, did an amazing job getting that airliner down. I’m trying to finish the job he started and get you out of here alive. And I want to get back to my wife, too.”
Ice creaked against ice in the distance. I looked up and saw the fading dot of Polaris pinpointed in the center of heaven.
“It’s my fault I’m here. That my daughter is here,” I said.
“It’s nobody’s fault.”
“You know why I took this flight?” I bit my lip.
He waited.
“Because I wanted some time to myself.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
All the things I desperately wanted to say to Emma. To tell her that we were still alive. All the things we had wanted to do together—that she wanted us to do but I always put off. Taking her on an adventure somewhere. Learning to swim with Lilly. Finding out if we were going to have a son or daughter. What had I done?
“My wife is pregnant. Who leaves their pregnant wife by herself on the other side of the planet?”
“You think it better if she was here? She would probably be dead by now.”
“Her mother is sick with cancer, and her family was…I just didn’t want to stay. Didn’t want to deal with it. I was being selfish. I pulled my family apart. Put my daughter in danger and left my pregnant wife. I should have stayed.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What the hell is wrong with me?”
Silence.
Just the ice moaning in sadness. I was so thirsty I didn’t think I had a spare drop of fluid in me, but a tear leaked down my cheek. Asshole. I rubbed it away with the back of one orange mitt. I was such an asshole. I hadn’t even admitted the truth to myself—not really—but I needed to get it out. I needed to confess.
“Did you know that there are five types of brothers?” Otto said.
“What?”
“Do you know”—he repeated more slowly—“what the five types of brothers are?”
“You mean, like brother-in-law?”
“Real brother. Wife’s brother. Sister’s husband. Wife’s sister’s husband.”
I counted in my head. “That’s four.”
“So what’s the fifth?” he asked.
“No idea.”
“Brother from another mother. That’s what we are now, Mitch. I’m going to get you out of here. Don’t start blaming yourself, it’s a way of giving up, of giving in. Your daughter needs you strong.”
“Okay…okay,” I stuttered.
“But we need to get moving. And I need you to take this.”
He pressed something into my hand. It was the knife from the emergency kit. Roman had the other one.
“I’ve got the gun,” Otto said. “I need someone I trust with this.”
I glanced left and right. “You want to leave now? It’s dark.”
Not pitch black, but not twilight either.
“Someone is following us,” he said and got up.
CHAPTER 31
“ARE YOU CRAZY?”
My hand holding the headlamp shook. I tried to angle the light to get a better look at the submerged ledge of ice thirty feet away across an undulating oily blackness.
Otto steadied my hand. “This is the narrowest part and we can pull ourselves up on there.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“I walked a mile back and forth while you slept. This crack could go for miles.”
Bjorn stood beside him. “I’d bet this is part of an ice shelf. Or it was. And by that I mean, attached to land. But he’s right. A crack like this could be twenty miles long. Might never end.”
“We need to swim across,” Otto said.
“I can’t swim.” I couldn’t stop my hand shaking and it wasn’t only the cold.
“Float then. You don’t need to swim.”
I shifted my wobbling light beam to the middle of the inky abyss. They wanted me to step into that? Swim thirty feet through glacial ocean water and haul myself onto ice?
“I almost died last time we tried this, and we don’t have the life vests.” Everyone had discarded them when the Marines arrived.
“We didn’t have these survival suits then.”
“You said the ocean here is fifteen thousand feet deep.”
“Doesn’t matter how deep.”
“I realize that I can drown in ten feet of it.”
“More like only two or three thousand this close to land,” Bjorn pointed out.
Otto muttered, “You’re not helping,” and then added in a louder voice, “Mitch, these suits float. They’re mini-lifeboats all by themselves. This is exactly what they were designed for.”
“As long as you don’t let water into them,” Bjorn said.
Otto turned to him. “Could you please shut up?”
“Daddy, I’m hungry.” Lilly pulled on my arm.
I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the dark water for another second or two, but then I blinked and looked down at my daughter. “We don’t have anything more for now.”
After Otto got us up, we huddled together and opened half of the MRE food rations—six of the packets—and shared the contents in a semi-religious ceremony by the lights of our headlamps. I ate a pack of curried chicken and another of beef stew, together with Jang and Lilly. The packs had chemical heaters which we used to warm the food and then cup in our hands. A side dish of mashed potatoes. I let Jang and Lilly eat the crackers with peanut butter and jelly and pocketed the M&Ms.
It was by far the most delicious meal I’d ever eaten, but it was half of all our food remaining. Maybe a thousand calories each total to start the day.
Otto wanted to get something in our stomachs to kick start our final push. Said that we only had a day left to reach the base. Howard pointed out that we only made maybe five miles toward it the day before, and Bjorn said that polar explorers used up more like ten thousand calories of energy a day to fight the cold.
Otto ignored them both in his pep talk.
I drank a careful few mouthfuls of water from one of the bottles I’d kept in my interior pockets to keep from freezing. The kids finished off the rest.
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I stared again at the dark water before me.
As much as it terrified me, another part of me wanted to dive straight in and drink it. To soak in it and let it down my throat. My mouth was parched. Otto again warned us not to try and eat the snow. We needed to melt it first, he repeated over and over. Eating the snow would give us cramps and diarrhea.
A huge split now in the bottom of my middle lip where it had cracked. It bled and froze.
“Can I have some more water?” Lilly asked. “My throat is dry.”
I paused a beat before answering, “Sure, honey,” and took out my last water bottle. “Take a few sips, okay? Be careful.”
She held the bottle in her mitts. I unscrewed the cap.
“Let me see again,” I said to Otto.
“Roman’s got it.”
Behind me, the Russian stared through the night vision scope we’d scavenged from the boat. “I think it is one,” he said in a throaty growl.
Everyone was hoarse.
He handed over the scope and I closed one eye and looked through it. Nothing at first. Blank darkness.
But.
There.
A green dot hovered in the middle of my field of view and then disappeared.
“Are you sure?” I said.
Otto replied, “The scope picks up infrared. Body heat. I saw two dots earlier. Maybe more. They’re getting closer.”
It had to be the Finnish Marines. Didn’t it? Or someone else? Should we run away from them—or toward them?
“We either wait for them to get here,” Otto said, “or we cross the water. Fifteen miles that way”—he pointed over the water—“and either we’re safe, or we wait for whoever it is. You choose.”
I handed the scope back to Roman and noticed Jang’s eyes peering at me from behind the Russian. He’d taken the child in his suit today again, in that sling we had rigged.
I turned to face the ice chasm again.
“Okay…okay…okay…” I muttered under my breath, not really agreeing or disagreeing but more trying to convince myself.
“Daddy, Daddy.” Lilly pulled on my arm again.
“Give me a minute, sweetie?”
She dropped to her knees in the thin snow. “But Daddy!”
She had knocked over the water bottle. Before I could recover it, half of the precious contents drained into the snow. I bit my tongue and held back the curse words erupting in my head. It was my fault. I had to pay more attention.
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“Slowly…slowly…”
Otto backed himself into the water. We’d tied one end of a nylon rope around his waist and Roman lowered him, rappelling-like, down a forty-five degree angle of ice four feet over the water.
Otto had his suit cinched up tight around his face. The rubber made a seal, he said, and he said that he could have jumped into the water and floated to the top like a cork. That’s what these things were designed for, he kept repeating. He liked using the words, “designed for,” as if that made this less terrifying.
Up to his midsection in the water, Otto pushed away from the ice.
He sank down.
Then floated, up and down, at about chest-level, then rotated onto his back. The three of us with headlamps kept them focused on him.
“Look, watch,” he said.
He unzipped half of the front of his suit and sat halfway upright, his arms pulled out of the sleeves. The arms of the suits remained to the side in the water, while he waved his hands at us from the middle of the suit-boat. It was more for my benefit than anyone else’s.
It did work.
I felt my heart rate subside a little.
Otto zipped himself up and back-paddled across, flopped over awkwardly onto the opposite ledge and pulled himself up with the cord around his waist. Liz went next with Jang stuffed into her suit. We tied her up, she dropped into the water and Otto eased her across.
She made it look easy.
Bjorn offered, “I’ll take Lilly?”
“Yeah, sure.”
From here I could watch and jump in if there was any problem. Definitely safer if she went with him.
“Honey, you listen to Uncle Bjorn, okay?”
I knelt in front of her and zipped her small suit up tight. It didn't quite seal the way the adult ones did. She didn’t appear scared at all.
With Liz and Otto on the other side, Bjorn held Lilly in one arm while he slithered down the ice edge and held the rope with the other. They were both tied to the rope, and bobbed like corks the moment they were halfway in. I kept my headlamp focused on her. A few seconds of holding my breath and my daughter was on the other side.
No going back now.
We ferried over the two remaining cases we had carried—sealed up—and Bjorn volunteered to slither out of his survival suit which they sent back across for Howard.
“Your turn,” Roman said to me as Howard suited up.
“Yep.” But it was difficult getting my feet to move forward.
“Come on, Daddy,” Lilly urged from the other side.
My arms shook so bad I had a hard time gripping the rope. I almost forgot to tie it around my waist before Roman reminded me. My breath heaved in and out in great white plumes that dissipated into the darkness around me.
The air sharp in my nostrils.
I slipped on my first step down the ice embankment and fell heavy against my side. I yelled out something, my mind filled with an image of me tumbling in headfirst and flailing and sinking as my suit inundated—but at least I’d be able to drink it in. Satiate the terrible dryness in my mouth before dying. Stupid thoughts competed inside my head.
My heart jackhammered.
Unable to breathe, I gulped for air.
I took another step.
Now a vision of my father at our community pool on Long Island. Get in, he told me, float into the deep end and swim. It’s natural. Do it. Step forward.
My left foot hit the water and I felt it immediately. Pressure around my leg as the water pressed in. The immediate coolness. I looked up and saw Jang’s little eyes peering at me from behind Roman’s head as the Russian manhandled the rope I held onto.
Jang’s eyes were so calm. The child smiled at me. Don’t worry, Mr. Mitch, his eyes said. We are all exactly where we should be.
I’m sorry, Emma. I’m so sorry.
I let go and dropped into the Arctic Ocean.
CHAPTER 32
“ELEVEN MILES.” Howard turned to show us his orange mitt with the phone in it, his face illuminated in its glow.
“Turn it off,” I said.
He wiggled his left hand free from the neck of the suit. Then dropped the phone.
I jumped forward and unzipped to pick it up and turn off. Frigid air flooded my suit and I swore. “How about I keep it for a while?”
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