The Winter Over Read online

  ALSO BY MATTHEW IDEN

  {The Marty Singer Mysteries}

  A Reason to Live

  Blueblood

  One Right Thing

  The Spike

  The Wicked Flee

  Once Was Lost

  {Stand-Alone}

  John Rain: The B-Team (Kindle Worlds)

  Stealing Sweetwater

  {Short story collection}

  one bad twelve

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Matthew Iden

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com , Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503942851

  ISBN-10: 1503942856

  Cover design by Edward Bettison Ltd.

  For Renee, who continues to make the whole thing possible.

  For my family.

  For my friends.

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  “Men wanted for . . .

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PART II

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  PART III

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PART IV

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”

  —1912 expedition recruitment ad attributed to Ernest Shackleton

  PART I

  FEBRUARY 12

  TWO DAYS UNTIL AUSTRAL WINTER SHACKLETON SOUTH POLE RESEARCH FACILITY SOUTH POLE , ANTARCTICA

  CHAPTER ONE

  The woman’s arms were spread wide, open to the world, as though she were asking for a hug or just starting a snow angel.

  One boot—ridiculously oversized—was turned at an obscene angle. The other, held rigidly in place by its thick plastic and neoprene, pointed toward a dishwater-gray sky. Reflective goggles and a thick balaclava hid her face, but a delicate lattice of ice crystals framed her mouth and nostrils, a ghostly “o” and two dashes where her once hot breath had frozen instantly in air that was forty degrees south of zero. Ramps of snow leaned against the body’s windward side, brought to rest against her by the constant Antarctic gales. Had they not found her, she would’ve been buried in eight hours, maybe less, and she could’ve been someone else’s discovery a hundred days or a hundred years from now.

  Through the rising wind and flurries, Cass stared at the body. It was tempting to imagine that there wasn’t a person inside the cocoon of Gore-Tex and fleece, that it was just a pile of clothes stuffed into boots and gloves, a scarecrow dropped half a klick from the west door of the Shackleton South Pole Research Facility to frighten the crew. Not a woman named Sheryl Larkin who had been vibrant and warm and alive twelve hours before.

  Each time Cass tried to wrap her head around the fact that she was looking at what was left of Sheryl, the thought wriggled away like an eel, refusing to be caught. Behind her own mask and scarf, her breath came in short, ragged plugs. Echoes of parting advice from her instructor back in Colorado Springs resurfaced now, counsel she’d laughingly taken for granted at the time. Never forget. Antarctica wants to kill you .

  “Jennings.” She jumped and turned to face Jack Hanratty. The station manager’s voice, already gruff, came through his balaclava sounding like a wood rasp. “Help Taylor get that body on the sled or there’re going to be three more out here.”

  Frozen, but not from the cold, Cass turned back to the figure sprawled on the ice. She did not want to touch it. The marionette-like lifelessness invoked another memory, and with it, a rising tide of fear and anger. I’m a mechanic, not a medic. I fix snowmobiles and broken engines, not people. What in hell am I doing out here?

  “Jennings!” Hanratty’s voice crackled again. “I said, give Taylor a hand before we all freeze to death. I’m going to take a look around.”

  Reluctantly, she helped Taylor maneuver the body onto a banana sled hitched to a 120-horsepower Skandic snowmobile. The cadaver felt like a piece of lumber—frozen solid or in the process of succumbing to rigor mortis or both. She’d hoped the mechanical stiffness of the corpse would make it easier to forget what she was doing, but the arms remained open and wide, still asking for that hug. Behind her mask, Cass bit down hard on her lip. Together, she and Taylor muscled Sheryl’s body onto the sled. Once it was balanced inside, he pulled a nest of nylon straps from the Skandic’s trunk and began the process of tying Sheryl down like she was a set of tent poles.

  Dizzy and numb, Cass watched him work, unable to look away. Like Sheryl, all of them wore the polarized, reflective ski masks that were standard issue at the South Pole, a layer of protection that was necessary to stay alive, but which swallowed up most of one’s face and nearly all of the humanity. Cass knew she was just as devoid of expression as the others, but for some reason, Sheryl’s facelessness bothered her—the cold landscape, the cold death, the cold reality, combined with Taylor’s and Hanratty’s stilted, businesslike attitude. It seemed as if a great and ancient law was being broken or ignored. Not thinking, she reached to move Sheryl’s mask away.

  Taylor’s hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. “You don’t want to do that.”

  Cass flinched, then retreated a step. Taylor had a dark reputation—Shackleton’s chief of security was rumored to have history with everyone from Blackwater to Israel’s Mossad—but he was probably right. If the sight and feel of Sheryl’s dead body, hidden by layer upon layer of clothing, was almost too much for her to take, the image of her face would definitely send her to a place she didn’t want to go. She moved farther away and watched Taylor finish tightening the crisscrossed straps. The body rocked with each tug. />
  Hanratty approached, stomping through the snow. “Taylor, you drive the body back. Doc Ayres should be waiting for you in the garage. No one except you two are to look at it . . . at her . . . before I return. And not a word to anyone.”

  “You aren’t coming back now?” Taylor’s twang—Southern Comfort with a hint of backwoods bayou—came through in the five simple words.

  “I want to keep looking around. We’ll join you in a few.”

  “The met report said the next storm is due at fourteen-thirty.” Taylor would never come out and chide his boss, but the warning was clear. “Con two.”

  “I know it,” Hanratty replied, turning his face southwest into the thickening flurry. “The blow that caught Sheryl probably covered anything worth seeing, but if we don’t look now, for sure it’ll be gone in another hour.”

  “What was she doing in the Dark Sector, anyway? I thought she was with the weather gang.”

  “No clue. She liked to jog. Maybe she thought she’d go for a long loop. Jennings, you’re a runner. You ever come out this far?”

  She shook her head. Was she a runner? Yes. Ten miles a day, every day, for years. Running away from something, running toward something. But never on the ice, where she didn’t trust she would ever come back if she dared venture out.

  “On the far side of the skiway?” Taylor pressed, gesturing. “In bunny boots?”

  “Hell if I know, Taylor,” Hanratty said, annoyed. “Maybe she spaced out and started chasing sun dogs. Get the body back to the station and we can spend the rest of the winter guessing.”

  Back stiff, Taylor nodded once, then hopped onto the Skandic. The snowmobile’s engine caught on the first try and he motored back toward base, nothing more than a blue-gray Lego block at this distance.

  Cass turned to Hanratty. “You want me along?”

  “You’re not going to walk back, I assume,” he said, swinging a leg over the saddle of the other snowmobile. “And I want to be there. I can trust Taylor not to talk.”

  Cass mounted behind Hanratty, but underneath her mask and gaiter, her face burned. Rather than put her arms around his waist for support, she gripped the bottom of the seat instead. More precarious, maybe, but she’d rather fall off the back than give him the satisfaction of holding on to him.

  As though reading her mind, he took off with a jolt that snapped her head back. For a long second, she teetered on the edge of pitching backwards off the seat. Hanratty, known for his object lessons, probably would make her walk back to base then. But she regained her balance as he slowed the snowmobile in order to follow Sheryl’s tracks.

  Or, rather, where the tracks should’ve been. In the arid, desert-like climate of Antarctica, little snow fell day to day, but tens of thousands of accumulated years of the stuff blew around the continent in curtains. The rest was sculpted into frozen waves of glass-like hardness, what the old ice-heads called sastrugi . A single footprint appeared occasionally, but there was no reliable trail thanks to the crystalline surface. And since bunny boots had been standard Antarctic issue for decades, any footprint they spotted could’ve been Sheryl’s . . . or it could’ve been laid down by any other Polie in the last twenty years. At certain points, there seemed to be a cluster of footprints, but again the temporal element was missing: they could be prints from a group of two or three or those of singular individuals inscribed over years.

  Snowmobiling over sastrugi was no picnic, and Cass’s teeth clacked together painfully as the Skandic bucked up and down on the icy fins. Thankfully, Hanratty kept their speed to a crawl so they could look for clues as to why Sheryl had been outside the base, alone and without a radio. None of it made sense. Leaving base without a radio was a violation of policy; doing so during the previous day’s storm was a violation of logic.

  As was keeping up a fruitless search while visibility began to fail. Cass tapped Hanratty on the shoulder and leaned forward to be heard over the snowmobile’s whine. “We’re running out of time.”

  “I’m aware.” The reply was terse, metallic.

  Veering south, they drove farther onto the plain. Shackleton, glimpsed over her shoulder, was nothing more than a dot on the horizon, and when she turned to look front again, wind drove the snow directly into her face. They continued for several minutes, bucking over the troughs of the sastrugi, eyes glued to the ground, trying to spot one man-made anomaly in an ocean of natural deviations.

  But there was nothing. Cass rose in her seat to look over Hanratty’s shoulder. The white, featureless expanse expanded in endless iteration and continued—as she knew rationally but had difficulty believing—for eight hundred miles over the Transantarctic Mountains and the Ross Ice Shelf before meeting the sea. Between here and there was literally nothing. Sheryl’s death had not come from that direction.

  A gust slapped them with such force that Cass had to snatch at the seat to hold on. The leading edge of the storm was coming at them fast. Despite multiple layers of expedition-rated clothing and the massive gloves they called bear claws, the cold was stupefying, spawning a knot of fundamental, animal fear in her gut. We shouldn’t be out here . I shouldn’t be out here. I came to Antarctica to lose myself, to find myself, not to die.

  Hanratty, feeling her anxiety, relented. “All right, Jennings. Take it easy. We’re heading back.”

  He hit the gas and they took off from their previous crawl with a jerk. To hell with pride , Cass thought, letting go of the seat and wrapping her arms around the waist of the thin, hard body in front of her. In tactile terms, Hanratty seemed not so different from Sheryl’s corpse.

  Within a few seconds they were doing fifty miles an hour, flying across the snow and ice so fast it seemed they were hovering rather than plowing through it, though they still caught several of the sastrugi hard enough to jar the bones in her knees and hips. Hanratty was careful to follow their double-wide tracks back, both as a backup to GPS and to avoid the ever-present danger of falling into a crevasse. At their speed, they wouldn’t have a chance of spotting the slightly darker aqua-blue shade of ice that was the only warning—the two of them would hit bottom before they even knew they’d found a chasm.

  For most of the trip, the wind pressed on Cass’s back like an invisible hand, then a gust of swirling, katabatic wind hit them unexpectedly from the side, lifting the right side of the snowmobile off the ground and threatening to dump them onto the ice. Cass instinctively leaned into the tilt, bringing her body weight to the fight to force the snowmobile back down. They landed with a jolt, the whining track bit back into the snow, and Hanratty piloted straight for the hump that was Shackleton base.

  As they neared the compound, the dozens of outbuildings that surrounded the base became dimly visible: the skiway where the planes came in, the Summer Camp of old red Jamesway huts, mounded berms of supply pallets, and a scattering of other buildings, sheds, and shanties. Thanks to the oncoming storm, all were obscured as though seen through a translucent white curtain, present but indistinct, and she only knew they had crossed the skiway when the punishing ride stopped thanks to the runway’s compact surface. Somewhere off to their left was the candy-striped ceremonial South Pole, surrounded by the flags of the Antarctic Treaty signatory states and topped by the reflective metallic bulb that everyone took their picture with. Then, as if erupting from the ground, the main building of Shackleton—the beating heart of all research efforts at the South Pole—loomed in front of them, looking like a colossal double-tall shipping container hovering on a cluster of pillars.

  Hanratty continued past the facility, then slowed and banked left, following a gentle slope around and down that ended at a man-made snow cliff some forty feet lower than the plateau on which the main base rested. Taking gradual shape out of the flurries were the half-moon entrance arches of Shackleton’s garage and warehouse, embedded side by side at the base of the cliff. Taylor must’ve been watching for them: the mouth of the garage gaped wide. Hanratty drove straight toward the white LEDs and crossed the open doorway
with a clatter and a roar, then cut the engine. Cass took a deep breath, trying to lose the feeling of dread that had built up as the storm chased them across the Antarctic plain.

  “Jennings. Let go.”

  Cass jerked back, releasing her hold on Hanratty. She swung off the saddle of the Skandic, stumbling a little as she did; her legs were numb from the thighs down. Stamping her feet to get some of the feeling back, she began peeling off layers, looking around while she did her little warming dance. Sheryl’s body was gone, presumably already in the medical lab undergoing an autopsy or an exam or whatever was supposed to be done in a situation like this. Cass fought down a wave of nausea. The garage workspace, normally comforting and familiar, now felt abandoned and dismal.

  Taylor punched the green button to close the bay door and it slowly obeyed, rattling and grinding on the way down. Wind keened as the descending door increased the pressure, then was cut off altogether as the rubberized bottom section slid into the protective socket in the floor. The two formed an almost airtight seal, although if a Condition Two storm was on the way, snow would find its way through regardless, piling in drifts on the inside of the door.

  “Jennings.” She turned to face Hanratty, who had doffed his goggles and balaclava. His gaunt, stern face—a Puritan minister’s face, an inquisitor’s face—was twisted into a scowl. “Not a word of this to anyone until I can make an official announcement, understand? Only you, Taylor, and I know about Larkin’s accident and I need to keep it that way until I can get some idea of just what the hell happened out there.”

  “I got it,” she said. “Who found her?”

  Hanratty frowned, but said, “The Herc pilot for today’s run back to McMurdo thought he saw something odd as he took off from the skiway. He called it in about an hour ago.”

  “Why didn’t you scramble one of the trauma teams? Why did we go out?”

  “We checked Larkin’s tag-out. She was gone twelve hours by the time the pilot saw her,” Taylor said, joining them. Stripped of his gear, he was a man of average height but had a gymnast’s poise and strength. His large nose and receding gray hairline were reminiscent of a bald eagle, though no one at the base dared say that to him. “This was a recovery, not a rescue.”