Ice Hunt

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I thought I heard something.” He stood and listened for another few breaths, then shrugged heavily. He turned and continued down the tunnel.

After another ten steps, the path plunged over an ice cliff.

Connor reached the edge first, bending over to shine his helmet light down. He suddenly stiffened and dropped to his knees.

Amanda squeezed up next to him. It was tight. The pit ended about fifteen feet down. The splash of red on the ice was a raw slash. One boot lay in the middle of the stain. Also a mining helmet, the lamp smashed.

Connor turned to her. “Lacy’s.”

There was no sign of a body, but the bloody track led off to the side. Out of their line of vision.

“I have to go down there,” Connor insisted. “There might be another way out that we can’t see. If Lacy tried to drag herself…”

Amanda stared at the amount of blood on the floor. It seemed hopeless, but she shrugged the coil of poly-line to the floor. “I’m lighter. You brace me, and I’ll go down and look.”

Connor looked like he was going to leap down there himself. But he only nodded.

Amanda tossed a length of rope to the bottom. Connor braced himself, seated on the ice a couple feet from the edge, legs apart, crampons dug into the walls. He passed a loop of poly-line around his back, under his armpits. He shook it, testing it.

“You ready?” she asked.

“I won’t drop a little slip of a girl like you,” he groused. “Just find Lacy.”

Amanda nodded. She pocketed her flashlight, grabbed the rope, and began to rappel down into the ice pit. She lowered herself, hand over hand, spiked feet against the wall. She quickly reached the bottom.

“Off rope!” she called up as her toes hit the floor.

The line jiggled as the large man unbraced himself and crawled over to the edge. He still wore the loop of poly-line around his chest. He stared anxiously down at her and mouthed something, but with his thick beard and the glare of his helmet lamp, she could not make out what he was saying.

Rather than admit her ignorance, she simply waved to him. She pulled out her flashlight.

As she swung her light, her nose curled. The smell was rank. It seemed to hover at the bottom of the pit like bad air in a cavern, heavy, thick, suffocating. She swallowed hard. One summer, while going to Stanford, she had worked in the kennel of an animal research facility. The stench here brought her back: blood, feces, and urine. It was a smell that she had come to equate with fear.

She followed the blood trail with her flashlight. It led past the cliff to an opening in the ice wall. It was a horizontal slot, even with the floor, similar to a street drain that led into a city’s underground sewers. It was no higher than her knee, but almost as long as the length of her body.

A big sewer drain.

She crossed toward it and called out, “Lacy!”

Deaf, she glanced up to Connor to see if he registered any response. He still knelt up at the cliff’s edge, but he was staring back down the tunnel rather than into the pit.

Her toe hit something on the floor, drawing her gaze back down. It was Lacy’s boot. It spun from her kick. She instinctively followed it with her flashlight. It hit the wall and stopped. From this angle, her light shone down into the boot.

It wasn’t empty. Bright bone, splintered at the end, stuck out of the boot.

She screamed. But no noise came out. Or maybe it did. She had no way of telling. She scrambled backward on the ice, crampons now acting like ice skates.

She craned up to the cliff’s edge.

No one was there.

“Connor!”

She could see his light up there, deeper in the tunnel. But it jittered all around, like he was doing some Scottish jig up there. Even the rope snaking down the cliff wall whipped and flailed.

“Connor!”

Then the light stopped its dance, as if hearing her. It settled still, pointing toward the top of the tunnel. The dancing rope went slack.

Amanda backed across the ice, trying to get some distance, trying to see farther down the mouth of the tunnel. She pointed her flashlight up. Her throat constricted into a knot, and blood pounded in her useless ears. She didn’t bother calling out again.

Something moved over the geologist’s headlamp, casting a shadow over the ceiling. Something large, hunched…

She now held her flashlight with both hands, pointing it like a weapon. It was surely just Connor. But being deaf, she had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe he was calling out to her…

Terror tightened her belly.

The shadow drew closer.

Amanda didn’t wait.

She bolted across the ice, fleeing along Lacy’s bloody track, aiming for the only means of escape. She dove belly first onto the ice. The wind was knocked out of her. She didn’t care. She slid toward the dark sewer drain, flashlight pointed forward.

Then she was gone.

The slot swallowed her away.

The momentum of her slide carried her several feet down the drain. Illuminated by her flashlight, the low ceiling drew upward. She scrambled up to her knees as she slowed, spinning slightly on the ice.

The sloped floor dumped into a hollow space. She sat up. The roof here was high enough to stand if she ducked her head, but she remained seated. Her flashlight waved around the room.

It was a dead end…in every sense of the word.

Across the bowled floor of the hollow, bones lay everywhere: cracked, splintered, some bleached white, some yellowed. Empty skulls, human and animal, gleamed. Femurs, ribs, scapulas.

One word rang in her head.

Nest…

In a back corner lay a crumpled form, bent and broken, unmoving, festooned in a red, white, and blue Thinsulate outfit. Frozen blood pooled around the shape.

She had found Lacy.

10:47 A.M.

ON THE ICE…

Matt fought the two guards who flanked him in the backseat of the Sno-Cat. “We have to go back!” he yelled.

An elbow struck him across the bridge of the nose. Stars and pain blinded him, knocking him back into his seat. “Stay seated, or we’ll handcuff you.” Lieutenant Mitchell Greer grimaced and rubbed his elbow.

The other guard, a bullnecked seaman by the name of Doug Pearlson, had drawn his pistol. It was presently pointed at the roof of the Cat, but the threat was plain.

“Matt, calm down,” Craig said from the front seat.

“We have our orders,” the driver, a petty officer, said.

A minute ago, Lieutenant Commander Sewell had radioed their vehicle. He had ordered them to continue to the Russian ice station immediately. The commander had been unable to raise the station himself, and warning of the Russian ambush had to be relayed.