Cold War - Jerome Preisler [41]
Nimec turned to face him.
“Fire and ice,” Nimec said. “I’ve been around a little, seen some unusual places. None of them were anything like this.”
Evers briefly met his gaze.
“Terra Australis Incognita,” Evers said. “ ‘Unknown to the sons of Adam, having nothing which belongs to our race.’ That’s what the legend says about Antarctica on a map by one of those Benedictine monks who tried to keep the gears of civilization turning in the Dark Ages. His name was Lambert of Saint Olmer.”
Nimec grunted. “You know your local history.”
“I read between flights . . . helps me cope with the endless holdups,” Evers said. “You know what, though? Old Lambert was right on. This is a different world. Or may as well be. Nobody will really ever belong here. Not a single one of us.”
“Just visitors, huh,” Nimec said.
“Unwanted visitors.” Evers’s face was serious. “Here’s another piece of information to stuff in your hip pocket. You know the satellite photos I mentioned? Look at any aerial views of the continent and you’ll notice it’s shaped like a giant manta ray.” He paused, shrugged. “Call me crazy, but there are days when I’d swear it’s a reminder. Mother Nature’s way of telling us something important about this place.”
Nimec was still looking at him.
“Namely?” Nimec said.
Evers moved his shoulders up and down again.
“Its sting can be fatal to humans,” he said, and got to work landing the plane in silence.
McMurdo Station (77°84’ S, 166°67’ E)
“Willy” was Williams Field, a prepared airstrip on the fast ice eight miles from McMurdo Station proper. As the Herc taxied to a halt, flight directors in hooded red-issue ECW outfits used hand signals to guide it into position.
A fleet of different vehicles hemmed the fringes of the ski way. Immediately alongside it were bulldozers and other equipment for clearing, raking, and compacting the snow pile. An enormous 4X4 shuttle raised on six-foot-high balloon tires—Ivan the Terrabus, said the lettering on its flank—stood ready to cart deplaned passengers to the station’s main receiving center. There were forklifts for off-loading the cargo pallets, fire trucks in case of a landing emergency, scattered vans, tractors, and motor sleds.
Willy’s operational facilities were identical to those of an ordinary small airfield in so many respects, it almost blunted one’s appreciation of the fact that the whole thing had been constructed on a plate of floating sea ice. It had air-traffic control towers and a considerable number of maintenance and supply buildings with corrugated metal sides. But each of these structures rested on skids, and had been towed from the main field six miles closer to the station, a seven-thousand-foot strip that could be used by aircraft with standard wheeled landing gear until sometime in December, the middle of the polar summer, when the ice runways there began to give in and melt to slush.
Nimec had learned much of this from his files, and seen more with his own eyes upon touchdown. He had adequate time to hear about the rest from Halloran and two other members of the aircrew as they sat together in a heated visitors’ lounge near the apron, sipped passably decent coffee, and watched the Herc being emptied of freight as it took fuel through the lines.
The stop was lasting longer than he’d expected. Almost two hours after the plane’s arrival at McMurdo it remained parked on the ice, the activity around it ongoing without any hint of a letup, its engines running because the minus-50° Fahrenheit temperature was just eight degrees above the danger threshold at which its hydraulics would begin to fail—the rubber hoses, gaskets, and valve seals getting brittle enough to crack, the JP8 fuel that powered the Allisons becoming