Ultimately, he thought of Carol. In an ongoing series of poor decisions and unexamined failures in Garner’s memory, Dr. Carol Harmon was an enduring reminder of The One That Got Away. As the divorce and the day-to-day reasons for it faded from memory, Garner found he could never forget the desire and affection of those years. Certainly nothing about either of their lifestyles had changed enough to suggest another attempt would yield a different result. If anything, their careers had only accelerated and further diverged.
He still loved her. It was the logistics that forever got in the way.
Dawn would be coming soon. Garner stopped to rest and looked to the east for any hopeful trace of light. As he retied his bundle of provisions, various parts of his body forced him to choose between continuing without rest and stopping to seek shelter. Clouds still obscured the stars, but the moon gave him enough light to see and, finally, a point of reference by which to guide his trek.
Then suddenly, perhaps three miles to the north, a startlingly bright flash of light rose into the night sky and burst over the desolate landscape: a flare.
For the first time in six hours. Garner altered his course.
With a definitive snap, the ledge of ice below the hovercraft finally gave way.
The vehicle flipped completely vertical, then it wheeled over on its side, smashing onto the surface. The hatch snapped off at its hinges but remained gouged into the ice while the rest of the hovercraft disappeared from sight, pulling the tattered remains of the orange cushion with it to the bottom.
The entire spectacle took less than a minute, though Carol had received ample warning. She gathered up her pitiful camp and crawled away from the edge of the fractured ice.
She was too exhausted, too cold, and too hungry to fret over this latest setback and its implications. The wind had died down, but the darkness and the cold remained. She was now completely exposed on the ice with no practical way of making a shelter or getting to the ship and no obvious way for the ship to find her.
As her strength continued to ebb, she believed she could feel unconsciousness coming on, perhaps forever. With the numb, helpless feeling that permeated her entire body came a host of regrets, of words never spoken and deeds left undone.
In that moment she realized that she wanted more than her research was giving her, more than the Nolan Group could ever provide her. Most of all, she wanted to live, but that possibility had never seemed more remote.
There was no sight of any approaching lights, either by air or on the surface, in any direction. For all she knew, she was the last person alive for a thousand miles.
She loaded the pistol and fired another flare. She had three left.
Then she closed her eyes.
At first Carol thought it was some kind of mirage, a hallucination. A single light bobbing toward her across the ice, as if a passing stranger out for a stroll just happened to see the flare. But this was no illusion. Carol quickly grabbed her own pathetic lamp and waved it in return.
“Over here!” she tried to shout, though what remained of her voice was little more than a croak.
The jouncing of the light increased; the stranger was running. She could now see that it was a single figure, wrapped head to toe in goggles, gloves — and one of the exposure suits from the Phoenix.
“Here!” She strained again.
“Hold on, I’ve got you,” came the reply from across the ice. She knew in an instant who it was and her tears began to flow freely, whether from relief, astonishment, or collapse, it didn’t matter. The one person who could find her had found her and that feeling was incredible.
“Brock!” she cried, trembling, still not wholly convinced this was not a dream.
Then he was there, next to her. She felt his arms close around her and nothing else seemed to matter.
“My leg,” she cautioned, as if the ungainly, primitive splint didn’t speak for itself.
“Okay, okay,” he said, urging her to keep still. “We’ll take care of it as soon as we can.” She felt like a child in his arms, and began relating the story of Byrnes and the hovercraft wreck as best she could.
“We have to get you some shelter,” Garner said. “How far is it back to the Phoenix?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Fifteen, twenty miles. More. There’s no way you can—”
“Rest,” he said, pressing a finger to her lips.
Garner wrestled the broken hatch back from the edge of the ice and turned it over. The smooth, rounded outer surface would serve as a sled, and the second paddle, threaded through the broken hinges, made an adequate handle. He lifted Carol onto the hatch and wrapped her with the blankets and pieces of insulation. Last, he tied the rest of their provisions and the jerry can of fuel onto the hatch and tested the weight of the makeshift yoke across his shoulders.
“Let’s go,” he said to her, then kissed her on the forehead as she drifted off to sleep.
25
Hours after Garner and Krail confirmed the travel arrangements for David Macadam, Global Oil arranged to send its utility ship, the Villager, to a rendezvous with the containment operation taking shape in Foxe Basin. Though lacking any aesthetic appeal, the Villager was the only vessel of its kind in the world. The blunt bow of the six-thousand-ton vessel was reinforced with steel plating eight inches thick, capable of navigating almost any obstructions the sea could toss in its path. Mounted on its stern was one of the sturdiest deepwater dredging apparatuses ever engineered, an invaluable asset for contouring the shifted sediment above depleted oil sands or clearing obstructions for the placement of a new platform. Amidships was an equally formidable pump-and-nozzle system, which could be used for purposes ranging from washing down pipes and derricks to filling new GBS structures with hundreds of tons of molten ballast. Booms, tanks, and sediment buckets lined every available surface on the Villager’s decks and crowded around her relatively small superstructure, which was necessarily moved forward. Someone once remarked that the Villager resembled a “real” ship that had been exploded from somewhere inside the hull, leaving a garish collage of rusted, tangled piping and winches that somehow still managed to earn a living. And earn she did: though the ship had been built specifically to assist in the construction of B-82, Global now recovered its expenses by loaning the vessel to other companies’ platforms in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. As new rigs sought to plumb increasingly hostile environs and older platforms sought to extend their original production cycles, the Villager had become a profitable nursemaid.
Macadam arrived at Cape Dorset after a thirty-eight-hour flight in a Mcdonnell-Douglas C-17 Globemaster, its 160,000-pound payload bay loaded to capacity. In the rear of the aircraft the sealing compound and its stabilizing resin filled a pair of sixty-five-hundred-gallon brewer’s tanks that had been taken directly out of Macadam barn and loaded onto a convoy of Army flatbed trucks. Now the tanks would be emptied into the hold of the Villager for the rest of the journey to Fury and Hecla Strait.
Macadam slept little during the trip. Instead he requested regular updates on the weather they would be facing, then attempted to factor this information into his calculations for the mix and disbursement of the Plasroc.