“Smooth move, Sergei,” Zubov muttered to himself, then bellowed angrily: “Just brilliant. A real goddamn Saint Bernard you are.” In his frustration he banged a jerry can off the fender of the Snocat and threw the empty container across the ice.
He stooped forward over the silent machine and tried to compose himself. The cold roar of the wind now assaulted his ears, which were still ringing from the clanking rattle of the Snocat’s engine. Resting for a moment longer, he found himself again thinking of Junko and the look of undeniable affection in her eyes as she kissed him goodbye.
That he was in love with her — at least, as much as he had ever understood the word love to mean — was no longer in question. Certainly his feelings for Junko qualified more than anything he’d felt for any other woman he had ever known. The question was whether he was intellectual enough, mature enough, or sensible enough to tell her how he felt and expect a rewarding response. Sense or not, he resolved to find an answer to that question the moment he returned to the Phoenix.
Behind him, a voice called out from the darkness.
“Hey! Want me to get the windows?”
Zubov whirled around. Garner was less than thirty yards away, struggling forward as he pulled a large wooden sledge. Seeing the dog that accompanied his friend, Zubov recognized the contraption as Victor’s komatik. A single body was strapped to the sled and Zubov assumed it was Victor.
Zubov clapped his arms around Garner in a bear hug, lifting his friend off the ground. Garner looked cold, and worse, he felt cold, even through his exposure suit. Garner had given every spare article of clothing to the occupant of the sled.
Now Zubov could see that it was Carol on the sled. She turned her head weakly and smiled at him through her bundled wrapping.
“Hi, Serg,” she said weakly. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Zubov’s surprise was replaced with stunned amazement.
“Fancy? It’s amazing.” He grinned again and looked back at Garner.
“How far?” was all he could ask.
“Thirty miles, give or take,” Garner said. “From the hovercraft. Another fifteen or twenty before that. Feels like I’ve been walking for a week.”
“Amazing,” Zubov repeated. “Remind me to call you the next time I lose my car keys. What about Byrnes? Did he stay with the hovercraft?”
“Patrick’s dead,” Garner confirmed. “His body went down with the hovercraft. We lost Tibbits and Dunlop too. And Victor.”
Zubov winced.
“Ah, shit.”
“I think it was Victor’s choice to die.” Garner tried to explain what they had found at the inuksuit. He didn’t want to think about the details of the pilots’ deaths. Not now. Their deaths were not by choice.
“I don’t believe it,” Zubov said. “You tenacious son of a bitch.”
“Yeah, we make our own path when we have to,” Garner said with a weary grin, his teeth chattering slightly. “Hard to miss you, given all the noise the beast was making — and the Snocat is pretty loud too.”
“Not anymore, smartass. I’m out of gas.”
Garner turned and pulled the hovercraft’s gas can from the items tied to the sled.
“And it just happens we have some of Byrnes’s special blend, but no ride. I smell a really good marriage of convenience here.”
“Damn right you do,” Zubov laughed, taking the fuel and patting Garner on the back again. “Only you would pack an extra forty pounds of fuel, just in case.”
He topped off the tank once more.
“This’ll give this gas-sucking thing an extra twenty or thirty miles, but even still, I can’t tell you if it’s enough to get back.”
“It’s getting dark,” Garner replied. “Let’s take our chances.”
They attached the sled to the back of the Snocat, trailer fashion, then Garner set Carol onto the single bench seat beside Zubov. Janey seemed content to continue alongside rather than accept a ride in the back of the noisy machine.
For the entire return journey to the Phoenix, Zubov could keep his mind on only two things: keeping his bearings in the blowing snow and formulating a contingency plan for when they ran out of gas for good.
Too quickly, the fuel gauge again sank to the half-full mark, then continued toward one-quarter without hesitation.
Zubov thought of Junko. He recalled the worry in her eyes the last time they had kissed and promised to resolve those fears as soon as they found the Phoenix. He fabricated instead a happier, albeit fictitious, memory. He imagined his love waiting for their safe return, her freshly scrubbed skin smelling of lavender and a small bouquet of flowers clutched in her tiny hands. It was absurdly romantic, but it reminded him of a woman he had seen in an airport once, staring expectantly past everyone else as she anticipated the return of her special someone. Zubov knew no one had ever waited in an airport for him in that way, but he liked the thought of it. He imagined his Junko meeting him at the turnstile, saying she loved him, then being swept up in his arms as she kissed him with the softest of lips.
A large hummock of ice suddenly loomed out of the twilight, snapping Zubov’s focus back to the task at hand. Behind them, the komatik swayed with the sudden shift in momentum, Garner and Carol were jarred from their exhausted sleep, but the Snocat retained its lumbering track. Junko would have to hold those flowers a little longer.
As the visibility finally began to improve, the ground revealed itself to be a hundred times more threatening than it had been on the outbound trip. Each time Zubov thought they were making good progress, the floe beneath them would abruptly end, forcing him to circle back to the west and farther down the shore.
As night descended, searching for the ships’ lights was easier, but watching for breaks or crevasses in the ice became next to impossible.
His vision was limited to the narrow cone of illumination projected from the Snocat’s headlights, and most of that was filled with swirling snow.
More unnerving was the noise of the Snocat’s engine, which covered up any audible clues rising from the ice itself. Inside the cab, they could not hear the groans and complaints of freshly rended fissures, or whether a given section of ice was threatening to break, cutting off their only route back to shore.
Even far away from the edge of the ice, Zubov had no way of knowing if the ridges they had to cross were strong enough to support the weight of the machine and its occupants. He was following, approximately, the same course he had taken going out and the ice barely held the Snocat’s weight then for one passenger, without a trailer.
Slow and steady wins the race, Zubov kept repeating to himself, though their measured progress seemed maddeningly slow. As annoying as the constant roar of the engine was, Zubov could only hope that it would remain that way: constant.
Janey appeared to share none of this anxious concern. She bounded along happily panting beside and behind the Snocat, her curlicued tail waggling in the air.
She seemed to enjoy watching these humans struggle, and could apparently tag along all night without fatigue.
Sitting between the two men, Carol endured the trip without making a sound, though she often fidgeted to find a more comfortable position for her leg.
Garner looked to be within a whisper of death, and a very quiet whisper at that.
He hadn’t said ten words since they started back. He claimed to be conserving energy, but his exhaustion was far more obvious. It was all he could do to keep one hand on the handrail, another around Carol’s shoulders. Zubov regarded his friend’s appearance with concern — his face was pale, yet tinged with the rosy lace of mild frostbite. Fatigue and several days’ growth of beard left his features gaunt and haggard except for the glint of vitality in his penetrating eyes. He was down, but not out — he was never out. No matter what the situation, there was always life in those gray eyes, like a fire burning beneath glacial ice. In all the years they’d known each other, Zubov had never seen that spark diminish.