The admiral was looking at the island of ice on the left, Antarctica.
The exec played his hand. “Something wrong, Admiral, sir?”
A smile had crept into the weather-beaten face. Dark, Spanish, and Machiavellian eyes that have seen so much battle gazed into that shelf of old ice, calculating. His hands grabbed the metal railing that stopped him from toppling off into the broiling water almost a hundred feet below.
“Everything is fine, Vasquez, everything is just fine,” said the admiral.
Summer night fell with the half-light of a dead sun. They could not see it, the sun was too far away on account of the earth’s tilt. The only member of the crew who wasn’t troubled by sleep was Nicolai, he being a resident of the continent all year round.
Olivia yawned, as did the others, in obedience to their body clocks. Peter’s neon wristwatch said the time was after 8 pm. Outside the tent the winds howled. A storm was coming indeed.
“A shit storm if I ever saw one, but we can always move in it,” said Liam Murphy.
“How many have you seen?” Victor Borodin asked him.
“Quite a number.”
Borodin shook his head and smiled. When it finally came, there was no doubt in any of the crew member’s minds that they were going to be holing up in the tent for a while.
Treacherous winds rocked the reinforced scandium tubes, threatened to pull the tent off the ice foundation. The crew ate concentrates for dinner, sardines and canned beans boiled in fat.
The noise outside made conversation inside almost impossible without yelling so crew members went to sleep.
Olivia could not make any recordings. And when she lay down, sleep came down upon her like a shroud, the seams inlayed with an old nightmare.
She was in the junkyard with John Williams. It was always in a junkyard in the dreams. And John was always there too, holding her hands and pulling her down behind rows of tires and scraps from torn motor parts. The air was always hazy, like looking through pouring rain.
And there was always the sound of gunfire; semiautomatic weapons, shotguns, and police issues. And this time, unlike the other dreams, she heard the voice of Tom Garcia.
Rob Cohen was behind her in this dream as well. Rob asked him what she’ll do now if the deal fell through.
“Hit the bottle, eh, Olivia? Are you gonna ruin everything else with your self-pity? I have a business to run here!”
Then one of the drug dealers, a handsome young boy with Spanish eyes and black beautiful hair, appears from nowhere. He begins to spatter the spot where her head had just been with lead from his semiautomatic.
John pulled him down.
“Watch it, Olivia!” he screams, then whispers to her, “Keep your head down, I can’t lose you.”
But it was he who raised his head up, at the wrong time. In the dream, it was wrong timing. That was the gift her dreams always gave her: the excuse that John had died of wrong timing.
His full head went up one minute and the next time Olivia looked, the head had mushroomed into a claret of brain matter and mashed bones.
She screamed in the dream. She screamed on and on. Her lungs sucked in air and expunged a terrifying shriek that went on and on—
A hand was slapping her face gently.
“Olivia, wake up, come on, easy. Wake up!”
Her eyes opened. Peter’s face was on top of hers. She caught the last, drawn syllable of scream leaving her lungs along with a vestige of the nightmare in her head.
She got up on her elbows and looked around. The sound of the wind outside confused her. When she saw the other people sleeping she recalled where she was.
“You were dreaming,” Peter explained.
“Was I?”
“And you screamed too.” Peter’s face was etched with concern. “You called a name, John.”
Her heart broke then, with it, the dam of tears.
3
Catharsis was not only achieved when we cry, but also when we share. As she poured her story out to Peter Williams, some of her emptiness filled.
Olivia cried into Peter’s shoulder for some time.
Then when she had settled down she told him. “I was working a case of arms smuggling from the US army stockpile into south America and Africa…” she began in a tight, small voice.
“John and I had been working on tips from an informant. The tips were good and credible. We went as buyers. The sale was on until something happened. One of the smugglers got itchy hands and started shooting. All hell broke loose and there was gunfire everywhere. The FBI agents took some hits.”
“John took my hands and we were escaping and then…” She broke off.
It was the part of the nightmare that was always hard to remember, harder to retell. She swallowed. Her eyes itched from dehydration. She looked at Peter. She touched the side of her face.
“Here, the bullet went in, here and…” She bit her lower lip and shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Olivia.”
She wrung her hands. “You know, it’s been so long now and I ought to have moved on but I can’t. I don’t know how. So I drank to forget, but the more I drank the more the dreams come. And it’s a vicious cycle of pain and I’m caught in the middle of my own shit storm. Every night.”
Her head fell on Peter’s shoulder again.
There they stayed, for the rest of the storm.
The wind let up five hours after.
Frank Miller had Itay Friedman and Nicolai erect a map stand on the wall of the tent. Nicolai also provided Olivia with a small gas stove on which she cooked for the crew.
Victor Borodin groaned, “Oh finally, some real food.”
It wasn’t much. Beaten eggs, vegetables, and oats. Miller had a small collection of white wine that went around too. The billionaire watched the crew eat. Itay Friedman finished setting up a comprehensive map of Antarctica.
“May I have your attention please?” He tapped the map with a stick.
“Class in session,” Olivia whispered to Peter. Her voice was still sore from crying.
Peter chuckled at the joke. It felt like a century ago that they left Miami. He missed his office, his students. He was going to miss Craig’s wedding too. And he sure was going to renege on his promise to handle Craig’s classes for the week. It wasn’t even clear how much longer before they found what they were after.
“This is a map of the continent. We are here”—Miller tapped at a corner of the white mass that was the Antarctic—“and here is where I believe we are headed.”
He tapped a spot on the map where there was a big red spot.
“Somewhere not far from here is Hitler’s secret laboratory,” Miller added.
“The what?” Liam Murphy said, half yelling.
Frank Miller’s eyes scanned the crew. The expressions varied from mild surprise to shock, wonder, and amused confusion. After the silence came murmuring.
Anabia Nassif rose from one of the improvised benches from Novolavarevskaya. “We were told that this was a scientific research expedition into the effects of global warming on the Antarctic, I mean. What’s this, what’s going on?”
Victor Borodin dropped his glass of wine.
He wiped his hands on the spill stain on his trousers. “Shit,” he cussed. Then the arguments started again. Everyone talking all at once. Peter, Olivia, and Ted Cooper were the only members least surprised.
Liam Murphy looked at Olivia. “Hey, you knew about this all along?”
“Ya’ll better listen to what moneybags has to say.” Olivia pointed.
Ted Cooper smiled at her.