Carter considered this at around him in bright sunshine trucks rolled away from the station on ice roads, carrying wind machines in back. Scientists and construction workers in colorful snowsuits labored and shouted Penguins, seals, and birds waddled and dived into the hay. In a wasteland, life flourished when it could. Nothing natural could stop life. Only the artificial, the man-made forces of holocaustal destruction could completely end life.
"All set?" Hawk asked.
He pulled the cigar from his mouth and stared south as if he could see the South Pole. Carter's only scheduled stop.
"Looks like it."
Carter got into the little nuclear helicopter. Ski marks in the packed snow behind it showed where it'd just been pushed from the storage shed. The man Hawk had entrusted to guard it moved quietly and tiredly away.
"You have four days," Hawk continued. "That's all. Your main supplies will last that long. Your emergencies should last two weeks more. I expect to hear from you every day. But I'll give you four, just in case. Then I send someone after you."
"I understand."
"No one's to know exactly what you're doing, so watch your radio transmissions."
Carter smiled. He'd never seen the great Hawk so worried.
"How'd you get out of that Ethiopian desert that Blenkochev left you in?" Carter asked as his eyes and fingers ran over the helicopter gauges. He glanced at Hawk.
Hawk was studying him, his eyes narrowed.
"How'd you hear about that? No, no. Never mind," he said and jammed the cigar back in his mouth. "A Bedouin found me. His wives took care of my wounds, and he gave me a lift on his camel to the Mediterranean."
"You make it sound easy. You were near death. How'd you get lucky enough to have a Bedouin find you? That desert's a thousand square uninhabited miles."
Hawk glared. He worked the cigar across his mouth.
"I took my watch apart," he said reluctantly, "crawled up the tallest dune I could find, and used the crystal to reflect light. I just kept shining it around until the Bedouin found me. I Figured I was going to die anyway, might as well go with heat prostration. The chest wound would kill me soon anyway."
"Good thinking for a man near death."
Hawk shrugged. He allowed a smile to play on his lips.
"There are no Bedouins in the Antarctic," he warned. "Be careful." He stepped back. "And happy hunting!"
Carter closed the helicopter's plastic door and turned on the motor. He let it warm as Hawk stomped his feet and gusted cigar smoke into the pristine air. Hawk looked almost happy, as if he were sending a part of himself off with Carter, the best part, the part that longed for his own adventures again. Only once did Carter see him frown, and then the AXE head quickly covered it, a true professional.
The helicopter rose straight up, its rotors beating healthily. Skuas, Wilson's storm petrels, and snow petrels scattered away, their wings flapping into the brilliant sky.
Carter hovered the craft at about thirty feet. Abruptly Hawk raised a hand and waved. As Carter gave him a thumbs-up signal, Hawk nodded, clasped his hands behind his back, and stalked away. He had his own work to do.
In the helicopter, Carter moved across the Ross Ice Shelf, part of the ice sheet that covered the polar continent with as much as three vertical miles of ice. He watched for signs of a downed aircraft. The ice shelf was so vast that it contained more than seventy percent of the earth's supply of fresh water.
The cloudless day provided a clear view for about three hundred miles in all directions. Here and there sprouted remote scientific stations and temporary settlements of Antarctic Treaty member nations. The outposts were little cardboard boxes on the glistening snow and ice. But there were no wrecked planes. The treaty, due to be reviewed in 1991, made Antarctica an international haven for peaceful study, and the happy results of that were all Carter saw.
Carter thought about this as the small helicopter flew on toward Beardmore Glacier where he would fly over the jagged Queen Maud Mountains. Apparently it took the most undesirable piece of real estate in the world to be the spawning place for international peace.
In a few hours, as the day lengthened into afternoon, Carter at last reached Beardmore Glacier. Still no sign of Diamond's having passed there.
Ominous gray clouds billowed on the horizon. Antarctica's wildlife had disappeared. Seldom did even the thickly feathered petrels venture this far inland.
Beardmore Glacier extended ahead and up in shining blue-white glory. Here Edgar Evans, a member of Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated polar party, died in 1912 as the group of five men fought their way back toward base that would eventually lead them to expedition headquarters at McMurdo Sound.
Carter pulled back on the throttle, and the helicopter rose, following the awesome glacier up between the sharp mountain peaks. Wide cracks marred the glacier, created by fissures below. He kept glancing at the weather gathering on the horizon and then down at the empty expanse of glacier.
He watched the sky. The clouds on the horizon were gathering force, splaying like knives across the heavens. He flew on, his attention divided between the land and the atmosphere. Only three hundred miles to his destination at the Pole.
The sky above Carter's helicopter was dark now, but he was almost over the glacier. He'd seen nothing of Diamond. The flatlands that contained the South Pole spread beyond the glacier. If he had to, he could tent the helicopter and wait out the storm at the Pole.
The helicopter suddenly rocked, knocked about like a leaf. Wind whipped viciously across the polar plain, hurling snow and ice into the air. The gray clouds released an ongoing burden of thick swirling snow. The air temperature plummeted, and the helicopter's windshield fogged. The radio went out, the victim of polar interference. A cold sweat broke out on Carter's forehead as he struggled with the helicopter's controls.
Twelve
The Antarctic air was thick with snow. Visibility was nil. Nick Carter couldn't tell the dense snowy air from the polar cap below. It was a massive whiteout, and sky and land were the same. White death on white death. Indistinguishable.
He needed to land the helicopter. But he had to wait for a break in the weather so he could see.
Carter held the chopper steady as he could, the controls growing sluggish. Had a sudden storm taken Rocky Diamond, too?
The helicopter blew to one side, then the other. Up and down. Dizzying. Confusing. Without direction. While under the influence of the South Magnetic Pole, no compass was reliable.
For hours Carter rode the winds, waiting for a moment of visibility so he could land. He had to stay up; he could not get too close to the earth and risk being smashed into the ground by the hurricane-force gales.
At times it seemed as if the hand of a behemoth senselessly hurled the helicopter into the unknown at the speed of light. At other times, the craft seemed to stand still in the eye of a white-whipped tornado, frozen for ail eternity.
When the break came, Carter almost missed it.
Exhausted, eyes behind reflecting glasses feeling the sharp pain that preceded snowblindness, the splash of blue sky whisked past.
Carter looked up.
There was a lull in the blizzard. A natural hesitation where the winds and snow parted and the sky and land showed separate and distinct.
He turned the sluggish helicopter.