Polar Quest. Tom Grace

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СКАЧАТЬ sick enough to turn down Duroc’s money?’ Kuhn asked.

      ‘Hell, no. I just don’t like flying false colors.’

      ‘It don’t matter what she’s wearing on the outside,’ Kuhn said, ‘underneath, she’s still the Ice Queen.’

      ‘Looks like shit, don’t it?’ Holland said. ‘Got no personality whatsoever.’

      ‘Maybe,’ Kuhn replied, ‘but for the first time in the history of VXE-6, we’re going to really live up to our nickname.’

      Duroc, Albret, and the rest of the two flight crews emerged from the camp and walked over to where Kuhn stood with Holland.

      ‘Commander, are your aircraft ready to fly?’ Duroc asked.

      ‘Yes, sir,’ Kuhn replied. ‘The tanks are all topped off and it doesn’t look like your paint crew did any damage.’

      ‘Good.’ Duroc nodded to Albret, who handed packets to Kuhn and Holland. ‘Here are the flight plan and the latest weather reports.’

      Kuhn opened the manila envelope and glanced over the southbound route. From Honduras, the planes would fly along the Pacific coast of South America, landing at remote airstrips to rest and refuel. In the final leg, they were to cross over southern Chile into Argentina.

      ‘I will meet you in Rio Gallegos,’ Duroc said. ‘There, we will load the men and equipment required for the mission. Any questions?’

      ‘Not a one,’ Kuhn replied, holding out his hand. ‘I guess we’ll see you in Argentina.’

      Duroc stood near the helicopter and watched the two LC-130s depart. The cargo planes circled the jungle airstrip once, then veered south toward the Pacific coast. Finding these unique planes and the crews to fly them was one of the more formidable challenges of this project, and he was pleased with his success. So far, everything was proceeding as planned, but Duroc knew that there was still much to be accomplished and many places where things could go disastrously wrong.

      ‘The workmen are in the mess tent, as you ordered,’ Albret announced. ‘They are eager for their wages.’

      ‘Understandably so.’

      Duroc unlocked the cargo compartment of the Bell 427 and pulled out a Halliburton briefcase.

      ‘Put the rest of our gear on board while I take care of the men,’ Duroc ordered.

      Albret nodded and jogged away as Duroc walked over to the largest tent in the compound. Inside, he found the five Hondurans laughing and enjoying the cold beer Duroc had provided. All eyes turned to him as he entered the tent.

      ‘Gentlemen,’ Duroc said, easily slipping into Spanish, ‘I wish to thank you for your excellent work over these past few days. As we agreed, here is five hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency.’ Duroc set the briefcase down atop the table where the men were seated and opened it so the contents faced the men. Inside, the case was filled with neat bundles of U.S. twenty-dollar bills. ‘It has been a pleasure doing business with you.’

      Duroc shook a few hands and the rest of the Hondurans raised their bottles in his honor. One of the men picked up a battered guitar and began strumming – they were rich and it was time to celebrate. Duroc smiled and left what promised to be a wild day of drinking.

      By the time Duroc returned to the helicopter, Albret had their gear loaded and the rotors turning. Duroc slipped on a pair of dark aviator sunglasses and climbed into the copilot’s seat. Albret ran through the rest of his checklist, powered up the twin turbine engines, and lifted off.

      As the helicopter rose above the treetops and began to move away from the runway, Duroc keyed a command into the onboard computer that instructed it to transmit a series of pulses at a specific frequency. Less than two seconds later, a thin layer of plastic explosive lining the interior of the briefcase exploded.

      The five men barely felt the searing heat from the blast or the shards of fragmented metal from the briefcase. Everything within fifty feet of the bomb disappeared in a fireball that incinerated the encampment. The explosion left a crater twenty feet across and ten feet deep.

      Duroc’s helicopter sped over the rain forest toward Tegucigalpa, where he and Albret would board a private jet for Argentina.

       2 JANUARY 24 LV Research Station, Antarctica

      Collins stood beneath a clear blue sky bathed in the whitest light he had ever known, a light blinding with brilliant intensity. The hard-packed crystals of ice that covered the glacial plateau glowed in dazzling imitation of the sun. Were it not for the yellow-lens goggles protecting his eyes, he would have been snow-blind as soon as he stepped outside the station. From his vantage point, less than seven hundred miles from the South Pole, the sun traced another unbroken ellipse in the sky. Endless day.

       Click.

      Ansel Adams could’ve worked some real magic down here, Collins mused as he adjusted the exposure setting on his camera.

      Today, the wind, temperature, and sky conspired to produce one of nature’s rarest and most dazzling sights: parhelic circles. Sunlight, refracted through tiny airborne ice crystals, created the illusion of luminous halos, arcs,and flaring parabolas in the sky. Collins counted twenty distinct formations dancing around the sun.

       Click.

      Like a surrealist painting, distance was an illusion in the interior of the southernmost continent. It was generally accepted that the otherworldliness of this place was due in equal parts to extremes in temperature, altitude, and lifelessness. Over fifty years of record keeping by Russian crews manning the Vostok Research Station – Collins’s closest neighbors some forty miles to the south – bracketed the local temperature range as between-40 degrees and-128 degrees Fahrenheit.

      Satisfied that he’d captured at least one decent image from this spot, Collins moved his camera around to the opposite side of the station. LV Research Station had been home to Collins and his wife, Nedra, since November and had been entirely prefabricated in the U.S. as a mockup of the habitat for NASA’s manned-mission to Mars. At the center of the station stood a short domed tower. Four cylindrical modules – each the size of a railroad tanker car – stood mounted on thick legs and radiated out from the tower in a cruciform configuration. The modules provided space for research, crew quarters, power and environmental systems, and storage.

      Beneath LV Station, the sheet of glacial ice that blanketed nearly all of Antarctica rose to a height of 11,500 feet above sea level. Thanks to the katabatic winds – dense sheets of frigid air that flowed down from the nearby ice domes – the rarified air that Collins breathed was even thinner than that of other sites of equal elevation around the world. These winds siphoned low-oxygen air from the upper atmosphere to fill the void left behind as they flowed down toward the coast. When they had first arrived here, it took Collins and his wife several days to acclimate themselves, and both still had to be wary of overexertion.

      Collins could attest to the extremes in temperature and altitude, but assumption that this place was totally lifeless was something that he and many other scientists around the world were challenging. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, energy in the form of sunlight was assumed to be essential to the formation СКАЧАТЬ