“Not me, man. I took one look and closed the lid. But our missing man sure did.”
Linda had forgotten they hadn’t accounted for all fourteen members of Wilson/George. “You found Andy Gangle?”
“Is that the dude’s name? He’s at the back of the garage. And he is messed up.”
Andy had taken his own life in the end, driven to suicide by the same madness that made him kill his companions. He had sat down, with his back against a rack of spare tools, and pulled so hard on his lower jaw that he’d nearly broken it loose. He’d died, either from exposure or blood loss, with his fist stuffed into his mouth as if he were trying to get at whatever affected his brain.
Something glinted brightly in his other hand. Mark pried it from the stiff fingers. It was a piece of gold, misshapen now, but at one point it had to have been ornamental. There was a hammer on the floor next to Gangle’s body. When Mark shone his light on it, he could see where bits of gold had transferred to the head.
“He smashed it with this hammer?”
“Why?”
“Why’d he do any of this? He was sick.”
“What was it?”
“Hard to tell. A figurine of some sort.”
“Is it pure gold?”
“I’d say at least two pounds. Say, thirty thousand dollars.” Mark peered into a knapsack that also was within Gangle’s reach. It made a sound like broken glass scraping together when he lifted it. He peered inside, then dumped the contents on the floor.
It was impossible to know what had been in the bag originally because all that fell out was opaque greenish sand and small bits of similar-colored rock. Like with the golden statuette, Andy Gangle had hammered at something until all that remained was dust and fragments no bigger than a thumbnail.
There was also an odd tube made of what looked like cast bronze in the bag. One end was closed off and the other was shaped like a dragon’s open mouth. The body of the tube was scalloped to resemble a dragon’s scaly skin. Mark examined it more closely.
“This is a pistol.”
“What?”
“Look, here at the closed end there’s a small hole for a wick or taper. It’s a single-shot muzzle-loading pistol.”
“Looks Chinese, with the dragon and all.”
“And ancient,” Linda added. “I assume all this stuff, whatever it was, goes with our mystery friend in the box?”
“That’s my read,” Linc replied.
“Weird,” Mark opined.
Linc asked, “What now?”
“Report our findings back to the Oregon so we can let the CIA know what happened. My guess is, Overholt will want us to pay a visit to the Argentine base to see what’s happening there. In the briefing material I read, it said no one has laid an eye on their facility in two years. I say we anticipate him and head out on our own.”
“I’m not walking thirty miles across Antarctica,” Mark griped.
Linda tapped the front of the nearest snowcat. “Neither am I.”
After making a radio call to their ship and fulfilling Dr. Huxley’s request for tissue and blood samples from Andy Gangle and the mummy in the trunk, it took almost an hour to get one of the big vehicles fired up. Without electricity for the plug-in engine warmer, the oil had turned as viscous as tar. It had to be drained and warmed over a camp stove twice since the first time it cooled too quickly to crank the motor. Despite his nerd chic, Mark Murphy was a nimble mechanic.
Heat from the snowcat’s ventilators was a welcome breath, and only a few miles from Wilson/George it was warm enough for them to unzip their outer parkas and remove the heavy mittens over their Gore-Tex gloves. Linc drove, and Lin
da relinquished the shotgun seat to Murph.
She decided they should circle out into the snowy expanse behind the base and approach the Argentine camp from the east. Compasses were useless this close to the South Pole, but the snowcat was equipped with satellite navigation. This, too, was a little spotty because the constellation of satellites used for triangulation was often hidden by the horizon. The system was not developed with polar navigation in mind. There were base relay stations to aid GPS, but most of them were on the other side of the continent where most of the research bases were located.
The landscape was an unbroken vista of white. Even the distant mountains were still covered in winter ice. Some would melt as the spring thaw deepened to reveal gray granite slopes, but for now they towered under a mantle of frozen snow.