Chapter 8
Reed
“The whole thing can fit inside the chopper backseat,” the master carpenter of Waypoint Station, Garrett, was explaining.
In the twenty minutes it had taken me to change into my flight suit, pack my bag, get the chopper started and warmed up, talk with my base station to get permission, and file the flight plan, the station’s master carpenter had apparently rigged some kind of ladder-cum-ramp.
Daniel, Viktor, Garrett, and I were standing inside his workshop.
“I absolutely love what you’ve done,” I said to him. “But…” I rubbed my chin as I studied it.
“But?” Garrett asked.
“I’m worried this is too short. It’ll fit in the backseat of my chopper all right, but I think it’s too short for any rescue work we may have to perform.”
He was already nodding as I spoke, seemingly aware of this issue already, so I stopped talking and let him speak.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Let me show you.” He bent down and pulled on one end of the ramp, and the entire thing started extending.
I was newly amazed—not only had he designed a ramp in twenty minutes, but he had also managed to make it collapsible.
He kept extending segments of it like one of those vacuum cleaner handles, and by the time he was done pulling every segment out, the thing stretched to forty feet.
Viktor whistled, and Daniel and I exchanged stunned looks.
“You are a magician. This is fantastic.” Viktor bounced on his toes.
Garrett looked mighty pleased. “It’s a team effort,” he said modestly. “I’m not the one taking the risk to fly out there. I just wanted to contribute in some way.”
We practiced collapsing and extending his creation a couple of times to make sure Daniel and I could do it out there, should we need it.
“Where do you want these, Pilot Harmon?” one of the crew asked. Other people from the station were helping me load the supplies we might need. We had no idea what we would find.
“Under the backseats,” I instructed.
“Can I have a private word with the Doc?” Garrett asked.
“Sure,” Daniel replied. “You go ahead. I’ll join you soon.” He nodded at me to get going.
“Ah. Okay.”
I jogged back toward my chopper. August flagged me down.
“What about fuel?” he asked, coming to stand next to me, a device in his hand.
“Yeah. I’m worried about fuel.” Unlike other places in the world, you couldn’t just make a pit stop to refuel. Any pilot knew that after a certain distance, there was a point of no return where you could not fly back because your fuel only took you as far as your destination.
“Nobody is going to be able to come out to me and refuel me out there, so I need extra fuel. This is a smaller chopper.” I pointed at my bird. “The tanks can’t hold extra.”
“Hmm. So how much are we talking? Flying in and out, plus some extra as backup?” he asked.
Daniel came and stood by me. I had to stop myself from instinctively reaching for him.
“Not just that. I have to keep her running the whole time we’re on site. I don’t want to risk shutting down the engine and not being able to restart it. Here at the station, I have backup batteries and your engineers and tech staff who could help me, but out there on the ice, I have nothing.”
August nodded. “Right. So, keeping her running the entire time. Okay, I think we are looking at…” He looked at the iPad in his hand.
Together, he and I ran through some calculations for the amount of extra fuel I would need.
Like all research stations, Waypoint had its own fuel reservoir tank.
Soon after, August left us to retrieve fuel for me.
“All set?” I asked Daniel. He was dressed in a flight suit like me, with a parka on top, aviation goggles on, and a warm cap on his head.
“Yes.” He took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Garrett wants us to deliver this message to Nate.”
I took the piece of paper and unfolded it.
I challenge you to a duel, Nate Braddock. Meet me at Waypoint Station. We fight until death.
“Eh?” I frowned and re-read it. It wasn’t signed.
Daniel lifted his goggles onto his cap and shrugged. “No idea. I didn’t ask. We are to deliver it.”
Huh. Okay. I folded the note and gave it back to him.
Our eyes met, and for a moment, I forgot all about the mission.
The sky above us was awash in the pale Antarctic twilight, the sun sitting low on the horizon even at this hour, casting long shadows across the ice, but the light also made his skin glow, almost as if he were carved from gold and ivory. Desire flared in my belly.
“Can’t wait to finish what we started earlier,” I said, my voice husky without even trying.
He bit his lip and looked away, avoiding my gaze, but the pink in his cheeks was a giveaway. “Just don’t try anything in the cockpit,” he murmured.
“Can’t promise. The name isn’t helping. Why cock?”
He flushed deeper but joined in my laughter.
***
It was one in the morning when we finally lifted off. The advantage of being in Antarctica was that I could fly at night—despite it being past midnight, the sun never set during the summer here.
Our flight plan took us toward the interior of the continent, which meant that as we got closer to the South Pole, the light actually got brighter.
I was not used to this mind-bending erasure of day and night.
I had been told it gets easier the more time you spend on the continent, but I had only arrived one week ago, and my brain kept trying to tell me it was daytime.
I was glad Daniel had forced me to sleep earlier. I would not have been cleared to fly otherwise. After fifteen minutes of flying, we settled into a familiar and comfortable rhythm.
The windshield framed a world like nothing I had ever seen. Near Waypoint, the water had been fractured, with chunks of ice floating loose in the shoreline. Out here, the ocean had settled into itself: dark blue, deep, unbroken for miles in every direction except where the bergs rose out of it.
I had not been prepared for the size of them.
The first one we passed, I looked at in awe. It rose from the water, its face carved in horizontal layers of white and a blue so dense it was almost black in the deeper crevices. We passed close enough that I could see the surface texture.
“I’ve flown everywhere,” I said. “Seen Everest at dawn, the Sahara in a sandstorm, the North Sea in winter with waves forty feet high. I have seen things from a cockpit that most people only see in photographs, and I had always felt, privately, that I had a reasonably complete picture of what this planet looked like.”
Daniel was looking at me with soft eyes.
“It doesn’t look like this anywhere else.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “It doesn’t.”
“Best part is, I get to see it with you this time,” I said.
Our eyes met again, and I held his gaze as long as I safely could before going back to checking my instrument panel.
“That one.” Daniel pointed at another massive berg. “Marcus, our glaciologist, would know better, but I’ve heard enough from him over the years to know it is old. Could be anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand years.”
“Thousand?” I was stunned.
“Hmm. We are looking at some of the most remote, pristine, and oldest parts of Earth.”
I whistled in awe as we passed the massive piece of centuries-old ice. Ahead, a school of fish broke the surface, moving fast, their smooth backs catching the light as they rolled. I watched them until we passed over, and they disappeared behind us.
“Dolphins?” I asked.
“Yes. If we are lucky, we might catch seals and whales too.”
I reached my right hand across to him and grabbed his hand.
“Reed,” he chided softly.
“Can’t not touch you.”
We flew like that in silence for the next several minutes.
“Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
I kept my eyes on the horizon as I held his hand. I had lost my nerve earlier at the dock and couldn’t get the question to leave my mouth, but it was time I got my shit together.
“Why did you leave?” I finally asked the question that had haunted me. Up here, he couldn’t run from me. I desperately needed to fix whatever had gone wrong. And I couldn’t do that without knowing why he had left. “When we were back on US soil, I looked for you.”
“What are you talking about?” Daniel turned his body toward me. I chanced a quick glance. He looked at me like I had grown three heads. “You’re the one who left.”
“What? No, I didn’t. I waited for a whole week.”
“That’s impossible. I remember that we got separated on the flight back, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone until the military finished debriefing.
That took two days. As soon as I was cleared, I tried to find you.
You were not on the base. I had them look up the log.
The airman confirmed you had signed out the day before. ”
I sucked in a breath as the realization hit me. My hand tightened around his as the implications crashed through me.
“Reed? Where were you?”
“I…I went to your home address. My debrief was only hours. Most of it was processing my U.S. citizenship. I never… Man, I feel like shit. I was still attached to my Australian unit… so they didn’t debrief me. Fuck.”
“Hold up. My home? You went to my home?”
I nodded. “Yes, I assumed you must have gone there since I couldn’t track you at the base. I found out your home address and drove there. It was locked, but I reasoned you had to come back at some point. So I rented a hotel room and waited. And waited. You never came back.”
“That was a rental, Reed. I have no permanent address.”
“But where did you go?”
“After I realized you didn’t wait for me, I… I resigned from the military and immediately applied for the Antarctic program. I flew directly here. I couldn’t face… I ran away.”
I looked at him. His eyes held the same pain that was coursing through me. Did we miss each other? Could all these years of separation be just because we were stupid?
An iceberg that had collapsed through its own center had formed a natural arch spanning open water, the sea visible straight through it, framed in ancient ice like a doorway into nothing. It felt like some poetic metaphor for our story.
“Face what?” I asked quietly.
Daniel shook his head, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
“You thought I didn’t want the marriage.” I said it like a statement.
“Yeah.”
“Did you think I would forget you, my heart?” I was in pain. “Did you think I didn’t want you?”
“I…”
“Oh, my prince.” I pulled him closer and kissed his temple. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry,” I whispered. “Still married to you. Always will be.”
Daniel froze like a statue, unable to respond at all.
“Talk to me, Daniel.”
“Your ring… you don’t wear it. I assumed you…” He trailed off.
“I wore it! I wore it until one day it fucking broke.”
“Broke?”
“Yeah. During the Everest trip, it just disintegrated. It was made of PVC pipe, remember? I couldn’t even save any pieces.”
“Oh.”
I blew a long exhale. “I cried, you know?” I smiled at him ruefully. “When I realized I had lost the last part of you, I wept like a boy. My Everest crew had no idea. They thought I had lost my nerve.”
There was a flash of movement, then suddenly I was being kissed. Our helmets knocked, but Daniel grabbed my face and just went at it. It lasted only a few seconds before Daniel pulled back, but it rocked my world, and everything suddenly fell back into its correct place.
The radio crackled to life over our headsets. Waypoint’s station chief’s voice piped in. “ETA?”
Daniel was at the comms as my co-pilot, but he had his face in his hands. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind. He wasn’t one to collapse like that, but he carried the guilt and the grief much more than me. Few people understood just how deeply he felt everything.
I checked the instruments. “Thirty-three minutes, sir.”
“Copy that. Everything okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Radio when you’re there.”
“Will do.”