Nick led the way. The rest followed. Even Hurst, who’d been bandaged and given a pain-killing shot, managed to limp along, bracing himself on Mike Barlow’s strong shoulder. But his face looked dead-white and glistened with sweat despite the cold. Tyler was being used as the doctor’s beast of burden, lugging her aluminum equipment cases and a folded canvas tarp.
Nick stopped beside the rock markers where the Bloodhounds had registered their initial hits.
“You said these were mineral deposits,” Ivins commented.
“I hadn’t read your diary, then.”
“So?”
“Lovett wrote that he’d marked the graves. A pilot’s marker, he called then.”
“So?”
“I’m guessing he used what he had available, pieces of his Junkers. I’m also guessing that since he was sick he didn’t have the strength to dig graves in this kind of soil. That leaves us with the exploratory trench he mentions in the diary.”
“Not bad.” Ivins nodded at the doctor. “How do you want to do this?”
“You supervise the digging but don’t get too close to them while they work. The rest of you”—she made it a point to glare at Nick—“be careful with your shovels. If you slice open a body you expose the virus.”
Nick shuddered at the thought. Don’t panic. Think. But her mind felt as cold and unresponsive as her half-frozen feet.
Karen pointed her pistol at Tyler. “Over here.” She paced well away from the rock markers. “Spread the tarp and set out my gear.”
Once that was done, she knelt on the tarp, snapped open one of the cases, and quickly erected a foot-high tripod with a thermometer attached.
“Twenty-eight degrees,” she read.
“Like I said, it’s warming up,” Ivins announced.
“I’ll keep an eye on it. We’re safe as long as it doesn’t thaw. Now, put them to work.”
“You heard her,” Ivins said, gesturing with his pistol as he backed up a few paces.
Nick looked at Barlow. “Tell me you’ve dug up bodies before.”
He shook his head. “I can’t say I’ve had much practice digging bodies up.”
“We’ll have to go slow, then. Remember, no holes, no punctures. Just strip away the soil little by little.”
She laid out a six-foot square around one of the rock markers. “Jesus,” Barlow muttered. “That’s a lot of dirt.”
“I don’t care,” Hurst said. “I’m going to freeze to death if I don’t do something.”
“You’re in no condition to dig,” Nick told him.
“Watch.”
They each took a corner of a six-foot square—Hurst, Tyler, Barlow, and Nick herself—and slowly worked toward the center. Within a few inches the ground was frozen solid, and they exchanged their shovels for picks. But the picks, designed to be swung overhead for the best leverage, had to be used like surgical instruments, chipping into the ground a handful at a time. The work was not only backbreaking but terrifying each time one of the sharp points dug into the tundra.
But working was better than resting. When you rested, your sweat froze.
As the day progressed, blood began soaking through Hurst’s bandage. By noon, his blood was leaking freely. Despite that, color had remained to his face. Or had infection set in and with it fever? Either way, fever or blood loss, Nick figured Hurst couldn’t keep up the pace much longer.
Making matters worse, Ivins refused them a lunch break, or even time out to change Hurst’s bandage. But he did allow them to munch on energy bars as they worked.
Their rate of progress, Nick estimated, was two inches an hour, though their pace seemed to be slowing. Certainly Hurst’s was.
“Time?” Nick shouted at Ivins.
The man stared at her like she’d lost her reason, then shrugged and said, “Three o’clock.”
Seven hours at two inches an hour, she calculated, put them at a depth of one foot, two inches. The question was, how deep was the trench Lovett had used for a grave? An exploratory trench, he’d called it in his diary. Just what did that mean? And why dig it here?
She took a quick look around. Nothing obvious occurred to her, so she went back to considering depth. Anything was better than thinking about what they were after, or what it would mean to find it. Three feet would be deep enough for a grave in this climate. Maybe even two feet, she amended, though that was probably wishful thinking on account of her blistered hands.
She glanced at the dark, leaden sky. How much daylight left? Probably no more than two hours. Four more inches at best, more likely three. That meant they had one more day of digging ahead of them at least. One more day of life.
Hurst, who’d been prying at the frozen earth with a pick, suddenly keeled over on his side. As he did so, the toe of his boot dislodged a fist-size nugget.
“Get him out of there and keep working,” Ivins shouted. He was pacing nearby, stamping his feet and flailing his arms to keep warm.
Taking comfort from the thought that Ivins looked worse than she felt, Nick grabbed one of Hurst’s arms, Barlow the other. Together they dragged him out of their shallow pit. They propped him against a boulder that provided some shelter from the wind.
Tyler stared at them as if in a daze.
Nick slipped back into their hole and examined the nugget. It was gold all right. Using her fingers, she scooped the tundra Hurst had loosened before his collapse. There were more nuggets underneath.
She grabbed a handful, sat back on her haunches, and laughed.
Ivins came closer, but not too close. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
I have nothing to lose, she thought, and threw the nuggets at him.
He lurched to one side to keep from being hit. “We’re rich!” Nick shouted.
The others stopped work to gape at her. Even Hurst managed to raise his head to stare.
“We’ve struck gold,” she clarified.
Ivins dropped to one knee to retrieve one of the nuggets Nick had thrown at him. Karen joined him to take a look.
At the other end of the hole, Barlow began rooting in the soil. He, too, came up with a handful of nuggets, which he held out toward Ivins as if offering a bribe.
If only it was that easy, Nick thought, and started digging with the point of her pick. The chunk of soil that came free was flecked with gold. There’d been bags of it once, she suspected. Bags probably long since disintegrated, though the gold they contained would still be here, concentrated in one area. Or maybe there were bags intact, deeper down. This was no exploratory trench. It was a cache, a hiding place. And the only grave site available. Lovett’s marker, his permanent testament, was a for tune in gold.
Another probe of her pick unearthed more nuggets, which she casually tossed out of the hole and onto Ivins’s feet. Gold had dulled his caution and he was perched on the lip, staring down, open-mouthed.
Nick grinned up at him and went back to digging by hand. “This is nothing,” Ivins said.
“Are you crazy?” Tyler told him. “There’s a fortune here.” “You’re talking millions, I’m talking billions. Stop digging.”
Nick ignored him.
“You heard me,” he said. “You’ve wasted the whole day, for Christ’s sake.”
“Think about it,” she said. “You can see how hard it is to dig, and there’s four of us. So what chance would a man alone have, unless he already had a hole dug to use as a hiding place.”
“You’re saying the bodies are in there, too?”
“If they’re not,” Nick told him, still prying at the frozen earth with the tip of her pick, “I have no idea where to look.”
“You’re forgetting the rock fall.”
“For that, you’ll need the Corps of Engineers.”
She set the pick aside and tugged loose a clump of nuggets. Protruding from the hole they left behind was the toe of a man’s boot.
Part of her, the archaeologist, felt triumphant; the rest of her lurched backward to escape the contaminated boot.
“What the hell!” Ivins muttered.
Nick pointed. Barlow and Tyler scrambled out of the hole. Hurst opened his eyes, blinked blindly, and closed them again. Nick felt certain he’d seen nothing but his own feverish vision. “We’ve found a body,” Ivins shouted at Karen. “A toe anyway. A boot.”
“How many times have I told you, I need the lungs,” the doctor replied.
Ivins pointed his pistol at Nick. “You heard the doctor. And since you’re the expert, Nick, you uncover the body.”
Nick stared down at her glove, the one that had touched the boot, and held her breath against the virus that could be swarming there.
“Expert or not,” Ivins went on, “you’re expendable now that we have a body. Uncover the rest of it.”
“Tell her not to worry,” Karen shouted. “The temperature’ s been dropping steadily for the last two hours. It’s twenty degrees now. At that temperature you’d have to chew on the corpse to infect yourself.”
Sure, Nick thought, if it was so damned safe why did the doctor have a contamination suit spread out on the tarp?
“Do you want to end up like Hurst here?” Ivins nudged Hurst’s wounded thigh, now coated with icy blood. Hurst didn’t so much as groan.
Ivins kicked the thigh hard enough to crack the ice.
“All right, goddammit,” Nick said, and went back to work, using the point of her pick like a dental probe to work loose the nugget-filled soil surrounding the body. Her slow progress had Ivins pacing, but he didn’t complain. No doubt he realized hers was the safest way. A puncture wound, no matter what the temperature, would spread body matter just waiting for a thaw.
After an hour, she’d stripped away enough of the frozen soil to expose a man’s chest. By then the light was fading fast and the doctor, who now wore a contamination suit, called a halt. She waved Nick away from the grave.
Nick joined Tyler and Barlow, who looked none too happy to have her so close, but Ivins wanted them bunched together. Hurst was left where he lay.
Karen switched on a powerful, battery-powered lantern and circled the grave, examining the body from every angle.
“Doctor Scott,” the doctor said finally, “did you nick the body at all?”
“No.”
“All right, we’re home free for the moment. I’ll extract my tissue samples in the morning and test them. With any luck we won’t need to dig up the second body.”
“Why not take the samples now?” Ivins said. “The sooner we finish, the sooner we get out of this place.”
“It’s too risky in this light. I want to see what I’m doing. I’m dealing with the Spanish Lady, not some two-bit amoeba.”
“We’ve got kerosene lanterns,” he reminded her.
“That’s a risk I’m not willing to take. Now let’s get out of the cold and have something to eat.”
“What about her?” Ivins said, pointing at Nick. “I don’t want her sharing space with me.”
“Chances are it’s perfectly safe,” Karen replied. “
Well, I’m not risking it.”
“Put in her in one of the tents, then. She and Hurst. Don’t worry, Doctor Scott. We’ll give you a sleeping bag. You’ll survive. You may even survive your date with the Spanish Lady.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked.
“Back in 1918. they tried to figure out how long it took for the flu to incubate. They tried infecting all kinds of animals. They found that the only two animals that seemed susceptible were pigs and humans. I’ll need a test subject to determine that the vims is still alive.”
“See any pigs around?” Ivins chimed in.