Kimba picks up the remote, turns the TV on, and flips through a few channels until she reaches CNN.
Antarctic expedition team trapped in deadly storm
Deadly?
Trapped?
The headline appears above a line of photos, and I recognize David and Maxim immediately. The words and images are a one-two punch to my solar plexus. I can’t breathe and I’m choking.
“A dangerous situation is unfolding in Antarctica,” the reporter says with the appropriate amount of professional graveness. “A team researching climate change in the southern hemisphere finds themselves caught in a storm of imperfect conditions. Their ship has been hit and is sinking. They’re thousands of miles from civilization and hundreds of miles from shore. Extreme winds have assaulted the area, and low visibility makes flying in to rescue them nearly impossible.”
I collapse into a rolling chair and fold shaking hands in my lap. I’m not sure I can do this again. When they found Tammara’s body, there was barely time to cry, to attend the funeral and console her family. If I think too long about how she died, I’ll wonder if Mama died that way, too. If her body was so carelessly used and then discarded, but unlike Tammara’s, never found. I pushed grief aside, old and new, the demands of the campaign as much a distraction as a necessity.
Now this. I feel trapped here with my frigid grief and icicle fear, and the thing I don’t often allow myself anymore, but for Maxim, I must find.
Hope.
29
Maxim
“It’s too dangerous.”
I say the words to the entire group, but Dr. Larnyard is the one I pin my hard stare to.
“What do you suggest, Kingsman?” he snaps. “We stay on a sinking ship and die in the ocean?”
A few of the university students gasp at the word “die.”
This motherfucking idiot.
“We’re not going to die,” I reassure them, taking a moment to look directly at the youngest students. “I won’t let that happen.”
Grim meets my eyes with raised brows. His message is clear. How you gonna keep that promise?
“We’ve been hit,” Dr. Larnyard reminds us unnecessarily. “We were three degrees to the right yesterday, and now we’re how many, Captain?”
Captain Rosteen glances from his tilt meter to me. “Five degrees now.”
“Two degrees in a day is significant,” Dr. Larnyard says. “We need to get off this ship. Some of those ice floes are a full acre. We can take rafts to those and wait there to be rescued.”
“Except no one can make it to us right now,” I say. “And we don’t know when they’ll be able to. You’d have us in tents on an acre of ice in the middle of a blizzard?”
“It’s the best of two evils.”
“The best would have been if we’d listened to Kingsman in the first place,” Grim snaps. “And stayed ashore where our chances would have been better.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that now,” I cut in. We have enough we’re fighting without fighting each other, but I have to talk some sense into Dr. Larnyard before he actually convinces anyone to follow him into a deadly storm. “We need to find the best way out of our current circumstance, and I cannot endorse leaving this ship in a storm this bad.”
“And I cannot endorse staying on a ship sinking into the Southern Ocean,” Dr. Larnyard fires back. “This is your first Antarctic expedition, Kingsman, yes?”
“Yes,” I grit out. “You know it is.”
“Well it’s my fifth,” he says. “And I’ll be damned if I let some amateur with a superhero complex lead our team into a death trap.”
“Him lead us into a death trap?” Grim asks, anger imprinted on his usually stoic features. “You were the one who—”
“Grim,” I snap. “Shut the hell up. That’s not helping.”
There’s a brief silence while our angry eyes clash in the tension filling the ship’s meeting room.
“I’m leading this expedition,” Dr. Larnyard says. “It’s my call to make, and I say we take our chances while we can. If the storm worsens, it’ll only make it harder for us to leave later and get to safety on one of the nearby ice floes. It’s now or maybe never.”
His dire words spark a flurry of concerned murmurs from the team, just shy of panic.
“I’m staying with my ship,” Captain Rosteen says. “I’m not saying it’s the safest option. I’m saying this is my ship and I won’t abandon it until there is no choice left to me.”
“I’ll go with them,” one of his crew members offers, his dark eyes anxious when he glances out the porthole to the howling storm beyond.
“I’m not leaving either,” Grim states firmly. “It’s not the smartest option.”
“I’m staying,” I add, hoping reason will prevail if enough of us push for it.
In the end, most of the group decides to stay aboard the ship. Even as Dr. Larnyard and about a third of our team prepares to take a few rafts to the nearest ice floe, I keep watching the radio, willing someone to call and say conditions have improved enough for them to fly in and rescue us. It’s not safe on this ship. I know that, but it’s our best hope.
I watch through the porthole when Dr. Larnyard and his contingency load into a few rafts, insulated in their extreme-weather gear and pressing into the howling winds.
“Fool,” David mutters from my left.
“Asshole,” Grim adds from my right.
“I hope they don’t regret leaving.” I blow out a worried breath. “Hell, I hope we don’t regret staying. Any word from anyone?”
“Nope,” Grim says. “Visibility is shit, and no one with half a brain would risk trying to fly into this storm right now. It’d be signing their own death warrant.”
I hope we haven’t signed ours.
*
It’s only been a few hours when we hear a shout from outside. Grim, David and I run to the porthole.
“Shit,” I say through clenched teeth “I told that stupid bastard.”
If it wasn’t for the bright red jacket, I wouldn’t be able to make out the figure bobbing in the icy water through the sleet and snow. A tent floats not too far from him, picked up and tossed carelessly by the screeching winds.
“Larnyard,” Grim mutters.
“Is he dead?” David asks.
The frantic movement of Larnyard’s arms answers his question.
“We have to help him,” I say, crossing our room to grab my puffy jacket and slip on my extreme-weather gear.
“Motherfucker,” Grim says. “I’m not risking my life for that buffoon.”
“Well I am. If you can live with yourself knowing a man drowned not even a hundred feet away and you did nothing, go right ahead. Not me.”
“King, you can’t,” David says, grabbing me by the arm. “You gonna die for that idiot?”
“We have to try. At least let’s talk to the captain to see what he says.”
Captain Rosteen already stands at the railing, his grip white-knuckled as he holds on against the wind.
“What can we do, Cap?” I ask, tugging the woolen toboggan lower over my ears.