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years old again, screaming until her throat seized up—and suddenly she wasn’t sure if she had called out for Franz or for her mother, for her father.
    Whether she had called a warning to him or not, Franz crawled out of the ruined nylon dome even as the deluge was tumbling around him, and he scrambled toward her. Mortar shells of ice exploded to the left and right of him, but he had the grace of a broken-field runner and the speed born of terror. He raced beyond the avalanche to safety.
    As the ridge stabilized and ice stopped falling, Rita was shaken by a vivid vision of Harry crushed beneath a shining white monolith elsewhere in the cruel black-and-white polar night. She staggered, not because of the movement of the icefield, but because the thought of losing Harry rocked her. She ceased trying to keep her balance, sat on the ice, and began to shake uncontrollably.

    Only the snowflakes moved, cascading out of the darkness in the west and into the darkness in the east. The sole sound was the dour-voiced wind singing a dirge.
    Harry held on to the snowmobile and pulled himself erect. His heart thudded so hard that it seemed to knock against his ribs. He tried to work up some saliva to lubricate his parched throat. Fear had dried him out as thoroughly as a blast of Sahara heat could have done. When he regained his breath, he wiped his goggles and looked around.
    Pete Johnson helped Claude to his feet. The Frenchman was rubber-legged but evidently uninjured. Pete didn’t even have weak knees; perhaps he was every bit as indestructible as he appeared to be.
    Both snowmobiles were upright and undamaged. The headlights blazed into the vast polar night but revealed little in the seething sea of windblown snow.
    High on adrenaline, Harry briefly felt like a boy again, flushed with excitement, pumped up by the danger, exhilarated by the very fact of having survived.
    Then he thought of Rita, and his blood ran colder than it would have if he’d been naked in the merciless polar wind. The temporary camp had been established in the lee of a large pressure ridge, shadowed by a high wall of ice. Ordinarily, that was the best place for it. But with all the shaking that they had just been through, the ridge might have broken apart….
    The lost boy faded into the past, where he belonged, became just a memory among other memories of Indiana fields and tattered issues of
National Geographic
and summer nights spent staring at the stars and at far horizons.
    Get moving,
he thought, awash in a fear far greater than that which he had felt for himself only moments ago. Get packed, get moving, get to her.
    He hurried to the other men. “Anyone hurt?”
    “Just a little rattled,” Claude said. He was a man who not only refused to surrender to adversity but was actually buoyed by it. With a brighter smile than he’d managed all day, he said, “Quite a ride!”
    Pete glanced at Harry. “What about you?”
    “Fine.”
    “You’re bleeding.”
    When Harry touched his upper lip, bright chips of frozen blood like fragments of rubies adhered to his glove. “Nosebleed. It’s already stopped.”
    “Always a sure cure for nosebleed,” Pete said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Ice on the back of the neck.”
    “You should be abandoned here for that one.”
    “Let’s get packed and moving.”
    “They may be in serious trouble at camp,” Harry said, and he felt his stomach turn over again when he considered the possibility that he might have lost Rita.
    “My thought exactly.”
    The wind pummeled them as they worked. The falling snow was fine and thick. The blizzard was racing in on them with surprising speed, and in unspoken recognition of the growing danger, they moved with a quiet urgency.
    As Harry was strapping down the last of the instruments in the second snowmobile’s cargo trailer, Pete called to him. He wiped his goggles and went to the other machine.
    Even in the uncertain light, Harry could see the worry in Pete’s eyes. “What