“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s late, and I want to sit on my thoughts a little longer, give them a chance to work themselves out.” He paused. “That’s why I waited to bring them up.”

Megan looked at him. The blowing wind and snow slammed aggressively against the window.

“I’m supposed to meet Annie for drinks,” she said. “You can join us if you like. It might make the waiting easier. For you and me.”

Nimec was quiet.

“Better not,” he said then. “Don’t think I’d be very good company.”

She stood looking at him a few seconds, nodded.

“We’ll be at the bar if you change your mind. You know where it is?”

“I can find it.”

She nodded again, and started away down the silent corridor.

“Meg?”

She paused, half turned toward Nimec.

“I almost forgot to mention you run one hell of a lodge,” he said.

Megan smiled warmly at him.

“Appreciated,” she said.

Burkhart heard a cannonade in the southern distance: long rolling rumbles, a bellowy roar, then a rending crash. Someone less familiar with Antarctica might have mistaken the din for thunder, but that was an infrequent occurrence on the continent. Instead he knew it to be a berg calving from the ice sheet, its great tortured mass breaking off into the sea, the stresses of its division accelerated by the storm.

As the sounds continued rocketing across the sky, he set his full attention on the dome some eighty or ninety feet up ahead. His men waited at his sides, snow whipping around them, their snowmobiles left a short distance back. The vehicles would have made this final stretch of ground easier to cross, and Burkhart was convinced the wind would have muted the buzzing of their engines even if they had ridden straight into the center of the compound. Still, he’d taken no chances and ordered his group to dismount.