“Think of a seagull, but smarter, wilder, and mean as the devil. Those birds can dive from midair, snatch a tiny piece of food out of your hand without nicking a finger, swoop in on the tits of a nursing elephant seal to drink her milk. But for all their sharp instincts and reflexes, I once saw hundreds of them, a whole flock, splattered over an area of a quarter mile after a whiteout lifted.”

Nimec gazed out the windows in silence. The transition to clear water was as abrupt as Evers had described. For a while he could see nothing but the thick crowd of bergs floating below him in apparently motionless suspension, and then the plane was past the ice belt and over the open sound.

Looking ahead into the near distance, Nimec was struck by a long, solid border of white that rose up against the calm blue-gray sea and then swept back and away to the furthest range of his vision.

He recalled the briefs he’d studied in preparation for his mission, and instantly knew they were nearing the forward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

“We enter our final approach pattern in a couple of minutes,” Evers said. “There’ll be an unloading and refueling stop at MacTown. Ought to be fairly short. Then we take off for Cold Corners.”

“I assume it’s back to coach class for me.”

Evers nodded. “Sorry. They do a nice job grooming the ski way at Willy, but it can be bumpy.” He paused. “I’m banking to port in just a second. You might want to take a peek out the right-hand windows before you go aft and buckle up.”

Nimec felt the aircraft tilt gently, and looked.

Below them now, the ice shelf was a continuous sheet of whiteness that gleamed so brightly in the sun it made his eyes smart. A stepped ridge of glaciers sat atop it, extending seaward from the interior like a wide, rough tongue questing for water. At the far end of this glacial wave, two frozen mountain peaks reared thousands of feet above a great hump in the otherwise flat plain of ice. A plume of smoke flowed from the summit of the larger mountain, tailing into the wind.

Evers glanced over his shoulder at Nimec.

“That area where the ice looks like it bulges up is Ross Island. Home to Mount Erebus, his baby brother Mount Terror, and the fifteen hundred Americans at McMurdo Station,” Evers said. “Terror’s the quiet one. As you can tell, Erebus is something of a hothead.”

Nimec kept looking out the window.

“I knew MacTown wasn’t too far from a volcano,” he said. “Didn’t have any idea the volcano was active.”