Credit: Jamie Tufrey
Combat training. I don’t have any. If the movement I thought I just saw actually does turn out to be movement, I’m gonna get sprayed over this iceberg like raspberry flavouring over a snow cone. Ni pedo. Así es la vida.
Papá was hoping I’d get killed. In between raving about how I was a traitor and trying to get my signature for a life insurance policy with him as the beneficiary, he prayed to God that the Argentinian guerrillas, Las Focas Leopardo, would put a bullet in my head.
That’s if bullets could get through a skull as thick as mine, he said.
Keeping my hood up and my head down, I writhe back down to the groove where the bot grinds its diamonds against the ice. When I open the panel, I discover there’s still 83 minutes to go.
While I watch, the bot draws up a two-metre section of the 550 mm core sample, seals it in plastic and rolls it down the tarpaulin to lie beside the others.
The autoboat that’s coming in 83 minutes has a two-metre wide cargo hold.
When the bot finishes taking the sample, it’ll roll up the tarp full of ice columns, hook up its cable and lower them over the edge of the iceberg into the boat.
The bot itself will be left behind, its circuits irreparably damaged by the cold, but I’ll have the proof that we need. Let the sceptics argue that the ice under my feet is not a piece of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.
Let them pretend that the missing I-667 that the International Ice Centre lost track of during the storm has rejoined the continent somewhere, its outline camouflaged by thin sheets of sea ice.
I’m not letting them get away with it. This is I-667. If the only way to prove it is to match a 75 m core sample with one from McMurdo, I’m crazy enough to do it.
Chúpalo, sceptics. I don’t have kids, but I’ve got nieces, five of them, all sleeping in the same bed, and for every second that you put your fingers in your ears and sing, “money, money, money makes the world go round,” thousands more dirty bodies get crammed into mass graves or overcrowded camps.
Another movement in the corner of my eye. I twitch. It’s just a bit of ice flicked into the air by the bot, surely. Not the remnants of an army that hacked off Larsen Ice Shelf and towed it to Argentina after they drank their mainland glaciers dry.
Not the nominal losers in a water war that ended with New Buenos Aires in flames and four million Argentinian climate refugees sent to Australia and New Zealand as part of the peace treaty.
You tell me who the real losers were in that war. The white Australian social worker who’s supposed to give counselling to my Papá, for one. I’m pretty sure she prays to have him make good on his hunger strike threat and put an end to the monthly shoe-pelting once and for all.
A boot crunch. Abandoning the bot, I scurry half way to the edge of the iceberg before I remember that the autoboat isn’t there, yet, and the water is minus two degrees. If I was a giant, I’d run across the Ross Sea, using the white stepping stones God provided, all the way to the New Zealand Navy base at Possession Island.
I run the other way, uphill.
Actually, it’s less like running. More like trying to climb a pyramid of chayotes in a street market. My breath freezes on the fur of my hood; the insulation of the suit makes me overheat; the blood rushes to my head like mercury in a thermometer that’s going to explode. All the time, I’m trying desperately to believe that I’m running away from my imagination: maybe seals; maybe birds.
