Frozen in Time (26 page)

While the rest of us catch our breath, WeeGee fires up the engine, arranges the hoses, drills a hole to create a water source, and gets to work. Normally, the Hotsy uses a spray gun at the end of the hot-water hose. But WeeGee replaces it with a ten-foot black steel pipe. On its end he screws a pointed silver nozzle that pushes against the glacier as it melts a six-inch-diameter hole. It takes forty-five minutes or more to reach a depth of fifty to sixty feet. While WeeGee works, there’s little for the rest of us to do but wait and hope that he hits something.

With countless details to manage, Lou returns to base camp. While looking through his bags, he finds a gold ball that’s supposed to screw into the top of the flagpole. He cradles it in his hands and waits for help mounting it. Jetta tells Lou that military lore suggests that a hollow flagpole ball should contain a match and a bullet. A commander facing defeat is supposed to burn the flag to prevent its desecration and use the bullet to commit suicide.

A
FTER MELTING SEVERAL
holes at Point A, and instructing me in the little-known art of Hotsy glacier drilling, WeeGee drops Alberto’s camera into the holes, hoping to see signs of Duck. The camera’s images are projected onto a twenty-inch diagonal video screen Alberto has embedded in a small Pelican case, and we crowd around to watch. The images resemble a colonoscopy in an icehole, although here everyone hopes that the camera will spot a foreign object. But one hole after another contains nothing but ice.

That wouldn’t bother WeeGee—the radar can be imprecise, so maybe whatever caused the anomaly is a few feet from the holes. Under normal circumstances, he’d simply melt more holes. But WeeGee notices a disturbing pattern: water from the Hotsy pipe builds up as though stopped by a clogged drain. But when each hole reaches a certain depth, the water disappears. It’s a mystery to the rest of us, but to WeeGee it’s bad news: the holes are draining into an underground ice void. The anomaly that Jaana spotted isn’t the Duck. As she suspected, it’s a subsurface pocket of air in the glacier. WeeGee delivers the disappointing news to base camp via walkie-talkie. The other anomaly proves no different. We leave the Hotsy on the glacier and trudge back.

L
ATER THE SAME
day, on the ice beyond our sleeping tents, WeeGee helps Jim test the magnetometer. They bury a three-foot-long steel spike in a shallow hole and, without telling Terri the location, ask her to scan the area. A beachcombing metal detector Lou brought as a backup device has already failed.

Terri walks back and forth, the magnetometer on her back, staring at the little screen at her waist. At one point the device seems to register a slight signal, but the test is a bust. Terri says a plane engine would give off a much stronger response, but Jim walks away shaking his head.

With few remaining options and little time, Jim, Lou, Jetta, Jaana, and I walk along the rocks to the spot overlooking Balchen’s X. Jim still hopes that the Duck is out there, and he again describes the flight path Pritchard might have taken. But Jaana’s radar search of Essex Three, a heavily crevassed site closest to Balchen’s X, turned up nothing, removing another once-promising point of interest. Out of earshot from the others, Jim concedes, “I’m starting to think we’re not going to come up with anything.”

Later that night, I find Lou resting his sore knees and still holding the gold flagpole ball.

“Don’t get any ideas,” I say.

“Don’t worry,” Lou says. “I’m not giving up.”

With help from the safety team, he screws the ball into place.

A
T A PLANNING
session that night, Lou and Jim agree that there are no more reasons to search Essex One, Essex Two, Essex Three, or Points A, B, and K. Once the six highest-priority sites, now they’re the glacial equivalent of dry wells. Tomorrow, Terri will carry the magnetometer to the lower-priority Point O, located on a slope roughly between Essex Two and Essex Three. Jaana’s radar readings there were confounded by underground crevasses, so the magnetometer visit feels more like crossing an item off a to-do list than investigating a real prospect.

Despite the loss of time from the GPS mishaps, the 2012 Duck Hunt expedition will soon have cleared seven sites, one more than required by the Coast Guard’s contract with North South Polar. It’s getting colder on the glacier, and reports from Kulusuk Airport say a storm is coming our way. We have at most two or three days before we’ll have to leave. With nothing better to do, Jim suggests that the radar team head to the farthest point yet, CRREL Point N, a mile beyond Essex Three.

Standing over a map in the command tent, Lou has an idea. He sees that the newly discovered Point N anomaly is near two other sets of coordinates, one given to him by JPAC, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, and the other from the final crash report written about the PN9E in 1943. If Jaana is headed to Point N, Lou says, she should also survey the JPAC location and the 1943 point. He calls the historical point BW-1, because the crash report was written at the Army’s Bluie West One base.

Lou admits that it’s another long shot, probably the longest yet. Neither the JPAC point nor BW-1 registered as a hit on any previous aerial radar survey, which is why they weren’t named among the priority sites. Also, long-standing doubts about the historic sightings of the Duck undermine confidence in the BW-1 coordinates. Still, there’s nothing to lose but time.

M
Y DREAMS OF
finding the Duck pretty well dashed, I head to the sleeping tents. On my way, John grabs my arm and invites me on a safety team adventure: a nighttime glacier hike. Joining us are Frank, Michelle, and Jaana, who despite all her radar work is up for more hiking.

Equipped with ice axes and roped together, we set off by moonlight toward Essex One, to find a crevasse that John noticed earlier and now wants to explore. We talk and laugh on the way, a momentary relief from what we all suspect is the expedition’s looming failure. When we reach the crevasse, we lower each other one at a time into its crooked mouth. The opening leads to a cave filled with countless enormous icicles in translucent shades of blue, a secret underground spectacle that Michelle names “the chandelier room.”

On our way back, undulating green curtains of northern lights stretch across the sky. Frank tells us to look away and then quickly look back. Each time, the shapes change, like wisps of luminescent smoke against a blue-black night. The sight gives me new appreciation for the misery of PN9E navigator Bill O’Hara. Anyone who wants to shoot the aurora borealis from the sky must know suffering beyond measure.

W
ITH SEARCH LOCATIONS
dwindling, Jaana feels pressure to find something. Every day, upon returning to camp from a radar run, she hears a half-dozen versions of the same question: “Did you find anything?” Each time, she experiences the sadness that comes from her reply.

Before Jaana leaves with John and Frank to search the final three locations, Point N, JPAC, and BW-1, Steve aggravates her by asking if she’d be willing to run the radar not only around the three points of interest, but everywhere in between and on her way to and from the sites. Restraining her desire to tell him off, Jaana refuses, but the implied message plays on her nerves: we’re desperate, so come back with something. Trying to stay cool, she tells herself, “I can’t do more than cover as much as possible, and if I do not see anything, I do not.”

Fortified by Michelle’s breakfast egg burritos, Jaana, Frank, and John leave camp in their usual order: John out front to keep the lines straight when the radar work begins; Jaana in the middle with the gear; and Frank in the rear, watching the dragon tail—and Jaana—to keep both out of crevasses. They go first to BW-1 because it’s the closest of the three sites to camp, just under 1.4 miles away. Using John’s GPS, they find the coordinates and place a flag at the spot.

Expecting a repeat of the previous days’ fruitless work, the trio begins walking one radar line after another to the southwest of the flag. Each line extends up to five hundred feet, to be certain the area is thoroughly covered. No luck. Next they move to the northeast side of the flag to run more radar lines. Partway through the second line, Jaana calls out, “Hey, John, can you stop?”

During four days of radar work together, the radar team has scanned nearly fifteen miles of glacier, not including the miles they’ve walked together back and forth from base camp and between the points of interest. Not once in that time has Jaana stopped in the middle of a line. But staring back at her from the little screen at her waist is something unusual. The glacier at BW-1 is almost free of crevasses, a near-solid block of ice some one hundred feet deep atop bedrock. A perfect ice cube of monstrous proportions. But now, Jaana sees a flaw in the cube.

Between thirty and forty feet below where they stand, the radar shows what Jaana calls “a large, clear anomaly.” She settles herself and continues to work.

They start walking again, but when they reach the end of the radar line, Jaana surprises John and Frank again. Usually, they separate their lines by forty-five to fifty feet. This time, she asks John to lead her along a line close to the previous one. Neither John nor Frank asks why, but they know something’s up. On the second pass, the anomaly announces itself again on the screen, a boomerang-shaped message from beneath the ice. Jaana asks her partners to place a second flag between the two lines, directly over the spot where she thinks the anomaly is located.

At 10:25 on Monday morning, August 27, the expedition’s fifth day at Koge Bay, walkie-talkies set to the same frequency come alive: “Radar team to base camp,” Frank says.

“Come in, radar team,” Lou answers.

“We have a ten-meter anomaly at BW-1 position.”

“Do you like it?”

A long pause ensues.

“She likes it. Over.”

Everyone within earshot catches the significance of Frank’s last comment. It’s the first time that Jaana has been impressed enough by the sight and size of a hyperbola on her radar screen to alert base camp from the field.

Lou calls them back after warning me, “If I cry, don’t take my picture.”

He asks for Jaana, then says, “Is there anything different about this anomaly.”

Jaana: “Yes.”

Lou: “Can you please tell us what?”

Jaana knows what Lou wants to hear: it’s the Duck. But she’s a scientist, and she won’t jump to conclusions. She says calmly, “This is in clear ice, with fewer crevasses.” Jaana explains that the anomaly is large, and it’s more than thirty feet deep in what otherwise appears to be solid ice. Also, it creates a radar response that goes all the way down to the bedrock, which makes it unlikely to be a crevasse. Yet until WeeGee melts some holes and drops the camera, there’s no telling for certain what it might be.

Jaana’s restraint notwithstanding, word of the BW-1 anomaly races through base camp. Terri and the magnetometer team are told to move from Point O to BW-1 as soon as possible. Jim calls Air Greenland to request a Hotsy airlift from Point A to BW-1, a 1.3-mile distance over crevassed terrain, made worse by a large area where there’s a steep four-hundred-foot rise. The idea of the Hotsy team pushing it over the ice seems ludicrous and potentially dangerous. Lou goes as far as to say it would be impossible. Jim asks Air Greenland for fast service, but the first available helicopter won’t arrive before late afternoon tomorrow. We’ll take it, Jim says.

Lou swallows painkillers for his knees and scrambles to BW-1 to watch the magnetometer sweep. When Terri crosses the spot over the anomaly, her screen registers a reading “ten times higher than the ambient magnetic field.” In other words, something metal appears to be buried in the ice. For the first time in days of walking atop the glacier, Terri has a hit. The magnetometer shows the same reading on several passes, but not all, leaving some doubt whether the machine is working properly. Still, Lou considers it confirmation of the radar finding.

A SECTION OF THE RADAR COMPUTER SCREEN SHOWING THE TEN-METER ANOMALY AT BW-1. THE SMALL HYPERBOLAS NEAR THE SURFACE ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY A CREVASSE, WHILE THE LARGER ONES DEEP IN THE ICE RAISE HOPES AMONG THE DUCK HUNT TEAM.
(MITCHELL ZUCKOFF PHOTOGRAPH.)

“I said, ‘John, Ben, Loren, give us a sign,’ ” he says. “And Terri started and stopped, started and stopped, and oh my God, it’s there.”

While Terri is at BW-1, the radar team moves to Point N and the JPAC point. They find nothing at either site. Like BW-1, Point N is almost solid ice, but with no anomalies worth noting. The JPAC site is so heavily crevassed that Jaana’s screen fills with hyperbolas, making it almost impossible to pick out an anomaly if one’s there.

After Terri’s magnetometer hit at BW-1, Lou wants the radar team to return to repeat the survey. Jaana, John, and Frank run several lines in a new direction from the BW-1 flag, with the same positive results. Point N and JPAC are forgotten; all our bets are on BW-1.

B
ACK AT BASE
camp, geophysics experts Jaana, Terri, and Bil are upbeat but restrained, knowing that the hyperbolas might be a crevasse, and the magnetometer’s accuracy has been suspect. Still, Terri says that when she first heard about Frank’s walkie-talkie call with Jaana’s message from BW-1, she thought, If she called it out, it has to be something significant. Jaana wears a poker face, but privately admits feeling “full of energy, really happy and excited.”