Page 9 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 4

Thule Air Baseis in Greenland and about a thousand miles from the North Pole. The base was, when she arrived in August 2010 to do a story, and still is a spartan affair of single-story barracks, mess halls, a hospital, bowling alley, various admin buildings, as well as an air defense wing, radar tracking, and missile defense sprawled on concrete and bare brown earth right to the edge of an ice cap.

The mission at Thule is also as straightforward now as when it was first constructed on the sly back in 1951: keep an eye on those pesky Russians and their even peskier nukes. Over time, the mission’s expanded to one of space surveillance via NORAD and the Air Force Space Command.

All of this boiled down to one indisputable fact. Thule was and is one of the most boring bases known to man. A place one sent new cadets and enlisted to see if they’d crack. Because, face it, if anything remotely interesting had happened, we’d have been at war with Russia eons ago.

Not expecting much—this was a fluff piece, after all—she’d flown in from BWI. She was seated on the right side of the plane, which people said was the “good” side. She had no idea what they were talking about until the plane banked over Baffin Bay and she looked down. There, in the middle of bluer-than-blue water, sculpted icebergs towered. Mount Dundas, an enormous, flat-topped tombolo thrusting up from the water, hulked over the base. She felt her throat constrict and her breath hang because it was all…beautiful.

She wandered the base in a daze that first day. Although there was still snow in some shaded nooks and crannies, the day was warmer than she expected, the mercury inching up to fifty. The personnel were a mix of Air Force, Canadian, and Danish military as well as civilian contractors. On their off-hours, guys in shorts played softball, and the few women stationed there ran endless loops around the airfield. Each dorm had its own kitchen, but the food in the chow hall was so good, most personnel ate there or splurged at Top of the World, an all-ranks club which hosted bands, dances, and special performers.

She met Ben at Top of the World. It was her second night, and she’d spent the day capturing the play of light on the icebergs and the sea. She wandered into the club, her hair smelling of icy salt, her cheeks still stinging from wind and sunburn. Slotting herself into an opening at the bar, she looked at the guy on her left. No real reason. Completely random.

What she noticed first was not his looks. She saw the book. Well, actually, the author’s photograph on the cover: T.S. Eliot. Which simply did not compute. It was like finding a homicide cop who loved Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson.

“The Waste Land?” she asked.

“What?” He’d looked up, blue eyes a little glazed and unfocused until they sharpened on her. “Oh, no. Prufrock. You know Eliot?”

Her mother was an English teacher. Of course, she knew Eliot. Nu, was the pope Polish? (This had not been true for a couple years by then, but she still liked the line.) For the next several hours, they argued the poem over ice-cold Belvedere martinis—three olives, very dry, a glance at the vermouth bottle. He thought that the line, I am Lazarus, come from the dead, was an allusion to Lazarus and Jesus in John, while she pointed out that it might also be the beggar from Luke, and then that had led to a discussion of how a good Jewish girl knew anything about the New Testament. (It all boiled down to three words: know thy enemy.)

Two days later—her last on Thule, as it happened—they bundled up in parkas and hiked up Mount Dundas. It was kind of a weeny adventure. They made the seven hundred feet in an hour, more or less, though the best part was the final fifty feet straight up over sheer gray rock on a fixed rope, where he also taught her how to do an emergency belay because, well, you never knew. She teased him about being a Boy Scout. A throwaway line, sure, but also a test of sorts. She’d been raised by two people who were also Star Trek loons. For a school Halloween party, her dad, who taught cinema and television at the local university extension, dressed up as Spock while her mom slathered on green body paint, donned a tattered bikini-thing, and did a pretty credible Orion slave girl while she near about died of embarrassment.

Anyway, if this guy had ever seen The Wrath of Khan, he knew what his line should be.

And he nailed it. “I may be many things,” he said, managing to look offended, “but I was never a Boy Scout.”

Then, to prove it, he kissed her—and then he did that again and again, and his lips were warm and hungry, and she sighed into his mouth. If it hadn’t been forty degrees, and they’d not been on top of a barren plateau, things might have gone further right then and there. That would have to wait a few hours yet, though, but worth it because once they were in bed, they didn’t have sex. They madelove. Big difference.

Before they descended Dundas, they inked their names on a rock he’d carried up from the base and put it atop a large mound of other rocks left by previous climbers. They couldn’t hold hands on the way back, not if they wanted to make it down alive. But it didn’t matter. Every time she cast a glance over a shoulder, Ben was there, with those beautiful blue eyes and those lips, that face. That body she wanted to explore. The love they were in the process of making with a glance, a smile. An argument about Eliot. A throwaway line about Captain Kirk.

Thule was the beginning.

It was also, in a way, the death of him—and her.

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