He looked out his window and saw the first spot of color he had seen for more than five hundred miles. The heavily insulated modular dwellings that had been flown in dangling from the cargo hook of this very helicopter were almost the same color as the snow. But a short distance from them was a large half-cylinder tent, like a Quonset hut, made of blue and red canvas panels, strongly anchored with yellow poly ropes, near the bottom of a large, bare hill. This was Mammoth Seven.
Warburton saw people emerge from one of the trailers. One looked up and waved. Then they were setting down on a big red X in the middle of a red circle that had been painted on the snow. Warburton and Charlie unfastened their belts and waited for the pilot, another Inuit, to open the door and lower the ramp.
Once outside, Warburton realized he hadn't really been cold at all inside the damn helicopter. This, now this was cold.
There were two people hurrying out to meet him, all but indistinguishable in their puffed-up nylon and Gore-Tex outfits, hoods over their heads, eyes hidden by big blue sunglasses against the icy glare. Warburton followed them toward the big pressurized tent looming like some high-tech circus big top a hundred feet up the side of the hill. They trudged up the path and entered through a zipper in its side.
Inside, hoods off, Warburton recognized Dr. Rostov, formerly of the St. Petersburg Museum of Natural History, now the head of the Mammoth Seven recovery. They were in a square room about the size of a hotel elevator, which he knew from visits to previous mammoth sites to be a sort of air lock. The tent was held up by internal pressure, so the outer and inner doors of the room could not be opened at the same time.
Rostov started to open the inner door, then cleared his throat. Warburton realized the man was