Free Stronger: A Super Human Clash by Michael Carroll

turned to me again. “So … Where are you going?”
    “Home. America.
North
America.”
    He nodded at that. “OK. But it is a long walk. And a long swim. And then a much longer walk.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know where you are?”
    “Antarctica.”
    “
La Antártida, sí.
But … How did you get here?”
    “It’s a long story. Can you help me get home?”
    “Sure. Well, we can take you to our base. But the Americans might find out. For the past week they have been looking for something. That is you, yes?”
    “I guess.”
    “They have helicopters, men in trucks…. But the blizzard must have covered your tracks, because they are looking inthe wrong place.” He pointed off to the right. “They are one hundred, two hundred kilometers in that direction. My friend, we will make a deal,
sí
? You tell us everything about you—where you come from, how you are … like this … and why the Americans were keeping you here in this frozen hell—and we will do what we can to get you to Tierra del Fuego—Argentina—without your captors discovering you. Agreed?” He grinned and extended his right hand.
    I couldn’t see any better option. I shook his hand. Even with the bulky gloves he was wearing, his hand was swallowed up by mine.

CHAPTER 9
THE MINE
    COSMO’S PIEBALD SKIN was visible only through long scratches in a thick layer of mud and sweat-soaked rock dust. He was so exhausted that he almost passed out as he squirmed free of the narrow access shaft, and I had to grab him before his head cracked off the floor.
    I gently lowered him to the ground, and Keegan passed me her rolled-up jacket to place under his head. She held her water bottle up to his mouth and poured a little in, then splashed some on her free hand and used it to wipe the grime from his face.
    Donny DePaiva, Thomas Hazlegrove’s number-two man, was watching with three of his fellow guards. DePaiva was in his forties and never seemed particularly interested in the workings of the mine unless Hazlegrove was around, in whichcase DePaiva suddenly became the most hands-on and attentive guard you could imagine. “Well? Are they alive in there?”
    Cosmo shook his head. “No trace of them. Nothing. They must have tried to get out when the cave-in started. If they’d stayed where they were …”
    “So they got crushed.” DePaiva shrugged. “Well, we tried. All right.” He jerked his thumb at the narrow tunnel. “Seal it up.”
    Keegan said, “Or we could just leave it. You never know—we might need to break through again one day.”
    “Yeah, whatever.” DePaiva had already turned away and was walking back toward the surface with his colleagues.
    When they were gone, Cosmo said, “They’re making progress, but it’s slow going. Jakob reckons it’ll take a month, maybe six weeks.”
    Keegan said, “That’s not good. Their food and water will run out long before then.”
    “So we bring them more supplies.” Even as I said that, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. On top of the difficulty of obtaining more food and water without the guards noticing, there was the secondary problem of actually getting it to Jakob’s team. Cosmo was the only one who was small enough to squirm through the access shaft, and he really didn’t have the strength to crawl through more than once a day, certainly not often enough to bring the necessary supplies to Jakob.
    There was a solution to that, but I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
    * * *
    I crouched down just outside the doorway to the rusting prefabricated cabin that served as Hazlegrove’s office. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk, leaning way back with a PneumatoDrill 400 maintenance manual opened in the middle and lying across his face.
    I knocked on the door. “Sorry to wake you,” I rumbled.
    Without moving, he asked, “What do you want, Brawn?”
    “I have an idea. It’s a good one too. It’ll increase productivity quite a lot.”
    “Go on.”
    “But in return for the idea,