The Explorer's Code by Kitty Pilgrim Page A

department head at the hospital would never approve of what they were doing, and if something went wrong he would have to play the innocent. Miles had offered to take the blame, if it came to that; he was retired, wealthy, and had no organization to censure him.
    To maintain secrecy, they were both paying for the expedition out of pocket. Oakley had the money. He had patented a popular ulcer drug early on in his career and had been living off a princely income ever since. With his money and Miles’s dedication, they had decided: no paperwork, no grants, and no funding proposals. They hadn’t said a word to the press, had not even indulged in any lunchroom chat. Scientific competition hadtorpedoed many a worthy project. And Oakley wanted to be the very first to crack the gene sequencing of the apocalyptic pandemic virus of 1918.
    The problem was finding tissue samples of victims who had been stricken ninety years ago. There were only a half dozen cadavers in the world preserved under the kind of conditions necessary to generate a good tissue sample.
    His cell phone was ringing. It was Miles, calling back.
    “Paul, we are good to go here.”
    Miles sounded ramped up and energized, and the connection from Svalbard was surprisingly clear, despite the fact he was in the most remote spot on earth.
    “Did you find enough people to help you do the digging?”
    “Yeah, I got a couple of guys who can do the heavy lifting. I will call you when we get closer to the . . . samples.”
    “Great. Talk then.”

Svalbard, Norway
    M iles flipped his cell phone shut and watched the exhumation. They had been digging for three hours now, thawing the earth with a steady jet of steam, shoveling out the muddy gruel, and piling it to the side of the pit.
    He remembered when he first considered exhuming the grave in the Svalbard settlement of Barentsburg, forty years ago. Back then, he had been a young scientist with lots of ambition. But he hadn’t timed his expedition properly, just went on a whim, with only a pickax and determination. It had been a complete failure. The season had been wrong, the ground frozen. There were no samples.
    Miles had learned a lot about permafrost since then. In very cold climates, permafrost can tolerate a considerable amount of heat, water, or steam without thawing, making a steam generator a critical piece of equipment. And even then it wasn’t easy because the amount of energy needed to melt the ice was intense. Normally it took one calorie to raise one gram of water a degree, but it took 80 calories to melt a gram of water from ice, and 540 calories to make one gram of water into steam.
    Luckily the ground in Barentsburg was ideal for this. This grave was in thaw-stable permafrost, well-drained and coarse sediment. It was mostly glacial outwash that contained a mixture of soil, sand, and gravel. Because there was so much rock, the settlement of the ground after it thawed would be minor.
    Miles was also lucky the mass grave was well below the active layer of earth, not subject to annual thawing and freezing. It was permanently frozen.
    The great problem with cemeteries in the Arctic was that if the graveswere not deep enough there would be frost heaving. Shallow graves were often subject to the phenomenon of frost jacking—the thawing and freezing gradually pushing the ground surface upward. Any object buried in this active layer of soil would be constantly rising with each season. So coffins buried hastily in shallow earth were continually heaved up after a few thaw cycles. It was a macabre sight, and unnerving to many who had placed their loved ones in what they thought was a final resting place only to have them reappear after a few seasons.
    This, however, was a very, very deep grave—a mass grave. It had not thawed since it was originally dug in 1918. The bodies would not have decomposed as rapidly as they normally would. Now Miles would try again to collect the tissue samples frozen into a pile of