By 6:15 he had spotted the ice barrier. If he was near the barrier, the Russians knew, he was close to the base. But he saw neither the base nor the men. “I do not see any light,” he said. His voice was virtually inaudible—partly because the Motorola’s batteries were dying, partly because of the onset of hypothermia. By now his core temperature had almost certainly dropped below 98.6 degrees, prompting his back and neck muscles to constrict into a “pre-shiver,” followed by sporadic shivering. When his temperature dropped to 96, shivering intensified; walking and talking became a bit labored. “I am near the barrier,” Zehnder added.

“Move along the barrier to the Mabus Point,” Wowa said, urging him to head east. “Toward the wind.”

“Understand. Go toward the wind.”

“We are going to fire rockets now. Watch.”

Flares filled the sky.

“I am looking,” Zehnder said, speaking in staccato phrases. “See light.”

Again, the flares went up.

“Yes,” Zehnder said. “I see light.”

What he didn’t know was that the light was everywhere and nowhere—bouncing off the snow and ice, whose reflections create a kind of glitter-ball effect that can be stunning when it’s not interfering with saving your life. The icebergs were also having their way with the wind, causing it to ping-pong among them. “When you are walking among icebergs,” says Popolitov, “it’s impossible.” By 10:30 visibility was so poor that Stepanov, fearing additional casualties, ordered the men to return. At 10:30, Wowa instructed Zehnder to make a shelter in the snow—basically, a makeshift igloo—in order to stay warm: in 1990, a Japanese explorer had done just that and survived. But Zehnder didn’t respond. An hour later, Wowa sent another flare up and radioed again. This time Zehnder responded, but inaudibly. Twice that night, between one and two, a radio operator at Mirny detected two distinct “clicks” from Zehnder’s radio. Then, nothing.

Sometime during that night, Zehnder’s body temperature dropped to 95 as he entered a state of moderate hypothermia. His shivering, caused by muscles contracting to produce heat, grew convulsive. After an hour or so, as his temperature approached 93, his metabolic rate had slowed. He almost certainly began to lose his mental faculties and to stumble like a drunk, his motor skills so shot that he couldn’t operate his Motorola.

The next morning Popolitov didn’t dare tell his colleagues what he was thinking: that Zehnder was already dead. The others, frostbitten and drained, were eager to give it another go, even as the storm still raged. Again and again, throughout the day and night, teams trudged out into the blizzard, shooting flares and finding nothing. The next morning, after the weather had finally calmed, rescue teams fanned out, glowing in the headlights of tanklike vehicles—the snow drifts were so large that, in order to show the way, the men had to walk in front of the vehicles. Popolitov and a younger colleague, Vladimir Panfilov, decided to follow the ice barrier to the left of the base. At 8:40, after struggling through the twilight for 90 minutes, Panfilov wandered ahead. When Popolitov caught up, the young Russian was crying hysterically and vomiting. He was staring down at Zehnder, who was lying on a smooth sheet of ice near the barrier. Zehnder had been near the barrier that first night; unfortunately, he didn’t know if he was to the right or to the left of the base. And now here he was, flat on his back, gloved hands over his face, which was covered by a mask of ice an inch thick.

News of Zehnder’s death traveled fast, shooting from Mirny to South Africa to New York, where Guido and Arielle received the news in the middle of the night. In the coming days, Guido’s answering machine was filled with rambling messages, often from “friends” he’d never even heard of. “Women would call,” Guido recalls. “A lot of women. At least 50 of them, from all points of the world. I didn’t want to go into it too deeply, because it was a very awkward situation. A lot of them cried, and a lot wanted to go to Antarctica. And for me it was already a difficult time. I had to pretend that every woman was the only one. I just kept saying, ‘Yeah, I know.’”