Black Ice Page 9

‘How far do you reckon we can see?’ Sean tried to fix his eyes on the horizon.

  Lauren shrugged. ‘Five hundred miles at least.’

  ‘Awesome. And no sign of man.’

  ‘Not that you can see.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The air.’ Lauren gestured into space. ‘It’s polluted even here.’

  Sean gave her a sceptical look. ‘No way. This air is the cleanest I ever tasted.’

  ‘Sorry, you’re wrong. Just a few parts per million, but we’re breathing sulphur, carbon monoxide and a whole batch of other pollutants right here at the end of the earth.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe, this place looks so pristine.’

  ‘You don’t believe it? You can even see it in an ice core. You drill a core into any part of the glacier and you can see the taint of man-made pollution as clear as day. Hundreds of metres of crystal-clear ice, going back through time, then you get these dark rings appearing in the last six inches of the sample … that’s the Industrial Revolution.’

  The few moments of rest had left them bitterly cold; this was not a place to linger.

  ‘Which way do you think we should take for the descent?’ Lauren asked.

  Sean considered the options. There were three different possibilities, all quite steep, all seeming to pass through areas where crevasses were likely to lurk.

  ‘I think we should keep to the left.’

  ‘What about that smooth gully down the middle?’

  Sean shook his head. ‘That’s an avalanche chute. See where the ice fall at the top feeds into it? Not a good place to be caught if something decides to come down.’

  They committed to the descent, using the inherent braking potential of the snowcat engines to keep the pace down to walking speed. Many times they were forced to retreat, spinning the machines at the edge of uncrossable crevasses and powering back up the slope to try their luck on another trajectory.

  But by eight they were down, stiff and bruised after thirteen hours of almost continuous driving.

  ‘Camp?’ Lauren asked him. That was the only word she needed to utter; Sean was as ready to rest as she was.

  They had the tent erected in less than twenty minutes, a meal cooked and eaten in just an hour. Then they put up the aerial for the nightly radio call back to Capricorn, the calm voice of Frank a reassuring—if faint—presence as they gave him an update of progress.

  ‘How about tomorrow?’ Sean asked as he helped Lauren to pack the radio away.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Lauren replied, ‘will make today look like a picnic. We’re heading for one of the most evil crevasse fields in Antarctica.’

  ‘That’s nice to know.’ Sean could barely mumble the words before he fell asleep.

  25

  It was the uncertainty which was so wearing, the never-quite-sure of whether a snow bridge was going to hold or not … the will-it-or-won’t-it of the process which shredded even the steeliest of nerves in the end.

  Lauren had crossed crevasse fields before in other parts of Antarctica. She had skied through them on the way to research sites, even once or twice run through them with skidoos like now.

  Then she had been a passenger. Others had been making the decisions on which zig-zag line to follow through the maze, more experienced eyes than hers had been weighing up the odds between one route and another.

  This time was different: now she was the leader, and Sean was her responsibility.

  ‘The technique is pretty simple,’ she had told Sean when they reached the first of the big ones. ‘You take a good look at the snow bridge, pick what you think is the strongest part and drive as fast as you can across it before it collapses.’

  ‘And the penalty for getting it wrong?’

  ‘There’s a word for it … let me see now, I think it’s called “death”.’

  Sean held up his hands. ‘OK. Stupid question.’

  ‘Look how solid this snow bridge is; you can see it clearly if you come over and take a look from the side.’

  Sean did as she suggested, moving down the crevasse to look side-on at the place where snow had congealed across the gap.

  ‘How do they form?’

  ‘By the wind. Imagine it blowing hard from the south, snow gets impacted against that far wall there and it begins to stick together. Over the years it congeals and hardens, growing outwards to the other wall until eventually it forms a seal—like an arch—over the top. Some crevasses get covered completely.’

  ‘This one looks strong.’

  ‘We hope.’

  Lauren revved up her snowmobile and blasted across the fragile span of snow, trying not to look down into the inky drops which beckoned on either side.

  Sean followed on a few moments later, holding his breath as he felt the weight of the snowmobile press down on the central—most vulnerable—part of the arch.

  ‘It felt like it sagged as I got to the middle,’ he told her as they rejoined on the far side.

  ‘Sagging we can cope with. It’s the breaking we don’t want.’

  ‘So how many more of these are we going to have to deal with?’ Sean’s face was flushed with the excitement of the prospect.

  Lauren squinted into the distance, trying to assess the scale of the crevasse field they were about to weave through.

  ‘Hundreds certainly,’ she told him. ‘Maybe even thousands.’

  By the halfway stage, Sean had taken over the lead, quickly assessing each crevasse crossing as it came along and invariably choosing the same route that Lauren would have done. Gradually, she relaxed, secretly pleased that he was taking the reponsibility off her for a while.

  They came to a smooth section, crisp, even snow offering maximum purchase for the snowmobile tracks. Sean pushed the speed up to fifteen, twenty miles an hour.

  Then Lauren saw it.

  ‘Stop!’ Her scream was loud enough to cut through the rip of the engines. Sean did as she said, and she pulled up by his side.

  ‘You see that?’ she said.

  Ahead of them was the merest hint of shadow, a long line which they were about to cross, something so subtle that Sean could not be sure it was there at all. It could have been a sagging in the surface … but then again, it might just have been a trick of the light.

  ‘I’m … I’m not sure,’ he told her. ‘I think it’s solid. It looks like a fault line from an old pressure ridge.’

  ‘But look how wide it is,’ Lauren told him.

  Sean looked again. Then he saw what Lauren was saying: it really was wide—the darker shadowed area was a good thirty metres across. Looking to each side he could see it snaking for hundreds of metres, perhaps even kilometres, in both directions. A cold shadow of terror crossed him as he recognised its true scale.

  They stopped the engines.

  ‘You think there’s a crevasse under there?’ Sean asked. ‘Because if it is, it has to be the biggest mother of them all.’

  Lauren shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I think we should check it out before we try and drive over it.’

  She took a snow probe from her rucksack, a thin section of aluminium with a sharpened tip normally used for locating buried avalanche victims. Now she used it to test the solidity of the snow in front of her, edging forward on her knees until she was right on the lip of the shadowed area.

  To her horror, the probe slipped into the snow as easily as a hot knife through butter. She put her fist into it and moved it around, easily creating a hole. Whatever she had found, it was hollow; there was no doubt about that.

  Lauren bent her face to the snow and looked into the hole she had just made.

  ‘No way!’ she whispered in awe. ‘Sean, you are not going to believe what I’m looking into here.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Well, imagine you’re lying on the high point of a cathedral dome and you can slide one of the tiles off and look down into the interior.’

  Sean inched forward to join her, bending down to look into the hole as Laure
n had just done.

  His eyes took a while to register the scale, but, when they did, he could hardly comprehend what he was seeing. It really was the biggest crevasse he had ever looked into, a cobalt crack which might have plunged four kilometres down to the true surface of the continent, for all he could guess.

  On the far wall he could see stalagtites of sharp ice, each one as thick as a factory chimney, each one pointing a frozen finger into the oblivion he had so narrowly avoided.

  Sean pulled his gaze away from the hole with difficulty, looking across the deadly trap with a dread feeling clutching at his guts.

  ‘You think that snow would have held if I’d kept going?’

  Lauren chose not to answer verbally but instead broke a piece of ice off a nearby sastrugi.

  ‘How much you think this weighs?’ she asked him, showing him the book-sized chunk.

  ‘Couple of kilos.’

  Sean watched as Lauren tossed it right into the middle of the snow bridge, the area around the impact immediately caving in to create a hole about a metre square. The ice was swallowed out of sight, and an instant later it plummeted to the depths of the crevasse.

  They listened, like two children waiting for a stone to hit the bottom of a well, for any sound from the interior, but there was none.

  ‘It’s just like a skin,’ Lauren said, deeply shaken. ‘That snow bridge is a few inches thick in the middle and no more…’

  ‘This one has to have a name,’ Sean said. ‘I’ll christen it Deep Throat.’

  They remounted the snowcats in silence and found a way to route around the giant crevasse, Lauren leading the way. The detour was a big one, but when it was over she felt they had overcome the worst.

  ‘Don’t feel bad about what just happened,’ she told Sean as they paused to drink tea from the flask. ‘It could happen to anyone.’

  Sean shook his head, subdued after the near miss. ‘I was getting too cocky. I’ve done that before on big climbs sometimes; you know, you just get to the point where you think you got the whole thing worked out? Then—bam—something creeps up and slaps you back awake.’

  ‘You’re doing great. Just slow down a little, and we’ll get through fine.’

  Lauren looked ahead, experiencing a surge of relief as she saw the changes in the terrain. Now the glacier shrugged off its stresses and strains like a river reaching middle age leaves its rapids behind. It became docile and quiet, free from the traps and pitfalls of the first crevasse field, level enough to hit thirty miles an hour in short bursts.

  Although they never discussed it formally between them, Sean let Lauren lead the way from that moment on.

  How she had seen that slenderest of visual clues, he would never know.

  26

  That afternoon they hit the two-hundred-mile point, the agreed position for the second depot. This time the location was an easier choice: a huge black boulder which sat, incongruous and alone, on the surface of the glacier.

  ‘What’s this thing doing here anyway?’ Sean asked. ‘Where did it come from, unless it fell from outer space?’

  ‘It’s a wanderer. Or at least that’s my name for them. This one will have come from the mountain range forty miles behind us. It got eroded off one of the peaks by frost action, fell onto the glacier and has been travelling down towards the sea for probably the best part of a few thousand years.’

  ‘A travelling rock?’ Sean was delighted with Lauren’s description. ‘That’s weird. I like that.’

  ‘Sometimes they travel for hundreds of miles.’ Lauren smiled as she watched Sean circle the boulder in awe.

  They placed the barrel in the lee of the boulder and lashed it down as they had at the first depot. Like before, Lauren made a note of the GPS position in her pad, and they had some food while they checked the map.

  ‘We’ve got another fifty miles of flat ground, then we’re into the next crevasse field,’ Lauren told Sean. ‘And it’s bigger than the last.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Sean said, ‘is why the hell Fitzgerald and his buddy kept going when they hit more crevasses. They must have known by then they’d have to call in a plane … so why didn’t they do it here, where it could land realistically?’

  Lauren shrugged. ‘That’s Fitzgerald for you, the man just doesn’t know when to quit. He would have kept going right up to the time he physically couldn’t put one foot in front of the other.’

  Three hours later they were driving the snowcats into the labyrinth, progressing cautiously as huge drops fell away beneath them on every side. If anything, the objective dangers were even greater than the first crevasse field, the snow bridges weaker now they were loaded with snow from the storm. They kept to a crawling pace as the hours ticked by, never taking chances unless they could be sure no monster crevasse lurked ahead.

  The transit passed without incident, and they found themselves in the middle of the crevasse field. Lauren checked the GPS.

  ‘This is it,’ she told Sean. ‘According to my calculations, we’re right on top of the coordinates for the spot where the beacon was fired.’

  Sean looked around. ‘I see nothing. How accurate do you think that beacon is?’

  ‘It definitely won’t be as precise as the GPS,’ Lauren replied after some thought. ‘Maybe accurate to within four or five hundred metres either way.’

  ‘Which means we could have an area of a couple of square kilometres to search.’

  ‘Or more.’

  They looked out over the glacier, realising the task of finding the tent was going to be no easy feat in that minefield of crevasses. Worse, there were numerous ridges where pressure from within had pushed up great mounds of ice.

  If the tent was hidden from view by one of the larger pressure ridges, they could easily pass within ten or fifteen metres without spotting it.

  They began the search, keeping together for safety, slowly crossing and re-crossing the glacier in a grid pattern, stopping every ten minutes to scan the surrounding terrain with binoculars. The weather conditions were fickle and changeable—for ten minutes it might snow heavily, preventing them from moving at all, then it would clear without warning, giving them another chance to see.

  Suddenly, Sean spotted the tent.

  ‘There’s someone standing next to it! He’s heard the engines.’

  27

  The lone figure raised a hand as he saw them approach, a gaunt spectre of a man standing by the half-collapsed tent. Not far off, odd-shaped bits of metal were strewn across the ice field—the remains of the crashed aircraft, partly covered in snow.

  They killed the engines as the man stumbled forward.

  ‘Who are you?’ he managed to say. ‘Where are you from?’

  If Lauren hadn’t known she was being addressed by Julian Fitzgerald, she would not have guessed it was him. Fitzgerald was proud and erect, with a ramrod back; this creature was stooped and hunched. Fitzgerald was well built, almost stout; this man was emaciated and hollow.

  ‘We’re from Capricorn base,’ Lauren told him. ‘We came overland.’

  Fitzgerald screwed up his eyes as he looked at her.

  ‘You,’ he said, searching his mind for the name, ‘I’ve met you, you’re…’

  ‘Lauren Burgess. And you’re right, we have met before…’

  ‘Welcome to our camp,’ he told them and fell forward onto his hands and knees.

  Lauren and Sean helped him to sit and gave him hot chocolate to drink from a flask.

  ‘Have you got food?’ he asked them urgently. ‘We don’t seem to have eaten for some time.’

  ‘We’ve got everything you need,’ Lauren told him. ‘But what happened here? Why did the rescue plane crash?’

  ‘The landing site was too small,’ Fitzgerald replied. ‘They tried to bring it in, but it was just too tight. They hit that sastrugi at the far end and lost control. That big lump out there is one of the engines.’

  ‘Where’s the rest of the plane?’

  ‘Down
here.’ Fitzgerald stood with some difficulty and led them to the edge of the nearby crevasse. ‘And it’s not a pretty sight, I can tell you. The fuselage is broken in two.’

  ‘Those poor men.’ Lauren was distraught. ‘They wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

  Sean spotted a red rope dangling over the edge of the lip.

  ‘You’ve been down there?’ he asked Fitzgerald.

  Fitzgerald unclipped the rope from its anchor.

  ‘Of course I’ve been down there. How do you think I got the journalist out?’

  Sean was astounded. ‘You pulled a man out of there on your own? How deep is the wreckage?’

  The explorer shrugged. ‘Deep enough. Not the first time I’ve carried out a crevasse rescue. We had a pulley with us.’

  ‘What type of condition is he in?’

  ‘In a lot of pain. Both legs broken, I think.’

  Sean was expecting the explorer to pull up the rope, but instead Fitzgerald tossed the end of it into the crevasse.

  ‘Won’t be needing that again. Both the pilots are dead. Nothing we can do for them now.’

  Lauren went to the tent to check on the condition of the other men. The interior was squalid, reeking of human waste.

  The man on the left was the Norwegian Carl Norland, she imagined, the more skeletal of the two. His condition looked bad, his nose damaged by frostbite, his mouth bleeding. He appeared to be close to coma, unconscious, starving and extremely dehydrated. In his right hand he held the emergency transmitter, his bony fingers locked around the yellow casing.

  Lauren prised the unit from his grasp and de-activated the switch, there was no point in having the emergency bleeper sounding into the airwaves with the land rescue underway.

  She tossed the transmitter amongst the jumble of equipment at the back of the tent and turned to the other man. This was the journalist, she realised, awakening from sleep as she bent over him.

  ‘I heard a noise,’ he croaked, ‘Is there another plane?’

  ‘We’re here to rescue you,’ Lauren told him. ‘You’re going to be all right now; we’ve got drugs and food. What’s your name?’

  ‘Richard. My legs … you’ve got to do something about my legs.’