Antarctica (12 page)

The men descended on them. Ruskey and Lombardo helped Kosta away, Rivera took Plutarchos, and Andrew felt Jack’s firm grip around his shoulders.

They walked to the top of the slope and looked over.

The hill ended in a sharp drop-off, almost straight down. Andrew could see maybe 200 feet, but that was it. The snow obliterated sight of the bottom. “What do we do now?” he asked.

“Go back and circle around,” Siegal suggested. “What else can we do?”

“In this wind—with the dogs sick?” Lombardo shook his head. “We’ll never make it.”

Andrew stared at the whirling snow. As it swept away from the ridge in great bursts, he caught momentary glimpses of the wall’s lower part. It seemed to slope outward. “We could slide,” he said.

Rivera laughed.

“Suicide,” Oppenheim said.

Jack was squinting over the ledge. “It looks as if there’s a valley down there. If we stay here, the cold’ll kill us. If we make it to the bottom, we’ll be on the lee side. We can take shelter there until the storm breaks.”

The men turned in to one another, wary and beleaguered.

“Is that an order, Pop?” Ruppenthal asked.

“Sledges first,” Jack said. “Then dogs. Then us.”

The first sledge went without a fuss, shooting straight down the wall on its runners. The second hit a rock. It teetered to one side, then flipped into the air. “No!” wailed Oppenheim as the contents of the sledge—stoves, food, tent supplies—flew off.

As each item pitched downward, vanishing into the storm, Andrew’s hope went with them. They couldn’t make it without the supplies. Most of the food was on that sledge.

The other men had seen it. They knew the implications. But they were carrying on. He needed to carry on, too. Kosta was struggling with the frightened dogs, beckoning for Andrew’s help.

Together they cajoled Socrates into going over first. Three others followed willingly. Seven were too weak to resist. The rest snarled and snapped. Kosta couldn’t do much from a sitting position; his feet were useless. Finally the men had to gang up and send them over, one by one. Ruppenthal received an ugly gash on his arm for his efforts; Cranston struggled with a combative husky and ended up going over with it.

Jack was the next man to go. Kosta followed, bellowing with an ungodly shriek. The others followed, counting to 160 between trips to give the others a chance to clear.

Andrew was last.

He tried to see the others but couldn’t.

His body seized up. He imagined sliding to the bottom, landing among a pile of corpses and supplies. This was insane. They didn’t
know
what was down there.

But he knew what was up here.

He had no choice.

He pushed himself over, and suddenly he was in the air, not sliding but flying, borne on the snow and wind—until his rear end slammed onto the ice and he tumbled, out of control, trying to stay on his back for fear the ice would rip off his face.

He could see nothing but he felt the angle change, growing more horizontal, until he was sliding past shadows—and they were running after him.

Andrew came to a stop in a snowbank. He lay there, feeling his heart thrum, as the men ran toward him—Jack, Petard, Cranston, Rivera.

Jack lifted Andrew out of the snow. “Well?”

“Fun,” Andrew said woozily. “Can we do that again sometime?”

“Central Park’s more my speed.” Jack hugged him tightly. “I’m afraid the weather’s no better down here.”

“Worse,” Cranston shouted.

As they stepped out from the snowbank, the blizzard barraged them. Andrew tried to turn his face, but it didn’t help. The wind seemed to be coming from all directions at once.

“We’re getting close to the mountains!” Jack shouted. “They’re causing this wind-tunnel effect. The wind races down the slopes and is blocked by this ridge—it has no place to go.”

“We’re finally near the Transantarctics?” Andrew asked.

“Don’t get too excited,” Jack replied. “It’s another month to the Pole after we cross them.”

“If we cross them,” Rivera remarked.

“We’re setting up camp, about fifty yards northeast,” Jack said. “We’ve lost a lot of the food supply, but Petard thinks he knows where it is.”

“I spotted something by the base of the ridge, to the east of the campsite,” Petard explained. “Follow me.”

Andrew stayed close to the four men as they trudged against the wind. Before long Andrew saw a dark shape in a distant, upward-sloping bank of snow. “There it is!” Andrew cried out.

“What?” Cranston asked.

“Something!”

Just ahead of them a low, hideous rumble began. It was soft at first, like the distant calving of an iceberg from a shelf into the sea. But there was no shelf here, no sea.

The men stopped.

Jack grabbed Andrew by the shoulders and turned him around. “Run—all of you!”

The earth was shaking now, the rumble now a crashing of rock and ice, growing louder. The ridge was giving way, breaking apart into an avalanche.

Andrew felt shards of ice pelting his back and legs. He fell to the ground with a yell, and Jack yanked him to his feet.
“Fly!”

His legs churned. He took in gulps of frozen air that seared his lungs.

But the noise stopped as suddenly as it had started. And by the time they’d reached camp, the only sound Andrew heard was the howling of wind.

The tents were flapping angrily, the men gathered in concern and terror by the openings. They raced toward Andrew and the others.

“You boys all right?” Ruskey called out.

“All present … and accounted for,” Jack shouted, panting. “Wish I could say the same for the food.”

In the silence, the men stared at a distant, growing shape. Through the white storm was a denser cloud, rising darkly—the fallen snow, tons of it, billowing like dust in a desert wind.

Had they remained a moment longer, Andrew knew they’d have been buried inside.

“We were lucky,” Petard said.

Rivera’s arms were tracing the sign of the cross. “This time.”

As Andrew caught his breath, he saw O’Malley stoking his stove outside another tent. Ruppenthal intently held an ax over the flame. The blade was red hot.

Andrew staggered closer. “What are you doing?”

The two men looked at each other. Neither answered.

A scream from inside the tent made Andrew’s hair stand on end.

“O’Malley,” Andrew said tentatively, “how’s Kosta?”

“Dr. Riesman took a look at his feet,” O’Malley answered.

“Frostbite?”

“Worse. Gangrene.”

“Does that mean Kosta has to lose his—?”

O’Malley nodded grimly.

Andrew glanced at the ax. He felt sick.

December 11, 1909

T
HE COLD WAS SUPPOSED
to stop the pain.

It didn’t.

It made everything worse. So much worse. The men were fading in and out and Kosta hoped they would just disappear,
poof,
and he would be free from the pain, free from the cold, free from this earth, free.

Riesman was a kind man, to be an animal doctor you had to be a kind man, so why did he do this? What kind of man used an ax on another man while he was awake? In Nísyros, in the tiniest back-road
chorià
of Greece, you didn’t treat a goat like that.

Now he was useless. His feet were bloody stumps. At least with the toes he could force himself to walk. Without them, what? What was the point in taking away a man’s toes and expecting him to go on? Did they plan to carry him on the sledges, like the
papou
in the old country, the lame grandfathers who had to be carted around in wheelbarrows until they died? Not here. This was not Greece. This was a hell from which there was no release. They were in danger. They didn’t need Kosta.

He tried to tell them—
God have mercy, leave me, leave me to freeze, to go peacefully in the cold—
but the words wouldn’t come, just the moaning and the pain, and he could see the blood in bright red clumps of ice on the ground.

Jack was talking. Holding Kosta’s hands.
“Alios eenai entaksi.”
Everything is all right.

But it wasn’t, it would never be, they were all doomed if they slowed down; they had to cut their losses and move on. Didn’t he see that? Was this his idea of compassion, risking the lives of an entire group for one man?

The words flew around him in the tent, English words. The men were arguing. They never understood Kosta’s Greek—only Jack did—so they assumed Kosta didn’t understand them. But they were wrong, and they were stupid, because they were talking about him and he understood.

He’s dying.

The dogs are dying.

We’re dying.

Siegal, Rivera, Ruskey—they were afraid. They wanted to move on, save as many as they could.

We need him,
Jack was saying.
He will heal. He will walk.

Only Riesman was paying Kosta attention, trying to stop the bleeding, doing things that made Kosta shriek with pain—and when his leg jerked, the blood from his stumps flew into the men’s faces and all over the dogs and the canvas.

“Stop it! Just stop it!” The boy, Andrew. So loud. He was never loud. “Listen to you all—‘Is he too heavy, is he going to eat all our food, will he slow us down’—he’s not a
thing.
He’s a man. The best one of us all. He’s telling us to leave him. Would you do that? Would any of you offer to sacrifice yourselves?”

No.

No, he’s a child. A dreamer. All he knows, everything in his head, comes from books. Heroes and villains, virtue and evil. He hasn’t lived long enough to know destiny, to know that men controlled nothing, that all you could do was hear when God was calling and know that it was time to say yes.

“We’re only as strong as our weakest member,” Andrew went on. “Right? I mean, isn’t that what separates us from the animals? Isn’t that what makes us human? Were you relieved when Dr. Shreve died? No. So what happened since then? What changed you?”

They were all listening, silent. Taking the boy seriously.

“If we leave Kosta,” the boy said, “we’re saying a life doesn’t matter. And if those are the rules now—well, who’s safe? Any one of us can be deadweight. Any one of us can be left behind. If that’s what we’ve become, what’s the point of going to the South Pole?”

“It’s going to be hard enough making it, even without the Greek,” Rivera said.

“Maybe we should split,” Ruppenthal suggested. “Some of us should wait here. The others go off to the Pole, with the dogs who aren’t sick.”

“Are you crazy, Rupp?” Siegal said. “No one can survive here, standing still. Besides, we’d never find each other again.”

“So what do we do?” Cranston asked.

“Feégheteh,”
Kosta said feebly. “You go.”

He forced his eyes open. The faces stared down at him, shadowed by the hoods.

“Yes, Kosta,” Jack said. “We go.”

Finally. A wise decision. The American was using his head.

Kosta let his body relax. Sleep quickly began to overtake him.

Peace.

Rest.

At last.

“Pop,” Petard said, “do you mean—we’re
all—?”

“Yes. All of us,” Jack replied. “Kosta, too. We’re going back to the ship.”

Kosta was suddenly wide awake. “No!” he blurted out.

“Sir?” Ruskey said.

“We lost half our food over the side of that cliff,” Jack replied. “The seals and penguins don’t come this far inland—so once we run out, we starve. The dogs are sick and weak. We’ll be lucky if they last another month.”

“What do we tell them back at the ship?” Siegal asked. “They waited for us for no reason?”

Lombardo’s face was red, contorted with anger. “We’ll eat less and run faster. You’re telling us to give up! We can’t fail. Our mission was to find the South Pole.”

“To find it
together,
Vincent—and return alive. You’re not a failure if God and nature stop you—only if you resist them when it becomes impossible. You fail if you defeat yourself. Our team didn’t do that. We knew how to prepare, we knew how hard to fight—and now we must know when to turn back. Frankly, I intend for this mission to be a success. Only now success means something different—it means a safe return to the
Mystery
for all of my men.”

Oppenheim let out a soft, derisive snort. “Is that an order …
sir?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Pack up now. We move when the storm breaks. Finding a way around that ridge will be hell.”

December 31, 1909

“T
HIS IS BETWEEN ME
and you. I mean, all this stuff I just told you—anyone asks, I didn’t say nothing, right?”

Flummerfelt was a monster. The strongest sailor on board by a long shot. He could lift a 100-pound box of tackle onto his shoulder like a sack of grain.

Above the neck, however, he was traveling short-sail.

Nigel and Philip must have had a grand time at his expense. Telling him they would organize a
mutiny.
Those two couldn’t organize a tea party. This had to be some strange New Year’s prank. Captain Barth had refused to allow a party, and the men were starved for entertainment.

Colin would have to set him right in a hurry. They were alone in the afterhold, but not for long. All hands were chopping ice. If Colin didn’t return abovedecks with sledgehammers and harpoons—and Flummerfelt—Captain Barth would have their heads.

“Nigel is a stowaway,” Colin said. “He has no legal rights on this ship. And he isn’t much of a sailor. Now, how can someone like that lead a ship like the
Mystery
?”

“Same question as what I asked. But, see, that’s why they need me. You, too. I seen you up there, an’ you know your way around the deck. Captain Barth? He’ll let us stay here until the ship is crushed. He’s depressing the workingman, like Nigel says. Anyways, in the new order, I’ll be first mate.” Flummerfelt smiled proudly. “You’ll be my second. They’ve stockpiled some weapons in the storeroom. Can you load a rifle?”

“Wait. Have you seen these weapons?”

“Sure. I helped load ’em. Some of these guys has never done that before, so that’s why I’m asking. Anyways, Talmadge brought some guns onto the ice this morning. I was supposed to bring the rest. Now we can both do it.”