Black Ice (13 page)

Lauren stepped in.

‘Sean. Maybe Fitzgerald is right; we don't have time to lose now. These two men are in a very serious state, and we know we're in for another storm on the way back. Forget about the plane, stick to the snowcats.'

Sean held up his hands. ‘Anything you say. I'll have them ready.'

They turned to their tasks, Sean servicing and refuelling the two machines, Lauren administering painkillers, putting both of Richard's legs in splints, and boiling water to begin the process of rehydrating the three men.

Fitzgerald made himself useful, warming up soup on the small gas stove and helping Richard to drink before feeding himself.

‘What about your gear?' Lauren asked the explorer, gesturing to the tent. ‘We're running overweight, so be selective about what you bring.'

‘Just our personal packs,' Fitzgerald told her. ‘The rest of the stuff's beyond repair anyway.'

Sean entered the tent and found the two small rucksacks. He left the soiled sleeping bags and the jumble of harnesses and cooking gear which was scattered at the back. Then he spotted the yellow emergency transmitter.

‘What about the transmitter?' he called to Fitzgerald.

‘Leave it,' the explorer told him. ‘It's dead weight.'

‘Expensive thing to leave behind,' Sean told him.

‘The suppliers give me a new one for every expedition.'

Sean left the transmitter in the tent and helped the others as they loaded up. They left the explorers' tent where it stood and put the two sick men into clean sleeping bags. Sean arranged the kitbags so that they could lie in relative comfort on the sledges, and tied both men on. Fitzgerald rode behind Sean on his snowcat.

They made slow progress through the crevasse field, weaving their way carefully to avoid the harder bumps.

As the effects of the morphine faded, Richard began to cry out in pain with every shudder of the sledge. No matter how delicately Sean drove, the rough surface was transmitting shocks to his shattered legs.

‘He needs more drugs,' Lauren decided. ‘We'll pitch camp for a few hours' sleep once we get out of the crevasse field. We could all do with some rest anyway.'

By the early hours of the morning they had their three tents erected and had melted down enough ice to hydrate some more food. Richard ate like a man possessed, spooning the fruit compote into his mouth so fast that Lauren had to tell him to slow down. Carl Norland had to be spoonfed and still showed little sign of recovery.

Lauren put in a radio call back to base, then—utterly exhausted—fell into a deep sleep as soon as her head touched her inflatable pillow.

Sean lay awake by her side, there was too much running through his mind. Finally, he dressed quietly and went out onto the glacier, where a sliver of moon was occasionally visible through gaps in the clouds.

The next storm would be with them within a few hours, he realised, the incoming front was already lifting ghosts of powder snow off the ice.

Sean turned on his torch, watching the wind scouring the glacier. Their tracks would be erased within a few hours. He knew he would never find the crevasse again if he could not retrace their route.

He looked back at the tents. All was quiet. He climbed onto the snowmobile and fired up the engine, letting the machine idle as he arranged his balaclava and gloves.

Suddenly, a hand gripped his arm. Fitzgerald was next to him, standing on the ice in just his socks.

‘Where do you think you're going?'

‘I lost one of the kitbags off the back of the sledge,' Sean told him, easy with the lie. ‘I'm going to backtrack and see if I can find it.'

He shrugged off the explorer's hand.

‘Wait! I'll go with you. It's not safe on your own.'

‘I'll be fine,' Sean told him. ‘Get some sleep.'

Fitzgerald watched him set off into the crevasse field, the snowcat quickly accelerating away into the dark night.

28

Sean pushed the snowmobile hard, squinting through his goggles as the headlight picked out the tracks which were his guide.

Unladen, the machine was fast and responsive. It took him less than one hour to cover the same ground they had so painstakingly driven in three hours that evening. Sean relished the speed.

By two a.m., he had located the crevasse. It wasn't going to be a problem identifying where the Twin Otter was—the skidding aircraft had cut a trench a foot deep into the glacier as it crashed, a gently curving line running for two hundred metres and ending right at the crevasse lip.

Sean thought about what those final seconds must have been like: the panic in the cockpit as the pilots saw the crevasse looming … the desperate attempt to steer themselves out of the skid. Then the crushing finality of the fall.

Sean snapped his crampons onto his boots and walked carefully to the crevasse edge. He leaned as far as he dared over the lip, shining his headtorch down into the abyss. The bulb was a quartz halogen, the most powerful available, but it still picked out no detail in that blue-black void.

The Twin Otter was too deep to be seen.

He pulled a fifty-metre rope from the rucksack and uncoiled it as he looked for a suitable anchor point. He found a patch of unbroken ice and scraped it clean with his axe. Next, he twisted a fifteen-centimetre ice screw into place, snapped on a carabiner and secured the rope to it with a figure-of-eight knot.

A few steps away, a glint of metal caught his eye; it was another ice screw. Fitzgerald's belay was still in place. Sean wasn't going to use it, but he inspected the titanium device out of professional interest, noting that the explorer had done a good job.

But why had Fitzgerald tossed his rope into the crevasse like that? It went against the grain to waste any resource out here. That bothered Sean in a way he could not quite define.

Sean threaded the double loop of his waist harness and fastened the leg straps. Then he clipped his descendeur onto the line and stepped off the lip backwards into the frigid green interior of the crevasse.

Straight away he found himself swinging in free space, the wall of the fissure undercut. He began to lower himself cautiously down, abseiling in one continuous movement into the dark chasm below and shivering involuntarily from the rapid drop in temperature.

Forty metres down, he began to pick out the broken outline of the Twin Otter, the shattered wreckage shining dimly in the light of his headtorch. Sean let himself down gently onto the flattest section of metal and checked on his line. He had descended forty-five metres—almost the entire length of the rope.

He took stock, sweeping the twisted debris with the headtorch beam, each breath sending a puff of frozen vapour to catch in the light, the sharp smell of aviation fuel still detectable in the air.

The aircraft was tilted at an angle, the nose down, the fuselage crushed by the vice-like jaws of the glacier. Directly beneath it the crevasse narrowed dramatically, becoming little more than a metre-wide slit falling away to an unknown depth.

Sean walked down the fuselage, still holding the rope for safety. Metal crampons are not made for clambering around on aircraft, and an unprotected slip would certainly be fatal.

He saw that one of the wings had been ripped off to a fractured stump, the control wires and cables spewing out like the nerve endings of a sawn-off arm. The other wing had been folded down beneath the plane. Both engines had been lost.

One thing was certain: the Twin Otter was not broken in half as Fitzgerald had described. As far as Sean could determine, the only major part of the structure which had been severed was that wing.

He swung down further and found the gaping hole where the door had been ripped from its hinges.

He entered the passenger area, wondering how, from this mess, the reporter had ever survived. Almost all the seats had been torn from their anchoring points and were jumbled in the front end. A fire extinguisher had been ripped from its clip and had embedded itself in the front bulkhead. Several of the windows had cracked, the glass crunching beneath Sean's crampon spikes as he moved.

There was a pool of frozen black blood near the front. Close to it, two dark green boxes were lying amongst the debris. Sean read one of the labels:
Fuerzas Aéreas Argentinas: Comida de Emergencia
.

The plane had been carrying emergency food, he realised. Sean checked the boxes, finding them empty, as were the many tins and wrappers scattered all around. That was how Fitzgerald and the others had kept alive while they waited for rescue, he thought; lucky for them that the plane's operators had thought to include the food as a contingency.

There was a medical supply box too, and to Sean's surprise he found it had barely been touched.

Then he noticed something had fallen beneath one of the squashed seats. It was a small packet of biscuits, wrapped in green paper. Sean put it in his pocket to eat on the way back to the camp.

Next he pushed through the narrow gap in the front of the fuselage and entered the cockpit. The headtorch beam picked out the two pilots.

The scene was not as he had imagined it. He had expected the stench of death, but there was none; both victims had been frozen where they sat before decomposition could set in. He had imagined them in uniform; in fact, both wore civilian clothes.

He looked closer, trying to make some sense of the tangled mess of metal and flesh. Both must have been killed instantly, he surmised, crushed by the enormous impact as the front of the cockpit had been driven into the ice wall. The instrument panel had been thrust forward with incredible violence, and parts of the rudder controls were embedded into the chest of one of the men.

The other—the one wearing a leather flying jacket—had lost half of his head, his skull pulverised, the blue-grey pulp of brains clearly visible through matted hair and dried blood.

Suddenly, a loud crack cut through the silence. The wreckage shifted slightly. Sean stood there, his heart beating wildly, realising that the walls of the crevasse must be closing in, crushing the aircraft ever tighter.

What should he do? Sean was overcome with a terrible sadness at the fate of these two men and for the families which must be grieving for them. There was no way he could extricate their bodies for a proper burial. He took out his compact camera and switched on the flash. He took a series of photographs of the bodies and their wounds—maybe a crash investigation would need this evidence later.

Then he held onto the frozen hands of the two aviators and whispered a prayer he had not spoken since childhood. The words sounded strangely comforting in the midst of such violent death.

Next he checked the pockets—there would be belongings, identification; perhaps someone would be grateful for the return of these things.

In the flying jacket he found a wallet. He flipped it open and saw the name on a credit card: Capt Manuel Villanova—that was the one with the head wounds. There was a photograph inside the wallet, a pretty woman standing in front of a woodbuilt house, a smiling black-haired boy by her side.

Sean placed the photograph in Villanova's hand. It seemed the right thing to do.

Then he tried the pockets of the other man, finding nothing save a few coins and a cigarette lighter.

Another crack, louder, more resonant. The aircraft fuselage gave a metallic groan.

Time to go. Sean zipped the few items he had retrieved into his jacket pocket and clambered out of the wreck. He fixed his jumar ascendeur onto the line and began the ascent. He settled quickly into the rhythm—sliding the jumar clamp up, pushing up on his foot sling, letting his harness take the weight, metre after metre, up towards the lip.

Halfway up, feeling himself breaking into a sweat, he stopped to rest. The wreck was already almost invisible beneath him, lost in the turquoise embrace of the ice.

What a place to die.

An image flashed to his mind as he began the climb once more—Fitzgerald manhandling that reporter out of the plane, using the crevasse pulley to winch him to the surface.

My God, he must be strong, Sean thought, marvelling at the feat.

One hour later he was back at the camp where he found to his relief that everyone was asleep. He covered up the snowcat and crawled as quietly as he could into the tent he shared with Lauren.

‘You went down to the plane?' she asked him sleepily.

‘Yeah. Not a sight I want to see again in a hurry.'

‘Tell me about it tomorrow,' Lauren told him, ‘and get some sleep yourself. We're leaving at six to try and get these men back to Capricorn.'

‘Going to be a tough one towing these guys on the back of the sledges. They're going to go through hell.'

‘I think they've already been there,' she told him, ‘to hell and back. And there's a different type of hell waiting for them back at the base.'

‘How come?'

‘Because tomorrow's the last day of daylight. From then on we're officially into winter. No flight will be able to reach us until September at the earliest.'

‘These guys are going to be stuck with us for the whole
winter
?' Sean looked at Lauren, aghast at this realisation.

‘I'm afraid so.'

‘But that's going to be a nightmare. What if the mix doesn't work? We don't know them at all.'

‘We're stuck with it, Sean; there's nothing we can do. Those men are going to be with us now for the next two hundred days, so we'll have to accept it. Maybe it won't be so bad.'

Even as she spoke the soothing words, Lauren knew that she didn't believe them for a moment. She knew too much about the unique pressure the Antarctic winter exerts on the human psyche.

Nightmare might not be a strong enough word.

PART 3

The Big Eye Blues

29

Frank raised the binoculars to his eyes and began a leisurely sweep of the northern horizon. The oppressive gloom of winter was permanent now, and the only clue to the existence of the sun was a dull, barely detectable orange and blue glow in the sky. This was the fifth or sixth time that morning that he'd forsaken the warmth and security of the mess room to venture out onto the ice, scanning for the headlights of the two snowcats.