Black Ice (33 page)

‘We keep the watch,' Lauren told her. ‘Imagine how it would feel to come out here in the morning and find Fitzgerald had stolen all this food and the sledge during the night.'

They agreed to the plan, and, desperate for the warmth, the first four volunteers were inside the tent and into the sleeping bags within minutes of finishing the meal. The tent was designed for two, but four could jam in—head to toe—at a pinch. The comfort level was low, but no one had the energy to put up the second tent, and the tight conditions generated a few more degrees of heat.

Out on the glacier, Lauren and Sean took the first watch, sitting on the sledge and staying close to the heat of the fire.

‘You must be proud, getting everyone to the first depot,' Sean told her.

‘Proud of the team. I haven't done anything special, but I appreciate the thought. Not many people thank the leader.'

‘Well, all the more reason to do it. You did a great job to get us here … and you were right about keeping everyone together when Murdo wanted to make the break.'

‘Thank you, Sean.'

‘You think they've got it in them to get over the mountains?'

Lauren let out a long sigh. ‘They have to. There's no other way down onto the glacier. But I must admit that frightens me a lot.'

‘It's Frank we'll have to watch. He's definitely the weakest link. Richard's a bit wobbly too, but he'll pick up now we've got some provisions.'

Gradually, they fell silent, awed by the millions of stars which the clear night revealed above them. Every few minutes a shooting star would race across the night sky.

‘You think Fitzgerald's on our trail?' Lauren asked him.

‘I hope not.' Sean peered out into the night. ‘But even if he is, maybe we got lucky and he's hit a problem with the snowmobile. Maybe he had a spark plug crack, or threw a belt. I don't know what kind of mechanic he is, but I sure wouldn't want to be on my own out there with a dead machine.'

Lauren looked out into the darkness.

‘Maybe he's keeping just out of sight. He wants us to think he's lost us.'

‘So we let down our guard?'

‘Precisely.'

When their two-hour watch was over, Lauren and Sean took their turn in the tent while Mel and Murdo took over the watch. Crawling into the protection of the sleeping bag was a sublime moment of luxury. To be out of the penetrating wind seemed to Lauren to be the greatest pleasure she had ever experienced.

Her belly was full, her mind relaxed now the tension of the search for the depot was over. Lauren let the glorious warmth of the duckdown fold around her and nestled down to sleep as the snores of her companions filled the tent.

‘Sean?' she whispered.

‘Yep?' His reply showed he was right on the edge of sleep.

‘I wanted to tell you something about what happened between us at the base…'

Sean turned towards her, his face so close she could feel his breath on her cheek.

‘Don't you mean what
didn't
happen between us?'

‘Yeah. It's just that it happened to me before, on another base. I got involved with someone, and then it all went sour. Then we had to spend the entire winter living under each other's skin, and it was a total nightmare.'

‘I think we would have been cool.'

Lauren leaned forward and kissed him softly on the lips.

‘I think so too. And maybe we still will be.'

‘If we get out of this alive.'

They were silent for a while.

‘There's still two hundred miles to go,' Lauren whispered, her heart full of fear as she lay there awake, listening to the sound of Murdo and Mel talking softly outside the tent.

72

‘One and pull … and two and pull!' Lauren called the moves as they hit the lowest flanks of the Heilman range, the sledge graunching across the rough ice in fits and starts as the incline began to work against them. It was day eight of the trek.

‘Keep it coming! One and pull … and two and pull.'

‘You were born in the wrong century,' Murdo muttered. ‘You sure you weren't a slave driver in a former life?'

There were four of them on the harness now, Lauren and Sean at the front, Mel and Murdo at the back. Richard brought up the rear, his damaged feet counting him out of the hauling duty even though he desperately wanted to help.

It was the first morning after finding the depot, and they were better fed and rested than they had been at any point since the fire. That was why Lauren was pushing them so hard. They'd slept for a straight ten hours, and Lauren had let them eat their fill at breakfast, knowing that they would need every precious calorie for the trial of hauling Frank over the range.

Frank had fought to stay off the sledge, had insisted he was strong enough to walk, but a quick test stroll had revealed the truth—he was still feverish and weak from the infection. He had reluctantly taken his place, lying in a sleeping bag for extra warmth.

Lauren was sure of one thing. They had to cross the range in a day. One extreme burst of energy while they still had the reserves. If it took them longer and they got stuck on the higher slopes in a storm, there was little prospect of finding a safe place to pitch the tents.

She had them awake at six a.m. By ten they were navigating their way onto the first of the steep glacier ramps which had seemed so easy with the snowcats. They worked on foot; without skins, the skis were as good as useless.

‘Don't let the momentum stop,' Sean yelled as the sledge jammed in a crack. They heaved extra hard to free it, thigh muscles straining as they leaned forward to win a few more inches of the slope.

‘Keep it coming!' Lauren urged them on as they paused to rest. ‘Another twenty minutes before we stop!'

Somehow they did as she asked, leaning forward and straining in unison, the sledge grinding reluctantly up the ice for a couple more paces before they rested, gasping for breath. With every metre of height, it seemed the sledge was gaining weight.

‘Are you carrying rocks in there?' Murdo demanded of Frank. ‘Or do you just weigh a bastard ton?'

Midday. They hauled the load up a particularly steep rise then eased back on the makeshift harnesses, appreciating the relief as the constant strain on their backs was relieved.

‘Take a break,' Lauren told them. ‘Ten minutes.' She gave them a boiled sweet each and a swig from a water bottle containing powdered orange drink.

‘It's the harness that kills me,' Murdo said, sitting heavily on the sledge.

Lauren knew what he meant. Hauling Frank up the range was proving a backbreaking task, and one which wasn't getting any easier as the hours crawled past. The harness was Sean's design, a simple series of loops twisted into their only rope.

As a means of towing the dead weight of the sledge, the system worked fine; they could harness four pullers at the same time, arranged in a fan formation in front of the sledge. It reminded Lauren of old black-and-white photographs of Scott's expedition, in which his team had manhauled provisions in the same way.

But on these punishing slopes the disadvantage was a serious one: the rope had no padding, the nine-millimetre cord cutting ever more insistently into the flesh of their waists and hips as they fought to gain altitude. They tried wrapping pieces of clothing around their waists, hoping to alleviate the pain, but the constant motion of the rope would inevitably dislodge them, sawing its way steadily into the soft tissue around their waist until the skin broke.

As the ascent went on, these erosions became blisters, then the blisters became sores. Within a few hours, every member of the team was suffering from open, weeping wounds around their hips, one more ailment to add to the chronically blistered feet and the problems of burns from the fire.

‘Can't we camp?' Mel begged after five hours of hauling. ‘I'm really in pain here.'

‘We keep going,' Lauren insisted. ‘We can make it in one hit. Another few hours and we'll be at the col.'

An afternoon squall whipped across the mountain, slowing their progress as they contoured around one of the major peaks. A boulder bounced down the slope just a handful of metres ahead of them, crashing quickly out of sight into the cloud.

For an agonising hour, as the visibility continued to fall, Lauren feared they had lost their way; it would be all too easy to head up the wrong arm of the glacier and find themselves in a dead end. She kept to the compass bearing, trusting the instrument to keep them on track; it was essential they followed the same route they had found with the snowcats.

Then they came to a feature Sean remembered.

‘That's the cliff!' he reminded her. ‘This is where we stopped to refuel.'

They shared a can of tinned fruit, broke open a packet of chocolate biscuits and ate two each, their bodies greedily absorbing the sugars they contained.

There was no conversation now, just the deep panting as they fought against the incline.

A short while later the squall blew away, taking the dense clouds with it and revealing their position. The col was above them, they were right on target.

‘Remember that last section of ice?' Sean reminded Lauren. ‘We'll have to think about that one.'

They pulled in a zig-zag pattern, exploiting the easiest angles of the slope, traversing back and forth, gaining a few metres of height on each pass.

‘One and pull … two and pull…' Lauren's throat was sore from the shouting. They were sweating with the effort now, a dangerous state to be in as the moisture froze as soon as they stopped to rest.

Then they came to the final obstacle, the sheer sixty-degree slope which guarded the col. To try and tow the sledge across without the protection of a rope would have been inviting disaster.

Sean derigged the harness and anchored one end of the rope to a big boulder. He inched across the slope and tied the other end off on a shard of rock on the far side. Then he returned and rejoined the group.

‘We'll use the rope as a handrail,' he told them. ‘Keep the sledge on the uphill slope.'

‘Are you sure?' Frank was eying the dizzy drop beneath them. ‘What happens if you can't hold it…?'

No one replied.

‘Let's get on with it,' Lauren said.

They each took a hold of the sledge and started to move, unsteadily, out onto the slope. Murdo fell twice, but he managed to regain his position both times and didn't let go of the sledge. Frank's eyes rolled with terror as they hit the steepest section; he was clinging to the side struts, his knuckles white.

‘Keep your eyes on the far side,' Lauren told them, ‘and for Christ's sake don't look down.'

They hit the easier ground, and Sean returned to retrieve the rope.

Forty minutes later, with a last collective heave, they hauled the sledge over the remainder of the pressure ridges and made the final col; they had gained two thousand feet of altitude in nine hours of ascent, and now the Blackmore Glacier was below them.

‘Jesus Christ,' Murdo gasped as he saw the view, his legs giving way beneath him even as he spoke. ‘Is that where we're going?'

73

Lauren had focused her mind so sharply on what it would take to get the team up on to the high col that she hadn't even thought about the descent which waited for them on the other side. Now all sense of exhilaration faded fast as she considered what lay between them and the flat terrain of the next glacier.

It wasn't that the terrain was terribly steep, the height fell away in a gradient not much greater than the lower slopes of an average Scottish mountain. But it was complicated territory, riven, as is always the case where unseen forces are colliding beneath the surface, by the dissecting fissures of crevasses and crunched-up ice.

Lauren cast her mind back to the snowmobile descent she had made of this same route with Sean, remembering now the many dozens of times they had made a route-finding error, piloting themselves into a dead end where they were blocked by an uncrossable crevasse. With the machines, rectifying such a mistake was simple and painless, just a question of turning the thing around and letting the engine power back up the slope to try another possible route.

But how would it be on foot? How many times could she ask her team to backtrack—always the most demoralising action under any circumstances—particularly as she would be asking them to backtrack
uphill
?

‘Sean, how much do you remember of the descent?' she asked him.

Sean looked down at the slope.

‘I think we tried to go through the centre of that ice fall.' He pointed to the feature which dominated the middle distance. ‘But we couldn't find a way through that. As I recall, we came back up a-ways and ended up scooting over to that far right wall and going down that gully.'

Lauren followed the line of his outstretched hand.

‘You're right,' she confirmed. ‘Do you think you could find the same way again?'

Sean considered the question for a while, trying to spot any familiar landmarks which would guide their way.

‘I can try,' he told her, ‘but it was a hell of a maze.'

By midafternoon they were penetrating the fractured terrain, weaving a trail beneath intimidating blocks of ice. One was shaped like a sail, another a soaring arch like a killer whale's fin. The team passed as quickly as they could beneath these obstacles, knowing that they could fall at any moment.

There was no conversation between them now, no room in their minds for anything but the total concentration needed to prevent a slip. Without crampons, the terrain was hazardous, each of them having to think twice about each footstep, searching for the crimps and rugosities in the surface of the ice which would give them purchase against a fall.

Good though Sean's navigation was, they twice ran themselves into a dead end, having to turn and tediously retrace their steps back up the slope to try their luck on a different line. But little by little they made a safe descent, Sean lowering the weaker members of the team by rope where the ground was too steep to tackle on foot.