Black Ice (41 page)

As they pitched the two tents that night, Lauren felt her heart bursting with pride. ‘We did nine miles today,' she told the team. ‘I think we should split open one of the chocolate bars to celebrate.'

She supervised the cutting of the bar—one of only three left from the first depot—each precious square taken with glee by the grateful recipient, cupping their gloved hands so as not to lose a single microscopic crumb.

No one mentioned that the knife used to cut the chocolate was the same one that had been used to amputate Frank's fingers just twenty-four hours before.

Frank got a bonus in addition to his square—the silver paper filled with fragments of chocolate, a gesture which had him beaming from ear to ear as Mel checked his fingers.

‘No infection,' she told him. ‘Looks like you're going to keep your hand.'

That night Lauren wrote in her diary:

Anything is possible when the human spirit wants. Frank has reminded us that we are all lucky to be alive. I feel right now that we can overcome anything.

Lauren had saved her chocolate, wanting to delay the ecstasy of the moment when its taste would be hers. As soon as the last torch was turned off, she placed it in her mouth, using her tongue to position the softening square against her palate for what seemed to be hours. Long after the actual square had dissolved, she held a mouthful of the chocolate-flavoured liquid in her mouth, remembering how she had done the same thing eating pieces of Easter egg in bed as a child.

Two bars left. And a handful of cans. Some biscuits and a few packets of soup.

Forty-five miles to go.

92

The front left strut of the sledge broke the following morning. There was no particular knock or movement which precipitated it—it just snapped without warning while they were traversing a smooth piece of ground.

The effect was instant and dramatic, the broken strut causing the collapse of the front of the sledge, which dug straight into the ice, where it acted like a brake. The two occupants were tipped to one side, only just managing to hold onto their positions.

‘Hold it there!' Frank called out. ‘Problem.'

They carefully lifted the two men from the sledge while Sean inspected the damage.

‘Metal fatigue,' he announced. ‘Cracked straight through the tube. We got to think of a solution to this one or…' Lauren flashed him a warning glance—it wasn't going to help to frighten the two incapacitated men any more than necessary. ‘Well, we've got to think of a solution, and we
will
,' he finished lamely.

‘I had a feeling this would happen.' Frank's voice was fearful. ‘How bad is it?'

‘It's a setback,' Lauren told him, ‘nothing more. This is the type of problem Sean and Murdo solve for breakfast.'

‘If we had any breakfast,' Murdo added despondently.

‘Well … my magic carpet ride had to hit the buffers somewhere along the way.' Richard lay back against a convenient ridge of ice and closed his eyes, as if by blacking out the scene he could make it disappear.

Murdo came to Sean's assistance as he struggled to remove the broken strut; the others left them to it, taking the chance to rest.

‘What do you think?' Sean asked him as they looked despairingly at the fractured metal.

Murdo shook his head. ‘This is finished. Even if we could drill a hole in the tube, we wouldn't be able to fix it back onto the frame.'

They lifted the top part of the sledge up.

‘Trouble is,' Murdo observed, ‘without the left strut the whole platform is going to be tilted on an angle. And the right strut will be taking all the stress.'

Sean nodded in agreement. ‘That won't last long. We have to prop up the left side. But with what?'

They considered the various items that had been salvaged from the fire, aware as they did so that their options were frighteningly thin.

‘How about this?' Sean proposed, holding up a piece of door frame they had rescued from the base for firewood. ‘This has the rigidity for the job. If we saw it to the right length and bore a couple of holes at each end, we can wire it to the frame.'

‘We can give it a try.'

Using all the tools at their disposal, they took it in turns to saw through the door frame. The saw was blunt, making the job a tedious one as the cutting edge bit toothlessly into the hardwood, but by persevering for an hour or more they had a section of wood which matched the missing strut.

Next they began to bore a hole at each end of the new strut, again sharing the work as their fingers froze after ten minutes of handling the knife. The corkscrew was found to be the most effective attachment, combined with a bit of judicious probing and trimming with the small knife blade.

‘Let's put it into position,' Sean suggested, ‘see how it's going to work.'

They raised the damaged section of the sledge until the new upright could be slid into place. A bit of jiggling to and fro had it more or less in the right position.

‘You think we can attach it well enough?' Murdo asked. ‘I get the feeling bootlaces are going to wear through mighty quickly.'

‘I've got some wire,' Sean told him with a smile. ‘Been saving it.'

‘You got some
wire
? Where the hell did you get that from?'

Sean slid off his goretex outer coat with the air of a magician about to reveal a favourite trick. He held the hood out for Murdo to feel.

‘Check it out,' he told him. ‘I had some wire put into the rim around this hood; helps keep it in shape when the wind's really going.'

‘You did? I wondered how come your hood was never flapping in your face.'

Murdo ran his fingers along the seam, feeling the stiff cord of metal which ran inside. He had to smile at the luck which had given them this break; that tiny piece of attention to detail—an equipment customisation Sean had had carried out in the States before leaving—was about to give Frank and Richard another chance on the sledge. The strut would never have held with a bootlace alone.

Sean nicked the edge of the seam with the knife blade and carefully pulled the wire from the hood. He handed it to Murdo to test its strength.

‘Perfect,' he smiled. ‘This could almost have been made for the job. What other secrets you got tucked away?'

‘Just a small modification,' Sean shrugged it off, but the others could see how pleased he was to have come up with the solution.

They threaded the wire through the lowest of the two holes and wound it several times tightly around the frame so that the base of the door frame was bound tightly to the runner. Then they ran the wire up the outside of the new strut—to avoid having to sever it—and repeated the procedure at the top.

When they had finished, the wood was secure enough that Murdo couldn't budge it by hand.

‘It's not very aesthetically pleasing,' Sean told Lauren, ‘but I think it will resist for some time.'

‘Can I sit on it?'

Lauren lowered herself cautiously onto the sledge, letting her weight press down on the frame. The strut held its position perfectly, absorbing the weight and keeping the front of the sledge true.

‘Lie down,' Sean told her. ‘Let's see if it'll tow.'

They dragged Lauren back and forth for a few minutes until they had satisfied themselves the repair hadn't caused some unforeseen towing problem; then it was time for Richard and Frank to be helped back on.

As they pulled away, Lauren thanked Sean and Murdo profusely. She was acutely aware that without their shared genius for improvisation the sledge would have probably remained where it had broken … and the two patients with it.

The two men were pensive as they bounced and rocked on the back of the sledge, no cry of protest coming from either even though Richard's legs and feet were now so swollen he had to be physically lifted on and off his transport, and Frank's hand was still giving him hell.

They had got away with this one, Lauren mused, but what if another strut failed? Her mind began to chew away as they strained at the ropes. What if a runner snapped?

Lauren's heart skipped a beat at every groan and creak from the sledge, fearing with almost every bump that metal fatigue would render another vital part of the structure useless.

One thing was for sure: there was a limit to how many times Sean and Murdo could pull off the impossible.

Forty miles to go … Lauren knew it would take a miracle now.

93

A big storm was coming, Lauren was sure; their weather luck couldn't hold out for ever.

The first signs were small ones, the tiny clues which don't mean much on their own, but which collectively add up to a big flashing warning light.

‘You might think this is a bit crazy,' Richard told Lauren as they set out on their first hauling session that morning, ‘but I think there's about to be a shift in the weather. My legs ache like hell when the pressure drops. Right now, they're both throbbing like a bastard.'

Lauren viewed the horizon, wishing for the hundredth time that she had managed to rescue her binoculars from the fire. As yet she could see no evidence of any dramatic shift in the weather, but something told her, as she breathed the bitter morning air into her lungs, that Richard was right. There
was
a detectable change in the air, a pressure shift which could only add up to bad news.

‘We could be heading for some serious weather,' she warned the team. ‘Let's get some miles ticked off while we still can.'

Obediently, they put in an extra effort, covering almost two miles in the next hour. The light conditions were extraordinary, with no sign of the sun, but a luminous, almost green glow bouncing off the ice around them. Huge snowflakes fell, dancing like thistledown from the sky, so big they seemed artificial.

‘Hollywood snow,' Sean called it, holding out his hand and admiring with wonder the feather-sized flakes which landed on it. ‘If you wrote it into a script, no one would believe it.'

The gentle snowfall stopped by eleven, giving way to an altogether less attractive bombardment: pea-sized granules of hail raking down from charcoal-grey clouds which were now scudding past with alarming speed.

Way out to the west, perhaps as much as one hundred miles off but already visible, Lauren could just detect the telltale black line of the incoming storm where it was playing on the horizon.

‘Shouldn't we camp?' Mel asked Lauren as they took a break. ‘We won't be able to get the tents up if this wind gets any nastier.'

Lauren considered the terrain. ‘I'd agree if this wasn't such an exposed place,' she told her. ‘We're on relatively high ground. See where the glacier dips down a little over there, about a mile away? Let's get there before we camp.'

The team knew it was a device, Lauren's tactic to get them to put in that extra mile—that there was little more protection where they were going than the place where they stood. But, nevertheless, they still did it, putting their backs into the business of hauling the sledge, biting their tongues to prevent themselves from crying out loud as the hated harness dug its way ever more deeply into the sores on their hips.

Lauren called a halt. The wind was force four to five, not unusual for any Antarctic day, but right on the edge of feasibility when it came to putting up a dome tent or two.

‘Let's do it fast,' she ordered, one eye on the scudding clouds, hoping she hadn't left it too late.

As they removed their outer layers of gloves to handle the fiddly components of the tents, the storm made its preliminary introductions, a harassing wind springing up, twisting and shrieking through the ice towers which stood around them.

Lauren and Sean pulled their goretex tent from its stuff sack, the fabric immediately coming alive and threatening to rip itself out of their hands.

‘One person on the guy rope at all times!' Lauren called over to the others. ‘You let go of that tent and it'll be blown a thousand miles.'

Lauren handed the vital guy rope to Richard, the only role which he could usefully perform given his lack of mobility. He held it tight, still sitting on the sledge, his hood pulled down low around his face to give some relief from the pounding hail.

Sean screwed the kevlar poles together and began to thread them through the eyelets on the strengthened ribs of the dome. It was hit-and-miss work with the tent billowing and flapping fit to rip, but in ten minutes or so they had the main poles in place and the fabric arched into the characteristic igloo shape which gave it its phenomenal strength.

As soon as the tent was shaped up, Lauren got the front zip undone and began the task of transferring Frank from the sledge into the interior. Trial and error had taught her that this was the only practical way to weight down a dome tent while the crucial task of fitting the flysheet was being completed.

In other parts of the planet a rucksack or two would suffice; here it had to be twice the weight or the tent would simply take off, contents and all.

‘Help me get Frank in there!' she called over to Mel and Murdo, seeing they were struggling to hold the tent down.

‘What?' someone screamed back, the wind had blown Lauren's words away.

Sean rushed over to help them, joining them just as a particularly vicious gust whipped the guy rope through the air. It lashed across Mel's face, drawing the hardened nylon across her skin with a stinging impact which felt like she had been bullwhipped.

‘Shit!' Mel fell to the glacier as the whiplash of intense pain seared into her.

Sean took her place on the tent and put all his body weight onto it to keep it in one piece as Murdo shuffled forward to try and open the zip. Crouching over the tent, he was blown onto his side by another evil gust as he tried, and failed, to jiggle the zip tab up its track.

Sean looked over at Mel, who was still sitting on her backside after the shock of the impact; red spots of blood were seeping through her fingers, even now beginning to stain the perfect white surface she was sitting on. Another gust; now the tiny drops of red were no longer falling straight down but shooting off horizontally in a fine spray.