The helicopter swung in a tight circle and headed out over the sea ice.
Rooker needed every particle of concentration for flying and navigation by instruments alone. It was like being airborne in a bowl of milk. There was no room for even the faintest flicker of uncertainty or self-doubt. He eased the machine into a steady ascent and at 110 metres a dirty-yellow glimmer began to suffuse the milk. A few seconds later they rose out of the fog bank into thin sunshine. The fog undulated beneath them, a billowing cloud that stretched to the lemon-yellow horizon. Fourteen miles to the northeast somewhere lay
Polar Star
.
Rooker lifted the pilot’s headset and pulled it over his head. At once Niki’s thick voice filled his ears with directions. It was good. He was dead on course for the ship. ‘The Zodiac is launched. They look for you on the ice,’ Niki said.
‘Thank you, Kandahar.’
He had a second’s respite now to look over his shoulder to Alice. Her eyes were starting, and her face was shiny with sweat and tears.
‘It’s coming. Help me.’
‘Hold on.’
‘I can’t. Stop. Please, stop.’
The wind was getting up. Below them, the mist was now streaming in thin tatters. Rooker caught a glimpse of the ridged pack ice far beneath. Under his layers of matted clothing a cold sweat chilled his back. He swallowed and eased the Squirrel back into a descent. The ice loomed up to meet him. He glimpsed ragged frozen waves and searched desperately for a smoother trough between them. They were skimming over a solid blue-grey sea. Then he caught sight of a flat grey saucer that measured little more in diameter
than the Squirrel itself. Sweating, hardly able to breathe, he hovered and with a wordless prayer put the helicopter down. It rocked alarmingly but the ice surface held.
Alice was making low noises in her throat. He told her to lie back across the rear seats and bend her knees. Struggling in the awkward space, they dragged down her torn windproofs and soaked underlayers.
Rooker shouted into the headset mouthpiece, ‘
Polar Star
,
Polar Star
?’
He could see the baby’s head. It was wet and black, and netted with blood and mucus. Alice was staring and pushing and as she did so the oval of head swelled in the birth canal.
A Spanish voice broke in on him: ‘NZ two-zero, do you read me?’
‘I read you.’
‘What is happening, please?’
‘The baby is being born. I can see the head.’
‘Okay. Listen to me. Let her push. Put your left hand on the baby’s head, use your right hand to support the mother’s tissues underneath.’
It was the
Polar Star
’s doctor. Rook did as he was told but he could see that Alice’s body knew what to do. She had stopped groaning and the terror had faded out of her eyes. Now there was a fierce light of absolute determination. A contraction passed and she rested with her chin sunk on her chest. The doctor’s voice crackled in his ear but Rooker ignored it.
‘Good.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m here. Wait for the next one, then push.’
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Here it comes.’ Her jaw clenched and her eyes squeezed shut. Through his hands Rook felt the clench of muscles as the baby’s head was born. He cupped his hand to support and protect it, gazing down in wonder at the tiny features. He had nothing within reach with
which to wipe the blood and mucus from its nasal passages, so he gently did it with the tips of his fingers.
Here was a new person, a whole new life beginning in this instant.
He had never known anything so natural and simple, and yet so momentous. His heart was swelling and he had to stare even harder to keep his tears from blinding him.
‘Is it there?’ Alice whispered.
‘I can see its face.’
‘Again,’ she panted, then gave a long wail of triumphant effort.
Gently, with his left hand, Rooker eased out the slippery hunched shoulders and the folded limbs. The baby lay in his two palms, wet with blood and amniotic fluid. She opened her deep, dark eyes and gave a tiny ragged cry.
‘It’s a girl.’
‘Margaret,’ Alice said.
They were both weeping.
‘NZ two-zero, can you hear me?’ the insistent voice went on. ‘Come in, please.’
‘Yes,’ Rooker croaked. He lifted the tiny creature and laid her on Alice’s belly.
Alice cupped her hands round her child’s head and bottom, and cradled her close to her body’s warmth, and he stripped off his parka and fleece jacket and tucked it over them. Alice was laughing as well as crying. ‘Meg,’ she was murmuring.
Beyond the windscreen of the Squirrel the mist rose like steam as the sun strengthened. The ice all around their small saucer and as far as he could see was chopped into frozen waves and crazily welded floes. But there was no time for more than the briefest glance to get his bearings. Rook looked for the helicopter’s emergency survival kit and found it stored against the fuselage behind the rear seats. He broke the seal, tore off the lid and saw what he was looking for.
He shook out the silvery folds of an insulated bivouac shelter and wrapped that over and round the baby as well. ‘The baby’s born,’ he said into the headset.
‘Are they both all right?’
‘Yes.’ It felt like the most significant word he had ever uttered. ‘What do I do now?’
He listened as the doctor advised him how to deliver the placenta and did exactly as he was told.
‘Don’t try to cut the cord,’ the voice ordered. So he wrapped the baby and the cord and the afterbirth in a warm bloody muddle against Alice’s body, and wound them in clothes and the folds of the shelter.
‘Now you fly them out to us,’ the doctor said. ‘Good luck.’
Rooker quickly leaned over Alice and looked into her eyes. ‘You did well. Are you ready now?’
‘I’m ready.’ Her face was soft and beautiful, and full of trust.
‘Good. Let’s go.’
Anxiety about what he had to do next was rising in his mouth like bile. He swung across into the pilot’s seat and opened the door to clamber down on to the pack. He couldn’t even try to lift off again without checking to see how much ice had formed on the Squirrel. And what he saw next made his throat close and his hands shake. There was a dark, serpentine thread winding through the ivory and grey monotony of the pack ice. It was a polynya, a little crack through which water came welling up. The weight of the Squirrel had depressed the flat floe and the sea water had flooded up over the skids. And now it had frozen over them in a thin, glassy layer of pure menace.
Mist drifted gently over the world of ice like a legion of ghosts.
He climbed back into the pilot’s seat, shivering without
his outer clothes. He started up the engines and uttered a soundless, wordless prayer. All he could do was use the engine power to break the seal of ice and pray to God that both skids came free at the same time. If one came loose before the other and the machine tilted by more than fifteen degrees, the blades would strike the ice and send them all cartwheeling into oblivion.
Rook pulled on the headset once again. Alice lay wrapped in her silver cocoon behind him.
‘Preparing for take-off,
Polar Star
,’ he said through clenched teeth.
Here we go.
He raised the collective lever and the machine trembled and tried to lift off. At once it began to list to the left and he hastily lowered the lever again. The right skid was now free but the left was still solid. The only option left to him was to try again with less power but more yaw. He swallowed hard and gave the left pedal almost full deflection as the engine screamed and the machine juddered and vibrated. Alice said something in a voice sharp with alarm. Suddenly the trapped skid tore free of the ice, and the machine soared into the air and spun through 180 degrees to face in the direction they had come. It lurched and tilted crazily as Rooker fought the yaw pedals to regain control, but now they were airborne.
‘What’s happening?’ Alice screamed.
It was another five seconds before he could answer her. He gripped the stick and they rose steadily through the wreaths of mist.
When he did speak his voice was almost steady. ‘Nothing to worry about. Not the easiest take-off.’
He flew onwards. Then suddenly there was grey water in the distance, flecked with ice like foam, and dead ahead through the screen he saw the paler grey superstructure and
red funnels of the
Polar Star
. There was a black smudge down on the ice margin, surrounded by half a dozen tiny orange specks.
‘Look,’ he said and pointed.
He set the Squirrel down for the second time, a safe distance from the open water. The sailors were already running towards them across the waves of ice. Two of them were carrying the poles of a stretcher. They reached the helicopter and there was a babble of Spanish voices giving orders. Big gloved hands lifted Alice and the baby in their silver blanket, and laid them gently on the unfurled canvas of the stretcher.
‘Rook,’ she called, twisting her head to see him.
He rested his hand on her head as the phalanx hurried over the ice. ‘I’m here.’
‘Come back quickly.’
He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘You’ll be safe now.’
Another sailor was standing in the stern of the Zodiac. The big outboard motor was already revving and churning the iron-grey water of a lead in the ice. They reached the black rubber side of the dinghy. Sailors in float suits stepped and balanced all round them as they prepared to lift the stretcher. Alice fought to free one arm and caught Rooker’s wrist. She pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed it.
A wave of terrible emotion flooded over him.
He remembered the moment of purity and innocence amidst the panic as the baby was born. He wanted to sink down next to her stretcher and pull her into his arms, and tell her the truth and never have to run or hide or fight ever again. He wanted to hold her and the baby, and keep them safe from whatever the world could do. Most of all he wanted to tell her the truth.
He stood stock-still, ignoring the precarious ice and the
jostling sailors and their imprecations, not even noticing the cold any more. There were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks.
‘You will come as soon as you can? Rook?
Answer me
.’
He took a deep, burning, painful breath. ‘Alice. I can’t follow you. It isn’t right. I am not right.’
Sailors’ arms and legs kept getting in the way, blocking their sight.
‘You must.’
He lowered his voice. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done. A man died because of me. I am a murderer.’
There wasn’t even a beat. ‘I don’t care,’ she screamed. ‘I don’t care what or who you are. I love you.’
But it was too late. They prised her hands away from him and folded her into her coverings. Rook stepped back and watched the sailors lifting her stretcher and placing it in the bottom of the Zodiac. She was sobbing and trying to sit up, clutching Meg, and there were huge boots clumping around her as the men clawed their way off the ice and perched themselves on the pontoon, until only one remained on the ice.
He put his arm across Rooker’s shoulders. ‘
Adiós
,’ he said, not unkindly, and pushed him back towards the helicopter. Then without another glance he leaped to join his companions. The boatman immediately opened the throttle and the Zodiac nosed away through the ice-thick water. Rooker couldn’t see anything of her, but he didn’t take his eyes off the dinghy until it reached the ship’s side. The seamen clambered up the metal stairway, a line of fat orange matchstick men, but the dinghy itself and the boatman and their cargo were winched straight up on to the deck of
Polar Star
. Only then did Rooker finally, slowly, turn away.
He strapped himself into the pilot’s seat and pulled on
the headset. With absolute brutality he made himself think of nothing but what must be done to make a safe return to Kandahar. Batteries, fuel pump. Start up both engines. The Squirrel’s blades spun again. ‘NZ two-zero, airborne,’ he muttered.
The voice of
Polar Star
’s radio operator came right back at him. ‘Good luck,’ he repeated.
Alice saw the ship’s mast and funnels looming crazily over her, and there were faces and the backs of heads, then the cream-painted walls and booming stairways of the interior. Meg’s tiny wet body lay in a sticky morass on her belly but she was alive, stirring, and her cry was a bleat that sounded louder in her mother’s head than all the shouting in Spanish and the racing footsteps and banging of heavy steel doors.
An indoor draught of hot air hit Alice full in the face. It stank of oil and paint and food and disinfectant, so much stronger than anything she had smelled in months that she almost retched. Another door opened ahead of her and she was borne into a clean, quiet white space. Spanish voices told her to be ready and then she was lifted on to a bed. A man’s face came into view. He looked odd until she realised that it was only because he was soap-pink, and plump, and clean-shaven.
‘You have given us quite a big surprise,’ the doctor said.
When the cord was tied and cut, and Alice had been stitched, and Meg had been examined and warmed on a heated pad, and wrapped in linen cloths and warm towels, the doctor gave her back to Alice to hold. She was entirely swaddled except for her small, composed face. For what seemed a very long time, suspended between awe and amazement, Alice studied her stipple of black eyelashes and the scoop of flesh that formed her nose and the precise bud of her mouth. A jerky tape of the helicopter and Rook’s stricken
face played inside her head, and shock and relief made the breath catch in her throat as she held the white bundle close.
‘I think all right, both of you, to put you on the aeroplane,’ the doctor pronounced at last.
Alice lifted her head to stare at him. Pieces of the world, little fragments of awareness, were sliding back into place. She realised that she could hear the throb of the ship’s engines. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Santa Ana,’ the doctor said, staring a little. ‘And then, I think they make you a flight to Santiago. We have no facility on the ship…’