Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  Icequake

  Crawford Kilian

  © Crawford Kilian 1998

  Crawford Kilian has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by toExcel, a division of Kaleidoscope Software Inc.

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – Shacktown

  Chapter 2 – Beardmore

  Chapter 3 – The Shelf

  Chapter 4 – The Helicopter

  Chapter 5 – The Greenhouse

  Chapter 6 – The Otter

  Chapter 7 – Laputa

  Chapter 8 – Vostok

  Chapter 9 – Pressure

  Chapter 10 – Winter

  Chapter 11 – Sortie

  Chapter 12 – Fire

  Chapter 13 – Traverse

  Chapter 14 – Iceway

  Chapter 15 – North

  Dedication

  To all the Kilians, and to the memory of James De Mille (1833-1880), Canada’s first explorer of the fabled Antarctic.

  New Shackleton Station Personnel, January 1985.

  Major Hugh Adams, 50, (NZ), Base Leader

  Dr Carter Benson, 38, (UK), Assistant leader, geophysicist

  Penelope Constable, 32, (US), Journalist

  Dr Ray Crandall, 35, (CAN), Computer operations

  Suzy Dolan, 37, (AUS), Assistant cook

  Terence Dolan, 38, (AUS), Cook

  Gordon Ellerslee, 32, (CAN), Drilling engineer

  Dr Will Farquhar, 29, (UK), Glaciologist

  George Hills, 42, (CAN), Carpenter

  Dr Steven Kennard, 34, (CAN), Seismologist

  Reginald Lewis, 29, (AUS), Electrician

  Sean McNally, 27, (UK), Climatologist (student)

  Alfred Neal, 44, (US), Pilot/aircraft mechanic

  Dr Herman Northrop, 41, (CAN), CANDU reactor operations

  Howard O’Rourke, 28, (CAN), Vehicle driver/mechanic

  Simon Partington, 30, (NZ), Vehicle driver/mechanic

  Dr Gerard Roche, 33, (CAN), Geophysicist

  Bruce Robinson, 26, (AUS), Radio operator/technician

  Dr Colin Smith, 37, (AUS), Meteorologist

  Jeanne Taylor, 23, (NZ), Glaciologist (student)

  Donald Treadwell, 39, (UK), Stores clerk

  Timothy Underwood, 27, (CAN), Seismologist (student)

  Dr Katerina Varenkova, 42, (USSR), Physician

  Thomas Vernon, 38, (NZ), Diesel mechanic

  Dr Benjamin Whitcumb, 30, (US), Palaeontologist

  Dr Max Wilhelm, 40, (NZ), Geologist

  Roger Wykstra, 29, (AUS), Radio operator/technician

  Chapter 1 – Shacktown

  Penny Constable woke up suddenly and looked at her wristwatch. The glowing orange light-emitting diodes told her it was 0503 hours, Thursday, February 7, 1985. With any luck, it would be her last day in Shacktown.

  The cubicle was dark. In the bunk below, Jeanne Taylor moved restlessly in her sleep. The hut’s humidifier was whining away in the corridor outside, but the air was still too dry for comfort; Penny’s nose was stuffy, and her tongue felt thick. She reached up to touch the cold, rough plywood ceiling. A few metres above the roof of the hut were the curved steel plates that covered Tunnel B, and above that was the empty whiteness of the Ross Ice Shelf. To the right and left of Tunnel B, separated by metres of solid ice, were the other tunnels of New Shackleton Station; to walk the full length of the station, from the end of the snow mine to the doors of the hangar, took only five minutes. After thirty-seven days here she knew every square centimetre of the place, and she hated it all.

  Insomnia in the Antarctic was usually a problem only for people wintering over. The weather had been so bad, though, throughout this austral summer, that almost no one had been able to get outside. Over half of Shacktown’s normal summer population hadn’t even arrived this year: bad weather and impossible radio conditions had forced many scientists to postpone their projects, and many of those who had managed to reach the station were stymied by lack of equipment or support personnel. Penny and Jeanne, a student glaciologist, had waited in Christchurch for over a week last December before a break in the radio blackout had enabled their Air New Zealand DC-10 to leave for McMurdo Station; thanks to the same break, Shacktown had sent its Twin Otter to McMurdo to pick up the two women and some supplies.

  Since New Year’s Day, however, the radio blackout had continued almost without a pause, and ‘katabatic’ winds, raging down the glacier valleys from the polar plateau, had brought day after day of Condition One: blizzards, bitter cold and whiteouts. Only Gerry Roche and Carter Benson, the geophysicists, had been happy to observe the massive solar flares and resulting magnetic storms that had caused the radio blackout and even knocked out polar-orbit communications satellites.

  Blackouts, whiteouts. And a handful of grey-faced troglodytes trapped under the ice.

  Penny could still savour a sour enjoyment of the irony of her predicament. As a little girl in Connecticut she’d loved being snowbound, safe inside the artificial worlds of her home and a book, knowing that outside was a cold anarchy held at bay. So when the Ottawa office of the Commonwealth Antarctic Research Programme had asked Science Progress magazine for a staff writer to visit New Shackleton, she’d asked at once to be sent. Even the bad political climate between the US and the rest of the Western world hadn’t discouraged her. CARP was doing important work, after all, work that was almost unreported in the States; she’d be the first American journalist in years to cover the story.

  Penny turned in her sleeping bag, trying to find a warm spot. A fat lot of good she’d accomplished. The only really big story had been the Roche Event in early January, when the earth’s magnetic field had abruptly vanished and then begun to grow again, reversed in polarity. She still remembered Gerry Roche’s expression when his magnetograph had begun to trace straight lines, like the last cardiogram of an old friend. But that story would be ancient history by the time she got home.

  There was Steve Kennard’s work, of course. The Canadian seismologist had confirmed the fact that East and West Antarctica stood on separate plates of the earth’s crust, with the boundary between them running through the Transantarctic Mountains. But he also believed a major earthquake was due somewhere in those mountains (despite the fact that Antarctica was known to be seismically quiet) — and he even thought such a quake might cause a surge of the ice sheet into the Southern Ocean. Good material for the National Inquirer, maybe, but not for a serious science magazine. Steve hadn’t been very helpful, anyway; he was suspicious that someone like Penny would sensationalise his theories before he’d published them in some bastion of orthodoxy like Nature.

  Even that story wasn’t really new. In her already-packed kit bag Penny had a draft article in which she pointed out that ice-sheet surges had been talked about since the early 1960s; people in the US Defence Department had even discussed the idea of starting such a surge with hydrogen bombs. If the theory had appealed to the people who’d given the world Vietnam, Chile and the Bay of Figs, it was pretty surely nonsense.

  What else? The Shelf Drilling Project? That was just a rerun of what the Americans had done back in the 70s. Will Farquhar, the station’s glaciologist, and Jeanne had learned a lot about the Shelf and the almost lifeless sea beneath it. but nothing really surprising.

  Ben Whitcumb’s fossils? Great, if you really cared about therapsid populations in the Permian West Antarctic. She was being unfair, she knew; Ben, the sole American scientist here, was a prick, an all-too-typical modern US
careerist right down to his crewcut hair and right-wing politics. His sermons on President Wood and the official American policy of Dynamic Self-Reliance had been as boring as his lectures on therapsid endothermic ability. Ben was the kind of scientist she’d come here to escape.

  There was Herm Northrop, the Canadian engineer who kept the whole operation going with his CANDU reactor. Sure, it was controversial. The reactor was too powerful for the station’s needs; the Canadians had supplied it — and Herm — more for propaganda than in the interests of research. But it was still an elegant, exquisitely automated feat of high technology, and Herm had been glad to explain it to her. She felt good about the article she’d written on him and the CANDU.

  After that, though, Shacktown offered only human-interest stories: Terry and Suzy Dolan, the Australian cooks who squabbled all day and screwed all night; Katerina Varenkova, the Russian exchange physician who chain-smoked Rothmans, beat everyone at chess and was homesick for Vostok, the Soviet base where her husband Ivan was this year’s station leader; Al Neal, Shacktown’s pilot and chief aircraft mechanic, an ex-US Navy flyer who’d been down here on the ice for over ten years — the Antarctic equivalent of a bush pilot; Don Treadwell, Shacktown’s only black, a Jamaican whose chief purpose was to prove that the Commonwealth still included some non-white nations, but who was nonetheless an extremely competent stores clerk and a man who didn’t need the crutch of machismo that most of the others hobbled around on. They were good people, interesting people, but Science Progress didn’t want character sketches.

  An objective report on the station itself would sound like anti-Commonwealth propaganda. They didn’t call it ‘Shacktown’ for nothing: the place was a mishmash of sophistication and sloppiness. Much of its scientific equipment was the most advanced in the world, but had been supplied as much for publicity purposes as for research. However, most of the station’s transport had been scrounged from the Americans’ cast-offs at McMurdo, or salvaged from Scott Base, which the Kiwis had closed after joining CARP in ’82. Even the design of the station was obsolete; the Americans had tried under-surface installations in the 1960s, and gone on to more efficient designs for surface buildings.

  Colin Smith, the station’s meteorologist, had predicted clear weather for today. If he was right, Al Neal would fly to McMurdo to ask for a Hercules to evacuate them all. Otherwise they might be stuck here for weeks more — and that might mean months, the whole winter, marooned like old Shackleton’s crew on Elephant Island. She’d be glad to leave, but sorry to go home: home was power failures, ‘security’ investigations, 50 per cent annual inflation; home was a growing fear as everyone began to realise that there wasn’t enough of anything to go around anymore, except for the military and the police and the bureaucrats and the corporations and the Ben Whitcumbs…

  Now she was really awake. It was 0515; breakfast wouldn’t be ready until 0600. She decided to get up and go to the dome to see if the weather really had cleared up. But Jeanne beat her to it. Penny heard her groan a little, then get up and shuffle down the corridor to the women’s latrine.

  Unzipping her bag, Penny swung down to the floor and gasped like a sunbather plunging into cold water. She switched on the overhead light and shivered as she pulled wool pants and a heavy shirt over her waffle-weave underwear. (Something else to hate: you couldn’t sleep naked.) Fur-lined Wellingtons went over thick socks; in most of the huts the temperature gradient was so steep you could wipe sweat off your face while your feet went numb with the cold.

  Women and married couples (this year only the Dolans) were housed at the end of Hut 6; the women’s latrine was a buffer between what the men called the Harem and Eunuchsville, the rest of the dormitory huts. The latrine stank, as always. Jeanne was crouched over one of the toilets, throwing up.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” Jeanne mumbled. “Go away. Go back to bed.”

  “Should I go get Katerina? She’s just down the hall — e

  “Just leave me bloody well alone, Pen.”

  “I will, as soon as I pee.”

  That was about par for the course these days, Penny thought as she sat delicately on a freezing-cold toilet seat. Hugh Adams, the station leader, did a good job in keeping people as busy as possible, but there were still too many empty hours: cliques formed and broke up, everyone snapped at everyone else, people went looking for arguments or retreated into sullenness or sleep.

  Feeling sullen herself, she left Jeanne and walked up the corridor. A short, insulated passageway led to Hut 5, another dormitory; from there, service tunnels ran to Tunnels A and C. She turned left and walked to Tunnel C, where most of the labs and offices were housed.

  No one was around. Much of the equipment in the glaciology and seismology labs was already crated, ready for shipment home. In the geophysics lab, a few instruments still hummed and clicked. Although the fluorescent lights were on as always, the place looked odd; Penny realised after a moment that genuine sunlight was reflecting down the spiral stairway from the dome. Her boots clanging on the steps, she hurried up towards the light.

  The dome was a double-layered Plexiglas hemisphere atop a tower three metres across and standing four metres above the surface. The work area was a muddle of electronic equipment, clipboards, coffee cups, technical manuals and cameras. Two wooden folding chairs filled most of the floor space; Penny sat down in one and looked around.

  Low in the northeast the sun blazed. The sky was a deep, saturated blue, all the stronger for its contrast with the bright red-orange of Shacktown’s few surface buildings. Those buildings were heavily drifted over on their lee sides, and the empty oil drums lining the ski-way were scarcely visible. Nearby, twin radio masts gleamed against the sky; farther away, beyond the smooth curve of the hangar roof, was the smaller tower of the drilling project. Ventilation pipes, crusted with ice, steamed just above the surface. According to some gauges on a workbench in front of her, the temperature outside was -25°C, air pressure was 1240 millibars and there was no wind at all.

  This was the first time since New Year’s morning that Penny had seen her surroundings in full sunlight. She felt more cheated than ever. To the north, east and west the Shelf extended to the horizon: a vast plain of ice, hundreds of metres thick, as large as France. On the flight from McMurdo she’d seen something of the Shelf’s immensity and its varied beauty; even here, from this low vantage point, it revealed much of itself. In one place shadows clustered blue-black against a low ridge; in another the sun gleamed on a field of sastrugi, wind-carved ice sculptures that sometimes stood taller than a man. Ice crystals glittered, catching the sun for an instant as they condensed somehow from the desert-dry air.

  To the south the horizon crumpled into the pinkish-beige peaks of the Queen Maud Range, part of the Transantarctic Mountains. In the clear air they seemed much closer than forty kilometres; the sun was so bright on their glaciers and snowfields that it hurt to look at them. Due south of the station was Shackleton Glacier; a little to the west, but invisible from here, was Axel Heiberg, the steep glacier up which Amundsen had driven his dog teams to the pole. And off to the east, two hundred kilometres or more, was the great Beardmore, which Scott had struggled up and down on his doomed journey. Beyond the mountains, she knew, was the polar plateau, the greatest desolation in the world.

  But she had seen no more than a glimpse of all this through the scratched windscreen of the Twin Otter and the blurred Plexiglas of the dome. What she would really remember would be blowing snow, grey and dense, racing past the dome in a screaming wind. This clear, sunlit stillness was lovely but transient; the real Antarctic was fluid, chaotic and meaninglessly violent.

  *

  On her way to the mess hall, she made a detour to the greenhouse, down at the end of Tunnel C. The hut that housed it had originally been intended for storage, but the first station crew had been full of plant lovers. They had smuggled in sacks of potting soil and packets of seeds, and had later added kitchen com
post, discarded soil samples from geological surveys and sawdust. After four years the greenhouse was dense and lush, the envy of other polar stations. Under fluorescent lamps, flowers, houseplants and vegetables grew in flats on tiered shelves or in pots made from soup cans.

  Unlike most of the huts, the greenhouse was so well insulated that there was little temperature difference between floor and ceiling, and it was the only place in Shacktown — except for the kitchen — that was reasonably humid. As the pleasantest part of the station, it normally had plenty of visitors at all hours, but this morning it was deserted.

  Penny was glad to be away from the smells of urine, sweat and tobacco that filled the rest of the station. Ignoring a neatly printed sign that said ‘Leave the fucking tomatoes fucking well alone!’, she rubbed a tomato leaf to luxuriate in its pungency and the memories it evoked of hot summers. She sighed, and continued on her way.

  The mess hall was a long, narrow room that took up almost half of Hut 2. Its pale-green walls were filmed with grease; the only decorations were two big photomurals of rural New Zealand and a bad oil portrait of Sir Ernest Shackleton. The place was crowded with battered chairs and tables; the ceiling was low and stained by countless leaks. A steam table separated the room from the kitchen, where Terry and Suzy Dolan were noisily preparing breakfast. Today’s house-mouse was Sean McNally, but he wasn’t around; probably he was down in the snow mine, feeding the melter. At the other end of the mess hall, a door led to the library-lounge, which was dominated by the big screen of a videotape projector and by a map of the Antarctic on which Shacktown’s location was indicated by the words ANUS MUNDI, done in a fine italic hand.

  Penny walked into the mess hall, got a cup of coffee and sat down with Hugh Adams, Carter Benson and Al Neal, who were the only ones there. After a few mumbled greetings, Penny asked Al when he was leaving for McMurdo.