Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  Ben Whitcumb worked over fourteen hours straight in the tunnels. He went to bed at 0200 and fell asleep in his clothes, sitting up on the edge of his bunk. Geologist Max Wilhelm, his roommate, came in an hour later and gently stretched Ben out before climbing into the top bunk.

  Colin Smith spent most of the night in the dome, alternately making weather observations and trying to raise the helicopter on the old ANGRC-6 transceiver. Over the endless wind he often heard distant booms, rumbles and metallic clangs. Sometimes he almost persuaded himself that the noises were those of an approaching helicopter. They weren’t.

  Chapter 4 – The Helicopter

  The helicopter smelled of petrol. Al sat very still in his seat, catching his breath. He had been thrown pretty hard against his safety harness, and his ribs ached. Nothing was visible through the cracked windscreen but a boiling greyness of snow moving at 100 k.p.h. He unsnapped his harness and made sure the Search and Rescue and Homing distress signal was on. Not that it was likely to be picked up. Thank God for that brief contact with Shacktown — at least they’d have a rough idea of the helicopter’s location.

  “You all right, Al?” Will’s voice was almost lost in the wind. He looked dazed.

  “Sure. Been through worse.” He forced his body to relax. “How about you?”

  “A bit shaky. But I’m not hurt.”

  They got out of their seats and stumbled into the cabin. The smell of petrol was much stronger here. Al moved quickly from one person to the next, checking them over and getting them on their feet. No one was hurt, but they were all shaken up and slow to react.

  “Get your survival packs,” Al ordered. “Get your survival packs. Then get out.”

  “It’s cold,” Penny complained. “It’s cold out there. I want to stay here.”

  “Come on, Pen.” He gripped her shoulders, his hands clumsy in bear-paw mitts, and pulled her out of her seat. “We might have a fire. And if we don’t, we’ll freeze in here.” He thumped the wall. “Helicopter’s a heat sink.”

  The wind was almost as deafening as the surge had been. They groped their way out of the helicopter, each dragging a rucksack full of survival gear; Steve stubbornly brought his seismograph tapes and Penny’s camera as well. The surface here was a topographic nightmare of drifts and sastrugi, with nothing high enough to give shelter against the wind. There was some protection in the lee of the helicopter; they huddled there while Al slowly circled the crash site, up to his knees in drift. He glimpsed the pressure ridge as a ghostly line in the whiteout.

  “There,” he shouted, and started plodding along the helicopter’s skid track towards the ridge. It meant walking straight into the wind, but the others followed without a word, bent almost double to stay on their feet.

  It took them almost fifteen minutes to reach the ridge, though it was only a hundred metres away. In the lee of an almost-vertical mass of ice, Al, Tim and Steve zipped their three survival tents together while Will and the women crouched in a hollow nearby. Steve crawled into the tent; a few long minutes later it glowed orange from the light of a primus stove. The others went inside at once.

  The tent was scarcely high enough for them to move around in, even on all fours, and was just wide enough for them to lie side by side. Al assigned each of them a spot and told them to unroll their sleeping bags. “Then get your anoraks off and get into your bags. Two at a time; it’s too crowded for everyone to do it at once. Penny and Jeanne first.”

  Penny felt dreamily clumsy, but she managed. The sleeping bag seemed even colder than the outside, and for a long time she shivered convulsively. Almost like a high, she thought. Your brain goes off duty and your spine takes over.

  By the time everyone was settled, a pot of stew was steaming over the primus. The steam made frost crystals form on almost everything but the top of the tent, which was flapping violently in the wind.

  “Hoosh smells ready,” Steve said. Without getting out of his bag, he dextrously poured stew into plastic mugs and handed them round. “Get it down quick, while it’s hot.”

  It was unbelievably delicious, though Penny had trouble holding the mug still enough to drink from it. The heat from the stew thawed the frozen tears on her nose and upper lip. She gave back her mug for a refill, and when that was gone accepted a greasy bar of pemmican and some hard, sweetish biscuits. It hurt to eat — every breath made her fillings ache — but gradually she felt warmer. Her hands and feet began to hurt.

  Jeanne, lying between Penny and Will, said: “Will? Are we going to die?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “What?”

  “I said certainly not! Damn that flapping tent.”

  “Papa Al, is Will right?” Jeanne sounded very scared.

  “He’s right, House-mouse.” Al reached across Penny and patted Jeanne’s sleeping bag. “We’ll be fine. Shacktown knows where we are, and the SARAH is still transmitting from the helicopter. Soon as the wind drops, they’ll send out a Sno-Cat and we’ll go home in style.” In the light of the primus he looked very tired and old. “Finish your lunch and take a nap.”

  To save fuel Steve turned the primus down to a faint glow; the tent darkened. The wind’s noise lessened a little as snow drifted over them. No one said much. Jeanne went to sleep, cuddled against Will.

  Shivering in her bag, Penny tried to decide on an angle for the story. Do it ironically, she told herself. The brilliant seismologist surprised by the earthquake he’d predicted. The escape from one treacherous shelter to another, each in turn destroyed, until a flimsy nylon tent was all they had. And they would have to escape again, to the doubtful safety of Shacktown. Then where? It would make a grimly amusing story.

  She was suddenly aware that Al, lying beside her, was crying. She turned to him and touched his shoulder, trying to comfort him as he had comforted Jeanne. He was facing the wall of the tent; his weeping stopped at her touch, and he rolled over to face her. His eyelids were caked with ice.

  “I really messed us up, Penny,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. Too old for this kind of work. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  One by one they fell asleep despite the wind and the occasional tremor in the ice. Steve and Tim lay side by side on the far side of the tent from Al and Penny. Their faces were close together, and they spoke softly.

  “If McMurdo’s out of action,” Tim said, “we’re screwed. There’s nowhere else to go. At least nowhere the Otter could reach, especially in bad weather.”

  “I know.”

  “What’ll we do?”

  “Depends on how Shacktown survived the quake. If it’s okay, we can winter over.”

  “Steve, for God’s sake — you’ve got your bloody surge, and we’ve seen what it’s already done to the Shelf. It’s floating out to sea. How are we supposed to winter over on a goddamned iceberg?”

  “With luck.” Steve said nothing for a while. “If Shacktown isn’t habitable, we can still rig some kind of emergency shelter on the surface. If old Shackleton himself could do it, so can we.” He rubbed some of the frost from his moustache and beard. “Anyway, we’ve got more immediate problems. Go to sleep.”

  “I’m too hyper. And scared.”

  “Think about that nice can of beer I owe you.”

  “Hey, yeah. By the way, congratulations on your quake. Your reputation is made.”

  “Why thank you, thank you. I owe it all to my brilliant assistant… God, Tim, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it just beautiful?” They chuckled softly together, like boyish pranksters.

  Millions of tonnes of snow blew across the Shelf that afternoon. By 1500 the wind had increased until its roar made sleep impossible. The tent was not too cold, thanks to the shelter of the pressure ridge and the insulating layer of snow. Around 1600 Will went outside for some ice, which he melted to make tea and soup. They had their meal without saying much — the wind was too loud — and settled into their bags again.

  At 1700 the wind suddenly dro
pped. An occasional gust hummed over the ridge, but it was at least possible to talk.

  “I shouldn’t have had so much tea,” Penny said. “I’ve got to go.”

  “It’s the cold more than the tea,” Al said. “And the ladies room is right outside.” He was his old self again, calm and business-like. “Take the ice axe and chop yourself a little hole in the ridge, so you’re out of the wind. You can freeze your sphincter if you’re not careful.”

  “That’s not all I can freeze,” Penny muttered.

  “I’d better come, too,” Jeanne said.

  They had to dig their way out. The whiteout was fading, but it was still hard to find the horizon. A drift had built up over the helicopter until just one rotor was showing. The air was bitterly cold and full of snow. Penny chopped at the rock-hard ice until she had gouged a shallow niche. It seemed to take forever just to loosen her trousers, and pulling them down was agony. Jeanne squatted beside her. Their urine crackled and sputtered on contact with the ice, freezing almost instantly. When they crawled back inside, Will gave them each a hug.

  “Well,” he sighed, “if you two can do it, so can we.”

  Sobbing and giggling, Penny burrowed into her sleeping bag. “I n-n-never f-felt less p-p-penis envy in my life.”

  Inevitably the traffic in and out let a lot of snow into the tent. Much of it got into their sleeping bags, where it melted. Penny found herself shuddering uncontrollably and could scarcely hold the biscuits Will gave her.

  “We aren’t so b-badly off,” he told her. “When Bowers and Wilson and Ch-Cherry Garrard made their w-winter trip to Cape Crozier, they h-had to th-thaw their way into their bags w-with their own body heat, inch b-by inch.”

  “Get stuffed,” Penny moaned.

  By 1800 the wind had picked up again, and it blew all night. They slept, woke, ate and slept again. Penny dreamed she was in the tent and woke unable to tell dream from reality. There was always the wind, and sometimes muffled voices; there was the glow of the primus and the glitter of frost on the tent. Once during the night she wanted to reach up and touch the sloping wall of the tent, but didn’t; she was afraid that if she did the snow above them would collapse the tent and bury them alive.

  Silence woke them all a little before 0600 the next morning. After more stew, pemmican and tea, Al got two fluorescent-orange pennants out of the survival packs and went outside to plant them at the top of the pressure ridge. When he came back there was an odd, excited expression on his face.

  “Come on out. It’s clear and not too cold — no wind, anyway.”

  Everyone had full bladders, and followed him outside without much delay. While they stood or squatted by the wall of ice, they looked around. This side of the pressure ridge faced Grid South-West; the Shelf was a gently undulating white plain, gleaming white in the light of the sun. Even the buried helicopter scarcely stood out.

  “What the hell is this pressure ridge doing here?” Jeanne asked Will.

  “Dunno. Unless we’re right on a fracture zone — ”

  He looked as if he’d been hit. Then he floundered up the path Al had made to the top of the ridge. The others trailed after him, their breath crackling in the cold stillness, and stood in silence as they looked out towards Grid North-East.

  Less than twenty metres from where they stood, the drifted crags of the pressure ridge came to an end. Beyond them was a gap over two hundred metres wide, the bottom of which could have been seen only by standing nearer the edge than anyone cared to go. Across the gap the blue-white ice cliffs of the next island reflected the sun from a hundred great facets; at the top of the cliffs was a pressure ridge like the one they were standing on.

  “We could have flown right into this cliff if I’d been coming down a little more steeply,” Al said. “Or hit the ridge on the far side there, and gone all the way to the bottom.”

  As he spoke, a chunk of the opposite cliff — about forty metres thick, twenty metres high and a hundred metres long — creaked, snapped and fell. It must have hit relatively thin ice at the bottom and broken through it, because its impact threw a dazzling geyser of frozen spray high above the Shelf. The noise would have seemed very loud to them even twenty-four hours earlier.

  “And that could have happened to us last night,” Tim observed. “Or in the next thirty seconds, for that matter. We’d better get the hell away from here.”

  Al pointed Grid North. “There are the mountains. I’d say we’re only ten-fifteen kilometres Grid East of Shacktown. We could walk it.”

  “Might be hard going through the drifts,” Will said. They were already moving back down the ridge.

  “Sastrugi look bad,” Al said, “but the surface shouldn’t be too rough. Probably a good hard wind-crust in most places.”

  “What if we get another blow?” Tim asked. “Just stop and camp?”

  “Right. But we shouldn’t need to. Ought to be home and dry before suppertime.”

  “I’m game,” Penny said. “Anything’s better than soaking in that bag.”

  It took fifteen minutes to take down the tent and pack their gear. Five minutes later they were walking past the buried helicopter, with Al and Steve in the lead. Al had been right; the wind had compacted the snow into a hard crust, slippery in places but otherwise as easy to walk upon as a pavement.

  No one spoke. Even on a good surface it was hard to travel in ten kilos of clothing with an eight-kilo survival pack on one’s back. Penny’s nose ran, forming an icicle on her upper lip that couldn’t be removed without taking skin off as well. As they began climbing a slope, she had to breathe harder; the cold air in her lungs made her cough. When she exhaled, her breath crackled as it froze.

  The first two kilometres were fairly easy, a steady march over long, shallow gradients. Then they came into a relatively high area where the wind had carved the surface into sastrugi, and footing was treacherous. Now they had to scramble and slide, and in places they could get through only by chopping steps into the hard, slick sides of the sastrugi. After an hour Penny’s feet and hands were numb. She realised she had fallen behind the others and hurried up the slope of the next rise. At the top she coughed until she couldn’t stand upright. There was a salty taste in her mouth, and red spots in the snow by her feet.

  “Steve — Steve! I’m in trouble!”

  He turned and came back to her while the others waited.

  “I’m coughing blood.”

  Steve put his arm around her shoulders and guided her down the slope. “It’ll be okay. You’re moving too fast, breathing too deeply. The air’s starting to freeze your lungs. Don’t walk so fast that you start panting. You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll stay with you.”

  They walked and climbed slowly, trailing after the others. The sastrugi field seemed to go on forever. The crests were blindingly bright; some of the troughs between them were deep in shadow. It was hard to see where to put her feet and she fell several times, but Steve always caught her.

  “Your face looks pink,” she said to him.

  “So does yours.” He looked closely at her. “It’s sunburn. We’ll all be pretty badly burned by the time we get home.”

  “At least I can’t feel it.”

  Around 1000 Al called a halt. They ate some biscuits and sweet chocolate, and Will melted snow for tea. He poured it into their mugs at a rolling boil, but it cooled rapidly — to Penny, the first sip was scalding and the last only tepid. At least it warmed her enough to make her feet hurt.

  “Can I have some more?” she asked.

  “No, but you can have some hot water. Too much tea and you’ll dehydrate yourself,” Will said. “Not to mention freezing your bottom.”

  They moved on. The surface was softer here; snow was deep and powdery in the lee of each sastrugus, and in places they waded knee-deep. Penny felt less dependent on Steve, but didn’t let herself get too far away from him. She noticed Jeanne keeping close to Will. Tough kid. She loo
ks like hell, but she’s not complaining. Jeanne seemed to have got over whatever had made her sick yesterday morning.

  Her throat and chest hurt like hell. Even though she kept to a slow pace, she was sweating; the sweat kept freezing, breaking off her skin and gathering at her waist and boot-tops. It was worst inside her padded bra, which trapped the ice on her breasts. When she rubbed a forearm across her chest, she could hear the ice crackle but couldn’t feel anything except a steady ache. At least they’d warned her to expect this, back in Manitoba at the training camp, or she’d have started screaming — frozen lungs or not.

  One foot after another. The sastrugi were replaced with a stretch of hard, flat wind-crust, but after only a couple of hundred metres they found a belt of deep crevasses cutting across their path. The first few were narrow cracks, easily crossed in a stride, but after that the gaps were four and five metres wide.

  “I don’t remember crevasses like these anywhere close to Shacktown,” Al said.

  “They’re old,” Will answered. “Must’ve had thick, hard snow over them till the quake.”

  “Everybody stay well away from the edges,” Al ordered. “We’ll just have to detour.”

  It was like traversing a maze without walls: a hundred metres’ progress cost three hundred in cautious zigzags. As the sun climbed to its zenith, the depths of the crevasses turned from black to a deep glowing blue. They moved slowly. Al, Tim and Will, roped together, tested the surface with telescoping aluminium rods. If the snow resisted a hard push, they advanced; if it yielded, they stopped to find another path.

  Penny was beginning to feel drowsily detached from herself, and to daydream about the dry warmth of her bunk. A tremor ran through the Shelf, no different from a dozen others they had felt since the crash. This time, however, the snow under Will collapsed into a crevasse five metres wide. As he fell, Al and Tim were yanked off their feet and dragged downslope, head first, towards the edge.

  Steve lunged forward and caught Tim’s ankle with one mittened hand; with the other he drove his ice axe deep into the snow. Penny and Jeanne stumbled up to him and gripped his shoulders.